In tabletop roleplaying games, it’s often tough to provide backstory and broader setting information to the players. Reciting a summary or printing handouts is seldom effective; even if players pay attention, they’re less likely to remember events in which they did not participate. In the Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition campaign I’m currently running, I ran into this problem, and addressed it with the Cutscene technique.
(more…)
Any creative work is a sort of conversation between two people: the author and the reader. Except it’s not.
Books, movies, music, video games, and so on are created by one or more people, and then are consumed by one or more people. The work in question (let’s call it a game) serves as a medium by which the player communicates with the authors or developers. One can imagine an experience analogous to digital gaming where two people sit in a room, one telling the other what’s happening and the other responding with their actions. This actually wouldn’t be too different than tabletop roleplaying.
But playing games doesn’t really work like that; there’s this big thing between the authors and the players called a game. The authors and the player can be in different states; they might not speak the same language; the original author might be literally dead in real life. But the work, the game, spans this void of time and distance to allow a sort of mediated communication. And in the middle there are a bunch of imaginary people existing in a series of nested universes that make the exchange possible. Let’s meet them, shall we?
(more…)
