I had grand hopes for this site when I first began it about three months ago, but my plans have fallen by the wayside, mostly as real life gets in the way as it is too often wont to do. I won’t go into the specifics (read my LiveJournal if you’re curious about that sort of drama. This space is meant for more intellecutal (I hope) disccussion. Leave it to say that I’ve been just too tired at the end of the day to sit and compose any sort of meanigful discourse. Hopefully as things begin to settle down now I can again give this site the attention I want.

Though I haven’t been writing in this space, I haven’t completely avoided the topic in my headspace. I finished the Dunsany book last week, and I just have to say it’s a treasure. There’s nothing about his work that I don’t like and I find it increasingly hard to believe that he so nearly passed out of public consciencesness. Less than a century ago, he was one of the most well known and prolific writers of his time, but now — though his work is in the midst of something like a revival — he’s really only known to those interested in the history of fantastic literature. He’s sort of “the fantasist’s fantasist”, to be very trite. I have more I want to say about Dunsany, but I’ll save it for a later entry, when I am more organized and less sleepy.

I’ve also been reading a book titled Sex and Sorcery, by Ron Edwards. It is actually a supplement to the Sorcerer RPG, which I am unfamilier with, but the book addresses issues of gender in roleplay that I haven’t seen addressed so explicitly before. What it has to say about the gender of players and the gender of the characters they play, and more importantly about the “gender” of stories is definitely grist for a longer entry here, but only after I’ve had more time to fiinish the book and digest what it has to say.

However, a reference to the game system Sorcerer stirred a minor revelation that I thought worth mentioning here, in reference to interactive storytelling. I don’t have the book in front of me for an exact quote, but it was implied that this game requires strong input from the player in regards to story creation, that there is as much responsibility on the player to provide interesting material as on the GM. This is a point of view I can heartily agree with, and I would hope to find a group that could support this sort of interchange in a tabletop gaming situation. It’s also the idea I had in mind in building Castle Marrach: individual characters get to tell their own stories against the backdrop of a larger tale that is gradually revealed.

But the word “responsibiility” is the key phase here. What I failed to acknowledge is that players either 1) Don’t recognize their own responsibility, 2) Don’t know how to fulfill it (i.e. don’t know enough about creating stories), or 3) Just plain don’t want it. It’s much easier, after all, to be either a task-based player, whether that task is to slay one monster so you can go up one level and kill the next montster or to follow the cat and figure out why he’s carrying the necklace or to diligently apply yourself to skill lessons so that you can impress a ranking character and get a promotion. Do this to get this, in innumerable variations. Or you can be a reactionary player, and simply respond to the circumstances that are presented to you. Neither of these are necessarly bad ways of playing, but I think that if you want to elevate your RPG beyond the level of game (which term implies that there is something to be won) to the realm of true interactive storytelling, then you really need to empasize the responsibility of the player to contribute creatively, and more significantly, teach her how to do it.

I’ll save the ramble on possible methods of teaching people to be good storytellers for another time.