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Thursday::Jan 11, 2024

A History of Role-Playing

I

played my first table top role-playing game when I was about 12 years old. It was the Star Wars Role-Playing Game -- I'd heard about Dungeons and Dragons, but I thought it was scary and for grown-ups. Star Wars was already a deep love, and it was safe, so I was overjoyed to find out there was such an alternative. Since then, I have played:

I've spent the vast majority of my time in role-playing games as the Game Master, being the primary one of my friends willing to put in the time with the rulebooks, the worldbuilding, and the storytelling. And for the first perhaps seventeen years, my experiences were, on the whole, defined by frustration. I would try everything to make the games go right, I would work endlessly on my creations, diligently writing stories and characters to the best of my ability. But over and over, when play sessions actually started, everything turned into a mess almost immediately. And what was worse, the messes were boring messes, defined by indecision, actions made at random in an attempt to make something happen, incongruity left and right. Combat was long and stagnant, the players never seemed to connect with the worlds the way I was hoping, the gears of my self-written systems never seemed to catch.

But every so often, magic would happen. Some moment would crop up in the games that felt different, different from any medium I'd ever experienced. These moments were always few and far between, but they were what kept me coming back. I needed to find a way to make those moments consistent, instead of the lightning-in-a-bottle that I could never seem to hold on to.

Looking back, in a typical three- to four-hour session of virtually any role-playing game, I was looking at perhaps 15 to 30 minutes of real, genuine emotional engagement. It wasn't worth it. I felt drained and disappointed every night, convinced it was my fault, that I was wasting everyone's time.

While no fanatic, seeking out whatever RPG I could get my hands on, I'd played more types of games than most, and I knew from the start there was something special about Burning Wheel. Its mechanics were both graceful and gritty in a way that d20 systems could never match, and there was a deep allure in its Beliefs system, where character motivations were intrinsically linked to the moment-to-moment mechanics. I played the game extensively in college, and had a higher ratio of good-to-boring than with other games, but the game still wasn't singing the way I knew that it could.

After a particularly abortive Dungeons and Dragons campaign in my mid-twenties, I took several years off of role-playing games. They had defeated me. I didn't know what the cause was, but they just didn't seem to work.

Then I stumbled across a series of Actual Play videos by Judd Karlman and Sean Nittner playing a one-on-one campaign of Burning Wheel, and like St. Paul, the scales fell from my eyes, and I could see. I realized what the actual relationship between player, Game Master, and the story was. I saw that the only thing that mattered was motivation; and that once you understood what motivated a player and their character, all you had to do was make everything revolve around those motivations.

This was the genius of Burning Wheel. In games like Dungeons and Dragons, I felt that I was constantly guessing what my players would want to do. Even if I guessed right with some, I was certainly missing with others, and disharmony reigned. Someone was always bored. More often than not, everyone was bored. But in Burning Wheel, by forcing players to name their motivations, and by tying advancement in the game to pursuing those motivations, the game master's job could be almost easy. They just had to put obstacles in the way of what the players had already said they wanted, and everything would follow from the sparks that would fly.

I had gathered as much early on in my Burning Wheel days, though I was clumsy in attaining it. What really turned up the gas in my Game Mastering was realizing that I could skip over the things that no one cared about. Burning Wheel's mechanics are particularly well-suited to this trick, but it is widely possible and applicable. If no player has a belief relating to crossing the Deep Dark Forest, then who gives a fuck about traveling through the Deep Dark Forest. Roll a couple dice to see if it went well or badly, and then move on to the parts that people care about.

It's hard to overstate the difference this mentality makes. Suddenly, every scene mattered. Hell, I could think of story in terms of scenes, editing on the fly based on what we knew was relevant. Instead of simulating a world with which the players were interacting, I was crafting a situation in which the players were enmeshed. Excitedly, I reached out to my brother to attempt to play Burning Wheel one-on-one, something neither of us had ever attempted before. We built a scenario like we were writing the background to a play, and put in a two-hour session.

It was like nothing I'd ever experienced before. A wealth of game principles that I'd heard of, and struggled in the past to implement, all clicked into place as a cohesive whole. The story we thought we were telling rapidly shifted into a different, far more compelling story of family tragedy and estrangement, all improvised and guided by the game's rules. Where in the past, I'd struggled to find a 20:80 fun-to-boring ratio, that session was wall-to-wall, edge of our seats emotion and excitement. Everything mattered, every dice roll felt important, every piece of dialogue felt like it was alive. We saw, all at once, what role playing games could do, how powerful they could be.

There will be more to this story, but I've rambled on for a long time now. I've seen the magic. Like a religious convert, I am full of energy and certainty. There is a deep art here, made all the more poignant by its existing so delicately, purely amongst a small group of friends, virtually incapable of being shared with anyone else. I tell you: these games can be great, much greater than even most of love them can imagine.



2024 01 19 :: The Role of the Mind