Yay! We've raised two kids with Once Upon a Time--I bought the first edition way back in 1994, maybe?
Once Upon a Time, Interactive Fantasy, and your column in Valkyrie were the first things I ever read by you. I sometimes wish you still wrote about role-playing.
Yeah; I just don't find I role-play any more. Richard ran a 20th anniversary (oh, god) session with some of the old college Star Wars characters a while back, and that was a lot of fun, but I dropped out of the Pendragon campaign. It was all just numbers. I don't know whether that's because I've changed, the group's change, or 3rd Edition Pendragon has changed. My theory, is that RPGs are all about virtual communities; at it's simplest it's about the internal dynamic of "the party" -- the sneaky one, the clever one, the strong one, the good one, the cynical one, etc. So they work best when there's a kind of feedback loop going on: "the party" is fun because the players are a group of friends, and the friends become a group because they pretend to be "the party" once a week. That dynamic is very hard to re-create outside college. I don't want to RPG with strangers; trying to run a "long distance campaign" (meeting up every few months to play) never seems satisfactory. I guess that The Young People are so used to communicating on Facebook and Twitter that forming virtual communities in World of Warcraft or whatever seems more natural to them. I rather suspect that sitting in bars listening to people with guitars singing songs about pirates, highwaymen and fairies has rather filled the RPG shaped space in my life...
Yay! We've raised two kids with Once Upon a Time--I bought the first edition way back in 1994, maybe?
ReplyDeleteOnce Upon a Time, Interactive Fantasy, and your column in Valkyrie were the first things I ever read by you. I sometimes wish you still wrote about role-playing.
Yeah; I just don't find I role-play any more. Richard ran a 20th anniversary (oh, god) session with some of the old college Star Wars characters a while back, and that was a lot of fun, but I dropped out of the Pendragon campaign. It was all just numbers. I don't know whether that's because I've changed, the group's change, or 3rd Edition Pendragon has changed. My theory, is that RPGs are all about virtual communities; at it's simplest it's about the internal dynamic of "the party" -- the sneaky one, the clever one, the strong one, the good one, the cynical one, etc. So they work best when there's a kind of feedback loop going on: "the party" is fun because the players are a group of friends, and the friends become a group because they pretend to be "the party" once a week. That dynamic is very hard to re-create outside college. I don't want to RPG with strangers; trying to run a "long distance campaign" (meeting up every few months to play) never seems satisfactory. I guess that The Young People are so used to communicating on Facebook and Twitter that forming virtual communities in World of Warcraft or whatever seems more natural to them. I rather suspect that sitting in bars listening to people with guitars singing songs about pirates, highwaymen and fairies has rather filled the RPG shaped space in my life...
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