I was reading some old posts on Apathy Games the other day and I stumbled on Why We Need to Pay for More Adventures, written by Tyson Hayes. It’s an old article but it’s a good one. In this gem, Mr. Hayes laments that RPGs lack the shared experience across groups found in video games. Go ahead and read it. I’ll wait…
I get it, and I’m wistful for the “good old days” too. I’m too young to ever have enjoyed The Temple of Elemental Evil, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, or Tomb or Horrors, though I have run The Keep on the Borderlands (TPK, first room with the zombies). On the other hand, I’ve had the occasional conversation with a random stranger about various video games and I tear up just a little bit whenever I listen to The Lament of Captain Placeholder.
On the other hand, I also understand the motivation to make your own adventures. You get a unique gaming experience that has been tailored specifically to your group and it’s free! Well, it’s mostly free. I suspect that most gamers are like me insofar as the older we get and the more responsibilities we have, the higher the dollar to hour ratio becomes. Maybe for some of us it’s time to re-evaluate a decision that we made decades ago that has become less and less cost effective while we weren’t paying attention.
I think the lack of shared community experience obviously has a lot to do with system too. Look at that list of “Classics” up there. Notice how they’re ALL from DnD? While DnD only briefly had a complete lockdown on the market it was the 800lb gorilla in the room for a very long time. While I’m not suggesting we discard the variety we have today in favor of a greater sense of community, it’s much harder for something to become a shared experience of such a fractured community. Luckily, what we do have is that wondrous series of tubes, the internet. Though we may no longer be able to depend on swapping tales in our FLGS or at a con unless we play one of the games that has major market share, there’s a community somewhere out there for almost everyone.
I disagree with Mr. Hayes on this point: “We refrain from the recap (of our sessions) because our loyal readers weren’t present for our games and thus they aren’t that interesting.” While I agree that reading about Mr. Hayes’ game will never be quite as community building as playing the same game as Mr. Hayes and comparing notes afterwards, I disagree that they are uninteresting. Over the years I have found game write-ups I’ve enjoyed as much as any other form of media, and after reading, I often feel a sense of connection with the characters and places similar to those from novels or similar media. It’s not quite the same thing but it’s feasible that the community can enjoy water cooler chatter over the latest write-ups.
One of the things that I think will help the RPG community build this type of shared experience is the advent of Kickstarter. Often the stretch goals associated with a new RPG project include a handful of pre-made adventures. This goes a long way towards allowing groups to have similar experiences.
Something we can do as members of the community to encourage these shared experiences is to make our own homemade adventures available to others. While it’s unlikely that without some extra support my home brew adventure would take the net by storm, and it’s true that few of us produce adventures that would be ready for a true professional release, that doesn’t stop us from sharing and others from making use of them. After all, even with professional grade adventures, no two groups ever run them exactly the same anyway.
More important than my ramblings, however, are yours. Is this an issue? Do you wish we as a community had more shared experiences or do you not care? If you agree with Mr. Hayes and I, what’s the solution? What do we need? What can we do to support creation of shared experiences?
Personally I rather enjoy the diversity of experiences and hearing about different groups campaigns, play styles, and adventures.
If for example everyone in a forum group only played the same modules/adventures they would have less to discuss since the variety of experiences would be limited to variations had within those same adventures.
The shared experience I feel we get as a community is that of roleplaying games themselves, not a particular adventure, or ruleset, but the act of adventure creation and the shared storytelling experience that comes with rpgs.
That’s mostly why despite the advance in video game rpgs to feel nearly unlimited in scope, (Skyrim, Fallout New Vegas etc.. even more so if you count all the free player made mods and paid DLC available for these games.) they can never quite match the unique “magic” and enjoyment of the table top rpg experience no matter the setting or rules the groups use.
I agree with the idea that roleplaying is our shared experience. There are differences in the story, but “what did your group do?” is the discussion point. Discussing house rules, optional rules, and other changes to games.
Plus, there are a lot of awesome shared experiences from using the same system. Burning Wheel, D&D, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, and Shadow Run all tell different stories. In college the roleplaying games club that I ran ended a semester with a “Story Telling Night” around a fire pit roasting marshmallows. Our shared experience was trading stories of our characters adventures and the villains and monsters they overcame.
I understand the desire to have shared experiences across our broad group (tabletop gamers), but I think the nature of the collective is a bit different than what happens around video game RPGs. As Silveressa said, there’s something intriguing about reading the unique spins and twists of someone else’s homebrew campaign.
On the other hand, I am in total agreement about the getting-older and dollar-to-hour ratio thing. Long gone are the days when I could spend hours evolving the personality of NPCs, detailing overworld and dungeon maps, and creating monster stat blocks. I need all the help I can get! If that comes via a pre-printed adventure, so bit it. I often bend those to the desires of the current group, anyway.
I’ve been playing the same adventure with several different groups – and at conventions the groups even got the same characters. Never have I had the same experience from one group to another – even in railed adventures. What the players (or collaboratively; the group) wants from a game differs so much that their actions will create different experiences.
And this with the same game master and the same characters. What will happen if you played the same campaign with different game masters and characters too? Even more diversity. So I would say what Tyson Hayes propose can’t happen.
Also, a CRPG is not the same thing as a game, if you compare with TTRPG. It’s a campaign. So either you need to sell campaigns OR you need a game that creates a certain experience. Perhaps not the same actions, but a game that creates the same feelings. From that, then you can talk about the common components that created that feelings.
We have that today with, for example, horror games where you discuss different techniques. That’s a campaign. We also have discussions about, for example, how to play a ranger in D&D4. That’s about the game. I think Tyson is looking at the wrong tools (the campaign alone) and have the wrong perspective (everything should act out the same) where feelings and uses of components instead can be the common ground.
Yes! I’ve found I really enjoyed these too. Prior to starting my own GMing career (and since then), I lived vicariously through a couple of blogged game write-ups and even the Penny-Arcade D&D podcasts. When I started my own campaigns, I made player or GM write-ups part of the deal and have been posting them online for the same reason.
Well, the problem I’ve had in the past, with pre-generated adventures that is, has been that they rarely meet my expected standards. You go to your local game shop, spend some time perusing, make a decision (usually based on the picture on the cover, because they’re shrink-wrapped), take it home, and start reading. If you’re lucky, you have something you can use, but with a significant amount of alterations to fit your group/campaign. If you’re not lucky, you waste (prep) time reading a less-than-quality adventure, not to mention the money you spent, and no one has a good time, because you end up either running the low-quality module you bought, or you do a rush job of your own because the module just won’t fit.
Then you have those modules that fit into a series, which trap you into spending even more money and time and have no guarantee of being any better than the single modules. And if you have anything but a ‘typical/standard’ adventuring party, you can be sure that virtually none of the pre-made stuff is going to fit.
On the other end, I have often found myself interested in the stories of other gamers who were involved in campaigns that I had no part of. Sure, there is a degree of separation, but I have found that a good storyteller can almost eliminate that barrier (my good friend Dave was a master at this, especially with our friend Joe chiming in occasionally and adding the extra ’emotion’).
So, maybe what the TTRPG community needs is not more common experiences, but more experiences that are shared better, via good storytellers. Of course, those natural real-life bards are hard to come by, but just maybe we could all practice a bit and make up for some of that lack.
Yes, this flies in the face of the ‘industry,’ since it does nothing to profit those who actually develop and print the games, and it also requires each of us to work at being better able to explain what we do, and it requires that our stories be worth telling… you know, this is sounding like a lot of work… well, I think it just might be worth it. Let me know if I sound crazy, but maybe we could each pick the one person who is best at telling stories in our group and have them be the group’s ‘sharer’…? I don’t know, just a few coppers worth…
I’ve always enjoyed Judd Karlman‘s write ups; they alone have often been enough to encourage a second look at a system. I loved the old “TV Guide” of Primetime Adventures links too…
The fact that we’re all reading the same articles on Gnome Stew and can apply them to our own games proves that we have a shared experience. The style of gaming that we play IS the shared experience. I can tell another GM about this crazy stunt the players pulled to escape the dungeon and he (or she) will still get it.
It’s interesting to think about, that’s for sure. But I feel there’s enough similarities to RPGs that the experience is still there.
Sorry folks. I was AFK for a week.
I don’t think anyone is saying we can ONLY play the same adventures or system. Instead what Mr Hayes (I think) and I am on about is that we wish there was MORE overlap, not complete overlap.
And yes, I know that even if you and I both run the Tomb of Horrors, our experiences will never sync up completely. Heck we can even watch the same movies or read the same books and come away with different interpretations. But The similar experience gives us a different framework to discuss and compare/contrast our experiences against than a less similar one.