The Wyrd Lands

Do we know is really happening when playing an RPG? One particularly thorny part is figuring out who is actually speaking at any one moment. This blog tries to think about this using a bit of literary theory.  Yeah, you aren’t proficient with glaives, unfortunately. This is a quote from a bit of Critical Role where the GM is telling a player that they can't use an item. In this quote, who is speaking and being spoken to?  If the 'you' is the player (Laura Bailey), it makes little sense why Matthew Mercer would be telling her she can't use glaives. Is the 'you' the character Jester? It seems unlikely given that Matthew Mercer is talking as himself to a fictional character sitting at the table who doesn't know themselves if they can use a glaive well. These may seem like flippant questions which we can intuitively answer, even if that might be hard to articulate. However, I think that trying to articulate an answer helps us to reflect on RPGs. In particular, I...

I was chatting recently with The Revenant's Quill  who has written a post about the "unspoken mechanic" of most RPGs: creating and manging the shared model wherein the game takes place.  His post, and some of the resulting chat on Discord, interestingly matches a lot with the ideas from a theory I read as a literature student: text-world theory . Of all the theory I have ever read, this one captured in Joanna Gavin's book, is perhaps best placed to describe RPGs.  The feeling of being so immersed in a text-world as almost to lose sense of who and where we are is familiar to just about anyone who has ever read a novel [or played any RPG]. We can populate our text-worlds with living, breathing, thinking characters, carrying out complex physical and mental activities, in authentic material surroundings. I'm going to briefly describe it in this post as a prelude in other posts to thinking about how it applies to RPGs.  Let's start with a simple sentence from Oz B...