The Wyrd Lands

Do you like charts? Cos, baby, I got charts! RPG charts!  Last time I tried applying a literary theory to an extract from an actual play of Into the Odd . This led me to pick out the idea that the language of RPG play seems to move between four levels of perspective when players speak.  I decided to try and track these levels of perspective within through multiple games. I decided to take a similar moment between them alla similar moment in multiple games. This moment was action or event resolution and the games range from Into the Odd, through 5e and Night Witches. I'll start with sharing the chart and the data it's based on for Into the Odd, then show the other charts and then write a little about what they mean to me (and maybe a bonus chart or two!). Into the Odd (Tuesday Knight Games) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D46WpD9wSB0 (24:52 - 27:08) GM [1.5]You probably could take a shot at them now, if that’s what you wanted to do.  P1 [1.5]Yeah, let’s light em up. P2 [1...

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...