We’ve been talking a lot about improvisation and working with your players, but we haven’t given you nearly enough background for the topic. There’s a book that I found years ago called Robin’s Laws of Good Game Mastering, and I lend or recommend it to every one of my friends who asks me for tips on how to be a good storyteller. I like it so much that when I started looking through my old copy again while I was starting this article, I had to stop myself from simply quoting the book word for word. It’s more than just a good place to start; the book has an impressively down-to-earth approach that will give you a basis for campaign and adventure design, for preparing easy improvisation, and for reading and managing your gaming group’s social (and problem solving) dynamics. It also offers a very simple gamer typology that should allow you to identify what drives you and your players and what rewards them most in the realm of RPGs. If you’re interested in gaming or in group dynamics, I couldn’t recommend a better read.
Tag Archives: Roleplaying
Types of Games
In my last post, I talked a lot about what roleplaying is, and – surprise! – it wasn’t just one thing! That is part of the beauty of roleplaying, it’s full of options. What are these options?
Well, first, we have the three qualities talked about before:
Roleplaying, Storytelling, Mechanics. To keep in line with the existing literature on Gaming Theory, I have slightly renamed the categories I used in the previous post. I have renamed ‘Mechanics’ as ‘Competition’ (it goes by ‘gaming’ in GNS Theory, but I find that to be a bit ambiguous of a term); it essentially refers to how much of the experience of the game is rooted in competition. Storytelling will be referred to as ‘Narrative’, and Roleplaying will be expanded slightly to ‘Simulation’. Simulation refers to how much of the setting goes to recreating system-internal realism. Note that this realism does NOT have to be actual realism. For example, many unrealistic things happen in Star Wars, but there is an assumed set of rules which governs things like lightsabers. Any given game will have a balance of the three, like so:
