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Recursion 4: Who is the author of work and play?
Earlier I posted a link to an interview with Crouch. This work was intended from very early in its conception to be part of a globalised and corporate multi-media experience that will include television or movies, and included discussions with business men as part of its genesis. These 'universes' (e.g. SW, MC, DC) are money-making machines, and often include RPGs (desktop and computer) as part of their portfolio. Stand alone RPGs (Indy) are often presented as an alternative to such corporate world-making, and somehow qualitatively different. What kind of experiences have you had with various types of RPGs, what do you prefer, and what are the reasons you have for your preferences?
Comments
Nothing to add about gaming: commenting so I see future replies
But obviously the indy world exists in most areas of life these days - games, books, music etc. You could probably include at least some parts of the open source software movement there.
I suspect the multi-media and branching into TV element was there because the author already had work adapted for television (Wayward Pines, though I've neither read nor seen it).
As for gaming and the indie element, I'm not sure I distinguish between indie and corporate any more. I mean, apart from D&D and Pathfinder, every RPG is indie these days, and perhaps it was always so. And D&D is a tiny part of Hasbro's revenue.
The financially bigger games have glossier presentation and maybe a line of products rather than one book. But my perspective has changed there too to see no stark difference. Crowdfunding has changed the game.
One interesting related thing to me is indie authors, producing fiction outside of ordinary publishers. There's someone in this thread I could name here, and someone else in the club. Such authors are a wonderful part of the modern day range of fiction, and really I should read more such. And it is different to how it was.
Then there's computer software, and indie computer games - though there the smaller budgets are still huge compared to even the biggest RPGs.
Oh, and music. Another great modern feature is its availability outside of major record labels. Again, I can think of a name of a regular.
Indie creation is great! One of the best things about the technological tools available in the modern world, and which was much harder not so many years ago.
I'm with @dr_mitch in finding no difference between indie and corporate TTRPG producers: they're just about all "indie", with only a precious few people actually making a full-time living from the games.
One of the problems of low barriers to entry is curation and finding the gems among the dross, and that brings up whole other discussions of cliques, in-crowds, and gatekeeping (inadvertent or not).
But going back to the original question title, the authors of our games are still very much the people sat around playing them. I strongly agree with a comment Chris Kubasik made several years ago that we probably have enough RPG rulesets. What we should be doing is celebrating and developing the skill of playing these games, and getting better at creating and delivering high-quality art/entertainment in the gaming session. Unfortunately, that's a performance art, so is something that's harder to reify into a product that can be seen, discussed, and sold.
I generally avoid the corporate and, apart from The One Ring line for Middle Earth, I avoid RPG conversions of franchises that were developed for other media. I like my RPG settings to have been created for the purpose of playing RPGs. And again, here comes @NeilNjae with some provoking thoughts... I'll have to think about that one. I've always maintained that the purpose of RPGs is not to tell stories, but to create experiences.
So then what's the relationship between the game designer/author, the publisher, the fan community, and the people at the gaming table? Who is, or should be, central to the RPG hobby?
And what about the value of RPG books themselves, and the fact that many such books sit on shelves, unplayed; but still providing value to the owners, whether it be as a beautiful artefact, a good read, or a source of ideas?
I've just realised I completely missed the recent move towards this performance art: the streaming crowd! (That's mainly because I don't have the patience to watch them.) But is the increase in capturing the performance of RPG play changing the balance of "fame" between designer and player? Are there celebrity players, with fans who will watch any game-stream they're in?
I'm going to get bcak to all the discussions this evening, but in the meantime here's a little nugget from yesterday's news: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/dd-licious-wendys-now-has-a-tabletop-rpg-and-the-villain-is-frozen-beef/
That's something I truly consider to be corporate. For multiple reasons I have a cringe reaction to this, and vague sense of embarrassment.
The gaming table is central. Nobody else is needed. Writers are people who generate tools for the table to use. Publishers help bring those tools to market. But those tools aren't necessary - gamers can have great freeform games with no rules, dice, markers, or playmats.
Sure, all books have value. They can be an entertainment to read, or have value to collectors. I don't see how that alters the fact that role-playing is about having experiences.
I cringe at it a bit, too. Not because it's corporate - businesses will exploit anything, and role-playing game writers have been exploiting gamers for decades. That's why people are always asking when such-and-such a franchise is going to become a game.
I looked through this document and it is well put together. It's cringeworthy for its setting that panders to corporate marketing, but no more cringeworthy than the majority of new settings on the market that pander to 'geek culture'. If you change a few names in this Wendy's document, it's really hard to tell it apart from all the Joe Fantasy settings that have flooded the market, IMO.
Both playing and reading are important ways we practice what is not present. I'm more and more interested in the ways that the global market continues to affect imagination among local friends, and in that way shape the possibilities of our action.
I learned to role-play games from AD&D, then moved on to RM, and these shaped the way I and my friends constructed and communicated our imagination. The monster, treasure manuals etc. shifted imagination to a kind of shopping - a good GM presented a pleasing blend items from the shop. Sure they added something, but one thing the rules did was organise our imaginations, which made it possible for us structure our play around the table-top world. They let us use shorthand to describe what was happening because the descriptions were provided elsewhere (intertextuality), like the way news is now presented. Skill at reading was vital for being able to do this, but now it seems to be more about developing a skill in inter-watching.
Our world was our own tabletop, but increasingly playing is about being in some unknown person's table-top, a table-top which is really a very large number of people who are playing an entirely different game, e.g. http://www.kryptonsite.com/smallville-creators-al-gough-miles-millar-are-doing-a-book-signing/ "We have been told that fans are definitely invited to come by — and yes, you can ask them your burning Smallville questions while you’re at it." To me that is a 'GM' team who are hoping they have tens of thousands of 'players'. Given the recent warping of imagination by our gatekeepers, I think it is important to understand how and why they are shaping our imaginations in the ways that they are, and to make sure it is wellness-making.
'Crouch' has made a world for us to play in, and claims to be an individual, much like 'James Patterson,' who is no longer a person but a business whose function is to deliver profit (to who anyway?). All these worlds are constructed specifically to empty my pocket. To be honest I have more respect for Wendy's. They are upfront about what they are doing, and seem to me like people.
@BarnerCobblewood Your phrasing is different, but I think our sentiments are the same on this. Or almost.
I want RPG creators to create interesting new settings (or taken a step further, 'game experiences') for us. Maybe I'll play in them, or maybe just read them to be inspired to do my own. But I don't want RPG creators to adapt popular media so it can be expanded to new markets. I don't need a Game of Thrones or an Avatar RPG.
I nearly always prefer to create and run my own settings, anyway.
When it comes to RPG settings, I want not exactly originality but freshness.
For example, the One Ring is a fresh take on Middle Earth, and is the first RPG that takes it away from D&Dish tropes- it's seeing it directly rather than through a D&D lens.
Cthulhu in RPGs is pretty stale and cliched. But some of the Trail of Cthulhu books combine it with other genres in interesting ways or present an original take on the concepts within RPGs. I'm thinking of the Final Revelation, Cthulhu Apocalypse, Cthulhu City, Dreamhounds of Paris, Bookhounds of London here. For that matter, for Call of Cthulhu, the sadly defunct Cold War is good.
Vampires are pretty stale. But Vampires vs Spies in Night's Black Agents feels fresh.
There's a whole bunch of fantasy out there, much of it stale, but historical fantasy can feel really fresh, especially when it's a time or place that hasn't been covered before - or when it's covered in a new way or when previous takes haven't been adequate. For example, Pendragon was fresh, as is Mythic Britain - and very different to Pendragon.
Glorantha is old and established, but I never really experienced it before, and it's new and exciting for me at the moment. So that's fresh, as are the different takes in variant rules systems.
The game has indeed changed. In order to play you now need to know how to promote the crowdfunding, not make games. Now I just throw games out there, like I throw music out there. Maybe someone will trip on them, but that's the only way they will know they are out there.
Anyway, I am Indie, just not a good example. Neither fish, not fowl, nor good red meat.