Storytelling Games
I enjoy storytelling games. They are the only medium in which no-one, even the
tellers, knows the outcome of the story. Usually, they involve players taking
on the roles of protagonists, with a storyteller who takes on the role of the
antagonists and other characters. They exist in a space between improvisational
theatre and tactical wargames, with players at both ends of the continuum. I
flatter myself to think I play nearer the "impro theatre" end.
I enjoy my sci-fi TV, and happily use settings that everybody knows and do not
require me to reinvent the wheel. For a Star Trek story, I helped set up a science
fiction society in the University of London. The site for the ongoing series
Star Trek: Colony describes these
games as well as an ongoing saga of tenuous alliances, broken hearts, mystical
cults, and twenty-fourth century science. of As if that wasn't enough roleplaying,
I also admin Who-rpg, the mailing list about role-playing
gaming based on Dr Who.
With Fred Hick, John Morrow, and Lee Valentine, we surveyed how folk use adjectives
and wrote an article on Choosing Natural Adjective
Ladders for new games which, like Fudge or Castle Falkenstein, use them.
During my PhD, I was deeply into online massively multiplayer storytelling games,
all of which seemed to be in the same dark gothic world of Werewolves and Vampires.
These included GarouMUSH, adminning Storyteller's
Circle, and creating an extensive database of information on Ireland for a game
set in Dublin. I also wrote a conversion
script to turn MUSH help screens into web pages. In a moment of weakness,
I even co-ordinated a document on various attempts to pseudo-realistically explain
the genetics of werewolves. But
then real life took over.
Nowadays, I am a great fan of the Fudge System. Character descriptions are written
in plain English. The rules for including the random element in stories are
extremely simple. My Fudge pages include information
about my Middle Earth campaign.