The Dragon's Talon

This week, I think I will not have a writing exercise up .  As an apology, I offer you an older story; this is actually a prologue of sorts to a D&D campaign that was originally started in second edition and later played for a time in fourth edition.  I confess that it is fantasy, my default ‘go to’ genre, but I hope it serves as an example of my style which is not so formal as A Prince of Shadows, nor trying to be self-contained when it clearly is not.

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This is a response to a blog post on Gamasutra by a man named Steve Mallory, a designer I know through the ‘net who makes some good points about narrative design; read the original post here…

True authorial control… Now there is a scary phrase to use in front of your producer…

True authorial control is taking your player and asking them what they want to do today, rather than telling them what they are allowed to do.  Is that wise? (continue reading…)

Last week, we continued learning about archaic speech. It was another very patronising lesson, but you just keep coming back…

This week, we will learn a little about insults, so let’s put a nice safe break in. Only continue reading if you are sure that you want to…

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Last week, we started learning about archaic speech. It was a very patronising lesson, but you seem to have come back…

Today, we will learn about oaths and curses. We will touch on religion, some slightly vulgar words and imagery that might border on violence involving sexual acts and anatomical impossibilities.

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Inspired by my post about playing female characters online, I got thinking about gender roles in RPGs. I don’t believe in women’s things and men’s things, but there is a tendency for people to drift toward certain stereotypes. You probably don’t think about it when you are actually playing a game, but CRPGs do give us stereotypes. Arch-mages are men with beards, clerics are dour men and dwarves if they are NPCs and women if they are PCs. Fighters are men or else women trying to prove themselves better than men, rogues are slimy men or halflings who think they are cassanova.

I played a woman in some MMOs and people used to give me stuff, both in my guild and in pick-up groups. It was never overtly ‘have this because you are a girl’, but I saw so many examples of ‘I don’t really need this, so you might as well have it’ when I was playing a female character and never saw it with male ones. Do people think that a female rogue is more in danger of having substandard equipment?

Playing Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights, the original storyline has two love interests; one is male and one is female. The female interest seemed very much an equal, but very emotional (especially for a paladin) and conflicted. The male interest was stoic and protective, resolute in spite of his troubled past.

I suppose you play to your market. Given the things I have done, the evils to my gender, while working on a game for girls, I cannot really hold it against them. When your market is projected to be mostly men and boys, you play up the wish fulfilment. When (like World of Warcraft) you reach close to equal numbers, you make sure that the genders both get some heroes and heroines.

So you want to try some archaic speech in your roleplaying, be it MMOs or tabletop games? I will try to offer some help over the course of this series of articles which might help.

First of all, ask yourself if it is really a good idea. If you are playing a barbarian, you only really need to yell ‘Krom!’ a few times. On the other hand, done well with a character who justifies it, it can be a great idea. Think of Shakespeare; Romeo spoke in couplets, Hamlet too, but they had style and class. Dogberry, in contrast, was not the ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ type.

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My name is Anthony and I play D&D. I am not a geek, not according to the geeks I know. I tried calling myself a geek, but the real geeks disowned me. I was too cool to hang out in their world. I am not alone in this. Vin Diesel plays (or played) D&D and nobody would call him a geek. Not to his face, at any rate.

So why are people so scared to just admit it? I worked with a man who made Dwayne Dibley look cool and even he looked aghast at the implication that maybe playing Neverwinter Nights meant he might like to try D&D.

The game itself has a bad press, I think. Endless generations of grognards and assorted beardies have scared away normal players until the first thing that springs to my generation’s mind is the cartoon from the ’80s. Even the other designers I work with seem never to have played D&D or seen it played. I am half-tempted to suggest it, as the management have been saying that we should host some social activities at work… Of course, I would rather play paintball or go on a Grand Union Canal pub-crawl. (apparently, the trick is to have a well-stocked bar on the barge…)

There is an E-Zine called Roleplaying Tips Weekly that I read, which I recommend to anyone who runs a tabletop game, and the latest edition has a great article on treasure siphons.

The idea is one that I am quite fond of;it gives the players a reason to care about the world and detracts very little. I will not go too far into it, as I recommend reading it, but the idea can boil down to ‘here is the chance to get 10% extra treasure that you much give away’ – rebuilding orphanages, paying off the rogue’s gambling debts, raising the dowry to offload your ditzy cleric to a nobleman…

You can find the E-Zine at http://www.roleplayingtips.com (link opens in a new window), but the E-mail version tends to be about a week ahead of the website, so try http://www.roleplayingtips.com/readissue.php?number=434 on Friday or so.