Gattletowne
The Crowned Light of Midday Night
I am very excited to find this site, and I truly hope that we (myself and the Community) are as good a fit as I think we will be.
So I will get right in to what I hope I can find here, and we'll leave all the personal bits for when we're all friends and comfortable. I am a writer first and foremost, but I also have a love for role-playing that has spanned the last three decades of my life. Recently, these two interests have converged in an unexpected and interesting way.
I have always loved storytelling, and I have always been technically proficient in terms of actually writing, but I've never developed a system that has worked for me to bring the two together. I have never seen a project through to the end. A few months ago I made my most impressive attempt to date. I wrote several hundred pages of a rough draft over four months of daily writing, and then got overwhelmed with the scope of the story I was trying to write, and boom, I was done. I set it down and haven't looked at it since. A few months later I came across an actual-play role-playing podcast called Friends at the Table. The GM happened to be a regular on a console/PC gaming podcast I listened to weekly. Anyway, the FatT podcast was very interesting to me. I had grown up playing traditional AD&D tabletop RPGs that were mechanics/combat heavy. I enjoyed these games as a teenager, a twenty-something, and even into my early thirties, but this type of role-playing was different. The players had a very active co-creation role, along with the GM, and they played their characters with a refreshing honesty that placed an emphasis on interesting narrative rather than the advancement of their characters via some arbitrary rules matrix. Their characters and the abilities and skills they possessed merely provided color and flare to the ongoing saga that this group of role-players wove with their imaginations. The games they played, Dungeon World and The Sprawl, were still mechanics heavy, but it got me thinking. What if I could add some role-playing elements into my writing?
I started down the path of solitaire role-playing. One person, no GM. There are, believe it or not, systems out there that help you do just that, and it's not as silly as it sounds. I have adapted a system (I didn't create it, other people did the hard part) that helps me to add an element of chance and surprise into my writing that is fun and refreshing. It takes me down narrative paths I would have never considered otherwise. It has been such a good experience that I have decided to create a serial based on the results I am getting from 'playing' with this solitaire system. I began with nothing but the barest of setup frame work, and the name of my protagonist, and now the universe is growing in richness a depth. I'm very excited for it.
But I always come back to the FatT podcast, and I'm so impressed with the skill with which those individuals build and populate their worlds. It's humbling, and it' so much fun to listen to. So I think my goal here is to join a group of role-players (or run my own game) who's goal is to tell great stories without being bogged down with mechanics heavy games. That is not to say I am averse to systems or unwilling to learn a new game, but I'm interested in narrative and the creativity that can come from many minds rather than just one. And again, clearly a framing mechanism for context and randomness is useful, but narrative is the thing. Narrative is the best thing. I think that's what I'll be having, please.
So I will get right in to what I hope I can find here, and we'll leave all the personal bits for when we're all friends and comfortable. I am a writer first and foremost, but I also have a love for role-playing that has spanned the last three decades of my life. Recently, these two interests have converged in an unexpected and interesting way.
I have always loved storytelling, and I have always been technically proficient in terms of actually writing, but I've never developed a system that has worked for me to bring the two together. I have never seen a project through to the end. A few months ago I made my most impressive attempt to date. I wrote several hundred pages of a rough draft over four months of daily writing, and then got overwhelmed with the scope of the story I was trying to write, and boom, I was done. I set it down and haven't looked at it since. A few months later I came across an actual-play role-playing podcast called Friends at the Table. The GM happened to be a regular on a console/PC gaming podcast I listened to weekly. Anyway, the FatT podcast was very interesting to me. I had grown up playing traditional AD&D tabletop RPGs that were mechanics/combat heavy. I enjoyed these games as a teenager, a twenty-something, and even into my early thirties, but this type of role-playing was different. The players had a very active co-creation role, along with the GM, and they played their characters with a refreshing honesty that placed an emphasis on interesting narrative rather than the advancement of their characters via some arbitrary rules matrix. Their characters and the abilities and skills they possessed merely provided color and flare to the ongoing saga that this group of role-players wove with their imaginations. The games they played, Dungeon World and The Sprawl, were still mechanics heavy, but it got me thinking. What if I could add some role-playing elements into my writing?
I started down the path of solitaire role-playing. One person, no GM. There are, believe it or not, systems out there that help you do just that, and it's not as silly as it sounds. I have adapted a system (I didn't create it, other people did the hard part) that helps me to add an element of chance and surprise into my writing that is fun and refreshing. It takes me down narrative paths I would have never considered otherwise. It has been such a good experience that I have decided to create a serial based on the results I am getting from 'playing' with this solitaire system. I began with nothing but the barest of setup frame work, and the name of my protagonist, and now the universe is growing in richness a depth. I'm very excited for it.
But I always come back to the FatT podcast, and I'm so impressed with the skill with which those individuals build and populate their worlds. It's humbling, and it' so much fun to listen to. So I think my goal here is to join a group of role-players (or run my own game) who's goal is to tell great stories without being bogged down with mechanics heavy games. That is not to say I am averse to systems or unwilling to learn a new game, but I'm interested in narrative and the creativity that can come from many minds rather than just one. And again, clearly a framing mechanism for context and randomness is useful, but narrative is the thing. Narrative is the best thing. I think that's what I'll be having, please.
