Quote:
Originally Posted by Anthony
You should use it as a tool for things it's good at doing. It's a form of social game intended to be entertaining to the players at the time you're doing it, not something intended to produce a lasting artifact (you can use RPG techniques as an intermediate step in creating a lasting story, but it's an exercise for inspiration, not something you expect to give a final result).
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Really, though, I think that all forms of story are intended to be entertaining to the audience at the time they experience the story; that's the fundamental function of story. Oh, if you really like a story, you may want to hear it again, or in technologically advanced societies, read it again. But even in a print culture, a huge volume of fiction is intended for ephemeral entertainment. And that was true even more recently for film and video; it was within my lifetime that it became possible to see a favorite work again without being dependent on a revival, an art house showing, or a broadcast that was likely to be chopped up to fit in commercials. There are early movies that are lost because no one thought there were more than ephemeral trash—and that includes parts of recognized classics like Metropolis.
And on the other hand, being done for entertainment doesn't preclude either the treatment of serious themes, or the use of sophisticated narrative and dramatic techniques. Some of those techniques can be borrowed from other forms than RPGs—film provides us with a lot of useful analogs, such as cross cutting or fading to black—even though not all of them work. And it's also possible to produce real emotional effects on players.
For example, back when I was running DC Realtime, I used a White Wolf supplement to put the superheroes through an "amnesic circus freaks" story, one of the classic tropes of comics. And after they freed themselves, they started wondering about the source of the magic that created the amnesia. And to make a long story short, they traced it to the Endless, and one of them, who had the power to enter the Dreaming, invited Delirium to come back with him. She took one look at the Veil of Delirium (its actual name in the book!) and said, "You found it! I didn't even know I lost it!" and reached out, and then her eyes were the same color and I told the players that Delight had come back to the cosmos. And they sat there in utter silence for a full minute. I doubt that I will ever achieve anything in RPGing that tops that moment for applause.
More generally, I don't view an RPG as a tool for creating a "story" in the form of a novel, or poem, or movie, or what have you. I view it as a tool for creating a story in the form of an RPG. I don't think that's any less a story than the other forms, any more than Bushman chants are any less music than the Messiah. And yes, it's ephemeral, but for most of human existence, all music and literature, dance and drama were ephemeral. . . .