Ephemeral Role-playing

[jack]

One of the strange things about GMing is that it's a naturally ephemeral hobby. If you get really good at writing, you might write stories people keep reading years later. If you get really good at playing a musical instrument, you might play to larger audiences or at higher-profile occasions.

Whereas, if you get really good at GM'ing, you'll still only ever really do it with four other people, and many of the ideas you have will get recycled into an "ideas" folder because they didn't come in play.

Some people write modules or stream games, but that's not for everyone.

That's not bad, I just personally find it really hard to enjoy moments for themselves without wanting to save them forever.

Comments

[aldabra]

I imagine you end up with a bunch of plot and dialogue which didn't go quite how you would have expected and could be repurposed as stories? Concentrated enjoyable moments have potential.

[jack]

I do save everything that doesn't fit (both in text files, and just swilling around in my brain), and as Liv reminds me, doing that almost certainly gives me lots of grist for any future creative endeavours, so it's not wasted. But I have difficulty reminding my brain of this :)

And yes, there is a fair amount of overlap between stories and roleplaying, and I often borrow ideas, but a lot of the specifics for one just don't serve the needs of the other, and vice versa.

And for that matter, I do LOVE my session write-ups, even if they're different they're clearly twinned with sessions.

[green_knight]

I think there's another aspect to this as well: the magic really happens in the shared space with players. It's collaborative storytelling - modules/written materials can be good, but it's in the interactions of GM and players and dice rolls that memories are made, and sometimes it's the little moments that create the most memorable events.

And then you get the people - mainly GMs, in what I see - who want to immortalise games and not only post short transcripts (those are great, I love them) but turn them into novels, which opens whole crates of worms - nobody remembers everything (you'd need to videotape sessions, which is icky in itself), you're assigning motivations/thoughts/words to real people, and whose intellectually property is a gaming session anyway?

[jack]

That's definitely true, it's all of the people.

I also think, people usually make a mistake if they try to bottle those sessions into another format. The things that make an interesting role-playing session are different to the things that make an interesting book. So sometimes it works (e.g. GRRM's Wild Cards series based originally on a roleplaying concept), especially if you want to take the setting you've created and tell a *new* story in it. But often it's a trap, someone tries to write the climactic moments of the roleplaying session or campaign, and they're just not interesting to read.

I love my session write-ups, but I have to translate a lot, sometimes the exciting/funny moments in play are exciting/funny to read about, but often they're not. Or maybe I'm just saying "some people are good GMs and not great novelists" :)

I think the consent issues are not too bad -- I can see how it could go badly, but I think you'd often write up a general summary, and most players would be happy to contribute, as long as you can leave out anything they're not ok with, and don't present it as "ALL MY STUFF, PEOPLE BE GRATEFUL I GIFTED IT WITH YOU".