Jobs are like buses
In the middle of the Death of RPGs (tm The Internet) I am now four weeks on the far side of the busiest I have ever been; two books, back-to-back, both involving hefty amounts of research and one needing me to recruit a playtester group over the Holiday period. I was pleased with both of them, they both stretched my experience and they’ll look good on the CV. The second was especially important, being the first work I’ve done *outside* White Wolf, for a company I met and talked to at GenCon. I initially balked at the word count and timeframe they were asking but memories of the only other time I turned down a job (which turned out to be something I would have loved and remains a deep regret) poked at me to say yes. Professional pride then pushed me to deliver, but the cost… I spent all the Holidays bar Christmas Day and Boxing Day writing. I even spent the New Year’s Party sat in the corner tapping away. I let pretty much everything else, web-presence-wise, slide, including the blog. My day-job went through a major reorganisation, including massive redundancies. I barely noticed, all evening run-time focused on Getting The Words Down.
So that’s where I’ve been.
A Story Told
Soul Cage is done. For the first time in a decade, I am not playing or running Mage. Once I’ve had a rest and properly planned my next rpg, the Vampire stand-in game someone else in my group has been running will finish and for the first time in a decade and a hefty bit I will not be participating in a World of Darkness game.
That still kinda shakes me.
It’s a peculiar form of Necromancy, listening to the recordings of the last few Soul Cage sessions while writing the Actual Play. Minute by Minute, I can hear it ticking away towards the end. It was a good end, informed (more than I realised at the time) by my sadness at never actually having taken “Ascension” through to the eponymous conclusion. There will be a reunion of sorts, a “lost tale” that goes between the finale and the epilogue, at GenCon 2011, but other than that I’m *done*. Off to see what other vistas I can see, a Gamesmaster rather than a Storyteller again.
Where The Wild Things Are
So I’ve been hearing a lot lately about how roleplaying hasn’t died out, it’s just shifted to a form invisible to most people we would call “roleplayers” (and by “we” I mean he average inhabitant of rpg.net). It’s a truism that the overwhelming majority of roleplaying on the internet is done in IP-based forums; collaborative Harry Potter and Twilight fiction lists, RP-based guilds lurking in the corners of MMORPGs and using the graphics engine of Warcraft to do for freeform roleplaying what the Machinima crowd do for home movies. If these masses could only be tapped, goes the wisdom, then the hobby would be saved.
The theory comes with the rider, of course, that these guys and girls (and a whole lot of them are girls, putting certain gender stereotypes to rest) are already perfectly enjoying themselves without giving us (and by “us” I mean RPG authors) any money, so why should they start now? The question of how to monetize these guys is burning a lot of midnight oil.
But that’s where most commentators stop. It’s out there, it’s vaguely disreputable and they don’t want any more to do with it other than to try to tease people on to the type of roleplaying they’re used to.
Screw that.
In the manner of an anthropologist, I am going in to live with the New Roleplayers. I shall report my findings as and when. My first foray is a relatively easy one – a hardcore Roleplaying Guild in World of Warcraft. Now, Warcraft’s a fun game in and of itself, but these guys some mutual friends introduced me to aren’t *playing* warcraft. They’ve carefully gathered gear that creates the avatar appearance they’re after, they’ve found a relatively quiet corner of one of the in-game cities with a shop hardly anyone goes in, and they’ve taken it over. There are long-running storylines, in character politics, struggles against enemies that aren’t part of the game as created by Blizzard (in fact, I’m pretty sure they don’t exist outside of the shared narrative – when in the “headquarters” the players play out their characters actions using the game engine, but when they go offscreen they resolve it through mutual agreement or by temporarily electing a GM).
Fascinating. I wonder how it fits with Toy Dogma. I’ll stick with them for a few months at least, to see how it all shakes out over time. Maybe interview a few of those involved and post the results up. But this isn’t some laugh at the other thing – I’m participating. And actually enjoying it.
I wonder if anyone can introduce me to one of those collaborative fanfic forums.
