Storytelling.
No, I won’t adventure myself in the perilous woods where narratologists and ludologists struggle for survive.
Still I think that a good game can be also an experience, it can tell a story to players. Maybe not the best story in the world, but a different one, told together by the designer and the players. Now, refelcting on how creating a good story, I found myself reading Mouse Guard, the role play.
It is a small ruleset created to play adventures in the world described in Mouse Guard’s comic books by David Petersen. These stories tell the adventure of a group of heroic mice which patrols the territories of a small nation in order to maintain communications and relationships between cities inhabited by mice.
What strikes me is that by reading the book, I suddenly realized that it was the first RPG manual in which the author spends a lot of time trying to give player advice on how compose and tell a story.
I think that everyone who is in charge to develop a good narrative around a game should take a peek to this book. It will be worth the time. Plus, the game seems quite funny.
Cool.
Actually, if I remember correctly, World of Darkness games always had a part of the manual devoted to storytelling. More recently, D&D4 finally did a good job in simplifying and somehow structuring the rhythm, hints and tips into a pretty digestible formula to create adventures that maybe won’t be worth a pulitzer, but at least escape the hack&slash pattern.
Yeah, but Mouse Guard has a better guide. It is in many senses more concrete, it tells you where to start, giving you some checkpoints you can use to build the mission.
PS: the code of this blog seems broken. I guess I should take a deep look, there’s a lot of stuff which doesn’t work…)
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