Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [7]
A common way to play TRPGs is to organize a gaming group, a number of people who meet on a regular basis to advance the same TRPG adventure. Such adventures are referred to as campaigns, and the characters, known as player characters, form a party. My first research sample comes from the Sorpraedor campaign, which began in the spring of 2002 and continued until 2006. The world of Sorpraedor was created by DM Scott Cover and has involved various players, though a stable group of five played twice a month from January 2003 through September 2004. In September 2004, one player moved away and in February 2005 two other players left the game. While new players replaced them, with new characters, the overall story arc remained continuous for the entire four years. In addition to some variation in players, when a character in the story dies, the corresponding player often continues playing with a new character. This has happened several times in the Sorpraedor world. In fact only one character, Whisper (my character), remained stable in the game world from its creation in 2002 to the end of the campaign in 2006.
While I draw on my experiences throughout the Sorpraedor campaign, I offer several specific samples as representative of our game play. The first of these is the narrative of Blaze Arrow that spanned several gaming sessions from the end of January to the end of February 2003. The appendix includes the full written story of this episode as I composed it after the gaming sessions. This narrative was originally written to report events in the Sorpraedor world for a player who had not been able to attend a gaming session, and was written before I began this research project. As such, I leave it in the original form as a research sample from the Sorpraedor campaign. For the second sample, I recorded and analyzed several hours from a session in October 2003, and snippets of this transcript serve as data in chapter 5. Even before I began officially gathering data as a researcher I was the group note-taker and had compiled detailed notes from most of our gaming sessions, which were useful to me as both a gamer and a researcher. In addition to these notes, I draw on notes that Scott took as the DM and email conversations saved between Scott and other players. Finally, I include interviews with several members of the gaming group to ask specific questions about their experiences.
Throughout my analysis I refer to both characters and players in the game, depending on whether the situation involved the character or the player. Note that other than myself and Scott (the DM) the names of my fellow players are pseudonyms. Because of my familiarity with these players and characters from years of campaigning, I often refer to them by name and thus offer an introduction to them here. When I refer to both player and character at the same time, I include the player name followed by the character name. The characters in the campaign at the time of the sample were as follows:
• Whisper (played by myself): a 17-year-old human sorceress whose mother is a dragon. Her magical powers are innate, and as she grows older she develops more magical powers and more dragon-like features and abilities.
• Maureen (played by Mary): a human thief who led a hard life, but is always open for more adventures.
• David (played by Alex): a halfling ranger; a creature of the woods who believes strongly in his principles.
• Cuthalion (played by Mark):