• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 364 0

other. Often the information is all threaded through the DM, but sometimes players may keep certain facts about their characters private. Mary could have envisioned her own tortured past for Maureen and let this affect her actions in the game but not have told anyone, even the DM, the details of this past. In fact, this is probably more true of an RPGA game where a player shifts among DMs but keeps the same character. The player does not have time to fully explain the backstory or to work as collaboratively with multiple DMs as Mary did with Scott. Such an example, however, might be seen as too far removed from the gaming session to actually be included as a part of the text. A more common scenario is one in which the DM knows each piece of the story but players do not share bits of information with each other, or the DM withholds information from the entire group. Doing this can increase the suspense of the game and can lead to a richer story.

Finally, Murray (1998) offers one last metaphor for the role of the DM—that of a bard. She explains that if we reconceptualize authorship in terms of a bard, we can “think of it not as the inscribing of a fixed written text but as the invention and arrangement of the expressive patters that constitute a multiform story” (Murray, 1998, p. 194). A bard, by Murray’s (1998) description, chooses bits and pieces of stories to create his or her own (p. 188). A bard also responds to a live audience, noting which direction of the story they are interested in hearing. In fact, one can imagine that a bard might even allow members of the audience to take over parts of the story and tell them, although not in the same way we see in the TRPG. The metaphor of the bard also seems fitting, and somewhat ironic, because it is one of the character classes available in D&D.

Whatever metaphor we chose to represent the relationship between the DM and players, we clearly see that the TRPG does not follow the traditional notion of the author and reader. We also see that DM and player roles change depending on the type of game and game setting. A home campaign is not the same as an RPGA campaign, yet in both we see an interaction with texts that is productive. While it is difficult to define who is the author and who is the reader, we can see that acts of authorship continually occur in relation to the TRPG. When a game designer sits down to write a module, he or she does so as an author. When the DM creates his or her own world, he or she does so as an author. In Hammer’s (2007) terms, these are both acts of primary authorship. However, when a player creates a character complete with a full narrative backstory, he or she also does so as a primary author. When the DM takes that character backstory and uses it in their campaign setting, they become secondary authors, just as when they take settings from published works by game designers. Likewise, both DMs and players work together as tertiary authors to bring the world they have created as primary or secondary authors to life. According to Aarseth (1997), “the reader is (and has always been) a necessary part of the text, but one that we now realize can (or must) perform more than one function” (p. 74). While it is often argued that digital texts are reason for a revolution in reader–author–text dynamics, the TRPG offers a clear example of how this dynamic is not new, although it may be more prevalent in a digital world. The TRPG as a text is collaborative; it is multi-vocal, but it is not just the text that must take on multiple voices. The players—including the DM—must simultaneously play the role of the reader as well as the primary, secondary and tertiary author.

8

THE CULTURE OF TRPG FANS

Throughout this book, I have looked at the ways that tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs) foster narratives. In chapter 5, I divided the actual gaming session into three spheres that access different worlds and are governed by different logic. Of these spheres, the final sphere was the social sphere, and it is the one that I turn to in this penultimate chapter.