It's about the story

I'm not usually one for blogging just to provide links to other articles, but this one by Travis J Lee over at GamingReport.com entitled On Being Part of the Group Story is worth reading.

I think the point is that roleplaying isn't our first love. Novels and movies, these are our first loves. Roleplaying only comes after... the desire to create and participate in something like these loved stories. And if the story is our first love, and we got into roleplaying because we wanted to be a part of the story, why don't we work harder at making the activity more like the stories that we say we want to emulate?

I suppose there are some who don't connect the roleplaying game with "being a part of a story like Lord of the Rings" or whatnot, and really just see it as a type of wargame. And that's fine, I suppose, but I feel a fundamental disconnect with them... I cannot relate. I like a fine wargame... I was a big Car Wars fan and I own multiple editions of Battletech. But to me those are very different from roleplaying, because roleplaying is about participating in stories.

Even when I was in middle school and Dungeon Mastering my first dungeons, it was still about story. Not in the way I think of it today, but it was still about the characters and their exploits, and I remember the characters as people, not as collection of combat numbers. My brother's cleric, who chanted his prayers... at first level, he chanted, "Ooommmm." And with each level, he added another syllable to the chant. "Oommmm, mey ni ah-so, oh-soooooo. Oommmm."

Little things that, as shallow as the characters may have been, added... character. They created memorable moments. Some of the memories are about killing monsters. Many of them aren't. And while we didn't tell stories with coherent plots (with clear beginnings, middles, and ends) and consistent motivations, our characters still told their story.

In the beginning, just being in the story was enough. But eventually, the desire to tell more interesting stories grew, and now my roleplaying is almost entirely story-driven. So I really can't seem to find any common ground with players who aren't in it for the story, at least on some level. And maybe those players are in it for story and don't realize it... I never thought of it in those terms back in the eighth grade. I just wanted to play D&D because I knew it was fun, and it was like Lord of the Rings and stuff. But I know why I've stuck with roleplaying as my primary hobby since then, and that's the chance to participate in the story.