The Forge Archives

Greetings All,

If you were to read a article or essay about role-playing games what would interest you the most?

What sort of information would you most definitely want to see included?

Why I ask..

In order to put the "GNS Theory" and "Threefold Models" into proper historical and relational context I have decided to expand my original  effort at writing up a article/essay into a full blown regular encyclopdia article, one covering the Role-Playing Game; period.  (Big period, that!)  While I think I have a good start, for some of the material, it is really on a primer...

Which is where the fine, knowledgeable, and ever so ready to help others members of The Forge come into the picture.

What I am looking for is feedback with comments, suggestions, questions about what the heck I am doing, proposals, and any ideas you'd like to offer.  Look over the outline.  Have a chuckle, sip your soda, check the scores on the big game then let me know what you think.

[*]What would you like to see in a encyclopdeia article about the role-playing game?

[*]Do you think something important might have been left out of the outline below?

[*]Do you think the organisation of topics could be better, how?  

[*]Do you consider this sort of thing a waste of time?
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Going into Draft 5 the revision of the original raw entry posted here and here I have a rough outline that presently looks like this:


"Role-Playing Games"

This article (at present) will be divided into four main divisions dealing with the various aspects of role-playing, as follows:

 I. The Game

    ?. Chief Principles of Play
    ?. Objective of Play
    ?. Method of Play
    ?. Social Context
    ?. ??

II. History

    1. Origins
    2. Developments of Play
    ?. ??


III. Theories of Play

    1. "Roll vs. Role" Gaming
    2. Threefold Model
    3. GNS Theory
    ?. ??


IV.  Illustrative Games

    ?. ??




Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

It might not fight into your project, but I've always wanted to know the statistics on what games the great unwashed masses are buying, what they are playing, and which games they actually like - at different points in the history of RPGs.

By far, I think Part 1, "The Game" is going to be the hardest to write.  In some ways, I think you might be better off tackling "The History" first.  After all, it's easy to say what roleplaying has meant, historically, but it's much, much harder to create a definition of what roleplaying is, was, and has yet to become.

After all, many roleplaying definitions start off "well, there's some players and a GM..." which excludes a lot of recent work.  Others try to say "well, there's a bunch of people acting out stories together..." but then that includes things like improv theater, which is not really the same as roleplaying.  Finding a definition that includes traditional & systemless play, both tabletop and LARP, both face-to-face and PBeM, is going to be a royal task.  You want the definition to be big enough to include everything that modern roleplaying has become (or is developing towards) while excluding things that "aren't roleplaying."

Good luck :)

Later.
Jonathan

I'd be interested in seeing bits on the PR problems that rpg's have had over time from religious groups and the like. Both the negative and the positive. Most people hear religous people saying the role-playing is the tool of satan, but they rarely hear about the church group in canada that did a study on it and found that it was actually more beneficial and that the majority of their focus group got better grades and got in less trouble. Things like this would probably be good to have especially if you feel your essay would help the PR of the gaming community as a whole.

Sylus

Nothing wrong here... except one thing...

Article?....No, no, no... book...

There are far too many things that would be important... Look at the list of topics on this forum.  How many topics do you think there are?  How many pages do the topics have on average?  How many pages of topics are there in this forum?  How many forums are there on this web sight?  How many web sights do you think are on the net?  How fast do you think they are developing?  How much of RPing history do you think has been covered on the net?  Mabee I'm exagerating, but mabee not...

Anyway-

Things I'd like to see?  I'd like to see the development from wargaming and its impact on other industries and genres.