I Was A Goblin

I WAS A GOBLIN: But I Wasn’t A Hobbit

From the time I got into role-playing games, the selling point was well-established: the games allowed players to create stories in which they were the heroes. But what kind of stories? The RPG set-up requires a group of characters (4-6, on average) to work more or less together – individuals can break away from the group, but these break-outs can hardly be extended as other players are likely to get bored while one person’s storyline is furthered.

This is a fairly rare set-up in storytelling, which tends to focus on a single protagonist, or a protagonist plus a sidekick. War stories are an exception, as the focus can be on a squad. Team sports stories, too. And school stories often follow small groups of protagonists, who can’t separate too easily because of the tight setting. But pretty much no early role-playing game – and very few later ones – have focused on war, or team sports, or school as a setting. Instead they chose fantasy or science-fiction. Sci-fi novels didn’t often focus on groups, but at least Star Trek provided some kind of narrative model. And fantasy novels? In the mid-1970s they were a genre in transition from pulp-derived ‘sword and sorcery’ sagas to Tolkein-derived ‘high fantasy’, a change sparked by the enormous success of Lord Of The Rings. more »

Tom in FT /The Brown Wedge /TMFD • 9 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Schisms And Isms

A minor point of terminology: more »

Tom in FT /TMFD • 3 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: On The Level

D&D nowadays is publically remembered as a cartoon, or a fad. A core of gamers still play it, of course, but the RPG hobby as a whole is a cultish and diminished thing. And yet – unless I’m missing out some really obvious antecedent* – D&D is one of the most important games in leisure history, because of one significant first.

D&D was the first game in which the rules governing the player’s actions change the longer the game is played.** more »

Tom in FT • 6 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Gifted Youngsters

There was a divide in role-playing between people who treated it as a small-scale, modular wargame and people who treated it as a way to tell stories interactively. (You could argue for a third type of player, who treated the games as a way to enact power fantasies, but those players still varied in the ways – rules or roles – they approached those fantasies).

I knew which side I was on without a doubt – the storytellers, the improvisers, the players who dreamed of creating a shared epic. Once, on some application form or other, I even listed under hobbies “interactive theatre”, which thank heaven I was never called on. more »

Tom in FT • 8 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Encyclopaedia Goblinica

Or: Games I Have Known. For the sake of my patience and yours, I have mostly restricted this to games I either owned or played – ones where I read a friends’ rulebooks and only dimly remember have been ignored, with a couple of notable exceptions. If you want to know more about any of these, you have but to ask. Games listed in order of my encountering them:

Dungeons And Dragons: The original in its simpler and frankly more elegant form. If you’ve ever played a computer RPG, you’ve played this, pretty much.

Advanced Dungeons And Dragons: Sprawling Gormenghast-like monster with 20 rulebooks that somehow became the most popular RPG in the universe. The default setting for most “I Was A Goblin” posts. more »

Tom in FT • 18 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Pierre Menard, Dungeon Master

After playing Dungeons and Dragons and other games for a couple of years, I found myself firmly on the ‘storytelling’ side, not the ‘point-scoring’ side, of the gaming divide. I also had precious few people to play with and – equally discouraging – no stories to tell.

This resulted in an odd interval in my gaming life, where I put a lot of effort into using the roleplaying game medium to recreate other people’s stories – books I had enjoyed. At the time I was 13, perhaps just 14, and reading a huge amount of science fiction and fantasy, so this is what I draw inspiration from. At school, the group of mostly novice gamers I’d assembled was subjected to a campaign based on Julian May’s time-travel science-fantasy Saga Of The Exiles. Back home, my friend Sam was treated to what amounted to a walkthrough of Gene Wolfe’s Book Of The New Sun. more »

Tom in FT • 3 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: There is another world, there is a better world

A big selling-point of tabletop RPGs – possibly a legacy of the era they appeared in, the liberal 1970s – was their non-competitive, open-ended aspect. Individual players wouldn’t “win” games, the group would only achieve its goals through co-operation. Most games replaced victory conditions with points-based progression systems, which meant that games rarely ‘ended’ as such – the most common structure would be a series of adventures, referred to in gamespeak as a “campaign” (another hangover from the hobby’s wargaming roots).

Which raised the question – how should these adventures be linked? If games were to be heroic sagas, even the most dice- and rule-driven demanded a context. And with context came continuity, and as the hobby developed the idea of ‘worldbuilding’ became more prominent. more »

Tom in FT • 11 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Worlds In Collusion

In my teens and early twenties I made three sustained attempts to create worlds.

The first two were for AD&D games, the third was for a freeform – i.e. largely ruleless – role-playing campaign. Each of them ran into two basic problems – one in-game, one out-of-game. The in-game issue – we’ll call it the Balance Problem – is that a role-playing world needs to accommodate the kind of adventures players are likely to have: if the characters are powerful enough and the adventures wide enough in scope, it’ll most likely affect the status quo of the gameworld. The out-of-game issue – we’ll call it the Botherd Problem – is that different players will have different levels of commitment to caring about the game world – and almost all of them will care about it less than you. more »

Tom in FT • 4 Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: Small Worlds

As the eighties progressed, one-size-fits-all patchwork “campaign worlds” fell from fashion in the RPG world. They didn’t initially lose their market dominance – most Dungeons and Dragons products, for instance, were set in its smorgasbord Forgotten Realms setting – but a minimalist approach to world-building, concentrating on helping a gamesmaster evoke particular moods or playing styles, became more common. more »

Tom in FT • No Comments

I WAS A GOBLIN: I Was A Gothling

The World Of Darkness series of RPGs, beginning with Vampire: The Masquerade, were nineties gaming’s great success story. They appealed to an older audience than D&D and its imitators; they brought new gamers, including a lot of women, into the hobby; they drew on and seemed relevant to wider popular culture. 

They also built into their systems a lot of modifications designed to make gaming more story- and character-oriented, correctly recognising that this was the one real point of difference the tabletop hobby now had in a world where videogames could handle the dice-rolling and levelling-up more efficiently and enjoyably. Characters in Vampire and its successors were created with personality traits and flaws to the fore, things that would make a real difference to how a game might progress – and there were game mechanics to allow decisive player interventions in the story flow that might override the throw of the dice.

I ought to have loved Vampire – it aligned with everything I wanted from a RPG and represented a major break from the wargaming tradition. But, though I played a handful of games, I never liked it, and its success marked the end of my involvement in structured, rule-led gaming. more »

Tom in FT • 8 Comments