It was a real treat getting to talk with Abel Enzo of the Iron Realm, recently. I'm just such a fan of what he has made, so talking to him was a huge thrill. A year ago, when I was tearing through his available catalog, I never would have thought I would be chatting with him and comparing notes.
And it turned out to be quite a comparison. We have very different approaches - which is noteworthy only insofar as there are so few people telling stories this (procedural) way.
If you missed the interview, Abel has a kind of ABABABABAB method where he games live, records it all, and then reflects and writes additional/expansion script after that. When everything is edited down, you get the show. I think a kind of feedback loop starts to happen and one section influences the next, and so on and so on.
My process is different. Mine is AAAAAAAAAAAAAA. I just sit down and start writing (or 'playing' ... there's no difference) and make rolls as they are needed. When I get up from my desk I have a section of script. I'll walk away from it, think it over, go to work, sleep on it, chew it over in my mind and come back to pick up where I left off. By then I will have rejected a few unoriginal ideas and, quite often, I will have remembered something that happened earlier in the story that should influence the current situation in-game.
In the end, Abel's dice-rolls and a good chunk of his gaming are 'live' and mine are not. Both ways are effective, I think. I wonder if there are even more ways one could make this work. Go 100% live and you have most actual-plays. I guess I'm at the extreme opposite end. What's the opposite of 'actual-play'?
Would that be a notional-play?
ReplyDeleteI like it. I think you just coined a new word :)
ReplyDeletetbh, I am always at a loss to know what to call TOTM. I usually go with semi-actualplay, but that's not very eloquent, is it?