We discover Role Playing Games as audio dramas

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Shaun Makes is today’s guest on The Segilola Salami Show. Shaun shares with us his journey producing Role Playing Games from how he started to how he has grown as a producer. I assure you, you need to click play now.

About Role Playing Games

discover role playing games podcast audio drama Role playing games borrow heavily and are influenced by all manner of fiction. The inception of the hobby (in the 70s) was as a tabletop wargame or tactics game. The creators would play WWII strategy games but wanted to change or create games that would allow them to play as characters from their favourite fantasy fiction. Inspired by books by Tolkein, Lewis, Burroughs, Leiber, and so on, they created a game that would let them do that.

Decades passed, and today many people are playing a very different take on that game. Rather than pursue it as a wargaming or tactics game, Dungeons and Dragons is much more about the narrative, storytelling, character dynamics, and humour that come from a collaborative group effort. The Dungeon Master prepares a story arc – sometimes as little as three or four lines of prepped text, and sometimes as much as several novels – and then presents challenges to the players.

From Shaun Makes

Earlier on in the year, I attended an event where I knew I was going to run a game for 6 people I had never met before. It was a pickup game that needed to have a story arc complete within about three hours, and have a sense of accomplishment for the players. I created 6 quick character sheets for the players (little more than what they needed to mechanically play the game), and wrote myself this blurb:

Zindar, the dockmaster, is concerned about a pirate ship that is constantly harassing merchant ships as they clear the Bay of Chult.
He needs the adventurers to tail the ship, collect information on it, and bring it back to him.
He offers an additional reward for:
sabotage of the pirate’s ability to intercept merchants
recovery of a stolen talisman – The Chain of Savras
Follow the ship/stow away on the ship
Infiltrate the pirate hideout
Survive and get back with information.

When I present the challenge, I play the character of Zindar, I use voices, I try to tease out character traits from my players, I encourage them to come up with their own solution to the problem. Their approach to these is never what I expect. I could give this same prompt to different groups of players, and they would always come up with different ideas, ask different questions, play the same set of 6 characters with different quirks.

Creative Commons Attribution for the music in the RPG clip

“Twisted”, “Babylon”, “Mesmerize”, “Artifact”

Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

About The Segilola Salami Show

The Segilola Salami show is hosted by Segilola Salami who is also an author and a blogger. Her latest book is called Useless Warrior Princess.

The aim of the show is to be entertaining but educative as we see guests share their experience on self-publishing in a virtual cafe and listeners get to discover new authors and new books.

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