Close the distance with the audience
All right, luvvies?
I have this one opinion about roleplaying game podcasts that I’ve been really wanting to share, but I don’t want to put on twitter, because it would take too many tweets and would almost inevitably be interpreted as a targeted dunk on specific podcasts in my community. I like drama, but not that kind of drama.
Anyway, I’ve put it all down here for you, because I trust you to take it as a “here’s a trend I’ve observed that doesn’t work for me” and not a “people who do this are terrible and wrong”. Niche podcast craft opinions, awaaay!
Coming right up
Actual play is an art form and that art form is not film
Three quick bits of podcasting news
Game design work in progress
Talismans to wear on your sleeve
Roleplaying games are theatre
is something I make a bit of a joke out of insisting on twitter, but also something I do genuinely believe and spend a fair bit of time thinking about.
An actual play programme like Merely Roleplayers is clearly theatre - we’re inviting an audience to witness our performance. But even if you’re playing a roleplaying game at home, with no microphones and no cameras, there’s still an audience there. The players are the audience. You’re performing a story for yourselves and each other.
Roleplaying is a storytelling medium. It’s an art form. Excitingly, tabletop RPG actual play is an emerging art form - related to improv, audio drama and spoken word, but (I think) fully its own thing, and something that couldn’t have existed before streaming and podcasting.
Art forms have conventions. Actual play is an emerging form, so its conventions are still emerging. As someone who produces an actual play programme and also subscribes to … probably too many other ones, I have started to develop Opinions about the emerging conventions of the form.
I’m desperately trying to articulate this without throwing shade or declaring that anyone else is Doing It Wrong. That’s the cool thing about experimenting with an emerging form - there are no rules! There is no wrong way to do it! There’s just a thing I’ve noticed that I want to talk about, in terms of how it’s shaping my approach to making Merely Roleplayers something I’m proud of.
It’s this: the emerging convention of narrating actual play using the language of film and TV.
Or in fact, not of film and TV, but of film and TV pitches.
“We open with a shot of…” “The camera pans to show…” “Cut to…” That kind of language. I hear it a lot, in a range of different shows.
It speaks to the dominance of the screen as the storytelling medium of the age; we turn to screen conventions as shorthand even in a fundamentally auditory form. I say fundamentally auditory because even in actual plays with a video component, the visuals generally aren’t what’s doing the storytelling. The players’ words do that.
This shot-calling convention caught my attention because for me, it totally breaks my immersion in the story the players are telling. It takes me from feeling like I’m sitting in with a group of friends playing games and telling stories, to feeling like I’m sitting at a boardroom table while someone pitches their movie idea to me. So while, again, I want to stress that I don’t think it’s a bad or incorrect thing to do, it’s a style that really doesn’t work for me personally, and which I’m consciously pushing against in the way I compère Merely Roleplayers.
So what are the alternatives? Well, if we’re borrowing existing language and conventions, there are some other sets sitting around that just feel right to me. Drama - specifically audio drama; spoken word; prose fiction. All forms that tell stories mainly using words and dialogue. So instead of “we open with a shot of a rainy high street” - “Rain is falling on the high street, bubbling in the gutters”. Instead of “the camera zooms in to show her slipping the key into her pocket” - “Subtly, without anyone else seeing, she slips the key into her pocket”.
I feel like that puts less distance between the audience and the story, right? Instead of asking the audience to imagine a TV screen and a story playing out on it, we close the distance and just ask them to imagine the story. To me, the shot-calling style suggests that the goal is to make the experience as much like a movie as possible, not to tell the story in the best way possible with the tools of our medium. I like movies, but I don’t think they’re the pinnacle that all other forms of storytelling should try to emulate, and I don’t believe that audiences - especially those who seek out actual plays - need things filtered through the language of film in order to imagine them.
Of course, an actual play can absolutely just be about enjoying your hobby and wanting to share the joy. But I think there’s room in the field to think about it as an art form as well - and if I’m making art, I want it to be good art.
Podcast news
Merely Roleplayers returns on 27 October with Vigil: Playtime. More details, including a trailer and how to subscribe, at www.merelyroleplayers.com
For this year’s International Podcast Month, I played a fancy diplomat who pilots a gaudy, caped, gold-detailed mecha, in a game of Beam Saber by Austin Ramsay. You can find the episode in the IPM feed.
A massive thank you to everyone who put Merely Roleplayers forward for an Audio Verse Award - thanks to you, we’re nominated in the Improvised Production category, alongside shows I’m in awe of (Campaign: Skyjacks, Party of One) and some of our convention friends (Flintlocks & Fireballs, These Flimsy Rituals). You can vote for the winners in each category from this Sunday, 11 October, at audioverseawards.net
You have two days left to nominate your fave podcasts for a Discover Pods Award (the window closes on Sunday 11 October). If you’d like to nominate Merely Roleplayers, the categories I’d suggest are Best Audio Drama or Fiction Podcast and, of course, Best Overall Podcast and Best Individual Podcast Episode. Only if you think we deserve it, mind.
Play along at home
I promised I’d use this newsletter to share some things I’m working on that aren’t public yet. Always scary! If these things never end up happening, you’ll know I started something and didn’t finish! Oh no!
So the main thing I’m working on at the moment, apart from producing Merely Roleplayers, is making some of the game design work I’ve done for the podcast available to buy and use with your game group.
I’ve got two things in the works at the moment.
Powered by the Podcast is an anthology of light, pick-up-and-play roleplaying games designed for drama-heavy one-shot sessions in a range of genres.
For all the Merely Roleplayers productions so far (except The Cloudskipper’s Captain and Parallax), I’ve hacked together a light but functional roleplaying game in the Powered by the Apocalypse tradition, designed to play up the tropes and conventions of that production’s genre. I’m now smartening up those rule sets and publishing them in a form other gaming groups can pick up and use.
The Sherrydown Enquirer is a Vigil tie-in zine and Monster of the Week supplement. For Vigil, we’re playing Monster of the Week, a published roleplaying game system with a handy licence that allows other creators to publish supplements. I’m creating mysteries for the Merely Roleplayers gang that are fully compatible with the Monster of the Week rules, so I’m also going to publish those mysteries in case other groups playing Monster of the Week feel like hunting the cool monsters I’ve invented. Plus, the Sherrydown Enquirer will double as an in-world artifact and lore/setting supplement - so if you enjoy Vigil and want to know more about the world it’s set in, the Enquirer will be worth picking up.
Issue 1 of the Enquirer is fully written and just needs laying out, quality checking, sensitivity reading, accessibility formatting, and so on. I’m aiming to be able to release it around the end of the first Vigil production (it’ll naturally include spoilers for the production, so I wouldn’t want to release it any earlier even if it was ready).
Talismania
I have a respectable collection of pins and badges that I’m not getting to show off much at the moment, thanks to working remotely and not meeting friends. Maybe you’d like a look at some of them?
These are probably the two I wear the most. The Bi Pride heart is by Tab Kimpton on Etsy, and the button on the right is from Arts Emergency, a great charity that gives young people without old-school-tie connections a leg up into the arts. If I’m in a hurry, not sure what I’m feeling or not sure what vibe I want to give off, these are the two I reach for.
Until next time,
Matt