All the world's a stage
Karen, Richard, and Matt are professional relations: business partners who are also family members. This issue, Richard edits Karen’s interview with their son Matt, about Merely Roleplayers – the Foggy Outline podcast where theatrical people play roleplaying games.
“Creating drama is what it’s all about.”
Karen
By my reckoning it was around about 2018 when you first came up with the idea [for Merely Roleplayers] and there are 300 episodes.
Matt
Our first episode was around Halloween 2017.
And there are significantly more [episodes] but if you want episodes right the way back, you’ve got to come to foggyoutline.com and listen to them streaming off the website.
Karen
What gave you the inspiration?
Matt
I ran a game on a holiday for a group of friends. I said,
“I want to run a roleplaying game this evening. It’ll be very simple, who wants to do it?”
All 12 or 13 people said they wanted to play.
That was a ghosts, demons, ghost-busting story, set in the house we were in, playing ourselves, but with stats and dice. The game was inspired by The Adventure Zone podcast where they played a Powered by the Apocalypse hack [inspired by the game Apocalypse World by D. Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker].
That game was my first experiment creating something with that system, very simple, easy to run and giving everybody a very easy on-ramp.
Not long afterwards I said to the Artistic Director of Blackshaw Theatre,
“Do you think it would be a good idea to do what we did on holiday as a podcast? As an excuse to get people together and be a bit silly.”
Merely Roleplayers is theatrical people who play roleplaying games as opposed to gamers who play roleplaying games, which is most actual play podcasts.
Karen
What do you find the most enjoyable part of the process?
Matt
Playing the game. That’s the reason we’re doing it. Our primary goal is to have fun. When we’re not having fun, that’s the point to say, “What’s going wrong here? Should we stop?”
But, getting in the room and all the things happening that you could never predict because you…, once you get a group of people together, bouncing off each other…
Karen
It’s that dynamic, isn’t it?
Matt
Yes, you have no idea where it’s going to go.
Karen
You’ve also been a player and allowed someone else to lead. Which do you prefer?
Matt
I prefer running the game. I have fun being the baddy, trying to give people interesting scenarios to play in.
If you’re a player, you concentrate on what your character would do, how they’d respond. So, I feel like I can relax more if I’m…, I was going to say, “just a player”. I don’t think that’s the right way to put it…
[As a player] I can switch off, or I can be the player that I like to see when I’m running the game, who takes decisions and who’s always going,
“Can I push? Can I keep pushing…?”
Creating drama is what it’s all about. While we’re truthful to the characters, setting and events that have gone before, we still want to create the biggest explosions (laughs) that we can, whether that’s emotional ones or literal ones…
“I have fun being the baddy, trying to give people interesting scenarios to play in.”
Karen
What’s surprised you most about it?
Matt
I think how, how much we’ve got out of the Vigil setting, the current Main House production. It’s about monster hunting in a small, middle-English town…
[Vigil] has just kept running. It’s partly because of the way the game’s designed and partly because of the ideas the players have come up with. We’ve still got stories we want to tell in this world, the players still have things they want to explore with their characters and every time we put the call out for who’d like to be in the next session, there’s people who want to be doing it.
Karen
And it’s remembering each character’s back story when you’ve got such a long-running series.
Matt
Yeah, which has been a challenge. I want to be improvisational and to give the [players] interesting, unexpected answers to things. [But] the longer you play, the more back-story you get built up. [I may want to do] something that’ll take things in a zany direction, [but] the weight of what’s gone before sometimes has to drag the improvisation back or, in an ideal world, fuel it.
Karen
(Laughing) …because there’ll be someone out there that will realise you’ve gone wrong…
Matt
Well, it’ll be one of my players! (both laugh).
Karen
Thank you. Is there anything we haven’t covered?
Matt
You’ve talked about your experience [as a listener] and said,
”It’s fun to listen to but I’m never really sure what’s going on…”
Is that still the case?
Karen
No. Since then, I’ve concentrated more and been more thoughtful about trying to follow the plot.
Matt
That’s great, because my goal with Merely Roleplayers has always been for it to be as accessible as possible. Which is why [I recap at the start] of every episode. I also edit it so there’s never such a big pause for interpreting game mechanics that you lose the thread of what’s happening. I try to emphasise that the story is comprehensible to whoever’s listening.
Karen
Thank you, Matt.
There’s more to this interview. Buy us a cuppa on Ko-fi to support our work, and you can read the unabridged version.
📖 Our bestselling course What do we mean by climate breakdown? is now available as an ebook, written by Richard, edited and formatted by Matt. It’s £3.99 and nearly all of that goes to us, to fund future projects, not to any platform or middle-man. Buy it at foggyoutline.com.
👒 Thank you to everyone who visited us at Craven Business Expo – especially if you took the chance to sign up to this newsletter (hello, new readers)! We put the names of everyone who signed up on the day into a hat, and the winner (you know who you are by now) is taking home a signed copy of Less by Patrick Grant.
🪐 Matt was Maddy Searle’s guest on A Game Of One’s Own, an actual play podcast all about solo and duet roleplaying games. They played energy harvesters who risk spaghettification by regularly ripping the universe a new one, in Coiled Spæce by Æther Corp games.
🎲 Merely Roleplayers‘ Main House production Vigil: Shadowfall hits the halfway mark in Act 3, where our esoteric neighbourhood watch chase the kidnapped shadows to the realm the players all refuse to call Shadopolis.
🔬 Matt published No safety net, chapter 4 of Camera Obscura. Can the Research Assistant fend off Finance and the Institutional Review Board while the Principal Investigator is away?
Matt highlights Dr Julia Shaw:
Dr Julia Shaw is a scientist who specialises in false memory, investigative interviewing, and understanding the criminal mind. She is bisexual, and in 2022 she released her book Bi: The hidden culture, history, and science of bisexuality (I’ve read a fair few books on bisexuality and this is the one I recommend to everyone). Happy Pride month! 🏳️🌈
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