Types of Role Playing Games

Types of Role Playing Games
Hi my name is Barry Osser from North Coast Role Playing in Eureka, California and I’m here today to talk to you about two different styles of role playing. Now styles are not genres, this is not doing Superheroes versus Space, that type of thing. What we’re talking about is dice generated versus character generated story lines. Now when you talk about role playing a lot of people think that it’s in terms of the word r-o-l-l roll which suggest to you that you’re going to be rolling dice, now in any role playing game we use dice as a random generator so the dice are in any version, but the dice centered games or the hack and slash games, the terminology kind of now rolls around, that’s the r-o-l-l version of role playing. That’s the one where you character gets together with a bunch of other characters and the objective is to go and kill as many things as possible, you’re not doing a who done it, you’re not doing anything that Sherlock Holmes would be proud of. Your idea is basically the Bill Shattner type of thing, hey let’s go and beat the crap out of it and let’s…can I say that? Ahh beat the holy heck. That’s the Bill Shattner type of attitude where you get to go out and beat the heck out of anything that’s there and get the answers that way and if you didn’t get the answers, there’s going to be someone else to beat up. The other version is the character or story line centered role playing and in this version what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to be a real character. You and I both know that you’re not going to walk out every single day, I don’t care who you are-you could be a marine, you’re not going to walk out every single day and go beat the holy heck out of every single person you meet to get some answer and 50 cents for a bus. In the character or story line setting what you want to do is you want to create a world where things can really happen and I’m saying this using the term because we are in fantasy role playing, yes, we’re not flying around on ships, but the ship does not become the most important thing. The guns on the ship do not become the most important thing; your character is the most important thing. So again in the story line version what you’re trying to do is create a story and build a story. Each of the characters taking on a part, hopefully there’s repercussions for the fact that you’re going around and killing people and those repercussions come back to bite you in the butt.