Over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a trend at my DnD table as more players have moved from the traditional pen(cil) and paper to having a laptop, notebook or, more frequently, a netbook or smartphone in front of them instead. In this article, I’ll explore some of the tools available to facilitate this move and explore my own experiences.
Whether you’re writing a novel or playing a role-playing game, there comes a time when you have to develop a character. There are a number of ways you can approach this and this series of articles will explore some of those.
I’ll start with the character development that I’ve dealt with the most: Developing a character for a role-playing game, specifically DnD.
Through all fantasy games, single- and multi-player, virtual or table-top, runs a common thread: The writing. It has been argued many times, and reasonably successfully, that the history of fantasy gaming was born of the ground-breaking work of Tolkien, however it is more correct to say that he was the great populariser of a genre that has been with us for hundreds of years. The archetypes that exist in his work still inhabit the games we play today: Orcs, Dwar(f|ve)s, Elves, Trolls, etc.
The images that those names invoke, and that are visualised in modern MMOs, aren’t too far from the descriptions found throughout fantasy literature. So what of the state of writing in fantasy games themselves?