thread: 2012-03-15 : Monster Mania Con
On 2012-03-15, Meserach wrote:
Vincent:
I am not looking to expand the market for RPGs necessarily! Like, I am not interested in ALL of the things associated with that term. But there are specific practices, like "inhabiting a character" and "collaborating to improvise a story", which I am interested in trying to sell to wider audience, in the context of games of my own design which might not otherwise be defined as RPGs, but DO include those specific activities.
If what you;re saying is something like "I think there is no way to sell inhabiting a character and/or collaborating to improvise a story to a non-RPG audience - if you want to reach them, you have to drop those weird activities from your game", then okay. (Although that conclusion does make me super sad!)
But is that what you believe, or not? Which specific activities that come under the umbrella of "roleplaying" are saleable, and which ones are just too kooky?
If I was to categorise them as SALEABLE and TOO KOOKY, I might start to make a list like this:
SALEABLE
* rolling dice
* reading out narration from a book
* following instructions about what to do next
* using a randomiser to discover what discrete action happens next (like, which page to I turn to?)
* attempting to optimise performance according to win/loss metrics
TOO KOOKY
* acting in character via speech patterns
* acting in character via gesture and/or facial expression
* thinking in character
* dressing up in character
* creating a narrative that makes an artistic statement
* improvising character dialogue
* improvising fictional events without explicit instructions that say exactly what happens next
...and so on.
But I think (or rather, I hope!) that maybe some of those "too kooky" things might actually be saleable with the right marketing, framing and explanation.
