BioWare Blog: Telling Stories
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Everyone agrees on what your reality is for the evening, and over the long months if it's an ongoing campaign. You each build on what the others are doing with the help of a story guide who has some ideas he wants to throw into the mix. Creating a character is one of the best parts of starting a new game but the playing of that character and interacting with your fellow players is where the immersion and emotion that make a game memorable surface. Having spent some years in the trenches of amateur and professional theatre I know that the actors are all aiming at the same goal of telling a story for the audience. Gaming is different only in that your audience is the other players. You perform for them.
As a player, there are two things that make a game great. The first is acceptance of the basic core setting and the characters that have been created to populate it (we are fighting monsters in Ravenloft, we are Shadowrunners in Victorian England and so on). The second and more subtle is not just accepting the fact, but working toward the idea that you are playing with a group to tell a group story. An example of this thinking is that your scenes of angst, horrific revelation, romantic drama, ridiculous comedy and all the rest are ideally performed for the other players, not in some secret back room or away from the gaming table. This may seem unnatural, as we all have the drive to conduct private moments in private, but some of the most fascinating parts of the game are seeing what your fellow players are doing. I am fortunate to play games with people who understand this second distinction to varying degrees.
