Kicking the Boundary Stones

In response to last week's post on jumps and causal transitions, random Firedrake comments:

Rather than imitate linear narrative, though, I'd prefer a system which flows from the things that role-playing does well, rather than turning it into a copy of television or film.

Here's my reply to this is an oft-expressed opinion.

(Although, the Internet being what it is, I guess we must allow for the possibility that this is oft-expressed by random Firedrake...)

We don't yet know what roleplaying does well, because the form is young and we have yet to fully explore its boundaries. It is still less than forty years old. The aesthetic limits of film had not been completely established in 1935, forty years after the Lumiere brothers. Jazz, which came along a few years after the first film screenings, was far from completely plumbed by the early forties.

A century later, it's tougher, because so much has been done by so many, to do new things in film or jazz, but hardly impossible.

As roleplayers, we are much luckier than today's filmmakers and jazz players. We live in a time of fertile continuing development. The full extent of the form has yet to be established. Some experiments will fail; others will spawn sub-movements. Others will be drawn into the main corpus of RPG thought.

When we take techniques from older narrative forms and import them into roleplaying, they transform. They become roleplaying expressions of outside ideas, adjusted to fit. Just like all of the previous concepts from other forms we once borrowed and now take for granted. And thus, they become part of what roleplaying does well.