Are You Writing Serious Fantasy? - The Barrow-Downs Discussion Forum

Nar · 05-07-2002, 10:07 AM

I basically agree with your position on RPG, littlemanpoet-- and you know more about them than I, I have only played a few, briefly, and I've never run a game. I think, however, that your suggestion at the end that the results of a game could be written up and become a work of fiction is very true. That last stage of putting all of the creation, including the events & reactions in the game down in written form, and possibly editing and coalating it would produce art, and there's no limit to how good or serious it might become.

There's a theory that the plays of Shakespeare were a group effort-- that Shakespeare wrote the scenarios and most of the dialogue, and the actors then fleshed out their characters by adding or expanding their lines, and the resulting plays were later written up. This would account for the plays' huge vocabulary-- as I understand it, no other author has ever coined or used so many different words. I tend to disagree with this theory; I tend to think think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, rather than a group or the Earl of Oxford or whoever, but this 'the plays were written by a group' theory does works very well to explain things like Shylock suddenly turning from a cardboard villain into a human being and tragic figure in the end of The Merchant of Venice-- I can imagine the actor doing Shylock getting carried away by his character, breaking out of his limited role and ad-libbing his 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' speech.

Suppose the plays of Shakespeare were a group effort, then they would be literature's first and greatest body of work derived from a RPG. Shakespeare would be both 'Court and Dungeon' -master and editor/poliser/poet of the published Folio containing the plays. This final process of gathering and editing would have been crucial in pulling the plays into unified works of art. Even if the plays were a group effort, there's no disputing that Shakepeare was a brilliant poet, and storyteller, he just may also have been a brilliant editor.

05-07-2002, 10:07 AM	#11
Nar Wight Join Date: Apr 2002 Posts: 228	I basically agree with your position on RPG, littlemanpoet-- and you know more about them than I, I have only played a few, briefly, and I've never run a game. I think, however, that your suggestion at the end that the results of a game could be written up and become a work of fiction is very true. That last stage of putting all of the creation, including the events & reactions in the game down in written form, and possibly editing and coalating it would produce art, and there's no limit to how good or serious it might become. There's a theory that the plays of Shakespeare were a group effort-- that Shakespeare wrote the scenarios and most of the dialogue, and the actors then fleshed out their characters by adding or expanding their lines, and the resulting plays were later written up. This would account for the plays' huge vocabulary-- as I understand it, no other author has ever coined or used so many different words. I tend to disagree with this theory; I tend to think think Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, rather than a group or the Earl of Oxford or whoever, but this 'the plays were written by a group' theory does works very well to explain things like Shylock suddenly turning from a cardboard villain into a human being and tragic figure in the end of The Merchant of Venice-- I can imagine the actor doing Shylock getting carried away by his character, breaking out of his limited role and ad-libbing his 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' speech. Suppose the plays of Shakespeare were a group effort, then they would be literature's first and greatest body of work derived from a RPG. Shakespeare would be both 'Court and Dungeon' -master and editor/poliser/poet of the published Folio containing the plays. This final process of gathering and editing would have been crucial in pulling the plays into unified works of art. Even if the plays were a group effort, there's no disputing that Shakepeare was a brilliant poet, and storyteller, he just may also have been a brilliant editor.