Scampir

Be the Choster you wanna read

  • He/Him + They/Them

One Canuck built the #ttrpg tag and the #mecha tag. And that was me.

Cohost Cultural Institution: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots
Priv: @Scampriv


There's this impulse I have and it comes and goes whenever I fumble about trying to fit in another ttrpg into my life. It's that game I tell myself and others I want to play where we set it in some kind of technological visual language of the past. An SNES game, an abandoned MMO, the low fidelity lens crossed by crt scanlines. Blur the pixels, feel the warm glow on your face and so on. For me, the impulse is from the digital rpgs where I saw those rudimentary visuals and filled in the abstract with my imagination, plus wonder.


Pink mountains are my shorthand. I am reaching for the isekai and retro-wave imaginary of heroic fantasy and letting it seep in. These are fantastic wonderscapes of the natural world that offer a modicum of whimsy. How big can a fantasy city be? How big can a tree be? What does a city on a waterfall look like? These factors do not need explanation, the explanation is that the world is that way and all characters relate to the world accordingly. They aren't somewhere you really engage with on these terms, even if you ever go there. They are an imagined visual background in a conversational game.

But here is my struggle with Pink Mountains. It is that in a roleplaying game (here modestly restricted to a definition where we roleplay through circumstances), the most evocative things I bring to the table, the pinterest board visuals, are not what is best emphasized by the activity. The conversation of our game is not concerned with engaging with pictures of Pink Mountains. The Pink Mountains are therefore additive but not foundational to the activity. What I actually have to bring is what directly ties into the roleplaying: What is going on and who is doing it?

This is the hangup. It's that the aesthetic vignette is not enough for roleplaying games. I find a lot of the fun in roleplaying games are in their unique premises, which give me things to consider when I am preparing to run the game or topics and challenges to think about engaging with when I am playing. Because that's what we're really here to do right? Take some characters and run them through events and see how they come out the other side?

So my conclusion is, Pink Mountains are nice but cannot be treated as foundational to the roleplaying game inventory. I have to dig deeper into the moments that spark deep character drama, dream up the altars for those rituals, and only reach for the Pink Mountains once I have down where everyone stands at the beginning.


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in reply to @Scampir's post:

You could say the same about a play: there's no character besides the ones played by the actors, and yet the stage is still set for each scene. Sometimes that's by visuals (not acted), sometimes by dialogue. In both cases it's there the vast majority of time

i do think a lot about theatre in relation to ttrpg ngl. My sibling went to post-secondary for it and is always bringing in things out in the theatre world to try and contextualize and compare whatever we discuss about ttrpgs

I've heard similarly, especially from folks that have an improv background and know tons of commedia del arte knowledge, and how it relates to scenes and characterization. It's fascinating stuff. As far as those mood boards go, I think it's as reasonable as having concept art or storyboards for your writer's room.

I think it's as reasonable as having concept art or storyboards for your writer's room.

Ok so this isn't what i'm getting at. It's not that the moodboard has no place in the organization of the game, it's that the moodboard is a pursuit that gets put aside to engage in play. The moodboard itself is a good tool to help everyone communicate something about the game, but the things that it is supposed to help conjure cannot become things to be engaged with themselves.

Ahh I think I understand. Are you saying it's like how there's "map-making" games (where this stuff would potentially be part of the play) and "player-storytelling" games (where it isn't)?