where's my fucking Bionicle OSR game
- 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
posts from @Scampir tagged #tabletop rpg
also: ##ttrpg, #tabletop role playing games, #Tabletop RPGs, #tabletop rpg's, #TTRPG, #ttrpgs, ##tabletop rpgs
I will not elaborate
I had to pause while trying to write a chost about the kinds of stuff in ttrpgs that I like! I was writing about characters and the unique abilities that games give them through class/background/playbook package. I had to stop because I do not have a proper and clear design term that I feel I need to discuss it. I'm looking for something that delineates
- "the character" as an imagined person that a player interfaces with the fiction by "playing as" them from
- "the character*" as the game artifact that a text presents as a common template. 1
I think the clearest way to describe this without terminology is what you see when you look at a character sheet, but I need a general purpose term for class and playbooks and the others. Even though there is nuance in saying that a character is from a certain class or uses a certain playbook, what I need is a shorthand to talk about where exactly the verbs organized under these terms are coming from and why that's significant.
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Archetype has been used to describe these often, but I think that the term Archetype connotates a pre-existence of a slew of characters that the game artifact is in reference to and synthesizing which precludes games where the character class is truly something new.