Episode 2: Avatar and Author Play in D&D

Every other week, entertainment journalist Sean Weeks picks the brain of multi-ENNie award winning game designer Steve Dee about games as an art form, and how they change us, and how games can rise to that calling and we can improve our literacy around games.

In Episode 1 we looked at how Dungeons and Dragons was created and the assumptions that have been put on it over time. In this episode we talk further about how the construction of D&D and all roleplaying games since has been around the concept of avatar play, where the player is assumed to be taking on the role of their playing piece, and acting as a combination of their own player skills and the powers of their character, and trying to keep their playing piece alive and unlock powers for it. Even in more narrative RPGs, there remains this sense of survival being key, and power being vital.

This is a fine mode of play, but it is often directly oppositional to the way stories are constructed. It certainly limits the kinds of stories that can be told into a very narrow niche, and forces players into a survival mindset where they are often trying to "get the better of" the story. As a result, this creates a rich vein for comedy, but that comedy points to the fact that there is a mismatch between expectations. And all too often, the person responsible for patching over these cracks is the poor beleaguered GM. 

People are hungry for dungeon crawling adventures but they are also hungry for more storytelling, and it is time we asked the hard questions of what stories RPGs are leaving behind.