I found this interesting wee article today in Clarksworld magazine. It’s all about the role that RPGs play for fantasy writing and writers, interviewing China Mieville amongst others. Mieville says
What we love about Cthulhu is that it is beyond our ken, as Lovecraft repeatedly points out. Then, in an act of Promethean heroic vulgarization, the Call of Cthulhu RPG neatly laid out Cthulhu’s ‘Stats’ – Str, 100, or whatever it is. This is not a dis of RPGs. My point is that that desire to systematize even the fantastic, the point of which is to evade systematization, is a kind of geek honor, a ludicrous and incredibly seductive and even creative project, an almost majestic point-missing, that in missing the point, does something new.
Which is an interesting point. I often read a genre novel and think ‘I’d love situations like that in my games’ and then realise that games just don’t work that way – scenes don’t get constructed perfectly. They’re messy and unpredictable. It’s also why I don’t like the ‘shared story’ approach to RPGs – it tends to elevate predetermined plot over spontaneous reactions of characters. As author Tim Waggoner says:
So many writers plot out a story, march their characters through the plot, and then reach the outcome. They forget to leave room for the unpredictable, for the joy of surprise. Gaming taught me that what goes wrong for characters makes for the most interesting stories.
Some interesting stuff.
Mostly Geek 