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Sheetless roleplaying article in progress - v1.0
I'm working on the sheetless roleplaying article as a Google doc. It's nowhere near finished, but I thought you might find the work in progress interesting. I'm open to feedback, of course.
I haven't been using boldfacing or italics because I'm going to add those later on, when I convert it to a webpage.
Sheetless Roleplaying
Sheetless roleplaying is a variation on traditional tabletop roleplaying campaigns. It creates an unusually immersive and intense experience. Although it can be challenging, and requires more work from the gamemaster than a traditional roleplaying campaign, the result is usually a game which is far more involving and exciting than a standard roleplaying campaign.
Please note that sheetless roleplaying is not for beginners. Novice players are likely to find sheetless play confusing or even intimidating. As for inexperienced gamemasters, running a sheetless campaign is definitely more demanding than running a traditional game, and it requires both self-confidence and skill.
The essence of sheetless roleplaying is to take numbers out of the game, as far as the players are concerned. Character sheets are literally eliminated.
In a typical roleplaying game, each player has a character sheet with numbers that represent the skills, abilities, and powers of that character. The insight behind sheetless roleplaying is that those numbers are a barrier between the players and characters; they represent facts that no real person would know about themself.
Can you express your agility as a numeric score? You are likely to have some idea of how strong you are - but can you nail down that aspect of yourself with a number? How about your Wisdom? Charisma? Not to mention your skills?
Even for those rare categories in which you may be able to apply a number to yourself - your IQ, or how much you can bench-press - those numbers are subject to small changes on a moment-to-moment basis, and larger changes over time. In medieval-type fantasy settings, even IQ and weight limites would probably be unknown to most or all characters.
You don't think of yourself as a set of numbers. And in sheetless roleplaying, no player knows more about his or her character than that character knows about him-, her-, or itself.
So rather than knowing that he has a Strength of 17, a character might know that he has been an apprentice to the village blacksmith for four years, and has bigger muscles and is stronger than most of the people in his village. He might know that he could carry the smallest anvil from one side of the forge to the other, with difficulty. But he won't be able to know with certainty how his strength will compare with that of the stranger offering to arm-wrestle him in the village inn. He'll have to base his decision on his observations of himself and the stranger.
Numbers are not the yardstick by which we measure our abilities. For the most part, we test and judge ourselves in comparison to others.
Strangely enough, without a sheet of statistics to focus on players invariably get far more involved in the roleplaying aspect of their characters. They get into their character's viewpoint to a much deeper degree. As a result, the roleplaying experience becomes much more intense for the entire group.
Game system: Any, but
Magic: a special issue
Character creation: time, discussion, interaction between players
Acknowledgement: Bill
I haven't been using boldfacing or italics because I'm going to add those later on, when I convert it to a webpage.
Sheetless Roleplaying
Sheetless roleplaying is a variation on traditional tabletop roleplaying campaigns. It creates an unusually immersive and intense experience. Although it can be challenging, and requires more work from the gamemaster than a traditional roleplaying campaign, the result is usually a game which is far more involving and exciting than a standard roleplaying campaign.
Please note that sheetless roleplaying is not for beginners. Novice players are likely to find sheetless play confusing or even intimidating. As for inexperienced gamemasters, running a sheetless campaign is definitely more demanding than running a traditional game, and it requires both self-confidence and skill.
The essence of sheetless roleplaying is to take numbers out of the game, as far as the players are concerned. Character sheets are literally eliminated.
In a typical roleplaying game, each player has a character sheet with numbers that represent the skills, abilities, and powers of that character. The insight behind sheetless roleplaying is that those numbers are a barrier between the players and characters; they represent facts that no real person would know about themself.
Can you express your agility as a numeric score? You are likely to have some idea of how strong you are - but can you nail down that aspect of yourself with a number? How about your Wisdom? Charisma? Not to mention your skills?
Even for those rare categories in which you may be able to apply a number to yourself - your IQ, or how much you can bench-press - those numbers are subject to small changes on a moment-to-moment basis, and larger changes over time. In medieval-type fantasy settings, even IQ and weight limites would probably be unknown to most or all characters.
You don't think of yourself as a set of numbers. And in sheetless roleplaying, no player knows more about his or her character than that character knows about him-, her-, or itself.
So rather than knowing that he has a Strength of 17, a character might know that he has been an apprentice to the village blacksmith for four years, and has bigger muscles and is stronger than most of the people in his village. He might know that he could carry the smallest anvil from one side of the forge to the other, with difficulty. But he won't be able to know with certainty how his strength will compare with that of the stranger offering to arm-wrestle him in the village inn. He'll have to base his decision on his observations of himself and the stranger.
Numbers are not the yardstick by which we measure our abilities. For the most part, we test and judge ourselves in comparison to others.
Strangely enough, without a sheet of statistics to focus on players invariably get far more involved in the roleplaying aspect of their characters. They get into their character's viewpoint to a much deeper degree. As a result, the roleplaying experience becomes much more intense for the entire group.
Game system: Any, but
Magic: a special issue
Character creation: time, discussion, interaction between players
Acknowledgement: Bill