The goal of writing is to produce a collection of words that tell a coherent story that other people will enjoy reading while roleplaying is concerned with the entertainment of the participants. Roleplaying is linear with events being played out in roughly the same order that they occur, but writing is not bound by this. The use of flashbacks and prequels can even allow the finished product to be out of chronological order. An author should know what the plot is going to be from the start while a GM has to accept that whatever plot he thinks of, the players will most likely do something else. In a roleplaying game each player controls a PC and the GM controls the NPCs. When writing, all characters are controlled by the author or are shared by co- authors. Writing has no rules other than a general sense of self consistency while roleplaying has varying degrees of rules and mechanics depending on which system you use.
Even my normal writing style tends to lean towards roleplaying. I always have at least one character whom I consider a PC for that story. Scenes usually get roleplayed out in my head before being committed to paper. And I often find that it's easier to get into character when doing so that when actually roleplaying. After all, I don't have to deal with distractions such as dice, mechanics or trying to get the GM's attention. Many of my stories start with a scene or set of scenes that I find interesting before I have a plot in mind. There was one story that was done primarily for the purpose of entertaining myself and I had no idea where I was going until I got there. I showed it to a friend who offered to beta-read for me and she said that she thought I ought to have some bad guys show up rather than having nothing more than the two characters talking to each other.
There's also "Matilda's Story," the first installment of which appears later in this zine. We roleplayed out the events in our local group with no changes to our normal playing style except that there was a tape recorder running in the background. Once the GM had a private conference with one of the players and agreed to stay near the tape recorder, banishing the rest of us to the kitchen instead of the two of them moving and everyone else remaining behind. There were also points where play halted while I changed tapes. A sentence or two sometimes had to be repeated. That's about it for the effect it had on the way we played. While listening to the tape, I am transcribing and editing the spoken words rather than creating an original work. Somehow these processes combine to produce a story though at no point in time would I say anyone was writing it.
I was in a play-by-email Champions game once. That is to say that the characters were all written up in Champions format. During actual play, participants took turns writing and editing sections of text. As long as an action was reasonable for someone of the PC's abilities and it didn't contradict something someone else was doing, the GM allowed it to occur. Play was not strictly linear as a piece of text would be passed around as long as players wished to continue modifying it, even if a later part of the story had already started circulating. When writing, you were allowed to use NPCs and even other PCs, though the person who controlled that character had the right to edit what you wrote if they disagreed with it. The final product that resulted certainly told a coherent story, even if that was not it's purpose.
While officially a collaborative piece of fanfic, the three Highlander wars seemed more like a roleplaying game to me. Every player had a PC - a fictional version of themselves, usually with various exaggerations or other modifications. While there were other characters wandering around, mostly characters from the Highlander television series, each one had a real person that they were associated with. Anyone who wanted to borrow any character (real or otherwise) for a post had to schedule time with the player who controlled that character and that player had the right to read the post and say that they were being written out of character. The first war was extremely chaotic with little in the way of advance planning. Most posts were reactions to, or at least influenced by, posts by other people, but there were dozens of plot threads all running simultaneously. The second war was a cruise and the third had a number of parties and such as scheduled events, but still left plenty of room for unrelated adventures. I'm certain that some people who weren't involved enjoyed reading the posts, but it was hard for even the participants to read everything and our fun was the real purpose.
Actually, what's really bizarre is that if I had to name the type of writing or roleplaying that the war most resembled, I'd say it was like a LARP. There are huge number of players involved. There aren't really any NPCs so the plots have PCs working against each other more instead of against characters controlled by the GM. It's also time sensitive. There's a specific time when it starts and specific time when it ends. Game time had some dependence on real time, though we made it pass half as slowly since our virtual selves didn't have to work during the day. This is, of course ironic since it's about as far from live action as it can get. Not only can the players not actually physically interact with each other, but they aren't even in the same state, let alone the same building.
All of these combine to convince me that distinguishing between roleplaying and writing, like a lot of things, is more like distinguishing shades of gray than distinguishing between black and white. It gets especially confusing when dealing with things near the middle of the range. That's how we can end up with a play-by-email game that feels more like writing and a collaborative fanfic that feels more like roleplaying.
This article previously appeared in Interregnum #33.
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