The Art of Storytelling in Tabletop RPGs - Create Epic Adventures for D&D, Pathfinder & More | Perfect for Game Masters & Players

Critical reviews are rarely well-received on Amazon so I feel compelled to spell out what I am NOT saying here. My review in no way challenges or is even qualified to challenge the author's conceptual mastery of rhetoric as an academic discipline. Moreover, I think tabletop roleplaying games can benefit from scholarly attention and that people who play them can benefit from reading scholarly work, not only in terms of their intellectual curiosity but also as roleplayers. There are RPGers out there in no small numbers who think and write very deeply about these games, albeit outside of the framework of a formal discipline. This book offers only a little to such RPGers, however, and much less to RPGers generally. For example, one of the key contentions of this book is that tabletop roleplaying games need to be studied separately from computer roleplaying games. For RPGers, the insight is quaint at best. But of course it would need to be rigorously demonstrated to an audience -- say a PhD committee -- with basically no interest in or knowledge of RPGs.Furthermore, the author seems unaware (or unconcerned) that the struggle to define RPGs has been the subject of a quiet (I guess) but passionate debate among gamers for at least 15+ years now. Cover proposes a definition that describes "creating a narrative experience" as the purpose of RPGs. Her phrase "narrative experience," as opposed to the stricter understanding of narrative as a form, seems to be what rhetoric as a discipline offers to understanding RPGs. I found this point to be tremendously important, in light of the long debate among RPGers. But this seems to slide past Cover somewhat, even despite her acknowledging that Daniel MacKay's definition needs "expanding" based on this distinction. MacKay is in my opinion actually flat-out wrong: the purpose of playing a roleplaying game is not to generate a thing called a story but rather to interact. To this point, the concepts of "narrativity" as a tool to "bridge separateness" and "social immersion" as motive are very strong and merit deeper investigation. Unfortunately, that would have been a more useful book for RPGers than this one.