Play An RPG Without Reading Anything

I’ve wanted to do this for a while but getting started is intimidating. I spent some time recording and editing an introduction to The Artifact. It’s meant to be the first of several to get a player familiar with the game. Putting this together was a difficult process for me, I hope what I learned in recording speeds up the process for me next time.

The Artifact Introduction m4a file 11 minutes 2 seconds

The idea behind this first recording is that we often have new players mixed in with more experienced players. In getting prepped, sometimes I’ll have myself or Tarnoc sit off to the side with the new player and explain the basics. Sometimes we go off on a tangent, or deliver too much detail and the new player goes into information overload. Other times the player wants to know more and we’re busy with other issues so we hand them the book and say “Read the intro.” It usually takes them more than 11 minutes to do so and it uses up the mental resources they have to make decisions later (I’m big into this idea).

In the beginning, the reading of the intro was brutal to record. Reading straight from a text is not easy when you’re being recorded. I can’t tell you the number of takes I made to get it to how it sounds now.

At the moment, I’d have a hard time recording another one because 3rd edition is in flux. There are a lot of things changing (for the better we’re hoping) but once we nail down a few things I want to do a recording for event resolution (the core resolution mechanic) and then one that walks the player through character generation. Eventually I’d like to have enough audio files that a new player could listen to them on their iPod, and have a reasonably firm grasp on how to play the game without ever looking at a book. Obviously no one wants to listen to lists of skills or an enumeration of a starting character’s equipment but the idea is that the player could look at the lists and think “Oh, I know what these are all about.”

Let me know what you think of the effort. One day I might even move to *eek* video!