Writing Excuses Transcripts

Writing Excuses Season Four Episode Five: Role-playing in games as a tool for storytelling

From http://www.writingexcuses.com/2010/02/07/writing-excuses-4-5-roleplaying-games-as-a-tool-for-story-telling/

Key points: Role-playing as a player can help writers understand character motivations. It can help writers learn to wing it. It can teach writers to look for different, clever, non-obvious ways to solve problems. It can help provide a "test environment" for ideas. But beware! Role-playing can be so much fun and addictive that you aren't writing. Also, beware of trying to copy a great role-playing session or game directly into a novel. Role-playing characters, tone, etc. are not always appropriate for a novel. Remember, role-playing games are for fun. Novels need realism.
( roll for revelation? )
[Brandon] There have been plenty of  "you get suck... players get sucked into their role-playing game" sort of books. Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg did this. It's kind of become a cliche in fantasy. So you're not going to do that. You're going to have role-playing characters get sucked out into our world, and see what happens.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Howard] Roll for initiative.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write. Or play. Whichever you want to do.