Is it possible to write a good fantasy novel based on your group's RPG shenanigans?

Is it possible to write a good fantasy novel based on your group's RPG shenanigans?

This is now a "Sorin did nothing wrong" thread

Possible, yes. Easy? No.

It's like storytime threads on Veeky Forums. You never tell the story as it actually happened, because that will involve a lot of pauses, interruptions, tangents and other stuff which happens in the course of a game but doesn't actually make for a good or enjoyable story.

Any retelling of an RPG should be inspired by more than anything else. Take the best of the characters and the story, along with the general structure, and write it all up. Don't worry about embellishing or altering it, because adapting between different mediums isn't something you can do directly.

I always remember something 2D said in the old Shadowrun Storytime threads, that it was the movie version of the game, sped up and focusing in on the good bits. That's the way to do it.

No, because unlike a role playing game, you'll want to follow the rules of storytelling, like having three acts and a character arc.
Especially when weird shit happens caused by a crit of crit fail. It's kind of hard to think of a way how the witch hunter accidentally shot his own foot instead of one of the party members.
Unless you heavily modify it to the point where it's no longer recognizable as your campaign, it won't be good.

>It's kind of hard to think of a way how the witch hunter accidentally shot his own foot instead of one of the party members.

And that's one of the reasons critical failures and critical skill checks are awful house rules that need to be dropped.

It's possible to write a good one in the same world but based on your PCs? Very unlikely.

With a lot of editing yes. That's how record of the lodoss came to be.

I think it's possible, but like says you have to do a lot of editing to distill it into something usable.

Really I think turning sessions into podcasts, videos, or replays is probably the closest you can be to authentically transcribing the game into another medium, and even then there should be some amount of editing or post production to make it not shitty.

>record of the lodoss war
OPsaid good fantasy, user.

I'm surprise there is so few youtube channel or live RPG sessions. I mean there is so many people looking at other people playing video games, so why so few with RPG?

You know how Critical Role is shit?

Maybe that's why.

Yes. Dragonlance was, for instance. It takes editing out the gameist anachronisms though, like having 40+ million types of monsters with no explanation of the biomes involved.

>you'll want to follow the rules of storytelling, like having three acts and a character arc.
most RPG scenarios don't follow a 3 act structure though. does that mean they are bad? what is the significance of it?

I remember hearing Vin Diesel did that sort of thing, but I'm not sure on the specifics.

Doing live recording of multiple people takes production values. Less so for online sessions than for IRL around a table stuff, but even then it does require everyone involved to have a decent recording setup and for someone to make sure it's all edited and mixed correctly.

Compared to how easy it is to record game footage and a single persons audio, the disparity is pretty easy to understand.

It's also worth noting that there are a few other really successful shows, like itmeJP's Rollplay series, who have those production values and pull in pretty solid views.

Because it's like watching someone doing their taxes, even if they're having the time of their life.
Also, it's for people who wish they could have friends but they don't, and they can relish in the idea of playing and RPG with friends for even just a few hours.
source: me

Yes, but it needs to be 'based on' it, not an accurate retelling of it. A lot of what makes good roleplay makes for a shitty novel.

The most famous example is the Malazan Book of the Fallen being based on a GURPS campaign.

Watch "Cosmonauts and DnD" and you tell me why people don't watch RP sessions.

Syd Field has successfully memed three act structure into an unarguable law of filmmaking, and a whole lot of people are adept at trying to twist everything into a defined 'three act structure' which has the exciting observation that stories generally have a beginning, middle, and end.

Despite there being lots of one-act stories, or Shakespeare using significantly more than 3 acts in most plays.

3-act structure is a structure that works but anyone telling you it's the only structure is a memelord

Probably not. You have to figure PCs are predominantly pretty damn stupid aside from metagaming, even the most intricate A+ keikaku in-universe curves out as what would be a profoundly simplistic plan in real life and that's not counting the times the players just escalate shit for no reason because it's make-believe and they can't really get hurt.

Not at all; not even the "loosely based on it" version most anons are suggesting.

This is because, in real stories, characters don't randomly drop in and out with little explanation or reasoning, randomly change motivations and/or morality without cause, be completely unmatched to each other without the coming-together-beyond-differences thing at the end, make basic critical mistakes about common knowledge of the setting and things that happened in very recent memory, murder each other almost constantly without having much to gain, and possess the analytical and tactical mind of an eight-year-old. While there are certainly good fantasy stories with a few of these qualities, I think you'll be hard pressed to find them all in anything that isn't fanfic-level garbage.

If you can't tell I'm a disgruntled GM

Where is Sorin now anyway? He dead?

This. In real life most PCs would be considered dangerously immoral, dishonest, insane and most of all incompetent.

Probably. WotC wouldn't go to the effort of pulling such blatant character derailment out of their asses if they didn't want the vampire dead.

Well OP, your pic obviously say yes.
Also Rake a best

Ok, video launched.
So far I've learned that GM don't actually play RPG.

Sad times. Sorin was alright.

Not even Sorin, so I guess you're some kind of double-failure. That's pretty unfortunate.

Riddick was STRONGLY based off of a character of his from back during his 1e/2e days.
The Last Witchhunter was one too.

As someone who is gearing up to stream his group's sessions on Twitch, there's a lot of preparation and cost for getting things running that most groups don't want to deal with, and that's assuming everyone in your group is on board and isn't a total sperg that would ruin the whole thing.

...

I am generally opposed to formulaic approaches: sooner or later the audience/party catches up to the recipe.

It doesn't matter. The three-act formula is the bit at the center that holds it all together, but it's the characters and the setting that the people come to watch and to root for.

It's like the stick holding the marshmallow together: you're not going to eat it, but if you try to mess with it, you might end up fucking everything over and now it can't keep the fluff up and it'll all fall to the ground into a big mess.

Go for it user: shill.

>because unlike a role playing game, you'll want to follow the rules of storytelling
...Is that not the 'normal' way to play RPGs? I mean, operative words being "want to," but if you just ignore the storytelling of things then the game will inevitably become a rote exercise. And at that point why even play?

But it isn't, though.

Stow your custom Veeky Forums contrarian fedora, user. You won't impress anyone here with that shit.

It may have been good when it came out but it aged very poorly.

When I GM I usually follow a three-act structure in most of my homebrewed adventures, to be honest. It makes it a lot easier to plot adventures out.

Character arcs are more up to the PCs themselves; I can't force character development on anyone, but in my experience it sort of happens naturally anyway.

You know, I kind of wonder which edition is Vin Diesel's favorite. Has he gone on record about that sort of thing?