Perhaps you’re already familiar with the term “actual play” or “actual play report.” If you aren’t, it is basically an account of what took place at a roleplaying session. While there is certainly room for entertainment and storytelling in such a run-down, the focus tends to be on the actual, real-life events at the table during the game. We gamers have a tendency to fictionalize our experiences, weaving events into a cohesive and hopefully interesting narrative that we can tell to others down the road. Actually, this is a pretty general human trait.
Actual play reports try to differentiate what did happen from what we will later tell ourselves happened.
Actual Play and Game Design
Game designers—from the team at Wizards of the Coast to the beginning GM who designs her first magic item—tend to have assumptions about how their game will work. Or their new sword. Or the adventure they wrote. Yet, it is a time-honored bit of advice among roleplayers that things rarely go as planned. Actual play reports let game designers know what NPCs get left out of the story, which encounters go badly, which are perhaps too easy, and how people around the table react to various new rules or situations.
It is a bit like playtesting, except I tend to think of playtesting as an active effort to poke holes in a plot or rules system before it is released for public consumption. Actual play results from, well, actual play where everyone is attempting to enjoy the game. In a perfect world, everyone would be on the same page. The world is hardly perfect, though.
Ideally, everyone who plays a given game or scenario will have similar (though obviously not the same) experiences. What this tends to mean is that the rules are solid and accomplish everything they set out to do, the story is clear, all the bits you as a designer felt were interesting are in fact interesting to other people, there is enough flexibility for the unexpected, and so on. Sometimes things fall through the cracks in playtesting. Sometimes people just surprise you.
What’s in It for You?
For GMs, putting together such an account can help you understand what skills you need to work on. For instance, even though I’ve had the books since their release, I’ve only managed to run a few games of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Since they tend to be pick-up games, I rely on pre-written adventures. Recently writing up actual play reports helped me to realize I could stand to work on my improvisational skills when things go off course, which was rarely a problem I encountered when I designed my own adventures during the long-running campaigns I had in college.
Even players can benefit. I’ve seen sad sessions where players are absolutely bored out of their skulls, and yet two weeks later if you speak with them they’ll have this notion that they had a blast! They’ll even cite things that didn’t happen. Such is the power of the imagination! There was a time I became jaded with RPGs for this reason, and I would tell my friends that clearly our idea of the session was actually much more entertaining than the actual session, so why play? Why not just create characters and imagine their stories on your own time?
Actual play reports—whether writing them myself or reading/listening to those of others—help me to be a better game master, a better player, and a better designer.
What’s your experience with actual play reports? Love them? Hate them? Do you have any anecdotes about what you’re playing right now? Tell us in the comments, or drop us a link to your blog!
Some Resources
- There is of course the actual play forum over at The Forge.
- You may get some mileage out of ActualPlay.com.
- I have my own fledgling attempts over at my blog: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
- I highly recommend the Return to Northmoor podcast, even though it is sadly no longer updated.
