Storytelling or Mechanics/Visual Aids

Just to gauge the communities focus' more clearly, what do you find most useful/what do you use more often in your campaigns. I personally am quite verbose as a GM, and spend less time on visual aids and more time on creative design and immersive text and setting than on creation of maps and other visual aids. Is there an ideal balance? Is one aspect more important than others? Is the age of storytelling slowly dying out in favor of visually pleasing and mechanic based encounters? Discuss

Is there an ideal balance? Is one aspect more important than others? That will depend very much on the people in question; it can be different for everyone. Is the age of storytelling slowly dying out in favor of visually pleasing and mechanic based encounters? I'm not sure what you mean by 'age of storytelling'...story games are doing better than ever. It would be foolish to deny that games like D&D 4e are incredibly encounter oriented, at least mechanically, and also very popular. But there's also never been a greater variety of alternative and innovative games available if that's what you're after. Personally, I prefer less traditional games. I still play some D&D now and then, and am in a few Talislanta games, but when I get the chance, I'll play something like Fiasco, Danger Patrol, or My Life with Master. I would love to give a drama-oriented game like Smallville a go, but with work travel approaching, I've been hesitant to create a group for it.

We unintentionally had a relevant discussion while talking about r20 itself back near the start of open beta. Might be interesting to you, David. <a href="http://community.roll20.net/discussion/219/roll20-design-philosophy" rel="nofollow">http://community.roll20.net/discussion/219/roll20-design-philosophy</a>

I fail to see how visual aids detract from the art of storytelling. It depends on what your goal with storytelling is. For example, if you feel that oral storytelling should rely on just the verbal communication tools to convey the story--encouraging the storyteller to become a better storyteller in skill--then visual aids detract by giving a concrete example. It makes you descriptively lazy. On the other hand, if you view RPing as entirely an entertainment passtime, you might not see developing your oral storytelling skills as any sort of priority, and most people don't. It's a difference in approach. All dependent on what your goal is. But, if you recognize your goals, you will likely not slack just because you have visual aids... Although, personally, I've been storytelling for over two thirds of my lifespan, and on a medium like r20, I have trouble sitting and staring at the blank whitespace while telling a story. It's nice to have a visual. But its important to remember to describe the scenes fully... not to rely on that imagery. I suspect this is one of the reasons some folks have been asking for adjustable tokboxes that can be moved around, made bigger, etc, for those times when they don't have a handout or whiteboard stuff to display to their players.

Deightine has hit the nail on the head for me. In a lot of visually represented RP'ing experiences ive had under other GM's, ive found that the imaginative juices dont flow nearly as well, and players tend to be less enticed by clever wordplay and well-worded descriptions of areas. Simply seeing a statue on the table doesnt ever do the justice of a well voiced description, and therefore doesnt create that same mental image of creative worlds. The thread was initially intended to see whether players enjoy games where a good amount of time and effort goes into the setting of the scene, and describing the world, npcs, combat and mechanics with a storytellers flair... or whether they prefer the less imaginative, where advancement, progress, mechanics and rules are king.

About Storytelling: Mixing visuals and narration for a stronger online role playing experience, I would want to see a way in Roll20 for "hightlight" the text written in the chat tab by the GM, when it's "pure narration". Such thing (adding a frame or a box wrapping the text, changing the font size/font type, adding italic, bold . . .) adds a different quality to the chat box dynamic and helps the differenciate Narrative text of practical and casual chatting. The "narration" mode for a given text in the chat box could be enabled by pushing X-key along with Enter -again, this is something that Fantasy Grounds II does for good results.

@Axel I misuse the Emote feature when I want text to stand out, since it wraps it in a nice bold orange box :) Since most of our communication is through voice, we primarily use chat for OOC, jokes and initiative rolls however.

Hi Ken Bauer, Well, if you prefer to mark your narrative text with the "emote" frame, it works for me! :-) The important thing is, I believe, to be able to "mark" text when you want to highlight it with a different quality for some reason -like emphasizing a narrative context, and to be able to convey that meaning successfully to your buddies. We will use Roll20 mainly via text chat. It's the way we like to use VTTs! ^^