Where to begin? Rob and Sara discuss the fundamentals of creating a story for tabletop roleplay, and how the game system you choose influences how that story will be told. We begin by discussing various games, and the particular types of stories they're good for telling with - specifically, we mention D&D, Palladium, DREAD, the ÆonVerse (Adventure!, Aberrant, Trinity), the World of Darkness, 7th Sea, and WR&M). Choosing the correct game system can make or break how your story is told around your table, by enhancing the aspects of the story you wish to focus on, such as dramatic heroics, pulp action, horror / tension, combat, etc.

If choosing a game system whole-cloth doesn't work for your story, there's always homebrewing! Writing your own setting and applying existing rules to it, or adding / removing / rewriting rules to better enhance how your story is told is a practice as old as gaming itself! We briefly discuss the pros and cons of homebrewing your own setting. We also discuss how to enhance a pre-written setting if writing your own isn't your goal, by using established characters and set-pieces, but how to still subvert expectations so even the old can feel new and exciting!

As this is our first episode of our podcast, we had no listener questions, but we found a few at Reddit's /r/DMAcademy subreddit that we tossed at one another to answer.

We record every Wednesday, at 7pm Eastern. Listen live at podcastdetroit.com, Studio 4!
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