D&D Online November Producer Letter

Turbine’s official Dungeons & Dragons Online website has been updated with a new producer letter for the month of November. This time, executive producer Judith Hoffman talks about the benefits of “sharing stories” with other people. An excerpt:

As far as books are concerned, I’ve always found the written word to be much more enjoyable if I have friends who are reading the same thing that I am and really, can anyone honestly say that they don’t enjoy a good old-fashioned book club?

Wait, don’t answer that.

In many ways, role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons are the ultimate extension of this phenomenon, which we call (shared stories.) RPGs go a step further than communal book-reading or movie-watching, because the participants don’t just share the experience of the story they take the adventure provided by the DM and run with it, creating a unique shared story as they progress. The fact that these stories are created by and unique to the players gives them more ownership of the story (their story) than a group of people who are just reading the same book or watching the same movie.