I've been working on a new story in The Written World recently and I've also been a character in a few, and there's one thing I'm curious about:
Are people more comfortable using a first person/second person point of view in narratives, where the narrator/God refers to the player as 'you' and they refer to their character as 'I', or a third person perspective in which everyone refers to the character by their name?
In the first system, the narrator would say "You wake up to the sound of the apocalypse" and then the character would reply "I look out the window and see the destruction of society", and in the second system (using Eric the Rather Useless Knight as an example) the narrator would say "Eric does so-and-so" and the response would be "Eric gets out of bed".
All the stories I've been involved in so far use the second option, but the story I've been creating uses the first (for no real reason but personal preference). What do you guys think?
(And on a sidenote, it seems like everyone is more comfortable writing in present tense. Anyone prefer something different?)
I would always prefer third person, since it would make for a finished story that you (or rather, they(!)) could re-read and make sense of. Tense I think can be much more flexible, as it's quite natural to jump tenses - we do it day to day.
Agree though, would like to see a bit more experimentation.
