Leave yourself room for later. If there’s anything I’ve learned from doing lots of worldbuilding—for my own linear fiction and for the collaborative fiction of RPGs—it’s that trying to fill every last nook and cranny of a setting is a daunting task. And actually filling up everything is choking, stifling. Don’t fill up everything. It leaves no room for the future, and it leaves no room for anyone else.
Continue readingTag Archives: Storytelling
Don’t Know Where the Story’s Going, Quick Thoughts
This post follows Be Boring and Be Hungry. It’s all about making characters for roleplaying games, and how to think about RPG character creation from the perspective of a writer.
Playing RPGs recently, one friend of mine was struggling with how to make and play her character. It was not her first time playing RPGs, but she felt less experienced than most of the other people at the table and was anxious to make a good impression and make good story contributions. She has a writing background, and is familiar with arcs and storyboards and how to make a good dramatic narrative. But she was foundering as we sat at the table, sinking beneath the weight of making a character who would be interesting enough to the rest of the players, a character who would have a complete story. She couldn’t see a way to do that, couldn’t see a way to tell the stories that seemed right for the character she had, and couldn’t reconcile her knowledge of how to tell stories with the structure of our RPG.
In a darkly funny sort of way, Continue reading
Hiding your Rolls, Quick Thoughts
This will be another quick one, I’m still with family. These thoughts are brought to you by an excellent post on hexcrawls I read a while ago… one I’ve unfortunately forgotten and thus cannot cite here.
In RPG systems where the storyteller must roll dice, there’s a long tradition of storytellers hiding the results of their rolls. There are plenty of reasons for this (fostering tension, keeping secrets, the fact that sometimes characters don’t know whether they’ve succeeded, etc.), and some of them are useful. But it’s worth noting that not every roll needs to be hidden. This especially applies to combat in D&D.
I’d argue that—whenever possible—not hiding your rolls is the better course. There’s more to this: when you don’t hide rolls, it’s okay to not hide foes’ stats. You needn’t reveal them immediately, but as PCs spend a while fighting an NPC they will slowly get a feel for the NPC’s capabilities, and that is perfectly natural. This also speeds up play, as you needn’t try to reference material while keeping it secret from players.
With this approach, there are still times when hiding your rolls is better for the feel of the story. For example, hiding your rolls works well when the PCs are surprised or don’t know what they face. This experience of information asymmetry matches the experience of the PCs. In fact, when players are used to getting information about their foes, the sudden lack of information might completely change their assessment of a situation (likely for the worse).
Note that when you’re not hiding your rolls, you aren’t able to fudge them for or against the PCs. Some players love this, some hate it… and it’s definitely more dangerous to the PCs, as dice are random and capricious. Simply put, when not hiding rolls it’s harder for you to protect your PCs from your own mistakes in creating challenges without foreshadowing them sufficiently.
When you’re not hiding rolls, I would suggest playing more openly in all ways; talk with players about what the PCs are able to see, what they might guess based on their previous experience, and what capabilities they know their opponents have (thus far). Be generous with that information! Nobody likes to be “gotcha’d,” and there’s no need for you to trick players in that way. Save that cleverness for creating exciting and tricky encounters, puzzles, or what-have-you.
Of course, all these suggestions cultivate a particular flavor of game. You needn’t use them if you don’t like them. But I’ve had good experience with them, and I think my players felt more rewarded by their victories when they knew that I hadn’t coddled them by fudging die rolls in their favor. I hope you find them useful.
The Story of a Sword
I had an idea a while back, something that came to me while I was lying in bed at night. It’s an unfortunately productive time for my imagination, when I’d like to sleep but instead often come up with story ideas. Then I struggle to record them and whatever resonance they hold for me before they slip away, and when I wake in the morning and stare at whatever I’ve written down I have to wonder why I thought it was a good idea.
Wait, no, I’m mixing this idea up with many others that I have. *This* one came to me while I was supposed to be listening to a presentation. I promptly jotted it down on my phone and emailed it to myself. Anyway, I’ve elaborated on what I think the opening of the story is and I’ll share that opening scene with you today. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s not, it’ll probably change… but first you’ll have a chance to enjoy it.
Tombs=Raided, Hearts=Won; Tomb Raider Rocks
I don’t usually wish that I paid more for a game. But I liked Tomb Raider so much that I almost wish I hadn’t bought it on sale. I want the people who made it to know how much I liked it, and I want them to put as much high-quality work into making the next one as they put into making this one. Because there’s a next one. I mean, even if I didn’t know that Rise of the Tomb Raider is coming, I wouldn’t have any real doubts (except, I suppose, if the studios involved fell apart or lost the rights, which would be terrible). The end of Tomb Raider left it clear that Lara is nowhere near finished with being the awesome badass which she’s become, and that makes me very happy. Watching the announcement trailer for the new game has reduced me to a quivering pile of enthusiasm.
Why am I so happy about all this? Tomb Raider is a brilliant game, and does things with story-telling that remind me why games are such a fascinating medium in the first place. It’s an adventure novel with audience participation, a new entry in a genre that I love, and it evades the problematic trappings that spoil so many other adventure stories for me.
Ok, spoil is a strong word. I love adventure stories enough to enjoy them despite their frequent problems, but being able to enjoy one that isn’t so inherently problematic is a breath of fresh air. It doesn’t hurt that this particular story is extremely well written, with characters who feel like real people, and who share history with each other that seems fitting and unforced. It’s a little bit like someone crossed Tintin with Indiana Jones, turned the tone dial to ‘gritty and a bit bloodthirsty,’ and then put you through the Bildungsroman of Lara Croft as she goes from untested and unconfident archaeologist to self-assured and competent survivor and adventurer, hellbent on keeping herself and her friends alive. Wait, no, that’s almost exactly what it’s like. It’s glorious.
Look, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can play the game yourself. But if you want to read more of my thoughts on the topic, including the few reservations I have, please be my guest: Continue reading
Transistor
There are many things that I wish to say about Transistor, but the story-related ones will have to wait for after the break. I don’t want to spoil anything for you.
To start with, this is one of the prettiest games I have seen in a while, and it has a soundtrack that makes me want to close my eyes and sink into it. I spent a considerable amount of time simply sitting and absorbing the game’s music, doing nothing else for fear of missing out on the songs. I wish that the soundtrack had all of the various in-game versions of the music, including Red’s hummed accompaniment.
I’m hard pressed to peg the game to a single genre or type, but its construction and design bears a profound similarity to Bastion. You do battle with an ever-growing variety and number of foes, following the protagonist from a third person isometric perspective as you wander through lushly painted land- or cityscapes, slowly puzzling out the backstory of the characters and learning what is happening around you. As far as I’m concerned, what worked in Bastion works here too.
As a game, I found Transistor very appealing; designing my own powers, mixing and matching elements as I discovered new killer combos, and adapting my loadout to the situation presented were all quite satisfying. Making sure that I wasn’t crippled when I lost one of my powers due to a mistake, and being forced to rethink my situation creatively when I failed in that, were both very rewarding as well. And when battles became a little same-y towards the end, or failed to present me with situations that I hadn’t foreseen, I still wanted to follow the story. Now that I’ve finished the game, I also want to see how it handles itself on a second pass-through. But I’ve played it enough to be able to say that I like it, and that I suspect you’d enjoy it as well. Now about those *SPOILERS*…
The Attraction of Games: Why?
This article is honestly me cheating a bit as I would have preferred to write a true analysis or something more comprehensive than a question, but I’m busy! So this is what you get. But don’t fret, I think this question is actually extremely interesting, and very important.
Why do we play games? I ask this because I recently got into a debate and one participant countered criticism about a game’s setup with, “I hear people play games for the story.” Now this very well may be true since many games have fun stories, but so do books and movies, and you don’t have to fight your way to the next bit of stories in those. You don’t have to spend hours jumping from one plot point to the next. So why do we turn to games for story when we have books and movies?
To me I think the answer is “participation.” Games allow you to participate in the story. But it is with this answer that I then begin to question certain games which don’t let me actively participate in the story, but instead just force me to do task after task that holds no real meaning in the overall narrative. Along this vein, should we forgive games with great stories for their bad gameplay? I could go on, but I actually wrote a bit about this previously in my article about games and art, but I think we can go further into this question.
Since I need to get going I’ll leave the floor open for you to counter, explain, extrapolate, divulge, or what-have-you in the comments below.
Types of Games
In my last post, I talked a lot about what roleplaying is, and – surprise! – it wasn’t just one thing! That is part of the beauty of roleplaying, it’s full of options. What are these options?
Well, first, we have the three qualities talked about before:
Roleplaying, Storytelling, Mechanics. To keep in line with the existing literature on Gaming Theory, I have slightly renamed the categories I used in the previous post. I have renamed ‘Mechanics’ as ‘Competition’ (it goes by ‘gaming’ in GNS Theory, but I find that to be a bit ambiguous of a term); it essentially refers to how much of the experience of the game is rooted in competition. Storytelling will be referred to as ‘Narrative’, and Roleplaying will be expanded slightly to ‘Simulation’. Simulation refers to how much of the setting goes to recreating system-internal realism. Note that this realism does NOT have to be actual realism. For example, many unrealistic things happen in Star Wars, but there is an assumed set of rules which governs things like lightsabers. Any given game will have a balance of the three, like so:
Fistful of Wits 