Telling Stories: Three beats
Raymond Chandler had a rule which is appropriately called Chandler’s Law. When a writer has forced himself into a corner, have a man burst through the door with a gun in his hand. Even if that turns out to be an absolute brain fart, the event is absolutely going to get the plot moving again, if for no other reason than the simple fact that having people burst in the door with guns generally changes the tenor of conversations at even the snootiest of events. “I say, Fitzgerald, there’s a gentleman here with a firearm! Do you believe he’s bitter over some tedious old affair that no one remembers?”
You might not be a fan of Chandler’s work, but he knew how to keep a story moving, and it leads nicely into the three-beat structure which I’ve been teasing for a couple of weeks without explaining. Roleplaying scenes have a beat, a certain cadence and flow, and the three-beat rule is all about making sure that the scene keeps moving no matter what. It’s about keeping things humming along at a decent pace without being breakneck, and thinking about scenes less in terms of “here is the one thing I am doing right now” and more in terms of “here are the actions and here’s why anyone should care.”
Challenge Accepted: The puzzle roadblock
Looked at in a broad enough sense, every game is a puzzle game, and the differences just come down to how it’s puzzling you.
I recently found myself playing through Half-Life 2 again for reasons that are not clear to me. But that’s not the important point right now; what’s more important is that I was struck, not for the first time, at how tedious stretches of the game could get. The tense, brutal firefights were great, but then suddenly I’m in Ravenholm and dealing with millions of small enemies nipping at my heels without any ammo to be found. Or I have to piece together another physics-based puzzle. Or I’m doing anything related to the game’s vehicles. Or the goddamn antlions and sand.
None of these are segments that are unfamiliar at this point. I know how to get through all of them with a minimum of fuss. But they wind up feeling tedious for various reasons, and every time I hit another one of these roadblocks I rolled my eyes in irritation. Which seems an apropos condition, because in some games, the puzzles evolve naturally from the existing gameplay, but in others they’re just a way of padding out the game until you get to the next good part.
The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy IV, part 11
Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano
The Lunar Whale is clearly the spiritual equal to the Invincible from Final Fantasy III; there’s an onboard Fat Chocobo, a free inn, all of that fun stuff. But more importantly, it’s our ticket to the moon! We’re on the moon! Yay!
What were we going to do on the moon again? I mean, I know Golbez wanted to get to the moon, but do we know why he wanted to get to the moon or what he planned on doing once he arrived on the moon?
Leaving aside that I’m pretty sure an angry fight broke out on the Lunar Whale as someone asked that question, there’s a store up here that sells Elixirs and Ethers, and there’s a big crystalline palace just sitting there that seems like the place to visit. So we find a place to park the Whale, get out, and head into a castle just outside of it. With only the slightest bit of concern, at that. I mean… I remember what happened the last time I entered a cave near an otherwise isolated tower of crystal. It wasn’t necessarily a fun ride. Stupid Cloud of Darkness.
Demo Driver 8: Splice
On the one hand, I appreciate that we have arrived at a point wherein a game that would not do well with any plot doesn’t feel the need to engage in even an excuse plot. On the other hand, I’m annoyed that a game can’t be bothered to even give me an excuse plot, so perhaps I’m just messed up.
When I was younger, I had a book report to write about a book that I didn’t particularly care about. The one trick I hat was, well, an array of literary tricks. So I used them. I dove into my big bag of stylistic obfuscation and went nuts, dropping every bit of didactic deception into the requirements as I could. By the end, I had four pages or so of book report consisting of a paragraph of information and a whole lot of flourish.
My teacher gave it back to me with a note that I had written something which served as the ultimate triumph of style over substance. I think Splice would have given it a run for its money, though.
Splice, by the broadest definition, is a puzzle game. By a more practical definition, it’s really a game of stylistic clicking that doesn’t mar the experience with things so superfluous as narrative or feelings or even meaning. It’s a bit of distracted clicking. But it’s very pretty and soothing clicking, which is probably worth something, even so.
Telling Stories: Only a little time
In an ideal world, you would have all the time you want for roleplaying and work. And whatever other hobbies you have, too. Skateboarding, maybe. But reality doesn’t work that way. You have a limited amount of time in a given week, and with enough demands on that time it becomes really hard to also work in 2-3 hours of roleplaying on one night. Let alone on multiple nights.
Your options are simple. Find more time to roleplay, or get better at making roleplaying work without a whole lot of time. If you’ve attempted and missed out on the former, well, time to fall back on the latter. How can you do more with less time?
The simple answer is that it’s tricky, but it is doable. What follows are the best tips that I have for making sure that you still get involved in roleplaying even if you aren’t able to go for marathon sessions on a regular basis, or even if you’re just a bit shy on time for a given week.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 