Telling Stories: The post-mortem examination
When everything is said and done, that’s when you can take it all apart.
I recently wrapped up some pretty big roleplaying in Final Fantasy XIV. Well, “recently” more in the sense of “within the past month,” but that’s not the point. It was a big storyline with lots of moving parts, the near-death of the main character I’ve been playing for the past four years, and a lot of long-standing character threads finally getting resolved. Not that there aren’t still boatloads of story threads to be picked up, of course, and so as soon as it was over I started running a post-mortem on it.
So why do that instead of get started on the continuation of the story? Because a post-mortem, written or not, is a great way of examining how the whole event went down, even if it’s just from your perspective. The most effective tool in your arsenal when running events is the ability to look at what happened, see what did and did not work, and subsequently understand what could be done to make the next event run that much better.
Telling Stories: Off the table
If you started roleplaying far enough back, you almost certainly started it with tabletop games. Heck, that might still be where you do most of your roleplaying. The great thing about tabletop games is that they are pretty much fixed points in time, and if you want to start running a Vampire: the Masquerade first edition campaign, no one’s going to stop you as long as you have players. The books do not unwrite themselves.
A lot of what I write here is just as applicable to tabletop games as it is to online roleplaying, and I’ve said before that my background in the latter makes me far better at the former. But if you’ve never roleplayed online, it’s easy to erroneously assume that you can just jump in with all of that experience and take off. Realistically, there are substantial differences between playing online and offline that you have to get used to first. Some of them are better, some of them are worse, but none of them exist in a vacuum.
Telling Stories: You need to make the money
Let’s be real here – no matter when your game is set, professional murder is not a particularly good way to make a living. Sure, the definition of “professional murderer” is a bit more limited than the usual catch-all of “adventurer,” but the number of characters I’ve seen in games that are actually purely adventurers is pretty small. However you’re making your money in a mechanical sense, your character is probably finding a way to make money that doesn’t involve roaming around outdoors and swording small woodland creatures for cash.
This is usually glossed over, mostly because no one wants to come home after work just to pretend to do more pointless work. (Pointed work is a different story.) But you can get a lot of mileage out of having a character with a job that isn’t either an offscreen concern or a de facto license to traipse about and kill woodland critters after all. So let’s talk about that.
Telling Stories: Keeping it tense with zero stakes
I will freely admit that I have seen a decided minority of Doctor Who, but I’m always fascinated by the lengths that the show goes to in order to justify its plots. And kind of with good cause. The Doctor’s TARDIS is basically a get-out-of-plot-free card, able to travel through time and space with an ease usually reserved for making instant popcorn. Many of the conflicts in the show could be solved simply by going back in time to before the antagonist had a certain idea and then throwing him into a locked vault.
I am aware that the Doctor has a rule against killing; that is also a mechanism to avoid having him solve every single problem with infanticide.
Of course, every single story ending like this would make for a terrible series anyway, so I’m not begrudging the existence of these contrivances. The alternative is awful. But it raises an important question about roleplaying, wherein you have no such artificial narrative blocks. You can leave at any time, and you have absolute veto power over what happens to your character. And that’s for good reason, obviously, but it also creates an environment wherein you can always, always leave.
Telling Stories: Going to the chapel, et cetera
Ah, marriage! That binding of kindred spirits, that most loving of all acts, that quick and easy way to cause plenty of drama. And not just via the usual routes of drama where in-character romance throws all sorts of wrinkles at you; that is actually secondary to this particular flavor of dramatic potential.
Unfortunately, most roleplaying weddings really do just treat weddings as the endpoint of a romantic relationship, which is fine as far as it goes. I’ve used it for that purpose, and in real life I am relatively certain my readers here do not want to hear yet again how much I love my wife. (A lot.) Marriage is certainly useful for that.
But there are so many other ways to get drama out of weddings. Many ways which can not even require romantic relationships, or actively work against the in-character relationships you already have. So let’s talk a little bit about how you can make good use of weddings in roleplaying and what marriages can provide for drama.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 