Telling Stories: The opening still matters
Endings are the part of a story that tends to get the most press as being complicated, and with good cause. A bad ending makes you wonder why you wasted the time necessary to get to the ending, after all. It’s as true with roleplaying as anywhere else, which is why I’ve had more than a few columns on making satisfying endings in a medium of ongoing roleplaying where nothing ever really ends so much as it sort of concludes.
But what gets skipped over a lot is that the beginning matters, too. Maybe not as much as the conclusion, but in some ways it’s even harder to recover from a slipshod start. A poor ending makes people roll their eyes as they walk away, but a poor start leads to walk-offs before you even get the chance to end.
So how do you make the beginning memorable, concise, and enjoyable? How do you kick off a plot with all of the same panache you’d expect from a conclusion? I’m glad you hypothetically asked.
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.”
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.
Telling Stories: Short stories with tragic endings
Not every sad story is a tragedy. You have to do a little more legwork than that.
A character who loses the man she loves is a sad story. A character who loses the man she loves because when it came down to it she simply could not be honest with him, not without giving up a part of herself that mattered more than him? That’s tragic. A man who became everything he ever hated because he was too afraid of being controlled by others to let his guard down. A pair of people who once were lovers, still love one another, but find themselves on opposite sides of a war because the strong ideals that once drew them together now push them apart.
Tragedies aren’t just sad events. And tragedies are not the only way to create drama, and they’re not the only sort of dramatic characters worth considering. So let’s talk about what tragedies are not, about what tragedies are, and about how to make the most of them in play.
Telling Stories: I wish I was
At its most basic level, all roleplaying is a form of wish fulfillment. Sure, you may not want to be your characters, but you presumably enjoy slipping into their heads for a little while. It’s a chance to step out of yourself and engage in behavior you never would in a normal setting, whether that behavior is something you’d personally find reprehensible or just something different from the norm. (Slaying monsters, for example, does not form the foundation of a solid career path in modern society. I’ve checked.)
That doesn’t mean it’s always a good thing.
Wish fulfillment is a tricky thing to discuss when it comes to roleplaying precisely because it’s always there, even if it’s usually a background issue. You can’t pretend it has nothing to do with your characters, but you also don’t want them to be nothing more than pure self-serving fantasy engines. So let’s talk a little bit about wish fulfillment in games, how it works, what you can get out of it, and how you can avoid making your characters into the gross sort of wish avatars.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 