Telling Stories: I do not build a maze, I assemble tools
I’m in the midst of planning for a big roleplaying plot right now. That means integrating plots, making a couple of alts, planting the seeds of resolutions that won’t come for quite some time. It starts with an injury, I already know that. And it ends with…
Well, it could end with anything. That’s the whole point of this right now – creating a lot of potential outs. Oh, I have a fairly clear picture of what many of the long-term effects will be, but that’s not the same. There is no ending, just a variety of potential conclusions.
I’ve said many times in the past that roleplaying is not storytelling. This extends to events, storylines, and the like. If you have an ending ready when you have started the event, go back and try again, because you are doing it wrong. A good storyline isn’t about having a specific ending in mind, it’s about putting the pieces out and letting other people assemble the result on their own.
Telling Stories: This is the world we live in
Here’s the funny thing about games: at one point, I realized that my shaman in World of Wacraft was essentially a superhero. She summoned fire, lightning, and wind to do her bidding. She was superhumanly fast, strong, and intelligent. She could walk on water and breathe beneath its surface, shroud herself in deadly electricity, and even speed up herself and her allies faster than the eye could see. Put her in some spandex and give her the same set of powers and no one would bat an eye.
Except, of course, she wasn’t a superhero; she was a shaman. Because that’s the sort of world she lived in.
The fact is that there are a lot of assumptions that go into a genre, and a lot of assumptions about the ways that the world works. You’re aware of them, but you probably don’t know exactly why, for the same reason that you know a shaman isn’t a superhero despite her ability list. Because the world of a fantasy game works differently, even with the exact same abilities. Even in World of Warcraft, it’s a lot more lethal.
Telling Stories: Three big memories (and why they stand out)
Over the years, I’ve done a lot of roleplaying. So much so that honestly, I don’t remember most of it.
I don’t mean this in the sense that I’m not paying attention, just that roleplaying enough means that things are slowly going to fade into memory. You can’t be expected to hold onto a decade of memories with perfect clarity if you’d like to remember trivia like the names of your cats and whether or not you paid the phone bill.
But some stuff sticks out, memories that you couldn’t get rid of even if you tried. So here are a few of my best, as well as some thoughts about why I still remember these and what lessons you can learn from them, good and bad. Because there’s a reason why a lot of roleplaying fades into the background as “important but not memorable” while other pieces stick out for years afterward.
Telling Stories: Playception
I do not know why it is that people like the idea of putting on a play in-character. Seriously, couldn’t tell you. It’s kind of ridiculous, you’re already in the midst of a play in the first place. You’re doing the same thing, only another layer down. I suspect that eventually you’d wind up with players roleplaying their characters who are also roleplaying characters who themselves start roleplaying, going four or five levels deep before you start asking what the heck is going on and what series of life choices brought you to this point.
However, I also know that I love the idea, because I totally want to see my characters on stage and hamming it up. Nonsensical? Sure. Also fun as hell.
Of course, if you didn’t already know (and you probably did), putting on an actual play is an activity fraught with pitfalls and problems. Putting on an in-character play is even more problematic. So let’s take a look at what you can use to make it go… well, not smoothly, it’s not going to go smoothly, but at least less poorly.
Telling Stories: Roleplaying is stressful
Here’s the thing about roleplaying – a lot of people who have never done it have very strong ideas about what it entails, which are usually some mixture of well-meaning and wrong. Mostly wrong.
This is not out of malice but out of simple reality. It’s very easy to understand what’s required to get good at PvP in a game; there’s plenty of supplemental material available. Ditto raiding, small-group content, or whatever else your game offers. But one of the reasons that I felt (and still feel) that having a regular roleplaying column is valuable is because no one talks about what that requires. No one mentions how much effort goes into making these things happen.
Mike Mearl, a designer working on Dungeons & Dragons, said at one point that tabletop roleplaying is twenty minutes of fun packed into four hours. Roleplaying online offers a slightly better ratio, but if you’ve never taken part, you don’t realize that there’s a lot of work that goes into it. A lot of the advice I’ve given, both here and in Storyboard, is about trying to minimize that work, or at least make the work as pleasant as possible. But it’s still work just the same.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 