Telling Stories: Serial roleplaying or building events
One of the things that has made my wife and I both develop an affection for Netflix-produced shows is the simple fact that these shows don’t have to work like traditional television. They can break a cardinal rule that’s long been accepted as fact – they can be completely non-serial.
Most shows have to be designed so that you can sit down and watch with a minimum of overall knowledge. This isn’t always a bad thing; after all, Batman: The Animated Series ran on the idea of boiling down the characters to their essences, and it was one of the best animated shows ever. But when you get shows like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, you feel the writers struggling against the restrictions imposed by a format that relied upon standalone episodes. It’s kind of a miracle that Lost ran as long as it did while putting up a wall for any new viewers.
There’s something of the same issue when it comes to roleplaying. You’ve got a tug-of-war between the serial version or a more constant continuity. The trouble is that one is a lot more rewarding than the other, and the benefits of serial roleplaying are mostly conceptual.
Defiance and the dancing bear
Let’s all pause for a moment to appreciate the show giving us another non-English curse word to pepper speech with while avoiding strict censor guidelines.
The dancing bear joke really isn’t; it’s more of a punchline in search of a setup. It’s simple enough, though. If you see a bear dancing in the circus, you’re not concerned with his form. You’re just impressed that the people training him got him to dance at all. Sure, it’s mostly just shuffling back and forth, but does it really matter as long as it counts as dancing?
A lot of media has the dancing bear problem. Strictly speaking, for instance, it doesn’t matter if the Transformers cartoons are any good, it just matters whether or not they sell toys. Skylanders toys could come to life at night and try to kill your pets, but the important thing is that they tie into the video game. You get the idea. When you’ve got any piece of media tying into something else, you’re starting out with a dancing bear.
Defiance falls into that category quite handily. It’s a show that’s made to tie into an online game running at the same time, with the promise that the two will feed into one another – events in the game are reflected by the show, and vice versa. The problem being, of course, that a show not aimed at supporting a merchandising line can’t survive for long on novelty. It’s not enough to be a dancing bear here; you have to be a bear that turns out to be a pretty good dancer.
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.
Recent Work
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Chocobo Dash
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Eliot Lefebvre 