Telling Stories: Making a guest appearance

Your character is the protagonist of their own story. If that’s not the case, then go play whoever the protagonist is, because they’re the one with interesting stuff happening. That doesn’t mean your character has to be the super-unique lone heir to some fantastic legacy; it just means that on a list of people who are moving forward in the story, your character should be up there. What’s the point of making your character just an also-ran?

Most people don’t have that problem, though. In fact, most people make characters who have tons of stuff going on, backstory, biographical elements, crazy stuff. Which becomes its own problem when you take into account the fact that if your character wants to get involved with other characters, you want to do so in a way that’s both respectful of the other person’s story and yet still influential. So how do you walk into someone else’s narrative without being either disrespectful or utterly forgettable?

12/26/2014

Telling Stories: No repeats

There are times and places where repeats are perfectly fine. A lot of radio stations in Connecticut seem to advertise “no repeats” as a badge of honor, which is slightly less than heartening when you realize that these stations have perhaps ten worthwhile songs in their rotations. Nor do I expect most television shows to provide me with a constant drip of new entertainment year-round. Heck, half of my knowledge of Law & Order comes from catching enough out-of-order repeats that I eventually began to piece together a coherent whole.

Roleplaying is not a medium which is kind to repeats, however. I would go so far as to say that repeats are actively detrimental to roleplaying for a number of reasons. They’re tempting, at times, but in a medium which relies upon your ability to craft an entertaining story with other people, handing over a story people have already seen just feels like going through the motions for no real benefit.

12/19/2014

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.

12/12/2014

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.

12/05/2014

in Online Games, Roleplaying, Story, Tabletop Games, Telling Stories
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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.

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