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.
Telling Stories: What you don’t see when looking in the mirror
If I had to point to why I enjoyed Star Trek: Deep Space Nine so much, I could do worse than pointing to the episode of “Waltz.” In some ways, it’s very much a bottle show – the captain of the series and the character who’s been long set up as a villain facing off against one another and simply letting drama develop. But I particularly love the amount of insight it gives into that villain, a look into the mind of Dukat. We have a character who is sharply analytical and has looked deep within himself to figure out his flaws, only to come up with a conclusion so far from redemption that his subsequent actions are at once deplorable and expected.
And it also gives chilling mirrors of any time that the viewers tried to self-analyze.
The thing about introspection is that it’s tricky to do properly, because as the audience and the author we have a different perspective. We can see what characters are doing wrong when the characters themselves often can’t. So that raises the interesting question of how much introspection is too much and how to put yourself in the right place to see what they would see.
Recent Work
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Chocobo Dash
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
Eliot Lefebvre 