Exchange of Realities

There’s nothing that gives a place more color than the quirky traditions it’s amassed over the years. Many of these serve no apparent purpose, or are a matter of superstition, but some are useful behaviors that have just been rendered irrelevant by changes in the world.

There are two major ways to create traditions like this. The first is just inventing the tradition and then worrying about why it exists—for instance, deciding that in your world crows and not owls are associated with wisdom and academia. Usually, this is starting from an image and working outward. The good news is that it’s easy; all you need is the image, and the resulting traditions are likely to have more quirk to them; the bad news is that on average, they’re less grounded in how the world works, and the people who interact with them can usually figure that out.

The second process is more organic, but also more difficult. In this version, you begin with a cause, then trace it through the years to figure out what sort of practice it created. The best thing about first causes is that they can be almost anything—a religious belief, the result of a ruler’s ego, a fortunate or unlucky coincidence. The difficult part, though, is trying to track it through time; a lot of factors can change a practice, particularly if it wasn’t very popular to begin with.

Inspiration for these quirks can come from almost anywhere. History is a good one; our own world is full of quirky traditions and idiosyncratic practices. If you can find it, I recommend reading Charles Panati’s Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things: along with giving origins for most major American holidays, a significant number of points of etiquette and major event traditions, and a large smattering of fairy tales and nursery rhymes, it also covers a range of items from toothbrushes and cosmetics to slinkies and Silly Putty.

Players can serve as a source of inspiration as well. For instance, finding ways to help or hinder them can be an excellent springboard: perhaps there’s something deemed auspicious or inauspicious about something they’re wearing or carrying. From there, you just have to figure out what that’s going to result in, and where it came from. (Extra credit if you can make the source of such a quirky tradition a plot hook in its own right!)

And there’s always the things the players do. My personal favorite example was a little story from the longest-running game I played in. Imagine if you will a rather misfit group that’s just found themselves in charge of a country. Now imagine that the tightest connection in the group is between the one who basically got set up as the “official” ruler—read being the photogenic one—and the one who, despite being a glorious hero, still has to deal with more than her share of racism issues. Now add to this a communique in which the former is invited to a discussion and the latter isn’t explicitly, but there’s an ambiguity in the numbers that could mean she’s technically invited but nobody’s admitting it. What it was was a typo, but we took the idea and ran with that, turning it into the way the rather disconcerted nobles dealt with the fact that they did not want to antagonize their new ruler’s sense of loyalty but didn’t want to be seen as acknowledging the other character’s importance: they’d invite “The Empress”, list a number of people that was one higher than the number of names invited, and the two characters would show up at the event for which the invitation was given. I have word from the GM that this little quirk is probably going to far outlive its originators, and that there’ll be some point at which everyone’s forgotten why the Empress is plural.

Either way, implementing these sorts of traditions can increase the sense of the world as a living thing, intrigue the players, and in general improve the immersion and interest in the game.

How about you? Getting any good ideas?

Most people who have taken up writing have heard of Chekhov’s Gun. For those of you who haven’t, the premise is that if there’s a gun on the wall in Act 1 of a play, it will go off by Act 3. (Or its lack of going off will be a plot point.)

The most important application of this rule isn’t props, though. It’s characters. And this is equally applicable in both gaming and writing.

The short version is that every major or important minor character should have a reason for being in the group and in the story. In a game group, this usually takes the form of mechanical differences between the players. Some systems encourage this more easily than others (heck, D&D 4E penalizes lack thereof), of course. Now, this isn’t to say you want complete differentiation. Having someone who is utterly scary in social arenas but useless in a fight isn’t much fun for that person—or much of anyone else, given how frustrating having to devote all one’s time to protecting someone can be—if you’re fighting regularly, and that character’s opposite number is going to start dreading social interactions. It’s best if they’re all technically functional in most arenas. But you want to make sure that there are at least separate specialties—that any one character isn’t completely eclipsed by everyone else around them.

This is particularly important when introducing a new character into an established game. The obvious threat is to the newcomer’s position: if you’ve got a group that’s been working together for a while, particularly one in which most of the players like to serve as generalists, they probably have people with competencies in most of the situations that crop up, and strategies or ways of improvising in the few cases where none of them have reliable ways of dealing with the situation. They may even be good at dragging such situations onto their own favored battlefields—the social monster who starts shouting down armies because she can’t figure out what else to do about them, perhaps, or the fighter-type who tends to revert to knocking heads together when there’s no other apparent way through the situation. Someone new coming in is going to need one, preferably both, of two things: a mechanical niche that makes it necessary to keep them around, and a background or ability that justifies their being present in and accepted by the group. (Getting them trusted, of course… is a blog entry in and of itself.) But then there’s the other possibility: what if in some way the new character renders one of the existing PCs redundant, by doing her job better than she can do it herself?

The other question is what happens if you figure out that the latter might be the case, particularly if the new build has already been finalized. To how much extent can you justify asking someone to please get off the nice person’s toes, particularly if whatever the toe-stepping specialty is a part of their concept?

And what happens if the player’s worried about schtick overlap—in either direction—but the GM doesn’t see it as a problem? (I’ll admit, I still don’t have an answer to that one. Suggestions would be welcome.)

While it’s not going to involve literal hurt feelings or irritation in a story, taking into account what purpose a character serves in a narrative is just as important for a writer. What’s the point of writing a bunch of semi-major characters if all they do is serve as a cheering section for the main character? Imagine for a moment that your semi-major characters have players; would they be up in arms about their lack of apparent purpose at any given point in the story? Would they be sitting around eating popcorn while the rest of the group plays? What, for this character, is the equivalent of the gun being fired, and have you gotten around to it yet? Will you? Why are they here?

It’s something to think about.

The biggest complaint I get from people who don’t participate in my hobbies is that there’s no real-world benefit, or that it’s all escapism. Just as much in writing as in gaming, mind you. (I’ve known some real downers in my time.)

I would like to take this opportunity to thumb my nose at these people. Our hobbies have practical uses too. So neeners.

Now that I’ve satisfied my inner five-year-old, I’ll get to the point. In a roundabout, massively delayed way (yes, the idea was about a month in coming.  It’s been a long month), I actually owe this concept to the writing-blogger shakespearemom, whom I met through our mutual host. She’d written, here, about how much she’d like to be able to just step into another personality for a bit, and detach herself from herself.

Sound familiar to anyone? Non-beer-and-pretzels gamers? Deep-immersion writers? Can I see a show of hands?

Most of you have created characters who aren’t you. I imagine many of you have created characters with qualities you respect: patience, skill in a certain field, confidence, determination, you name it. And a hefty number of you, when writing or playing these characters, have probably found yourselves slipping into their modes and mannerisms. Simple enough, right?

Now imagine you’re in a stressful situation. Maybe you need to perform onstage, or talk to someone you’re not entirely comfortable talking with, for whatever reason. Either way, it’s outside your comfort zone. But what if there’s a character you’re good at falling into mode for who could handle an incident like this—by skill, by confidence, by just not caring enough to worry about failing? Might it not work to slip partway into that character, just enough for the qualities you need?  Calling forth the social monster when the situation demands it, channeling someone with Babysitter Presence when your hyper nephew is up to his usual chaos?

The trick doesn’t stop there, of course. If you find it works for you, why not start leaning your character creation in directions that will give you a useful trait to cherry-pick? They don’t even all have to be admirable; even an antagonist’s overwhelming arrogance can occasionally come in handy. What about creating characters whose interests either are real-world or have real-world parallels, even if they’re not something you-yourself would be into? Wouldn’t it be useful to have a mindset like that for when you have a friend who can’t stop talking about something you know almost nothing about and care less for?

So what do you think? Might this work for you? Is it a practical enough application to get those people who tell us to go out and do something useful to shut up or maybe even start asking productive questions like “So how exactly does this work?”

(Image borrowed from Wikipedia.)

Isn’t it fun when a little detail becomes something major?

Seriously. You introduced it as a plot element. A joke, even. Or it happened as a coincidence, a bunch of lucky rolls. But now it’s got a life of its own.

There are a bunch of documented stories of a nameless NPC becoming a force of nature in the PCs’ eyes because they rolled poorly and it rolled well. Or of someone who was introduced as a one-shot gag character, but that someone’s PC decided they liked and wanted to keep around.  Or curious PCs turned anonymity into recognition.  It’s usually their fault, after all.

This happens to me a lot, actually. But my personal favorite was a potted plant.

It began as a joke. Most of these things do. I was trying to populate a city in which the only thinking entities were automata. So I brought it to my muse, and one of my muse’s suggestions was a plant automaton. Yes, you heard me correctly. On the surface, it looked like a potted sunflower. With eyes. And little spidery legs. Its job was to choose a target, follow that target around, and then, when the target turned to look at it, rather obviously revert to standard plant form. (The creator was making fun of a rather paranoid acquaintance.)

And I introduced it. And it followed them. What I wasn’t expecting, though, was what happened after they saw it waiting for them when they exited the one building. One of the members of the group had a spell that would let him understand anything, so he cast it and started asking questions.

“Why don’t you come out?”

“He’s looking at me.” (Everyone in the group except the target had seen the plant in open form by that point.)

“What were you made for?”

“Is joke. Funny. Sense of being followed, turns around—plant.”

They spent an hour talking to that plant, during which it acquired its own theme music and a more than decent amount of personality. When they asked for its name, the closest it could come to one was “Are you following me around too?” (I’m still trying to figure out how they added the ‘Now’ too it, but they ended up using that as a name, calling the little guy Ayfmtn, or Ayf for short.)

Twice they planned to take it home, and twice they forgot at the last minute. But that didn’t end its time there. One of my players asked for a very minor modification to it—I accepted, it was just too amusing not to. Which resulted in a Western-style faceoff between the plant and an invader to their city. One powerful demigod. One ticked-off plant. With a cannon. A joke cannon, sure, but it was a very impressive joke cannon, and the way the player described it led to it managing to get the opponent to use one of her most powerful defensive abilities…. on ZAP in glowing letters in the air in front of her.

I already have plans for what happens when they invite it to the costume party they’re planning….

So who or what is your Ayf-analogue?

In the vein of my posts the last two days, I’d like to play a little more with description and imagery.

Some people tend to get hung up on a certain variety of metaphor. The most common, I think, is the tendency for women in romance novels to be compared to food, but that’s far and away not the only one, just the most irritating.

And some of the fun can be finding new themes for what characters can be compared to. I once designed a character who envisioned everyone and everything in terms of instruments and musical styles: she described her mentor as rather like “A slow piece on koto, short movements and long pauses as the string’s vibrations die down” and someone she had to deal with once—a rather compensatory fellow, let’s put at that way—as “One trumpet overblowing a fanfare”. The fun thing about that is that there are multiple places where you can build a comparison—the timbre of the instruments, the balance of the group if you’re comparing them to a group piece and not an individual, the tempo and key of the piece itself either way.

What about birds? There’s a lot of variety there, and plenty of points of comparison. Birdcalls and people’s voices, for instance. Plumage and general appearance, as well, or size and, well, size, or general diet and habits of the bird and general habits of the person. Or what about plants? You’ve got foliage and blossoms, rate of growth, wind resistance, usefulness, natural defenses, you name it!

Or we can go with weather. Between levels of wind, levels of cloud, levels of sun, levels of precipitation, general fickleness, and other such features, you could fill a meeting hall with people described in terms of different weather patterns.

For the more technologically advanced setting, how about machines? How many apt descriptions can you get out of computers alone?

If you’re looking for a challenge, you can dive into a character’s mind and go for something a little more meta-world: referencing legends, plays, or other bodies of common culture. Imagine, for instance, someone viewing most of the people he meets in terms of the characters in the plays they attend every week, or always drawing parallels between the legends she grew up on and the situations she sees or experiences.

Whether you plan on actively trying to embrace the alternate metaphors or not, I suggest you look through your descriptions. Is there a particular metaphor set you seem to cling to most often? If so, you might want to look at it more closely, see if you can change it up a little. Theme stagnation isn’t much fun; while a character always using the same theme makes sense, on a writer it looks a bit more sloppy.

Yesterday, I discussed how different characters might describe people in different ways. Telling isn’t enough, though, so let me show you how it works. Remember our friend Ruby, from the character development sequence? I’m going to describe her from a few other character viewpoints.

Lirit, her mentor: “Ah, Ruby… you’ll know her when you see her. She looks young and sounds younger. There is a good mind in there, though, and a lot of enthusiasm. She’s come a long way from the girl who dropped onto my doorstep with no idea what she was supposed to be doing or even what she was. I just wish she hadn’t gotten so overprotective…”

Esemeli (yes, she has a name!), demon-researcher: “Hyper girl, that one. Short words, long sentences. Don’t think she has any idea how to hold still. Can never really tell if she understands what I’m talking about or not. Doesn’t matter, though; she’s too noisy for my workroom. And the mess she made when my idiot brother tangled with her—I’m not messing with that. Even my life’s too short to deal with the kind of chaos she’s likely to create on a bad day.”

Kestrel, enemy-turned-ally-turned-utterly-confused: “She’d pass for normal, if you didn’t know what to look for. Doesn’t usually have the fangs out, isn’t as pale as the rest of her kind. Just this sweet, innocent kid who can probably tear you apart with her bare hands if you tick her off, and beats up whichever side started the fight when she can’t tell who’s in the right.”

Ereth, professional soldier and passing acquaintance: “Ah, the kid with the streaky hair. Seen her around the camp a few times. First time she’d had a bellyful of rock candy and couldn’t hold still, but there was the one time when she was hanging over the game tables, pointing out possible maneuvers with one hand, snarfing up popcorn with the other, and chatting incessantly. Knew what she was talking about; we were surprised, but we probably shouldn’t've been. She sounds oblivious, but there’s something about where she places herself—few scuffles I’ve seen her in, she’s always been exactly where she needs to be, or made where she was into where she needed to be. Odd girl.”

Shizuyo, ferret familiar to one of her friends, through some sort of translation: “Big, loud, but fun. Cold and warm at the same time, and smells like earth. Knows where to scratch, but squeezes too much and too hard. Should really start keeping raisins in her pocket. Good for keeping people out of trouble, though.”

If you look at all of these, you’ll notice that most have something to do with the personality or profession of the character involved. Lirit, for instance, focuses more on Ruby’s inner qualities and improvement, while Ereth is more concerned with her understanding of how a battlefield works. Kestrel’s understanding is more based on how Ruby differs from the norm for her type (given that “her type” are usually Kes’s enemies, this is pretty logical). Shizuyo looks at her from the ferret-perspective of comfort, discomfort, food and protection (and, you might note, emphasizes scent, sound and the size differential). Esemeli is the most interesting case, in my opinion: being generally antisocial and academically inclined, she looks at Ruby in terms of the differences in their educations and in terms of how inconvenient dealing with the girl would be.

Most people, when they try to describe a person for a story or game–or when someone within the story or game is trying to describe another person–tend to hit the same few qualities. They’ll do hair color (maybe length if they’re feeling ambitious), eye color, approximate height, weight (or body type), race if such is applicable. What is this, a comparison of drivers’ licenses?

Didn’t think so.

Most real people don’t look at the people around them that way, either, or at least not entirely. Different people fixate on different features, or find different ways of describing them; is there any reason why your NPCs would all use the same description?

One way to work around this tendency is to think about the distinguishing feature of the character being described. It could be clothing (”the young man with the long black coat and glasses”), possessions (”The guy with the staff-length curtain rod”), style (”looks like she just stepped out of a teahouse”), associated creature (”The lady with the ferret on her shoulder”). Perhaps it’s a physical feature–tattoos, a shaved head, a particularly noticeable birthmark or scar, a certain way of walking. Maybe it’s something the describing individual picked up from interaction with the person described: a chip on the shoulder, a drinking habit, excessive nerves, a certain arrogance, a particularly large or small vocabulary.

You may also want to think about what the character doing the describing would be likely to look for. Someone who lives by the sword is more likely to notice things that would indicate how well-trained the other person is or what weapons they might use (like how they move, or where their hands tend to rest when not in use). A person more concerned with social status would tend to guide to the cost of the other person’s clothing and whether it’s currently in fashion, or what sort of slang and group-speak they use, while a crafter might concentrate on the workmanship of the person’s possessions.

Dominant sense can also make a difference. The hearing-dominant will most likely notice vocal timbre and general tone. Olfactory-dominant individuals might pick up on someone’s scent–and will probably let you know about it if the person hasn’t bathed in a while. The touch-dominant might tell you about hair or clothing texture, and the particularly impulsive among them may add what happened when they tried or asked to touch it (if nothing else, it would certainly explain the bandages on their hands).

Using tricks like these can tell your audience more aobut the people they’re looking for and the ones they’re questioning. It will help you as well, giving you a better idea what the characters you’re describing are like, and occasionally letting you throw a false trail as the group encounters a description they wouldn’t've thought of on their own. Try it; it’ll be fun!

There’s always an ending.

For games, for series, for everything. It’s hard for us to admit that, though. Maybe it’s still an attachment to this character, or this world, or a desire to see a certain social dynamic finished. Maybe what we’ve got is really, really popular, and we don’t think we’ll ever top it.

It happens. We have a really good game, awesome characters, a great plot arc. It’s just getting better, and better. But we can’t drag out the current story arc any longer, or we’ve been planning and timing it perfectly, and either way it results in that brilliant, tension-filled ending in which the BBEG is destroyed, the world is saved, most of the questions have been answered and the ones that remain aren’t particularly important, and in general, a conclusion has been reached. But we can’t just end it. We still see something missing, or think we still have something left to say in that world, that timestream. And next thing you know, there it is, like one of those shows that finished a major plot arc a while ago and really should have ended, only the characters were so popular and the merchandising potential so vast that they really couldn’t leave well enough alone.

But after the story ends, if you can’t find a new one, what else is left? Where do you go from saving the world? How are you going to keep it from going into a Dragonball Z-esque sequence of power creep and “My energy ball is bigger than your energy ball”?

At this point, there are several questions you want to ask yourself.

• Can the group still go forward? This is something of a clump of questions, including “Can I top this, or at least equal it, drama-wise?”, “Do the characters still have room to develop?”, “Are there still enough loose ends, and are they sufficiently intriguing?”, “Can I still come up with a new threat that isn’t functionally the old one with power upgrades?” and “Are there any challenges left the group can’t take?” If you can’t get a yes answer to a majority of these sub-questions, you might want to look twice at whether you should really be continuing.
• Do the players want to go forward? (This, of course, is a game-only question.) Some of them might have gotten tired of this game, for a number of reasons that have nothing to do with your storytelling skill. Maybe the character has resolved his major guiding conflict and isn’t interesting anymore. Or she’s been played the entire time as an underdog, and the player just isn’t sure how to play her now that she’s the top dog. Or there’s no possible mechanical improvement to the character that interests the player. (These can be resolved with a new character, but not always.) Or perhaps they feel that the end of the story is a satisfying conclusion to leave on, and want to try something new.
• Do you still have a story to tell? This is a vital element: A continuing game without a story is just a steadily escalating sequence of fights, and a series without new plots is just repeats of old themes with new names. Continuing without any set path after a conclusion is just asking for a decrease in quality—I’ve learned that the hard way.
• Why do you want to continue? This one is the hardest question to answer. If it’s because you’ve got a new idea or an entirely different direction, you might have a chance. If you’ve got a loose end that everyone wants to look into and you know what to do with it, there’s still life there. But if it’s just because the players don’t want to turn loose the characters, or because you can’t let go of your world, you’re going to want to reconsider. That way lie cottage industry plots and downward spirals.

If you’re answering most of these with a no, and your reason to keep going can be summed up as inertia, you should probably call it a conclusion. It’s tough, but look at it this way: If your story was good enough that people wanted to continue just for the sake of continuing, it’s good enough that it deserves to end on a high note instead of risking a downward spiral. When it’s time to let go, hanging on isn’t going to be good for anyone: Not you, not the players, and not anyone’s memories of the campaign.

Without them we might lose our battles, or merely spend weeks between them recovering. Without them our stories would be darker. We know them even in the real world—less power, yes, but more training and dedication.

Here’s to our healers!

They can be the easiest to play but the hardest to play well, particularly when not in a leading role. Some forget that compassion is not required, others that those who put you together know best how to take you apart. Others forget life beyond healing. So many such characters branch from the same story.

And yet for those for whom healing is life, motivation is easy to arrange. Give them a plague, they’ll seek to remove it. Give them a source of pain, they’ll seek to end it.  Give them a group to keep alive, or sometimes to bring back when the first task has proven too hard, and they’ll do so.

In our own world as well as those we create, we owe them. Who here has never been aided by doctor nor nurse, or never treated in some way for some ill? For nights spent on call, for days juggling patients, for the hours of their own miracles and the broken rests after their failures; for calm bedside manners in times of stress, humor sent against desperation; for confidentiality, for dedication, for knowledge of what must be done, we salute them.

Here’s to our healers!

For those of us writing and not gaming, they are perhaps the hardest to write, as we need to know what form their healing takes, and to have a decent understanding of how the body works and what can fix it. But we include them anyway, making order from chaos, engaging in tug-of-war with death and winning. We write them as healers for the body, and they chase the ills away; we write them for the mind, and they bring their patients back from circular thoughts and emotional freefall.

But we must respect them. It’s easy to say that magic makes the healer’s job easy, but where’s the story in that? Why should one touch repair a wound, or one word heal a heart? Make of their art the craft that it is, or the battle that it can be. Remember the slow recoveries, the fleeting rewards, the parts where hope strains and stubbornness carries the day. Remember forced cheer and everpresent stress, and that never-ending need to rewrite time for the sake of the patients. Remember that a healing can be just as much a quest as any cross-country travel, and just as much a fight as the most epic of battles. Your world will be the better for it.

Here’s to our healers!

For those, the most-needed, the least-remembered, I propose a toast.

For our Bartons and Blackwells and Nightingales! For our Pomfreys and Keishas! For our White Mages and Durkons and Suns! For the fellow who decided to cover the cleric role, for the one with five dots in Medicine or the long-suffering Wood Dragon user! For those who keep us on our feet when we can’t stay out of trouble!

Here’s to our healers!

For Daniel Hoagland, 1953-2008.  Here’s to my healer.

Requested by my wonderful colleague crsenter. (As a side note, I highly recommend her blog for people who want to work on their writing; she has an excellent approach to creativity and inspiration.)

Her question was how to get into the game late in the game, namely around the age of 40. Now, aside from the fact that it’s hard to fit into a group a couple decades your junior (doable, though), I’m not sure there’s that much difference between finding a game at that age and finding it at mine. I’ll cover the topics as best I can.

For playing live, the best way to find a group is your friendly local gaming store. They’re hubs of gamer activity, and most players looking for groups, or groups looking for players, will leave some sort of note there.  Failing that, you can try your local university; it’s a more set age group, of course, but that’s not too big a difficulty.

If you’re more interested in finding an online game, the options become a lot more varied. Of course, it makes a difference what kind of game you’re looking for. A good first stop, particularly for the writer-turning-player, is Escaping Reality/Capturing Fantasy, a play by post community and accompanying blog using a modified version of the World of Darkness setting/system and run by the minds behind Men With Pens. I haven’t personally tried the game—that would require free time, a commodity I’ve been lacking for a while now—but I hear nothing but good things from those who have, and I’ve enjoyed the posts.

For those who are looking for a different system or setting, a message board community may be the way to go. There are quite a few out there, but the three I am most familiar with are Giant in the Playground, plothook.net, and rpg.net (more by reputation for the last, though). GitP is the most stubbornly family-friendly of the lot of them, and is very much a D&D-centric forum; whether this is an advantage or not depends on who’s asking. Plothook.net is more specialized for game-running, and features a vast collection of systems; rpg.net has less actual gaming than GitP, but a wider variety of regularly used systems. Once you’re there, it’s mainly a matter of finding a recruiting thread and expressing interest. These places tend to expect that you have the materials, though; while some GMs will walk you through the process, and it won’t matter as much in a freeform, expect to need books unless stated otherwise, and make sure they know you’re a beginner.

And of course, you’re going to want to learn more about the gaming world than you can figure out just from here. The message boards above will help with this, of course, but you might want something a bit more static. Fortunately, you’re just in time to find a new resource: the RPG Blog Network, a hub of RSS feeds from a wide variety of gaming blogs, including this one. Mechanics? Dramatics? Industry news? The occasional convention appraisal or movie review? They’ve got it all. Now, granted, they’re not exactly a representative sample: since the minds behind this were D&D bloggers, and it’s their community that got involved first, most of the sites featured are D&D-primary. Give them a few months to get the word out, though. Speaking of which, one of the bloggers I met through this hub, Storyteller, has an impressive series on three of the four major forms of roleplaying, including how to get into them, and I filled in the one he was missing not long ago.

For those of you who already knew this stuff and still had the patience to read through, it’s your turn! Suggestions? Ideas? Opinions? Recommendations for the newcomers?