Exchange of Realities

And on the subject on life inspiring art, I got this one from two otherwise awesome people getting my gender wrong in the same day. (For those of you who haven’t figured it out from the about page: I’m a girl.) Also influenced by the main question of this post; while I think it might be reading slightly more into the situation than is actually there, one can apply it to the world itself.

It’s not a subject I’m particularly happy about, but it is there: There are many positions, careers, hobbies and other sorts of things for which people will assume a certain gender unless proven otherwise. You talk about a nurse, a quilter, or a secretary, and don’t specify a name, most people will guess it’s a woman you’re talking about. Bring up a doctor, an automobile aficionado, or, apparently, a role-playing blogger, and they’ll assume male.

Now, annoying though this may be, it can also serve as an excellent world-building tool. And it doesn’t even have to be gender-based. Take the average D&D world. When you’ve got races that as a matter of crunch have aptitudes in different directions, it’s to be expected that certain types will gravitate towards certain fields—people expect alchemists to be gnomes, for instance, and tend to be surprised to see half-orcs in non-martial disciplines.

So where does this come from? Part of it, of course, is natural aptitude. While it can often be a reason for these kinds of presuppositions, it isn’t always: just look at the real world. (I’ll get to those sorts of stereotypes later.) Typically, these things are grounded in some sort of observable difference, whether it’s real, a result of factors that have little to do with inborn traits, cultural to one subset of a group and nobody’s bothering to tell the difference, or some other factor.

Then there’s examples where a certain role is foisted off on people, or barred to them. For a historical example, consider the association in many people’s worldview between Jews and banking. This one isn’t aptitude-based at all—it came from the fact that for quite a while in Europe, they weren’t allowed to do much of anything else. In time, what began as “You’ll do this because nobody else wants to/because you can’t do this other thing” becomes a tendency to fall into that role anyway becomes the assumption that the group occupying that role is somehow more suited to it.

Sometimes it’s just a societal feedback loop—take the preponderance of women with textile-related activities. Whether it’s actually true or not, hardly anyone hears about men doing it as often (aside from some of the Big Names in fashion, anyway).

Then we have combinations of the above, and for this we have the classic example of the female gamer; this article is one of my best explanations I’ve seen. It’s a number of factors: the fact that it’s been a “boys’ hobby” for a while, the stereotype about not being able to enjoy or understand the crunch and the infamous “DM’s girlfriend” stereotype, that sort of thing. But here it is, and what can we do to change it but be living counterexamples?

Are these sorts of expectations and stereotypes a good thing? Not on your life. Might they be an interesting way to give a world a little more color, make an NPC just a bit less likable to the group, or create obstacles for the PCs to have to surmount? Definitely. Is it worth it? It can be.

This week I didn’t get to run. Again. At least it wasn’t my fault this time. I did, however, have most of my players, so I started asking them to plan.

A word of explanation: I’m a reactive GM. My players are reactive PCs. I also have an absurd number of inspiration-sinks to get into, and I just got out of…. well, suffice it to say, I haven’t been particularly brimming with ideas recently. I’d had some decent inspirations for things that could happen during the party they’re going to be throwing, but that was just events that would happen without their interference, and I needed to know a little more about what they’d be trying to make happen. Moreover, I’d designed my current arc to be rather sandboxy; there are a lot of things the group can try, and a lot of… entities they can try it with.

The first problem is… well, reactive/reactive. Bad combination. Worse is the fact that nobody quite knows what they’re doing; it’s a political situation, and I’d been hoping they’d be able to carry it; I’ll admit, I’d also been expecting a lot more input from people who aren’t involved in the game. So we’re all stuck, and this leads to lack of inspiration loops.

The second is that I’m a response-powered GM; I do a lot better when I can see collaboration or am getting feedback. (Particularly compliments.) Only nobody’s doing much of that either, and one of the players is leaving for the second time. An ego downswing for me doth not an interesting plot make.

So I’ve decided I’m going to try to do something to fix it: in this case, explicitly ask the group to start bouncing ideas off of each other. It’s going pretty decently, so far. Or at least, that part is. Sure, the politics thing is still slowing them down, but at least someone’s figuring out what they’re doing. Moral of the session: Never be afraid to ask about these things.

Thing I learned today, though: sometimes, reactive players are such because they’re worried about having too big an impact on the storyline. You may need to tell them not to worry. Regularly. As in, every time you see them and the subject comes up.

And… sorry, but that’s all the wisdom I have for you today.

Anyone who does a riff on countering burnout sometime in the next two weeks, please, leave a link in the comments. 

Just about everybody knows at least some of the major varieties of playstyle. You’ve got rules-heavy vs. rules-light, deep roleplaying vs. beer and pretzels, gritty vs. over the top, balance between combat and intellectual puzzles and social situations, and types of metagame enjoyment. (If you haven’t read this last one, you should; it’s awesome.) But there’s an axis of playstyle that most people forget, one that is in itself a often a silent killer of GM-player mutual satisfaction: proactive vs. reactive, or the level of initiative a player or GM takes.

Though this quality can be the same on both sides of the GM screen, it doesn’t have to be; a person might be highly proactive as a player, but very reactive as a GM, or vice versa. The following, then, are the four general categories; there are a lot of gradients between each extreme, but very few people are completely on the line between them.

The Proactive Player: “Okay, guys, I have a plan…”

This one’s off and running the moment her dice hit the table (if not slightly before). End on a cliffhanger, and she’ll have half a dozen contingencies within the next day, never mind by the beginning of the following session. Leave a plot hook anywhere near her, and she’ll drag it and grab as many of the party as she can along. When the group’s idle or stuck, she’s usually the first to find something to do for the sake of doing something; in the absence of a plot hook, she’ll usually choose a group ambition and find a way to follow through with it. Many proactive players are Currents. These players flourish in sandbox-style games, but are often the likeliest to be irritated by railroading; they’re also very good at interrupting well-laid plans.

The Reactive Player: “What are we doing now?”

This one might plan, but it’s likelier to be in response to what happens around him. Running games for him is rather like playing badminton: Action, response, action, response. While he may throw a wrench in your plans as they’re being executed, he’s not near as likely as the proactive player to ruin them before they’ve even gotten started, and there’s very little risk of him walking up to an NPC and asking for a life story without the NPC practically dripping with clues that they are Someone to be Spoken To. These players excel in games with set storylines, but tend to founder in a sandbox format: make sure they’re given a clear direction.

The Proactive GM: “How many folders did she BRING?!”

Like the proactive player, the proactive GM always seems to be “on.” She spends a lot of free time (and a lot of time that isn’t technically free) planning—world, NPCs, plot, rewards, you name it. This often leads to antagonists with highly complex plans. Or plans in general, which can cause frustration as the players do what players always do and mess them up. Proactive GMs can run just about anything—their sandboxes are almost real-world complex, and their stories twist at every opportunity.

The Reactive GM: “So what do you do now?”

For the reactive GM, the plot is in the hands of the players. Literally. He’s a dab hand at responding to even the craziest PC tactics, plans and strategies, and he’s likely to have a firm finger on the pulse of the group, responding to concerns quickly and effectively. But while he can work around almost anything, he needs something to work from; if the players aren’t moving, he might bog down as well. These GMs favor loose plots and sandboxing.

For groups of players, the types can be mixed and matched easily, though I recommend keeping groups half and half if they’re mixed; a single reactive in a group of proactives can feel left behind, and a single proactive in a group of reactives often steals the game. Proactive GMs work best with reactive players, and vice versa; their styles complement each other rather than conflicting, and someone’s always got the inspiration. A proactive GM with mostly proactive players might find herself frustrated by their tendency to mess up her plans. The worst, though, is a reactive GM with reactive players: even without additional factors it’s a recipe for stagnation, and heaven forbid someone run afoul of writer’s block.

So what’s your style? Ever run afoul of one of these conflicts?

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!