Exchange of Realities

It’s another of those weeks for improvising. I’d had tonight’s scenario in mind for two weeks, but finding time to plan—that’s another matter. Particularly this week. First I was teaching test prep in El Centro, then there was stuff at work, then one of my friends dropped by for some anime-watching. But I’d still thought I was going to get to plan today, until a ring-necked dove with all its tail feathers missing and a white cable tie around its leg ran into me on my morning walk.

I couldn’t exactly leave the poor thing alone, could I?

Bird rescue is a lot harder than it looks, even with a bird in a condition like that. There’s finding a box for it, then getting it into the box (particularly difficult when the little guy can still fly). Then discovering that the normal shelter won’t take it, and the pigeon owners’ club can’t identify it, and the place that will take it is across the county in traffic that’s acting like rush hour lite. And realizing that session is in an hour and dinner still needs to be prepared….

Let’s just say the day was full of improvising. On something that was supposed to be too spectacular to just improvise.

So I’m bringing my group into a swamp. To fight something that makes the Blob look like child’s play. The descriptions, fortunately, were pretty easy. Descriptions usually are. Just give them some dead trees, a whole lot of sludge, light levels… and the smell. You can’t forget the smell. It gets their attention every time.

Fun facts, as well: Spooky atmospheres can be greatly aided by the proper application of the right music. Blobs get excellent concealment from murky water.  Knowledge of proper placement can make an amorphous enemy scary.

And next week, I might actually be able to fit the session to the posts!

Sometimes brevity is the soul of wit, as in Rocketscientist’s writing exercise post this week. But sometimes what you want is a long sentence, and what matters is just keeping control of it.

I got this writing exercise from my creative writing professor about a year ago. At first, the concept looks simple. You have to write a sentence, a hundred or more words long, without at any point using the word “and”. Moreover, in doing so, you need to use proper grammar; run-on sentences don’t count.

Sounds pretty straightforward, right? But it’s a lot harder than it sounds. If you aren’t paying close attention, that little ‘and’ will sneak in at every opportunity. And a hundred words is a long run for just one sentence; reading it out loud afterward will probably leave you out of breath, and in writing it it’s easy to forget where the sentence began before it finishes. It took me several tries when I first took a stab at it. It didn’t help that, since my prof didn’t like adverbs much, I was trying to avoid those as well. I finally got it when I was trying to describe a place that was coming up in game; these writing exercises are always good for something, right?

On cloudless nights above the meeting place of the Arthchwyl, the northern lights twine around each other, burning scarves of ethereal fire, knotting, stretching, twisting, undulating between the blazing pinpoints that perforate the black-silk sky; their lights draw only sparkles from the snow-plain save within the meeting place itself, a great amphitheater where snow dips to ice in order to throw back the vivid display in the sky, a jagged mixing bowl ringed by spires of glacial ice which cast not shadows but rainbows around them, along whose sides the scattered veils of light become an endless writhing knot of color.

A lot of techniques help with this exercise: listing is a favorite, as is careful adjective use. Extended similes or metaphors don’t hurt, either. Don’t forget the colon or semicolon bridge, if applicable.

Can you reach a hundred words without the dreaded ‘and’? What sorts of writing tricks help you to get there?

Have fun!

One of my longest-running colleagues, Shakespearemom, has been doing a run of writing exercises recently. It’s been a while since I did write on demand on a regular basis, but I’ve found doing these things to be a very useful skill, and this one in particular was very important to a newbie writer.

The object of the game was to write a scene that got across an emotion, without actually spelling out that emotion, or even going into the characters’ heads at all. Just a nice little run of third person objective. I actually find this difficult; most of my writing is as much inside the head as outside. It made it quite the challenge.

The end result was too long for a comment, but perfect for a post.

Three papers lie on the desk in front of Amaya and Kiara, illuminated by the candle a short distance away. The center piece is a garden of illegible symbols in vertical columns. On the left, another bears short scrawls in two different sets of handwriting, festooned all over the page with neither rhyme nor reason to the arrangement. And the right has a number of letters and clusters of letters, their spacing irregular but the rows meticulously straight.

 

There isn’t a word, just the constant rhythmic tap of the butt of Kiara’s pen on the desk. Tap… tap… tap… the timing, the spacing, is perfect. Constant. Almost a heartbeat. Now and then she scrawls a few symbols on the left hand sheet. Looks at them. Looks at the right hand sheet. Crosses them out. Tap. Tap. Tap.

 

Three times this process is repeated, the tapping increasing in tempo and volume with each repetition. And through all this Amaya sits still, watching the pen, watching the letters.

 

Then Kiara sucks in her breath and shoves herself, chair and all, away from the desk. She stands, looks down at the three papers. Flicks a drop of ink off of her pen into the center of the mass of scrawls and strikeouts, then sets it down in front of her, hard enough that the top of the desk vibrates and the flame of the candle sways.

 

Amaya says nothing, but places her right hand on Kiara’s wrist and shakes her head, then picks up the scrawled paper with her other hand and blows on it. Five seconds—enough time for the ink to dry. Then she turns it over and makes a few strokes with her own pen on the paper’s clean back. One letter. And one symbol.

 

Kiara looks at them. At the original note. Back at the gap. Then she dives back into her chair, scoops up the pen and begins to write again. A few letter-symbol pairs, and then she looks at Amaya, who crosses out one and replaces it with another. Then a few more. And soon they’re trading them back and forth, filling in the gaps in the third sheet, scrawling notes in dovetailing patterns, occasionally crossing out or modifying each other’s notes.

 

Half an hour later, when the candle is close to burning out, they finish. Kiara fills in the last few blanks on the right hand paper and sets down the pen, then looks up to Amaya again. The older woman nods. “Well done.”

Yesterday, I expressed objections to an idea: that the tabula rasa character, the one without preexisting social connections, is likelier to form relationships in a story or game than someone that already has a few such connections. Yesterday’s post was directly responding to the comment that set it off, detailing my disagreement with the comments supporting the idea that a tabula rasa was better for creating in-game relationships. These are further thoughts I had on the subject of the tabula rasa in relation to the world.

Moreover, by not already knowing people, the tabula rasa lacks a trait that I have found to be highly beneficial for creating new relationships—people who know people. Look at your social calendar, your IM list, whatever gives you the best sense of your own set of connections: how many of the people you know were introduced to you by a mutual acquaintance? I’ll bet it’s a pretty heavy fraction. The tabula rasa character can’t do that; poor guy doesn’t have anyone to introduce him! Yet another black mark on the blank slate.

Then there’s the half-friendship: an inter-character relationship that exists at the beginning of the story, but either in an early stage or in need of re-cementing. I played a game that was full of these: not only did the main three characters all have pre-existing connections with each other that needed a bit of renewing, but most of them had estranged relatives, potential love interests who’d made rather poor first impressions, and other existing connections. Getting into the second plot arc, not only are the primary characters practically inseparable, but most of the backstory characters have tightened their ties to the PC they were written for, at least one other PC, or both. Which includes such oddities as—watch carefully here—the NPC spouse of an ex-PC (his player quit, though the character still shows up on occasion), originally stuck in a rather messy love triangle with a second PC, finding her vision in helping the second PC, who in turn regards said NPC spouse as somewhere between a trusted student and a confidante. (To add to the confusion, both of them have children.) Why is this? The pre-existing connections provided an excellent springboard; the characters knew each other, knew why they had or hadn’t originally gotten along, and essentially played off of both strengthening the pre-existing connections and the need to accommodate other people’s pre-existing connections.

And then there’s the tabula rasa’s effect on the GM. Now, this one’s a lot more subjective, since many GMs already have pretty good ideas for plots and don’t need the help. But some of us rather like having jumping-off points—parts of what the character’s already done that give us our own ideas. For me, associated characters, even barely known or currently missing/deceased ones, are an excellent source of jumping-off points. The problem with a tabula rasa, especially one that’s truly a blank slate and not ‘blank with hints of chalk from its last use’, is that he doesn’t have such things. No hooks to catch on, no threads to pick up again and weave into the main tapestry. Believe you me, this can make life difficult.

In sum, I believe I can safely say that the tabula rasa character does not have an advantage over more connected counterparts when it comes to creating new relationships and might, in fact, have a disadvantage.

Yesterday, I remarked on the lack of connections many characters, both in fiction and in games, seemed to have within their worlds. One response in particular caught my eye: Brickwall, presenting the tabula rasa, or blank slate, character as one of the reasons why people wouldn’t start with pre-existing relationships. As he puts it, “Who is easier to have form relationships with the others that inevitably come along than someone who doesn’t already have relationships to handle?”

As you can probably guess from my post title, I disagree.

Now, I’ll grant that his first example works: it is usually harder to set a character already married or otherwise in a committed relationship up with a new love interest. (Though he fails to take into account a number of factors that make it a lot easier, including political marriages. Who says everyone who’s tied the knot is a. really monogamously-minded, and b. actually in love?) And those sorts of messes are interesting in their own right. So yes, for most people one could grant a point to the tabula rasa. But I’m still not impressed.

The second one was the one that got me considering this response to be worth a post in and of itself. It operates on three assumptions that I disagree with—that the mentoring parent is necessarily the father (I apprenticed out to my mother, thank you very much), that having a strong parental figure precludes having a mentor figure, and (somewhat more implied) that the mentor figure has to necessarily be a parental figure. Pretty heavy load for one sentence. The first assumption I’ll assume to be an accident, so I’ll leave it alone. For the second: What if the character and her parent have a strong relationship, but don’t necessarily share interests, or if the parent has the interest in teaching but not the aptitude? Or if the character’s too busy taking her family for granted to realize what she can learn for them, and as such figures she has to look elsewhere? And think of it this way—there’s more prestige in being mentored by someone impressive from outside the family than from inside, as there’s little chance of nepotism: the right to the mentor’s tutelage must be earned. And more prestige is more reward. And as for the mentor having to necessarily feel like a parental figure, I disagree. I’ve seen a lot of real-world examples of the older-student mentor type, both for other people and for myself. (Heck, for a while I was one.) Reports of the need for a tabula rasa have been greatly exaggerated.

Now we have the third example—that someone without children of his own will be more parental towards the youngster in need of guidance than someone who’s been a parent, and thus the tabula rasa is better suited to ‘taking a student’ plots. Not so; if anything, I find someone with progeny, or at least young dependent(s) of some sort, likelier to take on a student. Why? First: in my experience, parents tend to have stronger parental instincts than non-parents. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen parents I knew taking care of other children as automatically as they did their own; on the other hand, a majority of the childless people I know (myself included) have next to no caring instinct and if anything wish the little brats would go somewhere else. Also, someone who’s had a young dependent is likelier to be reminded of the young dependent by the student du jour—and if he still has said young dependent, and the young dependent is friends with or otherwise close to the plot student, he might even take on the student as a favor to the young dependent. Sorry, but the tabula rasa has a blank score here.

And that’s just arguing with the comment itself (my response got a little long for one day). Tomorrow, I’ll have reasons why a tabula rasa character might actually be less likely to create new and interesting characterization-worthy relationships than someone who already has a family or a few contacts.

There’s something that’s always confused me about a lot of fantasy characters, and even more of the RPG characters I’ve run into. See, I’ve learned from personal experience that very few people actually like operating completely alone, and most would choose not to.

Image courtesy of DAVIDKNOX on stock.xchng

So why are there so many lone wolves out there?

Sure, we can talk about the rate of destruction of peasant villages from which heroes are destined to emerge until the cows come home. Or about how it’s easier to motivate someone who’s lost everything for revenge. But I’m not talking about the in-world reasons, only the out-of-world. I look at the traveling party full of orphans, or the hordes of fantasy novel leads with home lives they can’t tolerate and not much by way of friends for some reason, and I wonder—why is it that, when connections are such an important element of people’s lives, it’s so common for them to be written without them?

Now, I can see a few obvious reasons. In most role-playing games, after all, connections are weaknesses; if you write yourself a mother, or a teacher, or a younger sibling, it’s better than even odds that at some point the GM is at best going to threaten them to give you a plot hook and at worst likely to kill them off to trigger an emotional reaction. And I can see this as a reason; what’s the point of setting oneself up for more angst than is necessary? Easier to get it out of the way, one tragic event at the beginning from which it can all be recovered, right?

And yes, connections can hold you back; it’s not too many people who will go off into the wide world on some cockamamie adventure when there are people at home they need to protect. At least, not without trying to find a few alternatives, delaying the trip a bit while they ensure that the place they’re leaving is properly defended, or otherwise being more attached to their old lives than they are to the plot.

And of course, there are the people who don’t write connections because it’s easier not to write them. I’m sure you know the type. Heck, most of you have probably been the type, early in your writing careers, and who’s to blame you? Relationships are difficult things to write: romances have all been seen before, friends are rather subjective, families have expected patterns and there’s all this panic about cliché, and bosses—don’t get me started on bosses. And you have to take into account all the changes since they first met, and the longer the relationship the more variables there are to juggle. It can be pretty daunting.

So with all these reasons not to write them, why do I find it so confusing? It’s simple. The relationship—be it familial, friendly, romantic, educational, or whatever else one might come up with—is one of the greatest forces in existence when it comes to shaping a character. Everyone bears marks of their old associations, one way or another. Even the people surrounded by negative role models will often be trying not to be like the ones they grew up under. Their vocabularies, their moral codes, their modes of dress, their prejudices, their approaches to dealing with new people or solving problems or managing stress: all of them have as likely as not been influenced by their families and communities. And why would anyone want to deny a character that much opportunity for depth?

Have you ever had a plan that was going to go perfectly, fantastically right? When your spies were in all the right places, your contingencies were covered, you were on a good enough streak that you might start thinking you were the star of the narrative, and nothing could possibly go wrong? I’m sure you’ve been there. Like the rush of power from taking the deal all over again.

Until the Real Hero shows up. And it can’t be in the normal way, something you could reasonably plan for. No, he comes blasting in with, as my charming associate the Overlord of Penguins puts it, “a box of hamsters, 3 gallons of mustard, and a dozen kites”. And whatever he’s doing, it’s not so stupid you have a contingency for it because the one in a million plans always fail—oh, no, he couldn’t be that considerate. But it is so stupid that nobody in their right mind would expect it to work. But for some reason—call it luck beyond countenance, call it narrative immunity, call it a really bad deus ex machina because we know there’s probably one in there somewhere—this idiotic trifle actually works, and there go the plans.

Isn’t that horrendous?

The problem with these things is that they’re not preventable. I mean, sure, we can try. We can burn nitwits at the stake, we can sentence improvisational inventors to the loss of their hands (and then kill them when despite the warning they somehow manage to replace said hands with a contraption made of corkscrews, harp strings and sealing wax), we can try to limit people’s access to absurd components—but it doesn’t work. Take away their tacks, they’ll use pins. Confiscate the hamsters, they’ll try their hand with rabbits. Live in a world that doesn’t even have mustard, they’ll invent it.

So we can’t head them off at the pass. And we can’t come up with contingencies for them. Trust me, it’s been tried. Who here has heard of Reginald the Chessmaster, and his descent into madness? None of you? I’m surprised—in my day, everyone would warn you about that. See, he was a brilliant strategist. A pro at finding all the loopholes and closing them. Until that one day. It wasn’t even a major plan that was foiled. No, it was just a simple ritual for getting into a ruin he’d found intriguing, and he would’ve gotten away with it if he hadn’t smacked around some stableboy the night before, and the pesky twit hadn’t come back with a beehive, his sweetie’s garter and a wet gunnysack full of rotten apples. And since then… he tried to plan for everything. You’d see him up in the middle of the night, ranting away about what to do if the foe has a curtain rod and a sack of potatoes. When he was finally done in—with a sword, mind you, very prosaic sort of light-beats-dark—most of the community found it a mercy.

So what’s left to do? Learn how to improvise. Be the kind of person who can size up the situation and isolate the protagonist from his improvised equipment. Know how to change your plans in midstride. Have your own improbable ideas, and don’t be afraid to use them. Be angry; just be careful not to be so angry you can’t think.

And remember: Good is dumb. Their idiocy will come back to haunt them eventually.

This week, I touched on manipulation in many of its forms.

I’ve learned a lot about manipulation in my games, mostly by dint of practice. And some of the best practice I’ve had was with the antagonist of the first arc of my game, an individual-manipulation specialist by name of Jalil. If anything, he’s as responsible as anyone for that last chain of posts.

Imagine, if you will, someone who’s sold his soul to forces beyond comprehension, who can order almost anyone around and get it to stick but often chooses not to. A smooth talker, highly educated, and absurdly effective at getting under people’s skin. Now imagine that despite having been the group’s enemy for an amount of time that covered getting on for a year both in and out of character, and having been killed at the group’s hands after doing something even they could not forgive (one of about four or five named characters they haven’t let live, mind you), when they discovered that a newer acquaintance of theirs had a remnant of this person in his head, not only did they keep him around, but they made a point of finding opportunities to talk to him even knowing that any information he gave them would be accompanied by a neverending stream of biting commentary, because he was just that interesting. Imagine all that—and you have about the right idea.

Jalil demonstrated a gift for both direct and indirect manipulation while under the group’s observation. Their first meeting with him, after all, had been after he had set a trap for a friend of theirs, revealing his presence with a set of carefully chosen thefts in order to get her to come looking for him. And when that failed, had personally maneuvered someone else into a similar attempt, then delayed them with information of yet something else (that he was technically involved in). He managed to take advantage of just about every twist the group threw at me.

Though what I’d found particularly amusing about this one (aside from the sardonic commentary at the group’s expense; it wasn’t often that I could insult them with impunity) was that this was a manipulator good enough that even I didn’t tend to know half of what he was planning until after he’d succeeded. And, I suppose, that they’d liked him so much; by setting him up in the mind of one of their allies, I’d thought I was giving them a potential moral dilemma, not the well of snarky information he’d ended up as.

And even now, when they’re starting to worry about his influence on his host, he’s still too much fun to do away with entirely. So out come the cunning plans (I think the current one involves making a talking paperweight of the remnant-part of him).

Have to be doing something right, correct?

It’s been a long week. Which means I can afford to be a little selfish today, so I’m going to go on a personal tangent. A lot of people have been asking about things that make me wonder what it is that I want. In a game. In a story. In a world. And hey, the answer will probably say a thing or two about where I’m coming from, so I may as well go for it.

I want a game that plays to my skills. That lets me depend on my own wits, rather than on how well I’ve been able to string numbers together to create a character. (This is why I dislike playing characters less intelligent and less socially effective than I am: it means I have to hold back, and I’m not good at holding back.) Where I can come up with crazy plans, back them up with my own reasoning, and have a chance at convincing whoever holds the job of creating the world that this might be vaguely doable. Where I can engage in social maneuvering or come up with new and inventive uses for seemingly mundane magical effects, and know that the opposition is going to be fair opponents. Where, if I find myself in a position that involves delegation, minutiae, and assigning resources, I can try my hand at those skills. (Good practice for having to do the same in the real world, right?)

I want a game in which the rest of the group and I are a team and not a gaggle. In which collaboration is the default rather than something that happens on special occasions. I want to be able to settle down for hour-long discussions of “Okay, so we’ve got Objective X, Resources Y, Q, and P, and Obstacle Z. What’s the most interesting, plausible, and cinematically audacious way to use these resources to get past this obstacle and reach this objective?” Preferably a week early so we can modify the plan, and refine it, and make it even more balanced between plausibility, amusement and cinematic audacity in the interim.

I want a game that appeals to all my emotions. Where I can choose to play a character who hides behind masks, but at some point she can feel comfortable enough to take the masks off. Where there is joy as well as sorrow, elation as well as frustration.

I want to run a game (or tell a story) in which there are mysteries everywhere, hinted at in every session, just waiting to be found out. Where everything has a reason, and where every reason is an intrigue. Where the players know this, and act accordingly, turning over the rocks and asking the questions, tracing the little mysteries back to their sources. Where, if I were to spy on their conversations during the week, I might hear them comparing notes: “So what do you think her problem is?” “Well, according to a conversation another friend of ours had with me about a month ago gametime….” Where people go over all the details with a fine-tooth comb, and when the one solution they didn’t think of turns out to be the answer, there’s a chorus of “Oh, THAT’S why…!”

I want a world that’s consistent and alive, no matter what my role is in it. Where everyone has a stake in its development, and will cheerfully take the time to add a few little details. Where people can plot against themselves between sessions and see the fun of it during session.

That’s what I want. What do you want?

The last of Monday’s manipulation styles is manipulation through propaganda. Most of us have seen the impact of propaganda throughout history, and who hasn’t been on the wrong end of a commercial?

Essentially, the propagandist depends on the natural flow of information. As a result, users of this manipulation style are more common in places where information spreads easily: though a rumor may be able to permeate an isolated village within hours, it’s not going to spread past there if hardly anyone enters or leaves. On the other hand, we’ve all seen the speed at which information, even false information, can spread through the Internet.

The propagandist’s primary skill is knowing how to appeal to the emotions of as many different people as she can in a few words as possible. Often, this involves utilizing images of recent events, triggering fears, or playing to beliefs. The only rule is that it has to be something people will want to spread. Luckily, people will talk about anything.

A good propagandist understands the concept of of image—what people associate with everything from other individuals through events and countries, and more importantly how people want these things (not) to be seen. Image is, after all, her primary tool. With it, she can determine whether her target is to be liked or disliked by the masses. By tweaking it just a bit, she can turn a simple mistake into a scandal of epic proportions, or whitewash an atrocity into an act of heroism. And often, by reminding people that such is within her capabilities, she can convince them to follow her instructions. Nobody wants the propagandist’s poison pen turned in his direction!

But as with any other manipulation style, understanding only is not enough—it is also necessary to be able to apply the information, and that means knowing how an image can be changed and how to tie images together. The propagandist should be good with words, choosing ones that are loaded with associations and preconceptions, and creating phrases that are easy to remember and pass on. She should know how her targets are connected to those around them, and how her audience might feel about those connections. Knowing from history also helps: those who do not understand the past are not only doomed to repeat it, but unable to exploit it.

The propagandist’s greatest enemies, in most people’s eyes, are logic and reason. If people realize she’s trying to manipulate them, not only is she less likely to succeed, but they might work against her instead of staying out of the way. Granted, they’re likelier to somewhat contain her rumors or to slow their spread than to actually stop them; there are always people who will believe, and will talk. Not that that’s much comfort for the propagandist when the people who have seen through her misinformation are going after her.

But her own work can also be her enemy. Mistakes made in propaganda, whether it’s bad wording, exploiting the wrong problem, or just releasing the right thing at the wrong time, tend to perpetuate themselves, magnifying the effect as the word spreads. Moreover, it can be very hard to do damage control—after all, one of the strengths of the technique is that it’s so difficult to stop. A propagandist who makes one of the above mistakes, or whose message is just twisted too much by the Telephone effect, will find herself in at least as much of a pickle as one who’s been caught in the act.

Uncontrollable but effective, propaganda is the favored choice of the manipulator in a hurry or one who knows for sure how her audience is going to react. Can your world get it out of its head?