Exchange of Realities

When I was first hired on, I’m not sure what I was imagining a military base library to be, but I didn’t expect the interesting range of similarities and differences to public libraries that mine had. And between the fact that not everyone who reads this is going to have seen a military library, and the emphasis on library form being determined by library function that I put in my last post, I may as well show you what my Marine library looks like from a patron’s POV.

At first glimpse, you might mistake it for a small public library. There’s the circulation desk, up front, with its two reference computers; the internet room a ways to the right, the copier and the fax machine to the left; the single drop box is an internal wall slot rather than an external bin. Nonfiction fills the first room (weighted, of course, towards military history, which covers about half the normal shelves, as well as the ‘professional collection’ wall), DVDs the room behind it, and fiction and the juvenile and YA sections are in smaller rooms off to the side, all clearly labeled though not all labels visible from the door. In the main room, as well, there’s a magazine rack and a newspaper rack, three tables—one with at least one puzzle, probably more, one with a patron on a laptop, one with a pile of somebody’s gear—and a shelf each for travel and test prep. At any given time, you’ll likely see between two and four techs in the main room, one on Sundays; if you’re lucky, you might even see one of our two librarian/admins. And of course, there are brochures advertising programs, posted rules for the internet (and a corresponding sign-in sheet), and potted plants on top of every other bookshelf.

Then you notice the decorations. There’s a reproduction of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima painting just inside the door, similar paraphernalia at various places throughout the wall, a paired national and service branch miniature flag set on the end of one shelf, a bust of the anthropomorphic Marine bulldog mascot on the other. The bulletin boards are full of events on the base targeted primarily to Marines and secondarily to their families, except the one in the back half-covered with postings for jobs at Miramar. And then on the far wall there’s the crest, right below the banner that says “Commandant’s Reading List” (bet you didn’t know that Marines had homework!) and right above the shelf dominated by the big binder labeled “Marine Reading List”. (But wait near the desk for a little while; it’s almost a given that someone wearing desert camouflage will come in, probably as part of a group, almost invariably with two chevrons or fewer on his collar, and ask if we have the list and if so where it is.)

Speaking of that desert camouflage, you may not see it too often off-base but here (at least in summer) you’re unlikely not to see it. Some days they’re just a few tan spots in an already empty library, but more often they’re in small knots, swarming the tech lab or the copier, walking in pairs up to the Commandant’s List shelf to choose the subject for their book report or bemoan the fact that all the copies of the Art of War are checked out again, crowding into the TV room for a movie with explosions and shouting, bunching up behind the last shelf of the fiction room for a board game (yes, we provide those too). If the copier’s swarmed with camouflage and the tables are full of overflow from the computer room, the printers both working at top speed, it’s probably Tuesday, and Recruiter School has probably begun a new session. If instead they’re in a tidy mob between the reference desk and the tables, sprinkled with people in civvie garb and listening to one person lecture them about DVDs, internet programs and a coffee machine while another unobtrusively weaves through them distributing flyers, it’s Welcome Aboard and probably the first time any of that group has been through these doors.

Of our fiction, adult General Fiction comprises the largest portion of the holdings, with mysteries a little way behind and Westerns, mostly read by the retirees who pop in almost as often as the men and women in uniform do, narrowly edging out “Science Fiction” for third place. Then again, the audiobook collection is as large as the science fiction section. Children’s books get a room to themselves (along with children’s DVDs, seventy-five percent of which sport the strip of paper sticking out from under the back cover that signifies they’re checked out). Young adult (which seems to be entirely fiction and biographies) doesn’t; it’s four shelves around the outside of the TV room. It’s not clear if the Powers That Be understand what constitutes age ratings on a movie; instead, ‘Juvenile’ DVDs are all animated in some way, and the rest are all not.

Can you see how the patrons and the location have shaped the building?

Do you want a way of explaining where characters acquired or could acquire knowledge without having to worry about where they keep the books? A point of contact for academics, with each other or possibly even with everyone else? A way to make sure that knowledge in your setting, be it facts or stories or even potentially dangerous secrets, is not forgotten?

Image by ams9w3

You may need a library.

But before you fall into the standard model found in public libraries everywhere, think about the overall purpose and feel of your library, and how that would make it different.

First, consider the purpose—and please, be a bit more specific than “that place with books everyone can look at.” Where reproducing manuscripts is expensive, libraries are likelier to be a source of information than a source of books; materials are perused within the building itself, and borrowing might even require special circumstances and proof of trustworthiness. Some might be about finding information quickly and efficiently: in these cases as well, borrowing is likely to be limited, and the emphasis will be on making sure the materials are all well-organized in their places and that the staff know the organization system perfectly. Often, these sorts will be in a specialized field of study, like medicine. On the other hand, you have situations like today’s public libraries, in which the idea is to give people a source of books, fiction is as prevalent as (if not more so than) nonfiction, and a particular book might spend all but about a day or two of its first month in the collection checked out.

Now consider the library’s patrons, both what it’s likely to attract and how the people who come are going to shape the library’s holdings. Purpose will often create patronage: a specialist library draws specialists, logically enough, and a children’s library draws children. If it’s one of those libraries where the books have to be read on the premises, the average patron by necessity will have more time to spare than the average patron in a public library, who can sneak chapters of books between meetings or listen to an audio in a traffic jam on the way home. But the people in the area around the library have an effect as well. For instance, the Oakland Public Library system has a few branches that are the go-to spot for materials in different languages, since they’re in areas with high concentrations of people who speak those tongues. On the other hand, my Marine library (largest demographic enlisted personnel, then retirees, then dependents of the above two groups) not only has the expected slanting towards military history in the nonfiction section, but also features a shelf dedicated specifically to required reading for enlistees and a Western section larger than either its science fiction section or its young adult section.

Here’s a fun question: are the materials it holds necessarily books? Using something else can give a library an exotic feel and necessitate some long-reaching differences in how it’s built and how it’s organized. And even modern public libraries are as likely to have electronic materials as not.

What sorts of services does it offer besides the storage of information? A library can serve as a meeting place or a place to post events; it might host classes or hook mentors up with students. Most public libraries have copy machines and provisions for their patrons to get online. And what more can be done in a fantasy context?

Any of these factors can characterize a library, setting it apart from others of its kind and giving it its own personality. Give it a try!

Imagine you’re reading a story about a group of people. They’ve been traveling for a while, gotten themselves into and out of loads of trouble, and in general been through just about everything together. Then someone comes upon them, refers to one of them by name before they’ve even been introduced, and in subsequent conversations alludes to things nobody outside of the group could possibly know. Wouldn’t you wonder just what the heck was going on here?

Not all game groups have this problem, but the ones for whom suspension of disbelief is important are going to. Now, under normal circumstances this isn’t a problem, but consider what happens when a new player comes in. The kind of game where realism requires keeping track of who knows what is probably also complex in its own right, with a lot of information scattered here and there—the kind where it’s perfectly easy for a newcomer to be completely lost. But if you just tell them out of character, it’s going to be a bit weird explaining the knowledge within the game itself, isn’t it?

Solving this one takes the shared cooperation of the GM, the other PCs, and the newcomer. Each side has a role to play to make sure the transition is handled smoothly.

For the other players, the job is pretty straightforward; they’re the gatekeepers of the game-specific details, determining what the new person knows when. If they aren’t willing to share, the difference in knowledge will never be rectified. So their role is to facilitate the spread of information, finding reasons why they’d let it go instead of keeping it all to themselves, possibly even excuses to share something about their past that might be important or even merely helpful to the new guy now.

The new player’s job is to learn. And what better way to learn than to ask? When knowledge matters, a new player can’t afford to just sit back and assume she’ll hear whatever’s necessary when it’s necessary; what if there’s something she could use if she knew it but her teammates can’t necessarily figure out is relevant enough to share with her? So she has to ask questions. And not only does she have to ask them, she has to ask them when she can expect to reasonably get an answer; in the middle of a tense situation isn’t near as good a time for a conversation as during a travel segment or in material that borders on downtime. If the subject comes up at the wrong time and is cut off for that reason, she needs to try again.

The GM’s job, meanwhile, is to facilitate both the sharing and the asking of questions. The new player’s not going to get too far if she doesn’t know what to ask about, now, is she? And sometimes, she needs a little encouragement to get around to asking—appealing to her curiosity as well as her need to catch up, if you will. One important way the GM can do that is to make the things that happened before relevant. Situations that give the people who were there deja vu. NPCs referencing such and such a situation, preferably in the most open to questioning manner possible. While I don’t quite recommend sticking a subject on the table with a little tag labeled “Ask about me”, some of the tactics you need to employ may come close, depending on how big a cluebat your group in general and the new player in particular require.

It is important that each group watches for the other’s tactics and responds to them. If the GM references something, and there’s time, the new player should ask questions. If the new player asks questions, the other players should try to find reasons why it makes sense to answer those questions. If the other players find an excuse to talk, even if she’s bored, the GM shouldn’t try to rush to the next scene. Cooperation is vital to efforts like these.

But if you work together, you can get the information across, and it’s less likely the newbie will be missing something vital. And wouldn’t that make it better?

A new player joining a pre-existing group requires two elements: the group and the player. Duh. Yesterday I discussed how the player can adapt to the group, but it can’t be just her job; today I’m going to talk about what the group can do for the player.

First: provide a welcoming atmosphere. You may not realize how insular you come across, but she’s probably feeling all the us-and-them you’re giving off and a little extra. Even if some of it’s in her head, some probably isn’t, and that you can do something about. Ask her questions. Explain the in-jokes, and try to ease up on the frequency. Try to make running lines out of the stuff that’s just happened so some of your in-jokes are her in-jokes as well.

Second, be ready to offer assistance without too much judging. A lot of the newbie’s biggest difficulty comes from fitting in, and there’s nothing quite like not knowing something to make a person feel like she’s standing under a big neon sign labeled “Other”. They have a little trouble with the system, perhaps, or don’t know the world, or aren’t too clear on how they fit in. Why not have one or more of the oldies take the newbie under their wings? It’s one part social connection (particularly if it’s an oldie who doesn’t know the new player quite as well), one part bridging the knowledge gap.

Speaking of which, make sure the new player knows what she needs to learn before the game begins. Which rules are you strict on, and which do you let pass? What sorts of houserules do you use? What’s vital information about the world, as opposed to optional stuff?

Help her find a niche, as well. I strongly recommend bringing her in before play starts and having the character creation be in part a group activity; if she knows what the existing characters can already do, and what the group considers its strengths and weaknesses to be, that’ll make it easier to balance finding a concept she wants without stepping on anyone’s toes. And as an added bonus, if the rest of the group doesn’t get too overwhelming and lets the new player keep primary control over the result, the collaboration in itself can give you a chance to see how the personalities might mesh and what kinds of workarounds may be necessary.

One important thing to take into account is making sure the character gets into the group. This may seem like something that should be between the GM and the new player, but it’s going to be important to make sure the group has some say as well, as it’s they who have to team up with this person. Figure out what it is they’re looking for. If the game has been all about a certain type of character, they will know. If there are conditions it would seem necessary for a character to meet—competence of a certain kind, a particular mindset, a shared goal, the ability to be trusted—then it’s useful to know that ahead of time, so as to try to sneak it into the build. Many a game has been made difficult by the addition of a square peg to a group whose shuffling to create space created a round hole. If you can’t adapt to the character, then at least make sure the player knows what it would take to adapt to you.

This won’t eliminate all the inter-group tensions, but it should at least decrease them long enough to integrate the new player. Good luck!

It’s pretty common for a group to acquire a new player in mid-story; maybe the group’s been whittled down too much and needs to get back up to their old numbers, or the new player’s old game dried up and the GM figured they needed somewhere to play, or a hefty portion of the group likes them and wants them to join. Goodness knows a new mind to appreciate the nice game and a shaking up to the existing patterns can’t hurt, right?

Only sometimes, it can—and there’s a lot on your shoulders, if you’re a new player stepping in for the first time. What can go wrong, and how can you avoid it?

First, have a good idea where the social lines lie. You’ve probably got a friend in the group, or you wouldn’t be the only one asked right now—but by the same token, there’s probably somebody who dragged their heels a bit on letting you in. It’s a good idea to know who this person is; he’s the likeliest to complain about things you do, so if you can figure out how to not make a bad impression on him, and how to avoid the likeliest complaint triggers, you might be able to make the transition more smoothly. At least, make sure he knows what kind of person you are (or at least what kind of person you want to see yourself as and therefore show to other people); it’s not unheard of for someone in a tight-knit group to feel awkward about playstyle when confronted with someone he doesn’t know from Gygax. Make friends if you can, but don’t push too hard.

Second, be ready to deal with the feeling of isolation. People don’t just magically meld into a group, after all, and the longer the group’s been around together, the harder it’s going to be to find a place within it. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try, of course, just that you should be ready to deal with large numbers of in-jokes you can’t make head or tail of, quirks that you didn’t think they’d be willing to deal with from someone they met out in the world, and other hallmarks of people who’ve been enjoying each other’s company for quite a while. Act natural (plus or minus adaptations for the social “rules”) and be patient. (Yeah, it’s difficult; I never got the hang of that one.) And while it may be tempting, don’t rub the in-jokes you share with other members of the group in the faces of the other people who weren’t there too much, particularly if not invited. You weren’t enjoying them doing it a moment ago, were you?

Third, figure out what you’re going to need to know ahead of time. This includes system rules (or at least how strict their rules are; some games are a lot more tolerant of the mechanically behind than others), setting, and approximately how the party works. Ask lots of questions, particularly “What do I need to brush up on?”; even if you can’t figure it all out ahead of time, you’ll at least get points for trying. Context matters; “It’s too hard” may be a complaint from the person who’s barely skimmed through the material, but from someone who’s studied up on it, asked everyone who holds still long enough questions about it, and after hard work is still overwhelmed, “It’s too hard” is more a statement of fact. Be the kind of person from whom it’s a statement if you can.

Fourth, try to find a niche nobody’s occupied before, particularly one you’re suited to. Within the game, there’s both the mechanical and the personality niche for a new player; what kind of skills, attitude and way of life can your concept bring that hasn’t been covered before? (Just be careful to try for one you think you can actually qualify for; it’s hard to be the group common sense or maturity if you’re spouting insane schemes or showing at least as unstable a temperament as anyone you’re working with.) Outside of the game itself, there’s trying to find a ‘role’ within the group proper; are there things that everyone else is known for, like being “the girl with the game system”, “the food guy”, “the idea person”, “the mechanist”, “the one who brings cast pictures”, “the listener”? Is there a role you think you could play that isn’t covered? Try giving it a shot and see how it’s received; if it doesn’t work too well, though, don’t force it.

Last but not least, try not to shake up the routine too badly. A little bit of concession is one thing, but when you want to completely rewrite how they work to accommodate you, that’s something else entirely. So try to balance what you ask of them. If you’re messing up their time schedule, be willing to give a bit on what goes on when you aren’t actively gaming; if you’re not comfortable with their style, push for elements of your favored style but not a complete game rewrite; if you can’t stand the food, be willing to bring a full meal.

But it’s not just your job; tomorrow, I’m going to discuss where the rest of the group comes in.

You often see these little nuisances hanging around the protagonists. They’re characterized by being engaging underdogs—usually small and cute, but sometimes just lesser in power or Narrative Vitality than the protagonists themselves and somewhat more personable. (Given what angstballs today’s heroes are, though, that’s not hard.) They’re likely to have odd speech patterns, or compulsive habits, or something else that sets them apart from the standard protagonist and marks them as important secondary characters. And whatever they are, odds are anyone in the group with which they travel will step in to protect them under any circumstances. They’re the plucky comic relief, and dealing with them is like dealing with dynamite.

What makes them dangerous? First off, they are the keepers of the tone. While the Dark and Gritty Quotient is low, and usually without any attempts at changing it if it starts low it will stay low, they have narrative immunity that makes the protagonists look downright vulnerable. It makes them like cockroaches; put them in any dangerous situation, they’ll get out with a few bruises and a snappy punchline. Drop a building on the group? The plucky comic relief will crawl free from the rubble dragging a piece of the furniture that saved his skin behind him and joking about duck and cover. Trap them at the center of a fire? You don’t want to know how he’ll get out of that. The more improbable survival is, and the more absurd a situation it would take to make it possible, the more likely it is that the plucky comic relief will make it out.

But worse is if you make a point of killing him. You think you got threats of vengeance when you murdered the early-confrontation love interest? That one’s replaceable; it’s part of the contract. But the plucky comic relief is holding the hearts of the group and the tone of the story close to him at all times; ice him, and you’ll be lucky if all you get is a swift and ironic end. With him gone, the limits vanish. The Dark and Gritty Quotient, blasted by the death of innocence (yes, he’s a symbol. Deal with it), shoots through the roof. The protagonists’ morality sprints out the door. And hero rules like “Thou shalt not kill”, and more relevantly “Thou shalt not take glee in making the Hand of Darkness whose opposition to thee hath caused her to wrong thee greatly suffer” are the first things to go. Sure, if you know you’re doomed, want to to add as much darkness to the world as possible, and can’t feel pain, it might be worth it. But if not, don’t even think about it. And if you must snuff the plucky comic relief, do so quickly; the worse you make the little snot’s passing, the more trouble will come back to you later.

But if you can’t target him specifically, and you can’t just make collateral damage of him, what can you do? The logical thing, of course, is to lock him up. Yes, and expose yourself to the chatter and annoyances. I realize chucking him in an oubliette so as to avoid that is tempting, but if you do, he’ll be out either the moment you turn away or the moment you forget about him, whichever would be more inconvenient, and he’ll leave a mess of one-liners scrawled on the walls in something you can’t just clean off. Supervision, at a distance to avoid misplaced sympathy, would probably be safest.

Now, if you’re clever and can keep your wits about you, you might have another option: recruitment. Remember that whole ‘keeper of the tone, heart of the group, symbol of innocence’ thing? What happens if you manage to get all that symbolism onto your side? What does it do to the Narrative Causality? Nobody’s ever found out; for some reason, the last few who tried got recruited by the little snot instead. But if you think you can do it, and you’ve got some way to protect yourself from his wiles, wouldn’t the eventual result be worth having to laugh at his jokes?

Love him or hate him, the Plucky Comic Relief is a force to be reckoned with; if you’re going to go into big-league villainy, you’d best be ready to deal with him. Good luck!

(The management would like to note that we haven’t had a question in a while. Don’t be afraid to ask; not only do you get an answer to your dark dilemmas, but you get a link back to your site and further exposure of the innocent to your own diabolical materials. What’s not to like?)

Inspiration style synergy is all very interesting, but I haven’t touched so much on how it works as that it works. On the other hand, I’ve been fortunate enough to be in a group that’s practically powered by it.

The primary group I play in currently has four members, counting the GM, though we’ve had more before, and only three of us are from the beginning of the game. Our GM is an event-based conceptual, strong leanings in both directions; his worst element is setting, and his worst form expansion. Then we have me, the character-based expansionist weak in event. And then there are our two others—one’s event-based, one’s setting-based, and both seem to be somewhere between conceptualist and mechanist, often adjusting to balance each other out depending on who got which idea first.

Of course, there’s a lot of sharing of ideas going on. Some of it is cooperation between GM and players; the GM conceptualizes things, and often asks for suggestions from the rest of the group. Not long ago, the request was for thematically appropriate powers for some people, PCs and NPCs alike; I got the pattern from the GM, figured out things that seemed visually/thematically appropriate, and handed them off to the rest of the group for numbers maintenance.

But the greatest synergy is between the players. When you’re playing in a game, as opposed to running it or writing a story, the elements of inspiration don’t matter as much; it’s all about form. And between the three of us, we usually have every form we need to. As one of the others pointed out, “Usually I get crazy ideas and he figures out how to make them doable. Or he gets crazy ideas and I figure out how to keep them from getting too absurd while keeping them possible. Then you make pretty pictures of them.” It’s not always quite like that; sometimes there’s a definite path we need to take, and then I’m the one who makes the first move, twisting logic into a good answer and then tossing it to them to make feasible mechanics out of. Other times we want to write powers, and if it isn’t one of them coming up with numbers and wanting a picture, it’s me coming up with a picture (and a few numbers; I think my weakness is concept, not mechanic) and wanting a hand balancing the numbers. Either way, the best results are the three of us working together.

I’ve talked before about how the creative process doesn’t need to exist in a vacuum, and can in fact benefit from collaboration with other people. Inspiration style—particularly with the form of inspiration, be it expansionist, mechanist or conceptualist—can help by letting you figure out whose skills and approaches are likeliest to complement yours.

In all cases, you’re going to get the best results from a combination of different viewpoints. After all, people who think the same way are likelier to have the same approach but different opinions on what to do with it. Two conceptualists, for instance, are likely to have conflicting images. Two mechanists might be applying the same set of numbers to different problems and getting different answers. And while two expansionists can feed off of each other almost indefinitely when in their best form, it’s not going to do any good unless they get an idea on which to expand.

The expansionist needs the synergy the most, as her ideas have to come from somewhere. On the other hand, the conceptualist is likely not to feel he needs the help, particularly in a game situation: after all, his problem is details, and who cares about details? The mechanist is more balanced, as both original spark and details tend to be encoded in the numbers or ‘rules’ with which works, but she’s working in something which is ultimately an abstraction, and may have a bit more trouble if she needs to translate that into a more “reality”-oriented application.

For anyone with strong ideas looking for an assistant, an expansionist is probably the best choice. All she needs, after all, is the seed of an idea; whether that seed is a set of abstract numbers or a mechanic in need of in-world justification is somewhat less relevant. Another strategy to take is to try to find someone of a type that corresponds to the style you definitely aren’t. So a conceptualist whose weakness is mechanics would likely work best with a mechanist whose weakness is concept, as this covers the two major roles, and between them the two are likely to have just enough expansionist tendencies to cover for the lack of a specialized expansionist. This doesn’t even necessarily need to be a meeting of equals; I’ve often seen a conceptualist GM look to an expansionist player for detail or to a mechanist player—in both cases, in the game said GM is running—for numbers. Even better is when there’s a mismatch of both form and element, since that allows for the specialist to help the other find the holes in his work.

The ideal, of course, is all three working together, as that’s when things really get rolling—image from the conceptualist, hard numbers from the mechanist, and then the expansionist fleshes it out and ties it into the world. The end result is something far greater than if any one of them had worked alone.

Ever gotten this kind of synergy? How’d it go?

Yesterday, I talked about inspiration styles, and Michael asked, “How do I tell what my inspiration style is?” So I thought I’d share a bit on how my process works.

I usually begin with form, as that’s the easiest to sort into one category or another, and certainly the easiest to find within myself. Think about how you put your games (or stories, or what have you) together.

Are you the kind of person who works well when outlining what’s going (or most likely) to happen? Is it easy to come up with the general shape of things, but frustrating to have to go back and fill in the details? When running a game, do you tend to try to make sure that people stay with what you’ve got planned? You’re probably a conceptualist.

Do you consider your stories to be as much an experiment as anything, a chance to take variables, put them together, and see if it turns out as you expected? Do you get ideas from wanting to test out a certain game build, to play with an alternate version of an existing timeline and see how it comes out differently? You might be a mechanist.

Do you get most of your best ideas from talking to someone else? Are you detail-oriented, likely to seize on one element or one idea and flesh it out, keep growing it until it won’t get any bigger? Is beginning the hard part for you, but keeping going once you’ve got a good idea a cinch by comparison? You’re probably an expansionist.

Finding your element is a bit harder. There are three things you can use to determine it, though.

One is the kinds of scenes you enjoy planning, running, writing and/or playing (fortunately, these do often overlap). Think about what makes them enjoyable for you. Is it the intense feelings from envisioning the scene itself? The ability to ground the characters in their world? Watching a character and seeing how she reacts to what’s going on, particularly when you don’t expect it? Pulling superstitions and traditions alike out of nowhere? Something else entirely?

Consider also the kinds that you have the most trouble with; the ones that bog down pretty much the moment you step into them. I have a friend who took a while to realize that the group he was running for could be safely left to their own devices to amuse themselves, for instance, because when the same thing happened to him he tended to freeze up. On the other hand, there have been fights I just haven’t had the patience to run because epic and impressive though they were, almost none of the combatants on my side had both wit and a functional larynx. And I’ve known other people who tended to freeze up any time people were interacting with parts of the background they hadn’t finished designing with. If you’re fouled up by the absence of something, odds are that something is the element you mesh best with; on the other hand, if you’re hung up by the presence of an element, it may not tell you what your best is, but it’ll tell you what your best isn’t.

Another thing to consider is what sorts of sequences other people find to be your best. What elements of the story do you tend to get complimented on? Which ones do people notice? Just because they don’t always see you creating doesn’t mean they’d have too hard a time telling which things you’re most comfortable with/suited to. It doesn’t always work, though; I recently pegged someone as setting-first remembering the localization he’d done, but he claimed to be anything but.

Go through one or more of these, and see which of the categories the answers most closely line up with. It might surprise you.

We all know ideas come to different people differently, and all have some idea what sorts of things tend to trigger us, whether it’s reading or music, thinking about the problem or working on something else to let the subconscious take over, or any of a number of other inspiration tricks. But we don’t often think about what forms our inspiration takes, and how working with those can help us to minimize our blocked periods. As a result, I’ve gone through and looked at what I consider to be two general categories of inspiration source. One is the kind of story element the inspiration manifests as; the other is the general form the inspiration takes. First, the elements:

• Event-based. Event-based inspiration tends to focus itself on either scenes or incidents, often ones of particularly high emotion; the event-based storyteller’s main problem is just figuring out how to get from one scene to the next. He’s likelier to be proactive than reactive in GMing style, setting up circumstances to ensure that his events come into play. An event-based GM is likely to be on the plot side of the plot-sandbox continuum, or at least likely to make his events as unavoidable as possible; one whose ideas are mostly things happening is likely to have trouble keeping motivation if they don’t happen.
• Setting-based. Setting-based inspiration is the province of the worldbuilder. Rather than focusing on characters, or on story, the setting-based storyteller’s best work is done on the world as a whole. Her plots tend to spring up from the world itself; its cultural clashes, its politics, its climate changes and ambient magic and who-knows-what-all-else. That is, when she has plots; a setting-based storyteller thrives in the sandbox, letting her stories come from how the players interact with the world she’s created.
• Character-based. Logically enough, character-based inspiration is centered around one or more strongly developed characters, the paths and events and possibly even the character-based storyteller’s view of the world springing forth from what these characters would do. Character-based storytellers tend to make better players than GMs, the better to focus their energy into one character; however, when they GM, they thrive on plotlines based on a character (ally, enemy, it doesn’t matter) making a decision, and as a result often write the best villains. One thing that can help a character-based GM is making sure he understands who the characters he’s writing for are, in as much detail as possible; the better he understands them, the better he can appeal to them, and the more inspiration he can get from what they’d likely do.

Now, the forms.

• Mechanistic. What happens when you get a clash between two equal and opposite builds? Can a group of X power level be effectively challenged by the significantly weaker Y if Z factors are applied? Whether the mechanist can precalculate it or not, she wouldn’t mind seeing for herself. Mechanists play it by the numbers, usually solving or creating problems within the system and then going back and figuring out how to justify it with the details; they’re excellent in established systems, but usually lost in freeforms until they learn or establish some ‘rules’.
• Conceptual. A conceptualist knows the shape of things to be created; that’s not a problem. The difficulty is just coming up with the details. Then again, this might be why he GMs; details can be left up to the players. The difficulty for the conceptualist isn’t so much coming up with ideas as coming up with the ideas he needs when he needs them; he’s likely to have the overarching story planned out up to a year in advance, but getting the details for the stuff under his nose, not so much. He’s not as plot-driven as the event-based storyteller, but he does often err on the side of plot rather than on the side of sandbox.
• Expansion. An expansionist is rather like a supersaturated solution; she has trouble coming up with her own ideas, but give her the seed of an idea and she’ll turn it into something spectacular. As a result, an expansionist GM needs interaction to function: with her players, getting their opinions, speculations and wouldn’t-it-be-cool-ifs; with an assistant, who can toss in quick concepts she can work from when she’s blocked and can give her a little push when she’s expanded one idea to its limit and doesn’t have another waiting; even with a friend from outside, who might not know much about what she’s doing but will cheerfully listen to her talk about it anyway. Unless they have a really strong central idea, Expansionists are probably better off with pre-established settings, but only to a point; too defined, and there’s no room for them to make it grow.

I, for example, am a Character-based Expansionist. My game concepts are usually based around one or more characters, their plans, and how they interact; when left to my own devices, I often just throw conversation possibilities at people until something clicks. I don’t usually get ideas from whole cloth; rather, they’re inspired either by having a problem in need of solving, or by someone else making a suggestion that gives me ideas.

So what’s your inspiration style?