Exchange of Realities

In the spirit of Christmas (all right, sort of), I’m here to talk to you about miracles. A lot of the miracles I’ve seen all look the same: they’re big, and flashy, and look like they were designed to frustrate sfx artists and elicit gasps from an audience. They’re big, brass-band climax setpieces. Nothing against the type, but there’s more that can be done with miracles than that.

There are two elements to a miracle: its nature, and its display. The nature of a miracle is what, in essence, it does, whether that’s defeating one’s enemies, saving one or more lives, making some sort of resource last farther longer than it really should, or whatever improbable but ultimately useful effect it might have. The display, on the other hand, is the bells and whistles that go with it. In some cases, you get big fancy displays like the sun doing things that physics and common sense say it don’t. Others, it’s more subtle, like that container of food just never quite hitting empty—you might not even see it until you look at the aftermath.

If miracles are something that people can expect to happen (or rather, if people can expect there to be miracles, since the whole point of a miracle is to be somewhat against expectations), then it makes sense to vary them up. It’s harder to take a Big Shiny Miracle seriously when all miracles are big and shiny; they lose some of their impact. But when in between them, you have little miracles with little displays, and little miracles with outsize displays, and big miracles with tiny displays, it’s a lot less “Oh, they’re trying to make me wow again” when the big/big miracle comes up.

More relevant to the day at hand is a tip I’ve found highly useful: not matching the scope of the nature with the intensity of the display. In many cases, the scope and intensity are matched; small, personal miracles have small, personal displays, and big impressive miracles have sfx-migraine displays. But what is the display for? Sure, it’s necessary to the effect of the miracles in some places (cracking the world comes to mind, if the desired effect requires a cracked world), but in others it’s not; it’s rather like “Look at Me, see what I can do!” To me, at least, it defeats the purpose.

And that brings us back to Christmas. The story’s familiar to just about everyone—its adherents are rather fond of pushing it on everyone else, after all. But the short version: big, BIG effect, big enough to start a religion over. Locally (at least, if you ignore the absurdly bright star, but the guests had to find the place somehow), a pretty small display. The result is a lot more powerful: the nature of the miracle is great enough that one doesn’t need a grand display to realize how big a deal this is.

So think about the nature and display of your miracles, consider maybe having a smaller display for a greater miracle and vice versa. For those who celebrate the holiday, merry Christmas; for those who don’t, enjoy yourselves anyway!

For most people, it’s easier to treat the immediate and even the secondary effects of something that happened as, well, immediate. They have a direct correlation, and they happen right now. But not everything happens immediately, and not everything takes a short time from beginning to ending. Why can’t these things cause effects to happen later, when people aren’t expecting them? Or better, yet, what makes them happen later?

Photo by bluegum

One is the fact that some things take time. If the effect of a certain decision is “The city gets built”…. well, you know what they say about Rome, and it’s not going to be that different with someone else’s city. In short, gradual processes get gradual results; sure, it’s easy to forget it’s going on, but if you’re having trouble remembering it, so’s your audience, and if you’re slipping in things that turn out to be hinting at it right the way through, it’s not a deus or diabolus ex machina, now, is it?

The interesting thing about the above is that there are two ways that it can happen; either the effect (or something in the chain of effects) takes a long time, or it’s the cause itself that’s taking its own sweet time in finishing. If the effect is known, the latter can be a good way to build suspense; people know perfectly well what’s coming, they probably can’t avoid it, but it’s still hanging there being ominous and always getting closer.

The human factor figures heavily into delayed effect, as well, particularly where emotion is involved. Even assuming you’re dealing with emotions that just flare up the moment the event happens, that doesn’t mean the character feeling them is going to act on them immediately. There are a mess of reasons for this, from avoiding the scorn of a third party to wanting to take the person who affected them by surprise to wanting to come up with the perfect way to act on it and stalling until that can be done.

And then there are the people for whom the emotions created by the cause event themselves are a delayed reaction, and thus the effect that comes from them is delayed. Unlike in the previous example, they don’t even have to be really good actors for their reaction to take the main characters and the audience by surprise; it’s quite possible that at the time, they really were if not happy than apathetic, and it’s only with a lot of afterthought that they realize that yes, this does sadden them or upset them or the like. These sorts of delayed effects are particularly dangerous because the people who set them off don’t have as much opportunity to see them coming, and because a nursed grudge can be downright intense.

Last, there are the things that are the result of a very long chain. A leads to B leads to C leads to…. we’d be here half the night if we started listing them out, and the chain slowly creeps into the background, still carrying on its merry way and occasionally being alluded to by something else going on, until the last few effects domino their way down and we finally reach Z. Needless to say, that’s going to take time.

And as with just about anything that can take multiple forms, what’s to say the possibilities are mutually exclusive? Why couldn’t you end up with a situation in which a long chain begins with a long cause, or somewhere along the line there’s an effect that takes a while to go through; where one person stifles a reaction and plots, and the next thinks the first’s action is justified in the beginning but gets angrier as time goes on? Layering on too many of the same delay start can look contrived, but mixing them up can lead to a more organic delay.

So why make everything have its consequences immediately? Sometimes it’s more interesting when it can build.

The thing about cause and effect is that not everybody tends to think about it the same way. Some people treat the matter as linear: one cause, one effect, and leaving it at that. Some are good at taking the cause and effect chain down several rungs, but only seem to work with chains of direct effects and tend to miss the obscure ones. Others can go a whole round of obscure immediate effects, but have trouble going on to the secondary effects. And then there are the people who will track direct and obscure down several links at every opportunity, but they’re pretty rare. It’s a lot of work, after all.

The biggest strength of the first kind is the ability to make quick decisions. They look at a situation, figure out what’s likeliest to happen, decide if it’s worth it, and implement the decision. These sorts of people are also good at working with very little information; they don’t need all that much to come to the most likely decision. The bad news for them (and good news for their GMs, if they happen to be the players) is that they’re easy to outmaneuver if you can think two steps ahead rather than just one or if you’re a more lateral thinker than they are.

The second kind are basically the first kind with a little more forethought. They take a touch longer to assess the results of their actions, but then they move, and they’re a bit harder to outmaneuver because they know what they’re doing after Step 1 is complete, but they’re still able to operate on not too much background. Lateral thinkers are still a weakness of theirs, though, since they’ve only got one outcome in mind and it’s probably the most obvious.

Then you have the third kind, the indirect thinkers. These are the people who are going to look at all the variables and start figuring out everything that could happen from this one decision point. Everything. The good thing for them is that they can predict all sorts of possibilities, so they’re likelier to see problems with their actions before they arise, and plan accordingly. But they need knowledge—how else are they going to figure out all those nasty little variables? They’re also likelier to take longer, and to end up being paralyzed by indecision: if this happens, this is going to happen, but this other thing is going to happen too, and then where will we be?

Then there are the people who plot out all the consequences for the next several iterations of cause and effect, direct and obscure, immediate and secondary and beyond. As noted before, they’re rather rare; it’s a lot of work making all those calculations. The good news for them is that they can anticipate just about anything they have information for; the only thing that takes them by surprise is something that works on an entirely different flavor of logic or comes from information they don’t have yet. The bad news is that the information is important, as with the third types; and it can take quite a while to make a decision. The more detail they want to plow through, the more likely they are to be paralyzed when they don’t have it, and don’t have anything from which they can get it.

So which type are you? How do you crunch your cause and effect?

We’re all used to the concept of cause and effect. Someone does A, B follows, maybe C follows from that. It’s nice and simple, like a basic food chain. The grasshoppers eat the grass, the sparrows eat the grasshoppers, the hawks eat the sparrows; Hoyt’s friends walk into what looks like certain death, Hoyt does a risky improvisation on the effect of another spell he knows to save them, Hoyt’s friends are saved. But it’s rarely that simple. As any biologist will tell you, the average food chain is part of a food web that complicates matters further, where a carnivore might be a secondary and a tertiary consumer at the same time depending on which strand of the web it’s in relation to, where several things are eating one thing and one thing is eating several things and the strands separate and come together and separate again. Similarly, any given event isn’t necessarily in one cause and effect chain; it’s probably in several. What sorts of effects can come with a given cause?

The first kind is the direct immediate effect. That’s the one that most people jump to the most easily, the one that’s likeliest to be driving a standard plot. To use our earlier example, Hoyt successfully improvises the spell, and his friends are saved. A lot of people, and a lot of simplified plots, stop here—and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can come across as less real and is, in my opinion as one who pokes things to see what happens, a whole lot less fun. Or they consider something to have just one direct immediate effect, when it might have several.

Then there’s Type 1.5, the obscure immediate effect. As with the direct immediate effect, this is something that can be traced back to the cause, no steps midway. But unlike the direct immediate effect, the obscure immediate effect is something that wouldn’t necessarily occur to everyone, often because it requires a couple of steps of logic to get to, or because the results are less visible. Hoyt successfully uses the spell, and from it learns that spells, or at least this spell, can be modified on the fly to do things that they weren’t intended to do.

The second are the secondary effects. These are immediate effects, both obscure and direct, of the immediate effect (though if you want to go farther, you can have immediate effects of the secondary effects—it’s all a question of how far you’re willing to go). Hoyt successfully improvises, his friends are saved, Hoyt’s friends are grateful—direct effect of a direct effect, and if you go on to the next tier you might end up with “Hoyt’s suspicious-of-magic friends decide that having a mage around isn’t such a bad idea after all.” Hoyt successfully improvises, Hoyt realizes that this spell can be modified on the fly, Hoyt modifies the spell to do something else later—direct effect of an indirect effect. But none of it would have happened if Hoyt hadn’t successfully improvised the variation on the spell, and that itself might not have happened if Hoyt’s friends hadn’t gone walking into the monster’s cave.

A plot can be built as if every cause has one direct immediate effect, and that’s it. If you’re not interested in or too worried about the results of overcomplexity, or if there just isn’t time to start chasing effects down their little webs, it makes sense. But I prefer a world with obscure immediate effects and all the secondary effects that come from that. The world’s elements become more interwoven, giving it a reality it might not have had otherwise. Plots become easier to thread into each other, as an event can split one thread off, bring another in, tie two together, do a bunch of things at the same time. Multiple varieties of effect allow for more byzantine plots, where all sorts of things are going on at the same time and it’s hard to keep track of what except that it’s all a result of a few original causes. In short, I find being able to handle the complexities of cause and multiple effects far more fun. What say you? What do you prefer?

It’s not just what people do for most of their time that defines them; it’s also all the little things they do in whatever free time they might have. But a lot of characters—particularly the main characters of books and most RPG characters—don’t seem to have hobbies, unless those hobbies are things that in and of themselves push the story along. That’s too bad for them: along with giving a character something to do while waiting for news other than sit around twitching, hobbies provide excellent sources of show-don’t-tell characterization. What do I mean?

A hobby can further emphasize an aspect of a character’s personality, or imply the existence of one that hasn’t had opportunities to be explicitly stated. For instance, creators often indicate military buffs and master manipulators by the use of various strategy games (the manipulators, of course, getting the more abstract ones and the armchair generals getting the explicit war-games). Character does something with a lot of small, precise detail, like gem-cutting or filigree? That’s usually a sign of the twin qualities of patience and manual dexterity.

Sometimes, you can say something about a character’s antecedents through their hobbies. If you’ve got hobbies that are specific to certain cultures, a character engaging on one such might give a hint to where she’s from—or if she’d most definitely not from around there, imply that she has a strong interest in some aspect of that culture. Some hobbies are reserved for upper classes, either by law or by limitation of resources. And even hobbies that run the gamut of the classes can show some variation by socioeconomic status; embroidery, for instance, would involve different materials and embellishments at different income levels, and a little thing like not accounting for the different strengths and weaknesses of the materials could give away someone from one level trying to masquerade as being from another.

Hobbies can provide a bridge between two characters who might not otherwise talk. There’s something about discussing a personal passion that brings out the vocal sides of people; as I once told one of my coworkers at the library, “The nice thing about working here is that when they need me to hold forth on books, I can forget I’m an introvert for a little while.” Though it’s often friendship that this creates, it doesn’t have to be—depending on the circumstances, you might get admiration, envy, rivalry, scorn, even loathing, and all sorts of others varying by context.

How open a character is about a hobby can also say a lot. Some people wear their hobbies on their sleeves (often literally if it’s a character who knows his way around a needle and thread), but others aren’t as obvious about them, for a number of reasons. They might not think they’re that good, might be worried about the effect of their hobby on their image, or something else entirely. And of the people who are obvious about their hobbies, sure, many of them might just want to share what they enjoy, but others might be pretending to enjoy it in order to improve their social connections/make their relatives proud/learn something from engagement in the hobby. Pretty complicated, isn’t it?

So pick a character and ask yourself: what does this one do when free time is available? What is this character’s hobby, and why? How does she practice it, and how openly? You can probably learn a lot.

I always talk about characters as if they write themselves, since in my opinion, the good ones do. I certainly know that the ones that do, particularly the ones who don’t always tell you everything immediately, are usually the best kind to work with. But then you have the ones who could write themselves—who should write themselves—but for some reason they’re hiding things from you. And not just little things that will make sense later, but big important things.

Now, most of the time, I don’t have too big a problem with characters like that. One of my all-time favorite antagonists was one such—this was the man whose weapon I created as he was getting into his first fight, who attacked the NPC first and told me why later, who didn’t even tell me who his patron was until my college was on the next semester, and who smugly held onto the explanation of why he was stealing the grimoires full of things he already knew until about three game sessions before he died. But that was all right. When you know who, and you’ve got a decent idea what, and the plan is in progress, why can wait a bit, particularly when the opposition isn’t really asking. In stories like that, it doesn’t matter if the character’s taking his own sweet time to inform you, as long as you know he will eventually, when it’s dramatically interesting. In fact, I find that tendency to be indicative of a really good manipulator, and usually I welcome it.

The problem is when a character who knows what’s going on but won’t tell you ends up in a mystery arc. After all, when the character involved is known to the audience, motive and opportunity and the like can be left for expository sections or treated as the mystery in their own right (or, depending, just a nice puzzle). But when the character isn’t known to the audience, regardless of which side of the fourth wall said audience is on, the audience is dependent on things like, well, motive. And opportunity. And the like. In turn, that starts making it difficult to leave the appropriate clues to find the things, because not only are you having to figure out how to keep your people interested, you’re having to figure out how they or their narrative stand-ins are figuring out information that the culprit is still gleefully hiding from you. If at all possible, don’t start one of these stories until you’ve been given a full briefing.

And what do you do if you’ve been suckered into it by the character (or if in a game, shoved into it by the players) already, and you need that information now? It varies. For some people, the best answer is to make contact a lot and hope that the character gets sick of the whining and comes through. Others are prone to taking what they’ve already been given and trying to puzzle out the character’s path themselves, or try to find answers in the shuffle function on their music players, or something. Still others just write ahead, and if they’re wrong afterward that’s tough. There’s no right way, just trying until it works, and explaining to other people that it’s just a character-specific form of writer’s block.

Fortunately, what we need to know all comes out eventually. Even the smuggest characters realize we have to find out sometime.

Ever had to deal with The Character Who Wouldn’t Tell You Anything? What did you do to get through it?

It’s time again to dust off the posts and see what the latecomers missed; sit back, and let’s have another Reality in Review. This time, we’re hitting November of 2008—a month of holidays and antagonism, of names and of teachers, and that single month where this blog got (to) religion.

We all know how I am about combat, and November gave me another chance to try to work through it with “Keeping Fights Nifty”, an attempt to put the page-turner and the glued-to-the-session back in combat.

What’s in a name? As far as I’m concerned, three articles and a whole lot of Easter egg potential. Naming people and naming places are useful things for anyone to know about, yes, but have you ever wondered what can go wrong when you introduce a game group to someone with a moniker like Falflpaent’kirylisatzr, Dread Lord of the Seven Forbidden Temples?

“If friends are the family you can choose, mentors are the parents you have an option on.” That was how I began a week-long series on mentors, one of my favorite character types in their own right: from plot role to keeping the plot role from overwhelming the student, from teaching styles to cultivating mentor-student relationships to what can go wrong with taking an apprentice.

Ever had trouble keeping recurring villains from becoming recurring jokes? Despite not having reached the point of recursion yet, the Generic Villain was ready to take on that challenge and live to fight another day.

And then RPG Blog Carnival swept in, and I went a little overboard. The topic that month was religion, a nice magnet for characterization, worldbuilding, and metaphysics. What wasn’t to like? I focused on the question of whether gods and religion have to go hand in hand, attacking the rest of the month from that point, trying to keep the gods and their worshipers from occupying the same articles. The divine side didn’t give me much to work with—just creating gods and then linking gods and domains. The mundane side, dealing with people and religion, I found far more fascinating: there was looking at the laypeople in a service rather than just the celebrants; there was the one thing every religion needs; religions interacting with each other, diverging into new religions, splitting into sects; the connection between character and religion. Let’s just say that for that month, my primary editor found me to be a holy terror.

What does the biggest shopping day of the year in America have to do with the game table? A whole lot if you’re looking at motivation. I may not have shopped on Black Friday, but I met it head-on with a post about how to apply the principles behind Black Friday to getting a game group to do what you want them to.

Another month, another riff. Did I miss any of the good ones?

As elements of characterization go, emotions have got to be one of the most show-don’t-tell elements of characterization out there. People tend to look at you funny if you just say that such and such a character is angry, or sad, or what have you, and leave it at that. (This gave me headaches when trying to stick people with Conditions in Mouse Guard, since telling them “You’re Angry now” sounded funny, but that’s another story.) You can get away with a lot more directness in a game, sure, but if everyone else is up to trying to read the hints, why not try to keep it to show-don’t-tell? If you can create an emotional vocabulary for a character, not only does it let the audience read her moods, but it can help to differentiate her from the other characters around her.

Start with the face, but don’t limit yourself to it. Most human expression is read through the eyes and the mouth, with tightness generally a sign of negativity or emotional tension and looseness a sign of relaxation or happiness. And as my creative writing professor made a point of telling her students, don’t just insert a “smile” without context; there are far too many ways to interpret it. Use an adverb, use a more specific term, whatever it takes.

Posture and alignment are equally well-known tools in getting emotion across. In general, you can expect drooping to be a sign of sadness or weariness, tension to show anger, uprightness to show confidence. People tend to avoid facing people they’re unhappy with, afraid of, or embarrassed around, and you can usually tell the difference by how they’re avoiding them. And that’s without getting into all the different meanings of where the arms and hands go.

But those are obvious, and you probably know most of those. Let’s look at a couple other tricks.

Vocabulary and grammar. Yes, seriously; it’s not as consistent how people’s grammar and phrasing varies with mood, but once you’ve established how that’s going to work, you can use it as a cue even when the character’s hiding all the visual signs. For instance, I have three characters who deal with fear or pressure by changing their word styles, though differently. One gets snarkier and more condescending as she approaches pure panic; she rags on the cliché behavior of world-threatening opponents, gives insulting nicknames to entities that could probably flatten her (though they’re not quite as witty when she’s really shaken), and has been known to insert mocking asides in descriptions of the times she’s been up to her neck in trouble. Another’s speech (and in some cases, behavior) tends to go more and more childlike as her nervousness increases; you can tell who she’s really afraid of by who she calls things like “meanie” and who merits really simple sentences. The last tends to go into scholastic vocabulary and passive voice when she’s concerned, to the point where listening to her discuss a traumatic event sounds more and more like listening to a science lab paper until the point where she requests a change of subject or excuses herself.

While we’re still on talking, how about how much? Some deal with emotions like fear or anger by clamming up. Others handle the same emotions by refusing to shut up, and others by going into non sequiturs or telling jokes. Often, one person is going to handle different emotions different ways, so you might have one person who doesn’t talk much when content but babbles when nervous, while another is a fountain of conversation when cheerful but sticks to one-word sentences when upset.

And then there’s proximity to other people. For every person who clings when upset, there’s one who wants to be left alone, and another who claims to want to be left alone but is really hoping somebody else will follow. Some deal with envy by complimenting the envied one effusively on his good fortune, some by hanging out with someone else—anyone else—some by nursing the unfairness of the world in peace. Again, there’s no right way, but one person will probably have different ways of handling different emotions.

If you can put together a combination of cues for most of the emotions you’re likely to see, giving the character a consistent emotional vocabulary, you can use that to get across emotion without at any point having to use direct words like happy or angry. Give it a try!

Some people write their scenes from big epic images, some from the demands of the plot. But some base what happens on what the characters are currently feeling, whether they actually show the feelings or not. I find emotion to be an important part of any story, cementing the characters’ role as people and not devices and creating a difference between this and the other stories in its style. What can emotion do for you?

Emotion can help differentiate a story or plot from those like it. If you can attach your audience to the characters as individuals, they’re less likely to seem like stock characters in a plot that’s older than dirt. And giving them specific emotion, having them react because of things that are part of them and not just because that’s how that stock character does things, letting it be more complicated than Generic Rage—that makes them human. That sets them apart.

Emotion motivates. For every person who gets fully invested in a project, there’s some reason why she does so, and there’s probably an emotion behind that reason. Though many of the primary characters we read are driven by things like fear, anger, hatred, and other ones that sound like someone’s going to make a Dark Side joke any minute now, and most of the rest are some form of love, there are others that can push a character across the map and over the hurdles. A sense of duty. Gratitude. Curiosity. Hope. Belonging. Home. I’m sure you get the idea.

Emotion can help you figure out where a situation is going, even one you hadn’t planned for. What a character wants from it may ultimately decide what she does, but how she feels about it will if not decide what than at least affect how. Sad people and angry people don’t always make the same decisions, and those of happy people tend to be entirely different.

Emotion makes for deliciously complicated situations. For someone who’s looking for situations over than fights in which to create tension, filling everyone to the gills with feelings about the situation is as good a way to go as any. It’s one thing if The Heroes want one thing to happen and The Villains want something else to happen; it’s another if the goals are in place but Hero A is finding Villain B somewhat sympathetic, there are actually two sets of heroes who agree on the ends but dislike each other’s means, poor Citizen Q is caught in the middle of this mess and just wants to go home…. you get the idea.

You don’t have to actually say what people are feeling when they’re caught up in those scenes; in fact, it’s almost better if you don’t. It’s something that can be shown, though if they’re trying not to show it, it’ll be hard to see. But what a character’s feeling more often than not determines what they do, so even if you don’t plan on telling anyone else what they feel, it’s important, and probably even vital, that you know.

…they catch you at it. What were you expecting me to say?

The biggest problem that people with an episodic structure (serial webnovelists, webcomic artists, and of course GMs) have is continuity. When you’re going piece by piece, publishing the beginning before you’ve finished the end, it’s a lot harder to make absolutely sure your continuity fits. When you’re going sentence by sentence, as with a chat game, you might not even realize you’ve made the mistake until you can’t take it back. But however it goes, something’s going to happen that wasn’t in the game plan, that might even be the opposite of what you intended.

It’s how you handle it that makes the difference. Many people just admit the mistake. Some gloss over it, pretend it never happened. But then there are the others—the people who look at that mistake and turn it into something bigger, something better, something that in retrospect looks like they did it on purpose.

How do you do that?

First, be able to catch your mistakes, or have someone who can catch them for you. If you can’t do it yourself, your audience probably can; if you’re lucky, they’ll tell you instead of spreading the news all over everywhere. When they do, take note of it and figure out if it’s worth trying to salvage. Odds are it is.

Second, ask what might explain the mistake in-world. This is one of the tricky parts, as you have to be able to find a way to justify it, often on the spot. People referring to one person in an organization by the name of another’s cover identity? That’s not too hard. The papers of a dead man are strewn about the walls and ceiling rather than the floor? In a fantasy setting, that’s not entirely impossible, and the question is more what kind of magic was used. Someone refers to a hamster bred in one city as being from a species named after the city that replaced the hamster’s city? How hard that is depends on how far you’re willing to stretch.

If Step 2 fails, and you have the option, you may want to ask for help. I personally favor working with someone who knows the world but isn’t part of your audience; for instance, when I have trouble with my work, I often go to one of the three or four friends I have who either used to play in my game but don’t anymore or never did but were interested in my war stories. A serial creator may have a close friend or other sort of editor to bounce ideas off of. The important thing is that they have enough context to be able to come up with a reason that you see as having verisimilitude; a bad fix on a mistake is worse than either admitting the error or just trying to brazen through it.

Third, decide whether you’re going to attempt a coverup or not, based on whether steps 2 and 2.5 have gotten you any answers, how feasibly you can sneak in the explanation, and how long it’s been since somebody noticed the error. The less time has elapsed since the error became a part of the narrative, the more likely you are to be able to splice your fix in cleanly. The longer it’s been, the likelier someone is to be able to tell it’s a coverup. If you’ve decided yes, make it part of the story; give it consequences that mean something, and watch where the narrative goes.

Every now and then, one of these will take your narrative in a better direction. Are you willing to take that chance?