This week, character arcs were at the forefront of my mind. Due to my inspiration being mostly character-oriented, I deal with those a lot; most of my PCs, and even a decent number of my NPCs, have gone through at least one character arc, possibly more. But one of my favorite arcs is that of a primary NPC from my main game, a young woman by name of Satsu Kiara. And a lot of the fun with that is that, while I had an idea about some of it, most of it took me by surprise.

When I first created her, Kiara was quiet, clever, competent and utterly devoted to her work; not brave, but confident in her ability to handle her areas of expertise and capable of persevering. I had about ten sessions in which to establish her that way before a few lucky rolls on the part of the primary antagonist, Jalil, and a bit of hasty plot-logic led to her abduction at the hands of said primary antagonist. When the group found her, months later, she’d changed—not so much quiet as downright timid, working herself into the ground so as not to take time to fall asleep, and prone to freezing up not only when threatened but when dealing with much of anything that was both more powerful than she and not immediately friendly. In short, she’d arced offstage, and for the worse.

What followed was basically her arcing back to where she had started (slightly better, actually, but we’ll get to that), regaining her old confidence. Interestingly, the fact that she was undergoing development that was a reverse of her prior arc meant that there were two sets of reverse arc triggers going on at the same point. On the one hand, there were the things that resisted her initial development—if she was engaged enough on a topic, usually one of her twin passions of The Job and arcane experimentation, she was likely to forget about any differences between herself and whoever she was speaking to and argue it with the confidence she’d had in the beginning. On the other, there were those things that resisted her return to her old self—several environments that she’d been conditioned to feel helpless in, and the conscious efforts of Jalil himself (or rather, what was left of him… it was a little complicated) to keep her in her altered state.

The arc itself was one of those messy conglomerates of arc-types. Logically enough, part of it was a growth-arc, or rather a regrowth-arc. Part was rule-based—Jalil had imposed a number of rules on her worldview and tricked her into accepting them, and now she was testing them, seeing which ones were real and which could be broken. And part, and the most fascinating part for me, was interaction-based. With a remnant of Jalil still out there, it made sense that she couldn’t be finished until she had in some way shown that she could operate as an equal to him rather than an inferior, and even she sort of realized that, so they were in contact quite a bit.

And cue-points—were there ever cue-points. First, of course, was when the group first killed Jalil, allowing Kiara to return to her own range of environments rather than the rather more static one she had been confined to and requiring her to re-adapt to those—that was the growth arc, and it centered more on separating the fear of Then from Now, quelling her nightmares and ceasing to rely on her more flawed coping mechanisms. Second was the realization that there was still some of Jalil left, in a form weakened enough that she might be able to face him as an equal. Third was a misadventure she’d had with one of the PCs, he and she alone in one of her arc-reversal trigger environments, where the two of them had not only managed to stay out of trouble, but had tricked some of the locals into fearing them—it’s amazing what something like that can do for one’s confidence. By that time, she was most of the way recovered, but it was pretty much sealed when there was a task which only she could be spared for (the PCs being off dealing with bigger things), and she succeeded with flying colors using little beyond her own knowledge and cunning, and likely finished at the point where, as part of an attempt to remove the Jalil-remnant from his current host, faced him down within his own mind and told him not that she wasn’t afraid, but that she wasn’t afraid enough to lose, nor afraid enough to refuse to admit she was afraid—and then finished a group plan to make a paperweight out of him.

And the arc shows. Kiara-of-now is still quiet and subtle, but her confidence has grown. Once, she had been a specialist, skilled in areas pertaining to her duty and particularly skilled in those that were her passions; now she’s willing to work on things that don’t pertain to her emphases (including, fortunately for all involved, an effort on self-defense). Once, only things that were within her chosen fields were worth making a stand for; now, she’s willing to offer and stick to opinions in other areas rather than deferring to people who might not necessarily know better. In the beginning, her main political strategy had been “Don’t rock the boat”; now she’s involved in one of the greatest political events this timeline has seen.

The greatest joy I find in creating and playing a character is watching her grow and change; in her arcing and in her influence on those around her, Kiara has been one of the greatest sources of that joy in my game.

Character arcs don’t just happen out of nowhere, and for good reason. Having somebody just wake up one morning and say “I’m going to change some aspect of my personality!” would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it? You’d expect a cause, even something as improbable as a dream about antelopes, breakfast materials and blackmail, wouldn’t you? The good news is that, for the people who have trouble figuring out how to make their characters change, character arcs needing a cause means that one can tend to isolate the kinds of points or causes that set off arcs. So what sorts of things can do that?

One of the big ones is something going wrong, usually in a way that messes up a character’s rules of the world. When the girl who thinks herself invincible is defeated for the first time, the dedicated assistant of the major leader is suddenly having to take the leader’s place, or the adherent of a belief system discovers a contradiction in it that goes against what she thought her ideals were, there lies change—and most, particularly the interesting characters, aren’t going to just turtle up and try to ignore it.

On the other hand, there’s something going right, whether that’s in the way the character expected or not. What do you do when you achieve the goal you’ve been striving for for as long as you can remember? How about what happens when you discover a way out of what you thought were dead-end circumstances?

A lot of people arc in response to role models. This isn’t just finding one and deciding to try to emulate them, though that’s a common way of going about it, though. What happens when you discover that the role model in question isn’t quite who you thought she was? When the role model needs you for something, possibly even the thing you admired him for? How about if the role model dies?

And then there are those who arc in response to people who aren’t their role models. Sometimes it’s a vague acquaintance, a social inferior they’re familiar with, or even someone they barely know who has an impact. This is a lot rarer, though, since it requires a character for whom it actually matters what some random and possibly nameless person does and thinks, whether of them or not. And that’s not even taking into account the impact of friends; you’d be amazed at what they can do for a character with the potential for a sense of loyalty.

Some arcs come as a result of tasks that a character is supposed to do. In some cases, it’s a task the character originally wanted nothing to do with; the character might come to like it, come to deal with it, or at least come to find a way around it. In others, it’s something she’d always wanted to do, and there are a number of ways it might be not quite what she expected.

Every now and then the cause is somewhat more mystical in nature. Sometimes, a character learns something through a dream or vision, or maybe a prophecy—usually something along the lines of “You need to change x behavior, or else.” While people have done one-night epiphanies (A Christmas Carol, anyone?), I personally find it a lot more interesting when they spend a while working at it. Overnight character development can be a bit straining.

The above is a good range of potential character arc triggers; someone looking for a possible source of character arc might use one, or a GM trying to see if she can trigger character change might try to arrange one or more and see if the targeted player responds to it. Have any of these worked for you? Do you have any other triggers that can set off a character arc?

]]> http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/2009/11/27/cues-for-the-character-arc/feed/ http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/2009/11/26/the-reverse-arc/ http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/2009/11/26/the-reverse-arc/#comments Thu, 26 Nov 2009 08:00:42 +0000 ravyn http://exchangeofrealities.today.com/2009/11/26/the-reverse-arc/

Most people seem to see change in characters as a permanent matter—that once a change is made, it stays made, and the character carries on in that new path. It’s understandable to do that at least a little, particularly since the more action-oriented audiences would probably get sick of it and want to move on. But even on the most direct-for-dramatic-purposes of character arcs, there’s usually something that sets the change back a bit just by being there—a sensitive point, if you will. Used well, they can create a further obstacle and some interesting drama without drawing out the arc too much.

Often, people use some sort of object or circumstance that’s associated with the character’s state before an arc; this often results in the character’s subconscious switching her into her old reaction before the rest of her has a chance to catch up. It’s bad enough when it’s just having to deal with an embarrassing memory, but when you’re dealing with a full-fledged trauma trigger, it crosses the line into downright nasty.

On the other hand, there’s what happens when the arc reverser is a person. What makes them effective is that for the most part, people just aren’t that good with change, and they often actively resist it, whether they’re realizing it or not. In benign cases, it might not occur to them that the person they’re dealing with has changed, so they just act like they’re dealing with the “old” character. But sometimes, the second character feels threatened by the change in the first—or is otherwise opposed to it—and is actively trying to put the character ‘back in her place’. Reasons for that, of course, can vary. For every character whose arc-reverser needs her to stay in her old state so she won’t thwart some nefarious plot, there’s another whose arc is being opposed because the other character is scared of what that’s going to do to his role. How aware the arc-reversing character is of his own actions is in itself an interesting question, as that’s going to shape how he goes about resisting the change.

Who says the character herself isn’t the problem? Some people aren’t used to change in themselves, and would rather stay in the easier state. This can be true even when it comes to improving traits—after all, someone who “knows” she’s functionally helpless doesn’t have to take responsibility for what goes wrong, for what could she have done to change it? It was inevitable.

Sometimes, it’s a confluence of more than one of the above. It might just happen (or perhaps be arranged) that the character is dealing with a person in opposition to her arc while being in circumstances that further reinforce the old way. Again, this isn’t necessarily deliberate, though it can be downright devastating when it is.

One of the most common manifestations of this is the Family Holiday Dinner Effect. So there you are, out of the nest for the most part, struck out on your own. But regardless of how you’ve changed, you go back to that house and you’re reacting as if you were still at the most inconvenient possible stage of your childhood—that old family tradition packs quite a wallop. Worst of all, the parents probably don’t even realize they’re doing this; it just hasn’t quite occurred to them that you’ve changed as much as you have.

This is, of course, an easier concept for a writer to use than for a GM, since the writer knows the characters inside out. A GM not only needs to know the characters she’s trying to push this way, but also needs one of two things: either a player who’s willing and able to work with this sort of effect, or a way to mechanically enforce it. Without either of those, it’s likely to come across as a blatant attempt at manipulation, and people who see it and know it for what it is are likely to ignore it. But the writer has her own risks—many have frustrated their audiences by establishing something as an arc-reverser when it doesn’t really matter, but not used it to its full effect when it could actually cause problems to the characters.

It’s a concept worth thinking about. Now happy Thanksgiving, and go enjoy your dinner!

It doesn’t seem right if a character begins and ends the story as the exact same person, does it? But figuring out what kind of change they’re likely to go through is difficult in its own right, particularly for people whose strengths lie more in the range of events or settings. There are just so many things that can change—how does one settle on one?

I find it’s easier to understand a question like that when you’ve got patterns you can apply to the situation. So here’s my look at three major flavors of arc that a character might undergo.

My personal favorite character arc type is the rule-changing arc. Most people try to understand the world by assigning rules to it, whether they’re actually true or not. This isn’t just extrapolation of natural laws, like “What goes up must come down”, or societal tendencies like “People don’t like those who are different”, though those are part of it—it’s also the kinds of things that come from personal experience. They might be about a single person, like “Mother’s always right”, or about a group of people, like most prejudicial beliefs are. Sometimes, they’re about oneself; sometimes, they’re about the world. But either way, people get used to being in those patterns, and may even make a point of ignoring minor things that challenge the rules. Imagine, then, what happens if the rules are broken, particularly those rules that closely affect the character herself. That’s going to make a difference, isn’t it? There are a lot of ways in which a character’s response to a broken rule can go: a character might attempt to reassert it, flee to the opposite belief entirely, or change to fit the place in the pattern where she sits, growing if it gives her room to grow and trying to shore up her position if it puts her at risk.

The variety of character arc most people are used to, though, is the growing process arc. This usually involves the removal or acquisition of one or more traits, almost invariably related to some form of ‘growing up’. Coming of age and hero’s journey stories pretty much depend on this kind of arc. Unlike most of the others, though, it’s something that’s usually planned rather than something that happens to a character; on the other hand, other varieties often fold into it, so that the changes created by another kind of arc happen to coincide with part or all of a growing process trajectory.

Then there’s the interaction-based arc. This one has traits of the other two, in that there’s growing to be done and rules to be changed, but has a greater level of effect on its own cause than the other two. After all, growing up is one of those things that tends to happen, and a process that’s hard to change, and a break in the rules isn’t going to just knit itself up or deliberately grow larger. But since the interaction arc is based around a character’s interactions with another character and how she’s changed by them, it creates a feedback loop: the character changes, the character with whom she’s interacting changes, the original character changes a bit more to accommodate the changes, and meanwhile the changes are probably throwing off someone else’s image of the world, and so on it goes. Complex? Yes. Fascinating? You bet.

And who says a character arc has to be just one? As likely as not, what’s going on is a combination of several, all twining together to influence the character and in turn each other. That’s what makes them all different, and being all different is what makes them interesting.

Look through what your characters have been through. Can you see anything that might make them change?

I hadn’t been going to post this one for a while, but then I blundered onto ChattyDM’s riff about managerial skills and GMing, and he asked for it in the comments. Never let it be said that I turn down perfectly good requests.

The fun thing about writing and role-playing is that there’s no field they can’t draw from—but even those of us who have been doing it for years don’t realize just how many subjects we can get ideas from. The most unexpected for me, though, would have to be when I got bored at my library and picked up Martin Lindstrom’s Buyology. It’s about neuromarketing—utilizing knowledge of brain chemistry to make marketing that much more successful. And somehow, by the end of that book I was going straight from the actual marketing advice to ways of writing characters.

I’m sure we’ve all, writer and GM alike, had to deal with The Character(s) Nobody Remembers. You’ve worked hard on them, given them important roles, but even the person who remembers everything refers to them as “You know, that guy” or “the girl with the polearm”. If marketing tips like those can set brand names apart from the mass of companies, why couldn’t they do the same thing for our characters?

One of the biggest examples Lindstrom gave was revelance. His example was advertising in American Idol. The show had three major sponsors: Ford, which did only commercials; Cingular, which was the only cell service that could text votes; and Coca-Cola, which was everywhere, not only with cups at everyone’s hand but with its colors and shapes all over the stage and dressing room. As Lindstrom points out, the latter two got their money’s worth, while Ford just faded into the background, if anything losing eyeballs to the other two companies. The same thing goes for characters: if you want them remembered, the best thing to do is to give them a reason to be remembered. In a game, you might directly involve them in something the players are doing, as a help or a hindrance; if they’re main characters in an ensemble story, make sure they’re doing something. If you have three main characters, and one moves the plot forward, one regularly has just the skill for a particularly daunting problem, and one is there as moral support for the other two, who do you think people will remember?

Then there’s association, building a subliminal connection between two concepts. For the advertiser, this is often images and brands; according to one of Lindstrom’s studies, just using associated images was a more effective strategy for cigarette companies than actually using the brand name in an advertisement. For us, it’s building a connection between a character and various elements or images. The good news is that they can be just about anything: colors, landscapes, objects, skills, materials, emotions, you name it. I, for instance, use a complicated system of color and font coding for my NPCs—bold-italic for the particularly powerful/divine, bold for the PCs’ equals in power, plain for their inferiors, just italics for people’s familiars and weak spirits, and then each character has a specific color, either chosen from the initial palette or custom mixed, usually chosen to match with that character’s nearest associations. (Consider the not-quite-purple blue I use for my background. I borrowed it from one of my characters, who is from a group whose color association is blue but whose personality is more typical of their associated-with-purple counterparts.)

Ritual can also be used to take a character and set her apart from her peers. This isn’t the complex magical rituals of earlier articles; rather, it’s habits, either subconscious or deliberately cultivated. For brands, this focuses on use of the product, like lime in a Corona or dipping an Oreo in milk, but that doesn’t work for characters. Instead, you’ll want to focus on the little things the characters themselves do. A warrior might loosen her sword in its scabbard at the first sign of trouble, draw it slowly and deliberately to catch the light as conflict becomes clearly inevitable, and end her fights flicking blood off the sword and sheathing it. A trapfinder or a lockpicker might lay all his tools in front of him, give them a quick polish for luck, and then start applying them in a specific order. The captain of a ship might drink a glass of wine and pour the rest of the bottle into the ocean before she sets sail; a chef could insist on putting a sprig of dill and a little star of fennel seeds on every plate he finishes. Not only these little habits set a character apart from others, they also kick in another of Lindstrom’s concepts—the story. People start to wonder why. What’s it for? Does it work? Where’d you pick it up? It doesn’t even need to be character-specific—you can set an entire culture apart with little habits like that.

The last technique Lindstrom focused on was appealing to senses other than sight, particularly hearing and scent. When everything focuses on vision, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and tune out entirely; moreover, the nice thing about hearing and scent is that they tend to prompt visual images as well. (Just ask the kinds of people who get their scene ideas from music!) So your payoff isn’t just a more distinctive description, but also a secondary visual element thrown in for free. Of course, it’s easier for the face to face GM, particularly in the subtle manner that works most efficiently with this trick in advertising: if she’s willing to bring in props, people can see or hear what’s being described themselves. But that doesn’t mean that people dependent on the written word can’t have a character’s scent precede him into the room or identify another by the sound of her footsteps; it’s just a bit more of a challenge.

If we can get all this characterization material just by looking at what advertisers do to get buyers’ attention, imagine the uses of a bigger field!

One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is character change. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I can spend hours just looking over the behavior of a character and seeing how it compares to when she was created. Making mistakes and coming to terms with them, dealing with old traumas, learning things and internalizing the knowledge, falling in love—it’s only a smattering of the kinds of changes a character can go through. But it’s not near as much fun if the creator just says that a character changed. So how does one go about showing it?

One basic is changes in self-presentation. This is a popular one, but it’s easy to overblow (sexing up a character’s costume when he/she goes evil is a personal pet peeve of mine, and I’m not particularly fond of the insistence on tying hair back to symbolize confidence even if it is justified). Depending on how the character works, there are a lot of ways this can go—overall posture, hairstyle, color of clothing, style of clothing, addition or subtraction of ornamentation, where they wear their insignia, you get the idea. And yes, uniforms get in the way of this, particularly the ones that are supposed to put the uni in uniform, but even those don’t hide body language and facial expression too much.

Interactions with other characters are always fun. The way people address each other can demonstrate different emotions between the characters in question, power dynamics, prior relationships, the presence or absence of secrets, prior incidents that might have happened to one or both of them, one reminding the other of someone else… and that’s just the ones I can think of while writing this. Now what happens if these emotions change? For instance, if someone who always used to defer to one of her traveling companions at one point countermands one of the second’s decisions to that person’s face, what might it mean?

As a side note, are they handling conflict differently? Emotional intensity, particularly if that emotion is some form of fear, tends to bring out parts of people they usually keep hidden; if a character who otherwise has been showing no outward signs of change goes berserk during a fight without precedent, that’s usually cause to assume that something’s going on.

Then there’s behaviors in general. Things people won’t do are a vital part of their characterization, but nobody said they have to be static; a character who’s gone through enough change might loosen up on old ones, or acquire new ones. This is one of those things that should probably be set up gradually, or it might result in people expecting a doppelganger plot instead. On the other hand, taken in tandem with sufficiently intense circumstances or other signs of a drastic change in attitude/personality, it’s an excellent sign of character arcing. Similarly, a character doing things with increasing proficiency as time goes by, or seeming to lose the ability to do things she could do before, can show changes in characterization. Even just changing the emotional cues while a character is doing whatever the action or behavior is makes a difference.

What about attitude? While this one’s often done in tandem with how people relate to other people, it’s worth taking on its own—what people tell themselves when nobody else is there is just as important to how they act as what they tell other people. Changes in emotional cues, reacting differently to the same situation at two different times, pursuit vs. evasion vs. indifference, credulity, skepticism—a lot goes into an attitude, and any of it can be tweaked in ways that people should be able to see.

Consider also their priorities. Most people get used to the fact that life is full of choices, whether they have a good sense of what they’d actually choose in a given situation or not. What better way to show change than to go through the same choice twice under similar circumstances but with a significant time difference and make different choices each time? A character might show greater intensity in the pursuit, defense and discussion of those things she prioritizes; some things she might negotiate for and some she might fight for; some aren’t worth a confrontation, while others may be important enough to get around her other feelings on an issue.

Change one of these and you have an indicator. Change several and you have a pattern. Change them so that people can see them and you have a way to show and not tell. How do you prefer to show change?

Last week, I talked about making deals with the heroes, and things to keep in mind when doing so. But there’s another important element to making those sorts of deals, and that’s being the kind of Hand of Darkness the heroes are willing to make deals with and not necessarily kill on sight. Tricky? Yes. Worth it? Also yes. So what’s a villain to be?

Know how your goals and the heroes’ intersect, and know how they think your goals intersect with theirs. In general, heroes are likelier to put up with someone whose plans aren’t completely opposed to theirs, and who manage to stay off of their berserk buttons. If you’re a world-destroyer, you haven’t a chance; if you’re just in it for power, they might be able to deal with you. It’s better if you have something that in some sense is technically the same goal, even if your means are nearly incompatible; if both you and they want to protect the patch of world you’re sitting in, but they’re trying to spread freedom and you think the optimal means involve mind control to protect people from themselves, there might be enough common ground in your long-term goals to allow from negotiation.

Know how they’d relate to you as a person, not just a Hand of Darkness. You’d be amazed by how much slack you can be cut if the main thing that keeps you from being friends with this person is being on opposite sides in the endless battle between us and them; if they like your personality, they’re likelier to think you’re probably not all bad, or at least not all bad in a way that requires being put down before the evil spreads. And try not to be too off your rocker; if you’re insane you’re unpredictable, and if you’re unpredictable they can’t trust you to keep your end of the bargain. (Yes, I know insanity doesn’t always work that way, but this isn’t reality we’re talking here, it’s reality through the hero-filter. They have very simplistic outlooks on life.)

If you’re in a situation in which combat is the logical choice in action, you’re going to need to be able to present a very good reason why making a deal with them is going to be better for them in the long term than pounding your face in. This isn’t near as easy as it sounds, but at least you have choices: you can make negotiating better by, well, upping the reward, or you can make fighting worse by incorporating a dead man’s switch, secondary ploy, or something else that just says “Too big a price to pay.” (If you want a long-term bargaining relationship with the heroes, I recommend the former. If you want them to understand that you are a force to be reckoned with when it comes time for the actual reckoning, it’s all about the latter.)

Make sure they have some way to ‘know’ you’ll live up to your side of the deal. Sure, you don’t have to actually go through with it (particularly if you don’t mind them never trusting you for something like this again), but if they don’t think you’re going to hold up your end of the bargain, why would they bother bargaining with you in the first place?

Keep these in mind; there’s nothing quite as undignified as being destroyed when you’re trying to make a deal.

My game’s one of the things that taught me the most about the dangers of waiting for the proper moment. It’s pretty much inevitable when you’ve got a game full of people who all have latent hammish qualities, a wide range of typing speeds, and nearly no communication outside of the primary IC and OOC chat windows. Is it any wonder, then, that one person would wait for the right moment and the others would happen to do such things as would prevent the right moment from ever occurring?

One of the more notable examples of this was last week. The duplicate versions of the primary NPC had been a conundrum most of the group wasn’t entirely sure how to handle, and my newest player had gotten an idea for what sounded like an extremely nifty (if somewhat difficult to adjudicate) dreamshaping gambit that might give him an answer. The problem was, he wanted someone to come up with a line that could give the character the idea, and the players were busily talking about something else. Even in explicitly asking for a cue, he didn’t give them much of an idea what he was doing. I think they would have gotten to the right point eventually, but by that time one of the other players had come up with a considerably simpler strategy, in the form of a question he knew the fake wouldn’t have an answer to because even half the party didn’t know the answer. It was a pity; resolving the original idea could have been interesting.

The other major example of waiting for the right moment and missing it was mine, a few months ago. For various reasons, the group had found themselves in a place the center of which was a storm of magical energy the likes of which they had never before seen. To be exact, it was about on eye level with a tower they were walking into because it housed one of the machines that was creating the storm, one with conveniently near-360 picture windows. All I was waiting for was for people to look out said windows, since it’d seemed logical to me that they’d be concerned enough with the machine to have to actively look to see it.

For me, the problem wasn’t so much missing the moment as that everyone had the moment individually. One looked up almost immediately. Others, slightly later. Others, later than that. With the result that instead of one big glorious post in the IC window, I delivered that particular bit of exposition as individual posts in the different IM windows as the characters looked up one by one. At least, until near the last character, when I finally got sick of it and posted the whole thing in the main window just for the sake of record continuity. This despite having rather strongly (or at least, so I thought) hinted that out the window was where people’s attention should go.

The take-home lesson? If you’re going to wait for the right moment, be explicit about the moment you’re waiting for. They can’t give it to you if they don’t know what it is.

Usually, I love it when people in my games work with the Laws of Dramatics. They’ll kindly let the villain monologue at them, they’ll suggest awesome plot complications… you get the idea. Heck, every now and then someone will suggest and then facilitate something that scuttles his own plan because the alternative is just that much cooler.

But there’s one Law of Dramatics that just doesn’t work with a gaming situation, and that one’s the law of timing. You know, that one that says that a really nifty action or the like is best done when played off of something that sets it up. Writers rarely have problems with this, as they can set up their own cues. It’s not so easy with gamers.

First off, working off of timing assumes that someone is going to provide the cue, and that’s difficult at best. Let’s face it, even players who want to cooperate with the GM have an uncanny ability to find the one thing that would break the plan and then do it. Now imagine you’re in the game—as a GM or a player, it really doesn’t matter—and you’re just waiting for someone else in the group to do that one thing that would set you up perfectly. Ideally, they’ll get the idea and do it immediately. Realistically, it might never happen, or (usually in the case of epic scenery that people have to look in a direction to see) it happens in pieces rather than all at once.

Second, there’s the balance between sharing one’s plans and maintaining surprise. On the one hand, you’ve got the fact that people react more strongly to things they aren’t expecting, so you don’t want to give your entire game away. On the other hand, if the people around you don’t know what kind of cue to give you, how the heck are they going to provide it? Most people either go to one extreme or the other, sharing everything and losing the fun or sharing nothing and making it near-impossible to set them up. There are no mind readers here.

Third, there’s the fact that there are multiple minds on this, and they’re all thinking differently. The issue here is magnified when you’ve got a situation where people aren’t taking neat and even turns, like most problem-solving situations or an initiativeless battle; while you’re refining your grand, shiny idea, other people are trying to get to the end of the scene. If you’re lucky, they’re just going to do something that requires a rapid rewrite, and you’ll still get the gist of your idea through. But more likely, somebody is going to take down that enemy you were about to hit, or find some other solution to the problem, or otherwise find some way to render an otherwise lovely idea completely irrelevant. Most people who wait for the proper moment find it, all right—or rather, find that it was five minutes ago.

In a story, dramatic timing is easy. In a play, it’s part of the script. But in a game, sometimes it’s just better to get what you’re doing out there rather than wait for the scene to give you your setup. Why wait for a moment that won’t do you the same courtesy?

Epic scenery tends to get a bit of a bad rap, particularly in role-playing games. Sure, they ask, it’s big and pretty and all, but are you sure you didn’t put it in just for an excuse to show off your ability to create the stuff? And most of us, being honest people at heart (or figuring this is a good opportunity to look honest at heart), look down and shuffle our feet a little and admit that yeah, that might have had something to do with it.

In itself, I don’t see much wrong with lavishly described scenery for lavishly described scenery’s own sake (or, as TVTropes puts it, “Scenery Porn”). Even I keep a few stashes around here and there. But some people get bored with the amount of time devoted to the background, and even the people who like the extra detail and the pretty scenery are likely to get frustrated when it’s plunked down in the middle of a tense, terse scene and messing with the pacing. And this is likelier to happen when all the scenery is there for is to look cool, rather than serving a purpose. So how do we get beyond scenery porn?

Use the scenery to build up a character, either by parallelism or by contrast. Imagine, for instance, stepping into a description of one of those lavish courts where just about everything is designed to be lavish, gorgeous, and downright deadly, and on top of that you’re approached by someone who fits in perfectly with this place, like she could very well be part of the scenery. Wouldn’t that say something about her? On the other hand, there’s the contrast as well: a single person moving in a world tinted red and strewn with corpses is either a survivor or cause to run, and one who seems completely unaware of the dead is downright creepy.

On a somewhat larger scale, when you’re dealing with manmade-epic, you can use it as a way of characterizing the creators. After all, they have to be the types who would have made something like this, and had the ability to do so. Even better, along with the cultural exposition it provides, there are ways to add a little contrast and bring in an individual; imagine, for instance, one of those mountain-sized statues, weathering the ages, so on and so forth—and somewhere in the folds of its robe where the carved cloth brushes the ground is a tiny bit of scrawled graffiti.

Let the scenery be an obstacle. Those mountains may look impressive, the storm of magical energies outside the window may be spectacular, but along with how cool they look there’s the realization that one has to cross the mountains or dissipate/travel through/control the storm, and that brings in tension. Now the pretty matters.

Make it not quite what it appears to be. Mountain ranges that turn out to be enormous sleeping creatures may be on the verge of cliché, but they’re common because they’re spectacular, particularly when they’re not too obvious about what they are beforehand. (Explicitly saying that a mountain range looks like a sleeping dragon is one thing, but describing structures that in retrospect map one to one with the anatomy as the critter gets up….)

Do combinations of the above. Sometimes mix and match is more fun than just using one potential use of the scenery.

And every now and then, just let it be there for the pretty and admit it. It’s your job to have fun too, isn’t it?