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Story Elements

Friday, September 4th, 2009

A quality game is a lot like fishing.  You need to use a big enough net to catch the whole group.  You must maintain control without making them feel like they are powerless.  You need to give them enough room to run and tire them out, if you get them in the boat too soon, they’ll put up a fight.  You have to keep them out of the weeds or everything grinds to a halt.  You need to keep them from funning for the bottom or you’re never get them in the boat.  You have to use the right bait, a good strong line that will hold if they start to struggle and that can’t be cut right through, the wisdom to know when to let them run and when to reel them in, when to use the net, and when its time to hit them with a bat.

Hooks

A good story grabs you from the very beginning; it lays out the basics of the story, connects with you on an emotional level, and gives you a reason to follow along to the end.  This is called the Hook.  It takes hold of the audience and draws them into the story.  A bad hook makes the players feel like they are being dragged along or you lose them entirely and they go looking for something else to do.  A good hood grabs the players at a deep emotional level, anger, fear, or curiosity, and makes them want to get in the boat with you and seek the resolution on their own.  The bigger your group the more complex the hook, if you don’t grab them all party dissention may derail the game.

It is important to know your players and their characters well.  You need to hook them by the emotions so you need to know what makes them tick.  All art invokes and emotion.  And artful hook makes the players feel the way you want them to and makes them want to go where you lead.  A weak hook creates apathy or disinterest and makes the game move slowly, if at all.

Using the same hooks all the time lessens their impact.  The characters only have so many relatives you can capture or kill and the players will eventually move their families and friends into a tall tower somewhere.  Maintain a constant atmosphere of anger or fear, and the players adapt and you have to up the ante.  You can’t just threaten them every week, eventually you have to wound, maim, and ultimately kill.  Then what do you do?  Intro a new character each session, work hard to ge the characters to like them, and then summarily shoot them in the head?  The characters will withdraw and stop bonding with anyone including each other.  You have to change your lures often.  Capture their family, expose their past, offer them wealth, power, glory, or steal their toys.  Attack their pride by showing them up with a rival; make them doubt their own assumptions by changing the rules.  Send in the damsel in a dress, the arrogant villain, or the revel with a cause.  The players should never know what to expect when you rollout the hook, if they think they do then throw them a curve and prove them wrong.

Pushes – Plot Drivers

The scenes that move the plot forward are called Pushes, Bumps, or Beats.  They are the dramatic movements that give the story a kick by delivering information, introducing the key characters, or providing the time to put the pieces together.  Pushes keep the story from being a continuous stream of actions scenes with the plot of a video game – defeat opponents, acquire new weapons, advance to next stage.  Character development and role-play requires the freedom of dramatic scenes to give the players a chance to engage in dialogue instead of gunplay.

Pushes can be used to give the characters plot elements; clues, key characters, directions to explore, or even “red herrings” – misleading information to throw them off the straight track.  Pushes can also be used to develop the subplots, and alter the pacing.  If the game is moving too fast, cool things down with a “flavor” NPC that doesn’t develop the plot but offers an entertaining divergence, a difficult shop owner, a traveling salesman with stories to tell, and investigative reporter looking for an exclusive – whatever fits the scene.  If the action is moving too slowly, then it is time to up the ante.  Bring in their “boss” to tell them to pick up the pace, send in victims to beg for help, or break down the door and just start shooting.  Show them things are happening in the world while they are just resting on their laurels.  They don’t want to go looking for a fight, bring the fight to them.  Pushes are a chance for developing the story and giving the characters the tools they need and the will to keep things moving.

Climax

The point of all this build up is to reach the Climax, the scene where the last piece falls into place or the pivotal conflict with the villain, where the story breaks into the open.  The Climax is the most important scene of the game.  The twists are exposed and all your hard work is in the open.  The Climax can make or break a game, a badly played revel where the puzzle or the mystery doesn’t fit the clues or is just solved for the players or climactic battle the players can not win or effortlessly roll over the opposition ruins the game.  Logical progression and scaling are just as important as showmanship and fitting the challenge to the group in running the pivotal scene.

Resolution

Like chess, a role-playing game requires a good endgame.  The Resolution is where the loose ends are either tied up or exposed as possible hooks for the next game.  It is the victory scene for the players if the win or the cliffhanger for the next game if they lose.  The captured are released, the villain is dealt with or escapes, and the threat is ended or revealed as a larger plot.  All stories must have and ending and the resolution ties up the episode either as a happy ending or the foreboding of “to be continued…”.

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Evoking Emotion

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009

The most important element that many role playing games never address is that roleplaying involves creating art.  A role playing game is a creative endeavor designed to entertain which involves elements of theater; writing, acting and directing. Role playing requires the use of knowledge, skill and creative imagination in the production of entertainment that is enjoyable. A good game is a crafted thing and a good Operator has the ability to execute what he has devised.

Art is an expression of life and transcends both time and space. We must employ our own souls through art to give a new form and a new meaning to nature or the world…  The aim of art is to project an inner vision into the world, to state in aesthetic creation the deepest psychic and personal experiences of a human being. It is to enable those experiences to be intelligible and generally recognized within the total framework of an ideal world. –Bruce Lee

Good art evokes an emotion and a good artist can control what emotion he wishes the audience to experience. Tolstoy said “to evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then…  to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling – this is the activity of art.”  To make your game really come alive it must carry a “feel” or tone, a style expressive of a mood or emotion that permeates the work. A consistent tone helps to hold your Realm together. If your Realm is a Post-Apocalyptic world where life is cheap then random violence is a common occurrence and the tone is established by regularly testing the actor’s survival skills. If it is a horror tone you want to establish, then your planning will include descriptions of darkness, remoteness, and should include a building sequence of fear and false alarms. In a mystery, lots of detail is required so that the plots, characters, and events are peeled away like an onion, revealing the truth beneath.

Different episodes and scenes may have a different tone than the background tone of the Realm, but that serves to make those scenes stand out against the tone of the world. For example, if your group is a rough nomadic band of heroes that explore a dark and violent frontier then it will unbalance them to be called into the brightly lit refinement and political subtlety of the King’s Court.

Pacing is also an effective tool in handling the tone. If you only allow the players short pauses between the action scenes, they will feel your urgency and the sense of impending doom. If you stretch the pacing out and allow the players to wait for the other shoe to drop while surprising them with constant false alarms and red herrings, this can build tension. If they are waiting for someone dangerous to show up, then have a dim witted NPC quietly order pizza or bring back the NPC that was left for dead.

There are plenty of examples of artful writing out there in every genre, immerse yourself in them.  No artist ever works in a vacuum, and for writers that is doubly true.  Find good examples of the tone you are looking for and absorb as much of it as you can.  Take it apart and look at what elements are used to develop the feel.  What pacing and changes in pacing are used to reinforce it?   Take in as many examples of the stories you would like to tell and they will rub off on you.  With just a little knowledge of the tools of evoking emotion and establishing tone and some great examples at hand, you will see how easy it is to transfer those emotions to your players.

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