Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
This is a thread where I want to chronical my own growing realizations as a writer, as I've continued to grow as a storyteller on Thain, and serve as a dialogue room for other people who have similar realizations, as well as a general question room for people on Thain to reflect on some of the things I'm talking about, if they want.
I encourage readers to approach with an open mind! Some of the things I'm talking here might seem really obvious to you if you're a strong storyteller in that way already... but I hope some of the things in here are also helpful to you, that reflecting on them helps you to level up your storytelling too, the way I'm always chasing.
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
This first drop is a three-parter. If you feel like engaging with any of the questions at the end of each part, drop me a reply! If something in here interests you, or if you disagree with it, let’s talk! I really want to foster a strong dialogue around writing through these essays, if we can.
I. Pitching and Hitting:
Since coming back to NWN RP a few years ago, I have really seen some spectacular storytelling come out of Thain. I've been a DM and a storyteller for a long time, but I was shocked when I arrived here at the atmosphere Thain has built out of player eventing and the ways that it challenges players to take control of and write their own characters instead of having to rely entirely on someone else to give them the context through which to write that story. I realized very quickly that I had to level up a lot to use this even marginally well. I have internally broken the two skills present in RP on Thain into words that now seem to be growingly popular parlance: Pitching and Hitting.
I love these words, because they so often feel like they encapsulate what we're doing here: I imagine tossing someone a ball, with both of us sharing the goal that the other person is trying to hit it, and it is such a solid metaphor. Maybe our throws are not always the best, but we're trying to pitch the ball to someone as best we can. Maybe we throw someone a curveball. Maybe the other person has to make choices and changes to approach the hit better. While I could talk for a long time about things that I've learned about pitching and hitting since coming to Thain, I will point out two absolutely universal truths that have appeared to me to be a great pitcher and hitter:
Great pitchers have at least one question they're asking the character. It's not just enough to give a player a simple villain, you want to question the player's ideals! You want to put them under pressure to grow or change, because that's your contribution to their story. It means researching the person, knowing the kinds of questions to ask them, and then stepping back in the course of the event and letting them answer those. When you try to imagine a player event you'll run for someone, imagine this! Picture your audience, and then picture what you want to ask them. Maybe it's details about what they believe, or ways in which their ideals come up short. If you do this, you will be pitching straight into their wheelhouse, and they will love it.
Great hitters come to the pitch. Hitting is easy in theory, but hard in practice. Maybe your pitcher is struggling to give you the right questions, or maybe they're aiming for something specific that requires concessions by you. Maybe it requires you to pay attention, and piece together context clues inside of the setting to get a bigger picture of the questions you're being asked. Maybe it requires you to patiently wait while the atmosphere is built and NPCs talk and things slowly progress to the point that you will start being the one making decisions. Maybe it will hinge on you being willing to make a minor concession with your character - a piece of knowledge that they might have in a normal context but that you shelf because the event would be better if you did... but this is the essence of great hitting. So many of the hitter struggles I see come from not asking the question "how can I, with each decision, make this event better?". You don't want to just hit the ball! You want to hit it back to your pitcher. You want to reward them for giving you this pitch by giving them something to work with in turn. That means trying to track what's going on in the event, and rather than just passively consuming, turning your hit into an active return. How can you figure out the goals of this event and make it go from an 8 to a 10? That's the challenge of great hitting in collaborative storytelling.
Questions for you: Do you have a memorable question someone asked you? A time the pitch was just right? A pitch you’re especially proud of? What about a time you struggled to pitch that maybe in this light you see differently? Does this make you reconsider how you approach hitting in events?
The Change Arc, at its simplest manifestation, is all about the protagonist’s changing priorities. He realizes the reason he’s not getting what he wants in the plot is because either a) he wants the wrong thing or b) his moral methods for achieving what he wants are all wrong.
The Change Arc is all about the Lie Your Character Believes. His life may be horrible, or his life may seem pretty great. But, festering under the surface, is the Lie.
In order for your character to evolve in a positive way, he has to start out with something lacking in his life, some reason that makes the change necessary. He is incomplete in some way, but not because he is lacking something external. A person in a prison camp can still be entirely whole and balanced on the inside, while someone floating in a Malibu mansion’s swimming pool may be one miserable son of a gun.
Nope, your character is incomplete on the inside. He is harboring some deeply held misconception about either himself, the world, or, probably, both.
This sounds simple enough, and most people who have taken a writing class probably remember transformative arcs, but in the last year, I’ve realized just how critical this arc being front and center in a character is to receiving strong, directed, positive pitches. So often characters’ primary problems are, as this author describes them, “plot problems”. These problems they have are simple to resolve though if they lack a lie, because they lack the internal conflict that makes resolving them interesting. Beating a bad guy is simple and ineffective as a storytelling tool as a simple test of strength and power, but not a test of conviction or ideals.
As you sit down to write a character arc, I encourage you to ask this question: What is your character wrong about? Is it something in their methods? Is it something in their motives? What is the lie that your character believes? If you want to take your storytelling and transform it in ways you never thought possible, I encourage you to really put these things front and center. If you’re struggling to get good pitches, examine how you’re presenting your character’s lie and try to determine if it’s really apparent to your pitchers. If you’re struggling to pitch to someone, try to examine their character and figure out which ways they’re incomplete, and make that the basis for the question you ask them with your events.
I would genuinely argue that all good character eventing comes back to this lesson. I think there’s almost nothing more powerful than it, because there’s nothing more satisfying than a transformative arc. Your character should feel like a different person after a major arc concludes - and not just because they lost a good friend or watched good people die, those are external things - but because if they had the choice to do some of the things they did before, they genuinely might do them differently. That’s real growth! And it rocks. It makes your pitcher feel amazing to bring it out of your characters, and it feels amazing to see someone take that much interest in you to further your character’s story and growth.
Questions for you: What is the lie your character believes? Have they already completed a transformation arc, and are they into a new one now? What ways does your character reflect their lie that other players might notice and be empowered to pitch to it through?
III. Player Eventing: An Overview of my Lessons
Player events are intimidating. If you’re a new player coming to Thain like I was, it might be the hardest thing to get into the headspace of. You see all these set dressing tools, all these NPC creation tools, and you wonder to what extent you’re empowered to tell a story. It feels like somehow the line here is just blurry between player and Dungeon Master, and that’s because in a lot of ways it is! There's a lot to talk about relating to running good player events, and a lot I still have to learn. I admire people who can run them to an immense degree, and am constantly trying to figure out just what it is that they're doing. Even when we talk, it feels like the answers elude even them: "I'm just telling a story!" But I have a broken categories brain, and that's not answer enough for me... So let’s talk about types of player events that I’ve discovered this year, real quick:
-The One-off: Wildly underused, but generally beloved, the one-off is just a small event in which you give players some kind of classic D&D encounter. Maybe you quickly toss together a VFX+Placeable driven puzzle, maybe they resolve combat with a /duel for a little extra RP gravy, or maybe you release that monster-catcher’d boss you reskinned on them and turn it into an epic showdown after they get three riddles wrong. The one-off rarely rises to the level of a personal pitch, but it doesn’t always have to! Things happening in the world makes it come to life! Thain is an ambiguously ancient setting and discovery is the heart of these stories. You can always add to someone’s external pressures through an event like this, and get a solid pitch in.
-The Light Pitch: Maybe you aren’t ready to embark on a full fledge explorative arc with somebody, but you want to figure out what they’re about. You need to ask some simple questions about them to get at the heart of whatever arc they’re currently exploring with their character. You pull them aside, and you chug those invis pots, you do a little setup, and you run a totally separate scenario from yourself. You’re not in it! You’re just controlling it. This is the “Light pitch”. Maybe you want to know if a character values life over coin, so you have them come across bandits terrorizing a small group of woodcutters, who offer to bring them in on the cut. Maybe you know some things already and you want to know to what extent a player values one life over another, so you frame the event to learn the answer to that. These light pitches are great One-offs that are directive, for getting a sense OOCly of what kinds of pitches might be best suited for the other player.
-The Explorative Arc: You find a character whose goals feel like they contrast with your own character's goals through light pitches. Maybe this person bears a heavy burden of power and is waffling with how to use it, and your character is a manipulator looking for power. You might structure a series of events in which you try to draw in, manipulate, convince this person to use their powers for your ends. You might pressure them in what ways they won't use their power with hard questions about what they're giving up by having those ideals- people who could be saved if they would use them in this way. This is sort of the archetypal player event: You get something for your own character’s story, and at the same time contribute to another person’s. It takes planning, patience, and often lots of coordination with the other person.
-The Worldbuilder: This is the forbidden event type. Don’t tell anyone I told you that you could do this… but Thain is a crazy ass place where people will just let you make stuff up about the world, and it’s real. If you don’t believe me, just ask Corlupi: If you believe something is real, in this bizarre Never-neverland, it is, and we all just decide to agree it is because (See: Good hitting) we want to come to the pitch! We want it to be real because it’s more interesting if it is!
Now don’t get me wrong: There are things that are on-setting and things that aren’t. There are things that are spoken for, and there are things that aren’t. You can’t write Bargus and the Steinkreis Army, and you probably shouldn’t write about Bargus’ long lost sister unless you really understand the setting well… but you can absolutely explore your own factions within factions. You can make a group of corrupt guards in Greenvale, you can create a racist elf league in Greenvale, you can make a bunch of poor drug users in Greenvale (seriously, please help me think of Greenvale as interesting.).
This event is saved for last because it takes a lot of work. It takes being willing to do solid setups, big payoffs, and to have a strong cast of NPCs that you develop over many events… Chief of all, it takes knowing the setting, and events that struggle to reflect parts of the setting make a lot of questions that they don’t answer very well. It means really knowing your stuff, often having a broader dialogue first to be sure that you understand what parts of the world might feel appropriate or inappropriate... And that takes a lot of work to do. It takes humility, and patience, but everything I've seen on Thain cries out for people to still try to do it, because done right, this type of event isn’t asking one player a question. It’s asking the world a question, about itself, and inviting players to come and contribute to the answer.
Questions for you: What kinds of player events have you experienced that might not be on here? Does seeing them categorized give you ideas through which to approach eventing if you’ve been avoiding it lately? Do you have a favorite type of event to engage in, or a type that you generally avoid for some reason?
Registered Member #24041
Joined: 4:19:01 am GMT 01/24/17
Posts: 2213
I've been percolating this post for a while and this seems as good a place as any to drop it:
How to have a successful player event
In the past, I've written about the mechanics of player eventing at length (see: -Clickedy-,) and I think Forgiver's post above is a good introduction to the philosophy of player events- what to consider when you're trying to decide what story to tell. This post then will focus on the third aspect of it- how to actually do the thing.
For context, I've run or co-run probably north of 200 player events, between Nature Night, Necro Night, Soterya events, Bamaeus events, Melphaecto/Iron City events, Legebriewyn events, etc. Some of those events have been epic-scale sprawling stories that took place over months, and some were 15-minute events that I set up 5 minutes before the other person got to where the event was. Some of them have resulted in players telling me after the fact that the event shaped how they thought of their character and helped them to explore a new story angle they hadn't considered before, and some of them fell completely flat and all involved were glad when it was over. I've learned a few things on this list the hard way. I do want to make clear that everything I'm saying here is based on my personal experience, not as a hard-and-fast rule. With that being said-
Before the Event
About 3/4 of the work of a player event happens before the event starts. This is something I see a lot of players, particularly those new to eventing, struggle with. Keep this in mind as you start planning your own events.
-You should plan to announce your event at least 24 hours in advance, unless it's a recurring event (ie: every Tuesday at 7 we do an event). Thain players are busy, and people can't come to things if they don't know about them far enough in advance to plan around them.
-Announce your event in multiple places. At bare minimum, you should put it on the forums and on the events thread in discord. Some people only check one or the other, so you will miss them if you don't post in both places. Announcing it ingame is also good.
-Decide who your audience is for the event. Is it one person? A group? Anyone who is interested? This will help you think about your pitches for those individuals (see Forgiver's post above for more on this), but it will also help you determine the scope of your event and how complicated your scheduling is going to be. If you can't think of an audience for an event, it may be a sign that it's not a good time for the event. This doesn't mean it's a bad event, just that the current crop of characters may not be a good fit for it.
-Don't be afraid to message people ingame or on discord to see if they would be interested in your event. Work with them to find a schedule that works for everyone involved.
-Determine how the event fits in with your character's profile. I won't cover too much of the same ground as Forgiver did above, but in general, especially if you are just starting out with player eventing, player events should not be about your character, but they should fit in with your character's profile. What I mean by that is a good player event is more about the other people in the event than it is about you. That's not to say your character won't grow/change as part of the event- but others should have the bulk of those opportunities, and you should design your events specifically to give those characters those opportunities. When I say a character's profile, what I mean is that your character running the event should have some reason to be involved in the event. Theoretically I could have run Necro Night events on someone like Bamaeus, who is not at all a necromancer, but it would have been very odd and out of theme for him.
-Decide how complicated your setup is going to be. There is absolutely no reason you need to have a mega-complicated placeable setup, but if you do decide to go all out, keep in mind that for any DM requests like instancing or special placeables will need to have a DM available. Don't wait until the last minute to ask!
-Decide your event's scope. Is this event meant to be a one-off, as described above, or is it meant to lead into other events? Based on that answer, figure out where a natural cutoff point for the event would be. When the time comes to run the event, stick to this cutoff point, even if people are willing and able to continue past it. You'll be happier for it down the line when you are able to plan out the next event in the series rather than having to improvise it in the moment. Also, your scope should not include DM intervention. Do not leave your events hanging because you're waiting for a staff member to pick them up.
-When you set up the event, try to think of how someone who doesn't know the event's full story is going to see it. Is the place you're holding the event full of distractions (ie: extra placeables, NPCs, etc.?) that are going to throw players off? If so, unless those are specifically there to be red herrings, get rid of them or find a different place. In player events, players will assume that everything they see is part of the event, even if you don't mean it to be, because they will assume you have deliberately set up the environment that way. Help people focus on your story by only including things that are relevant to it. If your event would be helped by having an area without the normal spawns, please contact a DM to help set that up for you.
Once you have identified your audience, decided your event's scope, and set up your area, you're ready to run an event!
Running the Event
Comparatively, running a player event is the easy part. If you've set your event up well, you should know by now more or less who will be showing up, what the conclusion of the event looks like, and how the players will get there, and what the environment you will use will be. With that said, there are still a few things to be aware of:
-Try to start your event on time. Personally, I tend to give a max of 10-15 minutes as a "grace period" where I soft-start the event by explaining the premise to people to give folks running a few minutes late a chance to get there. I would not recommend waiting more than about 15 minutes for someone, unless the event is specifically for that one person, and they are the only other player in the event. Respect the time of those people who arrived on time, and when the latecomer does show up, feel free to OOC fill them in on what they've missed so far.
-If a character arrives mid-event, do your best to immediately give them a job to do. Nothing derails an event faster than someone showing up and asking for an explanation of the last 2 hours of plot. (And corollary, if you are a player showing up late to an event, don't do this! Accept that there are going to be some things you've missed, and try to figure out what you can as the story progresses.)
-If players aren't "getting it", don't panic. Give them hints or clues if you can, and remember that players don't have access to the same amount of information about the event as you, so what may seem blindingly obvious to you isn't necessarily going to be for them. It's ok to let people try things and have them not work. Players need to learn the logic of the event (what kinds of things work/don't work within the event) just as much as they need to learn the story of the event.
-If a player is being disruptive (which thankfully rarely happens), don't be afraid to PM them and ask them to knock it off. If you aren't comfortable with that, or if the problem continues, message a staff member. Running a player event is a voluntary thing that people are doing primarily for the benefit of others. We want to encourage people to want to do that.
-Remember: You control what happens in your event. You control when it ends, where it goes, who wins and who loses, which solutions work, and which ones don't. This is a lot of power! It is important that you wield that power respectfully, or people will begin to avoid your events. This doesn't mean the players always have to win, or that you can't say no to something you don't want to have in your event- but it does require some level of give and take. Even when players lose or the story doesn't end how they'd hoped, give them ways to either fix things, change things, or learn things based on what they experienced.
-Finally, bribe people. There is no high-minded concept here, no philosophy of social engagement. People are more likely to come to your events if you give them cool shit as an event reward. Doesn't have to be every event, doesn't need to be anything amazing- but if you're sitting on a hoard of random items, player events are a great way to spread those around, especially if you take the time to customize them to the event and/or character who will be getting them.
After the Event
-If the event was a one-off, you're done! if it was part of a series, letting people know an approximate timeframe to look for the next event will be helpful (ie: next week, next month, etc.) Keep people updated as much as you can. If there are lingering questions or concerns about the event, start a dialogue with the player(s) and see if you can come to an understanding- don't let little things discourage you from continuing to run events though!
-When you are ready, get feedback from someone you trust. Try not to take it too personally when people tell you how you might do things better in the future.
-Watch how others do events. Steal their techniques. You don't need to re-invent the wheel every time you do an event. Scratch has been doing big group events (with Nature Night and Section 6) for years- go to something like that and see how Scratch does it. Varmar has been doing these insanely detailed personalized events for characters- ask them for tips on how they learn enough about a character to feel comfortable doing a scene for them. Players on Thain are pretty open about how they do things, especially if they think you'll help add something new and exciting for them to play in too!
Conclusion
Player events don't have to be massive affairs to be successful. You can tell stories on Thain with as few as one other person and have it be something incredibly meaningful for both of you. Don't feel like you have to learn every command or every technique all at once, either. The people running player events today certainly didn't. Hopefully though this gives people a bit of a "checklist" to start with their first events. As you do more, a lot of the things on this list will come naturally and you won't really need to think about them consciously- your event ideas will eventually shift to be things that can fit the player eventing style.
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
Extra thanks to Cuch for outlining a lot of this player eventing information. It's all fantastic, and the points are well outlined.
I'll bump this thread after a couple days of existence with my own takeaways on some of the questions I asked in my last post: Over the years on Thain we've had a number of threads like "What's your character's sunset goal", "What is your character's song", "What's your character's alignment (and why?)".
Today I'd like to ask, for anyone feeling like answering it: "What is your character's Lie that they Believe?"
I think this is a really productive question to think about, but also to just put out there in the wild. It's not always immediately apparent, and it can really help other people to get a sense of the kinds of pitches you want. I'll be happy to start here with my oldest active PC and my youngest:
-Cimbaeth's is a brand new PC. A Hamley Ranger gifted with the power to turn the tides of a cursed land by his faerie mother. The lie that he believes is that the future and survival of the world must be built on necessary sacrifices - both by himself, and by others, whether they want it or not. He does not realize that the world he could be making in this way might not be the kind he wants to leave behind.
-Ath'ragnoon is a Mind Flayer Darkener bent upon truly eliminating the vestiges of heroism upon the surface, so that he might finally shatter Arcana and create a world upon which the psionic Illithid take their rightful place as the greatest species in the world. His last arc just concluded, and I am searching for his next major one! In his 21 event, he finally came to believe that the emotions he had gained through his repeated interactions with surfacers had not made him weaker the way that the Elder Brain had believed, but made him stronger: Both more motivated and powerful, and in his understanding of ways that he could break the hearts and minds of those he had come to hate. By becoming himself idealistic and trusting, and having that trust shattered, he has learned a of a greater pain that he can inflict upon the minds of others than any mind flayer before him: The pain of despair.
Do your characters have a prominent Arc they are engaged in? What is the Lie that they believe? What is it about this world that they just don't have right yet?
Registered Member #24078
Joined: 3:40:59 am GMT 05/14/17
Posts: 1715
"What is your character's Lie that they Believe?"
Morton: "Save the dead and the cursed, for unlike the living, they cannot help themselves " Morton has lived (and died for) this lie and likely will never come to terms with it before he finally meets his own final destruction. Although it hasn't changed, he has, particularly in undeath. Even in life, he cared more about the undead than the living, but the longer he chased this lie, the darker and less concerned he became for the living, ultimately leaving him a cold, undead blight of a thing that is trying still to save the dead before the madness of undeath takes him.
Slyph: "If someone knows you, they know best how to hurt you." Slyph is a changeling that wears many false lives but goes to extreme (and sometimes murderous) lengths to keep his true identity secret. This makes for interesting encounters for when others do learn his secret and he is caught having to look more closely at the lie he has lived by.
! Registered Member #20
Joined: 8:30:40 am GMT 02/25/04
Posts: 7123
The lie Nicolette believes is that it's right for her to be free.
The White Rose strongly holds two ideas:
*I want to be free to make my own choices.
*I want to use Nimmeril's Light to do good and help others.
Nicolette is the White Rose. A free spirit, someone who does not look to be controlled. When Kallista tried to control her, she turned against Kallista. When Bargus tried to control her, she turned against Bargus. She does not trust people easily, and institutions barely at all, often with good reason as most institutions she has interacted with have tried to harm her. Nicolette wants to save her people by finding their true lord.
Mira is the White Rose. A devout spirit, she was taken in willingly as a child by the Flames of Andarus, a questionable order of Andarus priests and knights. Mira is willingly tortured by the Flames to produce healing blood which is used to heal citizens of Steinkreis and push the Flames favored political ends. This treatment causes her to be scarred and sickly, but Mira does not care about the pain. Mira wants to help others and live life for their sake.
Mira leads a terrible agonizing life with the Flames. Yet Mira is helping people every day, while Nicolette is roaming the countryside looking for someone who might not even exist.
And so, one part of the White Rose would argue:
"You were given this divine power to help people, and you're obviously failing to do that. You refused to serve your mother. You refused to serve Steinkreis. You refused to serve the elves. Every institution that comes along, you find a reason not to trust. Instead, you've left your home on some wild selfish plan no one else thinks is even possible, putting yourself and the light in danger with every step you take. You could be helping sick and dying people in Steinkreis or a hundred other places every day. You could be protecting their armies. People are dying right now because of you, and what you don't want to admit is that they're right to try to imprison you. Every day you refuse to endure pain at the hands of the Flames or the council, more Kreisian blood is on your hands."
And the other side would of her argue -
"Look - we've tried this. Every single person who's tried to take control of Nimmeril's light away from us turned out to be a monster. Mother was a monster. The Steinkreis nobility were perfectly happy to use us for their own gain while doing nothing for their people. There's no trust to be had there and you know it full well. Every time its mattered, we've known better than the people who wanted to control us. If we'd done our duty and served Bargus instead of going our own way, the rift might have won. We have to keep control. We have to guide ourselves, because no one else will guide us. We can't trust any of these people with our power. They've shown us that over and over."
These ideas oppose each other, and only one can survive.
Hundbert Registered Member #293
Joined: 1:22:43 am GMT 10/06/04
Posts: 3123
"What is your character's Lie that they Believe?"
Azhag firmly believes that he's the good guy in his own story, and even good guys make the occasional mistake.
He has an ideal in his head about what he calls "The Greater Good" and it's his moral compass, guiding him towards most of the more important decisions he makes. The problem is that his moral compass is badly misaligned, and it frequently causes him to act in accordance with "ends justify means". Overall, he does do more good than evil in the grand balance of things, but he often considers, suggests, and even implements courses of action that would be, to 90% of people, morally reprehensible. Extremely prejudiced, slow to trust, and short-fused, Azhag's methods for bringing about his "Greater Good" have consisted of inciting riots, poisoning key individuals, and straight up, good old-fashioned murder.
Registered Member #24041
Joined: 4:19:01 am GMT 01/24/17
Posts: 2213
The lie that Bamaeus believes is that reason and logic can explain matters of magic and faith.
The lie that Mors believed for a long time was that if he could just master how to create and preserve the undead, that he could bring his brother back. Now the lie that he believes is that he can control Morton's increasingly-homicidal tendencies.
The lie that Legebriewyn believes is that his pact is with a fey of Feywood.
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
It's a new year! I hope you had a good holiday break, and if you’re like me, you’re easing back into the responsibilities of writing after a long binge of Netflix, other video games, and new media that have flooded your brain with new ideas! A new year also means I should probably get around to round two of the Writer's Room, where I muse upon various things that I've noticed, that I've learned, and that I've come to realize while playing and writing on Thain. As always my own work is a work in process! I’m not here to preach, even if sometimes it sounds like a lecture - it’s just a leftover habit of a former teacher that I tend to externalize my own lessons as lesson plans. Come on in, if you’re like me and dying to pull apart the weird little guts of what we do, and let’s talk Character!
Character is everyone’s favorite part of role play, but I think character has always been historically hard for me. I’m an alt-itis kind of player, someone who gets into ideas really easily, loves the sketching phase of making and concepting character ideas, and tends to get frustrated and spooked when it comes time to actually ink, and all that energy fades away to firm details. If you’ve ever known a traditional or digital media artist, you know this struggle! It’s so hard to retain all the fun energy, so hard to pick the specific lines you want to keep when a character starts getting firm…
I fill Google documents with ideas, backstory, tons of details about my character’s motivations and thoughts… but as they role play more, and become more firm, it becomes a challenge to get those ideas into the game where other people can see them! So I want to start today by talking about how we can bring internal conflict forward in player events, creating relationships for characters to build on that make an internal conflict into a future external one. I'll be using some of my own recent eventing experience in this as an illustration. Then I want to talk about a hitting realization I made this year that has helped me to always fail forward into my stories, rather than abandoning them when the going gets tough and sticky.
As always, we're all a work in progress! Feel free to add your own contributions to these!
Character Writing: Bringing Internal Conflict Forward Through Player Events, and Why You Shouldn't Skimp on Followup
In the past couple months, I've started a new character story for a character named Cimbaeth de'Cliodhna. I knew from the outset who I wanted Cimbaeth to be roughly - I embarked on a top-down treatment of Hamley as a place he might live, where I might explore interesting social dynamics for characters who weren't from there, and where I could start to tell his own character story. Cimbaeth is a person who is conflicted about how to do right. In his forums backstory, we know that he is a child of an Archfey and a Hamley Farmer, living now in a town of people who he feels personal responsibility toward, who has grown up with and loves - but who the promise of his long life and underlying fae nature consistently force him to struggle with the value of. He has secretly made a pact with his own mother, gaining a rare curse-breaking affinity at the cost of his life, or the lives of others. Cimbaeth's central character conflict surrounds his desire to do good for a future he will likely never get to share in, and what prices he's willing to pay to succeed.
Cimbaeth's internal conflict is going to be about a man trying to side with his humanity, but whose most effective method in getting what he wants is to sacrifice not himself, but others' lives to pay the cost of his spell-breaking. So how do we get his internal conflict out into the world? I started by identifying some character audience members that I could easily begin to build this story with. I'm good friends out of game with Kira and Cuchuwyn, and I know their characters Nicolette and Legebriewyn very well. I start thinking of ways I can use these characters to start getting my own story into the world, while helping them continue theirs:
-I know that Nicolette shares some relative history with Cimbaeth that it will be helpful to get off the forums and into the world! She too has a haughty, dangerous, impulsive, and alien mother. She too bears a burden of power. These are similarities. She's also an idealist: she has made up her mind to be willing to die for others by bearing Nimmeril's light. She's a free spirit, someone who bristles at others bearing the cost of freedom. These are differences between them.
-I know that Legebriewyn hails from the Feywood, Hamley's bordering neighbor, and that he too is pacted to... something powerful and dangerous. He is willing to make sacrifices of others, even to imprison Nicolette, to keep his homeland safe. These are similarities to Cimbaeth. He's also a bit of an elven supremacist, and someone who gives up his own body readily to save his own people. These are differences between them.
In pitching to Nicolette, I want to focus on events that might bring these things to the front. Maybe it's a quiet fireside chat about her mother. Maybe it's a situation where Nicolette has to sacrifice part of her body for others. The events themselves don't have to be ringers. The after-events where the characters dissect what has happened are the magic moments - these are the moments Cimbaeth can articulate his own struggles in making the same choices Nicolette would. It's easy to give Nicolette a situation where I know we will make opposite choices, or similar choices, so that we can talk about them.
In pitching to Legebriewyn, I want to focus on events that might bring these things to the front. I might focus on situations where Legebriewyn might need to bear the cost of a ritual for others, where he might want to choose humans over elves, where he end up confronting Hamley's racism with his own. To make him really pop in these events, I want to emphasize how alien he is to those in Hamley and how the similarities of their cultures (a world that focuses more clearly on its own ethno-groups) might feel difficult to deal with. I want Hamley's selfishness and fear to be a crooked mirror for Elven racism and superiority. This gives weight to Cimbaeth's choices, and it gives Legebriewyn ample things to react to and internalize. In the after-events, Cimbaeth and Legebriewyn might relate which choices they would make similarly, why they might choose to behave in certain ways. Their dialogue likely centers on justifying their own beliefs to one another, relating where possible and disagreeing where possible. This makes these internal conflicts tangible things in the world to someone.
This is a practice that I've related across the board in my storytelling. Narrative storytelling is telling the story of a character. It’s an exploration of questions surrounding the human condition. It’s triumphing over the tragedies of the human spirit - the failures and the foibles. It's getting who a person is, their headspace, their internal conflict out of a google doc where I concepted it, and into the real world through events that I ran from the player client. It often builds into larger ongoing plot elements, but can work just as well as a one-off.
It's important to understand that in the above it's really not the event itself that is even that important: The event is the impetus for decisions that will create character moments. The character moments themselves often happen in a separate event later. I've only learned recently how important it is not to neglect these after-events. The big traumatic awesome event you run is great, but following up is where so much of the real character story can happen. It often serves to hook into another pitch, continuing your own story forward.
Following up on the events you ran so that you can shake out the important parts and use them to your overall purpose of telling a narrative story is the central gain, it's the metaphorical XP points for killing the dragon. It's the food and sleep that give you your gains after a day in the gym. Your events don't have to slay. You can have crash and burn ones. I ran one with Miggen, Chaotic Drow, and Kira the other week in which I was pausing every fifteen minutes to run out of the room. Food poisoning! I was borderline upside down, and I knew it showed. The event was not well paced, often failed to explain itself, and struggled not to give characters a lot of binary choices. But the after-events that have followed up from the event were still immensely useful, because the event's premise and what it was designed to show carried off well enough that the after-event just required me to iterate on what parts I wanted to use again.
This is the challenge of getting your character into the world: It’s weirdly inorganic to just walk up to someone and say “My mother is a fairy, I have a cursed arm, and sometimes I have to kill people”. It also breaks the pacing of an action scene or a major event to pull out your fairy-arm and start sucking up curses while expositing what it is. The balance of this is what I called “Baking the pie and then eating it” the other day while talking about this realization. You bake the pie with an event - it doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be elaborate. It’s the prompt for your characters to talk about themselves. A dark woodland full of terrors and danger... Then you get to eat the pie at your next meeting. “There’s something you should know… In the forest, when we were being chased by that thing…”
You bake the pie. Then you eat the pie. It’s delicious. Is this A-B pattern helpful to you at all in formulating how you will get your character off the paper and into the game? Do you have another technique for how you get all those important little parts of a narrative character story out into the world? Let me know!
The Most Sincere Pumpkin in the Patch: Why I Cringe at “My Character Would Never”
The holidays are behind us, but I watched every peanuts special in spite of Apple putting them in paywall jail this year. I have a two year old, and I have a powerful pull of nostalgia, what can I say! During the Halloween special, Linus is convinced that a mash-up of Santa and Halloween, “The Great Pumpkin”, will come to visit and bring toys to good boys and girls - but only if you sit all night in the most sincere pumpkin patch. What a “Sincere pumpkin patch is” is just a play-word for believing in the Pumpkin without doubt or fail, but I love the idea of the most sincere pumpkin in the patch is something we wait up all night for to no avail. I think about it a lot as a phrase. There’s something about authenticity in Role Play that is extremely attractive to us, and I have found that as often as it can be useful, it’s often also a pitfall. I promise there’s a point to Sincere Pumpkins, but I’ll have to come back to it.
It’s very easy when we start with a character to develop their voice and their archetype. When we build an archetype, it’s often the most informational part of our process - maybe it’s “Warrior of the Light”, or “Defender of the Weak”. Maybe it’s “Opportunist Rogue” or “Cruel Dragonkin”. We start with these qualities because they’re recognizable - they’re the brand on the side of the pepsi can… but they’re not the ingredients. Pepsi isn’t the ingredient to Pepsi. The ingredients to Pepsi are clearly crushed up pixie sticks and crap. Drink Coke, it tastes way better.
The art of writing, of all writing, is the exploration of the human condition. It’s what we love, and it’s why we’re here. Humans are complex, and strange. Every writer is on some level wanting to explore the human condition, even when we’re writing an elf, or a Dwarf, or a monster (note that I’ve mentioned elves twice here). If your monster has no human condition, your likely narrative journey is bringing them to the human condition in some way. If your character is full of the human condition, full of emotions and feelings and conflicting motivations, you will never get stuck - you will always have ideas.
This was the lesson that I had to learn as I stopped cycling through my endless alt-itis this last year. A renewed focus on what being a human means, on how difficult it can be to make the right choices, and on how failure is so often transformative. So often I got caught up in difficult choices, and when I felt stuck, I just stopped and jumped to a new character. The solution I Found is that humans are not a flow chart. We’re not a binary system of choices. Whenever I found myself in a situation where I thought “Yeah, but my character would never”, I realized that I was ignoring the human condition I needed to be writing about, and focusing solely on the archetype I’d started with.
Now of course, there are certainly things that you can do that will cause your character to act “out of character”. Things that will break their archetype. This isn’t even always a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to be something you’re willing to do! But when faced with a choice, so often I hear people say “That’s not what my character would do” as if there exist only two choices, and my great realization of the last year is that, if your character is a person, they actually have many choices.
When I’m pulled over by a police officer for speeding, I have many choices. I’m not necessarily breaking character by choosing any one of them. There are many choices I am not likely to make. There are some choices that I would likely make that I would not ordinarily make, if circumstances motivated it. I’m a human, and my story can be tragic if circumstances call upon it to be - it can also be heroic, if that’s my angle. If you’re like me, the idea that you only have one given option or reaction to anything is born of the idea that you are, in absence of being thoughtful, trying to play your character entirely on impulse. You’ve convinced yourself that what is “in character” is whatever you most immediately and viscerally want for the character. You are letting the archetype drive, while the human watches. This is just not how humans work though - at least not the ones who live for a long time. My impulses are a very real part of me, but they're not the parts that usually get to make the decisions I make in any given moment.
The idea that only our immediate impulses are our characters, because they are somehow our most sincere reaction, is a narrative trap: characters who are people can and should be able to react in many, many ways to something. Sometimes we have to stretch what that might be to come to a pitch better. Sometimes we have to compromise. There are no awards for your reaction being the most sincere one, but there are many rewards for your reaction being the one that makes your scene (and your character’s future!) better.
Don’t dead-end yourself just to be the most sincere pumpkin in the patch (I told you we’d come back to it!). The true trick that I found to getting stuck less is to find the one in a million possible reactions that is the best thing for your character’s overall journey and story, while still being true to the moment, and do that. There are thousands of hours of character storytelling for you to make sincere choices, but some decisions - especially big ones - require you to be driving and steering your narrative, even if it means taking a less sincere choice. Your immediate impulse might not be the right one for the moment, and it might also be the one that feels best in the moment, but leads to dead-ends down the road. Mindful decision making will get you further, if you’re like me and tend to get stuck on your characters often, try to be engaged and observant for when those big moments come - I’ve found that sometimes they’re deceptively small looking.
This concludes this round of the Writer’s Room. Do you have times that in hindsight you know you should have made different choices? Do you feel differently - that you have character moments that you’re proud of that could have only come from being totally sincere to the moment? I’d love to hear about it if so! Thanks for reading down to the bottom if you made it here. Here’s to hoping for a great discussion, and another Writer’s Room prompt soon.
I think I'd like to respond a bit personally to your "My character would never" section since it hits one of my characters pretty directly. I think you've done a good job of putting to paper the thoughts and struggles that go on in my own head when I sit down and say "will this action compromise what integrity I think this character has," and therefore might believe I'm stuck in railroading a PC a very specific way. Garrik was the perfect example of this. I can think of the hours I've spent playing solo or just standing around psuedo afk because there were scenes/events going on, or groups in certain spots because he would either adamantly never hang out with them due to affiliation, or the scene would end in a PvP bloodbath that would just entirely disrupt any RP that was going on.
Playing a monster hating zealot, there were countless internal debates I had about what OOC decisions I wanted to make for Garrik just for the sake of having any level of RP with anyone outside of his immediate trusted group, because at the end of the day, playing singlepayer on a multiplyer server just wasn't fun. If I truly wanted Garrik to stay pure to the ideals and standards I'd have set for him, I'd write a book. Some things are just impossible to do on a PW RP server. With no perma-death, heroes and villains alike come back to new scenes. The dead don't stay dead, and you have to learn how to get over that hump of "If I want to keep playing with certain people, what changes do I need to make to add to the scene." How do you best compromise on a low population server where you know you're going to bump into the same characters and carry over PC conflict? Like you mentioned above, sometimes you have to stretch what your character stands for in order to be able to get not only a better scene, but a chance at character growth from it. That doesn't mean you have to forsake your character's beliefs, but that does mean having to realize there is more than one decision to make for any given scenario, and you have the power to steer it in the direction that will utmost help you still stay true to the type of PC you want to play. I'll provide a few examples of where I've allowed myself to hold back on Garrik for the sake of a story.
1). Rhandum/Saelor(it may not have been Saelor at the time, so I apologize) approach Garrik and Celestine (I think there was one more, it happened long ago so again I'm sorry for my lapse of memory) and say they have intel on the old Shadow Guard and need the Blood Guard's help to investigate. Garrik could very well have said piss off, no compromising with monsters, and I could have walked away and logged off for the night (and believe me, there have been instances where I've done such a thing before). The way Alan pitched the story was that the Guard was suffering in another plane/time of existance, and only Rhandum could get them there. So I give big props to Alan for allowing me an angle in which Garrik would actually consider being in the same vicinity with a monster. Now it came down to "Do I stick to Garrik's zealotry and try to murder Rhandum and Saelor? Or do I explore Garrik's side of refusing to leave a fellow man behind?" I chose the latter, because this was a choice that Garrik would still make that wouldn't make me question him as a PC, while also allowing the story to continue. And then tried to kill them after. There was absolutely an OOC influence because I know how much work went into setting up this event on Alan's side, but I think there will always be an OOC influence. We're here to collaboratively tell stories in the same sandbox.
2). Varmar had invited me to have Garrik present in one of Saelor's dream setups, and I flip flopped back and forth on this so much before finally committing because it was another direct MPC interaction. And again, I have to give massive props to Varmar for presenting it in the way that it was because it allowed us both to have a conversation as our characters without the scene getting derailed. I didn't know it when I entered, but Saelor actually had herself in a cage with what she wove, which allowed me to make another set of decisions: Kill the monster, be done with it, and log out for the night, or hold back and be somewhat apprehensive and allow the cage to be the device that let conversation happen (and then kill the monster if it lead to it). Instead of zerging for the kill, I let the scene play out from there.
I don't regret either of these decisions because even though Garrik is 90% attack on sight, the way in which these scene/encounters were designed allowed me to sit back and contemplate a different set of ideals that I know Garrik stands for without compromising what I believed in him as a character, combined with the fact someone had reached out to tell a collaborative story. He's also human, and a deeply flawed character. And flawed characters should be allowed to make mistakes that they come to ICly regret, it helps them grow and keeps them from getting stale. If I wanted to sit alone in the most sincere pumpkin patch, I would have never experienced these narratives. You can make compromises while still being true to your character, and I will say there are no shortage of times Garrik has wandered into something/been invited to somewhere and ruined someone's day where I have not made those compromises, stayed true to his zealotry, and the scene actually turned out well because it represented/got the point across of what type of character he is (not to say there haven't also been massive failures because of it). There's a time and a place, and it's all collaborative experience we learn from.
There is one moment that sticks out to me I waffle back and forth on, in which I feel could have made a better in game decision that would have made better setting/lore sense, but it would have been at the cost of narrative experience of other players. Specifically this was related to the Blood Guard raid on the crossroads to take back the Trade from the Sons of Fhelkorn. BG NPCs would handle the surface fighting (DMside), and Garrik was to take the adventurers through the tunnels (player side of the plot). There were monstrous players that were involved that wanted to assist in getting the Trade back and asked to help. Garrik could (and should) have easily said piss off as a BG. Instead I took the OOC route of accepting the help, and warning them to stay outside of the range of his axe, because again, it's collaborative play, and we're all here for the narrative. Would people have hated me if I said no and stuck to my IC guns? Who knows - probably not, my guess is they would have joined anyway and stayed out of Garrik's way. The biggest reason why I waffle on this choice these days is because I feel like it didn't appropriatey set up the way the newly formed BG faction should have been portrayed. But honestly, it's small potatoes these days, and things have been fleshed out over time.
I guess this is alot of words to say I agree with what you wrote, and no one is doing a disservice to their PC or character design if you attempt to explore certain angles or another RP route, even though it's not the first choice you think of. You'll have successes and you'll have failures, sometimes things just don't work out and that's alright. I wish I did a better job of communicating to people OOCly when that happened in the past, but I've found more often than not people just want to be part of a story, and will always work with you to provide a way to smooth things out to where decisions (and consequences!) will line up to help things make sense to their own PCs. Ultimately, you have to get out of the pumpkin patch, because the only one hurting from it is yourself.
[ The Island of Thain ]
Writer's Room
