Roleplaying gaming material -> fiction?
Peter Knutsen
Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
aspects as character creation and world building. And the writing of
SF has more in common with roleplaying gaming than with the writing
of ordinary fiction.
I know that Mary Kuhner is a roleplaying gamer, but it wouldn't
surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
Below are some of my own thoughts, but I'd appreciate opinions
and feedback. (If I didn't, I wouldn't have posted)
One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
convenient for the story.
Back to pitfalls, I don't believe it's a good idea to take
the events of an actual roleplaying gaming session (or a
whole campaign) and turning it into a story. Roleplaying
gamer characters are likely to spend much time trying out
solutions to the problem they face, before they find the
right one, and much of it is uninteresting afterwards.
It should be possible to turn an entire roleplaying
gaming campaign into a story, if you edit out a lot of
the silly and boring stuff, though. But me, the only
thing I'm doing is to share NPCs and world between
roleplayïng and fiction, PCs are never featured in the
written stories, although their deeds might become
rumours.
A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
player characters might end up being so skilled and
influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
and much less ambitious.
You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion. You never know
whether the player characters are going to travel five
hundred miles north or two thousand miles east, so you'd
better define all the cultures on the continent, and make
a few notes about what's on nearby continents. It's the
same for NPCs as for cultures, player characters might
ask all sorts of sneaky world-related questions when they
meet NPCs, such as "who is the most powerfull illusionist-
wizard in this realm?". The GM can get away with just
pulling names out of a hat, for a short while, but in the
long term it's odd that NPCs suddenly pops out of nowhere
as soon as the PCs asks about them, while they won't have
any past history or deeds attributed to them. So a good
setting designed for natural-style roleplaying gaming
will contain a large amount of important NPCs.
I don't know if this is *necesarry* for natural roleplaying
gaming, but the world I've made has several natural sources
of conflict, multiple hot spots. So if I some day should
want to write a story about trade conflict, or the
exploration of newly settled lands, I already have areas
where these are the issues. So there's things going on
everywhere, and that makes the world feel dynamic rather
than static. Many fiction worlds, with those of fairy tales
being extreme examples, seems very static, and when I read
I prefer stories set in dynamic worlds.
Having to stick to a set of "rules" might sound like it
restricts the creativity of the author. But while the
most popular roleplaying gaming rules system (AD&D)
imposes silly restrictions on what characters can do
(anybody who uses wizard magic automatically becomes
*literally* incapable of picking up a sword), a good
high-quality rules system never tells what characters
can and can't do, only how (well) they can do it.
--
Peter Knutsen
Pyrephox
>What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
>gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
Hehehe, I've thought about doing this many a time; mostly because I've got a
half-a-dozen well fleshed out campaign worlds that never saw the light of day
on my hard drive.
However, the only thing I've ever been able to do is just set a story in that
gaming world, and I couldn't really imagine using an actual campaign. PCs are
just too unpredictable and (IME) anachronistic to fit well in most stories.
However, I find it does help occassionally to run a plot point for a WIP
through the campaign, and see how real people handle it. If they catch on
immmediately when it was supposed to be a stumper, I can consider rewriting it
to make the confusion of the story character more realistic. The converse,
unfortunately, is not always the case.
>But while the
>most popular roleplaying gaming rules system (AD&D)
>imposes silly restrictions on what characters can do
>(anybody who uses wizard magic automatically becomes
>*literally* incapable of picking up a sword), a good
>high-quality rules system never tells what characters
>can and can't do, only how (well) they can do it.
>
D&D 3E actually goes a long way towards fixing this. It's a *much* better,
cleaner system than the previous two editions. Now Wizards can pick up weapon
proficiencies of pretty much any type, if they're willing to spend the Feat on
that, instead of on nifty spell stuff.
Pyrephox
www.geocities.com/pyrephox18/
----The Phox Den----
"She can't remember a time when she felt needed,
If love was red, she was colorblind..."
-_To the Moon and Back_ Savage Garden
Peter Knutsen
Pyrephox wrote:
>
> >From: Peter Knutsen pe...@knutsen.dk
>
> >What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
> >gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
>
> Hehehe, I've thought about doing this many a time; mostly because I've got a
> half-a-dozen well fleshed out campaign worlds that never saw the light of day
> on my hard drive.
I'm mostly a one-campaign-world type of person. I started
creating this world (described briefly further down) two
years ago, and I expect it to have potential for several
long roleplaying gaming campaigns, dozens of short stories
(maybe half of them bordering on novella length) and close
to half a dozen novels.
I.e. it'll last a decade, maybe two.
> However, the only thing I've ever been able to do is just set a story in that
> gaming world, and I couldn't really imagine using an actual campaign. PCs are
> just too unpredictable and (IME) anachronistic to fit well in most stories.
True about anachronism.
"My" campaign world is actually medieval Europe with magic
added. So I'm trying to get a very old-fashioned atmosphere,
especially the way people think and behave. PCs have a
tendency to think about modern concepts that weren't invented
at all in 997 AD (and several others that had been forgotten
when Rome fell), and have personalities that are incon-
sistent with the time period. Or rather, it's possible to find
players that are good at getting into the period, but filling
a whole group with them is difficult. When my "Aerth" campaign
started I had four players, two excellent ones, one with
huge talent but since he's a newbie he isn't performing well
yet, and one without much talent. Unfortunately, I lost one
of the excellent ones due to scheduling problems. And he
was a lot better at getting into period than the other
"excellent" player (the remaining "excellent" player plays
a depressed and rather bland mercenary warrior. He's a
great tactician but not really interesting. The departed
one did a truly amusing Viking raider/boatbuilder, he was
a lot more proactive and extroverted which made his being
in-character more noticable)
Most roleplaying gaming in the fantasy genre does not
deal with medieval attitudes, but with a random mixture
of attitudes and concepts from numerous different periods:
Classical (Rome and Greece), Medieval (it *is* there, just
very polluted by the other four), Rennaissance, Old West
and Modern-day-USA. This has become the standard melting
pot culture of sword-and-sorcery worlds, and players will
assume that unless told otherwise, and even if told
otherwise they'll still often assume.
I think it's tolerable for roleplaying only, but if I were to
translate the actions of the player characters into fiction
it would loose odd, contrasted with the rest of the game
world. So I stick with NPCs for fiction, possibly with a
very rare single scene where you see a PC.
But as for unpredictability, why do you see that as a
problem? I think it would give more realism, provided
that the players are acting in character and not just
doing silly things because they're bored (which is not
the same as a character doing silly things because he
feels like it).
Another problem is skill use. In fiction, if a character
has a skill it always works. In most cases, this is
realistic (horseback riding is not tricky, I suppose, if
you know how to do it) but in others it's not (lock-
picking, to take a classical example). I'd like to
translate that to fiction, but I'm not sure how. I'm
worried that too much of "Protagonist tries [something]
but it doesn't work, protagonist tries [something else]
but it doesn't work, protagonist draws his sword and
solves his problem by going berzerk" would make the
story genuinely boring.
A compromise could be to assume that characters will
only make use of skills they're quite proficient with,
unless it's an emergency. The kind of protagonist I
pick for fiction writing tends to be like that, in most
cases, reluctant to risk loosing face by trying something
that might fail.
> However, I find it does help occassionally to run a plot point for a WIP
> through the campaign, and see how real people handle it. If they catch on
> immmediately when it was supposed to be a stumper, I can consider rewriting it
> to make the confusion of the story character more realistic. The converse,
> unfortunately, is not always the case.
How do you do that? Of course you have multiple campaign
world, I have only one (with a huge amount of detail), so
you can afford to dump strange things into one of your
worlds. I'm kinda sensitive in that area, both with
roleplaying and fiction, although with roleplaying, it's
always possible to declare that "the last session simply
didn't happen" or "it happened, but in an alternate
timeline". With fiction, once it gets written down and
published, you're stuck with it. I haven't gotten publi-
shed yet, but I'm carefull about what I write down in the
stories.
> >But while the
> >most popular roleplaying gaming rules system (AD&D)
> >imposes silly restrictions on what characters can do
> >(anybody who uses wizard magic automatically becomes
> >*literally* incapable of picking up a sword), a good
> >high-quality rules system never tells what characters
> >can and can't do, only how (well) they can do it.
> >
>
> D&D 3E actually goes a long way towards fixing this. It's a *much* better,
> cleaner system than the previous two editions. Now Wizards can pick up weapon
> proficiencies of pretty much any type, if they're willing to spend the Feat on
> that, instead of on nifty spell stuff.
Yes, 3E is much better than older D&Ds, but it's still not a
modern system. If I were to read a story that actually
followed the 3E rules (instead of ignoring them whenever
it's convenient, as I suspect most AD&D fiction does), I'd
keep trying to guess what character classes the characters
had. Not good. The rules system should be invisible, but
in any incarnation of D&D (save one with extensive house-
ruling) you're constantly aware of what your character
class(es) is(/are).
> Pyrephox
--
Peter Knutsen
Patricia C. Wrede
writes:
>Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
>at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
>the writing of fiction.
The subject comes around periodically; you just happen to be here
between periods.
>I know that Mary Kuhner is a roleplaying gamer, but it wouldn't
>surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
Sure, just like there are gardners. Nearly everybody does *something*
with their time off... :) I haven't done any for a while -- it takes too much
time and energy -- but I used to.
>What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
>gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
>One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
>system between the lines of the story.
That's not a pitfall of using gaming material; it's a pitfall of lack of
writing skill generally. You can say the same thing about, oh,
research -- there are plenty of authors whose in-depth research
shows more than is good for the story.
The real trouble with translating gaming material into a book or story
is that the elements that make for a good game do not necessarily make
for a good story, and vice versa. There are times, and occasionally
specific games, where things can and do transfer easily, but they're
the exception rather than the rule.
A good game is designed to make the *game* exciting. The point of
the game is usually for the players to have fun, interesting,
rewarding adventures. If that means a random encounter with monsters
in the wilderness, everybody's happy -- the players get treasure and
experience or skill advancement after a dandy little fight. But that
sort of thing doesn't work in a book. Coincidence and random encounters
don't move the story along; they just destroy believability.
I know a couple of people who have used their gaming "world"
backgrounds for their fiction, but only a few, and generally with
enormous amounts of modification and adaptation. There's a
certain amount of potential overlap in the design, but you have
to be aware of what the different
needs of the two mediums are, and what you need to do to adapt
one to the other.
>It should be possible to turn an entire roleplaying
>gaming campaign into a story, if you edit out a lot of
>the silly and boring stuff, though.
Very, very rarely, even with editing. The structure of an RPG
campaign is fundamentally different, most of the time, from
that of a story; the pacing is different; the focus is different.
Even if you "edit out" all of the "We could try
filling the moat with goose down!" suggestions and most of
the random monster encounters, there's still way too much
coincidence...and with a good group of gamers, it is inevitable
that they will make certain leaps of logic based on either their
knowledge of the GM or their knowledge of real-world things,
which will be difficult or impossible to justify in the story.
> But me, the only
>thing I'm doing is to share NPCs and world between
>roleplayïng and fiction, PCs are never featured in the
>written stories, although their deeds might become
>rumours.
If you are planning on even *mentioning* any of your PCs in
your fiction, get a written, signed release from the gamer *now*.
Quite apart from the possibility of various unfortunate legal
complications later, your eventual publisher will probably insist
that you have them (to avoid said legal complications), and if
they've moved away and you've lost touch, it'll be a terrible job
to track them down.
>A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
>player characters might end up being so skilled and
>influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
>campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
>after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
>After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
>power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
>while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
>and much less ambitious.
That depends entirely on your characters (gaming and otherwise).
But it also is an illustration of my point: what makes for a good
game is a world in which PCs *can* grab power and influence.
That tends to be rather a large part of the game -- power of various
sorts (money, magic, political, abilities...) is the reward for successfully
completing a mission or a campaign, so the possibility of getting it
has to be built into the fundamentals of the world. It can be very
difficulty to strip out these fundamental assumptions about the
world and the people in it when you go to write a story set there.
>You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
>intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
>game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion.
Speak for yourself. My first gaming world was written as a novel *first*,
and then translated for gaming use, and I had more problems trying to
*reduce* the "breadth" of the world for gaming purposes. It really
depends on *how* one goes about building one's imaginary worlds, not
on what they're for.
> You never know
>whether the player characters are going to travel five
>hundred miles north or two thousand miles east, so you'd
>better define all the cultures on the continent, and make
>a few notes about what's on nearby continents.
I never know whether the characters in my books are going to travel five
hundred miles north or...never mind. But really, you don't have to
define the whole world, in either case. If the characters in a book head
off into terra incognita, you can stop writing for a week while you make
up the country they're headed for; if the player characters head off
the edge of the map, you can slow them down with a raft of monster
encounters and spend the week before the next gaming session
making up the country they're headed for. It depends on how you
prefer to work.
>than static. Many fiction worlds, with those of fairy tales
>being extreme examples, seems very static, and when I read
>I prefer stories set in dynamic worlds.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Lots of political turmoil?
That, again, isn't a matter of gaming vs. non-gaming; it's a matter
of personal preference. One of the longest-running and most
popular local games was set on an elaborate world that was
*intentionally* static -- sort of like being in the middle of the
4,000 years of Ancient Egyptian dynasties. Plenty of politics
and intrigue, but little or no social mobility and no "hot spots"
at all.
>Having to stick to a set of "rules" might sound like it
>restricts the creativity of the author.
Well, who makes up these rules in the first place? The author,
that's who. Unless you're suggesting using a pre-fab RPG
system, which I *really* don't think is a good idea.
"Taking material from an RPG" is one thing; using the RPG
as the background or the primary source material is something
else again, and much more difficult. It's a lot easier to lift a
single character or incident and slip it into a novel than it is
to convert a whole game into book form. The thing is, to a lot
of beginners (especially those in high school, who have just
become passionate RPGers), it *looks* as if turning the game
into a story will be easy. But what's interesting to a gamer, who
is participating, is not necesarily going to interest a reader, who
is essentially an onlooker.
The biggest problems of using RPG material are with plot. Getting
interesting characters out of RPGs is moderately common among
gamer-writers. Getting useful background material is somewhat
less common, but it happens. Getting useful plots is rare, rare, rare.
And it can be hard to shake the habits of gaming if one is telling
a story set in a world that one is accustomed to game, even if
one is not using any characters or incidents from a particular
campaign.
All of which is why there are so few published writers who started by
adapting their gaming material, when there are so many would-be-
writer-gamers who would *like* to start that way. It's not impossible;
it's just a heck of a lot harder than it looks.
Patricia C. Wrede
Lisa A Leutheuser
In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>,
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
>Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
>at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
>refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
Err... why? It's as good a description of roleplaying as
most others I've heard. I often use it when trying to describe
roleplaying to people who are only vaguely familiar with what
the media tells them about D&D.
I've gotten ideas from roleplaying, but I no longer try to
turn campaigns or adventures into stories because it just
doesn't work well for me. Actually, I do have one I want
to try because it's a neat story, but when I get around to
writing it I will be creating a new world and accompanying
history, replacing most of the PCs and NPCS with my own
characters, and doing strange things to the plot. By
the time I do that, the resemblance between the original
campaign adventure and my story will be superficial.
>One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
>system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
>that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
>a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
Ditch the rules completely. To me, RPG rule systems have
no use in fiction. Things happen in the story because I,
the author, creator and destroyer of all I write, decide
it will happen -- not because some dice and some system that
only vaguely models the world tells me that's what happens.
In the case of "translating" an RPG plot into fiction, it may
be that events which happened due to dice rolling will also
happen in the written fiction, but the dice-rolling origins
should not be noticeable to the reader.
>One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
>nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
>defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
>good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
>convenient for the story.
If you're writing for your and your players' enjoyment or if
the roleplaying game company is paying you to write a novel
set in their world, then the world in the fiction should be
identifiable as the roleplaying world. But, if you're writing
something that you would like to see published, the world should
not be identifiable. I can't stand it when I can identify the
roleplaying system technology or magic in the novel. In this
latter case, I would rework tech and magic. Besides, IMO, it's
wrong to use another person's world for fiction that I want
to sell for money.
>Back to pitfalls, I don't believe it's a good idea to take
>the events of an actual roleplaying gaming session (or a
>whole campaign) and turning it into a story. Roleplaying
>gamer characters are likely to spend much time trying out
>solutions to the problem they face, before they find the
>right one, and much of it is uninteresting afterwards.
Well, you ditch all that stuff, otherwise your story is
less a story and more a game session log.
>A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
>player characters might end up being so skilled and
>influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
>campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
>after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
Why is that a pitfall?
Also, I'm not sure what "natural style" and the players
becoming skilled and influential have to do with each
other. What do you mean by "natural style"? I mean,
is there an "unnatural" way to roleplay?
>After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
>power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
>while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
>and much less ambitious.
Are you talking about power-*gamers* or about ambitious
*characters*? There's plenty of the latter in fiction.
>You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
>intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
>game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion. You never know
Ah.. I understand now: natural == non-scripted. Non-scripted
is the better term. Natural implies there is an unnatural way
to roleplay. I don't think I know anyone who plays scripted
games, but I've heard that they're out there.
Getting back to the writing... why do you write fiction based
on your gaming world? Do you do it for your and your players'
enjoyment or do you want be published?
I ask about your goal because a lot of what you discussed is
a bit different from what I would do when "translating" a game
adventure into a SF&F story that I would be willing to sell.
For a roleplaying story -- the work of a GM and a group of
players -- to feel like my fiction, I need to completely claim
the story as my own. This means reworking the world, magic, and
other things that would identify it as a roleplaying world. The
plot idea would then reshape itself to fit its new surroundings.
I might use my character, but I'd rework NPCs and other PCs into
similar but different characters because I find it easier to make
my own charcters do things than to figure out what other people's
characters would do. By the time this is all done, I have a story
that was inspired by a roleplaying game but is its own creature.
--
Lisa Leutheuser - eal (at) umich.edu - http://www.umich.edu/~eal
Any advertising or other links in this post were not inserted by
the poster.
Patricia C. Wrede
Leutheuser) writes:
>I can't stand it when I can identify the
>roleplaying system technology or magic in the novel. In this
>latter case, I would rework tech and magic. Besides, IMO, it's
>wrong to use another person's world for fiction that I want
>to sell for money.
In addition to being wrong, it's also dangerous. You can get
sued. This may not be a large problem if the gaming system in
question was invented by your best friend, with no reference to
any major published-for-profit systems like AD&D or GURPS,
but even then, if he gets hit by a truck and his heirs get weird
about allowing usage, you are up a creek. And if you've based
your book on one of the majors, like AD&D or GURPS, and it
shows, odds are very good that no publisher will touch it. Licensing.
Permissions. Legal stuff.
It's just so much simpler to make it all up yourself.
>Getting back to the writing... why do you write fiction based
>on your gaming world? Do you do it for your and your players'
>enjoyment or do you want be published?
>
>I ask about your goal because a lot of what you discussed is
>a bit different from what I would do when "translating" a game
>adventure into a SF&F story that I would be willing to sell.
Oh, good point.
Patricia C. Wrede
Dorothy J Heydt
>I know that Mary Kuhner is a roleplaying gamer, but it wouldn't
>surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
I play a lot of _Asheron's Call_, an online RPG.
>What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
>gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
Substantially the same as taking material from your favorite TV
show and turning it into fiction. The advantage is that you get
writing practice. The disadvantage is that, even if you file off
all the serial numbers and give all the characters and situations
new names, they are still recognizable and will lead to editors'
rejecting the stuff out of hand, saying, "Too much like Star
Trek" (or whatever it was you were deriving from).
An interesting example is Elizabeth Moon's Paksennarion stories.
Whenever she is talking about life at the training camp or in the
military unit or so forth, she is spot on, because she's working
from her own experience. Whenever her unit goes out to fight the
bad guys, it turns into a scene from some young gamer's
description of the campaign he ran last week, such as I
encountered so many times in the pages of _Alarums and
Excursions_ when Hal was reading it.
>One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
>system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
>that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
>a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
I think you will find that *any* rules system will show itself,
to the detriment of the story.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Dorothy J Heydt
I had said,
>....The advantage is that you get
>writing practice. The disadvantage is that, even if you file off
>all the serial numbers and give all the characters and situations
>new names, they are still recognizable and will lead to editors'
>rejecting the stuff out of hand, saying, "Too much like Star
>Trek" (or whatever it was you were deriving from).
If, however, you aren't interested in selling the thing, only in
having fun writing it, go right ahead, and call it writing
practice.
Mary K. Kuhner
Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
Peter Knutsen wrote:
>>It should be possible to turn an entire roleplaying
>>gaming campaign into a story, if you edit out a lot of
>>the silly and boring stuff, though.
>Very, very rarely, even with editing. The structure of an RPG
>campaign is fundamentally different, most of the time, from
>that of a story; the pacing is different; the focus is different.
I think it's a lot like turning a movie into a book, or vice
versa. If you don't appreciate the ways in which movies are
fundamentally different from books, naive efforts are likely to
lead to bad results. Even if you do, many good books do not make
good movies.
Games and novels are probably *more* different than books and
movies, though this is not as obvious on the face of it.
I'm one of the stubborn people who consistently tries to do this--
not turn a whole campaign into a story, but turn a campaign arc
or thread into a story. I find that if I don't write the story
that's obsessing me, I don't write, so I'm stuck with it. I
hope eventually to learn how to do it well; I'm inspired by
the fact that *some* books make good movies in the end.
Commentators have said that I have some success with giving a
feeling that there is a complex backstory and many events going
on in the world. Of course, this could be done just as well
with a non-gaming story, but for me this is a strength of the
gaming story.
If the campaign was run in a fairly conventional style (a group
of more or less equal PCs) there are vicious problems with emphasis
and focus to be overcome; I've found those to be even worse than the plot
problems. The relative successes I've had, or seen from others,
almost invariably involve single-player games or single-player
arcs from conventional games. I think this problem is worsed
because Tolkien somehow manages a lengthy story with many central
characters, omniscient POV, and relatively little emephasis on
the central character. Writers assume that they can do that, if he
did. All I can say for myself is that it's harder than it looks!
I recently critiqued a fantasy novel on Critters. I wrote back to
the author and said "This is roleplaying, isn't it?--though you've done
a very good job keeping that fact inobtrusive." There were no
mechanical bones showing, and no anachronisms I could spot--none
of the usual "novelized campaign" giveaways. The main tipoff, and
in my opinion the work's main weakness, was a tendency to have too
many things at the same level of focus. It had one central
character, and she was definitely and successfully central, but the
second tier around her was all emphasized about the same, and each
one was an individual with a distinct divergent background.
This made the novel mildly confusing to read. The usual signposts
that tell the reader *this person is important* were either missing
or too widely and evenly distributed.
Other than that it was a very good novel--I was pleased to read it,
and I hope it will be published, though (in contrast to the RPG
stereotype!) I worry that it may not have as much action as editors
might like. It's a very slice-of-life story; it's about the
setting as much as the character.
My WIP is an arc from a campaign. One of the lessons I learned from it:
at about three points in the campaign, we overruled what a PC or
NPC would do, in the interests of playability. *Every time* I
wrote down such a scene, my critters called me on it. I don't know
whether the events were inherently implausible, or I just don't
"lie" very well, but I had to completely rework those parts. You
can get away with different things in a game than you can in a story.
Gaming material has to be ruthlessly cut, and also ruthlessly expanded,
to fit in the new medium. My first novel is 180,000 words, and it's
a slightly compressed version of one-third of one campaign. If I
rewrote it now, I'd cut it a lot more than that. On the other
hand, its first scene takes about 8 pages to cover about ten words
from the game. There are abstractions and compressions that serve
gaming well but are a disaster in text. (One trivial one I've noticed
often is naming; the rules as to when a character needs a name are
very different.)
I am the opposite of most RPG-inspiration writers I know (Jo, for one)
in that I'm not ever inspired to write about things I GM. The closest
I've ever come is storylets about the deep backstory. The writing
impulse is the *player* impulse. I don't know why this is....
If I can get around my current stuck point, I will bounce the WIP
off some first readers and see what they think. It's really a particularly
hard place for the writer to be objective, as Patricia says: the
thing was an interesting game, how is it not going to be an interesting
story?
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Tom Lynch
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote in message
news:39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk...
>
> Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
> at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
> the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
> refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
> SF has more in common with roleplaying gaming than with the writing
> of ordinary fiction.
Hmm... I do roleplaying online that genuinely is interactive storytelling,
but attempting to make a novel out of it would be hopeless. I shall now
explain why.
The game is based at www.imperialsecrets.com and is a fantasy world with
elements of just about everything that consciously avoids D&D-like
typecasting of races. It's split into six groups called Isles, each Isle has
three kingdoms (actually the first isle has five, but that's partly because
two of the PCs have reached monarch rank and were politically enough based
to have created their own estates). The game has been running for, I think,
three years now and as such we've got quite a full background and an
impressive history for recent years as well.
It's freeform; there are a few rules, like don't invent new gods but
derivatives of existing religions are involved, don't contradict what other
writers have suggested and if you want to start a war or something else with
lasting and major consequences ask the regents.
Each realm has three regents who deal with people wanting to start wars and,
monthly, with promotions. Players who've put out a lot of posts and
interacted well with other characters (no rules on this either, votes are
used to determine who gets promoted) since their last promo may receive a
promotion. The more promotions you receive, the more powerful your character
can be (though actually implementing any changes is up to you). Promotions
come in the form of ranks (my character, a werewolf crimelord/politician
with possibly the most devious daughter in the world - who's another PC - is
currently a Count) but these do not have to be reflected by your character
progressing in the Court if you choose otherwise and even if they are, don't
immediately have to be recognised.
Each player follows their own storyline in this universe but interacts with
others (JJ and his daughter, the assassin Danyale and his lover Clarissa,
high-class pimp who's currently pregnant with his child, and Tolan and Thera
who are the most dysfunctional married couple imaginable, for example)
although not by means of one-line posts replied to by the other player.
Instead when interacting they compose a joint post featuring the actions of
both characters off-list and send it to the list when it's ready.
Occasionally players travel to other isles if their business takes them that
way. Races are subtly different; another PC of mine on a different Isle is
an Angel, which in this world translates to a soul-sucking psuedo-vampire
who can produce leathery wings with which to fly but has to leave his body
below the waist behind when he does so, and Dark Elves are elves cast out of
their society for mixed blood and not necessarily evil. Nor are other elves
necessarily good any more than humans are.
We have some unusual PCs too; Unity the macro-virus, created by the
Immortals (one step up from the gods) as a weapon during their war some
millennia ago, Nightshades the animated shadow-mage, Jade the baby dragon
(whose player has now sadly stopped posting, apparently), Jerid the mage who
can manipulate sonic energy on a tremendous scale...
If a player doesn't post for over a month without giving a reason, his PC
becomes Waiting To Die, which means that next time someone's in the area and
a death is required, and the character would fit that place going on his
previous posts, that player can kill off the other PC. In practice people
can come back after a year or so and there's a 50/50 chance their character
will be around (if there's been a war in the meantime, probably not - the
king of Marma was just overthrown by a necromancer in a major civil war, for
example.)
Heather Anne Nicoll
> Another problem is skill use. In fiction, if a character
> has a skill it always works. In most cases, this is
> realistic (horseback riding is not tricky, I suppose, if
> you know how to do it) but in others it's not (lock-
> picking, to take a classical example). I'd like to
> translate that to fiction, but I'm not sure how. I'm
> worried that too much of "Protagonist tries [something]
> but it doesn't work, protagonist tries [something else]
> but it doesn't work, protagonist draws his sword and
> solves his problem by going berzerk" would make the
> story genuinely boring.
"Always works"?
Now I'm considering what sorts of 'skills' I'd give my various
characters if I were going to stat them in gaming systems (something
that I /do/ do on occasion; I unstuck a major part of the
work-in-editing by running some of it through GURPS).
Let's see, there's the character who would definitely have an
empathy/understanding people skill, who can hurt his best friend of many
years by misjudging his reactions and making a thoughtless comment. And
does so, fairly frequently.
There's the character with a rogue magical talent that she can't control
at all, and which she's afraid to learn about because of the
circumstances under which it's surfaced in the past. Said character is
also strongly predisposed towards fixing every problem with her best
skill, which is a thrown knife, and occasionally needs to be gently
dissuaded.
There's the character who's been taught intensively about something that
he just can't do do to lack of aptitude, and who hasn't been taught
about the magical skills he -does- have aptitude for.
There's the artist with the pastel equivalent of writer's block.
There's a long-shelved mage with an ability that he can't always get to
work. The senior mages poke at him to do so fairly frequently, because
it's a spell that was lost ages ago, back around that world's equivalent
of the Burning Times. Though he hasn't developed that into a skill yet;
it's a rogue talent at the outset of that story.
There's the telepath who can't talk mind-to-mind for long, because it
gives him migraines.
There's a swordmaster who accumulates a large number of minor wounds,
sufficient to degrade his ability to fight even before he gets knifed in
the shoulder.
Or the telepath who fails to notice the large number of astral-type
parasitic entities because they're hidden better than she can see.
I'd say that for all of the skills that /I/ have, I very rarely fail to
succeed in using them. I may not do as well as I wanted to, or as well
as I hoped, or it may take me six times as long as I thought it ought to
have done, or I might break what I needed to do it and have to replace
it, or discover midway through the process that I need a different tool,
but the success/failure that's appropriate to gaming isn't appropriate
to life, as far as I can tell; sure, if I were skilled at picking locks,
I might not succeed in the first minute of trying, but after ten?
equivalent to ten 'rolls of the dice'? Probably, yeah. Unless there
was a specific reason I couldn't.
Games often lack a continuum between complete failure and utter success.
Sure, none of my examples are 'complete failure', exactly, but they're
in that middle ground between hit and miss that's where reality and
fiction probably ought go, and where games don't always get to because
they need to know 'did you hit the monster or miss?'
--
Heather Nicoll - Darkhawk - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
We can move with savage grace
To the rhythms of the night. . . .
- Rush, "Force Ten"
diehn
> at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
> the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
> refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
> aspects as character creation and world building. And the writing of
> SF has more in common with roleplaying gaming than with the writing
> of ordinary fiction.
>
> surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
>
> gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
Well, David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington series, used to
work (I don't think he does anymore) in game design, creating the
Starfire RPG. He and Steve White wrote three books based in the
Starfire background, and I think they were pretty good (though In Death
Ground did seem too heavy on the battles), and a fourth one is supposed
to come out by the end of the year or so.
> Below are some of my own thoughts, but I'd appreciate opinions
> and feedback. (If I didn't, I wouldn't have posted)
>
> One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
> system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
> that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
> a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
I don't really roleplay, but one game system, GURPS, goes very much
for realistic rules (to the point of disgust for some people).
> One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
> nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
> defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
> good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
> convenient for the story.
I tend to not wing stuff, to develop an idea of the technology
beforehand. It's actually given me some ideas that are pretty good, and
even some that take the story off on a wholly different track than I
had originally intended. Fun...
> Back to pitfalls, I don't believe it's a good idea to take
> the events of an actual roleplaying gaming session (or a
> whole campaign) and turning it into a story. Roleplaying
> gamer characters are likely to spend much time trying out
> solutions to the problem they face, before they find the
> right one, and much of it is uninteresting afterwards.
> It should be possible to turn an entire roleplaying
> gaming campaign into a story, if you edit out a lot of
> the silly and boring stuff, though. But me, the only
> thing I'm doing is to share NPCs and world between
> roleplayïng and fiction, PCs are never featured in the
> written stories, although their deeds might become
> rumours.
>
> A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
> player characters might end up being so skilled and
> influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
> campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
> after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
> After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
> power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
> while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
> and much less ambitious.
>
> You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
> intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
> game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion. You never know
> whether the player characters are going to travel five
> hundred miles north or two thousand miles east, so you'd
> better define all the cultures on the continent, and make
> a few notes about what's on nearby continents. It's the
> same for NPCs as for cultures, player characters might
> ask all sorts of sneaky world-related questions when they
> meet NPCs, such as "who is the most powerfull illusionist-
> wizard in this realm?". The GM can get away with just
> pulling names out of a hat, for a short while, but in the
> long term it's odd that NPCs suddenly pops out of nowhere
> as soon as the PCs asks about them, while they won't have
> any past history or deeds attributed to them. So a good
> setting designed for natural-style roleplaying gaming
> will contain a large amount of important NPCs.
>
> I don't know if this is *necesarry* for natural roleplaying
> gaming, but the world I've made has several natural sources
> of conflict, multiple hot spots. So if I some day should
> want to write a story about trade conflict, or the
> exploration of newly settled lands, I already have areas
> where these are the issues. So there's things going on
> everywhere, and that makes the world feel dynamic rather
> than static. Many fiction worlds, with those of fairy tales
> being extreme examples, seems very static, and when I read
> I prefer stories set in dynamic worlds.
>
> Having to stick to a set of "rules" might sound like it
> restricts the creativity of the author. But while the
> most popular roleplaying gaming rules system (AD&D)
> imposes silly restrictions on what characters can do
> (anybody who uses wizard magic automatically becomes
> *literally* incapable of picking up a sword), a good
> high-quality rules system never tells what characters
> can and can't do, only how (well) they can do it.
>
> --
> Peter Knutsen
>
I agree with the rest of this, mostly. (Except calling D&D a rules
*system* - it's a set of rules, with predefined boundaries. A rules
system is slightly different:).)
--
YDKWJWD - You Don't Know What Jesus Would Do
More fun than a ballistic missile submarine past its expiration date
commanded by a manic depressive on an acid trip
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Mary K. Kuhner
system bones always show.
I'm not convinced of this--mainly because I think we find out that
a published story is roleplaying-based by someone guessing, and if
no bones show, it's hard to guess. But also because my record
for guessing on Critters is fairly high, and in at least one of those
cases I *don't* think the system bones showed through much, if at all.
My husband and I had an interesting discussion of what it is that
causes us to say fairly confidently "That story could come from a
game" or "That one couldn't". One major trigger seems to be that
certain aspects of the world--particularly mechanistic aspects of
how, functionally, magic and/or high tech work--were designed and
learned top-down rather than through the eyes of the main character.
This leads to the author putting in details that she wouldn't
have found had she been working from her protagonist outward.
You could get the same effect by being a top-down world designer as
a writer, or by writing many stories in the same world. But when
I see a stand-alone story in which the author knows about magic
the way Brust knows about it in _Jhereg_, I do wonder if there's a
game in there somewhere.
I'm not sure this is always a bad thing, if the underlying bones
are good ones (most published systems are not, I think, well suited
to this sort of work). Having magic known to the author only as
it is known to the protogonist can, when handled badly, lead to
magic becoming no more than a convenient plot or color device.
Another major trigger is the same thing, I think, applied to characters.
There are characters known with a certain kind of depth, and others
known with a markedly different kind: not a continuum shading away
from the protagonist(s). _Jhereg_ has this too, though some of
its sequels don't, to my ears.
_Rise and Fall of a Dragon King_ is an interesting book in this
context. I read it because of Cherryh's recommendation on her Web
page, and I'm not sorry I did. The protagonist is a remarkable
character. But every once in a while this set of 3-4 equal-focus
secondary characters pops in, and there is something about those
scenes that just doesn't work for me. It screams "player characters"
and it fails on the "interesting to play, but not to read" test.
I have the impression that those characters have to be there because
they *were* there, and yet they don't belong in the story as it
has developed.
I imagine writers of historical fiction hit the same problems, or
anyone else whose characters have a pre-existing life in some other
medium. There's a rock song that goes "Sometimes I'm just a writer/
Still trapped within my truth" and I've always felt, probably
at some violence to the songwriter's intent, that that's what it's
talking about. If you know what did happen (on some other level
of reality) it can get in the way of knowing what must happen
(in your story's reality).
I'd love to see someone else who's read both books speculate on why
it seems reasonable to suppose that _Jhereg_ has a game in its
pedigree, but Glen Cook's _Sweet Silver Blues_ does not raise the
same question, at least it didn't for us.
A last point: I got called by Graydon once on _Traveller_ references,
which suprised me a bit because I've never played Traveller in my
life. I called someone on Critters on what I felt were blatant,
clumsy D&D references, and got back a puzzled "I've never roleplayed".
This stuff is sufficiently in the popular mind now that people may
pick it up second-hand: "that's how Generic Fantasy Author X handled
wraiths, so I'll do it too". Conversely, I was once told that the
central scene of my first novel must have been invented, because it's
not gameable: but actually I was doing reporterage, writing down
almost word-for-word what happened. Material may come from gaming,
or not, but that's not what makes it bad or good: wherever it comes
from, you've got to get it so that it belongs where it is and nowhere
else, that's the trick.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Heather Anne Nicoll
> Well, David Weber, author of the Honor Harrington series, used to work
> (I don't think he does anymore) in game design, creating the Starfire RPG.
> He and Steve White wrote three books based in the Starfire background, and
> I think they were pretty good (though In Death Ground did seem too heavy
> on the battles), and a fourth one is supposed to come out by the end of
> the year or so.
For what it's worth, the Starfire system is far more a massive wargame
than an RPG. It doesn't deal with individuals, personalities, character
development; it deals with the economic power of planets, ship design,
and tactics.
Mind, when I play, I got to the effort of doing more than a
by-the-numbers characterization of the inhabitants of the planet I'm
playing from; I work out racial characterics, political systems,
attitudes that shape the sort of ships that beings who think like that
would build. I /could/, I suppose, get down to the level of 'Captain
So-and-so, leading the taskforce through the unexplored warp point in
the third system,' but it's not the scale on which the game is written,
where it /is/ the scale on which a book would be written.
So writing in Starfire is much more a case of 'there's this world, what
stories can we tell here?' than writing down the events of a campaign in
an RPG would be.
I should see if I can't nudge that play be e-mail Starfire game into
activity; we keep -trying- to get it going. . . .
Jo Walton
pe...@knutsen.dk "Peter Knutsen" writes:
This is going to be a rant.
> What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
> gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
The advantage is that you've done some of the thinking before you've
started writing, so you can have a world (character/plot/whatever) with
more depth for less effort. There can also be other advantages. But I
think they are usually massively outweighed by a disadvantage that your
post absolutely reeks of.
This disadvantage is that roleplaying isn't life, it's a way of
simulating life, with it's own conventions for how it works.
This means that if you use anything from the game directly, you
aren't writing about people any more, you're writing about simulations
of people, and people who are simulated in a really different way
to the way novels usually do it. (And for "people's behaviour" read
also "magic system" and "combat system" and "world" and "tech".)
This can be a big problem. It's an even bigger problem if you forget
this and start thinking it's OK.
> One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
> system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
> that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
> a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
>
> One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
> nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
> defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
> good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
> convenient for the story.
Those are _both_ disadvantages.
Really.
Huge ones.
Whatever rules system, however wonderful, it's a _rules system_, it's
rules for playing a game. Anything you do with that isn't like the
way people really are, it's a kludge for making a game work.
The example you gave about how people usually use their skills, but in
a game you have to roll is a perfect example.
Rolling dice for skills is a reasonable simulation of how people can
do things. Basically, the character can do X. But they may, on any given
occasion, do X superbly well, or they may totally screw it up, but
most likely they'll achieve the X they set out to do. That's reflected
in the rules by percentage chances. And that's really good if what you
want is a roleplaying game. But it isn't how life works. I mean I used
to live with someone who'd claim he'd had a critical failure on making
tea when he'd accidentally made coffee instead, and that being married
gives you +2 to respectability, but really that isn't how the world
works, and when you see the world in those terms - _especially_ a story
world - you're an additional unnecessary layer of abstraction away from
being able to write something original. And by original I mean something
real, something you have observed, something fresh that hasn't been done
to death already. And you're also a layer of abstraction away from being
able to describe it, because what you're seeing isn't someone doing
something, but a dice roll, a percentage chance.
What's more, "doesn't say what they can do, only how well they can do
it" - well, maybe, but as a writer you want to control that yourself.
It might be distracting to the story that this was the best cup of
tea they'd ever had, or that they poured it on their foot. You want to
be taking those decisions yourself, guiding the story yourself, writing
about it like something real.
Now, IMO, this goes even more strongly for things like how the tech
works and the magic system. Because most RPGs aren't very realistic
about that sort of thing - because you don't want to spend all day
looking things up in the Tech Companion III, especially when you
didn't bring the right tables tonight. They give you something that's
OK. But that's all you'll ever get, OK. Is that what you want for your
writing? I strongly suspect not. As for magic systems - if you want a
consistent second-hand magic system, help yourself. They're none of them
going to give you something that feels like _real_ magic, that feels
surprising and breathtaking and exciting. They'll deny you characters
- someone read a story of mine where I had a character who was magically
immune but could do some magic, and he insisted I meant psionics, because
it wasn't possible otherwise, as if the GURPS rules were laws of nature.
(Really. I am not joking here.) The thing is that in a RPG you want the
magic to be controlled and controllable, and not get out of hand, even
in Ars Magica, even in Everway, there are things the magic can and can't
do, which may well not be what you want to write about. And you can tweak
it, but then you're right away from what you wanted, which was something
consistent that someone else has worked out for you.
Lots of people do this, especially with magic. And they write stuff
that looks... second hand. It's OK. But OK isn't good enough.
Now, there are some brilliant wonderful inspiring RPG books out there,
which I'd recommend as writing aids. They're by John M. Ford, which
ought to make them easy to find. There are some pretty solid cultural
historical worldbooks for GURPS, though some are much better than others,
which make a reasonable pulling together of a lot of stuff. But you're
mostly better off with an :Every Day Life of: book precisely because
it hasn't made compromises for the game system and for simplicity. If
you wanted to write about the Celts, and you used nothing but GURPS
:Celtic Myth: (which I co-wrote) you'd have a worse book than if you
used Ross and a pile of original sources. (Actually I hope nobody ever
does that. I probably wouldn't see it, but if I did, it would feel so
odd, seeing my compromises go through another stage. I made reasonable,
playable, decisions on the best evidence I could get, but goodness me,
I know the shale I was standing on at the time, and nobody else does.)
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
http://www.bluejo.demon.co.uk - UPDATED Interstichia; Poetry; RASFW FAQ;
THE KING'S PEACE, Tor Books, Out now!!!
sample chapters on http://www.tor.com/sampleKingsPeace.html
Bryan Cochren
game and developing a story using his background, instead of events that
took place _in_ the role-playing sessions themselves.
I had a wonderful story taken from my favorite Legend of the Five Rings
character's background which has since been lost due to computer shifts.
It's still around somewhere, though, because it was sent out on a newsgroups
for that purpose. Heh...I'll have to go digging through the archive of that
newsgroup sometime and see if I can dig it out.
But anyway, that's my two cents. I think you're right in saying that the
actual campaing can make for rather drab stories sometimes, but a
background, something that happened to your character(s) before or even
_after_ you started (finished) with him can be interesting.
Spoken as a true fanfiction adherer.
--
Bryan
"Nobody's perfect. We all just try to look that way."
Patricia C. Wrede
Kuhner) writes:
>I think it's a lot like turning a movie into a book, or vice
>versa. If you don't appreciate the ways in which movies are
>fundamentally different from books, naive efforts are likely to
>lead to bad results.
No kidding. It's a *lot* harder than it looks, even if you think you
*do* appreciate the differences.
>Even if you do, many good books do not make
>good movies.
And vice versa.
>I'm one of the stubborn people who consistently tries to do this--
>not turn a whole campaign into a story, but turn a campaign arc
>or thread into a story. I find that if I don't write the story
>that's obsessing me, I don't write, so I'm stuck with it. I
>hope eventually to learn how to do it well; I'm inspired by
>the fact that *some* books make good movies in the end.
Well, I think the first piece of it is to identify what the actual story
*is*. When you're looking at a game that's got some aspect
that's giving your backbrain a severe writing itch, you have to figure
out what that one thing is, so that you can keep centered and
focussed on it. One of my friends describes this sort of work as
"all the scenes and viewpoints and incidents orbiting around a
central core." With games, it's not always easy to identify what
the story-core is; they're usually too...diffuse.
>If the campaign was run in a fairly conventional style (a group
>of more or less equal PCs) there are vicious problems with emphasis
>and focus to be overcome; I've found those to be even worse than the plot
>problems.
Depends. Neither of those things is my problem with writing gaming
stuff; it's a lack of plasticity in the material. If it got gamed that way,
well, in my head *that's how it happened.* Even if it just needs tweaking
to make it a readable story (rare enough in itself), I have a terrible time
making myself do it, and it doesn't *feel* right. It's just plain too much
work. So I gave up eons ago.
>This made the novel mildly confusing to read. The usual signposts
>that tell the reader *this person is important* were either missing
>or too widely and evenly distributed.
Fascinating. It sounds a bit like the problem with long-running serieses
that have a multitude of popular characters, all of whom have fans that
the author is trying to keep happy -- everybody *has* to show up and
have a bit of worthwhile business to do, and the whole first half of the
book turns into "checking in with A through Q."
>You
>can get away with different things in a game than you can in a story.
Yup. My point exactly.
>I am the opposite of most RPG-inspiration writers I know (Jo, for one)
>in that I'm not ever inspired to write about things I GM. The closest
>I've ever come is storylets about the deep backstory. The writing
>impulse is the *player* impulse. I don't know why this is....
Because if you're the GM, you're in the author's chair, and so you've
"already told" that story, maybe?
Patricia C. Wrede
Pyrephox
>I'm mostly a one-campaign-world type of person. I started
>creating this world (described briefly further down) two
>years ago, and I expect it to have potential for several
>long roleplaying gaming campaigns, dozens of short stories
>(maybe half of them bordering on novella length) and close
>to half a dozen novels.
>
>I.e. it'll last a decade, maybe two.
I, on the other hand, appear to be unable to start a new campaign without
creating a new world. This could be because world-building is one of the main
draws of RPGing for me.
>PCs have a
>tendency to think about modern concepts that weren't invented
>at all in 997 AD (and several others that had been forgotten
>when Rome fell), and have personalities that are incon-
>sistent with the time period.
True that. Most modern people just don't seem to be capable of understanding a
true "magical" mindset.
>But as for unpredictability, why do you see that as a
>problem? I think it would give more realism, provided
>that the players are acting in character and not just
>doing silly things because they're bored (which is not
>the same as a character doing silly things because he
>feels like it).
It can provide character realism, yes. But as far as the plot goes... PCs have
to be allowed a latitude in behavior and on-topicness that works wonderfully
for gaming (where the only real goal is to have fun) but would damage a linear
story. In a story, my main character *may* fall in love with a village
shopkeeper while just passing through, but s/he's unlikely to abandon the
adventure and settle down to raise a family. A PC, on the other hand, may do
exactly that. Then, of course, the game can shift to the problems of being,
say, the only trained warrior in a bordertown, with little disruption. A story,
on the other hand, would probably need more forward motion (unless this is what
you'd planned on for the character, of course).
Basically, making a story from a campaign feels (to me) like writing by
committee, with all the problems thereof.
>How do you do that? Of course you have multiple campaign
>world, I have only one (with a huge amount of detail), so
>you can afford to dump strange things into one of your
>worlds.
I rarely just "dump strange things" into my worlds. However, situations and
characters can often be worked in seamlessly to sessions, if you plan in
advance. Additionally, I try to make the PCs aware that they are not the only
people that matter in the Universe. Things happen without them, and around
them. If they go through a village that's trying to figure out who/what has
been poisoning the well, and the players figure it out in seconds, then not
only do they feel better about themselves, but I know that that scenario should
be changed before I try to put it in a story.
>I'm kinda sensitive in that area, both with
>roleplaying and fiction, although with roleplaying, it's
>always possible to declare that "the last session simply
>didn't happen" or "it happened, but in an alternate
>timeline".
Ugh. I hate doing that. I have done a little dream-adventuring, but the clues
are always there for the PCs to pick up on, and I rarely make them forget what
happened...even when some characters would rather not remember. :)
>If I were to read a story that actually
>followed the 3E rules (instead of ignoring them whenever
>it's convenient, as I suspect most AD&D fiction does), I'd
>keep trying to guess what character classes the characters
>had. Not good. The rules system should be invisible, but
>in any incarnation of D&D (save one with extensive house-
>ruling) you're constantly aware of what your character
>class(es) is(/are).
Hehehe, I'm *always* trying to figure out what character class characters are,
whatever book I read. It's a game for me. As long as the justification for what
a character does isn't just "because that's what the rules say" (like wizards
and swords, for example), I usually don't notice or don't care. Now, there was
one series that I read, that was almost painfully like a gaming campaign, with
the main character able to break the rules because she was from the real world.
But, let me make it clear, she wasn't supposed have fallen into a gaming world.
But I haven't seen any of the books in that series for years...can't even
remember what it's called now.
Pyrephox
>In article <Ybqy5.4103$O5.9...@news.itd.umich.edu>, e...@umich.edu (Lisa A
>Leutheuser) writes:
>
>>I can't stand it when I can identify the
>>roleplaying system technology or magic in the novel. In this
>>latter case, I would rework tech and magic. Besides, IMO, it's
>>wrong to use another person's world for fiction that I want
>>to sell for money.
>
>In addition to being wrong, it's also dangerous. You can get
>sued. This may not be a large problem if the gaming system in
>question was invented by your best friend, with no reference to
>any major published-for-profit systems like AD&D or GURPS,
>but even then, if he gets hit by a truck and his heirs get weird
>about allowing usage, you are up a creek. And if you've based
>your book on one of the majors, like AD&D or GURPS, and it
>shows, odds are very good that no publisher will touch it. Licensing.
>Permissions. Legal stuff.
And aside from all that, I don't know much about the GURPS system, but using
AD&D magic (for example) would be simply painful. Most game-system forms of
magic are primarily concerned with game balance, so that wizard-types and
fighting-types can compete/cooperate on a roughly equal playing ground. An
author, on the other hand, may need one or the other to have a clear advantage.
I can't even imagine trying to write a story with a "1st level" AD&D-based
wizard as the main character.
jere7my tho?rpe
*One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
*system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
*that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
*a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
As an aside, the new (third) edition of D&D actually has a decent
rules system. WotC razed the ramshackle, tottering pile of add-ons and
exceptions that was second edition and started over from the ground up;
it's now (amazingly) balanced and flexible. I turned my back on D&D ten
years ago; now I'm kinda excited about it again.
(Hmm...and, as a point of reference, I haven't seen anybody mention
that George R.R. Martin's _Wild Cards_ shared world was based on a
Champions campaign.)
----j7y
******************************* <*> *******************************
jere7my tho?rpe "Art immolates life."
c/o kesh...@umich.edu (734) 769-0913
Robert B. Marks
> at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
> the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
> refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
> aspects as character creation and world building. And the writing of
> SF has more in common with roleplaying gaming than with the writing
> of ordinary fiction.
>
> I know that Mary Kuhner is a roleplaying gamer, but it wouldn't
> surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
>
>
>
> gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
I suppose, having just written my own Diablo e-book for publication, I could
probably contribute something of value here.
The great advantage, I guess, is that you have a pre-made world to deal
with; this saves the author a great deal of time building the world
(granted, it isn't as fun as doing it from scratch, but it does save time).
A good role-playing world (such as the Diablo realm) leaves plenty of areas
for the author to develop, so there is a lot of flexibility.
However, it is also fiction based on a game, and there is a lot of chaff as
a result. One of the things I had to do was remove all of the game
constructs, such as healing potions, mana potions, character levels, etc.
Having a magic potion that will restore one's lost limb may be wonderful for
gamers, but it makes for lousy storytelling. Random encounters just don't
work well, in most cases (as a good example, look at the first 150 pages of
Raymond Feist's Krondor: The Betrayal).
I particularly made it a point to avoid character classes entirely; one
thing that drives me nuts is when somebody is defined strictly by their
character class. I find it much better if you have a character who is a
wizard by profession, but has plenty of other interesting things going on in
their life.
My basic process ended up as follows:
1. Remove game constructs until only the world remained.
2. Write plot outline set in the RPG world, ignoring character classes and
just creating characters.
3. Write the first draft.
4. Edit.
As you can guess, by the time I was at step three, the fact that the world I
was writing in had originally been a game world was inconsequential.
Best regards to all,
Robert Marks
--
The future has not been written, / The past is set in stone,
And I am but a lonely wanderer, / With time as my only home.
-- From Magus Draconum
Forthcoming: Demonsbane; Pocket Books, Oct. 31, 2000
Philip M. Brewer
> I think you will find that *any* rules system will show itself,
> to the detriment of the story.
Because the rules system doesn't know about what will make the best story.
Sometimes the logic of the story requires that actions by the hero be the
decisive factor in victory. Other times victory needs to come from the
mass of common soldiers. Sometimes your hero needs to win despite facing
an adversary with an overwhelming advantage. Other times your hero needs
to lose a battle that should have been won.
The author needs to write the scenes that provide the results demanded by
the plot. Rules systems don't know anything about that.
Every time an author uses a rules-based system and reaches a point where
something happens (either because its a rule, or the result of a die
roll, or whatever), it is probably the wrong thing for the story. The
author needs to decide what should happen--based on what makes the best
story.
Dorothy J Heydt
Philip M. Brewer <pbr...@bluestem.prairienet.org> wrote:
>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> I think you will find that *any* rules system will show itself,
>> to the detriment of the story.
I don't think I said that... but since it's true, what the heck.
>
>Because the rules system doesn't know about what will make the best story.
>Sometimes the logic of the story requires that actions by the hero be the
>decisive factor in victory. Other times victory needs to come from the
>mass of common soldiers. Sometimes your hero needs to win despite facing
>an adversary with an overwhelming advantage. Other times your hero needs
>to lose a battle that should have been won.
Two quotes, more or less on topic.
Patrick Neilsen Hayden: "The descent of the Holy Spirit is not
brought about by the accumulation of sufficient experience
points."
Another time, I was talking to a friend of my husband's about
RPGs (which he did) and novels (which I did), and said something
not unlike what you said: that the novel, and its characters,
needed to be so shaped that each would bring out the best
qualities of the other. He said, "Ah, you want to live in an
Augustinian universe, where God manipulates the lives of His
creatures for their betterment. Gamers live in a Newtonian
universe where things just happen the way they happen."
(Both, as usual, paraphrased from memory)
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
>
Patricia C. Wrede
>Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
>
>> I think you will find that *any* rules system will show itself,
>> to the detriment of the story.
>
>Because the rules system doesn't know about what will make the best story.
>Sometimes the logic of the story requires that actions by the hero be the
>decisive factor in victory.
Just to be clear here -- you *are* both talking strictly about gaming-type
rules systems, yes? Because, Dorothy, if you really mean that "*any*", I think
I have to disagree with you.
In the broadest sense, the "rules" of the real world are the laws of physics.
They limit what is and isn't possible. Technological/futuristic SF has pretty
much the same set of underlying rules to work with (bar a few grandfathered-in
elements like FTL and telepathy). Fantasy doesn't have to adhere to those
rules, but if it doesn't adhere to *some* sort of internal rules, there's no
story. The hero or wizard can do whatever happens to be most convenient to the
situation -- on Page 3, he can blow away an army battallion with his fireball,
but on Page 113, he can't blow away a two-man patrol under very similar
circumstances.
If a wizard or a whizzy new bit of technology has no limits, then the hero can
use it to solve the story's main problem on Page 2, and there is no story. If
the limits are inconsistent, then there's no logic behind the story and it
tends not to be satisfying. Consistent limits imply rules that define what
those limits are. For lots of writers, those rules tend to be implicit and
never fully and completely worked out...but that doesn't mean they *can't* be.
Gaming system rules tend not to work well for fiction because they're designed
for playability and all those other things we've been talking about. The focus
is wrong. But that's not going to be true for *any* rules, in the broad sense.
Patricia C. Wrede
Philip M. Brewer
> Just to be clear here -- you *are* both talking strictly about
> gaming-type rules systems, yes? Because, Dorothy, if you really mean
> that "*any*", I think I have to disagree with you.
Yes, gaming-type rules systems were the topic of the discussion. My
fault--I clearly overdid it in snipping down to just what I wanted to
comment on.
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> Well, I think the first piece of it is to identify what the actual story
> *is*. When you're looking at a game that's got some aspect
> that's giving your backbrain a severe writing itch, you have to figure
> out what that one thing is, so that you can keep centered and
> focussed on it. One of my friends describes this sort of work as
> "all the scenes and viewpoints and incidents orbiting around a
> central core." With games, it's not always easy to identify what
> the story-core is; they're usually too...diffuse.
I don't think the games I run HAVE a "story-core" because I think too
much of that comes out of what the players want for their characters, so
it's more like x-many different "story-cores" with x being either the
number of players, or the number of players plus me. Diffuse would be a
serious understatement.
I've never wanted to turn a campaign I've run into a book, and I think
this is a huge chunck of why. The only thing that is there that
actually belongs to me is the background, and the rest is partially
"owned" by the players, (including large chunks of the current setting)
and it's not mine to muck with anymore.
I actually have an easier time seeing writing game fiction from a player
point of view, although I don't seem to do that either, but at least
that character is MINE, and anything that hasn't already happened to him
doesn't matter, and would be mine to invent.
> Depends. Neither of those things is my problem with writing gaming
> stuff; it's a lack of plasticity in the material. If it got gamed that way,
> well, in my head *that's how it happened.* Even if it just needs tweaking
> to make it a readable story (rare enough in itself), I have a terrible time
> making myself do it, and it doesn't *feel* right. It's just plain too much
> work. So I gave up eons ago.
I can use my RPG *settings* as long as nobody has actually played in
them yet. Which, thinking about it, is a bit strange because I would be
happy, I think, to run the same game world again with a different group,
sort of a "lets back things up to the start, invent new characters and
do the whole thing over and see what changes. Why couldn't I do that,
but write a book about it? Maybe I could, but the idea really doesn't
appeal.
> Because if you're the GM, you're in the author's chair, and so you've
> "already told" that story, maybe?
I don't really feel like I'm telling the story when I run a game, it's
more like I'm providing the background descriptions, and some of the
characters, but it's the PC's story, so the players are really the ones
telling it.
Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
like it as much?) :)
Michelle Bottorff
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> I can't even imagine trying to write a story with a "1st level" AD&D-based
> wizard as the main character.
I've read some that I enjoyed.
They were all comedies, of course. The D&D magic system just shouldn't
be taken seriously.
Michelle Bottorff
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> I don't really roleplay, but one game system, GURPS, goes very much
> for realistic rules (to the point of disgust for some people).
Nonesense. GURPS is nothing on Space Opera for realistic rules. OTOH,
GURPS is actually playable in a table top setting, and Space Opera, I'm
told, never really was.
Really truely realistic rules are not what ANY kind of game needs, and
every GURPS player I know admits this.
:)
Book rules need to be a lot more realistic, but even then you have to be
careful. For a game the rule of thumb is "what can be quickly and
reasonably fairly determined in a game setting without too much
interuption to the game progress/mood", and for books the rule of thumb
is "what will the audience be able to believe in?"
Michelle Bottorff
Keith Morrison
>
> Not all games *have* a story-core. But if a writer is going to turn
> a game or a campaign into a book, he'd better find one or invent
> one. Because I don't see how you can get by writing a story that
> has no *story*.
Or worse, a story that ends before it begins.
I played the Star Wars RPG for a while and the GM introduced this one
badass villain who was clearly supposed to be a recurring villain.
Lots of artillery, lackeys and the Dark Side of the Force on his side.
We killed him in the first session.
--
Keith
Pyrephox
True that. Now, I think it works well for the game system, and I haven't seen
any spell point systems (for *D&D) that I've liked. I went off on a wild tear
once and "tweaked" (okay, rewrote almost entirely) it, but although I put it up
on my page, it's not really optimal. Might work for one of my original systems,
though.
Patricia C. Wrede
mbot...@sprintmail.com (Michelle & Boyd Bottorff) writes:
>Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>> Well, I think the first piece of it is to identify what the actual story
>> *is*.
>
>I don't think the games I run HAVE a "story-core" because I think too
>much of that comes out of what the players want for their characters, so
>it's more like x-many different "story-cores" with x being either the
>number of players, or the number of players plus me. Diffuse would be a
>serious understatement.
Not all games *have* a story-core. But if a writer is going to turn
a game or a campaign into a book, he'd better find one or invent
one. Because I don't see how you can get by writing a story that
has no *story*.
Patricia C. Wrede
Ian A. York
Pyrephox <pyrep...@aol.com> wrote:
>
>I can't even imagine trying to write a story with a "1st level" AD&D-based
>wizard as the main character.
I read one recently; a critique for a friend. It's mainly a parody,
though a remarkably well-written parody. It almost worked, but (for
me) it didn't, quite. Part of the problem is that there are already a
bunch of parodies with similar premises (from Bored of the Rings to Tough
Guide to Fairyland); part was a lack of internal meta-consistency (I
thought I picked up on a general snide tone--isn't all this *action*
silly?--coupled with a dependence on the action to keep the reader turning
the pages); and there were a few other problems that didn't help. But
having a low-level mage as the viewpoint character definitely was not a
problem; that part worked quite well, I thought.
Ian
--
Ian York (iay...@panix.com) <http://www.panix.com/~iayork/>
"-but as he was a York, I am rather inclined to suppose him a
very respectable Man." -Jane Austen, The History of England
Jo Walton
mbot...@sprintmail.com "Michelle & Boyd Bottorff" writes:
> I don't really feel like I'm telling the story when I run a game, it's
> more like I'm providing the background descriptions, and some of the
> characters, but it's the PC's story, so the players are really the ones
> telling it.
>
> Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> like it as much?) :)
When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
and they are true to their characters and do things, and I am in control
of seeing that that the pace and timing of what they do and what happens
in the world as a result makes a pleasing story. Oh, and has a climax at
ten o'clock every week, so I can get to bed at a reasonable hour. All
indications are that my players enjoy this considerably.
This, apart from the ten o'clock bit, is exactly what I do with plot and
pacing and all that stuff when I'm writing too, except that it's easier
because I can go back and tweak things if they turned out not to be what
I meant. It's not a damn bit easier with characters not surprising me or
not being themselves because they're out of my head and not out of other
people's heads.
The thing roleplaying did for me that was absolutely invaluable was
making me believe I could actually make plots work, that I could do it
my way rather than the proper way and have people not be able to tell.
At the end of the first Everway campaign I ran, the players told me that
they couldn't believe that they really had done everything they wanted
spontaneously but it had all worked just like that, just like a real
story, all coming together at the right time. (I had two different things
between characters, the major plot and a subplot - that's four things
altogether - resolve on the last session before the end of term.) And
I thought, you know, maybe I have learned something about pacing and
having things happening at the same time here, maybe all those abortive
starts at novels that come to a dead stop after 10,000 words don't mean
I can't do it, maybe I should try it like _this_.
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> > Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> > like it as much?) :)
>
> When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
> in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
> that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
When I write, I generally think of "the story" as "what the main
characters do." And I'm in control, because I'm the one that decides
what those characters are doing.
When I game, I am in control of all the stuff you are in control of,
(well, obviously, that's the DMs jobs) but I don't count that as being
in charge of the "story" because the "story" is what the PC are doing.
I'm in control of the gaming SESSION, but the game as a whole belongs
the players.
> This, apart from the ten o'clock bit, is exactly what I do with plot and
> pacing and all that stuff when I'm writing too, except that it's easier
> because I can go back and tweak things if they turned out not to be what
> I meant. It's not a damn bit easier with characters not surprising me or
> not being themselves because they're out of my head and not out of other
> people's heads.
It seems your writing method resembles GMing much more closely than mine
does. :)
Since I already know what my characters are going to do in a book, my
job as a writer is more on the order of "fixing all the background stuff
so that what they are going to do makes sense, somehow without breaking
the internal integrety of those very same backgroud materials."
Mostly I have a lot of flexibility in the location and personality of
minor characters, and what is actually said in any given conversation,
and minor geological features, little bits of marshy ground, streams,
hills, that kind of thing. I usually have a fair bit of control over
the weather, but in one of my worlds I don't, because it's an artifical
world, and the weather patterns are part of the internal integrity of
that world.
> The thing roleplaying did for me that was absolutely invaluable was
> making me believe I could actually make plots work, that I could do it
> my way rather than the proper way and have people not be able to tell.
The PROPER way?
The proper way to do ANYTHING is the one that WORKS. :)
I really can't recall anyone trying to tell me how I was supposed to do
plots. Of course, I wouldn't have been listening if they DID try,
because I seem to always have known how to do plots.
My troubles are more on the order of character devellopment, readership
involvment, incluing and pacing. Possibly description, although as a
problem that seems to be more on the lines of "oops forgot to put in any
descriptions." When I do remember to put them, people don't seem to
complain about how I do it.
Michelle Bottorff
David Goldfarb
Lisa A Leutheuser <e...@umich.edu> wrote:
>I've gotten ideas from roleplaying, but I no longer try to
>turn campaigns or adventures into stories because it just
>doesn't work well for me. Actually, I do have one I want
>to try because it's a neat story, but when I get around to
>writing it I will be creating a new world and accompanying
>history, replacing most of the PCs and NPCS with my own
>characters, and doing strange things to the plot. By
>the time I do that, the resemblance between the original
>campaign adventure and my story will be superficial.
On the contrary; it sounds like the resemblance will be deep
but obscured.
--
David Goldfarb <*>|"Our experts are convinced that such notions as
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | the 'round-square' are meaningful, and what's
aste...@slip.net | more, are of potentially great military value!"
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu | - Norman Kagan, "Four Brands of Impossible"
David Goldfarb
jere7my tho?rpe <kesh...@umich.edu> wrote:
> (Hmm...and, as a point of reference, I haven't seen anybody mention
>that George R.R. Martin's _Wild Cards_ shared world was based on a
>Champions campaign.)
"Superworld", actually, not "Champions".
--
David Goldfarb <*>|"I came to Casablanca for the waters."
gold...@ocf.berkeley.edu | "The waters? What waters? We're in the desert."
aste...@slip.net |"I was misinformed."
gold...@csua.berkeley.edu |
Jo Walton
mbot...@sprintmail.com "Michelle & Boyd Bottorff" writes:
> Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > > Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> > > like it as much?) :)
> >
> > When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
> > in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
> > that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
>
> When I write, I generally think of "the story" as "what the main
> characters do." And I'm in control, because I'm the one that decides
> what those characters are doing.
>
> When I game, I am in control of all the stuff you are in control of,
> (well, obviously, that's the DMs jobs) but I don't count that as being
> in charge of the "story" because the "story" is what the PC are doing.
> I'm in control of the gaming SESSION, but the game as a whole belongs
> the players.
I think ahead to shape things for them to react to, so that they do
what they want but I will put temptation in their way, or challenges
they can't resist, or invisible bridges with gaps in across uncrossable
abysses to magic castles. I would never have imagined them inching across
the bridge with a flour sifter held out in front of them checking their
footing, but once they had, I had no problem considering insects, mice and
wind requiring them to go through the process again coming out, except that
there wouldn't be time because they were being chased.
I think both when I write and when I GM, I am Necessity.
<snip>
> > The thing roleplaying did for me that was absolutely invaluable was
> > making me believe I could actually make plots work, that I could do it
> > my way rather than the proper way and have people not be able to tell.
>
> The PROPER way?
> The proper way to do ANYTHING is the one that WORKS. :)
The "proper" way that my ex-husband both writes and GMs. *sigh*
> I really can't recall anyone trying to tell me how I was supposed to do
> plots. Of course, I wouldn't have been listening if they DID try,
> because I seem to always have known how to do plots.
Everyone gets some things free, and it's very easy to be envious of
people who got different things. So, lucky you.
> My troubles are more on the order of character devellopment, readership
> involvment, incluing and pacing. Possibly description, although as a
> problem that seems to be more on the lines of "oops forgot to put in any
> descriptions." When I do remember to put them, people don't seem to
> complain about how I do it.
See? :]
Peter Knutsen
Pyrephox wrote:
>
> Peter Knusten writes:
>
> >I'm mostly a one-campaign-world type of person. I started
> >creating this world (described briefly further down) two
> >years ago, and I expect it to have potential for several
> >long roleplaying gaming campaigns, dozens of short stories
> >(maybe half of them bordering on novella length) and close
> >to half a dozen novels.
> >
> >I.e. it'll last a decade, maybe two.
>
> I, on the other hand, appear to be unable to start a new campaign without
> creating a new world. This could be because world-building is one of the main
> draws of RPGing for me.
I'm not sure if I like worldbuilding that much. I find it
interesting to read stories set in detailed and living
worlds.
But perhaps my desire to stick with this one world is that
it seems to me to be a good place for adventure. Lots of
stuff going on. Self-generating conflict (no need for the
author (or GM) to introduce evil-people-from-outside, in
order to get conflict going).
> >PCs have a
> >tendency to think about modern concepts that weren't invented
> >at all in 997 AD (and several others that had been forgotten
> >when Rome fell), and have personalities that are incon-
> >sistent with the time period.
>
> True that. Most modern people just don't seem to be capable of understanding a
> true "magical" mindset.
For me, the problem is mostly getting the players to stop
thinking "politically correct", "inclusively" and so on,
and start thinking medievally.
> >But as for unpredictability, why do you see that as a
> >problem? I think it would give more realism, provided
> >that the players are acting in character and not just
> >doing silly things because they're bored (which is not
> >the same as a character doing silly things because he
> >feels like it).
>
> It can provide character realism, yes. But as far as the plot goes... PCs have
> to be allowed a latitude in behavior and on-topicness that works wonderfully
> for gaming (where the only real goal is to have fun) but would damage a linear
> story. In a story, my main character *may* fall in love with a village
> shopkeeper while just passing through, but s/he's unlikely to abandon the
> adventure and settle down to raise a family. A PC, on the other hand, may do
> exactly that. Then, of course, the game can shift to the problems of being,
If the shopkeeper is worth falling in love with, another NPC
will eventually fall in love (or lust) with her and abduct
her, giving the PC something to do (rescue her).
Or... love tends to lead to sex which leads to pregnancy
(I'm not going to let my players get away with random sex
without risk. If they start engaging in it, I'll make a
table of unexpected results, such as STD and pregnancy),
and pregnancies can get complicated, which means the PC
has to travel somewhere to get a doctor or some unusual
herbs.
> say, the only trained warrior in a bordertown, with little disruption. A story,
> on the other hand, would probably need more forward motion (unless this is what
> you'd planned on for the character, of course).
It should be possible to make a story (a long novella or a novel),
a sort of overview of a character's life, if you skip the boring
parts. I'm not sure it would sell well, though.
One of the many differences between fiction and roleplaying
gaming is that in roleplaying gaming things can happen in
a random fashion. Such as an unexpected love affair.
I believe that if you insert such things in fiction, and the
unexpected events are above a certain maginute, the reader
will protest.
Of course they also give a feel of realism, so I expect
to insert minor randomness, to see how much I can get
away with. With the exact purpose of the story appearing
not to be preplanned.
> Basically, making a story from a campaign feels (to me) like writing by
> committee, with all the problems thereof.
Yes, that's why I've never really wanted to do that.
If I were to translate some roleplaying gaming series-
of-events into a story, I'd do it with a single player
and make sure to talk with the player about it first (and
offer him or her a share of any profits).
But if the purpose of roleplaying gaming is to have fun,
I find that more players than one makes for more fun and
surprise, and less work for the GM. Four seems the ideal
number of players to me.
> >How do you do that? Of course you have multiple campaign
> >world, I have only one (with a huge amount of detail), so
> >you can afford to dump strange things into one of your
> >worlds.
>
> I rarely just "dump strange things" into my worlds. However, situations and
> characters can often be worked in seamlessly to sessions, if you plan in
> advance. Additionally, I try to make the PCs aware that they are not the only
> people that matter in the Universe. Things happen without them, and around
> them. If they go through a village that's trying to figure out who/what has
> been poisoning the well, and the players figure it out in seconds, then not
> only do they feel better about themselves, but I know that that scenario should
> be changed before I try to put it in a story.
That's a good idea.
> >I'm kinda sensitive in that area, both with
> >roleplaying and fiction, although with roleplaying, it's
> >always possible to declare that "the last session simply
> >didn't happen" or "it happened, but in an alternate
> >timeline".
>
> Ugh. I hate doing that. I have done a little dream-adventuring, but the clues
> are always there for the PCs to pick up on, and I rarely make them forget what
> happened...even when some characters would rather not remember. :)
I've never done it, fortunately. And I try very hard to avoid
having to do it. Before the campaign even started, I read
through the rule books again and again and tweaked the rules,
removing all the types of magic that could change the world
drastically (such as the ability to temporarily or perma-
nently transmute matter).
> >If I were to read a story that actually
> >followed the 3E rules (instead of ignoring them whenever
> >it's convenient, as I suspect most AD&D fiction does), I'd
> >keep trying to guess what character classes the characters
> >had. Not good. The rules system should be invisible, but
> >in any incarnation of D&D (save one with extensive house-
> >ruling) you're constantly aware of what your character
> >class(es) is(/are).
>
> Hehehe, I'm *always* trying to figure out what character class characters are,
> whatever book I read. It's a game for me. As long as the justification for what
> a character does isn't just "because that's what the rules say" (like wizards
> and swords, for example), I usually don't notice or don't care. Now, there was
> one series that I read, that was almost painfully like a gaming campaign, with
> the main character able to break the rules because she was from the real world.
That's one thing I dislike about much fantasy fiction. We
get to hear about the one, unique exception to the laws
of nature.
Gandalf, from Lord of the Rings.
Pug, from Raymond Feist's "Magician". I didn't read more than
half of Magician, because I was so annoyed by the exceptio-
nality of Pug.
Luke and Anakin Skywalker who has an unbelievable concentration
of midiclorians in their cytoplasma. Many orders of magnitude
above the previous highest recorded number, IIRC.
The only fantasy series I can think of, in which the lead
character is not qualitiatively but only quantatively an
exception is Ursula K. le Quin's "Earthsea".
One reason for me using an RPG rules system as the
definition of the laws of nature is that I want to write
about people who are not unique.
About a person who goes to "magic school" and learns some
methods, then uses them.
In a way that makes the fantasy more like science fiction.
And I find that idea interesting. It's harder to write if
you're constrained by explicit laws (whether it's the laws
of physics, or some laws of magic from a freely available
RPG rules system), so if you still manage to be creative,
the end product is more admirable. You did something that
was hard to do, as opposed to handwaving the spells and
making it all up as you went, so suit the convenience of
the immediate story.
> But, let me make it clear, she wasn't supposed have fallen into a gaming world.
> But I haven't seen any of the books in that series for years...can't even
> remember what it's called now.
My "Aerth" world does have a single "fall in" character, a
girl from Earth/1999. But she operates under the laws of
physics of the new world, just as everybody else. Sure, she
knows karate and the recipe for gunpowder, but if she wanted
to, she could teach both things to other people (she doesn't,
not wanting to relase such powerfull technologies).
So all the has with her is knowledge, that could have been
gained by the natives through carefull research and
application of the scientific method.
And so far, she's not even a major character in the world.
There's half a dozen characters who are doing more to change
things, throw down rulers, establish new states, start and
stop wars, convert peoples and open new wine markets.
> Pyrephox
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
>
> In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
> writes:
> The real trouble with translating gaming material into a book or story
> is that the elements that make for a good game do not necessarily make
> for a good story, and vice versa. There are times, and occasionally
> specific games, where things can and do transfer easily, but they're
> the exception rather than the rule.
One thing I like about the RPG rules system I've settled on
is that the way magic works seems natural.
You spend much time learning each spell. You can't just swap
spells with another wizard over a glass of apple juice. It
takes time and effort to learn. And of course everyone can
learn magic.
There's no levels or other intruding stuff that doesn't make
in-world sense.
The rules system is freeware, and not very well known.
I wasn't around when it was made, about 15 years ago, but
parts of it seems inspired by the way magic works in the
"Earthsea" novels.
It's always seemed to me like a good way of how magic could
work in a story, if you were interested in magic working
along consistent rules (like physics in a science fiction
story) instead of as-it-pleases-the-author-at-the-moment.
It was the magic system that make me want to game under the
system in the first place, and it's also the magic system
that defines how my world works.
> A good game is designed to make the *game* exciting. The point of
> the game is usually for the players to have fun, interesting,
> rewarding adventures. If that means a random encounter with monsters
> in the wilderness, everybody's happy -- the players get treasure and
> experience or skill advancement after a dandy little fight. But that
> sort of thing doesn't work in a book. Coincidence and random encounters
> don't move the story along; they just destroy believability.
Too much coincidence of too large magnitude, yes.
Perhaps roleplaying gaming has advanced a bit since you left
the hobby, though. A good "random encounter table" doesn't
contain only entries that leads to violence.
I haven't taken the time and effort, yet, to make a good RET
for my campaign world, but if I did, it would be customized
to the local surroundings (if near a shrine, you'd have
increased chance of meeting pilgrims, if near an infected
town, increased chance of meeting fleeing people) and few
of the entries would suggestive of violence. Farmers, sheperds
looking for lost sheep, beggars, a squad of mercenaries either
before or after having handled a job.
> I know a couple of people who have used their gaming "world"
> backgrounds for their fiction, but only a few, and generally with
> enormous amounts of modification and adaptation. There's a
> certain amount of potential overlap in the design, but you have
> to be aware of what the different
> needs of the two mediums are, and what you need to do to adapt
> one to the other.
>
> >It should be possible to turn an entire roleplaying
> >gaming campaign into a story, if you edit out a lot of
> >the silly and boring stuff, though.
>
> Very, very rarely, even with editing. The structure of an RPG
> campaign is fundamentally different, most of the time, from
> that of a story; the pacing is different; the focus is different.
> Even if you "edit out" all of the "We could try
> filling the moat with goose down!" suggestions and most of
> the random monster encounters, there's still way too much
> coincidence...and with a good group of gamers, it is inevitable
> that they will make certain leaps of logic based on either their
> knowledge of the GM or their knowledge of real-world things,
> which will be difficult or impossible to justify in the story.
I don't have plans to transfer actual gaming events to fiction,
except as rumours and heresay, but when I GM, I expect the
players to have their characters act in-character at all time.
If a PC acts in a way that suggests that the player is using
out-of-character knowledge, I start asking awkward questions,
and if the player is found guilty there's an experience
penalty, then a larger one next time it happens, followed
(after many repeated offenses) by the player being thrown
out of the campaign.
But I have good players, so I haven't seen them act on out-
of-character knowledge yet.
Knowledge of the GM is possible, though. I have certain
idiosyncracies that the players could become familiar with.
I might be able to detect such cheating by asking the
players to explain the behaviour of their characters, but
it's not guaranteed.
> > But me, the only
> >thing I'm doing is to share NPCs and world between
> >roleplayïng and fiction, PCs are never featured in the
> >written stories, although their deeds might become
> >rumours.
>
> If you are planning on even *mentioning* any of your PCs in
> your fiction, get a written, signed release from the gamer *now*.
Thanks for the advice, I'll contact all the players and
mention the issue.
So far, the only thing I plan on mentioning, in one story, is
that "some days ago, down south, a strange group of mixed men
did the city of Rostock a great favour, by tracking and
capturing an evil murderer". No mention of the names of
those who did it.
> Quite apart from the possibility of various unfortunate legal
> complications later, your eventual publisher will probably insist
> that you have them (to avoid said legal complications), and if
> they've moved away and you've lost touch, it'll be a terrible job
> to track them down.
I wasn't aware of that, thanks for pointing it out.
If I can't get them to sign the papers, I can just neglect
mentioning the names of their characters, ever. It's not as
if it's a big deal.
Or I could have the campaign and stories take place in
seperate timelines. In the campaign, it was the PC party
that caught the murderer. In the stories, it was somebody
else.
> >A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
> >player characters might end up being so skilled and
> >influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
> >campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
> >after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
> >After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
> >power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
> >while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
> >and much less ambitious.
>
> That depends entirely on your characters (gaming and otherwise).
> But it also is an illustration of my point: what makes for a good
> game is a world in which PCs *can* grab power and influence.
I don't agree with this. There are extreme types of worlds.
One is the world were everything is settled and there's little
room for maneuver. Custom dictates everything and no one
strays from the norm. There's no conflict between ideas, and
very little conflict between characters, factions and nations.
Such a word is bad both for fictionwriting and gaming.
The other extreme is a world in which things are in a flux,
there are lots of changes, wars, conflicts.
Such a world is good both for fictionwriting and gaming.
> That tends to be rather a large part of the game -- power of various
> sorts (money, magic, political, abilities...) is the reward for successfully
> completing a mission or a campaign, so the possibility of getting it
> has to be built into the fundamentals of the world. It can be very
> difficulty to strip out these fundamental assumptions about the
> world and the people in it when you go to write a story set there.
Assuming that I'm correct in stating that both fictionwriting
and gaming tends to take place in fluxy worlds, the main thing
that might keep roleplaying gaming characters from grabbing
power is a GM who interferes.
I don't do that, I let the game proceed naturally (non-
scripted).
On the other hand, I demand high realism. Power is not easy to
grab. A player character in my campaign could grab the throne
of Eastern Denmark (as mentionet elsewhere, it's an alternate
history setting), or assassinate the Pope, or even become Pope.
But it would require hard work, much skill (both character
skill and player skill) and strong motivation.
One difference between roleplaying gaming and fiction is
that roleplaying gaming characters are often highly
motivated, even bordering on greed sometimes (although it
can be all kinds of greed: sex, knowledge, power, fame...).
Also, since there is by nature a competetive element in
roleplaying gaming, the character(s) against their
enemies, player characters are inclined to sieze opportunities
to grow in competence (a more general term than power).
Fiction characters are often motivated by a single goal, and
rather uninterested in other matters. And they're usually not
inclined to grab after power unless it's immediately and
obviously relevant to their personal obsession.
Alas, the player characters in my campaign aren't the most
motivated or power-hungry. The player I lost (mentioned in
an earlier posting) was the most motivated, his character
would have ended up as the king of Denmark, with luck and
skill and patience.
Anyway, a world can be such that grabbing power is easy, or
such that grabbing power is hard. Or it could be such that
grabbing power is downright impossible, but that requires
either that the world is static (not in flux) or else that
the GM (or author) constantly interferes when the character
gets a clever idea.
The world I've made (by taking early medieval Europe and
changing some stuff) is resistant to change. Like a
realistic world should be. So I don't see how it is
unfit for fictionwriting.
> >You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
> >intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
> >game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion.
>
> Speak for yourself. My first gaming world was written as a novel *first*,
> and then translated for gaming use, and I had more problems trying to
> *reduce* the "breadth" of the world for gaming purposes. It really
> depends on *how* one goes about building one's imaginary worlds, not
> on what they're for.
Why did you need to reduce the breadth? That doesn't make
sense to me.
> > You never know
> >whether the player characters are going to travel five
> >hundred miles north or two thousand miles east, so you'd
> >better define all the cultures on the continent, and make
> >a few notes about what's on nearby continents.
>
> I never know whether the characters in my books are going to travel five
> hundred miles north or...never mind. But really, you don't have to
Okay...
I've found out that when I write fiction, I must have a fairly
good idea of what's going to happen in advance. I have dozens
of unfinished stories proving that starting, without having
cooked up a plot, doesn't work for me.
The plot may change, of course, but I need one in order to
keep writing.
> define the whole world, in either case. If the characters in a book head
> off into terra incognita, you can stop writing for a week while you make
> up the country they're headed for; if the player characters head off
> the edge of the map, you can slow them down with a raft of monster
> encounters and spend the week before the next gaming session
> making up the country they're headed for. It depends on how you
> prefer to work.
Well, yeah. One time we played, the characters headed off to
a dungeon. I seriously didn't want to improvise the dungeon
contents, fearing that I'd then be tempted (or pressurized)
to make the contents of it too easy or too hard, so I
delayed the characters with a bandit encounter and then
finished the session early. Then I spent some time until
next session on defining the dungeon and the various undeads
inhabiting it.
The short story I'm working on now is about a man and a woman
who is going into an abandoned mine to retrieve a mythical
shield. And I'm doing the same thing, drawing up the entire
complex using a dozen sheets of graph paper. Because I don't
want to make it up as I write, since that leads to tempta-
tions that I want to avoid.
(They aren't going to explore more than 10% to 20% of the
complex, but I don't know precisely where they're going yet,
so I might as well draw the whole thing)
> >than static. Many fiction worlds, with those of fairy tales
> >being extreme examples, seems very static, and when I read
> >I prefer stories set in dynamic worlds.
>
> I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. Lots of political turmoil?
not necesarrily political turmoil. Just things happening. The
king or a prince getting sick or dying or getting married.
Stuff that makes the world seem living rather than invented.
> That, again, isn't a matter of gaming vs. non-gaming; it's a matter
> of personal preference. One of the longest-running and most
> popular local games was set on an elaborate world that was
> *intentionally* static -- sort of like being in the middle of the
> 4,000 years of Ancient Egyptian dynasties. Plenty of politics
> and intrigue, but little or no social mobility and no "hot spots"
> at all.
Doesn't sound like the most static, non-fluxy world possible.
I can't come up with any examples that are more static at
the moment, however.
> >Having to stick to a set of "rules" might sound like it
> >restricts the creativity of the author.
>
> Well, who makes up these rules in the first place? The author,
Yes, but it very often looks like the author doesn't make the
rules up in advance. He or she makes the rules up when the
rules becomes relevant.
Say that a character who is skilled in fire magic, gets stuck
in a dark place and needs to cast a spell to light the place
up.
Then, at that point in the ms, the author decides that the
character can conjure up a small flame that burns from a
fingertip.
It's just making things too convenient for the author.
Using the predefined set of laws of magic that I have in mind,
the character would either need to find something inflammable
and ignite it, with a fire spell, or else use light magic
(which is different from fire magic).
> that's who. Unless you're suggesting using a pre-fab RPG
> system, which I *really* don't think is a good idea.
Well, that is what I'm suggesting.
> "Taking material from an RPG" is one thing; using the RPG
> as the background or the primary source material is something
> else again, and much more difficult. It's a lot easier to lift a
I think we need to discern between the events of a roleplaying
game, and a roleplaying game system, which is a complex of
definitions about what happens when certain objects inter-
acts.
The specific part of the RPG system I'm interested in using is
the magic system.
> single character or incident and slip it into a novel than it is
> to convert a whole game into book form. The thing is, to a lot
> of beginners (especially those in high school, who have just
> become passionate RPGers), it *looks* as if turning the game
> into a story will be easy. But what's interesting to a gamer, who
> is participating, is not necesarily going to interest a reader, who
> is essentially an onlooker.
That's true.
In much roleplaying gaming, the characters behaves like
board game pieces, with no personality. That's not the
case in my campaigns, but it's still not easy to convert
the events to fiction, and I don't plan on doing so.
> The biggest problems of using RPG material are with plot. Getting
> interesting characters out of RPGs is moderately common among
> gamer-writers. Getting useful background material is somewhat
> less common, but it happens. Getting useful plots is rare, rare, rare.
I find that getting plots out of the world I've made is easy.
In a way, it's conductive to plots. Since I usually find
making plots hard, it's a good thing.
> And it can be hard to shake the habits of gaming if one is telling
> a story set in a world that one is accustomed to game, even if
> one is not using any characters or incidents from a particular
> campaign.
I don't think it's a problem if fiction becomes a little bit
RPG-session like.
In some stories, everything that happens looks like it fits some
big master plan. There's no surprises, no random stuff, nothing
that is truly irrelevant.
And that contributes to making the story seem less realistic.
> All of which is why there are so few published writers who started by
> adapting their gaming material, when there are so many would-be-
> writer-gamers who would *like* to start that way. It's not impossible;
> it's just a heck of a lot harder than it looks.
I'll contact the people who currently have the rights to the RPG
rules system in question, and ask for their permission to use
it for fiction writing. It's a non-commercial system (it used
to be shareware, but was changed to freeware in 1997), so I
doubt there'll be legal fuss. even if the copyright holders
should die, their wives and children are roleplaying gamers
too, so I don't expect any risk in that area (as another poster
suggested).
> Patricia C. Wrede
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
>
> In article <8qdjkt$n7t$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>, mkku...@eskimo.com (Mary K.
> Kuhner) writes:
7
> >I am the opposite of most RPG-inspiration writers I know (Jo, for one)
> >in that I'm not ever inspired to write about things I GM. The closest
> >I've ever come is storylets about the deep backstory. The writing
> >impulse is the *player* impulse. I don't know why this is....
>
> Because if you're the GM, you're in the author's chair, and so you've
> "already told" that story, maybe?
I might add that when I GM, I don't tell stories. One player once
complimented me that the campaign didn't have a plot, the characters
could do what they wanted.
When I GM, I'm mostly a kind of service-provider. I run the world
much like a computer would run a program, while helping the
players interfacing realistically with the world (such as making
at least reasonably good use of character skills and abilities).
So perhaps I'm some kind of spectator, the only spectator.
Although I do need to be very creative with all the little
details during the selssion, of course.
But I've never particularly felt the need to write a story
based on the events of a sessin I GMed *or* played.
It's my world that seems so suitable, and easy to work with.
Peter Knutsen
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
>
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwred...@aol.com> wrote:
>
> > Well, I think the first piece of it is to identify what the actual story
> > *is*. When you're looking at a game that's got some aspect
> > that's giving your backbrain a severe writing itch, you have to figure
> > out what that one thing is, so that you can keep centered and
> > focussed on it. One of my friends describes this sort of work as
> > "all the scenes and viewpoints and incidents orbiting around a
> > central core." With games, it's not always easy to identify what
> > the story-core is; they're usually too...diffuse.
>
> I don't think the games I run HAVE a "story-core" because I think too
> much of that comes out of what the players want for their characters, so
> it's more like x-many different "story-cores" with x being either the
> number of players, or the number of players plus me. Diffuse would be a
> serious understatement.
As stated earlier, I object to the claim that roleplaying gaming
has much relation with storytelling.
If anything, roleplaying gaming is a bunch of people competing
to tell different stories. That's why I refer to the events of
a session or campaign as the "emergent story". Acknowledging
that it's a series of events while at the same time militantly
pointing out that nobody planned for things to happen the way
they did.
> I've never wanted to turn a campaign I've run into a book, and I think
> this is a huge chunck of why. The only thing that is there that
> actually belongs to me is the background, and the rest is partially
> "owned" by the players, (including large chunks of the current setting)
> and it's not mine to muck with anymore.
Yes. I read the above yesterday, and today I must conclude that
it makes a lot of sense. (It's not so much that I didn't think
so earlier, just that I've never thought of it in those terms
before)
The players contributes a lot to the events of the session.
Since I'm lazy, and like to be entertained, I prefer to have
a good number of players (four seems ideal to me), rather
than play solo with me as GM and then a single player.
Also, roleplaying gaming characters tends to be diffuse when
single, so not much interesting happens if there's only one
PC present. You need several to get something interesting
going. Especially if you're like me and expects the PCs
to be proactive rather than reactive.
> I actually have an easier time seeing writing game fiction from a player
> point of view, although I don't seem to do that either, but at least
> that character is MINE, and anything that hasn't already happened to him
> doesn't matter, and would be mine to invent.
Also you know what the character is thinking.
When I GM, I'm often unsure what goes on in the heads of the
player characters. As long as it looks like they're being
in-character and consistent with their backstories and
player-defined personalities, I don't object (although I'd
like to know out of curiosity).
> > Depends. Neither of those things is my problem with writing gaming
> > stuff; it's a lack of plasticity in the material. If it got gamed that way,
> > well, in my head *that's how it happened.* Even if it just needs tweaking
> > to make it a readable story (rare enough in itself), I have a terrible time
> > making myself do it, and it doesn't *feel* right. It's just plain too much
> > work. So I gave up eons ago.
>
> I can use my RPG *settings* as long as nobody has actually played in
> them yet. Which, thinking about it, is a bit strange because I would be
> happy, I think, to run the same game world again with a different group,
> sort of a "lets back things up to the start, invent new characters and
> do the whole thing over and see what changes. Why couldn't I do that,
> but write a book about it? Maybe I could, but the idea really doesn't
> appeal.
That doesn't explain why you need the RPG setting to be
virginial. And I'm also not sure what you mean by the first
"use" above. Use for fictionwriting, roleplaying gaming, or
either?
> > Because if you're the GM, you're in the author's chair, and so you've
> > "already told" that story, maybe?
>
> I don't really feel like I'm telling the story when I run a game, it's
> more like I'm providing the background descriptions, and some of the
> characters, but it's the PC's story, so the players are really the ones
> telling it.
>
> Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> like it as much?) :)
I don't feel in control at all. And my players likes it :-)
So keep GMing that way, you're not alone. Only seriously in
the minority...
> Michelle Bottorff
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Jo Walton wrote:
>
> mbot...@sprintmail.com "Michelle & Boyd Bottorff" writes:
> > Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> > like it as much?) :)
>
> When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
> in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
> that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
> and they are true to their characters and do things, and I am in control
> of seeing that that the pace and timing of what they do and what happens
> in the world as a result makes a pleasing story. Oh, and has a climax at
> ten o'clock every week, so I can get to bed at a reasonable hour. All
> indications are that my players enjoy this considerably.
I don't try to control such things as pacing and climax. I let
it happen naturally.
Of course, that puts a great burden on the players. They must
make characters that are conductive to frequent climaxes
(of the dramatic type). I don't hand anything to the
characters.
Maybe playing under a GM such as you is more relaxing, than
playing under a GM like me?
> This, apart from the ten o'clock bit, is exactly what I do with plot and
> pacing and all that stuff when I'm writing too, except that it's easier
> because I can go back and tweak things if they turned out not to be what
> I meant. It's not a damn bit easier with characters not surprising me or
> not being themselves because they're out of my head and not out of other
> people's heads.
>
> The thing roleplaying did for me that was absolutely invaluable was
> making me believe I could actually make plots work, that I could do it
> my way rather than the proper way and have people not be able to tell.
I've known for several years that I can't make plots. And I have
a sneaking suspicion that that's why I've started crusading
against people who claim that roleplaying is about plot and
story...
I think I can manage to squeeze out some kind of plot for
writing fiction, though. But doing it in gaming strikes me
as unnecesarry, and as making the game a lot less game-like
than it should be.
> --
> Jo
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
>
> Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> > When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
> > in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
> > that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
>
> When I write, I generally think of "the story" as "what the main
> characters do." And I'm in control, because I'm the one that decides
> what those characters are doing.
But doesn't the character have a backstory and a personality,
which you've created before you started writing the story?
I know that I can't make a fiction-character do something that
is inconsistent with his or her backstory or personality.
There'll be holes in such predefinitions, of course. I might
have forgotten to define what the character thinks of cows,
or the name of the first girl he fell in love with or had
sex with.
But by defining things, you give up control. And I'm not sure
I *want* that much control. In fact I find that either one of
these are the case (I'm not quite sure which):
A. The less control you have, when you're creative, the more
admirable the product is, with the word admirable being used
in the sense related to what's difficult to do. It's
admirable to lift a 300 pounds heav rock, or read a 400 page-
book in an hour *and* be able to recall most of the contents.
B. There's an optimum somewhere between having no control
and having total control, where creative beauty and
admirability are both at the maximum - increase one further
and you loose the other.
What I'm trying to do is obviously to demagoguely establish
the giving-up-of-control-by-predefining as an act of
bravery, and the I-make-it-up-as-I-go type of author as
a coward. Might as well admit it.
But don't I have a point?
Peter Knutsen
Lisa A Leutheuser wrote:
>
> In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>,
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> >
> >Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
> >at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
> >the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
> >refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
>
> Err... why? It's as good a description of roleplaying as
Because the use of the word "story" strongly suggests the
presense of a single author who has planned the events in
advance.
When you do roleplaying gaming, the total sum of events are not
planned in advance. In fact nothing is planned in advance by
the GM, but NPCs (simulated by the GM) might make plans.
However, since the NPCs are not omniscient or omnipotent,
there is no guarantee that their plans will succeed.
[snip]
> If you're writing for your and your players' enjoyment or if
> the roleplaying game company is paying you to write a novel
> set in their world, then the world in the fiction should be
> identifiable as the roleplaying world. But, if you're writing
> something that you would like to see published, the world should
> not be identifiable. I can't stand it when I can identify the
The world is a mixture of authentic history and my own
creation. There's nothing of the world that is the creation
of other people, save the way magic works (which in turn
defines much of how the world deviates from our authentic
past - upper class people live longer due to the presence
of magical healing, for instance)
> roleplaying system technology or magic in the novel. In this
> latter case, I would rework tech and magic. Besides, IMO, it's
> wrong to use another person's world for fiction that I want
> to sell for money.
It's my world.
> >Back to pitfalls, I don't believe it's a good idea to take
> >the events of an actual roleplaying gaming session (or a
> >whole campaign) and turning it into a story. Roleplaying
> >gamer characters are likely to spend much time trying out
> >solutions to the problem they face, before they find the
> >right one, and much of it is uninteresting afterwards.
>
> Well, you ditch all that stuff, otherwise your story is
> less a story and more a game session log.
>
> >A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
> >player characters might end up being so skilled and
> >influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
> >campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
> >after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
>
> Why is that a pitfall?
Because the player characters are not perfectly integrated
in the world. The characters who are native to the world
(the NPCs) will think in a manner that is perfectly suitable
for the world.
The player characters will think about concepts, adhere to
norms, that are a mixture of the norms/concepts of our
present day world and the gameworld. With bad players,
they'll be far skewed towards present-day-norms-and-concepts,
but even very skilled roleplayers can't get perfectly in
tune with the mindset of the setting.
So if the player characters becomes major figures of power
in the world, they'll be very visible in stories that takes
place after the acquisition of power. And thus their
atypical-for-the-setting behaviour would be visible to the
reader and annoy him or her.
For instance, the Christian parts of my alternate history
Europe setting are rather sexist. If a player character
should manage to become Pope, he (or she - it could be
a female masquerading as a male, or using magic to shape-
change into male form) would almost certainly begin to make
reforms in recognition of the fact that women are intelligent
beings.
Either due to present-day-norms that the player can't
escape from, or else out of the efficiency-concern that
among all those unedcuated and opressed women, there must
be some valuable ressources.
With a fictional character, I could show how the (male or
female) character gradually realizes that the difference
between men and women are much, much less significant
than what the Church preaches. (In fact I have such a
fictional character at the moment, although he's more
likely to decide that the woman accompanying him is
an exception to the rule, and that women are still
unintelligent creatures).
But a player character would not gradually realize this,
he (or she) would have the meme from the start. Without
an expanation of why.
> Also, I'm not sure what "natural style" and the players
> becoming skilled and influential have to do with each
> other. What do you mean by "natural style"? I mean,
> is there an "unnatural" way to roleplay?
The unnatural part would be the GM constantly interfering
with the events of the game.
Or, to put in another way, that the GM becomes visible,
becomes a presence, so that the players starts to worry
about whether the GM likes them or not, or likes their
characters or not. (my campaigns are not popularity
contests - I might find a character boring or interesting,
but whether the character dies or not is up to the
dice, the rules, and how reckless or carefull the
character acts)
> >After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
> >power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
> >while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
> >and much less ambitious.
>
> Are you talking about power-*gamers* or about ambitious
> *characters*? There's plenty of the latter in fiction.
Ambitious characters.
But as I mentioned in another posting. Roleplaying gaming
characters tends to grab power when it's offered. And
I'm mostly taking about small gobbets of power.
A roleplaying gaming character finding a dagger in an
abandoned mine, filled with animated skeletons and
zombies, would probably pick the dagger up with the
intent of having it analyzed later, to see if it's
magical.
In fact most roleplaying gaming characters would do that.
Somehow, few fiction characters behaves in that fashion.
I think part of the explanation for this is that most
fiction worlds are extremely magic-poor (that's something
that bothers me, magic always being this fantastically
huge exception to the norm - but I've adressed that in
another posting). But in a world where magic items are
known to exist, and people able to analyze items for
magic aren't uncommon, such behaviour would be realistic
for some characters.
> >You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
> >intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
> >game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion. You never know
>
> Ah.. I understand now: natural == non-scripted. Non-scripted
Yes.
> is the better term. Natural implies there is an unnatural way
> to roleplay. I don't think I know anyone who plays scripted
> games, but I've heard that they're out there.
Believe me, most roleplaying is scripted.
But when I use the word "natural", I want to suggest that
things are flowing. You just let stuff happen, without
interfering or opiniating ("would this make for a good
story?" the GM might ask. But I wouldn't ask that question
while gaming).
> Getting back to the writing... why do you write fiction based
> on your gaming world? Do you do it for your and your players'
> enjoyment or do you want be published?
I hope to get published. I'm not sure the players in my
campaign would be thrilled to hear that I've written stories
set in the world - most of them would probably be rather
disinterested, while one of them might want to read the
stories to expand his knowledge of the game world (which
is a fair thing since he's a good roleplayer).
So I'm in it for the money. Or, rather, the fame since the
money aren't that big.
> I ask about your goal because a lot of what you discussed is
> a bit different from what I would do when "translating" a game
> adventure into a SF&F story that I would be willing to sell.
>
> For a roleplaying story -- the work of a GM and a group of
> players -- to feel like my fiction, I need to completely claim
> the story as my own. This means reworking the world, magic, and
> other things that would identify it as a roleplaying world. The
> plot idea would then reshape itself to fit its new surroundings.
> I might use my character, but I'd rework NPCs and other PCs into
> similar but different characters because I find it easier to make
> my own charcters do things than to figure out what other people's
> characters would do. By the time this is all done, I have a story
I'm sure I'd have the same problem with PCs. Which is one
reason why I'm not particularly interested in using them.
> that was inspired by a roleplaying game but is its own creature.
But reworking the magic system means that the world would be
seriously changed too. The world is the way it is because of
the magic system. The theopolitics would change completely,
for instance, if the current magic system was changed into
one similar to D&D's, or into a system that felt more like
psionics. (In fact, a lot of the magic in fantasy fiction
feels more like psionics than magic - in part because it
relies much upon an inborn gift and very, very little upon
training and education).
> --
> Lisa Leutheuser - eal (at) umich.edu - http://www.umich.edu/~eal
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
> In addition to being wrong, it's also dangerous. You can get
> sued. This may not be a large problem if the gaming system in
> question was invented by your best friend, with no reference to
> any major published-for-profit systems like AD&D or GURPS,
> but even then, if he gets hit by a truck and his heirs get weird
> about allowing usage, you are up a creek. And if you've based
> your book on one of the majors, like AD&D or GURPS, and it
> shows, odds are very good that no publisher will touch it. Licensing.
> Permissions. Legal stuff.
It'd be extremely hard to base a book on the GURPS system
in such a way that it shows, because GURPS is so generic.
For instance, it has several different magic systems.
Even D&D/AD&D is tricky here. The system of spell memorization,
while silly, was not invented by Gygax and Arneson, but by
Jack Vance. If threatened by legal action, the author could
claim to be imitating Vance, and could claim not to have
even heard of the *D&D spell memorization system. (But for
what it's worth, it seems to me that the (abysmal) AD&D-
based fiction I've read haven't adhered to the AD&D magic
system at all).
The magic system I'm using, however, is fairly easy to
recognize if you know it. Few could recognize it, because
it's a freeware system, and as such systems have no
advertising budgets, they're rarely in widespread use.
The recognizability comes from several quirks of the system
that are easy to recognize. They feel very natural, however,
which is why I like the system. It doesn't seem artificial.
I've replied with the legal issue in another posting.
> It's just so much simpler to make it all up yourself.
No it isn't. I've tried several times, to make my own
roleplaying gaming systems.
Making a magic system in such a way that things are explicitly
defined (the opposite of "open to interpretation") is diffi-
cult. It's a lot of work, defining things in an exact way
so that you can use it in a gaming enviroment without needing
the GM to make judgement calls every minute.
Also, I found that the magic systems I were tinkering with
became increasingly similar to that freeware system that
I had found on the net, so I decided to stop imitating it
and start using the real thing.
I must conclude that what you refer to as a "magic system"
would be nothing but a loose collection of notes about
how stuff relates to other stuff. Loose, fuzzy, muchly
open to interpretation. A magic system is much more explicitly
defined. That doesn't mean that it gets dull or that it
kills creativity, only that you can hand the system to two
or more different people, and they'll produce stuff that
is consistent with what the other guy makes.
What you refer to as a "magic system" must be a bit like how
George Lucas defined the technology of the Star Wars universe.
I'd rather be Timothy Zahn, or Arthur C. Clarke, than I'd
be George Lucas. (In fact I'd like to be able to juggle
the mythical/cultural archetypes with the same skill as
Lucas, but without being so fuzzy and inconsistent with
the laws of physics...)
Peter Knutsen
Dorothy J Heydt wrote:
> Another time, I was talking to a friend of my husband's about
> RPGs (which he did) and novels (which I did), and said something
> not unlike what you said: that the novel, and its characters,
> needed to be so shaped that each would bring out the best
> qualities of the other. He said, "Ah, you want to live in an
> Augustinian universe, where God manipulates the lives of His
> creatures for their betterment. Gamers live in a Newtonian
> universe where things just happen the way they happen."
Actually, much roleplaying aspires to Augustinian ideals, which is
why I anal-retentively speak about "roleplaying *gaming*" in an
attempt to aim at the small minority of roleplayers who don't
believe they're storytelling when they play a game.
But regarding fiction, I'd like my fiction to be newtonian too.
Like my roleplaying gaming.
When I prepare for a roleplaying gaming campaign, as a GM, my
task/duty is to set up all the objects (characters, factions,
nations, items) in such a fashion that the newtonian (i.e.
according-to-the-rules) interaction of the objects becomes
interesting and fascinating, and offers varied opportunities
to the player characters.
In theory, you can make a story the same way. Try to think
up a character and some surroundings that will, if they
interact naturally, produce a good story.
And that's what I'd like to do.
Of course, both in GMing and storywriting, you must impro-
vise small details. You can't preplan everything. But you
can preplan all the major elements and all the significant
minor bits.
Except that you can only do that if you know how magic works,
in some level of detail. That's why I need a magic *system*.
Also, you seem to think that all roleplaying gaming systems
are silly. This is due to the most popular system, D&D/AD&D,
being silly - but that's because D&D was the first system on
the market, so it grabbed a large share.
There are systems out there that doesn't have generic
Experience Points, for instance. Where you get better
at specific things by doing those things, instead at
getting better at being a Mage by shooting goblins with
your crossbow. There are also magic systems that feels
natural and consistent, rather than arbitrary and silly.
> Dorothy J. Heydt
--
Peter Knutsen
Heather Anne Nicoll
> Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
> > I don't think the games I run HAVE a "story-core" because I think too
> > much of that comes out of what the players want for their characters, so
> > it's more like x-many different "story-cores" with x being either the
> > number of players, or the number of players plus me. Diffuse would be a
> > serious understatement.
> As stated earlier, I object to the claim that roleplaying gaming
> has much relation with storytelling.
Maybe it doesn't for you.
I find that I use the same skills to create a roleplaying character that
I use to create a character to write about. When I gamemaster, I use
the same cat-herding skills that I need to use to keep my fiction
characters in order.
There are other skills involved in each, and there are sgnificant
differences, but there is, for me, a good bit of overlap.
--
Heather Nicoll - Darkhawk - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
We can move with savage grace
To the rhythms of the night. . . .
- Rush, "Force Ten"
Peter Knutsen
"Mary K. Kuhner" wrote:
>
> Dorothy Heydt comments that at some level, the roleplaying
> system bones always show.
>
> I'm not convinced of this--mainly because I think we find out that
> a published story is roleplaying-based by someone guessing, and if
> no bones show, it's hard to guess. But also because my record
> for guessing on Critters is fairly high, and in at least one of those
> cases I *don't* think the system bones showed through much, if at all.
>
> My husband and I had an interesting discussion of what it is that
> causes us to say fairly confidently "That story could come from a
> game" or "That one couldn't". One major trigger seems to be that
> certain aspects of the world--particularly mechanistic aspects of
> how, functionally, magic and/or high tech work--were designed and
> learned top-down rather than through the eyes of the main character.
> This leads to the author putting in details that she wouldn't
> have found had she been working from her protagonist outward.
Can you try to give an example of this?
> You could get the same effect by being a top-down world designer as
> a writer, or by writing many stories in the same world. But when
> I see a stand-alone story in which the author knows about magic
> the way Brust knows about it in _Jhereg_, I do wonder if there's a
> game in there somewhere.
>
> I'm not sure this is always a bad thing, if the underlying bones
> are good ones (most published systems are not, I think, well suited
> to this sort of work). Having magic known to the author only as
> it is known to the protogonist can, when handled badly, lead to
> magic becoming no more than a convenient plot or color device.
Thanks for making my point :-)
I want magic, in my stories, to be a technology, something
that is available. The exact opposite of a plot device.
Having to work within explicit rules is inconvenient, but
then again, we write because we enjoy doing something that
not everybody can, don't we? Because it's somewhat diffi-
cult.
An unavoidable consequence of this is that characters in my
stories will use magic more than is the norm in fantasy
stories. Because it's *available* to them, like any other
technology would, rather than being something that the
stingy author grants only when it's absolutely necesarry.
> Another major trigger is the same thing, I think, applied to characters.
> There are characters known with a certain kind of depth, and others
> known with a markedly different kind: not a continuum shading away
> from the protagonist(s). _Jhereg_ has this too, though some of
> its sequels don't, to my ears.
>
> _Rise and Fall of a Dragon King_ is an interesting book in this
> context. I read it because of Cherryh's recommendation on her Web
> page, and I'm not sorry I did. The protagonist is a remarkable
> character. But every once in a while this set of 3-4 equal-focus
> secondary characters pops in, and there is something about those
> scenes that just doesn't work for me. It screams "player characters"
> and it fails on the "interesting to play, but not to read" test.
> I have the impression that those characters have to be there because
> they *were* there, and yet they don't belong in the story as it
> has developed.
I've found, while writing my current story (expected to
be about 20k words long), that minor characters that I
invented for the story, turned out to have potential
to becomes more important characters in the world.
Especially a librarian I introduced early on. The protagonist
meets him and they have a brief conversation, in which
the reader learns something about both the world and the
protagonist. But I've since decided that the librarian
is a magician, although nobody knows about it - he is
helped by the fact that the kinds of magic he has learned
are internal, requiring no speech or gestures to use.
He'll end up as a sage-type character, one that tries to
exert influence through proxies (hired swords and the
like), I think. Too quiet and scrawny to dare go adventuring
himself. I think. But he might end up gettig highly motivated.
> I imagine writers of historical fiction hit the same problems, or
> anyone else whose characters have a pre-existing life in some other
> medium. There's a rock song that goes "Sometimes I'm just a writer/
> Still trapped within my truth" and I've always felt, probably
> at some violence to the songwriter's intent, that that's what it's
> talking about. If you know what did happen (on some other level
> of reality) it can get in the way of knowing what must happen
> (in your story's reality).
>
> I'd love to see someone else who's read both books speculate on why
> it seems reasonable to suppose that _Jhereg_ has a game in its
> pedigree, but Glen Cook's _Sweet Silver Blues_ does not raise the
> same question, at least it didn't for us.
>
> A last point: I got called by Graydon once on _Traveller_ references,
> which suprised me a bit because I've never played Traveller in my
> life. I called someone on Critters on what I felt were blatant,
> clumsy D&D references, and got back a puzzled "I've never roleplayed".
Can you give examples?
Why did Graydon call you on a Traveller reference?
What was it on the Critters story that made you think of
D&D?
> Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
diehn wrote:
>
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> > One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
> > system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
> > that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
> > a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
>
> I don't really roleplay, but one game system, GURPS, goes very much
> for realistic rules (to the point of disgust for some people).
GURPS is quite realistic, which is a good thing, but it has
a problem. It has only four attributes.
Try writing a story about a GURPS character who has DX 16
and IQ 16. Be generous with skills (make him a 200 CP
character). Brace yourself for reader complaints :-)
(Actually, I have one futuristic setting where a few of
the characters would have DX and IQ above 16, if they
were GURPS characters - but they were invented withot
relation to any RPG rules systems. One would have IQ 18
and DX 20, another IQ 19 and unremarkable DX - several
has IQ 16-17 and high DEX. I'm not particilarly looking
forward to the reader complaints, but I hope I can get
away with the story at some point)
> > One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
> > nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
> > defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
> > good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
> > convenient for the story.
>
> I tend to not wing stuff, to develop an idea of the technology
> beforehand. It's actually given me some ideas that are pretty good, and
That's good, but I'm afraid you and I are in a minority
as authors :-(
> even some that take the story off on a wholly different track than I
> had originally intended. Fun...
Yes, that's the blessing of predefining things. You discover
new ways of doing stuff and new complications.
For instance, a minor character in one of my stories, a
librarian, could never have been a covert user of magic
if it wasn't for the way the magic system works - some
magic types are inherently internal, they don't require
words or gestures to work.
But because of the way the magic system works, he can know
one or two particular types of magic (he knows only one,
though) and study and practice them in public, without
people noticing - but if he started to train other forms
of magic, he'd attract attention, since magic is illegal
where he lives.
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
> Book rules need to be a lot more realistic, but even then you have to be
> careful. For a game the rule of thumb is "what can be quickly and
> reasonably fairly determined in a game setting without too much
> interuption to the game progress/mood", and for books the rule of thumb
> is "what will the audience be able to believe in?"
I still maintain that you can make the audience believe in a
lot of strange stuff, if you can describe it so that it makes
sense and sounds consistent.
I haven't proved it yet, but I'm working on it.
And when I roleplay, I'm extremely critical with regard to
realism. If a form of magic exists, and is reasonably
easy to learn, but isn't in widespread use, the GM has the
choice of giving me a very good explanation for why that
is the case, or watching my rear end as I walk away from
the table.
For some roleplayers, realism and internal consistency is
as important as for readers of fiction.
In fact it's often more important, because as a roleplaying
gamer, you need to be able to predict the results of your
actions. This is easier if the world is consistent and
realistic (not necesarrily our realism, but it has to have
*a* realism).
Peter Knutsen
Jo Walton wrote:
> What's more, "doesn't say what they can do, only how well they can do
> it" - well, maybe, but as a writer you want to control that yourself.
I don't want to control that myself. Not necesarrily.
A writer of loose-and-easy sci-fi has more control and freedom
than a writer of hard science fiction.
Yet some people choose the difficult path of writing hard
science fiction, rather than sticking with sci-fi which is
both more popular and demands less of the author.
In a way, I'd like to invent a new genre called "hard
fantasy", which is admirable to write, the same way hard
science fiction is admirable to write, because it's
difficult, so few can do it well.
Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
> It might be distracting to the story that this was the best cup of
> tea they'd ever had, or that they poured it on their foot. You want to
A critical success on a Brew Tea skill roll wouldn't necesarrily
be noticable. Also, I doubt characters would make much fuss
about it.
And such flukes do happen. For instance, I have a low Cooking
skill, but if I were to cook food every evening for several
months (which is not likely), I'd most likely manage to do
it *right* once or twice, out of sheer luck.
[snip]
> (Really. I am not joking here.) The thing is that in a RPG you want the
> magic to be controlled and controllable, and not get out of hand, even
> in Ars Magica, even in Everway, there are things the magic can and can't
> do, which may well not be what you want to write about. And you can tweak
I've understood the magic system in question perfectly well.
It puts reasonable limits on what magic can and can't do.
It's flexible and non-instrusive. There's no way a character can
abuse it, the same way a tailor-made GURPS character (IQ 15/Magery
3) can abuse the standard GURPS magic system.
And I've *tried* to create my own magic systems. It's a lot of
work defining magic to such a level that there is no room
for interpretation. After many years, I gave up doing that since
I had stumbled upon a system that worked a way I really liked.
Anybody can write a few pages of notes on "how magic works".
But that's not a magic system. A magic system is a hundred
pages (maybe a little less, maybe a little more) describing
the how's and why's and when's.
One problem with making my own magic system is lack of
playtesting. The system I've picked up has been play-
tested for fifteen years by hundreds of people (it's
freeware, hence the "hundreds").
If I were to spend the months or years it would require
to create my own complex and well-defined magic system,
it would have loopholes that I would overlook.
Finally, you say that in gaming, you want magic to not get
out of hand. How is that different from in fiction?
In fiction, you want characters to behave realistically.
If a fictional magic user gets majorly depressed, and he
has the capability to destroy the planet he's on, he
*would* do it.
If you want your fiction to be realistic, you'll want
pretty much the same of the magic system as you'd want
from a magic system for gaming.
> it, but then you're right away from what you wanted, which was something
> consistent that someone else has worked out for you.
What I want is a predefined magic system. One that is defined in
such a way that there is little room for interpretation.
I want to restrict my freedom, the same way Arthur C. Clarke
restrict his freedom when he decides to write hard science
fiction by adhering to the laws of physics as we know them.
For what it's worth, I have applied a few tweaks to the magic
system which was created by someone else, but it's still
recognizable as that magic system for people who are familiar
with the RPG system.
For others, I seriously expect people to accept the way
magic works in the stories, without complaining.
> --
> Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
jere7my tho?rpe wrote:
>
> In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>, Peter Knutsen
> <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
> *One pitfall is that you can see the roleplaying gaming rule
> *system between the lines of the story. But I only consider
> *that a problem if a bad rules system is used (like *D&D),
> *a good system is invisible and non-interfering.
>
> As an aside, the new (third) edition of D&D actually has a decent
> rules system. WotC razed the ramshackle, tottering pile of add-ons and
> exceptions that was second edition and started over from the ground up;
> it's now (amazingly) balanced and flexible. I turned my back on D&D ten
> years ago; now I'm kinda excited about it again.
It still has spell memoriation ("try to guess what problems the
GM will confront your character with"), seriously incompetent
starting wizards (in any other RPG rules system, a wizard is
capable of casting 10-20 minor spells per day, although he may
know "only" half a dozen different ones). And character
classes are still knowable.
If I were playing in an D&D 3rd Edition campaign, I'd constantly
try to guess the character class of the NPCs, because that
would give me valuable and useful information about their
capabilities, advantages and disadvantages.
So if you're in the mood, take the above as a challenge and
write a story that adheres 100% to the D&D 3rd Edition
rules. Remember to use character classes strictly according
to the rules.
:-)
> jere7my tho?rpe "Art immolates life."
--
Peter Knutsen
PS. Granted, the D&D 3rd Edition system is cleaned up compared
to previous versions, but it still has many silly flaws.
Peter Knutsen
"Robert B. Marks" wrote:
>
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote in message
> news:39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk...
> >
> > Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
> > at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
> > the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
> > refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
> > aspects as character creation and world building. And the writing of
> > SF has more in common with roleplaying gaming than with the writing
> > of ordinary fiction.
> >
> > I know that Mary Kuhner is a roleplaying gamer, but it wouldn't
> > surprise me at all if there are others too, in here.
> >
> >
> >
> > What are the pitfalls of taking material from your roleplaying
> > gaming and turning it into fiction? What are the advantages?
>
> I suppose, having just written my own Diablo e-book for publication, I could
> probably contribute something of value here.
>
> The great advantage, I guess, is that you have a pre-made world to deal
> with; this saves the author a great deal of time building the world
> (granted, it isn't as fun as doing it from scratch, but it does save time).
Actually, I've made the world myself.
Not from scratch, though. I took early medieval Europe and
started making changes. The first thing I did was to introduce
the magic system from a freeware RPG rules system, and then
figure out how that changed the world (one side effect was that
upper class people (and rich middle-class people such as some
Jews) would have longer life spans due to the availability
of magical healing- a warrior king could easily life for a
century, for instance.
> A good role-playing world (such as the Diablo realm) leaves plenty of areas
> for the author to develop, so there is a lot of flexibility.
>
> However, it is also fiction based on a game, and there is a lot of chaff as
> a result. One of the things I had to do was remove all of the game
> constructs, such as healing potions, mana potions, character levels, etc.
> Having a magic potion that will restore one's lost limb may be wonderful for
> gamers, but it makes for lousy storytelling. Random encounters just don't
Depends on what system you use. Diablo has a very simple hitpoint
system, which makes magical healing feel annoying.
A system with a more complex hitpoint-allocation to different
body parts should work well, without the need for tweaks.
Same with the potion stuff. The system I use have a potion
specifically for healing fractured limbs. That's what it
does. (Actually, it's a spell that does that, but it can
be put down into a potion). So if characters can find and
purchase such a potion (or if they have the skills to brew
one themselves), they can carry it along in case it
becomes necesarry. Chances are, an adventurer (or a group
of them) would rather carry around potions that can only
heal normal wounds, since limb fractures occurs rarely.
Character levels, like simple hitpoint systems, is a thing
that is very intrusive, it detracts from the natural feeling/
impression of the events.
But I don't think the system I'm using has any such
detracting features.
> work well, in most cases (as a good example, look at the first 150 pages of
> Raymond Feist's Krondor: The Betrayal).
I haven't read it, but I'l take your word for it.
> I particularly made it a point to avoid character classes entirely; one
> thing that drives me nuts is when somebody is defined strictly by their
Don't worry. All good RPG rules systems are focused on skills.
> character class. I find it much better if you have a character who is a
> wizard by profession, but has plenty of other interesting things going on in
> their life.
Happens all the time in skill-focused systems :-)
> My basic process ended up as follows:
>
> 1. Remove game constructs until only the world remained.
I'd expand on that to read: Remove *intrusive* game constructs.
> 2. Write plot outline set in the RPG world, ignoring character classes and
> just creating characters.
Character classes are intrusive and thus they would have been
removed according to #1.
> 3. Write the first draft.
> 4. Edit.
>
> As you can guess, by the time I was at step three, the fact that the world I
> was writing in had originally been a game world was inconsequential.
Well, if you totally ignore the rules, the story could have taken
place anywhere.
My stories (or rather, the subset of stories I intend to
write that takes place on "Aerth") could not have taken
place on a planet where the magic system worked differently.
Or where the laws of physics allowed people to jump down
from 200' high towers and survive the impact with the
ground.
> Robert Marks
Good luck with your book, by the way :-)
--
Peter Knutsen
jere7my tho?rpe
<pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
*It still has spell memoriation ("try to guess what problems the
*GM will confront your character with"), seriously incompetent
*starting wizards (in any other RPG rules system, a wizard is
*capable of casting 10-20 minor spells per day, although he may
*know "only" half a dozen different ones). And character
*classes are still knowable.
This really isn't the place to debate the merits of D&D (*grin*),
but I would point you to the 3E sorceror class -- they can cast 8-10
spells per day at first level, cast spells "on the fly" without
memorization, and start out only knowing half a dozen spells. Sounds
like it fits the bill.
*So if you're in the mood, take the above as a challenge and
*write a story that adheres 100% to the D&D 3rd Edition
*rules. Remember to use character classes strictly according
*to the rules.
Oh, I would never use D&D as a story framework. Ye gods. I'm just
saying that the 3E rules are an actual ruleset, designed by people who
care about balance and so forth. And I guess I'm quibbling with your
statement that "a good system is invisible and non-interfering" --
that's true for some, but not all, styles of RPG play. A lot of people
like the "weaknesses" you cite above; there are even those who want more
restrictive rules, preferring battle simulation and so forth.
Unless you meant "a good system [to use as a basis for fiction] is
invisible...," in which case ignore everything I said. :)=
----j7y
******************************* <*> *******************************
jere7my tho?rpe "Art immolates life."
Peter Knutsen
"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
>
> In article <nCLy5.21$ta.120@firefly>, "Philip M. Brewer"
> <pbr...@bluestem.prairienet.org> writes:
>
> >Dorothy J Heydt <djh...@kithrup.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I think you will find that *any* rules system will show itself,
> >> to the detriment of the story.
> >
> >Because the rules system doesn't know about what will make the best story.
> >Sometimes the logic of the story requires that actions by the hero be the
> >decisive factor in victory.
>
> Just to be clear here -- you *are* both talking strictly about gaming-type
> rules systems, yes? Because, Dorothy, if you really mean that "*any*", I think
> I have to disagree with you.
>
> In the broadest sense, the "rules" of the real world are the laws of physics.
> They limit what is and isn't possible. Technological/futuristic SF has pretty
> much the same set of underlying rules to work with (bar a few grandfathered-in
> elements like FTL and telepathy). Fantasy doesn't have to adhere to those
> rules, but if it doesn't adhere to *some* sort of internal rules, there's no
> story. The hero or wizard can do whatever happens to be most convenient to the
> situation -- on Page 3, he can blow away an army battallion with his fireball,
> but on Page 113, he can't blow away a two-man patrol under very similar
> circumstances.
Yes, that's what I mean :-)
Also, my impression of fantasy litterature is that it very often
describes magic as very, very exceptional. People who can master
it are very, very rare.
Think of Star Wars. How many super-force users did we see in the
original trilogy? Five (Obi-Wan Kenobi, Luke Skywalker, Yoda,
Darth Vader, Emperor Palapatine). In Episode One, we learn what
makes these people so extremely, surprisingly, utterly
exceptional.
Think of the Belgariad. I've only read the first two books,
but we basically see three people who can use magic, the
boy, Polgara and the old man (Wolf). Like Star Wars, the
magic is very, very much an inborn gift that these people
are blessed with, and that normal people can forget all
about ever touching. Also, in both cases, the magic feels
much more like psionics than the casting of spells.
Or Raymond Feist's "Magician". Pug, the main character, uses
an unusual kind of magic. He doesn't play according to the
standard rules.
The only fantasy story I can think of, in which the main
character doesn't cheat, is the Earthseay trilogy. Sure,
Sparrowhawk has *more* magic than the normal folks. But
that's comparable to having an IQ of 150 instead of 100.
Luke Skywalker has a midiclorian-density that can barely
be measured, while us mortals have only a couple dozen
of them per cell (=the later part is guessing, but I'm
trying to prove a point).
I don't want to write about people who are totally and
uniquely exceptional.
Granted, I write about people who differ from the norm
in ambition and intelligence, but not in such a way as
to make them inhuman or unique.
Jakob of Hedeby is a "man who knows how to use a sword".
He's got an impressive talent, and is thus very skilled
for a man his age (around 20). But a serious mercenary
or sword instructor, of age 30 or so, could match Jakob.
Wotan learns new magics very fast, but he can't do anything
that nobody else can. There are tens of thousands of wizards
and mages who can learn the same spells that Wotan knows,
even if it takes them a little more time.
Just about the only truly unique character I have is
Elizabeth of York, an archeologist (i.e. grave robber
with a scientific bent). Her very unusual (although not
completely unique) gifts is a photographic memory, an
absolute sense of direction and the ability to count
small objects rapidly (Rainman-style). She benefits from
those, but she could have gotten along, and been a
successfull grave... sorry - archeologist, just as well
without them. They're flavourings more than talents.
By mechanizing magic, I hope to make it more like technology.
Less mysterious, more available. It'll get used more.
Gandalf's magic will be orders of magnitude more mysterious
than Wotan's. When Gandalf causes the stone bridge to break,
or ignites the faggot, we gasp in awe. When Solomon ben
Melchior kills the advancing squad of soldiers with a rain
of fire, the readers won't react the same way (except those
who knows the rules of the magic system. They'll be
impressed that Solomon can pull of a 9th DoM spell, using
Logos while Pushing for effect... On secod thought, if
another mage-type character should witness the event, he
or she would be extremely impressed too).
But really, is the problem mine? Isn't it rather Gandalf
who used too *little* magic? If he was such a mighthy
and old and wise wizard, why didn't he use it just a
little bit more?
As soon as you, as an author, makes it clear what rules you
are writing under (whether the laws of physics, or a specific
system of magic), the reader can complain if you break them
(happens all the time for writers of hard science fiction).
But I don't really mind that. I think I can be creative
without breaking the rule.
Peter Knutsen
Keith Morrison wrote:
> Or worse, a story that ends before it begins.
>
> I played the Star Wars RPG for a while and the GM introduced this one
> badass villain who was clearly supposed to be a recurring villain.
> Lots of artillery, lackeys and the Dark Side of the Force on his side.
>
> We killed him in the first session.
What's wrong with that? Such a stupid and wimpy villain should
never have been a recurring villain.
You need to choose the right people for the task, both when
you GM and when you write stories. Your GM wasn't able to
choose the right villain.
> --
> Keith
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
Heather Anne Nicoll wrote:
>
> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> > As stated earlier, I object to the claim that roleplaying gaming
> > has much relation with storytelling.
>
> Maybe it doesn't for you.
As I wrote in the original posting, there is some overlap, but
not much.
> I find that I use the same skills to create a roleplaying character that
> I use to create a character to write about. When I gamemaster, I use
> the same cat-herding skills that I need to use to keep my fiction
> characters in order.
Character creation is much the same yes. The concerns may be
subtley different, but in general they're the same.
As for herding, I'll claim that good characters doesn't need
herding. Whether we're talking fiction or roleplaying gaming.
And direction... I claim that if you make a good setup before
the campaign (or story) starts, you don't need to direct
stuff at all, in order to get what you desire (interesting,
complex and flexible sitautions for gaming, a satisfying
and believable story for writing).
> There are other skills involved in each, and there are sgnificant
> differences, but there is, for me, a good bit of overlap.
I'd say some overlap. I object to "a good bit" :-)
> --
> Heather Nicoll - Darkhawk - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
--
Peter Knutsen
Peter Knutsen
jere7my tho?rpe wrote:
>
> In article <39CF01DF...@knutsen.dk>, Peter Knutsen
> <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
> *It still has spell memoriation ("try to guess what problems the
> *GM will confront your character with"), seriously incompetent
> *starting wizards (in any other RPG rules system, a wizard is
> *capable of casting 10-20 minor spells per day, although he may
> *know "only" half a dozen different ones). And character
> *classes are still knowable.
>
> This really isn't the place to debate the merits of D&D (*grin*),
True. In other forums, I'd have barberqued you ;-)
> but I would point you to the 3E sorceror class -- they can cast 8-10
> spells per day at first level, cast spells "on the fly" without
> memorization, and start out only knowing half a dozen spells. Sounds
> like it fits the bill.
They're closer, yes. A lot closer, in fact. But one problem
is that the list of cantrips is far too small, so that about
5 of the 8 daily spells are coming from a very narrow list.
(Even worse, the Sorcerer can know only 3 of those cantrips,
narrowing things down further)
Cantrip-level spells aren't really serious. On the other hand,
1st level *D&D are too powerfull (or at least some of them
are).
The kind of spells that I claim a starting-wizard should be
able to cast 10-20 of per day are somewhere between cantrips
and 1st level spells in power.
A *D&D mage (/wizard) has a low number of high-powered
spells, that he must spend very carefully.
Spellpoint systems gives more flexibility, and in the end
they contribute to make the magic more like a tool or a
technology, less like a very precious and mysterious
ressource that you must hoard until you get in real
trouble.
> *So if you're in the mood, take the above as a challenge and
> *write a story that adheres 100% to the D&D 3rd Edition
> *rules. Remember to use character classes strictly according
> *to the rules.
>
> Oh, I would never use D&D as a story framework. Ye gods. I'm just
> saying that the 3E rules are an actual ruleset, designed by people who
> care about balance and so forth. And I guess I'm quibbling with your
They care about balance, yes. I'd prefer people to stop
playing any version of *D&D, but one aspect of the new
system that I do defend is the balance. People who claim
that it's unbalanced are simply stupid.
One thing I wish the designers had cared for, though, is
realism.
> statement that "a good system is invisible and non-interfering" --
> that's true for some, but not all, styles of RPG play. A lot of people
> like the "weaknesses" you cite above; there are even those who want more
> restrictive rules, preferring battle simulation and so forth.
I can see what you're aiming at, with "restrictive rules".
Or at least I think you can.
Am I right in assuming that you're referring to "flexible"
spells such as "illusions", where the GM must interpret
the effect that the spell has on the targets?
I like the magic system to be explicit and clearly defined,
but some aspects, such as illusions and (directly) mind-
affectin magic, can't be handled in a boardgame situation.
So you need a GM. But I prefer as little need for GM-
interpretation as possible.
If I've misunderstood you, please explain what you mean...
> Unless you meant "a good system [to use as a basis for fiction] is
> invisible...," in which case ignore everything I said. :)=
Nope. When I roleplay, I want the rules system to be like the
air.
Supporting me (without air around me, I'd get severa physiological
problems in seconds, and suffer lethal brain damage in minutes)
but without me noticing it.
A too loosely defined rules system gives no support. A
badly designed rules system makes its presence known all
the time.
> ----j7y
--
Peter Knutsen
Jo Walton
pe...@knutsen.dk "Peter Knutsen" writes:
>
>
> Jo Walton wrote:
> >
> > mbot...@sprintmail.com "Michelle & Boyd Bottorff" writes:
>
> > > Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
> > > like it as much?) :)
> >
> > When I GM, I am in control. I control the world, the weather, everyone
> > in the world who isn't the PCs, and the _genre_, the shape of everything
> > that can happen in that world. Then I let the PCs do exactly what they want,
> > and they are true to their characters and do things, and I am in control
> > of seeing that that the pace and timing of what they do and what happens
> > in the world as a result makes a pleasing story. Oh, and has a climax at
> > ten o'clock every week, so I can get to bed at a reasonable hour. All
> > indications are that my players enjoy this considerably.
>
> I don't try to control such things as pacing and climax. I let
> it happen naturally.
>
> Of course, that puts a great burden on the players. They must
> make characters that are conductive to frequent climaxes
> (of the dramatic type). I don't hand anything to the
> characters.
What's naturally?
I mean that if they are ambling along having a long argument about
how they're going to break a lock when they get to the town and not
paying attention to anything outside their argument, then I will
wait until the argument is getting repetitive and then mention the
bandit's head poking out over the escarpment.
One of the best climactic scenes ever was two characters declaring their
love for each other but declining to spend the night together even though
there was a strong chance one of them would die the next morning. That was
them entirely, but I'd still controlled the pacing by arranging the situation
requiring him to fight the next day.
> Maybe playing under a GM such as you is more relaxing, than
> playing under a GM like me?
You'd have to ask my players, but I don't think relaxing is a word you
would hear.
I don't mean I am scripting anything. I'm not.
> > The thing roleplaying did for me that was absolutely invaluable was
> > making me believe I could actually make plots work, that I could do it
> > my way rather than the proper way and have people not be able to tell.
>
> I've known for several years that I can't make plots. And I have
> a sneaking suspicion that that's why I've started crusading
> against people who claim that roleplaying is about plot and
> story...
>
> I think I can manage to squeeze out some kind of plot for
> writing fiction, though. But doing it in gaming strikes me
> as unnecesarry, and as making the game a lot less game-like
> than it should be.
"Should"? But as I was saying, I don't make up plots for games, I let them
arise out of characters and the interactions of the characters with the
world and the genre. And that's what I do for writing as well. A character
will take an action, and I can see that by the consequences of that action
a whole cascade of things will happen, which the character will, because
they are who they are, respond to, and interact with, causing further
events. That's what I mean by plot, not paint-by-numbers. In writing and
in GMing.
Tell you something really weird that just occurred to me - another thing
I learned how to do GMing is set piece atmospheric descriptions.
Two more reasons writing down a game won't work - GM POV is oral
storytelling, with all the different conventions that work for that, and
it's naturally in second person.
--
Jo - - I kissed a kif at Kefk - - J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk
Sylvia Li
>
> A writer of loose-and-easy sci-fi has more control and freedom
> than a writer of hard science fiction.
>
> Yet some people choose the difficult path of writing hard
> science fiction, rather than sticking with sci-fi which is
> both more popular and demands less of the author.
>
> In a way, I'd like to invent a new genre called "hard
> fantasy", which is admirable to write, the same way hard
> science fiction is admirable to write, because it's
> difficult, so few can do it well.
>
> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
>
two things will happen now: after a good night's sleep you will realize
that you *really* did not want to say this. Or, for as long as you maintain
the stance, this thread will burgeon in a direction that has nothing to do
with role-playing.
(chuckling, and waiting to see what will happen)
>
> A critical success on a Brew Tea skill roll wouldn't necesarrily
> be noticable. Also, I doubt characters would make much fuss
> about it.
>
> And such flukes do happen. For instance, I have a low Cooking
> skill, but if I were to cook food every evening for several
> months (which is not likely), I'd most likely manage to do
> it *right* once or twice, out of sheer luck.
>
No, you'd gradually learn from your mistakes. If you were required to eat
the results, you would figure out what you were doing wrong. It doesn't
take more than one burned pork chop to demonstrate that going off and
leaving food cooking in a pan at high heat while you do something else is
not quite the best approach. You might read a book or two. You'd ask
someone. Or you'd think about what might not be working. Food preparation
would become more important to you; you would pay attention to clues in the
world around you. By the end of several months, your cooking might still be
simple, but it would be acceptably tasty most of the time.
This would happen, *even if* you thought you were spending all your points
on learning Java Swing.
--
Sylvia Li
Lisa A Leutheuser
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
>
>Lisa A Leutheuser wrote:
>>
>> In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>,
>> Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>> >
>> >Well, it just surprises me that this subject isn't being discussed
>> >at all in here. Roleplaying gaming has certain things in common with
>> >the writing of fiction. While I'm hostile towards the crowd that
>> >refers to roleplaying as "(interactive) storytelling", there are such
>>
>> Err... why? It's as good a description of roleplaying as
>
>Because the use of the word "story" strongly suggests the
>presense of a single author who has planned the events in
>advance.
I guess so. I suppose it depends on how you describe it.
Story telling can be impromtu too. And "interactive", to
me at least, shows that it's not just a single person
doing the telling.
I don't say RPGing is "interactive story telling" without
describing the experience because by itself the phrase is
inadequate. But, IMO, every two- and three- word description
of roleplaying (another example "impromptu acting") is
inadequate without further explanation.
>When you do roleplaying gaming, the total sum of events are not
>planned in advance. In fact nothing is planned in advance by
>the GM, but NPCs (simulated by the GM) might make plans.
Sure GMs plan in advance. At least the ones I know do. I
think there's a difference between planning a game story line
in advance (plot hooks, NPCs, etc.) and forcing your players
into doing what you want them to do. In the first case, the GM
has set the scene and doing some forethought into what might
happen, but PC free will is left intact and the game may take
whatever unforeseen and strange turns the PCs (and dice rolls,
if relevant) come up with.
>However, since the NPCs are not omniscient or omnipotent,
>there is no guarantee that their plans will succeed.
Well, yes.
>> >A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
>> >player characters might end up being so skilled and
>> >influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
>> >campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
>> >after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
>>
>> Why is that a pitfall?
>
>Because the player characters are not perfectly integrated
>in the world. The characters who are native to the world
>(the NPCs) will think in a manner that is perfectly suitable
>for the world.
[text about sexism example clipped to save space...]
>Either due to present-day-norms that the player can't
>escape from, or else out of the efficiency-concern that
>among all those unedcuated and opressed women, there must
>be some valuable ressources.
>
>With a fictional character, I could show how the (male or
>female) character gradually realizes that the difference
>between men and women are much, much less significant
>than what the Church preaches. (In fact I have such a
>fictional character at the moment, although he's more
>likely to decide that the woman accompanying him is
>an exception to the rule, and that women are still
>unintelligent creatures).
>
>But a player character would not gradually realize this,
>he (or she) would have the meme from the start. Without
>an expanation of why.
First off, many writers have a hard time getting 20th
century attitudes out of their pre-modern stories.
Second, your pitfall is based on how you approach turning
gaming stories into fiction. I can see how it is a pitfall
for you, but I don't see it affecting me because how I
approach it differently. For example, I would do what you
described above for a fictional character; that is, I would
show the character gradually realizing what sexism is even
if that's not how the PC did it.
I'm getting the impression (based on the above and on the
dagger found in a dungeon example that I've clipped) that
you feel if you use the PCs in your stories, you have to
be faithful to how they behaved in the game. I don't feel
that constraint at all. I'm not interested in faithfully
rendering a PC or game story into fiction; it doesn't work
for me. I view the game and the characters in the game as
simply a starting point. If the characters did something
that was inappropriate for their culture or based on player
knowledge that the character shouldn't have, I don't feel
obligated to keep it.
I think we approach this issue two different ways: you
by writing stories about the NPCs and not the PCs, and I
by reworking the characters (PCs and NPCs) and the world
so that it's my creation and I don't have to worry about
being faithful to what happened in the game.
>> is there an "unnatural" way to roleplay?
>
>The unnatural part would be the GM constantly interfering
>with the events of the game.
>
>Or, to put in another way, that the GM becomes visible,
>becomes a presence, so that the players starts to worry
>about whether the GM likes them or not, or likes their
>characters or not. (my campaigns are not popularity
>contests - I might find a character boring or interesting,
>but whether the character dies or not is up to the
>dice, the rules, and how reckless or carefull the
>character acts)
Oh. I just call that bad GMing.
>> For a roleplaying story -- the work of a GM and a group of
>> players -- to feel like my fiction, I need to completely claim
>> the story as my own. This means reworking the world, magic, and
>> other things that would identify it as a roleplaying world. The
>> plot idea would then reshape itself to fit its new surroundings.
>> I might use my character, but I'd rework NPCs and other PCs into
>> similar but different characters because I find it easier to make
>> my own charcters do things than to figure out what other people's
>> characters would do. By the time this is all done, I have a story
>
>I'm sure I'd have the same problem with PCs. Which is one
>reason why I'm not particularly interested in using them.
>
>> that was inspired by a roleplaying game but is its own creature.
>
>But reworking the magic system means that the world would be
>seriously changed too.
Well, yes, that's the idea, but I based it on the assumption that
the world and magic/tech come from an identifiable game world game
and magic system. If it's a world you created, then it's not
necessary to rework the world.
--
Lisa Leutheuser - eal (at) umich.edu - http://www.umich.edu/~eal
Any advertising or other links in this post were not inserted by
the poster.
Lisa A Leutheuser
David Goldfarb <gold...@OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>In article <Ybqy5.4103$O5.9...@news.itd.umich.edu>,
>Lisa A Leutheuser <e...@umich.edu> wrote:
>>I've gotten ideas from roleplaying, but I no longer try to
>>turn campaigns or adventures into stories because it just
>>doesn't work well for me. Actually, I do have one I want
>>to try because it's a neat story, but when I get around to
>>writing it I will be creating a new world and accompanying
>>history, replacing most of the PCs and NPCS with my own
>>characters, and doing strange things to the plot. By
>>the time I do that, the resemblance between the original
>>campaign adventure and my story will be superficial.
>
>On the contrary; it sounds like the resemblance will be deep
>but obscured.
Two sides of the same coin?
Patricia C. Wrede
>Because the use of the word "story" strongly suggests the
>presense of a single author who has planned the events in
>advance.
I had a whole long argument half-written, and then I saw this. And
it seems to me that this statement is the heart of your argument/
attitude toward the relationship (or rather, non-relationship) between
writing and gaming. So I'm just going to address this, and forget
the rest for now.
Because my first reaction to the statement "'story' strongly suggests
the presence of a single author who has planned the events in
advance" was "No, it doesn't." "Story" says nothing whatever about
the author(s); it implies a bunch of events that are connected and
related in ways that we argue about here periodically. Improvisational
storytelling is probably, on a global scale, much more ancient and
widespread than the written sort that we're more accustomed to...
and when it comes to the ways in which people write, the idea that
most, or even many, writers "plan the events in advance" is laughable.
(Well, a lot of us *do* plan, but I do not know anybody who actually
sticks to the plan. And I don't really see how the planning matters
for definitional purposes or anything else, if the story takes a sudden
right-angle bend and goes off in some completely new direction in the
middle. Which the vast majority of them seem to do.)
Which means that the root of this discussion is fundamentally
a definitional dispute, as so many of them are. And it seems to
me that this one is likely to turn into "It means this" "No it doesn't"
"Yes it does" "No it doesn't" "does!" "Doesn't!" etc., which is
neither fun nor productive.
Having read through most of your other posts, I will just add that your
experience of gaming, and of fiction, appears to be very different
from mine.
Patricia C. Wrede
Patricia C. Wrede
writes:
>As stated earlier, I object to the claim that roleplaying gaming
>has much relation with storytelling.
That depends a great deal on the GM and the gamers, and not
in necessarily obvious ways.
>If anything, roleplaying gaming is a bunch of people competing
>to tell different stories. That's why I refer to the events of
>a session or campaign as the "emergent story". Acknowledging
>that it's a series of events while at the same time militantly
>pointing out that nobody planned for things to happen the way
>they did.
I think this is where the differences come in, and they are largely
definitional. You seem to think that a plot, or "interactive storytelling
gaming," has to be planned by somebody, in advance. This happens
not to be the case, either in gaming *or* in writing. Lots of people --
GMs and writers both -- *do* plan stories/plots/campaigns in advance,
in more or less detail, but some do stuff that's more like improv
theater. It's still storytelling
>Also, roleplaying gaming characters tends to be diffuse when
>single, so not much interesting happens if there's only one
>PC present. You need several to get something interesting
>going. Especially if you're like me and expects the PCs
>to be proactive rather than reactive.
Again, this depends *entirely* on the GM and the gamers.
The kinds of adventures tend to be a bit different, and if you
happen not to like the individual focus, then you won't enjoy
that kind of gaming. But I could send you several people who
would, one-on-one, as gamers, provide all the proactive
adventuring you could possibly want and then some. At least
one of them prefers to game that way; parties cramp his style.
>> > Because if you're the GM, you're in the author's chair, and so you've
>> > "already told" that story, maybe?
>>
>> I don't really feel like I'm telling the story when I run a game, it's
>> more like I'm providing the background descriptions, and some of the
>> characters, but it's the PC's story, so the players are really the ones
>> telling it.
>>
>> Maybe other GMs feel more in control than I do. (But do their players
>> like it as much?) :)
I think you both misunderstood. The GM is in the author's *chair;*
the background is hers, the choice of plotline (or the choice not to
have a preset plotline) is hers, the NPCs are hers. The GM can,
and does, provide exactly as much steering of the game as the
particular GM wants to. This is analogous to various writing methods:
the writer who does a detailed plot outline vs. the writer who "wings it,"
for instance, or the one who develops lots of backstory and then "lets
the characters do what they want" and watches how it develops.
It's not a matter of whether the GM is "in control" or not. It's a matter
of whether that particular story "feels told" in that particular writer's
head. Some writers cannot talk about their stuff in advance, at all, or
the story "goes dead;" some writers can't even write a plot outline,
because if they do, they can't write the story. In a game, you've got
a "live theater" version of the story playing out in front of you, and it's
a story that, if you are the GM, you contributed substantially to (setting
up the world, the NPCs; deciding what intrigue it is that the PCs stumble
over; etc.) It seems entirely reasonable to me that this would flip that
"this story has been told and I'm done with it" mental switch in a
great many GMs.
Patricia C. Wrede
Heather Anne Nicoll
> Heather Anne Nicoll wrote:
> > There are other skills involved in each, and there are sgnificant
> > differences, but there is, for me, a good bit of overlap.
> I'd say some overlap. I object to "a good bit" :-)
*rumbling noise*
/FOR ME/ there is a good bit of overlap.
Nine-and-sixty ways.
--
Heather Nicoll - Darkhawk - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
Heather Anne Nicoll
> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
This is to give you the opportunity to retract this comment.
Please do.
Lisa A Leutheuser
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>
>Michelle & Boyd Bottorff wrote:
>>
>> When I write, I generally think of "the story" as "what the main
>> characters do." And I'm in control, because I'm the one that decides
>> what those characters are doing.
>
>But doesn't the character have a backstory and a personality,
>which you've created before you started writing the story?
>
>I know that I can't make a fiction-character do something that
>is inconsistent with his or her backstory or personality.
>
>There'll be holes in such predefinitions, of course. I might
>have forgotten to define what the character thinks of cows,
>or the name of the first girl he fell in love with or had
>sex with.
I don't think having backstory and having gaps in the
backstory contradicts what Michelle Bottorff said.
I am in control of what I write. I also have backstory.
(I think of it as character and world history.) And I have
gaps in that history. And at times I come to a point where
I have to fill that gap, and sometimes in filling that gap
the story take a completely new and unexpected turn. But I
am still in control of the story, even when I surprise myself.
(I'm not one of those people who say "the characters took
over". I understand the experience, but I just refuse to give
my characters the credit because it ultimately comes back to
what I, while pretending to be the characters, came up with.)
>But by defining things, you give up control. And I'm not sure
>I *want* that much control. In fact I find that either one of
>these are the case (I'm not quite sure which):
>
>A. The less control you have, when you're creative, the more
>admirable the product is, with the word admirable being used
>in the sense related to what's difficult to do. It's
>admirable to lift a 300 pounds heav rock, or read a 400 page-
>book in an hour *and* be able to recall most of the contents.
Why should a story that comes to me in one glorious vision,
imprinting itself to the screen as quickly as my fingers
can type, be less admirable than a story that took me two
weeks or hard thinking to write out? I can admire the
discipline and effort taken to pin that elusive latter story
to the page, but I don't think the end result, the story
itself, is necessary more admirable than the one that came
to me all at once.
Oh, I am envious of those writers who *seem* to write
masterpieces without effort. Maybe they do. Maybe they
don't. Maybe they cry red tears each night and morning
over the sins they've committed to the page. Or maybe they
toast themselves with fine wine and self-conceit, confident
of their greatness. I don't know. All I know is that I
like what they've written. I can admire the creativity and
skill in the writing, I can admire the message in the story,
and I might even admire the author as a person, but I won't
say one story is more admirable than another based on the
effort needed to write it.
>B. There's an optimum somewhere between having no control
>and having total control, where creative beauty and
>admirability are both at the maximum - increase one further
>and you loose the other.
>
>What I'm trying to do is obviously to demagoguely establish
>the giving-up-of-control-by-predefining as an act of
>bravery, and the I-make-it-up-as-I-go type of author as
>a coward. Might as well admit it.
I don't agree with this at all. I don't think that predefining
is giving up control (on the contrary, to me it is exercising
control), and I don't see that giving up control == writer bravery.
Write how you write. Though you can often overlaps in method,
ultimately every writer has to find their own path to getting
their stories on paper. The right way for you is the way that
works for you. But I just don't understand what bravery and
admirableness has to do with the writing process.
I think there is some fundamental core difference in how you and
I think of the writing process and what stories are. The language
you use to talk about it and the ideas are alien to me. I say this
as a general observation from reading your posts in this thread.
(I won't presume to guess what you think of my ideas about writing,
though I don't think I've explained myself as much as you have here.)
Mary K. Kuhner
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>"Mary K. Kuhner" wrote:
>> My husband and I had an interesting discussion of what it is that
>> causes us to say fairly confidently "That story could come from a
>> game" or "That one couldn't". One major trigger seems to be that
>> certain aspects of the world--particularly mechanistic aspects of
>> how, functionally, magic and/or high tech work--were designed and
>> learned top-down rather than through the eyes of the main character.
>> This leads to the author putting in details that she wouldn't
>> have found had she been working from her protagonist outward.
>Can you try to give an example of this?
It's been a long time since I read Feist's _Magician_ (and I only read
it once, because I didn't care for it). I can't give a concrete example
from the text, but the feeling I recall was that when the characters
met something unknown, they considered a short list of *kinds* of things
that the world could contain, and tried to decide where on that list the
unknown fell. Undead may drain your life energy, or age you, or
damage you with their chilling touch, or a few other things. Those are
the things that undead do, and though we've never seen one before, we
figure it'll be one of those.
This is a blatant example, though. It can be much more subtle than that.
I can't point to exactly what it is in _Jhereg_, for example, except that
the author knew an awful lot about a couple of specific aspects of
magic, without a corresponding depth of knowledge elsewhere. It all
makes sense, that Vlad would know what buying a link to the Orb gives
you, and about teleport inducing nausea, and so forth. But--oh! It's
not hung around with the things Vlad knew before he learned the truth.
His experience of Draegarian magic (if I am recalling correctly--it has
been a long time) seems primary, whereas with his background there should
be an overlay of what he understood as a child and young man. Maybe
that's it.
I think this is an easy trap to fall into if you do top-down design, and
not specific to gaming. You *know* the truth, and it's hard to realize
when the fact that your characters don't, or didn't, should color their
perceptions.
One thing I had to learn as a GM is that I am not a top-down designer.
If I fill in the broad outlines of the map too well, the things in between
are not "unknown" anymore and I run into both realism problems (things
are too well known) and morale problems (I lose the sparkle of having
mysteries and surprises in the world). I think that using a gaming
system as a story basis can (though won't always) lead to the same kind
of problem, where in a sense you know too much about something--
particularly, you know about its generalities before you know about its
particulars, and this may get you stuck in generalities.
>> A last point: I got called by Graydon once on _Traveller_ references,
>> which suprised me a bit because I've never played Traveller in my
>> life. I called someone on Critters on what I felt were blatant,
>> clumsy D&D references, and got back a puzzled "I've never roleplayed".
>Can you give examples?
>Why did Graydon call you on a Traveller reference?
What Graydon cited, specifically, was the constellation of the word "Jump" for
star travel (and the associated idea that you can't Jump from near a star),
"credits" for money, a vaguely doggish looking alien race, and the starship
being a refitted scout. Two of those probably *are* from Traveller, third
or fourth hand. The doggish people, though, I was deathly afraid that Graydon
would notice that they're kif, and I was bemused to hear that they were
Vargr. I know nothing about Vargr except a broad cliche, and it's not the
same cliche. But (it's a pacing problem with the story) they're mostly
offstage in the part Graydon saw, so it's a reasonable assumption, and
one I need to watch out for.
>What was it on the Critters story that made you think of
>D&D?
The protagonist guessing that someone was of a certain profession due to
details of her armor, without any cultural context that would make that
make sense. "Barbarian" as a description of a profession. And a takes-
all-comers arena-fighting scenario. In retrospect, all things that the
author could well have gotten second-hand, like my Vargr.
What I've found with my own writing is that RPG material takes a *lot* of
reclaiming. It's not a shortcut at all; you have to revisit and rework
and rethink and change ownership. It wouldn't be easier, except that
this is the story I *have* and I'm stuck with it. When I'm done there
will be sections that are verbatam from the game, I suspect, and sections
where it's not recognizable anymore, and a lot of things inbetween.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Julian Flood
> One thing I like about the RPG rules system I've settled on
> is that the way magic works seems natural.
<marvin> Sounds awful</>
Seriously, I've never seen the attraction of gaming. If there's a story I
want it to have my characters in my world, learning and teaching my lessons.
However, I used to subvocalise rude things when someone talked about
characters taking over a novel: now I've read lots about it here and decided
that there could be something in it after all. Maybe you'll all convert me
to gaming. Don't hold your breath.
But it was a good guitar.
--
Julian Flood
Life, the Universe and Climbing Plants at www.argonet.co.uk/users/julesf.
Patricia C. Wrede
Leutheuser) writes:
>In article <39CEEF68...@knutsen.dk>,
>Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
>>A. The less control you have, when you're creative, the more
>>admirable the product is, with the word admirable being used
>>in the sense related to what's difficult to do. It's
>>admirable to lift a 300 pounds heav rock, or read a 400 page-
>>book in an hour *and* be able to recall most of the contents.
Sorry about the nested quotes, but I either missed this or it hasn't
made it to my server yet.
As a general statement, the above is ridiculous. *You* may admire
uncontrolled creative works more than controlled ones, but they
are not inherently more admirable. Furthermore, I defy you to
take one of my books -- THE RAVEN RING, say, or one of the
Mairelon books -- and pick out those scenes that "just came," the things
that "just happened" without intention, versus the ones that were
carefully pre-planned. (I don't think you can do this with anybody's
books, actually, but since I certainly don't presume to be a mind-
reader, I can't tell with anybody else's books whether you've guessed
right or not. With mine, I know.) If you can't tell from reading it
whether it was written in a glorious burst of inspiration or
constructed brick by painful brick, how can you say that one
way of writing is inherently better and more admirable than the
other?
>Why should a story that comes to me in one glorious vision,
>imprinting itself to the screen as quickly as my fingers
>can type, be less admirable than a story that took me two
>weeks or hard thinking to write out?
What you said, Lisa.
> I can admire the
>discipline and effort taken to pin that elusive latter story
>to the page, but I don't think the end result, the story
>itself, is necessary more admirable than the one that came
>to me all at once.
What you said.
>>What I'm trying to do is obviously to demagoguely establish
>>the giving-up-of-control-by-predefining as an act of
>>bravery, and the I-make-it-up-as-I-go type of author as
>>a coward. Might as well admit it.
>
>I don't agree with this at all. I don't think that predefining
>is giving up control (on the contrary, to me it is exercising
>control), and I don't see that giving up control == writer bravery.
Furthermore, I don't see that the writer who predefines everything
is, in fact, giving up any control whatsoever. The control is merely
being exercised durring one part of the process rather than during
a different part of the process. On some level, the author is *always*
in control: there is conscious volition involved in choosing which
words to put down, which events to portray, and I don't see how
one can give that up and still write anything at all.
Defining "predefined worlds" as "brave" and "make-it-up-as-you-go"
as "cowardly" a) insults a whole lot of writers; b) betrays an utter
lack of appreciation for differences in the writing process; and c)
sounds to me a great deal like "The way I prefer to work is good
and brave; this way other people prefer to work is bad and
cowardly; that way other people prefer to work is unartistic and
not creative." None of which appeal much to me.
Patricia C. Wrede
Jo Walton
pe...@knutsen.dk "Peter Knutsen" writes:
> A writer of loose-and-easy sci-fi has more control and freedom
> than a writer of hard science fiction.
>
> Yet some people choose the difficult path of writing hard
> science fiction, rather than sticking with sci-fi which is
> both more popular and demands less of the author.
>
> In a way, I'd like to invent a new genre called "hard
> fantasy", which is admirable to write, the same way hard
> science fiction is admirable to write, because it's
> difficult, so few can do it well.
>
> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
There is a woman, one hand on a leaf,
a fossil leaf, set in an asteroid
like a veneer of stone instead of wood.
She looks right at you, and she does not smile.
She has dark eyes, a blaster in her hand
aimed straight towards you with unwavering grip.
She says, "Peter, my home is out in space
one hundred years from yours, and here we say:
the obligation of a poet is
first to be true; and second to remake
the language, so it freshens on the tongue.
They are one obligation if you see it straight,
for language must be made to keep it true."
She stops, draws breath, her blaster moves a hair
but stays aimed at your heart through time and space.
"Listen," she says. "Each genre has its rules
What each needs to be true is its own thing.
Do you think that 'The Girl Who Was Plugged In'
was dashed off by an idiot in an hour
while angels sang 'Mission of Gravity'?
And will you set the truths of physics up
against the truths of human hearts, and say
that one is platinum and the other dross?
Or worse, you set the truth of rolling dice,
the truth of painful probability
the truth of simulation, of a game,
against the truth of how folk act in pain
and call yours noble and all others fools?"
She rolls her eyes. "Will you deny my dreams,
my passions, all the lineaments of life,
because you do not know -- and cannot tell,
for nobody is ever going to say
and I'm not inconsiderate enough
to let you learn firsthand, though you tempt me --
if this my blaster came straight out of GURPS
and can be found with lists of stats and range
and fumble tables, and a damage chart,
or if it came to hand, whole and unsought
on winds of indignation, at my thought?"
She puts the blaster down beside the leaf,
gently, she slips the catch on carefully.
She strokes the leaf, with grace and habit's ease.
Then her eyes fix again, inexorably.
"All those who chose to write by rules designed
for playing games, for simulating life,
had best be good, or more than good, the best,
had best be good enough to do so well
they need no heed of cautions - are you one?
You may be, but for most the risks are huge
the gains are very small, for they will give
their readers stories that are second-hand
and second-rate, and bound by rules that force
the story into grooves the rules have made.
Still, if this be your way, feel free, and write.
But know that you have broken the one rule
that sf.composition as a group
has always held the highest writing law
(and still does in my time, the lightspeed lag
makes usenet popular throughout all space
and people post from Pluto and the Oort)
and this law is: we do not say our way
is right, and all the others wrong
deploring that they do these dreadful things
so stupid and so easy and so quick.
We blink, and see that their way works for them
and by this proof is right, as right as ours,
and we quote Kipling, who you may despise,
because he was a poet, as am I,
and many on this group, in both our times."
She takes one step, light-gravitied, away
and blinks out in an instant as her hand
lifts off the fossil leaf set in the stone.
Lisa A Leutheuser
Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>
>What Graydon cited, specifically, was the constellation of the word "Jump" for
>star travel (and the associated idea that you can't Jump from near a star),
Though hasn't "jump" become rather common in SF? Does anyone
know if Traveller was the original source for the term?
>"credits" for money, a vaguely doggish looking alien race, and the starship
>being a refitted scout. Two of those probably *are* from Traveller, third
>or fourth hand. The doggish people, though, I was deathly afraid that Graydon
>would notice that they're kif, and I was bemused to hear that they were
>Vargr. I know nothing about Vargr except a broad cliche, and it's not the
>same cliche. But (it's a pacing problem with the story) they're mostly
>offstage in the part Graydon saw, so it's a reasonable assumption, and
>one I need to watch out for.
I have a Traveller character who knows a lot about Vargr.
She could answer your questions. :-)
Patricia C. Wrede
<jul...@argonet.co.uk> writes:
>Seriously, I've never seen the attraction of gaming. If there's a story I
>want it to have my characters in my world, learning and teaching my lessons.
Well, see, Julian, that's the thing -- if you try gaming *in
order to write*, it's not going to work at all, not for writing
and not for gaming. Gaming isn't writing, any more than
playing chess is writing, or Solitaire (Patience?) is
writing. They do different things. And if you judge an RPG
by a reader's standards, or by a writer's, then it's not going
to scratch the itch, because it's busy scratching a *different*
itch. And if you don't have the itch, scratching there will
just be annoying and pointless.
I think it's possible that listening to a bunch of people talk
about what they get out of RPGs may convince you that
some people enjoy them a whole lot, even if you don't (but I
expect that you don't need convincing of this, being an
intelligent person). But I doubt that it'll convince you that
RPGs are something you should try, or might like if you tried.
Patricia C. Wrede
Lori Selke
Sylvia Li <meta...@escape.ca> wrote:
>Peter Knutsen wrote:
>> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
>> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
>>
>Ooh. Let me admire that last paragraph for its sheer, blind courage. One of
>two things will happen now: after a good night's sleep you will realize
>that you *really* did not want to say this. Or, for as long as you maintain
>the stance, this thread will burgeon in a direction that has nothing to do
>with role-playing.
>
>(chuckling, and waiting to see what will happen)
Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. Or a hard science fiction
story. or a hard fantasy story. Or a soft fantasy story.
Not everyone can do these things *well*.
So Peter's first statement is correct; his second just doesn't
follow from the first.
(It could be argues, I suppose, that bad sci-fi and bad poetry
are easier to write than other things:
I
just wrote
a
very
bad
poem.
But that's another discussion.)
Lori
--
se...@io.com
se...@sirius.com
"But this isn't a dance! It's upright delirium!" -- The Desert Peach
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> > When I write, I generally think of "the story" as "what the main
> > characters do." And I'm in control, because I'm the one that decides
> > what those characters are doing.
>
> But doesn't the character have a backstory and a personality,
> which you've created before you started writing the story?
>
> I know that I can't make a fiction-character do something that
> is inconsistent with his or her backstory or personality.
Well of course, but I also make up the backstory and personality. In
fact, that's where my stories start, really. A charcter with a
backstory and a personality, and a setting (which is also part of their
backstory, of course.)
> But by defining things, you give up control.
Hmm, I believe I tend to think of that backwards.
Control is what I do WHEN I define something. As long as I am the one
defining things, I'm in control. As soon as someone else starts
defining things, I'm not in control.
This is why I like fantasy better than science fiction, perhaps? In
fantasy I even get to define the laws of nature. LOTS of control.
> A. The less control you have, when you're creative, the more
> admirable the product is, with the word admirable being used
> in the sense related to what's difficult to do. It's
> admirable to lift a 300 pounds heav rock, or read a 400 page-
> book in an hour *and* be able to recall most of the contents.
Um. No, I don't see this. This is saying that its harder to write that
which you have no control over. But some people un-controlled
"free-writing" tremendously easy, just, well, it doesn't turn up much
that is worthwhile.
I think this is a writer process thing. Some writers turn up the good
stuff when they are out of control, and some can only come up with it
when they are in control.
And I'm pretty sure this is the case for both your definition of control
and my definition of control. :)
> What I'm trying to do is obviously to demagoguely establish
> the giving-up-of-control-by-predefining as an act of
> bravery, and the I-make-it-up-as-I-go type of author as
> a coward. Might as well admit it.
>
> But don't I have a point?
A point for you perhaps, but not, I think, a point for everyone.
See above. :)
Michelle Bottorff
Michelle & Boyd Bottorff
> > When I game, I am in control of all the stuff you are in control of,
> > (well, obviously, that's the DMs jobs) but I don't count that as being
> > in charge of the "story" because the "story" is what the PC are doing.
> > I'm in control of the gaming SESSION, but the game as a whole belongs
> > the players.
>
> I think ahead to shape things for them to react to, so that they do
> what they want but I will put temptation in their way, or challenges
> they can't resist, or invisible bridges with gaps in across uncrossable
> abysses to magic castles.
Ah, but who gets to decide what kind of challanges will be irrisitable
to the characters?
The players.
I do everything you do, I just think of it differently.
I can put whatever I feel like out there, and as long as the characters
get to ultimately decide what they do, I consider them to be the ones in
control.
Because I am all powerful, I can set up a scenario so that it removes
their choices, then I am in control. But they won't be having fun, and
that's the point of the game, so every situation has to be somewhat open
to decision making and plotting.
That ISN'T how I write books.
It IS how some other authors I've talked to write books, but I've never
gotten it to work for me.
When I write books I always KNOW where my characters are going. I can't
seem to change that. It's as if by the time I've started writing the
book the story has already happened, and all I'm doing is figuring out
how and why it happened that way, and filling in a few details.
I've never seen a successfully run game where the story had already
happened and the DM was forcing the characters to act out that story.
(I'm not saying it hasn't HAPPENED, mind you, but I've never seen it.)
Even when the characters volentarily follow every little lead and hint
you give them, that's still their choice, and I'd still be just lucky
things are working out so smoothly. :)
Michelle Bottorff
Zeborah
> "Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
> >
> > In article <39C9D4C2...@knutsen.dk>, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
> > writes:
> > >A third pitfall is that if you GM in a natural style, the
> > >player characters might end up being so skilled and
> > >influential that they are the movers and shakers of the
> > >campaign world. That makes it hard to produce fiction
> > >after that point, without the PCs being very visible.
Assassinate them. :-)
> > >After all, player characters have a tendency to grab for
> > >power, influence and ways of increasing their competence,
> > >while fictional characters tends to be more complacent
> > >and much less ambitious.
> >
> > That depends entirely on your characters (gaming and otherwise).
> > But it also is an illustration of my point: what makes for a good
> > game is a world in which PCs *can* grab power and influence.
>
> I don't agree with this. There are extreme types of worlds.
>
> One is the world were everything is settled and there's little
> room for maneuver. Custom dictates everything and no one
> strays from the norm. There's no conflict between ideas, and
> very little conflict between characters, factions and nations.
>
> Such a word is bad both for fictionwriting and gaming.
You reckon? I've just written a few hundred words of a short story in
which everything is settled and there's little room for manoeuvre.
Custom dictates everything and no one strays from the norm. There's no
conflict between ideas, and very little conflict--
Whoops. Got carried away there. In fact, there's a lot of conflict.
Much conflict. Enough conflict to suffocate several worlds. It's just
that it's all simmering conflict, quiet and almost invisible. And it
never changes anything important, although it's certainly important for
the characters. The world is a shifting morass of personal and
political alliances, moving this way and that, being forced to keep to
the middle path by conservatives who have the image of a swinging
pendulum perpetually in their mind. Let it swing too far to the right,
and sooner or later it'll swing way over to the left, and no-one wants
another Night of a Thousand Riots.
My short story is about a woman and her best friend. Because there's
this issue, you see, but since there's no room for manoeuvring, no
conflict, and no-one straying from the norm, this issue hasn't been
addressed for twenty years. And now the pendulum's about to move a tick
to the left, and then it will swing two ticks to the right, and then it
will shudder back to rest; but those three ticks are enough for my
story.
Maybe this world wouldn't be a good gaming world; I don't know anything
about gaming. But it's a fine fiction world indeed.
> The other extreme is a world in which things are in a flux,
> there are lots of changes, wars, conflicts.
>
> Such a world is good both for fictionwriting and gaming.
If you want to write about changes and wars, yeah. If you want to write
about personal conflicts, then the external stuff can actually get in
the way of the personal stuff. Depending on how you juggle things.
> Fiction characters are often motivated by a single goal, and
> rather uninterested in other matters. And they're usually not
> inclined to grab after power unless it's immediately and
> obviously relevant to their personal obsession.
Okay, I'll 'play' with my main fictional character here. Motivated by a
single goal? No; she wants friends, she wants some peace of mind, and
she wants to do her job satisfactorily. That's three. (Although peace
of mind sort of counts as two...) Uninterested in other matters? No;
when other matters come up, she gets involved. Not inclined to grab
after power? Well, that one's true. She's not interested in power.
But then, nor am I. Nor, afaik, are most of my friends and family.
> Alas, the player characters in my campaign aren't the most
> motivated or power-hungry. The player I lost (mentioned in
> an earlier posting) was the most motivated, his character
> would have ended up as the king of Denmark, with luck and
> skill and patience.
Why alas? Okay, maybe it's an alas in a gaming system; it wouldn't be
an alas in any fiction I write.
> > >You're likely to add more breadth to your world if it's
> > >intended for roleplaying gaming use, particularly if you
> > >game in a natural (non-scripted) fashion.
> >
> > Speak for yourself. My first gaming world was written as a novel *first*,
> > and then translated for gaming use, and I had more problems trying to
> > *reduce* the "breadth" of the world for gaming purposes. It really
> > depends on *how* one goes about building one's imaginary worlds, not
> > on what they're for.
>
> Why did you need to reduce the breadth? That doesn't make
> sense to me.
To avoid putting in comments that confuse or frustrate readers. I just
read a story by my sister that kept putting guns on the wall and never
firing with them. At first I expected them to be important to the
story; when they weren't, I wanted them to at least be explained. But
you can't explain everything.
In my main WIP, I had to get rid of cultures -- actually delete them
from existence -- because they weren't important to the story, and they
were getting in the way of the story. If they existed in the universe,
I couldn't refrain from mentioning them in the story; but in the story
they were only red herrings that confused my readers. So I had to get
rid of them.
> > > You never know
> > >whether the player characters are going to travel five
> > >hundred miles north or two thousand miles east, so you'd
> > >better define all the cultures on the continent, and make
> > >a few notes about what's on nearby continents.
> >
> > I never know whether the characters in my books are going to travel five
> > hundred miles north or...never mind. But really, you don't have to
>
> Okay...
>
> I've found out that when I write fiction, I must have a fairly
> good idea of what's going to happen in advance. I have dozens
> of unfinished stories proving that starting, without having
> cooked up a plot, doesn't work for me.
>
> The plot may change, of course, but I need one in order to
> keep writing.
Right, and this is the thing: Every writer writes differently. You
plan ahead consciously before you start writing; I start writing and
work out the story by the time I've finished a couple of chapters; other
writers just write until they realise they're at the end.
> > define the whole world, in either case. If the characters in a book head
> > off into terra incognita, you can stop writing for a week while you make
> > up the country they're headed for; if the player characters head off
> > the edge of the map, you can slow them down with a raft of monster
> > encounters and spend the week before the next gaming session
> > making up the country they're headed for. It depends on how you
> > prefer to work.
>
> Well, yeah. One time we played, the characters headed off to
> a dungeon. I seriously didn't want to improvise the dungeon
> contents, fearing that I'd then be tempted (or pressurized)
> to make the contents of it too easy or too hard, so I
> delayed the characters with a bandit encounter and then
> finished the session early. Then I spent some time until
> next session on defining the dungeon and the various undeads
> inhabiting it.
>
> The short story I'm working on now is about a man and a woman
> who is going into an abandoned mine to retrieve a mythical
> shield. And I'm doing the same thing, drawing up the entire
> complex using a dozen sheets of graph paper. Because I don't
> want to make it up as I write, since that leads to tempta-
> tions that I want to avoid.
See, for a whole lot of writers this isn't an issue. For me, the
question isn't "Is this too easy? Is this too hard?" The question is,
"Does this make a good story?" And of course the level of difficulty
has a certain amount of impact on how good the story is, but it's
difficulty relative to the character, not to the task. Argh. It's...
difficulty *as perceived by* the character.
(Of course, I like making things up to some extent as I go along. To
some extent I make up my lessons as I go along: "Oops, that Bob Marley
fill-in-the-blanks was supposed to take an hour and they're finished
after only fifteen minutes! What do I do with them for the rest of the
time? Ooh, I'll make them draw a time-line of his life. And then a
family tree. And then they can write questions that they'd ask him if
they met him. And if they're still going strong, then I'll ask them
what questions they'd ask their *other* heroes...")
> > That, again, isn't a matter of gaming vs. non-gaming; it's a matter
> > of personal preference. One of the longest-running and most
> > popular local games was set on an elaborate world that was
> > *intentionally* static -- sort of like being in the middle of the
> > 4,000 years of Ancient Egyptian dynasties. Plenty of politics
> > and intrigue, but little or no social mobility and no "hot spots"
> > at all.
>
> Doesn't sound like the most static, non-fluxy world possible.
> I can't come up with any examples that are more static at
> the moment, however.
Maybe there aren't any more static examples. <shrug> Dunno, but it's a
possibility.
Where there are people, there is conflict. If there's no conflict,
they're not people.
> > >Having to stick to a set of "rules" might sound like it
> > >restricts the creativity of the author.
> >
> > Well, who makes up these rules in the first place? The author,
>
> Yes, but it very often looks like the author doesn't make the
> rules up in advance. He or she makes the rules up when the
> rules becomes relevant.
Okay, but it's what it looks like that's the problem, not what the
author actually did.
> Say that a character who is skilled in fire magic, gets stuck
> in a dark place and needs to cast a spell to light the place
> up.
>
> Then, at that point in the ms, the author decides that the
> character can conjure up a small flame that burns from a
> fingertip.
>
> It's just making things too convenient for the author.
Oh, phooey. Why the hell shouldn't our job be easy? :-)
The important thing isn't the process, it's the finished product. Now,
if the author has presented the world so that the character has a fire
spell ready to go, then that's cool, right? But it's also cool if the
author thinks, "Ooh, he needs to have a fire spell; I'd better go back
and mention in chapter two that his uncle taught him about fire spells,
and oh my, it was his uncle who gave him the pet panther! I'll have to
change that in chapters five and twenty, but this is *perfect* for the
resolution of the narwhal subplot."
If the author does the job right, the end result of one method is
*indistinguishable* from the end result of the other. Following rules
or retrofitting, the process doesn't matter.
> > And it can be hard to shake the habits of gaming if one is telling
> > a story set in a world that one is accustomed to game, even if
> > one is not using any characters or incidents from a particular
> > campaign.
>
> I don't think it's a problem if fiction becomes a little bit
> RPG-session like.
>
> In some stories, everything that happens looks like it fits some
> big master plan. There's no surprises, no random stuff, nothing
> that is truly irrelevant.
>
> And that contributes to making the story seem less realistic.
I don't read (or write) stories for realism. If I want realism I can
take the garbage outside and squint and get annoyed that I left my
sunglasses inside, and remember that I need to use my lip chapstick
thingy again, and say "Hello" to all the students on the steps who
recognise me, and wonder if I can work up the energy to go into town for
groceries.
I read (or write) stories for something that's more important than
reality. Let's call it super-reality, since surreality is already
taken. Reality is for the eyes; super-reality is for the soul.
When I write, I edit out the parts that aren't important. It may be
true that Captain rAys spends half an hour with her officers trying to
sort out some problem with the nanosystem, but it's not important to
show it. It's even counter-productive -- showing it will make the
reader think it's important.
When I read, my soul wants the threads tied together at the end of the
story. No loose ends. It's quite happy with tassles and such-like
decoration; a story would certainly be boring otherwise. But it doesn't
want to be looking at a tapestry and suddenly notice that someone's sewn
a sleeve -- an actual sleeve, jutting out -- where a horse should be.
Zeborah
--
http://www.crosswinds.net/~zeborahnz
Gravity is no joke.
Zeborah
> I must conclude that what you refer to as a "magic system"
> would be nothing but a loose collection of notes about
> how stuff relates to other stuff. Loose, fuzzy, muchly
> open to interpretation. A magic system is much more explicitly
> defined. That doesn't mean that it gets dull or that it
> kills creativity, only that you can hand the system to two
> or more different people, and they'll produce stuff that
> is consistent with what the other guy makes.
But... but... If I invent a magic system, I don't *want* to hand it to
someone else to produce something consistent with my stuff. I just want
to write a story where that magic system happens to exist. So I start
with some loose collection of notes, and I start writing, and I come
across a point where things are open to interpretation. What's the big
deal? I'm the author; I interpret. What's more, I can interpret it a
way that's good for the story.
Imagine... You've invented a magic system whereby powerful wizards can
be defeated by the application to their epidermis of a potent mixture of
cabbage, carrots, mustard, vinegar, and watered down condensed milk. So
you start writing this story, and the villain, a powerful wizard, comes
into the protag's house while the protag is making coleslaw for dinner.
And this is the first scene, where the wizard is supposed to threaten
the protag before going away to Wreak Havoc. But the protag freaks and
throws the coleslaw at him, and he dissolves into a puddle, along with
your entire story.
All you have to write about after that is the protag saying, "Oh bother,
now I'm out of cabbage." Realistic? Maybe...
But I'd prefer a story where the author left things a little fuzzy so
that the coleslaw would just make the wizard mad because it's ruined his
best cloak, so he turns the protag into a frog, who has to figure out a
way to communicate with her husband before he throws her outside, and
then they have to find out a way to save the world with some special
froggie insight. Or something.
> What you refer to as a "magic system" must be a bit like how
> George Lucas defined the technology of the Star Wars universe.
>
> I'd rather be Timothy Zahn, or Arthur C. Clarke, than I'd
> be George Lucas. (In fact I'd like to be able to juggle
> the mythical/cultural archetypes with the same skill as
> Lucas, but without being so fuzzy and inconsistent with
> the laws of physics...)
The physics isn't the point. The magic isn't the point. You want the
physics and the magic to, in the final product, appear consistent, but
they *don't have to start that way*. They don't have to even *be*
consistent, as long as the reader doesn't notice.
I don't invent a story to put around a magic system. I invent a magic
system to put into my story. The story's the thing.
For me. Different strokes and all.
Zeborah
> diehn wrote:
> >
> > Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> > > One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
> > > nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
> > > defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
> > > good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
> > > convenient for the story.
> >
> > I tend to not wing stuff, to develop an idea of the technology
> > beforehand. It's actually given me some ideas that are pretty good, and
>
> That's good, but I'm afraid you and I are in a minority
> as authors :-(
No, don't *do* that! Don't do that smiley face over diversity. IDIC!
The fact that many authors work differently to you would not be a bad
thing even if you were the greatest author who ever lived and sold a
million books every day and were studied in literature classes the world
over.
"There are nine and sixty ways
Of writing tribal ways
And *every single one of them* is RIGHT!"
Some people *can't* plan things out in advance. If they tried, they'd
never write a word. So they do it another way, and using that other way
they write amazing, incredible, wonderful, soul-inspiring books.
Process does not equal the finished product.
You write one way, fine. Other people write another way. And that's a
good thing, doggangit.
Zeborah
> Jo Walton wrote:
>
> > What's more, "doesn't say what they can do, only how well they can do
> > it" - well, maybe, but as a writer you want to control that yourself.
>
> I don't want to control that myself. Not necesarrily.
>
> A writer of loose-and-easy sci-fi has more control and freedom
> than a writer of hard science fiction.
More control means more responsibility.
> Yet some people choose the difficult path of writing hard
> science fiction, rather than sticking with sci-fi which is
> both more popular and demands less of the author.
<seethe>
The opposite of hard sf is not sci-fi; it's soft sf. Soft sf may be
more popular, I don't know. It does *not* demand less of the author.
It demands less knowledge of physics, that's all. You still have to get
the story, characters, setting, etc etc, consistent and enjoyable and
entertaining.
> In a way, I'd like to invent a new genre called "hard
> fantasy", which is admirable to write, the same way hard
> science fiction is admirable to write, because it's
> difficult, so few can do it well.
>
> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
I suggest you read this again. I suggest you think hard about this. Do
you really mean it?
Leaving "sci-fi" aside because you've chosen the pejorative term
already, and thus are begging the question; consider such names as...
oh, I don't know. Shakespeare. Wordsworth. Tennyson. --Dang, I don't
know poetry that well.-- k.d.lang. Pam Ayers. John McCrae.
"We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields."
Did an idiot write that?
My God, I wish I were such an idiot!
I wish I were such an idiot that I could express in words what my soul
is screaming: that you are wrong; that poetry is a beautiful and a
dangerous and a fragile thing; that it is written with as much *and* as
little difficulty as any hard science fiction book.
I wish I were such an idiot that I could write my soft sf stories
because writing soft sf is so easy, and get them published because soft
sf is so popular!
Read what you wrote again, and think about it, and think about all the
people you've just insulted, and apologise before you get killfiled by
too many of them. I'll refrain for now on the charitable assumption
that you've... drunk too much coffee or something.
Zeborah
(<groan> This is going to be a flamewar in the morning, I just know it.
I've done my research for the year on flamewars. I know all about
flamewars. I want to research *pleasant* character interactions for a
few months!)
Mary K. Kuhner
Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>This is going to be a rant.
So is this, I'm afraid.
>The advantage is that you've done some of the thinking before you've
>started writing, so you can have a world (character/plot/whatever) with
>more depth for less effort. There can also be other advantages. But I
>think they are usually massively outweighed by a disadvantage that your
>post absolutely reeks of.
>This disadvantage is that roleplaying isn't life, it's a way of
>simulating life, with it's own conventions for how it works.
It's a risk. I think, though, that many games have points at which
they touch life fairly directly, and points where they touch it less
directly if at all. The points of contact vary a *lot* from game
to game. For points where your game touches life, you can do as well,
or for some writers better, using the game material as you can making
things up de novo.
The trick is to know where you can do this, and where you can't--where
you have to re-create, re-imagine, re-own, because the stage background
you threw up for the game doesn't hold up for a story.
A lot of this you have to do anyway, or at least I do, because it's
just as true that my own first thoughts on many topics are too shallow,
stylized, or flat out wrong. In both cases, there is no shortcut--
you've got to do the work.
I'd certainly agree with you if you said "Using a game probably won't
save you much, if any, work in the long run." But I can't agree
with the leap to "Its advantages are outweighed by its disadvantages."
Not even with "usually" thrown in.
You might also bear in mind that direct contact with life is not the
goal of every form of writing. Not all stories are naturalistic,
even though it may be the predominant form at the moment.
>This means that if you use anything from the game directly, you
>aren't writing about people any more, you're writing about simulations
>of people, and people who are simulated in a really different way
>to the way novels usually do it. (And for "people's behaviour" read
>also "magic system" and "combat system" and "world" and "tech".)
>This can be a big problem. It's an even bigger problem if you forget
>this and start thinking it's OK.
I've found this to be a big, big problem with tech and magic, but not
with human behavior per se; our games put a high premium
on getting human behavior "right". My critiquers called me on it when
we knowingly broke that contract, every darned time, but they have
fairly seldom called me on human behavior in scenes where the contract
was observed. In fact, it's the "splice" material where I need to
bridge across plot or logic failings in the game that tends to get
"not in character" tags the most often. And this, sigh, is what
rewriting is for.
Peter Knutsen wrote:
>> One advantage is that you get a clearly defined magic or tech-
>> nology. In order to do roleplaying gaming, you must have
>> defined your tech gadgets, or how magic works, with pretty
>> good accuracy. You can't just wing stuff, into what is
>> convenient for the story.
>Those are _both_ disadvantages.
>Really.
>Huge ones.
I don't think this is necessarily so.
There is a class of errors that having a worked-out system will protect
you from, and for some writers, being protected from those errors is
very important, far more important than the (real) problems you bring
up. Five and ninety ways, remember?
I've (metaphorically) thrown books against the wall because I could not
believe that the world existed beyond the boundaries of the story.
Things were only there because they were needed, and all the second-
and third- and fourth-order effects of them being there were missing.
I think some of those stories might have been drastically improved, to
my tastes, by imposing a formal system.
I read a published fantasy novel where it's commonly known that all
mageborn go mad when their powers start to manifest. But the author
had never *lived* that reality: so the character, when her powers
began to manifest, never seemed to doubt for a moment that she was
sane. It ruined the book for me. I don't know if a formal system
would have helped this author; I can't help feeling that the experience
of living that character might have helped.
I've also read my share of stories where the stage-managing of
"I need X to happen, so I'll make it that magic can do that" broke
down horribly, leading to a world that didn't make logical or
emtional sense, characters who could do things on page 10 and not
on page 50, that sort of thing. If this is where one's temptations
lie, I think the discipline of having to work it all out in advance
could really help.
>I mean I used
>to live with someone who'd claim he'd had a critical failure on making
>tea when he'd accidentally made coffee instead, and that being married
>gives you +2 to respectability, but really that isn't how the world
>works, and when you see the world in those terms - _especially_ a story
>world - you're an additional unnecessary layer of abstraction away from
>being able to write something original. And by original I mean something
>real, something you have observed, something fresh that hasn't been done
>to death already. And you're also a layer of abstraction away from being
>able to describe it, because what you're seeing isn't someone doing
>something, but a dice roll, a percentage chance.
It's a problem, yes. It's not an insurmountable problem for everyone.
I think it depends partly on how you store stories in your head,
what form the internal narrative takes.
As for fresh, there are two experiences I know about only through
gaming. I'm not talking how to fire a gun or ride a unicorn. There
are two bits of my internal emotional space I found about about via
gaming. I have since seen one of them in real life, but up till then
I could write about that experience at all *only* because I had seen
it in a game. There's no extra level of abstraction. "It was as if
I had a blade of steel within me, and I never knew it until I tried to
bend and it cut me to the bone" *was* the primary experience; and I
think an experience that adds a bit to the range of what I can write
about.
(That story will never be published, due to issues of collaborative
authorship, and resolution--games never give me endings, and I have
no idea how it ends. But I'll stand by that bit.)
I really don't want to see people scared away from trying this by
a pronouncement that it can't work well, can't be fresh, original,
worthwhile. I don't think that has to be true. I *do* think that
it's hard, there's no free lunch involved, all sorts of caveats.
But I think _Jhereg_ and _Rise and Fall of a Dragon King_ and the
unpublished novel on Critters stand as counterexamples to the idea
that we should try to scare writers away from even trying.
>What's more, "doesn't say what they can do, only how well they can do
>it" - well, maybe, but as a writer you want to control that yourself.
>It might be distracting to the story that this was the best cup of
>tea they'd ever had, or that they poured it on their foot. You want to
>be taking those decisions yourself, guiding the story yourself, writing
>about it like something real.
Sure. You have to edit viciously, ruthlessly, you have to settle the
ownership issue--I tie myself into knots if I write about a game
while I'm playing it (though I do it anyway) because the ownership
issues have to be settled in very different ways to play and to write.
But ruthless and vicious editing is a reality of the business....
[rules systems]
>They're none of them
>going to give you something that feels like _real_ magic, that feels
>surprising and breathtaking and exciting.
I don't think you can know this. No, I *know* you can't know this--
at least, to my tastes the magic in that novel I read on Critters
worked, it was magical, it felt surprising and breathtaking and
exciting, and the fact that it was Earthdawn somewhere back in its
evolutionary history, though I did spot it, didn't hurt it.
>They'll deny you characters
>- someone read a story of mine where I had a character who was magically
>immune but could do some magic, and he insisted I meant psionics, because
>it wasn't possible otherwise, as if the GURPS rules were laws of nature.
Any decision you make denies you characters. Deciding to base your
story on history, for example. Deciding to make up your own magic system.
Deciding on one mode, or genre, or period. This argument strikes me as
being way too much like "Rhymed and metered verse is no good because
it reduces your range of choices." It does, indeed, but for some
writers in some situations limiting the range of choices is productive
and helpful.
>The thing is that in a RPG you want the
>magic to be controlled and controllable, and not get out of hand, even
>in Ars Magica, even in Everway, there are things the magic can and can't
>do, which may well not be what you want to write about.
I suspect, though, for Peter it *is* what he wants to write about. There
are a lot of stories there. Different stories than the free-magic ones,
certainly.
I know you found Peter's posts offensive, Jo. I did too. But if he
gets called on it, so do you; and I am finding the blanket dismissals
of your rant disappointing (and incredibly demoralizing, for personal
reasons that ought to be obvious). Yes, it's this newsgroup's one
law that every single one of them is right. You were getting dangerously
close to that ground yourself, albeit under provocation.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Anncrispin
past 5 or 6 years I've looked across a manuscript at a workshop student and
said, "This story is based on a role-play, isn't it."
And in every instance, I was right.
Role playing is NOT a good way to plot stories or create characters, IMHO.
-Ann C. Crispin
Dorothy J Heydt
I would venture to say that an RPG is a good place to get an
idea. Not a plot, an idea. (I have an idea that came out of an
RPG--or rather, out of having been booted off it for three days
because the billing office goofed.)
Rather like a dream--you can get some useful ideas out of dreams,
I have done so, but if you take the plot from one the results
will be, um, weird. I dunno about the rest of the group, but
with me when the dream mechanism kicks in, the other mechanism,
the one that ways, "Waitaminnit, that doesn't follow," cuts out.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
http://www.kithrup.com/~djheydt
Patricia C. Wrede
(Anncrispin) writes:
>Role playing is NOT a good way to plot stories or create characters, IMHO.
Well, I've seen rather a lot of similar beginner-level RPG-based
stories; not fifteen years' worth, because I haven't taught that long,
but plenty enough. And I'd still put a "for some writers" or "for
most writers" or "for most beginners" in there. Because a great
deal of what I know about creating characters, I learned from
gaming and GMing, and it's worked just dandy for me. And the
plotting part seems to have worked on some level for Jo, though
from what I understand, she wasn't lifting plots from her RPG, she
simply learned to have confidence in her own methods there.
The thing is, 99.9-repetend-9% of the beginner RPG-based fiction
I see falls into some or all of the pitfalls that everyone has been
talking about. This naturally gives it a bad name. And it is *very*
hard, IME, to break such beginners of their bad habits, which gives
it an even worse name (plus making it highly likely that people who
start off writing RPG-based fiction will never get published, which is
what most of them seem to want). So we warn people off.
But still, there are those of us for whom it's been a valuable and
useful adjunct to writing, a way of getting hold of skills that would
otherwise be very hard for us to come by. So I still want the
weasel-words in there, even though I mostly agree with you.
Patricia C. Wrede
Sylvia Li
>
> In article <8qo451$smn$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>,
> Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@eskimo.com> wrote:
> >
> >What Graydon cited, specifically, was the constellation of the word "Jump" for
> >star travel (and the associated idea that you can't Jump from near a star),
>
> Though hasn't "jump" become rather common in SF? Does anyone
> know if Traveller was the original source for the term?
Not unless Traveller can claim to be a lot older than I think it is. The
term, and the restriction, were used frequently in the kind of space opera
that appeared in the old Ace Doubles, or the Groff Conklin theme
anthologies: you know, John W. Campbell? Golden Age? Classic stuff,
already, by 1960.
> >"credits" for money,
ditto.
> a vaguely doggish looking alien race,
I think cat-like aliens were more popular, and lizards, and koala bears.
But I'm sure dogs got their fair innings too.
> and the starship
> >being a refitted scout.
Oh, but that was practically *required*! When it wasn't a scruffy
rattle-trap trader or a rich man's private yacht, that is.
> >Two of those probably *are* from Traveller, third
> >or fourth hand.
But Traveller got them all from 40's and 50's-era SF. I mean, this stuff is
part of our common heritage by now.
--
Sylvia Li
John F. Eldredge
Hash: SHA1
On Mon, 25 Sep 2000 09:38:24 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
wrote:
>Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
>write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
Any idiot can write a bad poem or a bad science-fiction story
(judging from the slush piles that editors have to wade through, lots
of idiots do so). It takes skill to do it well. My creativity runs
more toward software design than towards fiction, but, even with
programming, it takes both talent and practice to become good at it.
Also, with any kind of creative activity, there is always more to
learn.
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John F. Eldredge -- eldr...@poboxes.com
My PGP key is available from:
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--
"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power;
not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." - Woodrow Wilson
John F. Eldredge
Hash: SHA1
On Mon, 25 Sep 2000 07:52:15 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
wrote:
>
>
>"Patricia C. Wrede" wrote:
>> But it also is an illustration of my point: what makes for a good
>> game is a world in which PCs *can* grab power and influence.
>
>I don't agree with this. There are extreme types of worlds.
>
>One is the world were everything is settled and there's little
>room for maneuver. Custom dictates everything and no one
>strays from the norm. There's no conflict between ideas, and
>very little conflict between characters, factions and nations.
>
>Such a word is bad both for fictionwriting and gaming.
Such a world can become interesting, however, if a situation develops
that the customs and rules don't cover. Many first-encounter novels,
for example, follow this sort of plot, where human society and/or an
alien society have to adapt to new ways of thinking.
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Doug Wickstrom
Leutheuser) excited the ether to say:
>In article <8qo451$smn$1...@eskinews.eskimo.com>,
>Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@eskimo.com> wrote:
>>
>>What Graydon cited, specifically, was the constellation of the word "Jump" for
>>star travel (and the associated idea that you can't Jump from near a star),
>
>Though hasn't "jump" become rather common in SF? Does anyone
>know if Traveller was the original source for the term?
I know that it was not. "Jump," in one guise or another, has
been with SF since very nearly the beginning.
--
Doug Wickstrom
"Honto no ii katana wa saya ni haitteiru." --Tsubaki Sanjuro
Doug Wickstrom
excited the ether to say:
>In article <39CF5299...@escape.ca>,
>Sylvia Li <meta...@escape.ca> wrote:
>>Peter Knutsen wrote:
>
>>> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
>>> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
>>>
>>Ooh. Let me admire that last paragraph for its sheer, blind courage. One of
>>two things will happen now: after a good night's sleep you will realize
>>that you *really* did not want to say this. Or, for as long as you maintain
>>the stance, this thread will burgeon in a direction that has nothing to do
>>with role-playing.
>>
>>(chuckling, and waiting to see what will happen)
>
>Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. Or a hard science fiction
>story. or a hard fantasy story. Or a soft fantasy story.
>
>Not everyone can do these things *well*.
>
>So Peter's first statement is correct; his second just doesn't
>follow from the first.
Neither is actually correct. I know quite a few brilliant people
who cannot write at all, let alone a story or a poem.
Doug Wickstrom
Walton) excited the ether to say:
>In article <39CF00F0...@knutsen.dk>
> pe...@knutsen.dk "Peter Knutsen" writes:
[...]
>> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
>> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
>
>There is a woman, one hand on a leaf,
>a fossil leaf, set in an asteroid
>like a veneer of stone instead of wood.
>She looks right at you, and she does not smile.
>She has dark eyes, a blaster in her hand
>aimed straight towards you with unwavering grip.
[...]
Jo, that was wonderful. Bravissima! Ausgezeichnet! Magnifique!
--
Doug Wickstrom
"Tsuyu to ochi, tsuyu to kienishi, waga mi ka na?
Naniwa no koto mo, yume no matayume." --Toyotomi Hideyoshi
William Burns
(Reluctant but band-saving snip of Jo's poem.)
Bravo. Bravo.
--
William
Only 97 days, then it's "Welcome to the Third"
Jo Walton
mbot...@sprintmail.com "Michelle & Boyd Bottorff" writes:
> Ah, but who gets to decide what kind of challanges will be irrisitable
> to the characters?
>
> The players.
Well, yes, definitely, but I know the players and the characters, and
the group dynamics such that I can make a pretty good guess when it
comes to tempting lures. Not that I need to do it all that often, only
when there needs to be something.
> I do everything you do, I just think of it differently.
>
> I can put whatever I feel like out there, and as long as the characters
> get to ultimately decide what they do, I consider them to be the ones in
> control.
>
> Because I am all powerful, I can set up a scenario so that it removes
> their choices, then I am in control. But they won't be having fun, and
> that's the point of the game, so every situation has to be somewhat open
> to decision making and plotting.
>
> That ISN'T how I write books.
>
> It IS how some other authors I've talked to write books, but I've never
> gotten it to work for me.
>
> When I write books I always KNOW where my characters are going. I can't
> seem to change that. It's as if by the time I've started writing the
> book the story has already happened, and all I'm doing is figuring out
> how and why it happened that way, and filling in a few details.
I don't know, except for vague ideas of shape. I might know what happens
in the end - though I might be wrong about the details. I really do it
just the same. I let the characters go and shape what's around them. Of
course, weirdly, when I GM I have the PCs doing what their players want
and the NPCs doing what _they_ want, like characters in a story. The
only real difference for me, talking _purely_ about plot, is being able
to go back and change things - in a RPG, happened is happened, in a story
I can revise.
> I've never seen a successfully run game where the story had already
> happened and the DM was forcing the characters to act out that story.
> (I'm not saying it hasn't HAPPENED, mind you, but I've never seen it.)
You need to meet my ex-husband, who managed to do extremely programmed
stories without making us feel forced, except sometimes.
When I was writing encounters for *arcane* I used to write about a place,
whatever it was, with a pile of NPCs, and a pile of potential different
things you could do with it. Some people loved them, and other people
hated them and wanted "a scenario", so they could use the thing for one
fixed story. From seeing all these comments over a period of 21 months,
I'd say there were at least as many who wanted the one fixed story as
there were who liked open possibilities. I'd always assumed before that
people who bought "adventure modules" were getting them for ideas to
cannibalize. But it seems not.
> Even when the characters volentarily follow every little lead and hint
> you give them, that's still their choice, and I'd still be just lucky
> things are working out so smoothly. :)
I don't expect my characters to do that. I just make sure that things
happen to them in threes, and that sort of thing. Somewhere on the web,
and probably findably, is my Everway scenario "A Cold Coming We Had Of It",
at least, I think that's what I called it, it has a file name of "magi"
and it's a weird Christmas story - the PCs are summoned as demons by a
Herod equivalent. It's a good example of the sort of thing I mean, but
without character interaction examples, because of course it was designed
to be played by unknown characters.
Jo Walton
mkku...@eskimo.com "Mary K. Kuhner" writes:
> In article <969569...@bluejo.demon.co.uk>,
> Jo Walton <J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>
> >This is going to be a rant.
>
> So is this, I'm afraid.
You're absolutely right that I should have acknowledged it is a possible
thing to do, but it is so difficult, done so badly so often, and it looked
so much as if he was giving advice that looked like exactly the worst way
to attempt it that I didn't. What I wanted to say isn't that it isn't
possible to write well that way, but that it's not the way to bet. The
specific examples given of what wonderful advantages you could get out of
it looked so much like dreadful things I have seen that I lost sight of
that. But I should have said so, and I apologize for not doing.
It's a subject I'm touchy about, as there are writers in Britain who give
writing advice that aspiring fantasy writers ought to watch people playing
AD&D so that they will have an idea how to use magic, which strikes me as
so wrong-headed I have trouble getting enough breath to argue with it.
(Not advising gamers to use their gaming experience, advising _non_ gamers
to watch gamers and read the AD&D magic rules and be bound by them.)
It's entirely possible that someone will one day write a novel that is
a game written up and that works, and I think you're more likely to do
it than anyone. And I entirely agree with what you say about things to
be learned from living your characters and using those experiences.
But all the books I know that are derived from games and which work as
novels have come such a long way from the scenario and the rules system
that they can more easily be described as "inspired by" than "derived from"
let alone "adhering to".
Dorothy J Heydt
William Burns <wbu...@cancom.net> wrote:
>On Mon, 25 Sep 2000 18:19:20 GMT, J...@bluejo.demon.co.uk (Jo Walton)
>wrote:
>
>(Reluctant but band-saving snip of Jo's poem.)
>
>Bravo. Bravo.
Dammit, for some reason the poem itself didn't arrive on my
server. Can somebody mail it to me?
thankx
Rusty Wallace
(snip)
>Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
>write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
(snip)
Speaking as a gamer who lurks on rasc because it provides some very
interesting insights for my gaming....
Oh, Peter. Gaming pegs out high enough on the dork-o-meter with
plenty of people without contibutions like this to give it a boost.
There are alot of very clever and very insightful people in this group
who have a good deal to say on the subject of writing. You've just
seriously insulted most of them. Please take a couple of steps back
and reconsider your tone. Your posts to this thread are littered with
casual and, I hope, unthinking insults directed towards those with
opinions differing from yours. It is perhaps instructive to note that
some of those insulted have successfully published their work - a
clue, perhaps, that they are doing something right.
You have a bad habit of taking your own opinions and methods as gospel
and deriding anything that differs from your true way. It generally
plays OK in the gaming groups where alot of people are cheerfully
willing to argue about it - though even there it has caused alot of
quality posters to stop listening to you. This group is not about
arguing over the validity of various methods of writing. It is about
the process of writing and what works or doesn't work for *you*. It
is possible to get pretty objective about whether a particular piece
of writing is any good. I'm pretty sure it is not possible to
objectively conclude that whole methods and styles of writing are bad
or inferior. Please stop.
Rusty
Hedgehog
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> Any idiot can write a poem or a sci-fi story. So I don't
> write sci-fi, and I write poetry very rarely.
I think you just flung yourself over the precipice.
If you think poetry is easy to write, try writing some. Not
just lines that rhyme: that's not poetry of itself. But words
that by their rythym and their intertwined multiple denotations
and connotations *compel* feeling, *compel* a way of speaking:
that's hard. Harder even than hard SF, I'd say: there are so many
more possibly-free variables.
As for "a sci-fi story", what do you think one of *those* is if
"any idiot" can write one?
One of the problems I have is that in the WIP spells (when spoken)
are supposed to be poetic. There's a bunch of traditions I haven't
researched, but Flitz isn't too bothered about tradition; he uses
limericks.
Writing a decent *limerick* isn't that easy. Fortunately banishers
aren't judged on their literary skills in the field:
A large tower of water from the channels
Attempted to cross without trammels
But it was far too late
To traverse the lock-gate --
And shower the magus with droppels!
and
With steam and red fire I do dispose
Of watery women who have chose
To rise from the lock
And in vain to mock
And suffer a magus's life-blows
Don't worry, there won't be that many.
--
Idiot Hedgehog
Text copyright by the author. Hyperlinks may *only* be added with permission.{
Hedgehog
Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk> wrote:
> But really, is the problem mine? Isn't it rather Gandalf
> who used too *little* magic? If he was such a mighthy
> and old and wise wizard, why didn't he use it just a
> little bit more?
Because that would have been bad for the people he was charged
with protecting and developing.
In _Breakouts_, by and large magic is a *nusiance*. That's what
banishers are for: getting rid of a nusiance. And there's not
very much in the way of a "magic system", because what there is
pretty much precludes it.
Which is why the occasional sorcerer can be a damn sight worse
than a nusiance ...
--
Volume Three *Does* Shape Volume One, Alas, Hedgehog
Hedgehog
gra...@dsl.ca (Graydon Saunders) wrote:
> On Mon, 25 Sep 2000 08:23:36 +0200, Peter Knutsen <pe...@knutsen.dk>
> scripsit:
> >But doesn't the character have a backstory and a personality, which
> >you've created before you started writing the story?
>
> In my case, no; they wander in out of the dark and surprise me.
> (sometimes more than other times.)
Same here. When I started _Breakouts_ the short story, I had Flitz
and an Idea. When I finished ditto, I had Flitz, Brass, and one-third
of the situation.
It was *as I wrote* that I discovered the other characters, and more
about the situation. Now, I spent a couple of hours the other evening
ruminating about Book Two (_Facades_), and I have a lot more idea of
the *kinds* of things that will happen; but there will doubtless be
many characters that will Appear As I Write.
It presently appears that _Facades_ will be in three (of course) parts:
_A Death_, _A Birth_, and _A Wedding_. Except that it might not be a
*wedding*.
--
Haven't Finished Book One, Mind, Hedgehog
Dorothy J Heydt
Hedgehog <e...@electric-hedgehog.net> wrote:
>
>and
>
> With steam and red fire I do dispose
> Of watery women who have chose
> To rise from the lock
> And in vain to mock
> And suffer a magus's life-blows
Ouch.
Could you at least make it scan?
E.g.,
With steam and red fire I dispose
Of watery women who chose
To rise from the lock
And vainly to mock,
And suffer a mage's life-blows.
Slightly more grammatical as well.
You might look up Anderson's _Operation Chaos_, in which the (not
very magical) hero uses both simple rhymed verse (trochaic
trimeter couplets, more or less) plus pig-Latin.
Helen Kenyon
<mkku...@eskimo.com> writes
>
>I've also read my share of stories where the stage-managing of
>"I need X to happen, so I'll make it that magic can do that" broke
>down horribly, leading to a world that didn't make logical or
>emtional sense, characters who could do things on page 10 and not
>on page 50, that sort of thing. If this is where one's temptations
>lie, I think the discipline of having to work it all out in advance
>could really help.
>
day and not the next. They have off days. Had a stroke of beginner's
luck the first time. Whatever. To me, magic that is utterly reliable
feels very *un*realistic. Even if the magic is predictable, a human
being's ability to tap into it is subject to human variability. Having
said that, it has to make sense in the story context and not just be
fudged for plot convenience.
Helen
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