Category: character

Batman vs. Ted Lasso

We’re three months into the latest pandemic lockdown, which has been a bad time to do anything creative but a good time to engage with media.

This weekend I finished two such pieces of media – the second season of Ted Lasso and the Telltale Batman video game. And weirdly, I think they have something in common.

I’ll dig into that in a moment, but first, SPOILER WARNING! This post will contain spoilers for a TV show that came out like three days ago, and a video game that came out in 2016. Continue at your own risk – and find out which is better!

(Here’s the first SPOILER – it’s Ted Lasso, that show’s brilliant, the Batman game is pretty ordinary.)

Choose your fighter

Who is the Batman: Batman: The Telltale Series (aka BTTS) is a 2016 video game from, unsurprisingly, Telltale Games, a studio known for their branching-narrative games/visual novels. You get to investigate crime scenes, bang Catwoman, fight Two-Face/sexy Penguin and slowly realise that most of your choices don’t have any effect on the story.

Who is the Ted Lasso: Ted Lasso is – are we doing this? really? ugh fine – a 2020/2021 show on Apple TV+ about an American football coach working with a British soccer team. It’s really fuckin’ good, y’all: a show about hope & positivity that is also about the cost of hope & positivity, and is far smarter than any of us expected in these dark times.

What they have in common

Well, first of all, they’re both stories set in action-oriented genres (sports/superheroics) that preference character interaction scenes over expensive/hard-to-animate action scenes.

That aside, the main thing they have in common is plot. Or, more accurately, how they use plot in relation to character. Both Ted Lasso and BTTS rely largely on external plots, with character scenes triggered by plot beats, and okay let’s unpack these concepts.

There’s an old maxim, ‘plot is character’, which generally means that plot is what emerges from the actions and decisions of characters, and is usually stated by someone tedious in your first-year writing class.

In many stories, though, plot is external and acts upon characters – the story throws up events and characters respond to them. (This is most common in genre fiction, but you see it in other spaces too.) A lot of folks refer to these events and moments as plot or character beats, and while I think that language is overused, ‘beats’ feel appropriate for this approach to plot, like pounding on a drum to mark the next thing happening to the characters, rather than because of the characters.

Meaty beaty big and bouncy (I’m sorry)

In a story primarily based around an external plot, plot beats provide opportunities for character interaction, with two major functions:

catalysts for character change
catalysts for character reinforcement.

In a change beat, characters react in ways that, well, change them and redirect their course for the next phase of the story. Reinforcement beats are opportunities for characters (or rather writers) to restate their identity, creating conflicts and causing drama.

Reinforcement beats are particularly common in genre fiction, especially serial fiction (comics, soap operas, cinematic universes etc) where characters need to experience events and overcome conflicts without being so changed by them that they can’t be used in the next instalment/episode/issue.

no Batman, that’s not what I meant by ‘beat’

Tell a Bat-Tale

BTTS is primarily based in reinforcement beats, which is unsurprising for a genre story but nonetheless disappointing. The game sells itself as an interactive story guided by player choices, but ultimately you’re responding to plot events to enforce your own take on how Batman should act and how he should feel.

Does it have change beats? Yes, but they’re badly handled. Characters change, but that change often doesn’t feel earned or genuine. Fail to protect Harvey Dent and he becomes the psychotic, maimed villain Two-Face – but if you do protect him, he becomes a psychotic non-maimed villain that does the exact same thing. Catwoman will always leave you, Alfred will always be saved, and while your choices may mean they say different things, their words don’t change the story.

Also, the action scenes are pretty dull.

BELIEVE

The big risk (and big achievement) of Ted Lasso is that the second season is overwhelmingly composed of change beats, with little time spent on reinforcement beats or even on maintaining a continuous plot. Rather than being used as a ‘story engine’ (another term popular in writing classes), events come and go without many situational repercussions, but they kickstart character growth and development.

Take the thread involving the soccer club’s sponsorship. When Sam questions the ethics of the club’s sponsor, they pull out, and this leads to… a new sponsor already in place by the next episode. This show doesn’t care about the drama that might emerge from the search for a new sponsor, or dealing with financial struggles – it cares about Rebecca realising she deserves happiness, Sam finding the confidence to forge his own path, and the two of them shagging like rabbits after hooking up on the dating app that now sponsors the club.

Or consider the Roy-vs-Jamie conflict that powered a lot of Season 1. It would have been easy to draw that conflict into Season 2, but it fades away largely offscreen, replaced by Jamie and Roy learning to show emotional vulnerability and to support others. Wholesome, yes, but also an arc that focuses hard on how and why characters change, rather than the circumstances foregrounding that change.

Also, I got very emotional when they hugged. Ain’t gonna lie.

Who wore it better?

Stories that rely on internal plot, that rise from characters’ action, attract labels like ‘organic’ or ‘authentic’. Stories that rely on external plot, on the other hand, are often criticised as shallow, with beats that just exist to move characters from situation to situation.

Here’s the thing – it doesn’t matter if you do it well. Moving characters into position is just fine in a story, so long as the characters change and grow in interesting and engaging ways in the process. Character conflict helps with that, but it’s not essential.

Both Ted Lasso and BTTS promise character change, but one does it well, in ways that feel genuine, and one only delivers the illusion of change. It’s a shame, ‘cos all of you know how much I like Batman, but the lesson here is to be like the Moustache, not like the Bat.

Plus, only Ted Lasso gave us ‘Beard After Hours’, and that episode was a goddamn cinematic masterpiece.

Brendan Hunt's 'Ted Lasso' Performance in Season 2 Episode 9 | TVLine

I can’t wait to see how all of this pans out in Season 3 – and ugh, fine, I guess I’ll play the BTTS sequel, I hear it’s better.

See you folks another time.

character legacy wrestling writing

Gimmick talk, round two

Hmm.

Turns out I’m not done talking about gimmicks.

Let’s start with mine.

My Pokemans, let me show you them

Here’s the table I showed off last time, with all of the characters/gimmicks I’ve brainstormed (and stuck on corkboards) for my YA wrestling novel-in-not-really-progress-yet Piledriver.

FACES	HEELS
Hardcore veteran at age 18	Management’s golden boy
Action bishonen	~~Edgelord~~ ‘Sliding into your DMs’
~~Internet~~ TikTok daredevil	One true master of submission holds
Guardian of the mask	Pasifika wrestling royalty
Basketball MVP	Video essay guy
K-pop ~~star~~ stan	Sk8r boi
Brooklyn tough	The Smiling Assassin
Real freakin’ strong	~~Nasty~~ Freaky goth
Trash panda	Trophy collector
‘Fire in the belly’	Mean girl
Frenzied fighter	‘Big cash money’
Cool nerd	Eurotrash

Just as the novel is in the germination stages, so are these gimmicks (hell, none of these characters have names yet). As you can see from the strikethroughs, my ideas are still in flux and getting updated ~~daily~~ ~~weekly~~ sporadically. Gimmicks are surface-level concepts but they can nonetheless be surprisingly nuanced, and you can tinker with them for ages before getting them right.

In fact, I think some roughness here makes sense for the novel, which focuses (in part) on the creation and launch of a new, all-teenagers wrestling promotion. Ideas are going to be rough at the start, and there’s good story material in showing the development, refinement, testing and rejection of gimmicks in the early days.

That said, these are all good gimmicks, and I can tell you why. Because I am the King of Gimmicks.

…okay fine, I’m the *Prince* of Gimmicks, are you happy now

What makes a good gimmick?

An effective gimmick should be…

Easy to summarise, hard to explain: What is a ‘video essay guy’ or a ‘trash panda’ – or, to pick a real wrestler, Mr Perfect? I could tell you in detail but I don’t have to; you already (I hope) have an image in your mind. A gimmick is all high concept, a phrase that unpacks itself in the audience’s imagination; it’s only later, once the hooks are in, that it needs to be fleshed out and coloured in.

Triple H was ‘The Cerebral Assassin’, which he expressed by hitting people *very awkwardly* with a sledgehammer

Able to hold your attention: But you do need to get those hooks in, and that means holding the audience’s attention. A character is called ‘The Smiling Assassin’ – why? Does he smile (yes)? Does he murder people (no)? How does his ‘sneering killer’ concept flavour his fighting, his promos, his backstage scenes? If a gimmick is just a name or a look, it’s not going to keep audiences interested; it has to have some substance and nuance to inform what happens next.

Adaptable and extendable: Some gimmicks are face gimmicks, some are heel gimmicks, but the best can be pointed in either direction. Similarly, a strong gimmick can morph over time, add to itself, even contradict itself and still remain identifiable. Looking to WWE, Kane and Sean Michaels (‘The Heartbreak Kid’) were a dozen different things over the decades, but were still definitely the same characters and concepts each time. Flexible gimmicks like ‘Guardian of the Mask’ or ‘Pasifika wrestling royalty’ could have the same adaptability and longevity (unless romance and drama get in the way, which they will).

3/16 is also my birthday
I should probably get this as a T-shirt

Expressed in multiple ways: A great gimmick is more than a look, a concept, a finishing move. It’s a catchphrase, an attitude, a vignette, an ethos; it’s something that can be packaged a dozen different ways, all of them available from the merch table. Maybe no-one defines this better than Stone Cold Steve Austin, who turned a ‘tough guy who hates his boss’ gimmick into a dozen catchphrases, a million T-shirts, a presence in pop culture strong enough that someone who’s never seen a moment of wrestling might still understand and enjoy a 3:16 reference.

Deadpan: The Undertaker is a zombie. Kairi Sane is a wrestling pirate. Half the roster of Chikara were various types of humanoid ants. The key to making ideas like that pop is to take them… not seriously, perhaps, but at face value, rather than deconstructing or questioning them. Because when you undercut one wrestling concept, you undercut the very notion that it’s real or a sport or that it makes sense to settle personal disputes by suplexing someone through a table rather than talking to a small claims lawyer. Treat your gimmicks with respect and never wink at the camera – not openly, anyway.

—

Okay, that’s a lot of talk about gimmicks and how to craft them.

It’s time I knuckle down on applying my own advice to my character roster, fill out these index cards, finish the outline and start writing this book.

…unless I get distracted by a new puppy. But that would never –

PUPPY ENTRANCE MUSIC HITS

MAH GOD!

character legacy wrestling writing

Ya gotta have a gimmick

‘Gimmick’.

It feels a bit grubby just to type the word. Gimmicks are cheap, nasty things – foil covers and decoder rings and celebrity endorsements, things of that nature, I think we can all agree.

Don’t take my word for it – let’s see what the Collins Online Dictionary (which I’ve chosen because I’m not giving my home email to Oxford or Macquarie just for one bloody screenshot) has to say:

Hmm.

This is an interesting definition, because it’s loaded with this weird, classist subtext. How dreadful it would be to attract attention to something! What an unnecessary thing to do, when you could simply win the approval of your peers by working quietly on your dictionary for two hours a day from the comfort of your family’s estate before snooker with the chaps from the fox hunting lodge.

Am I reading too much into this? Almost certainly, but I don’t see why that should stop me. Because I come not to praise the definition but to bury it. Folks, here’s the skinny, the straight dope, the 411, the truth that Mr/Ms/Mx/Viscount Collins can’t handle:

Gimmicks are good, actually.

Especially when creating fictional characters.

The Disney silhouette

Team Collins makes one solid point – a gimmick is a feature designed to attract attention. As fiction writers/creators, we crave attention like a Coalition politician craves government funds illegitimately rorted from community programs. I don’t mean for ourselves (although hello yes here I am notice me love me validate me) but for our books, games, shows, Bayeux Tapestries etc. – and even more importantly, for the characters within those stories and give them life.

Animators understand this, which is why Disney animated characters always have distinctive visual designs, not just in terms of colour but shape and the silhouette that that shape creates. A unique and flavourful character silhouette ‘allows a designer to produce striking iconic shapes that will stand out among multiple characters or creatures.’ It’s an unusual feature that attracts attention, as Collins et al disapprovingly explained earlier.

Five distinct shapes, five distinct character gimmicks – Fighter, Thug, Party Pirate, Ol’ Surly Bastard and Racist Stereotype

The silhouette principle is just as important in text. If your characters don’t have an immediate point of distinction from everyone around them, if they don’t have a unique conceptual hook to catch readers’ attention – a gimmick – then most readers will move on and never discover the complex character depths you struggled to write.

Yes, gimmicks are surface elements, but you don’t get to have depths without surfaces to hold them together and squish them down. That’s just science.

Only wrestling is real

Why am I bringing this concept up right now, and being so weirdly insistent and borderline preachy about it? Because I’m writing a novel set within the world of professional wrestling, the King of Sports, and wrestling has always acknowledged the power of the gimmick – the immediate conceptual hook that makes the audience think, ‘yeah, I wanna watch this guy/girl fight someone’.

Which is not to say that every gimmick is good or effective – a cursory review of wrestling history reveals a lot of bad creative decisions. In the ’80s, everyone was defined by their job (Isaac Yankem, wrestling dentist), an ethnic stereotype (The Iron Sheik) or just some fuckin’ bullshit (the Gobbledy Gooker, obviously). But still, I think that was better than the ’90s, when most wrestlers were just variations on ‘edgy dude in jorts’ and the few exceptions got over simply through a sense of relief.

Any discussion of bad gimmicks is legally required to include mention of the Gobbledy Gooker – but damnit, this is Héctor Guerrero, show some respect

This is the difficult aspect of gimmicks – you need them to attract attention, but it needs to be the right kind of attention. They can be funny, they can attract a little ridicule, but they still need to get folks watching matches and appreciating the performer inside the gimmick, rather than driving folks away.

So with that in mind, here are the gimmicks I’ve developed for the 24 teenage wrestlers on the roster for Piledriver.

FACES	HEELS
Hardcore veteran at age 18	Management’s golden boy
Action bishonen	Edgelord
Internet daredevil	True master of submission holds
Guardian of the mask	Pasifika wrestling royalty
Basketball MVP	Video essay guy
K-pop ~~star~~ stan	Sk8r boi
Brooklyn tough	The Smiling Assassin
Real freakin’ strong	Nasty goth
Trash panda	Trophy collector
Fire in the belly	Mean girl
Frenzied fighter	‘Big Cash Money’
Cool nerd	Eurotrash

Bit of a mixed bag, I know – almost as if significant thought went into some of them, while others are tissue-thin nonsense based primarily on early morning free association and whim.

What can I say? I have my methods, and for this book, my methods involve writing down ideas as I get them and then fleshing them out down the track, rather than spending months fussing over each individual concept until it’s perfect and no-one cares any more. Plus, I have the advantage of these being in-fiction concepts – if some are weak, then characters can address and improve them as part of the story, when they’re not fighting monsters or making out with their co-workers.

(Also, go to hell, ‘video essay guy’ is a brilliant gimmick.)

Your turn

Not all of us are writing stories about professional wrestlers – which is probably for the best, ‘cos I want to sell this book – but almost every work of genre fiction can benefit from the writer thinking about distinct, engaging hooks for their characters.

(It’s not as big a deal outside of genre fiction; I don’t think readers are attracted to One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for his distinctive character silhouette.)

You can call it something else if you want – high concept, character premise, archetype – but a gimmick is what it is, and it’s something readers need and enjoy. Accept it. Embrace it. Live it.

I’ve got mine – well, I’ve got them for the in-ring personas, but I still need to work them out for the actual characters. What are yours? How would you sum up your main character’s whole deal in one easy-to-digest phrase? And how long could they last against the Gobbledy Gooker?

Let’s talk more about this next month. I still have opinions.

character legacy

Fifty and fighty

All right, first things first.

I turned 50 years old today.

I think I’m finally letting go of my hopes of being a child prodigy.

But I’m still here, still giving it a go, and that’ll do.

That’ll do.

—

So what am I doing in my fifty-first year?

For one thing, I’m still trying to learn new tricks, even when it comes to writing. I’m in the prep-and-research phase of a new novel project, and I’m doing something I’ve never done before – planning.

…okay, I haven’t actually planned the book’s title yet, but let’s called it Piledriver as a shorthand for now.

Raven’s Blood and the Obituarist novellas were all written the same way – I sat down with a premise, an opening scene, a finale to aim towards and some ideas for bits in the middle, and then haphazardly wrote my way into the story until I got to the end, which may or may not have resembled the ending I’d originally envisioned. I’m not going to abandon that approach, ‘cos it aligns nicely with my ~~laziness~~ creative instincts, but it’s high time I gave the whole plotting and outlining business a try.

But first, characters. Piledriver has an ensemble cast of, mighty fuck, twenty-four characters, all of whom need to be unique and clearly distinct from the others. How am I going to manage this Herculean task and (frankly, stupidly over-large) cast?

With a character stack.

The stack contains 24 index cards, each showing the core information of a specific character. Let’s zoom in on the most complete one, which is for the book/series’ main protagonist.

The important points you can immediately tell:

this is a book about professional wrestlers
yes, I’ve named the main character Jack Fetch
yes, he’s Jack the Giantkiller, wrestling is not a world of subtlety
my handwriting is fucking atrocious
I haven’t worked out some of the details yet

(Why is there a B in the top right corner? I’m gonna keep that detail under wraps for the moment.)

Other cards are sketchier still – no-one else has a name yet, and things like gimmicks, style and persona are mostly vacant. But the joy of the stack is that I can just grab a card and fill in a detail when it occurs to me. Some of those will get nailed down during the outlining, others as I write, and this will help me keep things consistent. Another positive of using physical cards is that I can also pin them to a corkboard to map out relationships, group them into factions, spot who needs some screen time and (eventually) array them for a big ol’ tournament.

I might have so much fun doing that that I don’t bother writing the book. We’ll see.

Anyway, that’s how I’m kicking things off in my life as an Official Old Dude. Check back in occasionally over the next 365 days to see how the planning (or indeed writing) of Piledriver is progressing.

For now, though, bugger doing any more work tonight.
Come on, it’s my birthday.

character do a D&D games story

So you wanna do a D&D (part 3)

Post author By Patrick
Post date September 16, 2020
No Comments on So you wanna do a D&D (part 3)

And the saga continues!

(I know I said I’d maintain this series of posts on a fortnightly basis, but if you think about it, 16 days is the same as 15+1 days which is the same as 14 days, and also the world’s on fire and time isn’t real.)

We’re back talking about D&D stories, and how you can start creating D&D stories if you want to get into the NEW HAWTNESS of pretending to be an elf warlock over Discord, and how different D&D-like games will tweak the settings of a ‘D&D story’ while still delivering an experience that’s about the same as D&D, oh no I said D&D too many times, D&D has lost all meaning, what’s a D&D, I D&D you in the face, D&D is in yr base killing yr doods.

*HARD RESET* okay we’re good now

The first post in this series outlined some elements of the typical D&D story; the second added tone to that mix and looked at some alternative games that are cheaper or that adjust some of those setting knobs.

Speaking of knobs…

Characters, created

Characters are at the heart of nearly every story and roleplaying game. Not all of them, mind you – Jorge Luis Borges wrote incredible stories with no characters in them, and there are some fascinating games about crafting histories and drawing maps – but fun, engaging characters are what we want 99.9% of the time.

Modern D&D characters are larger-than-life heroes; even if individual games initially position them as neophytes or bumbling naifs, they rapidly become tough and competent, ready to take on dragons, demons, liches and other Big Bads.

However, a lot of people seem to want games that are ‘gritty’ and ‘realistic’ (whatever those terms mean), which means the primary adjustment many fantasy RPGs make is dialling down the competence of characters. Some of them also re-calibrate to tell more stories that are better suited to such characters; others throw Joe Blow against the same array of dragons, demons, liches etc., because heroism is only ‘genuine’ if characters are totally outmatched or whatever.

Not my style, personally; if I want to tell a story about more-or-less regular folks (who nonetheless have swords and fireballs), I want that story to have a similarly constrained scope.

Beyond the Wall: Such as this absolutely brilliant game, which couples the simplicity of older D&D rules with modern ideas about shared setting creation to tell stories of heroic teens defending their village from unnatural danger, with a tone more like Susan Cooper or Lloyd Alexander than Gary Gygax. It’s superb, it’s simple, it’s cheap – of all the games I’ve looked at, this is the one everyone should investigate.

Warhammer Fantasy RPG: Heroic teens too, well, heroic? How about playing a ratcatcher, failed student, ferryman or a bloke who hands out racist pamphlets in the pub? Long divorced from the miniatures games, the Warhammer RPG created its own legacy of grimy British humour, Holy Roman Empire aesthetics and reasonably simple mechanics. If you like your fantasy grubby and your names groanworthy, this is for you.

The One Ring: Of course, if you want smaller-than-life characters, you can’t go past hobbits. Of all the RPG adaptations of Tolkien’s books, I think this one comes closest to evoking the tone of the setting and its characters, with systems that make a simple burglar or scholar feel engaging and important but also limited and grounded. Sadly this game’s in Limbo at the moment due to licence changes; you can’t buy it digitally, but physical copies are still out there if you want to try it.

So okay, that’s three games that constrain characters and keep them grounded. Are there games that go more larger-than-life than D&D?

13th Age: There are, and this bad boy is my personal favourite (see my current campaign for details). 13th Age couples over-the-top cinematic action with broad, sweeping characters-influencing-setting rules, in a gonzo world stuffed full of fantasy tropes that doesn’t stop for breath long enough to acknowledge its ridiculousness. It’s not the best at explaining itself, and it’s definitely aimed at those who enjoy the game part of role-playing games, which makes it a bit inaccessible for newcomers, but not so much that you couldn’t have fun with it. Give me a yell if you get stuck; I’ll come help.

Rules complexity

On that last note, the game part of these games is simultaneously the best and worst part – or perhaps the most-and-least accessible part. Rules define characters and make actions concrete; they’re also a bunch of numbers/systems that constrain imagination. Some folks like that, some tolerate it, some bounce off and never come back to RPGs again.

Rules obviously shape game-stories in significant ways; they define what’s possible and what’s not (or at least what’s technically not possible, until you all agree to say that it is). Rules complexity also shapes story because it determines a level of detail; the more defined and specific the rule, the more defined and specific the manifestation of that rule in the story. If your alchemy rules require 10 difficult steps for brewing a potion, stories take shape around taking those steps; if the rules just ask for one dice roll and a bit of narrative colour, the story is going to be about the outcome and not the process.

The current (5th) edition of D&D is moderately complex; the 2nd was less so, the 3rd more so, the 4th put its complexity in a different place. There aren’t a lot of contemporary fantasy games that are more complex; that’s not what the market wants these days. But there are plenty of games that are less complex, and if you want something that gets out of the way so you can explore the story, here are two solid options that do that in slightly different ways.

Tiny Dungeon: Perhaps the epitome of the get-out-of-the-way philosophy, this game has a simple 1/2/3 dice system and imposes little structure during play, to the point where I personally find it a bit hollow. The game also comes with a lot of sample settings and tweaks; whether that’s useful depends on whether those ideas grab you. Its real strength is immediacy – you can create a character in about 5 minutes by picking 3-4 choices from a list, and then just start playing. That’s a powerful thing, especially for players that don’t as yet have concrete ideas.

Quest: The new kid in town, Quest has been gaining attention thanks to its accessible writing, whimsical and inclusive artstyle, emphasis on character and very solid marketing campaign. Its strength is its narrative focus – it asks players and GMs to define characters and stories primarily using bits of text and imagery rather than numbers. But that also means players need a strong vision and concrete ideas coming in, which can be a lot to ask when you’re new to this whole thing.

Of these two, I think Quest is more fun and interesting, but it’s more work up front; Tiny Dungeon isn’t as engaging, but you can get started on a moment’s notice. Consider what works for you.

…or just use D&D if you want

And what works for you may well be D&D after all – and that’s great.

These other games all alter the stories and flow of D&D-style fantasy in useful and worthwhile ways. But that doesn’t mean you can’t make those alterations using D&D, so long as you’re willing to put the work in and make changes to the way the game plays at your table.

Want D&D characters to be more grounded? Present them with realistic problems and difficult challenges. Want them heroic? Do the opposite, and present stories that emphasise the fantastic. You can ignore external problems to focus on emotion, you can make the tone as gritty or cinematic or silly as you like; you can simplify the game rules by just ignoring the ones you don’t like. You can even get cheaper or free versions of D&D if you want to save money and don’t mind missing out on the glossy hardcovers. You do you.

Ultimately, games like these are tools for shared storytelling. Each tool has its strengths and weaknesses, but what really dictates the success of that shared creation is the enthusiasm and creativity of those working together to craft it. If everyone at the table wants to have fun creating a D&D story, the D&D/not-D&D game involved is the least important step in reaching that goal.

Places to go, faces to punch

Is there more to talk about when it comes to D&D stories? Yes, because you need a context for those stories – a world of fantastic places to visit, dangerous adversaries to thwart and relationships to explore.

You need a setting. And we’ll talk about that next time.

blogging character games reading

Lockdown Reloaded

Greetings from Melbourne.
Ain’t this fun?

*takes long pull from bottle of bourbon*
*looks out into the darkness*

Well, looks like we’ll be stuck here for a while. May as well catch up, maybe talk about some lockdown reads.

—

Speaking of lockdown reads, sales of The Obituarist 3 are… like, okay? Good? Bad? I don’t know, I just work here.

Let me add up the data – looks like 21 copies sold (on Amazon and Smashwords) since launch in early May, which means about… 40 Aussie bucks in revenue? As opposed to the $450 I spent on editing and cover design?

Yeah, well, so it goes. It’s a good book, but its market is limited. (Possibly just to people who know me.) I could probably generate more sales if I did more promotion, but we’re in the middle of a pandemic and a global struggle to confront systemic institutional racism. No-one needs me distracting people from what really matters by tweeting about a book.

It’s written, it’s out there, people will find it. Maybe tell your friends about the series if they want lockdown reads. That’s enough marketing from me.

(I really should update the site page, though. Maybe next week.)

—

And speaking of lockdown reads, let’s talk about games. Games that involve reading and writing (so educational)!

Thousand Year Old Vampire is a solo journaling RPG by Tim Hutchings, and if you’re like me-from-last-month then that concept might need a little unpacking.

The game presents a conceptual framework – you’re a vampire that lives so long that they can’t retain their memories – and then provides you with a large series of writing prompts (most of which have mechanical impacts as well). Rolling dice to navigate through the prompts, you write journal entries to record events while also translating that into your vampire’s unstable set of memories. Eventually you reach an ending, and have an epistolary narrative that you can read, share or just think about when you want to be sad.

While accurate, that description glosses over two key points:

This game is brilliant, with a fantastic mix of simple mechanisms and evocative prompts that constantly push you to generate dark, emotionally engaging stories.
This game makes writing fun, something I generally find inconceivable. My playthrough, telling the story of the fallen Ukrainian nun Penelopa, was some of the most playful joy I’ve gained from my own writing in maybe a decade.

Whether you’re a writer or a gamer (or both), there’s so much here to direct your creativity into fascinating stories while also enjoying solo lockdown fun. The PDF is cheap; the print book is apparently gorgeous but will cost you a mortgage payment in shipping right now. You do you – just make sure to pick it up.

—

And speaking of lockdown reads, let’s talk about a TV show, yes I know that’s a terrible segue.

I finally started watching She-Ra and the Princesses of Power on Netflix, and it’s as good as people have been saying for the last couple of years – a smart, savvy, energetic science-fantasy cartoon that never takes itself too lightly or too seriously, and is just crammed full of awesome teenage girl characters demonstrating agency.

(The plotting and worldbuilding is maybe a little uneven at times, but that is not why you watch a show like this.)

From a YA writer’s point-of-view, the most compelling part of the show is the way it establishes and develops character. The foundation of She-Ra‘s characterisation is love and friendship – presented not just as a positive force, but also as something that can go bad, fall short or distract from what matters. Everything in the show has its foundation in that core, and it’s an amazing demonstration of how you can use the common emotional understandings of your (largely teenage) audience as a way to express complexities and tensions that that audience will connect with.

Also, it’s pretty queer. And we need more queer TV.

Go binge this over a couple of weekends while you’re bouncing around lockdown – there’s a lot to learn from it and a lot of feelings to be felt. And goddamnit, I would die for Scorpia. She just wants to be loved.

—

And speaking of lockdown reads (shut up okay), how about you don’t read that self-serving bullshit screed that JK Rowling and a gaggle of alt-right fuck-knuckles published last week, whinging about cancel culture?

Here’s this blog’s position on all that:

‘Cancel culture’ is just what privileged people call ‘facing the consequences of my actions’ or possibly ‘being criticised because I used my power and influence to yell my fuckin’ garbage opinions all over the internet’.

Boo fuckin’ hoo, JK; go spew your transphobic white noise into the bowlful of £100 bills you have for breakfast every morning.

One of the few positives to this unending trash fire we now live in is that as the boundaries of polite society fall into the abyss, more and more people are looking around and saying, ‘wait, no, FUCK THIS SHIT, I won’t have it any more’, and calling people out on how they contribute to the problem. Whether it’s Rowling being hateful trash, Warren Ellis being a serial predator upon and betrayer of women (something I’m pretty fuckin’ upset about) or, I dunno, the entire corrupt system of police power and control in the world’s most powerful nation, we’ve had enough. Get in the fuckin’ bin with you.

Here’s a mission statement: if I ever get into a position where I a) have power and b) abuse it, y’all have my permission to cancel me harder and faster than Australia’s Naughtiest Home Videos.

…not that that seems likely if I don’t write more books.

*takes long drag on cigarette*
*coughs up a lung, throws half-finished cancer stick in the bin*

I should probably do that, then.

Stay safe, friends.

character ghost raven obituarist writing

Skin deep

Post author By Patrick
Post date June 4, 2019
No Comments on Skin deep

One notable thing about the 2010s is how many popular concepts from the 20th century are getting a revival. Some of those popular things are bad, like measles and Nazism. Others are good, like D&D and audio drama.

Let’s focus on the good for the moment. It’s a great time for RPG actual play podcasts, also known as ‘let’s listen to total strangers playing D&D for two hours as if that’s somehow entertaining rather than torturous’.

1000% accurate depiction of ‘Critical Role’

I kid, I kid. I used to think listening to other people roleplay was incomprehensible, but now an embarrassingly large proportion of my podcast playlist is taken up with AP ‘casts. They’re a good way to learn how other players/GMs approach games, after all – and god help me, the best of them are entertaining.

(The worst… look, it’s real easy to unsubscribe to a bad podcast 2 minutes after starting it.)

The successful ‘casts also have big fan followings – again, a concept none of us thought was possible or sane back in the day. The people, they LOVE listening to the D&D. They tweet about it. They tumble it. They patron it.

Anyway, if you check out social media activity around AP casts, or indeed any other form of audio drama/comedy/etc., the number one thing that comes through is that listeners, desperately, desperately want to know what these characters look like.

And that baffles me.

—

The thing I find least interesting, the thing I skip over in any book, the fast-forward-or-fuck-it-delete-the-whole-thing trigger in any audio medium… it’s what people look like. It’s descriptions of clothing. Of facial features. Of ohfuckmedead hair colour. Tell me about the character’s ringlets and freckles and I’m putting down the book/’cast in favour of strong drink.

Look, I get it. I know I’m wrong. I’m the weird one here. It’s utterly natural for human beings, a species that (mostly) uses sight as their primary way of perceiving all of existence, to want that sense reflected in their fiction.

But fuuuuuuuuuck it bores me.

I blame Raymond Chandler, as I often do. He taught me that you could describe characters through metaphor and simile without ever specifying what colour pants they were wearing. Consider lines like:

From 30 feet away she looked like a lot of class. From 10 feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from 30 feet away.

He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.

She had eyes like strange sins.

(Yes, I know Chandler described people more thoroughly at other times, and even what they were wearing. Don’t blow up my spot, I’m on a roll.)

I read lines like that at an impressionable age, too young or dumb to register Chandler’s misanthropy, misogyny, homophobia or general shittiness as a person, and they stuck with me. To the point where I struggle to engage with any prose or audio that takes the time to spell out all the details, and to where I look at fanart and clamourings for ‘official’ artwork of podcast characters as some kind of missive from an alternate reality that I would prefer not to visit, thank you.

—

The principle holds true in my writing. The best description I ever wrote of a character was ‘He had a face like a stab’. That suggests not only what the character looks like (sort of), it speaks to his personality and attitude – and to the personality and thought processes of the narrator that described him.

(I abandoned the project that included that description. But I swear I’ll use it again someday.)

But here’s the thing, and the reason why this is a blog post rather than a grumpy tweet – I realise this might be a problem. That readers – the readers I want to obtain and retain – like knowing what people look like. Especially in YA fiction, which I have decided to keep plugging away at like a punch-drunk bantamweight too concussed to know when to quit.

(Hmm. Might keep that Chandlerism too.)

So with Raven’s Blood, I started working on describing characters more. I’m not sure I succeeded. But as I start planning the next, hopefully final revision pass through that MS in a hope of finding it a home, and indeed to start writing the next novel, descriptions – of characters, clothing, places – are something I’m trying to focus on. And to find some middle ground between a five-word simile and a page-long then I looked in the mirror and listed all of my cute identifying traits monologue. Surely I can manage that.

(As for The Obituarist series… Kendall Barber’s skinny, bald and missing some fingers. And honestly I’m not sure he’s that skinny any more, 5-6 years on. I couldn’t tell you any more than that, and I hope you don’t ask.)

So that’s where my head is right now. Chime in with a comment if you’re so inclined. How important are visual descriptions or depictions to you? Do you feel the need to imagine what characters look like? And what kind of descriptive shorthand (if any) works for you?

—

BORING PRODUCTIVITY UPDATE: We moved house in the long gap between this post and the last, and I took a lot of concentration-destroying painkillers to cope with a knee injury.

But now we’re settled, I’m (mostly) off the drugs and walking straight, and I’m past the halfway mark on The Obituarist III. Which is proving to have a remarkable number of scenes in which Kendall is just wandering around without pants on.

Don’t blame me. I’m just a vessel for his truth.

character story wrestling

Plot, character, piledrivers

Post author By Patrick
Post date September 2, 2016
1 Comment on Plot, character, piledrivers

So I’ve been talking about how pro wrestling is a great space for communicating character and story through action – but talk is cheap. What does that actually mean? How do you use ten minutes of sweaty grappling and backflips to define a character, and what kind of stories can you tell through that platform?

The answer is – more than you might think.

I was going to wrap up this series of pro wrestling posts tonight and get back to beating myself up for my lack of productivity, but I kept finding new stuff to write about (and distracted by other stuff, which is why this Monday night post is going up on Friday night) – so let’s assume this is (at least) a two-part post and use part one to set some foundations, with a look at something everyone already knows about – World Wrestling Entertainment/WWE (and also NXT) – and what lessons might be learned.

Even if you’ve never seen a match in your life, you know about WWE; they’re a multi-billion dollar company, the single biggest wrestling organisation in the world. They have two big weekly shows (Raw and Smackdown) on regular TV, monthly pay-per-view events (even bigger shows) and their own $10-a-month wrasslin’ Netflix with more shows than I care to contemplate. The WWE Network is also the home of NXT, their ‘developmental’ offshoot where new performers build their skills/discipline before graduating to the main roster; just as importantly, it’s where they build an audience so that anyone cares about that graduation.

Tonal change is hard

A lot of folks I follow on Twitter, or who make podcasts I enjoy, are really into the current WWE promotion, or more directly into NXT, and that background interest is probably what drew me back to the sport after a decade away. It’s kind of sad, then, that I find their current product, well… kind of boring. Compared to the flash, speed and silliness of the Attitude Era (late 90s-early 00s), or even the mid-2000s, the current WWE/NXT style of wrestling is more low-key and PG-rated. The focus is on mat-based wrestling, with a mix of technical grappling and strength/power moves – there’s very little aerial wrestling, use of weapons/tools or straight-up brawling. In many ways it’s a ‘purer’ form of wrestling, but I can’t help but miss table/ladder/chair matches. (Lesson: when you set a tone early on, it’s more difficult to bring that tone down and retain readers than it is to raise the stakes and escalate.)

Risk aversion is sensible but boring

The other big change is in the attitude of the corporation, which has come to really emphasise the ‘professional’ in pro wrestling. WWE is a big, big business, and they don’t want to jeopardise that business by relying on unpredictable, idiosyncratic wrestlers with their own style or ideas about things are meant to work. The result, to my biased eye, is a growing homogeneity among the wrestlers, who are all drawing from the same set of moves and character concepts – moves and concepts largely chosen by an external group of coaches, managers and marketers – rather than bringing their own individual style and flair. And I get that, because you want a reliable and commercially viable product, and for your staff to be safe from injury due to unpredictable circumstances, but it makes it hard for me to tell many of them apart, or to care which one of them wins the day. (Lesson: you don’t have to play it safe, and you can depict any kind of character doing any kind of thing. SO DO THAT. Leave the homogeneity for the real world.)

Stick to the schtick

A lot of character development in WWE comes through visual flags – a wrestler always dresses a certain way, has a specific entrance, uses identifiable gestures. Similarly, every wrestler has signature moves and catchphrases that they’ll use in almost every match and promo – things that reinforce the character in your mind, that make them memorable even if you can’t connect that memory to a specific action or event. That’s a technique that’s very powerful in visual media, but can also be tapped in prose storytelling. (Lesson: set out simple, short signifiers for a character like a piece of clothing, a phrase or even a radical haircut, something you can describe in five words, and drop them into scenes so that readers get that instant bit of connection.)

Use all your tools – but use them properly

WWE make heavy use of promos, vignettes, backstage skits, brief interviews and other non-match showcases to build character, but their in-ring character development is a bit lacking; the current product doesn’t do much to showcase agendas, motivations or unique traits once the bell rings to start the fight. Almost all of that comes before and after, which is maybe the main reason I find their stuff a bit dull right now. Still, all of that developmental material works in building character nuance and substance. What doesn’t work is when the announce team just tell you a character is awesome, even when you can see that they’re a bit shit. WWE have been doing that for years, and if anything it’s even more distancing and annoying now that the video quality is so good and you can see mediocre characters underwhelm you in HD. (Lesson: character can come from lots of interactions and presentations, big or small – but keep the focus on what characters do, and don’t forget about ‘show, don’t tell’, okay?)

We don’t talk about the weird stuff any more

WWE’s storylines used to have a few weird and strange elements, but that’s largely been excised these days. Modern storylines revolve around professional rivalries for belts and prime roster positions, which bring larger paycheques and more merch opportunities. In other words, they’re wrestling stories about wrestling; the business is about the business. That has potential for metatextual shenanigans, but they’re rarely explored, and the end result is a storytelling environment that leaves me kind of cold. At the same time, the rare inclusion of a new element – a personal grudge, a lapsed friendship, a reflection of external factors – is just enough to stand out and get my interest, even if it’s never anything as over-the-top as the Undertaker fighting Kane in the fires of Hell. (Lesson: it’s good to set a baseline of realism, but staying there is kind of boring; look for ways to make stories be about more than their own immediate, sensible and predictable contexts.)

Good pacing makes up for many sins

The thing that WWE really understands these days, after decades of experimentation, is the rhythm of action storytelling – the pacing skeleton that supports all manner of wrestling meat. A standard WWE feud starts just after a pay-per-view, with hostilities rising between two wrestlers; at the next PPV they either settle things (short arc) or the situations escalates (medium arc). There’s a consistent, engaging build with peaks and troughs, highs and lows – something that gets you pumped and then lets you cool off. Matches are the same; the rise and fall of energy and spotlight in a WWE show is so crisp you could graph it. (Well, usually; I hear the recent SummerSlam PPV was 6 hours long, peaked too soon and burned the audience out by the halfway mark.) (Lesson: knowing the rhythm and flow of fights and stories is more than half the battle of conveying both effectively.)

—

I signed up for a free month of the WWE Network; that subscription renewed today, and that’s fine, but that’ll do. That gives me time to watch some of the ancillary shows (Breaking Ground is intriguing) and the Cruiserweight Classic, which is my kind of flippy-skippy wrestling, and maybe to take a few more notes on Raw and Smackdown. After that, I think I’ll be happy enough to let it lie. WWE have their own thing, and it works very well for their audience, but I’m okay with not marking out for them any more.

Who do I mark out for? And plunder for storytelling ideas?

Let’s find out next time.

character games genre story worldbuilding writing

Guild Wars 2 – the storytelling dos and don’ts (part 2)

Post author By Patrick
Post date April 9, 2013
1 Comment on Guild Wars 2 – the storytelling dos and don’ts (part 2)

Last week I started talking about Guild Wars 2, not because it’s a fun game (it is) but because it’s an interesting object lesson in the use of storytelling techniques. I wrote about 1300 words about that, and I can only assume that I stunned all of you into silence with my brilliance ‘cos no-one offered even a single comment on it. Should I ask someone to rewrite my essay?

Well, prepared to be driven permanently mute as I continue to write even more on the topic of story, character and high-level armour drops!

(Also, this was meant to be finished and posted on Sunday night, but the Comedy Festival is chewing up my time and spitting out minutes and limbs.)

(And they’re not even my limbs. Not sure where they come from. Damned creepy, really.)

Choices matter

Throughout your personal story in GW2 you get called on to choose between two or three courses of action, which dictate what the next chunk of narrative will be. That’s excellent game design because it actively engages the player, making them feel that they’re an active participant in the story – even though some choices are weighted pretty heavily towards one more interesting option. (“Well, you could disguise yourself as a minotaur or do LAH LAH LAH NOT LISTENING HAND ME THE HORNS AND SUPERGLUE.”) In fiction you get that engagement by presenting the main character – the reader’s window into the story – with choices to make. Make your main character an active participant in their own story and the reader will follow suit.

…even when they don’t

On the other hand, choices need to be meaningful, and the ones in GW2 aren’t. Sure, they determine which mission you tackle next, but the end point of that mission lines you up to the pre-determined outcome and next stage the same as the alternative would. The game has a path, and your choices just determine which bits of scenery you set fire to along the way. In a story, choices need to be genuine decision points that shape outcomes and have permanent consequences, or else there’s no point writing about them. And as part of that, some of the most interesting decisions are the bad ones, the ones that don’t work out and push the story further into conflict. Go crazy with those.

Voice defines character

A key element of GW2 is that your character speaks, generally in conversational cut scenes – and the most important part of that is that your character develops a distinct voice. No, not voice acting, but a style and tone all their own, from the patient Sylvari to the belligerent Charr to the egotistical Norn. Each character expresses personality through their words as well as their deeds, and that’s vital for any kind of fiction as well. It’s also something you notice when it falls away, as it does in GW2 as multiple plot directions collapse into one, taking with them your character’s distinct voice – so don’t do that. Maintain character voice, even when the plot takes the character in a new direction.

At this point, I feel I should show you my character. His name is Cadmus and he is a Sylvari Guardian and he is level 80 and he fights with a sword and torch and he made all his own armour and he is very awesome and okay I’ll shut up now PS he is boss.

Fuck lore

I blame Bioware for the trend of emphasising the rich, detailed backstory of their game worlds by littering their games with infodumps and books/scrolls/datapads that you find and reach and squint at instead of actually playing the game. GW2 has plenty of backstory, but rarely stops to tell you about it – it shows you, usually by sending you on missions where history pops up, says hello and stabs you in the face. Short on exposition and long on action/character, GW2’s history leeches into you by osmosis rather than study, and that is a fine lesson to bring to your fiction. Stay focused in the here and now, let your characters discover history organically, and throw out just enough to provide context before moving on.

Genre is a big tent

If you’re looking for purist, traditional fantasy, GW2 is not for you. This is a world featuring giant Vikings, inquisitive plant-people, horned cat-folk undergoing an industrial revolution and a race of freckled gnomish mad scientists with robots and lasers. Add to that pistols, aqualungs, airships, battle armour, dozens of sentient races (most of them bad), anachronisms aplenty and wide swathes of horror and you get a take on fantasy that is anything but traditional. And that’s a good thing. Genre is vast, it contains multitudes, and purity is past its use-by date. Never feel hemmed in by what a genre is ‘supposed’ to contain – put in the things you want to include and the genre will swell to fit.

A consistent tone? What’s that?

Mind you, the problem with a big tent is that you might fill it with boxes, open them all at once and find that they don’t play well together. GW2 tries to present a series, often tragic tone within its main storyline, especially in the third act, but then destabilises that by getting you to enter an 8-bit computer game or fight the terrible Marxist-Leninist mole people in various pun-based locations. It’s hard to have feels when giggles are just a few minutes behind, and hard to maintain a tone of desperate urgency when you can just wander off and ignore the plot for a week while you gather armour bits. Any idea can be serious or silly, calm or critical depending on how you treat it, so long as you pick a tone early on and stick with it. If you’re going to be a purist anywhere in your own work, it should be tone – find your level ASAP and stay there to the end.

Pictures are worth a thousand etcetera

The visual world of GW2 is both rich and very carefully crafted, so that whenever you look around you know where you are. Every location has its own feel, from the sedate human kingdoms to the once-drowned-now-risen wastelands of Orr. Architecture is similarly distinct – you instantly know the cubic, gravity-defying ziggurats of the Asura from the dark satanic mills of the Charr and the re-purposed shipwreck-buildings of Lion’s Arch. Making everything distinct means that everything has instantly-identifiable flavour, embedding players in the world. Writers don’t get to play with visuals (well, most of us don’t), but we have other tools – word choices, prose rhythm, dialect, adjectives and more. Just as you give every character a voice, try to give every location and scene its own voice too; it makes the stories within them all the richer.

Exploration isn’t necessarily story

That said, if all you’re doing is looking at the scenery or exploring the intricacies of how the Shamu-Shamu people make purple whaleskin booties, your story isn’t going anywhere. GW2 encourages exploration with various tools, including the thrill of discovery and the lure of XP and treasure drops, but the story gets put on hold while you check out the landscape. Do you want to put your story on hold while people are actually, you know, reading your story? I thought not. As with lore, position the rich tapestry of your world front and centre by making characters run right through it, showing its colours and complexity for a second and then getting on with things. Story is movement. Always keep moving.

—

I could probably come up with half-a-dozen more object lessons, but it’s late and this essay is already long enough.

Let’s close by saying this. There was a time where prose was the Only Important Way of telling stories. That time is the distant past. These days there are lots of ways of getting a story into the reader’s head and heart, from games to graphic novels to epic poetry to multi-part interactive fiction experiments on Twitter. I’ve been talking about Guild Wars 2, but I could have drawn similar lessons from pretty much game, any movie, any (mostly) well-crafted piece of storytelling.

Everything you take in can teach you how to tell stories, whether by example or as a don’t-do-this object lesson. Keep your eyes peeled and your mind open, and you can learn from any of them. All of them. And make your stories better in the process.

Also, I’m patrickoduffy.3067 on Jade Quarry server, looking for groups to tackle the lower-level dungeons and maybe a guild to join. Send me a tell. I’ve got your back.

character games genre story worldbuilding writing

Guild Wars 2 – the storytelling dos and don’ts (part 1)

Post author By Patrick
Post date April 2, 2013
No Comments on Guild Wars 2 – the storytelling dos and don’ts (part 1)

Look, I make excuse after excuse about why Raven’s Blood is taking longer than expected, and many of those are more-or-less true, but here’s the real reason – I’ve been playing the shit out of Guild Wars 2 for like the last four months.

I have an addictive personality, and MMOs scratch that itch harder than Wolverine with shingles. Which is a terrible metaphor, I know.

Anyway, I’ve been wasting a lot of time on exploring Tyria, fighting elder dragons and experimenting with various ingredient combinations to level up my cooking skills. And something that’s become clear to me is that GW2 is a game based heavily around story, character and exploration, and that it uses some interesting techniques to get those elements across while still delivering lots of action and fights. So, much like I did with Batman: Arkham City last year, I’d like to look at how Guild Wars 2 uses the tools in the storytelling chest to make something that’s more than just whacking digital pinatas for imaginary gold – and how sometimes it uses those tools well and sometimes not.

See, it wasn’t just four months of wasted time; it was research.

Arc after arc, raise after raise

The structure of GW2 is a classic zero-to-hero tale, but one that’s remarkably coherent and well-structured. The core storyline is broken in regular chapters, each of which reaches a natural end point that segues neatly into the next arc, and each of which raises the overall stakes. You start off as just another adventurer, fighting bandits or in a rivalry with mad scientists, and by the end you’re spearheading the battle against the great dragons and their unending army of the undead in order to save the world. And that progression is largely smooth and unbroken; you can always look back and think that it makes sense that you wound up where you are. The pattern of establish a status quo / upend it / fix it / establish a new status quo where the stakes are higher / repeat is the meat and drink of storytelling; it’s always worth considering as your main course.

But keep those doggies moving

The thing about that arc-to-arc movement is that it doesn’t give you much room to breathe between arcs, or else you lose momentum and don’t make the transition smoothly. Time elapsing in the narrative is fine; time elapsing for the audience is problematic. GW2 does the usual keying of events to levels and places, and most of the time you gain the requisite experience for the next mission in the process of getting to the location – but not always. A number of times I found myself coming up short and needing to potter around someplace else to gain a level or two, which bled away a lot of the urgency of the storyline. In your storytelling, don’t give characters unnecessary downtime between arcs – if time has to pass, it’s better to start the next chapter with ‘Six months later’ than to blow a whole chapter describing how nothing important happens for a while.

Character is at the heart of story

It doesn’t matter how rich the backstory and environment of your world is if there’s no-one for us to experience it through. GW2 does a great job of basing everything that happens around your character and their actions. All the plot-important events are instanced, so you don’t see all the other players doing exactly the same mission, and fully-voiced cutscenes bookend each event so that your character is actually interacting with NPCs and shaping the narrative rather than just being given a checklist of objectives. Over the course of 80 levels, I became not just invested in my character’s XP and bitchin’ armour choices but in his personality – a great achievement for an MMO, and the primary thing you want to achieve in your fiction. Do it the same way – build the story around your character and then let personality emerge from action and dialogue.

But your POV might be from the story’s kidney

GW2 positions your character as central, but not as the primary plot-driver; that role is taken up by various characters in the story arcs, with you as their lieutenant/assistant/main legbreaker. Doing so is understandable – you need NPCs to give you missions to drive play – but it still ends up with you being secondary in someone else’s stories. While it’s possible to make this work in a story (such as in the first few of Glen Cook’s Black Company novels), it’s more likely to leave readers feeling that they’re missing out on the story or reading about a less-interesting character. So if you’re going to place your main character outside the absolute centre of your story, make sure that their own story is at least as interesting that what’s going on front and centre.

Situations create narrative

GW2 largely eschews the traditional quest-journal approach of most MMOs in favour of a network of events that are married to locations and situations. Some are static; you enter an area and there are problems that are immediate and obvious (eel-men preying on wrecked ships, unexploded bombs in an orchard, uppity polar bears etc); just by wandering around and interacting with the environment you complete the event. Others are dynamic, suddenly starting up and bringing change into the scene – and some of those are links in a chain of events that change with consequences. If bandits attack a water pipe, you can try to fight them off; if you fail, the pipe is blown up and now you have to help repair it. This gives everything a feeling of import and weight; the world changes with you, even if only for a little while, and other players will be affected by your deeds. This is the kind of feeling you want to impart to events in your fiction. The best stories are not just handed down from on high; they emerge naturally from reactions to a situation, they shape the actions of characters and are shaped in turn, and the consequences that follow the event meaningfully changes the narrative.

Sometimes that narrative is a bit dull

When a situation calls for a variety of actions – combat, puzzle solving, interaction, chopping down trees or whatever – then it’s engaging on several levels. When it just involves attacking an indeterminate number of monsters using the same two weapons for ten minutes… not so much. GW2’s static and dynamic events are a mix of the inspired (especially when you end up putting on disguises and changing form), the serviceable and the just-hit-enough-things-until-it’s-over, which is as quotidian as it gets for a video game. Over in the writing world, you should probably try to avoid the quotidian, because those are situations that don’t have tension, conflict or emotional resonance, and the narratives and consequences that emerge from them just aren’t interesting. Of course, ‘quotidian’ isn’t the same as ‘ordinary’; lots of normal human interactions are charged with conflict and meaning, and can give rise to powerful stories. But situations that only allow for limited character actions, that don’t matter in the overall storyline, that don’t present more than cosmetic consequences… it doesn’t matter if your story’s set in Melbourne, Metropolis or Moria, that bit of it’s going to be dull. Skip it.

—

Okay, we’re well over 1000 words at this stage, this post is two days late and I’m only half-finished, so I’m breaking this in half. Come back next weekend for part two, which will be at least as exciting and educational as this one.

Plus I’ll add some screenshots of my character. He looks boss.