The Long-Running Series – Two of Four “Easy” Lessons from Role-Playing Games
(Reality check: This is written in the aftermath of the Great Los Angeles Rainstorm—and yes, this week that’s reality. All part of preparing to venture forth on the waterlogged streets to speak at Orccon gaming convention.)
Every Saturday for hours on end, there I was in the gaming group. Dungeons & Dragons, Champions, and other role-playing systems that kept me coming back for sprawling ongoing adventures that built from bandit raids to galactic invasions over time. Often with the same heroes.
Every Saturday. For years.
We That is, if games and books aren’t just too different to learn from each other.
One guess where I stand on that question. (Hint: I’ve written about cross-training them before.)
So, based on decades I’ve spent in gaming, writing, and trading ideas with the creative folks on both sides, here are four role-players’ tools to help a writer build a long-running series. (Or are they writers’ lessons for ambitious gamemasters?)
Lesson One-Half: Ready or Not?
Before I start on the four tools themselves, let’s take a moment to think about what we’re getting into. A three-novel series takes years of obsessive work to write, and one that’s planned as five books or to keep going as new ideas come is a whole order of magnitude beyond that.
The authors who do best at this have already honed their proverbial craft; check out George R. R. Martin’s trophy-strewn career before he launched Game of Thrones. A GM (that’s gamemaster this time, not short for GRRM) worth staying with for twenty character levels has probably been playing and running other adventures for years.
—Except the ones that haven’t.
[bctt tweet=”If anyone asks what role-playing games are, I call them storytelling’s ultimate do-it-yourself kit.” via=”no”]
So naturally, many a GM has tried to run a game within weeks of his friends showing him those crazy rulebooks.
Tip: if a friend who’s only starting to game suddenly can’t stop trying to get you in their brand-new campaign… hear him out. It might be the start of something tasty.
Especially if this friend isn’t one of the more impulsive people you know, it’s someone with a creative side and the drive that they just might pull this together, even though it’s learning on the fly. Which are the same qualities that make a writer. (I know I’m not the only one lured onto the keyboard through a set of dice.)
So: gaming shows that experience is a fine thing for starting a series on the right track… but it’s not the only thing.
Lesson One: For Them
For all the hundreds of pages in a game’s rulebook, and how every storytelling technique in history has a firm place in it, more than anything a role-playing game is a social experience. A GM sits down with players and tries to entertain them… including letting them take their turns strutting their stuff to you and the rest of the players.
Which means: what do they want?
Yes, partly that’s the “Londo Question” I’ve blogged about lately, to get inside characters’ motivations and line up the drama. But gamers know, it also means how anyone can turn up at the gaming table. A poet out for a sense of grandeur sits next to the dude who pushes for a fight and takes half an hour lining up the team strategy, while the brothers in the corner trade jokes all through it.
So a GM with big plans starts with those personalities and builds the campaign to serve them. Action challenges by the carload, check—but save some time and energy for those artistic players, and even try to play their contributions off each other. (Why shouldn’t some of the coolest description be about explaining how frightening the villain is, and how treacherous the swamp is that’s about to be laid out on the mat?)
Obvious starts to a campaign would be simply asking the players what they want. But that also means learning to look closer; two players may ask for “excitement,” but they both mean battles and yet one turns out to want a complex tactical challenge while the other’s out for sheer epic scale.
And then there’s designing the characters themselves. A player controls their hero for the campaign; if a friend’s always wanted to follow the footsteps of a shy hobbit ramped up to become a hero, it’s gaming gold to know that and give them a home “Shire” and a set of conflicts to do it justice.
For a writer, same thing. Know your fans, by knowing what they already read—probably the same stories you already read and love, but now learn to see what readers like in them, and why that works. And, which approaches out there just aren’t your style.
Gaming offers its own lesson about a writer’s plans: they’re going to change. One of my last group’s favorite storylines was a throwaway victim character (Wendy McDonald, even the name was a drive-by pick at the time) that we promoted to my character’s girlfriend and weirdness magnet, and eventually became a new player’s own character. All completely unplanned.
Or… I sometimes think of Superman’s “neglected origin” (I’ve written about it before) as something that could easily happen in a game. A character starts out with a backstory, and yet the player just doesn’t care about alien misfit storylines or old-home enemies as much as playing out what it means to be a hero here. While in contrast, Thor starts with nearly the same origin but gets a lifetime of Asgardian plotlines and a villainous brother who’s more popular than he is. Sometimes a storyline zigs, sometimes it zags.
And a writer, like a gamemaster, can base those stories on what genuinely works for the reader, the player… the customer. As long as we keep our eyes open for what turns out to actually work, and what we want to do with that story ourselves.
Lesson Two: For You
GMs create for their players, but they’re still playing in a sandbox they build, with everything from the “sand” to the paint around the rim coming primarily from their own vision. That’s at least half the fun, knowing that someone else’s hunger for story is being fed by how you see it.
—And honestly, isn’t that how it should be? Writers and GMs simply put in more work than their fans do, to find and test what genuinely works for people. Henry Ford once said “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
Starting a campaign is one of the greatest indulgences you may ever have. Fantasy, space, horror… the quirkiest new rule system or the old standby… Players may not even like the words “D&D” when you first propose it, but again and again I’ve seen a GM pull reluctant players in and shows them what a concept can be done right. And that’s just the two most obvious decisions.
Writing is spending years locked in a room with our dreams. So, we ought to make sure those are our dreams.
(Does this being the second point mean the writer’s less important than the reader? No, it’s more that in a game it’s best to start with one part player interests before wrapping them in the GM’s own… and most writers already start as fans and ought to understand the difference.)
Whether an idea starts with a player/reader expectation or not, the GM or writer can promptly find their own forms to put it in. A hero’s personal reason to destroy the enemy? One creator can go all out on showing the villain’s villainy; another can start with the person closest to the hero and make it seem like his fault the Dark Side came whispering. Being a GM can be constant practice in looking into the faces of players who expect one plotline, and reading just how far sideways you can twist it. All in the name of surpassing their expectations, of course…
Or, look at the most visible part of any game system: the rules. Most of the published “game” itself is the whole structure for managing character skills, resolving battles, and all the other “how can we” questions that keep the game rolling. (So to speak; some games don’t even use dice for that.)
So what do many GMs do with those rules?
They write their own.
It’s one of the most appealing parts of a campaign: re-building parts of the rules structure to make house rules that are more detailed or more efficient or just more your own. And it’s no surprise that the favorite candidates for change are how a game defines its own magic and exotic abilities.
Writers do the same, with any paranormal system we let in our story. (That flying belt is mine, and Mark’s going to use it the way I say it works!) An outsider looking in at a campaign or story might be surprised at how much attention goes to those customized parts… until they see how much they inspire us to keep writing, and how much the game group or the readers treasure that signature. And the longer the storyline runs, the more that bond pays off.
Or one more example: A GM knows he’s the actual “God” of the game world, able to preserve the heroes’ lives and storyline—and yet push it to the limit—by playing with luck and reality to protect them. Writers have the same power, and the same risk of overusing it and bleeding away suspense.
When you create a world, you can make it what you want, and keep it what you want. As much as people let you get away with, anyway… and that can be all the wiggle room you need.
Next time: the other two lessons, some specifics on planning and sustaining the story.
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