Writing Every Day 29: Out of Ideas

What do you do when you're out of ideas? When you have a game session scheduled, everyone's ready to sit down and get some gaming in, and you the Game Master have no clue of what to do?

I've been in this position a couple of time. Often it's because I don't want to advance the plot of the campaign, usually due to a player being absent who I'd really like to have participating in the session. Rather than bail on the game, if possible I like to run a one-shot session with everyone in attendance.

When I'm really, truly out of ideas, I'll often let the players do the driving, so to speak. I'll remind them of where they are and what their present goals are, and then sit back and ask them what they're up to. Occasionally their responses will be enough to spark an idea and I run the game based on their ideas and the consequences of their actions. Some of the best sessions I've ever run are based on giving the players enough rope to hang themselves; listening to their theories and suspicions can give you great material to work with. Just be sure that they don't realize how much what they're saying influences what's happening at the table.

If that doesn't work, I'll steal and remix ideas. I'll grab concepts from whatever book I'm reading, scenes or characters from TV and movies, and mash them up until I have something that's familiar but still new. Some of my favorite game sessions have taken heavily from movies like The Thing, or interesting quests from Skyrim, or something. So long as it has the veneer of the campaign world and isn't a direct ripoff, it works perfectly.

Writing Every Day 28: Homework!

A bit of a deviation for today's update. I plan to talk about working from home and my limited experience with it.

Starting this morning, I began a several-week long period of working from home. This isn't totally new to me. Back when I was a freelancer working from home is all I did. Between then and now, though, I've spent three years working in an office environment. I'd gotten used to the conventions of office work, and I now find myself changing gears back to the old, yet unfamiliar, routine.

I wanted to share some observations I've made over the course of the day.

Your Workflow is Uneven

Of course, it always is, but working alone at home you notice it much more. In the office, the unevenness of your workflow is concealed by trips to the coffee machine or printer. By short conversations with your coworkers. By trips across the office to the bathroom. Whatever. 

When you work at home, you notice that unevenness much more. One moment you'll be blazing away on a project and making huge headway, but the next you're staring at the screen for minutes at a time, or looking up the origin of paragraphs on Wikipedia, or something.

In the aggregate I got far more done today than I think I would have in the office, but those unproductive periods were maddening. Time slows to a crawl when you're working in solitude and you tend to notice the periods that make you feel guilty about your progress, far more than the other ones.

In an attempt to even this all out, I'm working with the Pomodoro method. It's one of many Getting Things Done techniques you'll find on the internet, and it attempts to force you into a steadier rhythm of work and short breaks. Definitely trying it again tomorrow.

Solitude is Awesome

The fact that I can listen to whatever music I want, don't have to wear anything more intense than sweats and a t-shirt, and have my workspace to myself is amazing. Solitude can be a great tool for productivity, because there's nothing there to distract you but you.

Solitude is Terrible

On the flip side of the above, working at home alone can be horrible. Time, as I said, slows to a crawl. You don't feel as compelled to go out to eat, because you have food at home. I haven't left the house all day. Since I work in the living room of my house, my living room feels confined and like the office again.

To alleviate the starkness of my solitude, I keep my chat client open to communicate with workers still in the office. I feel bad for my boss, since he received the brunt of my solitary-induced nonsense. Mid-way through the work day I was sending off observations about the effect of lower income viewers on the commercials of daytime TV. A link to polar/grizzly bear hybrids (hilariously they can be called pizzly bears). That sort of thing.

What this illustrates to me is the importance of interacting with your coworkers in the office. You don't have to be talking about work, but every so often you need to talk about something. It acts like a rest-stop on a long road trip, where you can mentally get out and stretch your legs by talking about some random bullshit.

My Job Shouldn't Be Tiring, But it Is

A huge part of my job is reading. Another is writing. Another is just thinking about stuff, analyzing it to see if what you've read or wrote is wrong in some way. None of these tasks, taken on their own, is strenuous. Combined, they are exhausting.

I used to work an intense manual labor job. It introduced me to the kind of bone-deep weariness that intense work can produce. When I got my current job, I thought that level of exhaustion was in my past. Boy, I was wrong.

The first kind of exhaustion wears you down and can keep you from wanting to act. You don't want to do anything, because you've done stuff all day. This kind of exhaustion keeps you from wanting to think at all. You want to veg out with a movie, or close your eyes and listen to music. Anything passive. Anything to take a break from all the brain work you've done all day.

Writing today's post took some effort because of this. I spent all day writing, and more writing was the last thing I wanted to do. But here we are. Some weary comments at the end of a wearisome day. 

Let's see if I have this figured out tomorrow.

Writing Every Day 27: Sequels

I've mentioned in the past how I like to run a campaign to its dramatic conclusion and then put the PCs and situation on the shelf for a while. Tonight I want to talk about when I choose to pull them back down. This isn't about cinematic sequels, though I may reference them from time to time.

When I decide to return to a group of characters, there are some personal rules I like to follow. First is that the characters' situation must change. For example, I've run a few games set in the post-apocalyptic wastelands town of Covenant. In the first campaign, the characters were some of Covenant's founders. The game was about the danger and difficulty of establishing a home in the frontier. When I decided to return to Covenant, I knew that I had to change something, so I made Covenant grow.

It made sense to me. A successful town pushes back the edge of the wilderness. The next frontier lies beyond it, and as a waystation to reach it, people travel through, buy supplies, or decide to stop traveling and put down roots. I advanced the timeline by two years, I think, and the tiny town of Covenant had grown to support a population of nearly a thousand. Small by our standards, but booming by the standards of an irradiated wasteland.

Growing the town allowed me to "start fresh," so to speak. The PCs knew old Covenant and were forced to adapt to its changing face. Instead of keeping marauders at bay, now they needed to worry about organized crime settling into the town. Or they needed to worry about other businesses muscling them out. Or needed to worry about losing their political clout in Covenant as new circles of power rose in prominence. You get the idea. They couldn't follow the assumptions they may have had based on the previous games, because the situation had evolved.

When I set out to change the campaign world like this, it helps to remember some of the screenwriting advice in Robert McKee's book Story. In it, McKee talks about the emotional charge of scenes. I've never tried applying the theory to individual scenes in an adventure, but I suspect it could be made to work. Each scene has an emotional charge, positive or negative, when it begins. McKee suggests ending the scene on the opposite charge. So, if the PCs begin a scene on an "up" beat, by the end they should experience a "down" beat, and vice versa.

That flow of emotional charge is how I treat campaigns and their sequels. Or at least how I try to. I start by altering the status quo in some way, like the expansion of Covenant in our example. Then I examine how the last campaign ended. Was it an "up" ending? Then the feel of the next story is probably going to take a downturn. Sometimes there's a bit of work that is required to transition between the two emotional states, but I try to get the feeling of the new game out as quickly as I can.

Since Star Wars is such a shared cultural phenomenon, I'll use it as my example. A New Hope ends on an iconic up beat (for everyone but poor Chewie). Then we roll right into Empire, where the Rebels are on the run. You'll notice that things aren't presented as hopeless at the start of Empire... heck, the rebels commend themselves pretty well in the Battle of Hoth, but by the end they are grim as hell. In Return of the Jedi, we begin with echoes of Empire's grim ending, but eventually it pushes through to a happy Ewok party ending.

If you do decide to sequelize a campaign, I suggest taking the time to examine the previous one. Find out how you can modify the situation and reverse the emotional charge. Try to have a solid idea in mind before you tell the players to bust out their old character sheets. Try to make the experience just as new and exciting the second, third, or n+1 time as it was the first.

Writing Every Day 26: In Defense of Critical Failures

I was not going to write about this topic. I pretty much believe that critical failures are something that RPGs have moved beyond and that more interesting options exist. Well, believed.

Believed, you see, because just now when I tried to pour myself some wine from the Trader Joe's box, the spout popped off in my hands and wine started exploding out of two points on the nozzle, rapidly filling my wine glass and the closest vessel I had at hand, a crock pot.

My wife was laughing. I understand why. There I was, fingers jammed into two holes that both spewed out a spray of wine, like an alcoholic little Dutch boy. It was funny. That it was funny is why I think there's room in the world for critical failures, after all.

In game terms, what happened would fall in the realm of a critical failure. (Why I would be rolling to pour some wine begs for some consequences, like spotting a sabotaged pour spout, for instance). If that kind of event happened at the gaming table, I bet it would have caused a few players to chuckle at their fellow's misfortune. The moment would be funny and fun, and maybe inspire that player to improvise. Maybe it's just the crockpot of wine I'm drinking, but isn't that what games are all about?

I think there's room for that level of failure on an attempted action. Often I see critical failure results that are just malicious, that cause damage to a character or kill the character outright. I don't think that's what critical failures should be about. They should be manic, or comedic. Pratfalls and not unintentional self-immolation. A critical failure, handled carefully, can bring some levity to the game and provide the players with a fun and unexpected moment.

Writing Every Day 25: Transitions

In both writing and roleplaying games, transitions are important. They allow us to flow from one paragraph or scene into the next while maintaining a train of thought, or the arc of the campaign. Participants don't have to mentally shift gears from one block of information to the next, because the transition creates a mental bridge between them.

In writing this process is all on the shoulders of transitions (not to be confused with transitional sentences, which I almost did). I'll let people smarter than me break the concept down for you.

In roleplaying games, transitions are scenes that link between various locations and encounters. Depending on the game and the Game Master's intent, a transition between scenes can be played out fully, or it can be summarized with a line or so. Think of all the sweeping montages of walking in the Lord of the Rings film franchise. Other than giving us a vista, they don't add much to the plot. The director Peter Jackson wisely decided to sum up to bring us to the next major beat of the story.

In your games, I advocate using this technique. Unless you have something interesting planned, feel free to summarize journeys to keep the story moving. This is particularly true when days or weeks of travel don't have any challenges to overcome, characters to interact with, or interesting locations along the way.

Readers of the blog already know what I'm going to say next. I advise using discretion when deciding to sum up the events between scenes. After all, the Lord of the Rings wouldn't be an interesting story if it glossed over the trials of the characters between Rivendell and Mount Doom. If you know the campaign will take the PCs on a long journey, be sure to seed some encounters or events along the way. Think of them like milestones on a long road; they mark the progress the PCs have made. This isn't just geographic. It also helps to mark the PCs' progress as characters.

Depending on how long this journey is, word may have spread of the PCs' exploits along the way. They can overhear stories of their actions throughout the campaign, colored by the perspective of the individually telling the tale (or by the Game Master introducing a bit of misinformation about the story). You can use scenes like this to remind the players of where they've just come from, what gains they've made in the campaign so far, before leading them into the next piece of the story.

Writing Every Day 24: Choose your Words

The words we use as Game Masters are critical. The world of the game is expressed through how we describe it to the players. Choosing the wrong word won't ruin your game, but choosing the right one can make it far better.

This isn't a rehash of the "A man isn't very tired, he's exhausted!" speech from Dead Poet's Society. I don't advocate that a Game Master keep a copy of Roget's Thesaurus on hand while running the game. We flip through enough print matter referencing rules and tables. What I'm talking about is trying to tailor your descriptions to specific PCs.

When you first describe an environment, individual, or monster, it's usually directed to the whole group. That's the shared experience, the absolutes about what you're describing. If, for instance, the group approaches a six foot tall man with a dark, scraggly beard, you might tell everyone exactly that.

Once you've described the shared experience, individual players may prompt you for more information. That's when careful word choice can improve your games. If you're familiar with the PC, try tailoring your responses as if viewed through that character's eyes and experience. A rich character interacting with a commoner may hear from you that the NPC's clothes are drab or shabby. A poor one might hear that they're sturdy, or practical. It's a simple little narrative trick that helps you feed a player's immersion and can coax them into better portraying his or her character.

As with most Game Master's tricks, this technique can be overused. You don't want to confuse the group by feeding them misinformation, or providing too many contradictory cues. Picking a thing or two about a scene and considering how the PCs might think of them is enough for any game.

Writing Every Day 23: Unity of Purpose

The games I run tend to follow a pretty standard story arc, with branches based on sidequest the players want to pursue. Once in a while the night's game has nothing to do with the plot of the campaign. We just do something that sounds fun. But largely it abides by storytelling conventions, because that's the kind of game that I enjoy running.

Our games often follow the course of a single story, usually with characters united in some thematic way. I've done pirate games, where the characters are members of the crew. Law enforcement games, where they're officers pursuing the same case. Sometimes even survival games, where they're trying to outlast some horror that will destroy their sanity or consume their flesh. Each of these games have a sort of common purpose built into the characters. The PCs work together well because they share a unity of purpose, be it their professions or ultimate objectives.

Establishing this kind of unity is also helpful for games with much more open character creation. Getting a crippled interrogator, self-centered nobleman, war-weary barbarian, and demon-blooded rogue to work together isn't an easy task. Yet Joe Abercrombie did so seamlessly with his book The Blade Itself by providing them all with a common purpose when he needed them to work together. Seriously, guys. Check out his stuff. I'm a big fan of his books.

Joe pulled it off by using a character I think of as the Recruiter. This is typically an NPC, but you can certainly hash out a PC version of the concept if you don't want to feel like you're leading the players by the nose. The purpose of the Recruiter is to find individuals suitable for a particular task or role. This character collects all of the PCs and sets them on their journey to rescue Princess Leia or form the Avengers, or whatever.

Another way to establish unity among disparate PCs is by giving them a monumental task to complete, and give them a reason to complete it. The Lord of the Rings is a classic example of this. The Fellowship are unified by the goal of the One Ring's destruction, despite the vast differences between them. They do this because they're trying to forestall the apocalypse, more or less. Feel free to sub in lesser apocalypses (the loss of the community center in Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo is the stupid example that came to mind) for greater ones (like the extinction-level event brought on by an impending asteroid strike that only the PCs, a plucky group of off-shore drillers can prevent). You can also transition between the Recruiter example into the unifying task, as Star Wars did when the race to rescue the princess transitioned into the destruction of the Death Star.

One downside to hinging the group's dynamics on a unified purpose is choosing what to do once the goal is achieved. Sometimes the group sticks together because they become fast friends on their journey, and the players are okay with keeping the group together and the campaign going. Other times one or more characters will decide that their part in the story is over and fade from the campaign.

I wouldn't advocate pulling the unified purpose idea for multiple campaign arcs in a row. While it keeps the game going, it begins to strain belief that the PCs are the right people, at the right place and time, to deal with every single impending doom in your game world.* Essentially, sequels are hard. You need to find a decent reason for the characters to keep coming together and working together. Sometimes the initial thing that brought them together suffices. The Avengers Initiative is an ongoing thing that requires the participation of its members, both old and new. Other times it isn't enough.

When I can't think of a decent reason to continue a campaign after the death of the Big Bad, I'll put that storyline on a shelf. Once a cool idea comes to mind I'll pick it back up again, letting the players step back into the role of the characters they've played before.

So. Another somewhat rambling post for today. At some point I bet I'll return to this subject. There are more, smarter words to be said on the topic. Hopefully by then I'll know what a few of them are.

*As an aside, at some point I want to write about the PCs as a part of a dynamic world. A world where things happen outside their immediate vicinity with consequences based on what they choose to pursue versus what they leave alone.

Writing Every Day 22: Why am I doing this?

Man, on its own that heading looks like a cry for help.

Now that I'm twenty-two (plus extra) entries into this experiment, I thought I'd take a moment to explore why I'm doing this and what I hope to get out of it.

I wish I could say that there was some inspirational inciting incident that made me choose to put up a steady stream of posts on the blog, but there really wasn't. I suppose it is more like how certain sedatives work; the substance builds up in your system until it reaches a critical amount and boom, you're unconscious.

The reason the drug was in my system in the first place harkens back to my college days. Back when I was in art school, I had an incredible teacher who assigned all of his students a high number of life drawing sketches to execute each week. I forget the specific number now, but it was something like fifty pages full of hand studies, fifty pages of face studies, and so on. He told us that these sketches were like an athlete performing short sprints. It was steady exercise that we performed to drill our skills and increase our endurance.

Those assignments have always held the ring of truth to me. Sketches are important to the visual artist. Words are important to the writer. While I don't feel comfortable calling myself a "writer," I do have to respect that writing is what I do for a living. There are people gracious enough to give me a salary to do so. I feel like I owe it to them to practice as much as possible, to run those short sprints.

I could do so in private, building up a massive catalogue of words that won't ever see the light of day. In the past, that's exactly what I have done. The reason I choose to do so in such a public way is because I hope someone out there reads what I'm saying. I do it because having someone like you read this stuff keeps me accountable. At that point I'm not doing it just for me. I'm also doing it for you guys.

There are a small handful of people out there who take a moment of their own day to look over what I'm saying. That holds similar value to me as the people who decide to pay me to write. Your time is valuable. You only have so much of it to go around, and that you'd spend a minute or two to look at the rudderless, rambling text I'm putting out is so, so appreciated.

Presently, the solitary means I have to show my appreciation is to keep writing, both here and at work. So that's what I'll do. I'll keep running my short sprints each (let's be honest, work) day for as long as I can. I hope that at some point, doing so will provide for me the same kind of benefit that those pages of life drawing studies were meant to back in the day.

Again, thank you for the time you've spent on me. A special thanks goes out to the teacher who showed me the value of persistence in pursuing your craft.

This one's for you, Scott.