Signal boost: Writing tips, and an RPG tale · 2:58am Feb 27th, 2016
I wanted to throw all y'all a quick pointer to hazeyhooves' thoroughly excellent post on what the Mouse Guard roleplaying game can teach us about writing effective characters. I would consider it a must-read if you've got any interest in RPGs -- since it's a great analysis of how different RPG systems use their rules to focus the game on different aspects of play -- but it's also the best writing advice I've read this year.
(Go read it. I'll wait. I wanted to add some comments that rely on its context.)
The thing is, even in an RPG, it's not just at a structural/rule-based level that character flaws drive great stories (and great games). Games like Mouse Guard or The Dresden Files RPG bake in ways for your character to have qualities that can both be advantages and disadvantages, which puts that ambiguity front and center so that it's much easier to craft compelling narrative around it, but that's a tool that's in your toolbox no matter what game you're playing.
As an example, my local RP group just started up a game of (homebrewed postapocalyptic) D&D 5th Edition, and I'm playing a dragonborn cleric by the name of Fortitude Sevenborn [1]. Dragonborn are half-dragons who resemble the teenage dragon bully in that one episode about Spike's racial heritage, and one of their specific racial bonuses is that they have a breath weapon just like D&D dragons do. Based on the backstory I came up with for Fortitude -- that he was raised by humans in an area where dragonborn were so rare that he was considered a freak of nature, and that one of his defining struggles was trying to fit in, and that as a child he blinded a promising young paladin after accidentally unleashing his breath weapon during a sparring match -- I took a character element that was a pure mechanical advantage and I gave it an interesting, totally gratuitous flaw. There was absolutely nothing stopping me from firing that breath weapon in-game, but it took me four sessions to actually do so, because every time the temptation came up to do a little bit of extra damage, I had to stop and think: "Is this situation important enough that he would overcome his own self-loathing, and could he live with the knowledge that he lost his discipline and reverted to the feral freak he spent his childhood trying to overcome?"
And what that meant was that when I did decide to pull that trigger, it created a moment of instant climax.
Fortitude had been field-promoted into a church leadership role when a princess launching a political coup arrested Karrach Thorn's high priestess and killed her assistant. In the aftermath of those arrests, he was standing outside the church with two other party members -- a very thin blue line -- as an angry mob bore down on the church building in order to burn it to the ground. Fortitude called the leader of the mob forward, ordered him to disperse the crowd, and the guy laughed in his face. "Is this important enough for him to be a freak?" I asked myself, and the answer was finally yes, so Fortitude unleashed a 15' cone of acid at the mob leader. Point blank. In the face.
Story Dice gave him a failed save and me a near-maximum damage roll, so the first and only use of Fortitude's breath weapon was to spring a surprise ability on the other players, dropping the mob leader in one hit with his face melted off. [2]
A character ability like a Dragonborn's breath weapon is a mechanical advantage. It allows you more agency in games (by giving you a wider variety of choices or more effectiveness when you make particular choices). Paradoxically, a character flaw is actually an advantage too -- but it's a narrative advantage, making your character more interesting by restricting agency or imposing consequences to choices. Interesting characters get more focus and table time, and lead to more memorable moments both in game and in hindsight. Fortitude's subsequent soul-searching was almost as epic as his choice to overcome his self-imposed limits, and I consider that a win, both for myself and the fellow players who come to the table to participate in an awesome unfolding story.
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[1] He's an orphan who was raised by the church. The "Sevenborn" name is given to all orphans, as they are considered sons/daughters of the pantheon of the seven god-emperors. Their first name is a virtue which the church raises them to embody.
[2] Cue immediate Intimidate check on the crowd, with advantage. Alas, I choked on that one and the mob still attacked.
Bonus link for folks reading the comments:
CosmicCowboy's been writing some interesting posts lately as well, deconstructing grammar from a linguistic standpoint. The series starts here. If you're interested in academic breakdowns of language, and what that can teach us about avoiding common language pitfalls, you might get something out of it.
I'd never really considered that, but I think I unconsciously do that when my friends and I are playing our current 3.5 session. I have a raptorian rouge , so I'll say 'humans are weird' or look to a party member, confused when my actions, that I thought were culturally appropriate, apparently aren't. So I think, also, that playing these games can tell you about your writing style too (and maybe things that you need to fix) because I tend to try and I guess embody the person that I'm writing, even if it's just to see if that person really would lift a hoof or sit or whatever. It's sort of how I check characterization.
This isn't entirely relevant to this post, I know, but it made me think of it.
Arg. We really, really need some sort of central repository for keeping track of all this great writing advice / discussion that the community keeps putting out.
See, you have fun intelligent things to blog about. I would just ramble about Myth for too long or post pictures of my cat.
I've always enjoyed characters with minor yet hilariously important flaws. My Oracle of Fire's curse (which was a built-in mechanic) was that when stressed in anyway he lost the ability to speak in anything but Abyssal. So basically I would need to communicate very urgent information and get so worked up that all I could do was scream backwards satan latin at people.
Or Luna the Gunslinger who was mostly good except for the whole need to liberate any and all food she comes across thing. I would bring snacks and eat them during inappropriate moments. Trying to talk someone down? I'm going to be eating a honeybun over here, in character, offering non-helpful advice. Loading my musket with a danish in her mouth, doing the whole "I'm late for anime school" thing. The best thing about it was that I would suffer minor penalties because she would try to have conversations this way, being all nonchalant and having the munchies or being half-drunk, and I had a high charisma, so it turned everything social into this great russian roulette. Every failure was amusing but every success became amazingly funny. Roll to intimidate while I'm snagging food, and play my successes off as people convincing themselves that I was actually so badass that I honestly wasn't afraid of them. (The fact that my gun could oneshot most level one mobs helped. Gunslingers were so rare I had to roll not to scare the town shitless whilst defending it)
Probably the best, though? Kitsune Risu was in a pony game I ran over Skype that was amazing on a lot of levels, and he basically made the session every time by working in chance to how he played. His character was a grouchy, mildly irredeemable asshole with a mildly radioative pet with some serious stockholm syndrome that was his main form of attack (HAMSTER TO THE FACE). He would just chuckle when he had to engage with an NPC, you would hear a dice roll, and you knew. You knew that if he rolled a 10 or below he was about to do something so incredibly, hilariously mean. And he would. He committed. The man always committed to the first idea he had.
So many ponies had gerbils in their faces.
That we should be writing cute mousie characters with swords?
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--Sweetie Belle
I'd say that flaw is an advantage too, at the right times! he clearly values self-control and keeping calm, and all that. that's what makes it an interesting flaw that adds to the character, and can lead to great climaxes like that situation.
also, I love that it failed to pacify the angry mob.
that's gotta pile on the guilt even further
Roleplaying is hard. :V I prefer dungeon-crawling for phat lewts and ekspeez.
"Why don't you just play a video game then?"
Because video games tend not to let you sit around with a bunch of overweight manchild chucklefucks, stuffing your face with junk food while laughing uproariously. It's all about the experience. V:
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There's a group out there called Fimfiction Editorial that was created expressly for this purpose, but it's kinda been dead for two years. :(
This sounds hilariously terrible.
...Do go on.
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Incidentally, on-topic, I've kind of realized that my style of writing is related to the fact that I more or less learned how to write by roleplaying, which means that my actions are almost always heavily focused on what characters do. Emoting, talking, things that other people can see - these are what I tend to focus on because that's what roleplaying IS to me and that is how I roleplay.
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This actually probably explains my approach to writing, too. :B
To be honest, I always start by min-maxing, and I find that this leads to excellent role-playing opportunities all of a sudden. My magus has dervish dance so he can add his dexterity to damage rolls, clear mechanical advantage min-maxing, but then I get to explain how he takes quadiran dance class after work to impress a cute cleric of sarenrae and ended up graduating from the class just to avoid being caught in a lie once it turns out the brother of one of his superiors was in the class and overheard his boasting.
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I'm glad someone read the hashtags!
In one of our local gaming group's most memorable D&D campaigns, our party became the owner of an insane gnome's experimental airship, and since Sascha had a few unspent skill ranks to drop into Craft: Engineering, she became our de facto engineer. To commemorate our launch, I came to that session dressed for the occasion, and had her give a speech to the crew:
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Thank you for sharing!
Always great to swap gaming tales.
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Hey, if backstory based on min-maxing works for you, go wild with it. You can certainly build memorable characters that way. I remember in an old, aborted RP campaign in Seattle, I managed to build a lizardman monk who took down an owlbear singlehandedly at 1st level (though there wasn't really anything else exceptional about the character), and there's plenty of fun in gamebreaking like the peasant railgun.
Sascha (per the video above) was sort of that lizardman monk turned semi-serious; the GM had explicitly said he wanted to play a campaign in which he would hand out lots of houseruled bonuses and was encouraging us to minmax ourselves into ridiculously epic characters, and so I started with a frostblood half-orc monk and ended up turning her into a dragon over the course of the campaign (somewhere in among all the airship acquisition, and all of our low-level shenanigans with a chair that had a levitation ability and whose seat could be raised or lowered with a lever on the side ... except the wizard who made it screwed up and gave it a raise/lower range of 100 feet instead of 1 foot). Other than her, though, all of my most epic and memorable characters were built around a fundamental character flaw that I had to overcome in order to do anything useful. My RIFTS character Rikchik the earth warlock was an inveterate coward and would run the instant that something threatened to actually do damage to him. My character in our short-lived Spycraft campaign was a demoman with literally no sense of self-preservation (he got out of an ambush on one mission by literally dropping a live grenade at his feet, and jumping out a window as his captors dove for cover). My sorceror Simon in our long-running, fondly remembered D&D campaign was a cripple (which the GM and I had to houserule, since core D&D doesn't even have rules for lame legs). Even Sascha was, in some ways, defined by her flaws: I explained her 2 CHA by roleplaying her as a firm believer in radical honesty who ... didn't quite understand its proper application. It was great fun coming up with new ways to stick her foot in her mouth with every new NPC we met. (And then over time, as she accumulated occasional critical successes on reaction rolls and got sandbagged with a magical item that made NPCs fall in love with her, she ended up accumulating a small army of followers and becoming the de facto leader of the group. Later on, alas, all the dragon stuff ended up ultimately shifting her CHA into the double digits.)
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#SoTriggered, you Otherkin hater :V
But yeah, RP (and especially GMing, in which you have to RP the world, not just one person!) taught me a lot about how to write, which is why I liked the linked article so much.
3783465 Ok, that video was awesome. I could easily imagine the tail coming out the back of your coat as Sascha!
It sounds like you usually start with a flaw, and then, through a combination of clever gaming, inventive roleplaying, and a GM who rewards deep character exploration, you consistently manage to turn it into an advantage. That's a pretty impressive trick.
3783465 Wait, your character turned into a dragon? Did your monk multi-class as a dragon disciple? That was a class from 3.5 I played once, that gradually turns you into a dragon at each level, with the breath weapon and the wings and the claw attacks and such.
I'm wondering if I should talk about my adventures with the Lawful Evil factotum Odium here...
Very interesting experiment. I wanted to make a skillmonkey with a ridiculous AC and skillpoints out the wazoo, but completely non-combatant to see how things go. Especially against DMs that are reading straight from game books that only cover pure-combat campaigns -- ick.
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I did, in fact, multi into Dragon Disciple (after our characters had a run-in with some magical mutagenic toxin that was later retro-justified into a narrative basis for some of the later prestige class cheesing we did). Then, as the campaign went on and our high-level characters got increasingly broken, got the DM's permission to just shift those over into actual hit dice of Silver Dragon, using one of the splatbooks' rules for monstrous PCs.
I wasn't even close to the most ridiculous character in that campaign. Our goliath barbarian Pepino did something similar and monstered into weretiger, and then used his inherent shapeshifting power to qualify for Warshaper (which is the most broken D&D class I've ever seen, and not by a small margin), and by the time I was cloudwalking and breath-weaponing, he was immune to critical hits, had a 15' base reach, did an average of 30+ HP per hit with like 6+ attacks per round and Mighty Cleave, and regenerated something ridiculous like 10 HP per round. The only monster that the DM threw at us that he wasn't able to singlehandedly take down was a custom-designed hydra tarrasque. He organized an arena fighting tournament at one point out of curiosity and got both Sascha and Pepino to enter so we could square off against each other for first place; I was able to dance around the arena in three dimensions to avoid his lethal melee meatgrinder, but even with a hit-and-run strategy, that 15' reach killed me, because every time I hit him I'd take an AoO back and he'd heal and I'd still come out behind on the exchange.
By the end we were flying around in a starship and running errands for the gods, and the last session involved us killing a deity who was planning omnicide, taking their divine rank, and ascending. I was having a lot more fun with the side plot about the hot-and-cold romance between Sascha and the gold dragon NPC who served variously as mentor, rival, and party conscience; it got to the point where the other players would joke about "Dragons Of Our Lives" and start making in-character popcorn and eavesdropping on our comms links every time the ambiguous lovers started another cycle of chasing each other and playing hard-to-get and getting angry at each other and making up just in time to get interrupted by another existential threat to solve.
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Yes, do! Was he a diplomancer, or a MacGyver, or what?
3784745 Nice, it sounds like a really fun end-to-end campaign that started at low level and just kind of mushroomed into ever-higher levels of craziness.
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Why choose? He was both.
Let's talk about a friend of mine, Odi. Odi exists in some form of every gaming universe I roll up, because he's so incredibly versatile. In every universe, he is a character that destroys himself in arrogance and hubris, and how he handles his own self-destruction.
Odi was a factotum -- that is to say, a fuckin' nerd. A buff one though, because;
He also kept the party gold, because all he wanted was knowledge, the pursuit of knowledge, etc. Material possessions that weren't books were meaningless to him in the grand scale of things.
Started off level one with Macguevyer bullshit and a diplomancy style of play with Knowledge skills at their maximum at all times. The gameplay for Odi was that he was an aggressive, obsessive pacifist who believed that inflicting pain on others was abhorrent. He also believed that if you violated his code of ethics, you were no longer protected by them and retribution would be cruel and swift.
This, combined with the fact that our DM could only work straight from a pre-written, incredibly linear textbook, resulted in some interesting moments.
After negotiating a peace treaty between some kobolds and goblins on two opposite sides of the dungeon, Odi's party was tasked with escorting some political prisoner goblins back into their territory. A level 1 character at the time, he got a 33 on an intimidate score to tell them that they were under his protection, but they would not betray him, because there wasn't a place in the seven hells that could hide them from his wrath should they stab him in the back.
So what happens? According to the book, as soon as we entered no-man's land we get ambushed by 4 other goblin warriors, and the prisoners... dive behind them for cover screaming "KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!"
Oh. Oh dear.
Odi is not happy with this at all.
Never Outnumbered skill trick, Imperious Command feat combine to give him area-of-effect Keyser Soze powers, because I like building my characters to be able to do mechanically what they should be able to do with fluff. The four goblins are paralyzed in fear for a round, allowing our rogue to coup-de-grace one of them.
The rest surrender immediately.
Odi grabs one of the prisoners and asks the others what he had warned them. They apologize. No. No, they need to be taught a lesson. I ask the druid if he needed a new leather shield. He absolutely does, he says. I inform the DM of the bag of salt I have in my inventory, among other things.
And then Odi forces the rest to watch as he flenses that goblin alive, tans his hide over the course of the hour, and crafts it into a shield for the druid in front of the rest, bound and unable to look away.
That was the start of Odi's arc. Lawful Evil at its finest.
It's important to note, then, that he developed.
At level 4 he becomes a monk -- inventing the Sherlock Holmes martial art of Bartitsu -- and pulls aggro. Nothing can hit him on less than a natural 20. He still refuses to attack, but trip attacks and the like are fair game. At this point he starts taking blows for NPCs the other players get bored and decide to try to kill out of frustration, reading more aggressively, is informed his alignment is Evil -- something he was unaware of -- and various things that kind of flesh him out a bit.
At thist point he bluffs the party an escort into the center of a keep, because the enemies outside "Have developed a secret weapon!". He's taken into the throne room where a knife is held to his throat and he'll be coup de grace'd if he can't answer within the next five seconds what the secret weapon is. Which is horrible because I rather obviously didn't think of anything. But Odi did -- You ever write a character smarter than you, so you were kind of surprised when something happened? This was that.
"I'm a merchant in charge of a rather high-value magic item chain. The invaders outside knocked over one of my shipments, containing a box full of Rings of Blinking. They can now walk through your walls, and only half the time be in the material plane where you can hit them. I've come to sell you protective measures until we can rectify this threat -- I will be involved in the operation personally you must understand -- in the form of Rings of True Seeing. With these, your people should have a reasonable means of self defense. We'll mark them down, of course. At this point I'm practically cutting my own throat."
He then uses concealed spellcrafting checks on a wand of Light, blasted it on some masterworked rings, and that passed the "Detect Magic" test they used -- they didn't have trained spellcrafters, so all they could tell for sure was that it was magic, and my bluff score gave them reason enough to believe me.
I must add, Odi did all this with the knife still at his throat.
By level 8 he's multiclassed out into Uncanny Trickster, which gives him his Factotum levels as well as more rounded resistances and skill tricks, in trade for less B/A/B. Which he's not using anyway. His armour class is now in the mid-to-high fifties. A level 20 fighter with a +5 sword rolling a 19 would miss him. This leaves him free to goad, pull aggro, and otherwise be a huge prick in the middle of combat, using Sense Motive, Bluff and Diplomacy checks to figure out what they're most insecure about and pry into it.
He's also using spellcraft skill checks to fake and bluff casting Maximised Empowered Fireballs using some alchemical gunpowder as a prop. This is because, well, if we always prioritized enemy casters... During all this faking, he starts to actually become horribly adept at magic, and takes up Craft Wondrous Item as a feat, flooding the party with some very fun little items. I've still got animated schematics for the clockwork Scorching Ray rifles he designed somewhere...
At level 10 the bastard buggers off to become a lich.
Factotums get Arcane Dilettante, meaning they can fake magic through rote learning. But he also has a caster level, and that's enough to make him a lich at 11. He starts doing that, and messing around with time magic. His sister, a 14 year old hyper-aggressive merchant sorceress, takes over for a while, apparently joining the party after trying to figure out where her brother was and getting bored, hanging with his old squad for a bit.
It's been revealed now what's happened.
The sociopathic bastard fucked up. In his arrogance that he could do magic as well as any wizard with four decades more training, he thought he could sort out spells far out of his league if he did it ritualistically. His newly undead self gets trapped in a Groundhog-Day esque time loop. Resets every month. In the three months the party has been absent, Odi has been trapped in the same month for over a hundred years.
The previously angry, arrogant bastard was confronted with his own personal hell. He had all that time with his library, his lair... but nothing he did mattered. Everything was wiped clean after a month. This was what knowledge for the pursuit of knowledge was: Powerlessness. An ability to affect anything outside.
For the first decade or two this was probably bliss. He had time to read every book ever written without interruption. Then he ran out of things to do. What was the point of making anything or doing anything if everything meaningful would be wiped clean?
But I'd made him a monk at fourth level, hadn't I? That was more than just a cheap way to get his Intelligence score to his AC and some defensive feats -- not that Odi knew it at the time. After going insane for about two decades, he decided that was boring, and went back to his old self-teachings, everything he had learned about meditation and Buddhism. and turned to sand mandalas. Creation for the sake of creation with the knowledge that it will be unmade.
You'd be amazed what an insomniac lich with 18 skill points a level and a Lyre of Construction can do in a month if he doesn't stop playing. The Lyre has a week cooldown when you stop playing it, but the cooldown only kicks in the moment you stop. And with Odi's ridiculously high Knowledge: Architecture and Engineering score, he probably got up to inventing art deco at some point in the next thirty or forty years.
Then he got bored of that. And much like Bill Murray before him, he decided to try to improve the life of those around him instead. For two decades, Odi spent the same month using his horrifically high diplomacy scores, previously only used as a weapon or manipulation tool, to try to improve the lives of everyone around him. Resetting every time, just practicing every loop to see what helped the most.
The biggest reason I chose a month instead of the traditional day is because anyone can give someone a huge tub of ice cream for a day and call it a victory. But Odi needed to learn what long-term changes did. And these people would never change, could never change.
So when the party finally pulled him out, everything down to the third level had been wiped clean. Even his monk level had been the manifestation of wrong teachings. and he was a hundred years out of combat practice. A simple monk's belt marked its memory. In its place were thirteen Cloistered Cleric levels instead, to Boccob, the uncaring God of magic. The only deity who truly doesn't care if you worship him or not, so long as you innovate and study and learn and share your knowledge with everyone you can.
That suited Odi just fine.
But yeah. I was really proud of how he's turned out. Mechanically, I laid out a bunch of things that made sense for him at the time, but right from level one I had that entire thing planned out, should he survive. How he would cause, survive and then grow from Groundhog Daying himself after turning himself into an undead abomination.
He's also turned to writing children's books, which I've been writing for our barbarian to recite in combat.
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Wish I had something more substantial to offer in return, except for "this is glorious and you should consider dropping it into your own blog too".
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I'm writing it in short story format so it's more palatable. Stuff like Desirebro's Tale and An Enterprising Rogue and Henderson's Tale are what we all should aspire to...
... I should do a blog on those too actually.