A New Year, A New Topic

I was recently asked if I was going to continue writing on this blog. “Of course,” I said. “Why wouldn't I?”

“Oh,” replied my sister, “because you haven't updated in a long time. I was wondering if you'd just abandoned it.”

“But I'm not writing anything,” I said, “except maybe adventures for our roleplaying games.”

“Why don't you just write about those?” she asked. It was a good question. Why don't I?

It's not like my content would change much. Devout readers will remember that I like writing about sci-fi and fantasy. It's not a surprise to hear that all of my gaming sessions are based in similar universes (that is, either fantasy or zombie mayhem, which is kinda sci-fi-ish). I've written two (crappy) novels that were set in a comfortable place between the two genres, but I hesitate to call it Science-Fantasy because another guy has basically defined that genre as something else altogether.

This is more my speed; bizarre.

But where should I start with a blog about roleplaying? There are already several blogs devoted to the mechanics of RPGs, and other still devoted to nothing but adventure creation. I don't really want a blow-by-blow account of a night's events, as I typically find those uninteresting. Because this blog is supposed to be my way of helping random strangers overcome writing hurdles, I think it'd be best if I covered the things I do from the perspective of an aspiring writer. Hopefully this will broaden the appeal of such a blog, ensuring that it can be read by people who might not care much about this kind of entertainment, but also by those who do.

Topic 1: What the eff is a roleplaying game?

Around December of 2010 I was regularly meeting with some friends from math. You can read the account for yourself in more detail. Long story short, I wound up trying to create and run a system of my design (read: poorly conceived) and play a rudimentary adventure with my friends. Well, most of those math friends only lasted as long as the class itself, so at the end of the semester I found myself writing stories for some new players, most of whom were directly related to me.

A few months and one systems change later, I found myself slightly more experienced with this kind of game. I had played board games in the past but I had never been a huge fan (note: this opinion has changed significantly since July 2011, but that's a topic for another blog).

To say that a roleplaying game is like a board game is to do them both injustice. Board games have very clear-cut rules and goals, and typically one player wins. They're made to appeal to a fairly broad audience; they're play-tested rigorously before production, which itself can be expensive. Roleplaying games are typically based around a system of rules, which can vary wildly depending on preference. They're written by one or more people, they're also play-tested, but these games are mostly distributed as a book of rules. There are no boards to print, no cards to make, no wooden chips or bits to include in a box. Some people are baffled by RPGs for this reason; if a board game comes in a box, then how can a roleplaying game come in a book?

Almost every game here is terrible.

So what exactly is a "system?"

Similar to how there are many different makes and models of automobile in the world, there are numerous roleplaying game systems. If I drive a Chevrolet and you drive a Toyota, we're both driving places but we're getting there with a different style. The feel of the cars might be different; the shape of the seats and the layout of the air conditioning controls might vary, but ultimately we're both driving cars. 

To continue the analogy, imagine that while you're driving your Toyota, I'm actually driving a completely different kind of vehicle. For instance, a train or airplane. Hopefully now you can start to understand the difference between the Dungeons and Dragons system and something more obscure. For instance, Savage Worlds .

The reason the game comes in a book instead of a box is because most of the game is about imagination. But how is that any fun? Some people think the idea of playing with their imagination is childish and stupid. Perhaps it is, but only as long as they're imagining childish and stupid things. The word imagination (like many other words) has suffered from Disneyfication; when people hear the word "imagination" they hear it in either a mysterious Sleeping Beauty Narrator kind of voice, or Ms. Frizzle shouting "use your imagination, kids!"

Ugh.

The first thing a you need to realize is that imagination can be a very dark and powerful thing. If you've ever read a book then you were subject to some degree of imagination both on the part of the author and from your own mind. Whether your were reading the driest and most boring narration of 15th century European history or the most exciting moments of the Lord of the Rings. Imagination is a part of your life whether you know it or not: If someone asks you what you're thinking of having for dinner, you'll probably look forward into the future with your imagination to see what you might eat. "What sounds good?" really means "what do you imagine yourself eating tonight?"

I googled "imagination"

Imagination isn't complete fabrication, either. When you're thinking, you're really pulling on every experience, conversation and memory in your life, usually with the most recent stuff floating to the surface.

With this in mind, I present you with the most simple explanation of why the heck anyone would waste their time playing a game like this. Essentially the game is one long string of hypothetical scenarios. If I said to you, "imagine that right now, while you're sitting in front of your computer, you look up and see a strange person standing in your doorway. The person is holding a knife and looks murderous.

What would you do?"

I'm not even sure they're playing a game. Looks like a really
terrible family reunion in the heart of the 90's.

Of course not every scenario is so dire, but these kind of scenarios are used frequently, even in things like employee training. This is nothing new to most people. So why is there such a jump in perception when I call something a hypothetical scenario versus when I call something a roleplaying game? A negative stigma brought on by horror stories of kids who killed themselves after playing D&D? The fact that the players of these kinds of games are typically really dorky? 

The fact is that tabletop RPGs are still fairly unpopular in the eyes of the mainstream, played only by an obscure underground of people. It's not all number crunching and funny voices; it's one writer creating a space for players to answer questions to hypothetical scenarios. It's this writing aspect that interests me the most.

It Stands For Death & Dismemberment

Now, I've written a few stories in my time. A few of them even have endings. A few of those actually have decent endings. Something I've never written, however, is a story for a game.

I've always been curious about Dungeons and Dragons, but I've always been turned off by the amount of stat comparisons, difficulty checks, dice rolls and general other nonsense that has to happen in order to have fun. I'm much more interested in the narrative part of the game; it's a video game where almost anything can happen! It's much more of a sandbox than regular games, because you're playing with someone's interpretation of the game rules, not with a computer whose rules are set in stone.

Because of this interest, and because of some new friends who are alright with the idea, I endeavored to create something that I call Dungeons and Dragons Ultra Light, loosely using the naming conventions of fonts, whose weights are measured in degrees from Bold to Ultra Light. That's right, now I'm at least two kinds of geek.

Like the kind of guy who makes a steampunk 20-sided die.

Essentially my game (playfully referred to as D&D Ultra) is the poor man's version of the regular game: There are no game boards, stat sheets, miniatures, and there's only one type of die. The ol' 20-sided, or d20 as it's known to players.

I sketched out some basic rules that made the game play more like an old Lucas Arts adventure game than D&D. It made me realize that the only thing that sets my D&D Ultra apart from, say, Monkey Island or Full Throttle (apart from their games having significantly better writing) is the random dice rolls. In Full Throttle, if you want to open a locked door, you'd click “open” and he'd say, “I need a key for that.” In my game, if you want to open a locked door, I might have you roll the die to pick the lock or use a spell to open it. This is actually what I wanted, because my interest with D&D has always been more with the social interaction than the combat. The dice rolls help keep things interesting.

Rolling dice in this game would only slow down the awesome.

Here's where we get to the portion of the blog that actually talks about writing. When I set out to make a game for my group to play, the first thing I did was search around for a usable pre-made campaign that I could use. Unfortunately the ones I found used a format I wasn't familiar with, and the adventures were far too in depth for some of the people in my group. Although I knew nothing about D&D, let alone writing a campaign, I decided to dive in headfirst and write my own anyway. During one sleepless night, I wrote out the first four areas of the campaign in my head. The next day I sat down and committed my ideas to paper (well, to a word processor) and added enough extra stuff to finish the story. It's very simple, really. As an actual story it wouldn't hold up at all. Frankly I just wanted to make a few interesting areas for my friends to run around in.

Once we actually played it, I learned what I did right and wrong. I previously knew I couldn't anticipate every action the group wanted to take. I naively assumed the group would loosely follow the path I gave them. I had a few interactions and descriptions on paper that I could read off, but 90% of the time I was making things up on the fly, which was immensely fun, but it would have been nice to have something to reference.

For instance, in the first area you have a few people you can talk to: The bartender, the barmaid, an old soldier and a really drunk guy. (It already sounds a little like Monkey Island, huh?) You can talk to all of them, but I had only written responses to one question for each character, and naturally those were the questions nobody asked. I also discovered that my group almost consistently either wanted to flirt with everyone or simply murder them. I was almost prepared; I had written in difficulty rolls for Flirting, Threatening and Bluffing. However, I didn't anticipate the murderous nature of my friends, which in itself is a little frightening.

It turns out that it takes many, many pages of text to be fully prepared for the group's choices. I found a free D&D campaign off the company's website and now I better understand what it says. If you flip to the back there are tons of little paragraphs detailing what happens when a player touches X thing or threatens X person. It's a little bit like programming a video game, except it requires no programming, just a lots writing.

It's a great writing challenge, and yet I find myself wanting to write many, many more adventures.