Storyboard: Swapping tales

A few weeks back, I took the opportunity to explain why roleplaying is most definitely not storytelling. So this week, I'm going to directly undermine every single part of that column and talk about running a steady story via roleplaying. If you haven't noticed by this point, I'm a big fan of subverting expectations.

My usual impish sense of humor aside, the two exist rather comfortably alongside one another. A long-running storyline in-game doesn't require you to have arcs and movements and motivations planned out -- rather, it's the natural outgrowth of character arcs and interactions from months or years of play. You lose much in the way of narrative consistency or overall theme, but you gain a sprawling organic network of developing plotlines.

So keeping a long-term story running is more a matter of letting time build on an existing base. But getting that existing base functioning and keeping it on an even keel isn't always a simple task, and that's what we're going to examine. There are a lot of ways to keep a story going in the game, but the better the foundation, the better it'll be.

Have a core

Whether or not you liked LOST, you can't argue that the show didn't have a truly massive cast. And with a few exceptions, the audience was generally willing to accept this huge list of characters without protest. Simply looking at the cast page raises questions about how anyone without bizarre anal-retentive tendencies could possibly follow all of the characters at all times.

The answer, of course, is that no one did. We followed about a dozen main characters as they interacted with a large number of less important characters. Sometimes those main characters were phased out and replaced with other characters, of course, but because we still had a core of constant fixtures, it was easier to follow all of the shifting loyalties and plotlines and the unending question of whether or not Ben was evil this week.

Keeping a core group of characters will help ground a long-running story without much difficulty. Keeping a core group of players can be even more valuable, as characters might get boring while players still have stories to tell with new incarnations. Even if it's just you and one other player interested in keeping a story alive for the long haul, that provides a center for other players to focus on.

Leave it open

Continuing the LOST analogy: Remember that several of the show's most memorable characters didn't show up until the show had already been running for some time. Some of the earliest cast members bowed out fairly early, including at least one important person who left and came back further on down the line. None of that would have been possible if the core group of characters had been a fixture without room for expansion.

So let's say that you and Player X are both in the game for the long haul. Don't discount someone new from becoming an important part of ongoing stories. If other players want to get involved in the ongoing developments, welcome them. Let the story grow on its own terms, and let other people become more and more central to the web of ongoing drama. (An active story is usually replete with in-character drama, after all -- that's part of the point.)

This also ties into the aforementioned column about storytelling. Letting someone come in after the equivalent of five hundred pages and suddenly become important is bad form, but that's for stories with a known beginning and end. You have neither.

Learn to weave

I talk a lot about weaving character stories together, but I'm a bit short on actual examples, partly because it's an organic process. That being said, organic processes are exactly what you're striving to create here, so let's look at an example. You've been steadily telling stories in City of Heroes with a reasonable core of people, your characters have fairly well-developed backstories, and in comes The Amazing New Player with a backstory that on first glance has nothing to do with anyone currently involved in the story.

Here's where weaving comes into play. Let's say The Amazing New Player, or TANP to be brief, has a backstory involving some sort of magical fallout from a years-old experiment. If you're lucky, another character is the product of a magical experiment or has tampered in mysticism way back when, connecting the two characters instantly. But it could just as well be handled more obliquely -- character B may decide that TANP's backstory is worth investigating, which leads to antagonist X, who was connected with character Q...

That is weaving, in the broadest strokes. It's the art of looking at the macro-story and figuring out how everything can lock together -- it's not a forced series of interactions but a natural outgrowth of deliberate vagueness. In a pen-and-paper game, you leave hooks for the GM to drag your character around. In an MMO, you leave hooks to latch on to other players.

Keep the exits open

No character is eternally fun to play. Sometimes classes or abilities change, sometimes priorities change, and sometimes you saw the coolest movie over the weekend and want to make a thinly veiled copy of the main character. It happens. The best thing you can possibly do for the health of a longstanding story is to let this sort of thing happen, to let character arcs finish, and to have the character in question quietly retire to a house in the hills or something.

The alternative is what's been plaguing the superhero comic industry for years now. Assuming that Peter Parker is somewhere in his late 20s in comic-book time, he's now been essentially refusing to emotionally progress from the death of his uncle more than a decade ago, because actual character development would pretty much end the series. So the writers have to resort to increasingly ridiculous measures to keep things interesting, and then you wind up in a storyline in which the devil puts everything back to how it was eight years ago for no real reason.

I am not making this up.

A cohesive storyline is helped when characters are allowed to step off the stage and leave the game behind when needed. It might seem to weaken the core, but it's better to let that happen than to try to force everyone to play characters with no reason to keep adventuring. Prune some branches, and the tree stays healthy.

Next week, we're going to dip back into archetypes for one of the last ones I expect to cover, a man on the road because there's nowhere else to be. The week after that, I'm coming back to storylines for some more administrative advice, at least until something shiny catches my eye. As always, comments are welcome in the comment field or at eliot@massively.com.

Every Friday, Eliot Lefebvre fills a column up with excellent advice on investing money, writing award-winning novels, and being elected to public office. Then he removes all of that, and you're left with Storyboard, which focuses on roleplaying in MMOs. It won't help you get elected, but it will help you pretend you did.