Storyboard: The story of the story
Two weeks ago, I went over the bare minimums of running a long-standing story in an MMO. Specifically, I was covering the more administrative and less narrative aspects of keeping a story going, due in no small part to the fact that you can't actually plan most of a story in a consensual environment. Instead, what you plan are setpieces and isolated incidents for everyone to interact with, smaller bits of stage setting that weave together into a larger and more satisfying whole.
If you couldn't guess, though, today I'm going to focus more on the latter. For an ongoing story in a game, you need to have some structure and some motivation to keep moving, so you're going to have to know a bit about creating engaging scenes and keeping everyone engaged. This, of course, is no small task in a tabletop game, where you have complete control of surrounding events and are creating a scene to facilitate the characters of others. It gets wonderfully more complex when you're setting up a scene for your character without any control of NPCs or surrounding environments.
Have a plot skeleton
A plot, as I keep harping on, is not a good thing for roleplaying in an MMO. A plot skeleton, however, is quite useful. It doesn't dictate what's going to happen; it just puts some obvious ideas and character interplay in a format around which people can plan.
For example, let's say Tom is a soldier who desperately wants to slay Dark Lord Kumquat, while Simon is a scholar who wants access to Dark Lord Kumquat's library. Putting down in a skeleton that Tom and Simon ought to eventually head toward Kumquat's fortress isn't dictating a plot so much as drawing character goals to a logical conclusion. That also gives players room to build interactions -- Jane, for instance, might want Simon to stay away from Kumquat, which would prompt some interplay between her and Tom.
The plot skeleton should give the loosest picture of where events are possibly heading. It isn't set in stone and can change based on character reactions, but it gives a broad roadmap of events that can be used as a baseline. Running a longer story is helped by making these roadmaps available, either with one person mapping things out in broad strokes or with every player providing a loose individual picture.
Short and punchy wins the day
There's a rule of thumb in fiction writing that's known by many names, but I've always heard it as the Ham Sandwich rule. To wit: Everything you write should be written with the assumption that your reader is ravenous for a ham sandwich, and you need each sentence to be so engaging that he doesn't wander off and go eat said sandwich. It teaches several important rules, but one of the most important rules in this context is brevity.
I have seen people plan out scenes that will "only" take an hour and a half to play out in their entirety, provided everyone can teleport to the right locations and there are no major debates among characters and nobody has to go AFK for 10 minutes. (Basic statistics makes it clear that as you increase players, the odds of someone having to go AFK for an extended period approaches certainty.) And lo and behold, these events pertain to the story of precisely one character, with nothing interesting for anyone else to do aside from asking leading questions on occasion.
Amidst the multitude of sins in that particular format is the simple matter that interest is going to wane, and fast. Make scenes quick, punchy, and pertinent to immediate participants. If people have been roleplaying for an hour, it had better be because they've got tons to say and do, not because the event has reached the self-perpetuating mass of a bad party.
Personal stakes
The previous example leads directly to another point. At least half of the people involved in a given scene -- and preferrably all of them -- should have a personal stake in what's going on.
Going back to Tom, Simon, and Jane: If all three characters wind up in the fortress, all three have a personal stake in what's happening. But if Simon doesn't care about Kumquat's library, then suddenly they're just along for the ride. Even if Simon and Jane have players who care about Tom's character arc, the actual characters will spend a lot of time shuffling uncomfortably like high-school dance attendees simply because they understand this is important but don't actually have the mechanisms to interact with it.
This is where small scenes become a lot more vital. If you can only run a scene that's personally relevant to three characters, have just those three characters show up and no one else. If something is important to just your character, for the love of spit, have it happen off-camera and let others know about it in the postscript. And if you really want something to happen that's relevant to more people, you could always form some personal connections before having a big important scene that no one cares about.
On a related note, make sure that everyone with an emotional stake in the situation has something to do. Simon and Jane do have a stake in what happens at Lord Kumquat's fortress, sure, but if they're expected to stand and watch while Tom fights him, the players will get bored and start thinking about that ham sandwich again. Another rule of writing wins the day here -- in any scene, every character should want something, even if it's just a glass of water.
And if you find your character no longer wants anything in a given scene? Just leave. Politely, but leave. In the long run, that's much better than hanging around as decoration when you're no longer contributing.
I still think there's more material to be unpacked on this particular topic, but for the time being, I'm calling it here. As is always the case, I'm eager to hear what others think, either via the comments or by mail to eliot@massively.com. Next week, there's another archetype on the plate, one that bucks all of the standards set forth.
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.
