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Storyboard: The growth of a plot tumor
Everyone has had that friend. Heck, almost everyone has been that friend at one point or another. It's the guy who just found himself in a relationship, and suddenly every single topic of conversation jerks right back to that relationship. It starts out subtle, but eventually your friend will turn everything back to the topic of his relationship, up to and including a car crash. And while said friend isn't a bad guy, you start enjoying your time with him less and less because he's down to a single droning note that's no longer interesting. The exact same thing happens in roleplaying. It's not usually about a girlfriend, although it can be. It's any aspect of a character's plot that grows until it's all-encompassing and grows into the plots of other characters as well. It's a plot tumor. It's a growth bigger than it has any right to be, and it's the sort of thing that can really drive you away from roleplaying whether or not you liked the plot in the beginning.
Storyboard: One hundred moments and done
All good things must come to an end. Roleplaying is all about creating a shared space for your character to inhabit with other characters. It's about crafting trials and challenges that can be overcome through narrative means; it's about building a set of experiences together. And all of the columns I've written up to this point have been entirely about making that work well and creating a shared environment that's fun for everyone. But it can end. One day, you may log in to find that the people you've been roleplaying alongside are no longer there -- that the friends you once had have left, the allies you once charished have moved on, and your universe has narrowed by degrees until it's just you. After all of the roleplaying you've done, it tuns out that your group of fellow roleplayers has slowly drifted away until the only person who remembers these stories is you. And it seems fitting, for the 100th column, to talk about what happens when you're left remembering a universe that never was.
Storyboard: To say nothing of cute shoes
Just as in real life, player characters in MMOs have more than one set of clothing for different situations. Sure, I don't divide my actual clothes up in usual MMO categories ("well, those are my PvP pants"), but I have things I wear around the house that I wouldn't wear out in public or when attending a funeral, for instance. But even that doesn't compare to a high-level roleplaying character, who has not only PvP gear and PvE gear and solo gear tand the like but also funeral gear and casual gear and so forth. It's all the joy of assembling a real wardrobe alongside the joy of stat comparisons. Roleplaying outfits are universally important. Even if your character is in a game without visible gear (such as City of Heroes), you probably have different outfits for different circumstances (civilian clothes, for instance). But there's an art to putting together a good roleplaying ensemble, and it's not just as simple as equipping the same equipment you wore 10 levels ago and calling it a day. You want to create a distinct impression, and that takes a little more doing. So how do you assemble a good roleplaying outfit?
Storyboard: Police state
Sometimes, column topics get away from you. When I sat down to write last week's Storyboard, I realized at the halfway mark that I had spent a lot of time not really hitting the core of the issue, and the overall article wound up being much weaker as a result. So I went back, started fresh, and instead delivered a column aimed squarely at the central question of whether or not it's important to have a flagged roleplaying server. But there is an issue that I didn't really address in that column but still remains relevant. If you're going to talk about having an RP server exist even if it's not policed, you do need to address what policing a roleplaying server actually entails. A lot of it is just plain speculative at the moment, given the overall track record of the industry, but that doesn't mean it's not worth discussing.
Storyboard: Flag a server
A couple of weeks ago, Matt Daniel, Elisabeth Cardy, and I were talking amongst ourselves about the dearth of official roleplaying servers in Guild Wars 2. Lis was contending that the primary defense from ArenaNet was the idea that the GMs wouldn't be able to properly police these servers, so as a result the, studio didn't want to designate them that way in the first place. As she put it, she'd rather see them not do the servers at all than do them in a slipshod fashion, and she believed an unpoliced roleplaying server was worse than no roleplaying server at all. This prompted me to ask whether anyone actually expected roleplaying servers to be policed, but honestly, that's a tangent to the real issue. I can convincingly argue that there are ways that the servers should be policed, but regardless of whether or not roleplayers expect this to happen, I think it's pretty absolute that not having a roleplaying server is much more slipshod than having one with inadequate support. The alternative suggests you really don't care whether your game has roleplayers or not.
Storyboard: Talk this way
One of the great problems presented to roleplayers is the challenge of presenting audio via text. We don't think about it all the time because most of the time it's easy to construct the sound of something from context. Sure, simply saying that your character sighs could mean any number of things, but contextually it's usually obvious whether it's meant as a gesture of exasperation or a sign of relaxed contentment. "Yes, I'm sure your new weapon will make a huge difference in the war" could be sarcastic or serious, but there are generally enough clues in the situation to make the difference obvious. But there's one obvious case in which that breaks down, and that's in the matter of accents. After all, people from two different regions shouldn't quite sound the same... but there's also no effective way to communicate how one voice or another sounds different. And the most common solution is essentially a matter of making your character's words borderline unreadable in the hopes that you convey a sliver of your intention.
Storyboard: Sadface
I have, on occasion, joked that all of my roleplaying characters are either looking for a tragedy or recovering from one. It's not an intentional thing, but for whatever reason, an awful lot of my characters tend to have a whole lot of pain and sorrow wrapped up in their heads. My attempts at making a joke character usually derail to the point that said character is even more depressing, like the mage I played who was supposed to be eccentric and wound up being desperately lonely due to her horrendous inability to focus on any one thing for too long. While it's very easy to go into the depressingly morbid side with a tragic character, we're not going into that this week. (Another week -- you know how I roll by now.) No, this week's problem is much simpler. If you're playing a character who's beset on all sides by misfortune, eventually you're just going to wind up with sadness-induced apathy. You're going to get tired of the fact that your character always fails and never wins and that things get worse every time he or she tries to fix problems. In short, you're going to not want to play the character because said character is just plain depressing.
Storyboard: Out of the rut
Every day it's the same thing. You wake up, you go to work, you convince your boss that you're actually working for eight hours or so, you go home, and then you log into your game of choice for some roleplaying. Except lately, that's been feeling like just as much of a routine. If your characters are supposed to be like people, it's not surprising that sometimes they'll wind up in the middle of a boring routine just like anyone else. Granted, depending on your roleplaying, that boring routine might involve several betrayals, affairs, and potential murders, but a routine is a routine. The point is that your character can get stuck in a rut. No matter how much you might like a character, it's no fun to keep running through the same basic stories again and again. You need to kick your character out of that rut, preferrably without destroying the elements you like about the character in the first place. So how do you get out of stagnant waters and start churning things up again?
Storyboard: An event with a touch of plot
In tabletop games, the GM is sometimes referred to as the player who doesn't get to play. Running a plot-heavy event in an MMORPG is fairly similar -- you're still technically there in the form of a character, but the focus is on an adventure that you're presenting for your fellow players. That means a whole lot of extra work on your part because you suddenly lack the advantage of letting the game handle most of that pesky worldbuilding work. You probably don't need to be told that this can all go bad. No, what you really want to know is how to avoid going bad. And while some of the stuff that I've posted in the past about running in-game events is still entirely applicable, there are also some unique issues that you're going to have to deal with when your event is meant to be tightly scripted. Plan it right, and the whole thing can go off without a hitch. Plan it wrong, and... well, do I need to do another column on drama already?
Storyboard: Welcome back, whoever you are
It happens. Maybe you got sidetracked with an alt and another alt wound up gathering dust. Maybe you had real-life obligations pulling you away from a certain game for a while (like, say, a job that more or less relies upon a variety of game experiences coupled with apartment hunting). Or maybe one thing led to another and you just didn't think to log in for a while. Whatever the case, you've got characters who have been involved in roleplaying for a while but just dropped off the radar. Of course, much like video game franchises, old roleplaying characters never really go away; they just go for longer period of inactivity. Unfortunately, diving back into a character you haven't played for a while prompts its own string of problems, namely the fact that from a story perspective said character apparently fell off the face of the planet for a while. So let's start small and lead your character back into the action, starting by figuring out where he or she has been for the past several weeks or months or years.
Storyboard: Not in control
One of the weird parts of roleplaying, at least for me, is the fact that I'm not really in control at all. I don't mean in the narrative sense, although that's also true. I'm talking about the simple fact that my characters have minds of their own, and that's half of the entertainment value. I see something happening, I know it's going to be bad, and I find myself thinking that the best thing my character can do is keep his or her mouth shut. And then I'm hammering away at the keyboard because even though I think otherwise, he or she has a very different opinion. Writers are familiar with the idea, of course. Characters wind up talking to you, even when you don't mean for it to happen. But it happens with roleplaying just as surely, and you wind up with a character driving in a totally different direction than you had planned, with your main-line character sitting on the side while some C-list concept takes center stage. And the funny part is that it all feels right, all the way through.
Storyboard: Over, done, finished, finito
The best stories have an ending. And if you want to tell a decent story in a roleplaying format, you're going to need some sort of an ending eventually. The problem is that most endings have a pretty strict sense of finality to them, and really ending your roleplaying kind of implies that your character is riding off into the sunset and possibly sipping martinis. (Depending on the game, they may be space martinis. Lots of things are possible.) So you want to end the story without ending your character's story on a whole. That's a good approach and one that can be handled. But it's also one that's a bit easier said than done, hence my devoting an entire column to it. So let's talk about creating a satisfying ending that manages to wrap up a story without subsequently wrapping up every aspect of your character.
Storyboard: You guys must be the party
A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about dealing with a major ongoing storyline in an MMO. For those of you who neither read the article nor can spare the time to click the link and read it now: It talked about the problems presented by having a storyline and offered a few different solutions for handling such inconsistencies. Of course, as I noted, very few of these problems apply to open-world sandbox games that have no sort of ongoing developer-run story for you to stumble around. No, those games have issues entirely their own, starting with the very nature of player-run stories. A completely player-driven story has the advantage of not having several issues that can crop up when dealing with an ongoing in-game story, but it also still has some serious problems. There are still issues that you're going to have to have answers for when you're in a game that lets you craft the world to match your whims, and unfortunately the methods for doing so aren't quite as straightforward as the methods for dealing with an in-game storyline.
Storyboard: Three guys walk into a bar
My days of playing Magic: the Gathering are... well, they're not over, exactly, but I'm certainly not in my heyday any longer. Despite this, I've made no secret of the fact that I still avidly read Mark Rosewater's Making Magic column because the stuff he says in the column is applicable to game design in general. There are a lot of ideas that I've drawn out of there over the years, and one of the ones that's stuck with me is the Timmy-Johnny-Spike split that Rosewater's quite fond of explaining at length. For those of you not interested in reading a decade's worth of columns just to understand what I'm talking about, the three names in questions are the so-called "psychographics" for Magic's audience, three psychological snapshots of why people play and enjoy the game. They're useful tools for understanding the reason certain cards resonate well with some players and not with others. And they're applicable to almost everything -- even roleplaying.
Storyboard: We are (among) the champions
The night before I started writing this column, I finally managed to clear Chapter 1 in Star Wars: The Old Republic with one of my characters. I overcame great obstacles, beat back horrible odds, and defeated a great menace to the galaxy. I was hailed as a hero by the authorities in charge, and while it had been at great cost to myself, I was now more than worthy of respect, accolades, and the gratitude of a galaxy unaware of how close it had been to almost insurmountable danger. But then I finished the quest. This problem is not unique to Star Wars: The Old Republic at all, though. By the end of my career in World of Warcraft, I had slain several unique individuals dozens of times on multiple characters, including several kills that were noted by NPCs as being once-in-a-lifetime achievements. Final Fantasy XI made me a pivotal figure in historic events that I could then jump right back into any time I had a friend doing the same quest. And let's not even get into the chronological strangeness that can erupt in Lord of the Rings Online. What's to be done when there's an ongoing story that your character is part of and not a part of?
Storyboard: They all laughed
Over the past 80-odd columns, I've covered ways to improve dramatic tension, to provide interesting character interplay, to improve out-of-character communication, and to enhance the experience of roleplaying. What I have not covered, somewhat to my surprise, is an important but often forgotten component of good roleplaying: humor. I realize that there are circles in which humor is anathema, where the mood moves between "somber" and "depressing" with nary a chuckle between, lightless pits into which no good cheer is allowed. Far be it from me to say that you're doing it wrong if you happen to be one of those people, but there's a reason why people don't want to join you in a roleplaying session. You guys are kind of depressing just to be around, and your roleplaying has all the verisimilitude of a goth kid's poetry while his parents are getting divorced. But let's not kid ourselves. Doing humor effectively anywhere is hard, and in roleplaying it's made even more difficult due to a variety of circumstances. So let's start out by examining some common pitfalls and laying some ideas down for what you can do to make your humor go over better in a game.
Storyboard: Let the gate be
Over the past two weeks, I've been essentially playing politics. That's a bit glib, sure, but if you have a better term for arguing two sides of the same issue over the course of two separate essays, I'd love to hear it. Of course, turning around and arguing the other side of my own points is something that I've been doing for years now; it's really not surprising. For those of you just catching up, we've been discussing player-generated story in games -- whether it deserves to be the only form of story and whether or not it's any good at that goal. Today, I'm going to try to wrap up this discussion forever, or at least for the purposes of this little mini-discussion. That requires a bit of re-framing, since I think that like a lot of other issues, this one isn't nearly as monochromatic as we like to pretend it is. There are virtues to both sides, and the real danger lies not in preferring one but demonizing the other.
Original Parasite Eve storyboards will blow your mind
The intro scene for Parasite Eve on PSOne didn't call for every audience member of a packed opera house to spontaneously combust on a whim -- every exploding pinkie finger was planned out by a twisted art director and put onto paper before it was recreated on-screen. Those very storyboards have now been shared with the just-as-twisted world by artist and former Squaresoft employee Marco Antonio Velasquez III. It may make us equally twisted to share them again with you, but we've never run this thing on a premise of morality, so enjoy these pencil sketches of flayed human flesh, straight from Velasquez's DeviantArt.
Storyboard: The other gatekeepers
If there's one thing that I've proven incapable of doing with tabletop gaming, it's remembering the names of NPCs. Not the ones related to this week's adventure, mind you; those I remember just fine. But throw out a big signature NPC and I suddenly find myself completely blank. It's bad enough that the only character I can think of off the top of my head is Caine from Vampire: the Masquerade, who mostly occupies a spot in my head for totally unrelated reasons. I can't help but think that if some clever GM tried to insert a major storyline character into an adventure, I'd wind up being the guy in the party who asked someone breathtakingly important if I could borrow some money. In the case of MMOs, I often have a bit more of an advantage. After all, Statesman and my character have a bit more interaction in City of Heroes than my characters in other games have with the setting-specific NPCs that I'd really like to be able to name off the top of my head. But even though I can remember who Thrall is, he suffers from the exact same problem as all the others -- as long as I'm not playing him, he's just plain not important.
Storyboard: The gatekeepers of story
There's a notion floating around the MMO mindspace, one that you've no doubt heard over and over again, especially in light of the recent heartbreaking closure of Star Wars Galaxies. It's the idea that creating a capital-S story in an MMO is by definition a flawed enterprise. According to this argument, the whole point of an MMO and the point of good roleplaying is to create a story that's unique to the players. Real memorable stories should come from players, not from developers. I could just write "no" here and be finished, but instead I've gone into full-on rant mode on this one. About a year ago, I wrote up a piece explaining that players are not individually storytellers, not even if you're roleplaying. That extends further, though -- a group of roleplayers does not suddenly become a storyteller, like a version of Devastator that's made up of literature majors. This isn't right, and it's doing a great disservice to the things that roleplaying actually does well.
