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Storyboard: Ten tips to avoid drama burnout, part one
Roleplaying doesn't create drama. Sure, we all hear stories about roleplaying drama, but it'd be more fair to say that MMOs create drama. There are epic arguments that erupt over who gets a piece of armor that will be obsolete in a few months, it's not really reserved to having players sitting around and talking. The difference, of course, is that the lower the stakes, the higher the drama and the more petty politics can get. It's the sort of thing where petty politics can get so bad people step away forever, because the fun of roleplaying is just not worth the irritation. Needless to say, you don't want that. If you enjoy roleplaying, you want to keep it as unspoiled as possible for as long as possible. So for this week's column, I'm going to cover the first half of ten tips that I find help ensure that you don't wind up getting knee-deep in drama that ruins the roleplaying. It won't always prevent drama from occurring, but it can help make sure it's nothing more than a mild misunderstanding.
Storyboard: Red light
When it comes to roleplaying, we've got more than our fair share of elephants in the room. Things we all know are taking place, that fall under the same aegis as the rest of the hobby, but things we don't really want to acknowledge publicly. Partly because you can have good roleplayers, people you know and play with, who have some less-savory elements lurking in the background. It's hard not to notice that a fellow roleplayer is cliquish, isolationist, and condescending... but it's very possible for a friend to be heavily into erotic roleplay (ERP) without you realizing it. And it needs to be talked about. It needs to be addressed, because there's something strange about the entire roleplaying community pretending that it doesn't exist. From a combination of factors -- squick, inappropriateness, and just plain disinterest -- we've allowed a shadow community to grow up in the space around roleplaying, with the tacit hope that if no one mentions ERP as if it were a part of roleplaying, it'll just go away and we can go back to what we were doing before. Before I go any further in this column, I'd like to note that some stuff in here might be squickworthy. It's the nature of the beast. Please tread carefully, and I apologize in advance to anyone skeeved out.
Storyboard: Type events
There are certain ideas for movies that get trotted out time and again. I'm talking about remarkably specific plots being rehashed over and over, like "spunky professionally-motivated attractive woman is single and attempts to rectify that problem through a process of mishaps." You would think that people would stop going back to the well at some point, but somehow there's a twist here or there that keeps getting made, and so you can expect to see almost the same movie coming back around on a regular basis. Roleplaying is similar in that regard, at least when it comes to events. I've seen a lot of innovative ones come around, but I've seen far more events that wind up fitting into the same basic archetype. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing -- having a consistent type gives players an easy framework to work with. But some of these events work better than others, and all of them can use a bit of polish here and there to make sure that everyone has fun in the midst of things.
Storyboard: If it walks like a duck...
If you play Warhammer Online, my column here is probably pretty much useless to you. The game's last roleplaying server has been shut down for quite some time now, and to be honest, the environment was never spectacular for roleplaying. You don't even have a "walk" toggle or the ability to sit comfortably in chairs -- minimal functions that even World of Warcraft manages to pick up. None of this is news. What might surprise some members of the non-Warhammer Online audience, though, is how much roleplaying is still going on. Oh, it's not the large and elaborate character ensembles that I tend to wax poetic about in Storyboard, but it's still roleplaying. And the fact of the matter is that there's a lot of roleplaying that has virtually nothing to do with our regular topic of discussion here, some of it small and some of it elaborate, all with the purpose of immersing the player in the game world. And while I focus on the subject that I know, it's worth noting that there are more things out there than just creating a bunch of characters and playing them off one another. Heck, sometimes it doesn't even involve creating characters per se.
Storyboard: To say nothing of Elim Garak
As usual, my promise of what would be in this column has been foiled, this time largely because my previous plan will require a bit more refinement. It happens. Last week's column also provoked some interesting discussion, some of which will fit well in a future column. But today, I'm going to go in a completely different direction and talk about something we've encountered at least once or twice before: the guest star. Guest stars are players who aren't as reliable as clockwork -- they show up every so often when real life, personal motivation, and various other circumstances align. Sometimes it's a case of the player not really wanting to show up on a regular basis, but more often it's a combination of external pressures and obligations. So when someone wants to be present more often but isn't, how do you make sure to get the most of the times when she is around? And if you're the guest star, what can you do to make your transitions in and out of presence as painless as possible?
Storyboard: Cooking up a roleplaying event, part two
Today, I'm continuing on with my discussion of roleplaying events from two weeks ago, which seems fitting given the big event that I'm undertaking at the moment. (I'm running our Choose My Adventure column for the next few weeks -- you've missed a chance to decide on the game, but you can still make me dance like a puppet in other ways.) The first time around, we discussed three big mistakes that you can make when you're planning your event, making the same basic erroneous assumption that leads you to just throwing random ingredients into a bowl and calling the resultant mass a cake. Really, just read the article; I think it came out rather well. The funny part is, most of the stuff we discussed last week comes up during the planning stages of an event. We haven't even touched upon behavior during the event itself, which is the sort of thing that really makes the whole thing sing -- or as is sometimes the case, squawk awkwardly to the tune of MacArthur Park. So now that we've got the first part out of the way, let's talk a little more about making that sweet, sweet event cake come out nice and tasty.
Storyboard: The stock
So there I was, sitting down and preparing to play through Mass Effect for the third time, except this time it was with the intent of playing a character straight through to the end of the franchise. That meant going through the list of regular roleplaying characters I had, trying to decide who made sense in context. I had already played through twice, which meant my options were a bit more limited, but I was willing to bet that I could find someone in my stable of characters worth playing. How is this relevant to roleplaying with MMOs? Simple: These are characters whom I'd played and generally created via MMOs, heroes and villains alike. And the lure of sticking to a strong character is seductive because you know whom you'll be playing and how to play the character for maximum impact. But you run a very real risk of being locked into a narrow range of character possibilities, and after a while, having stock characters built up becomes limiting rather than liberating.
Storyboard: Cooking up a roleplaying event, part one
There's a philosophy for organizing good roleplaying events that runs something like this: If you have a strong overall theme for the event and a bunch of good roleplayers, all you need to do is throw the two together and the next few hours will be fun for all. By the same token, if you have good ingredients and a good oven, you don't need to bother knowing anything about cooking -- just throw all of it together and you'll come out with a cake. Those of you who have tried this and wound up with a cake composed of corn bread, beef, teriyaki sauce, frosting, candy, graham crackers, and fresh-chopped onion will probably be having flashbacks right about now. To make all of the ingredients work together, you need a recipe, a plan -- more than just good intentions and a good group of parts. Otherwise, you're asking for trouble. It's not enough merely to have a good plan for a roleplaying event and a good group of roleplayers to take part. You need to have a plan for why characters are taking part, a way to make the group actively gel into a coherent unit instead of into just a group of people standing around. Of course, no one cooks without a recipe, the ingredients, and the necessary tools. But a lot of roleplaying events I've seen have neglected one of those three elements. So let's start off with the basics, with the things that crop up right in the planning phase that should make it clear your event is going to have some pretty major issues to overcome.
Storyboard: Motivational seekers
Every character has a reason for adventuring. Call it what you will, depending on setting, but there's always a reason you're out in the midst of danger rather than sitting back at home with a nice cup of tea, even if that reason is "home isn't an option any longer." Motivation is one of the big elements informing the entire archetype discussion series of columns -- it's all about why a given character would do one thing and not another. Of course, the game itself doesn't have any way of integrating that motivation. Much like the issues with lore, the problems of reconciling a game's stated motivation with your character's actual motivation can be pretty thorny. Especially in this day and age of quest hubs and heavy storylines, it can sometimes feel like all the efforts to draw you into the game world are pretty severely curtailing your ability to enjoy it. After all, you've envisioned a set of reasons for your character's actions already, and by all accounts she shouldn't even be talking to a questgiver -- except that said questgiver is the only way she's going to keep advancing in the game.
Storyboard: Making the most of the event
It's Tuesday night, and your guild has been hosting a roleplaying event that started back at 7 p.m. You've been here for two hours, and you can't shake the feeling that you're essentially watching every high school party ever unfold in front of you in-character. A slow and (to your opinion) half-hearted conversation is the only thing happening, and everyone else's character is just standing around waiting to have something involving happen. And in the back of your mind, you assume that everyone else must enjoy this sort of thing and that there's something wrong with you because you don't. True story? Yes. Far too often, I've seen this happen -- and in my younger days of roleplaying, I would let it happen. And since I want to start talking more about events, it strikes me that one of the first things to talk about is how to improve your enjoyment of events from an attendee's standpoint. You didn't organize what's going on, and you didn't have a theme in mind, but you're here now and you are either going to spend the rest of the evening standing and not having fun... or you're going to enjoy yourself.
Storyboard: The year of bionic chickens in review
Saying "year one" sounds so pretentious. Besides, it wasn't year one for roleplaying -- just year one for the column, with this installment serving as the capstone. And as I'm wont to do on anniversaries, I'd like to take the opportunity to look back at what worked, what didn't, and what I could be doing to make the column a bit better. Also: the header images. (I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the impromptu guessing game that's grown up around the headers' three images. I will also admit that's motivating today's image.) When I first started the column, I had a loose list of things I wanted to address over time, some of which wound up coming out early on and some of which fell off the radar altogether. Despite that, I knew that Storyboard was going to be a tricky column to write, because it covers an immensely wide field of topics. We certainly have other roleplayers on staff writing columns about roleplaying in a given game, but I wanted to make this something bigger, to talk about roleplaying in a broad sense as well as specific. That meant -- and still means -- dancing around a lot of issues, working with a lot of different play styles, and trying to keep things entertaining for the entire audience.
Storyboard: All the way live
Once again, I have managed to very effectively shoot my plans in the foot. Last week I promised that I'd be doing my year-in-review post this week, only to find on closer examination that I had missed a week in my column numbering over the past year, which means that I'm still one week shy to be doing a year in review, and while I could still write it up on the pretense of "close enough"... well, that's kind of a cop-out, right? Better to do that at the right time. This is all well and good, but it does mean that my original plans for this week's column are pretty well blown to pieces. So instead, I'm going to spotlight two live events that have been going down in two of my games of choice -- the Praetorian Invasion in City of Heroes, and the heralds of doom popping up hither and yon in Final Fantasy XIV. They're interesting to look at from the perspective of roleplaying, since both of them support and stymie roleplaying in different ways, and they're useful case studies for live events in general.
Storyboard: Time is not on your side
I don't know about the rest of you, but these days it sometimes seems like I just don't have the time to roleplay any longer. Don't get me wrong -- I love roleplaying with a passion normally reserved for romantic partners, or in rare cases, a particularly awesome game. (Or potential romantic partners within a game, but there's a time and place to talk about Merrill, and it's not here.) But by any deity you care to name, roleplaying can be a time-consuming and tedious affair. It's not such a big deal when you're in college and your primary responsibilities consist of actually attending your stupid Thursday class this week, but at this point, I'm lucky if I'm logging in by 8 p.m. and I might be up for another three hours at best. That being said? I still find the time to get a lot of roleplaying in along with playing the actual game, and it requires a delicate dance between saving time and glossing over the unnecessary. So today's column, coming right before the one-year mark, is all about finding the time to actually sit down and roleplay in a functional fashion while still getting to sleep and shower.
Storyboard: In your own words
I really should have learned by now to not promise anything for a given week's column other than the fact that it will be there, as I got halfway through the original draft of this particular new featurette before deciding that I hated it. So while I still want to delve a bit deeper into specific game lore and backstory, that bit is going to have to wait for just a little bit while I wrestle with the concept a little more thoroughly. (It'll be worth the wait.) Instead, this week I'm going to focus on an aspect of roleplaying that I've discussed before in passing but never in any real depth: finding a character's voice. That's more than just consistent characterization, although that's a part of it. Strong characters have distinct voices and behaviors, unique outlooks, and hangups, things that help an individual stand out from the crowd. It's the trick of finding that voice and having a distinct tone from other characters that makes starting a new character at once engaging and mildly horrifying.
Storyboard: All about the lore train, like it or not
In tabletop roleplaying, through all of the various supplements for a given game, there are usually overarching plots, which players could either interact with or ignore. This is the metaplot -- not the plot that necessarily concerns your game, but the plot that the designers are keeping an active hand in. Of course, if you wind up running smack-dab into the middle of the metaplot, your tabletop game has a distinct advantage over an MMO. If, for instance, the game has a story arc that involved a city's being destroyed within the metaplot, you can just ignore the metaplot or delay it slightly. Your story rules, and the metaplot just fills, in background information. This is not the case in MMOs. The game's lore is not a distant force; it's an oncoming freight train, and if you haven't gotten hit with it yet, you will. I touched on it briefly when I first talked about the strange relationship that roleplaying has to lore, but between patches and expansions, lately I know I've been feeling the pinch of the world changing around me. (Well, around my characters, at least.) So how do you adapt when a game's overarching plot derails a character arc or a group-wide story?
Storyboard: Archetype discussion -- a brief conclusion
Before I started writing up the archetypes that have made up a 10-part series (with two meta columns including this one), I only wrote out a very brief preamble in front of the Soldier column. As I said at the time, the goal was to provide character templates that work, in a broad sense -- characters that adapt easily to specifics and serve as a good jumping-off point for making something more original. It's a good way of glossing the series, made only slightly worse by the fact that it's not altogether true. From the first column, the archetypes I've been discussing have a long list of blanks for players to fill in, and that's been by design, because -- when you get right down to it, archetypes aren't characters. I touched upon this a bit when I stepped into the meta column, but now I want to be more explicit: Archetypes are at their core about motivation. They're not set to answer any questions about your character except for why he or she is out on the road, adventuring and questing and doing all sorts of unpleasant things.
Storyboard: Of straw men and specifics
I was originally going to wrap up the initial little series of archetypes this week, but I decided to hold off for a week for a couple of reasons: first, because I don't want to just be rehashing what I said two weeks back when discussing how the series actually worked; and second, because there are a lot of smaller and assorted topics that I wanted to talk about for this week's installment of the column. We're approaching the first anniversary, after all, and that means it's a good time to start thinking about the next year. There's also more to be said about the archetype from last week, and that's where I'm going to start off. It seems as if pretty much everyone got the joke about that column; it was meant as a parody of an archetype that's all too common in MMOs: the Mary Sue in roleplaying form, the person who can do no wrong even as the player breaks all sort of rules for no reason beyond ego. But there's a reason I went with this archetype instead of my first idea for an April Fools' Day article -- I think this archetype can actually work in a game, if played with care and with a gentle hand.
Storyboard: Archetype discussion -- the Strawman
We've saved the best for last in our archetype discussions, because this character is the best. Without a doubt. He is pure, unadulterated awesome distilled into walking, talking form, and you could only hope to be half as great as he is. He saves princesses, slays dragons, and wins kingdoms, even if the game doesn't feature any of the above, because he is just that great. Whatever you do, he knows about it, and whatever you think you've mastered, he's even better. Don't hate him just because he's outdoing you at everything you try. The Strawman is our last archetype out of the initial round, and he's without a doubt better than any of the other loser types that we've covered up until now. After all, they all had one crippling flaw or another, and the Strawman neatly sidesteps all of those problems. He's the man with the plan, the dude with a justified attitude, and the solution rather than cause of all the problems your group of fellow players will encounter.
Storyboard: Archetype discussion -- the recursion
There are a lot of reasons a character would head off on the road to adventure. Sometimes it's out of a sense of duty, to a nation or to morality or even just duty itself. Other times it's a quest for knowledge, or acceptance, or cold hard cash. You might not want to be there, you might be seeking one profound goal, or you might just be along for the ride while everyone screws up around you. We've talked about each of these roles in turn, as archetypes for characters to fit into. But an archetype is not a character. An archetype is the idea of a character, boiled down and stripped of everything but the skeleton. You need more to make a character that isn't one-dimensional. I've spent the better part of the past several months discussing how the various archetypes work, but now I want to talk a little more about making them work together beyond just a character overview. (We still have at least one more installment of archetypes proper, but I wanted to write this up first.) So once you have the seed, what do you do from there?
Storyboard: Another chance
Character regrets are a tricky thing. To be sure, they're a tricky thing that we've already discussed when it comes to making characters, but that's hardly the end. Then you have to bring your character out of the controlled environment of the character creator and into the madness of actual open play. And if you haven't created a regretful character... odds are you've still seen the problem. Even when you've crafted a character with a dark past and a lot of regrets without falling into maudlin traps... none of that means anything if other players don't know about it. You fall into the trap of telling people you've met not half an hour before about your character's full life history and all her mistakes, and then people get bored and quite possibly wander off. I focus a lot on character creation, but all of the best backstory in the world won't help you if you don't know how to weave it into actual play. So today I'm going to talk about how to take your character's backstory of mistakes and poor choices and bring it into actual play without sounding like you'll confess your innermost secrets to random passersby.
