The process of writing December 13, 2007
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments.Tags: players, story, world
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A few minutes ago, I was reading an interview with Tim Kring, the creator of the TV series Heroes, and I was struck by something he said. “This is something that I’ve talked about from day one – this is an organic process and you let the show speak to you as much as you speak to it…Otherwise, you’re trying to impose a will on a living creature that doesnt seem to want to play by the rules. It wants to go where it wants to go.” He was speaking about how some of the characters from the show evolved beyond what he had originally intended they should be, most notably Jack Coleman’s Noah Bennet (Horn-Rimmed Glasses Man), who originally was meant to be a bit part and became a regular.
This definitely applies to the creation of a story-based role-playing campaign. Chorenn originally was intended to be the story of a party that finds out that one of its members was not what he seemed, and whether or not they decide to help or hinder him on his destiny. Along the way, though, partially because of (unconscious) pressure from players’ characters and partially because there needed to be backstory to make things consistent, a huge number of new elements have arisen: The elves waiting in secret for the monarchy to fall so that they can obliterate the human lands, the disillusioned fallen angel who has taken to creating a paradise on earth (in his own image, of course), and the still-unknown blood relation between two of the party members.
Things continue to evolve, too. Most recently, one of the players left the game in the middle of a situation in which his character could not actually leave (and a new character could not replace her), and this resulted in the introduction of a man from the past, released from being trapped against his will in a powerful artifact. Part of the story, then, will be devoted to his rediscovering the world and finding out what happened to his family in the intervening 600 years.
Similarly, a player’s departure early on in the game, and the explanation of what happened to him led to a better definition of how the evil king thinks and works. He became a lot less simply self-interested, greedy, and cruel, evolving into an intelligent, self-interested, greedy, and cruel monarch, which is even worse.
If a game master wants to create a real, vibrant world and an immersive story, he must work with the players to create it together, and embrace the changes, the evolutions, that happen along the way. Work with story. Don’t force it to do something simply because it was what you had intended when you first started.
The Importance of History October 8, 2007
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments, World-Building.Tags: history, Ideas
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It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’ve been busy in real life, so much so that most of the work on my campaign has been directly on it, or on organizing all the information I have about it. I have set up a personal wiki, using the Wakka Wiki engine, to record all of the information and have it available to me anywhere I can get Internet access. I chose Wakka Wiki because it allows me to deny permission to secret pages — most wiki systems do not allow that. I’d link my wiki here, except that all the interesting stuff is closed to the public, so there’s not much there.
Things have been progressing nicely in the campaign. There has been a bit of party in-fighting, when one of the members finally snapped under the pressure when he realized that his goal of a quiet life had just been demolished, but another player stepped up and pulled the party back together.
The thing I want to discuss today, however, is more about how to build a believable world. I started at first with a map of the land, an idea of what the different regions were like, and a concept of its theology (with the intention of letting the players build the actual gods, since my pantheon is so free). I made sure the regions were sufficiently different so that they would have different flavors as well as different climates and monsters, and filled in the details as I went along.
However, I discovered after a while that ideas that I had needed to fit with other ideas that I had used before, and that the things that the players enjoyed the most were those that had a story behind them. Why is this particular lord so domineering and greedy? Because he’s not actually the lord — the real lord disappeared centuries ago, leaving behind only an artifact that identifies the true lord of the town, and the current lord, actually a lord regent, is constantly afraid that some peasant will walk up, touch the artifact, and rob him of his title and power. Why does this particular humanoid race seem to appear and disappear every century or so? Because they move from place to place, and many of their places are not within the human realms.
It occurred to me that to have an interesting, consistent world, you need to also have a history. It actually does matter what happened a century ago; things that happened back then may actually affect what happens today. In my campaign, for example, the elves lost the human/elf war and went into hiding centuries ago, long forgotten by the humans. A large faction of them are waiting for the human monarchy to fall apart, so that they can burst out of hiding and sweep over the human cities, leveling them to rubble. The party doesn’t know this, and if they can salvage the monarchy and unite the nation, they might never know, but if they don’t, they will discover the consequences.
I’ve always felt that giving the players choices made the game fun. In this particular game, the players make all the choices; very little of what they do is dictated by me, the gamemaster. But I have also found that if you can make their choices actually mean something, the game becomes epic.
Motivation May 3, 2007
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments.add a comment
The world and thrust for this campaign was born from many different sources. The first and foremost was my own disappointment with the emphasis on hack’n’slash in most D&D campaigns. D&D is honestly a strategic game; most of the rules are intended to adjudicate exactly what a character can and can’t do in a situation. Role-play, while present, is very secondary. While I do love strategy and combat, I felt that most campaigns only touched on roleplay and plot and character development.
Another thing that I wanted to bring to the game was the feeling that there actually was a world out there, one that went about its business no matter what the player characters were doing. While the story should center on the player characters, I wanted the players to see that other things happen in the world that they do not influence and, in many cases, they could not even hope to influence, and yet still affect them in various ways. As a corollary to this, I also wanted the characters to have their own goals, based on their backgrounds and personalities, and for the players to want to work with the group to accomplish both the personal goals and group goals (or, fight against the group if necessary). I didn’t want characters that emerged from a vacuum to form the perfect adventuring group.
I also wanted to explore other game mechanics that I have not previously had a chance to use. For example, at some point in this campaign, there will be warfare on the scale of armies. I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to use D&D warfare rules, bring in a new system, such as Warhammer, or let the battle be decided off-camera, possibly influenced by the activities of the player characters.
The last thing I wanted to do was base the campaign on one of my favorite books, The Silver Sun, by Nancy Springer. There are a number of scenes and plot devices in that book that are very fun, though I couldn’t use them verbatim because my husband, Robert (who is one of the players), has read the book and would recognize it (or at least, I thought so, though very recently, he mentioned the book and noted that he doesn’t remember the first thing from it).
One lesser consideration was that I wanted specifically to challenge the roleplay skills of one of my players, Nathan. He is a D&D enthusiast, and is the type of person who loves roleplay and will create a less-than-optimal character in favor of creating a character that exemplifies the person’s history, skills, and personality. Unfortunately, the games he’s been in have been light roleplay, and, with my husband creating optimized battle-machine characters, Nathan’s been very overshadowed.
These have been the motivations behind the creation of the world and campaign. I’ll discuss how I addressed them in an upcoming post.
Introduction and purpose May 2, 2007
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments.add a comment
A little over a year ago, I began a Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 campaign, with five players that worked at the same company I do. Previous campaigns that I had either played in or GMed myself were pretty stock — a party of people running around, slaying monsters, rescuing damsels, discovering artifacts, and raking in phat loot — so I wanted to create a more coherent world, one where things happen that aren’t necessarily relevant to the player characters, where things might completely fall apart and the player characters are helpless, but especially one where they might actually come out of nowhere and save the day. I especially wanted the players to feel that they were actualy playing people rather than characters: people who might be adventuring right now, but have families and friends, histories, and personal goals that might conflict with what the party wants.
That was the main goal. It’s a year later now, and the world and the game has grown to be more than I had ever dreamed of when I first started. I am creating this journal to record as much of this campaign as I can — not only the world that I created, but the things that the players have done, ideas I have for future game sessions, and underlying plotlines that the players may never uncover.
The goal of this journal is not only to share this with anyone interested, but also to hopefully encourage interested people to post feedback, ideas, and suggestions for the things that I am doing. I find that bouncing ideas off my friend Bob (who wasn’t able to commit to playing in this campaign) often results in him suggesting bigger, better things, and I thought that maybe more exposure and feedback could help even more.
I heartily thank anyone and everyone who takes the time to read any of this journal, and I hope that you enjoy it enough to return.
Hiatus June 4, 2008
Posted by chorenn in Personal Comments.add a comment
A hiatus in life, not in the game…
I haven’t written anything, for a variety of reasons. First, I took a vacation from work and pretty much ignored everything other than playing computer games and getting some work done around the house. Both were extremely successful and my quality of life has increased quite a bit.
Second, I’ve realized that I’m a little burned out on D&D at the moment. I spent the last couple of weeks creating a new character for my husband’s campaign – an Ultimate Magus built off a wizard/beguiler. I’m also in another campaign which just started up in which I’m playing a druid. Not only have I never played a druid, this game is in a GM-designed world in which the druid, cleric, and wizard classes are extremely limited, so I’m spending my time trying to make a playable character out of her.
(As a side note, the campaign is very low-magic and non-epic, so the characters have low stats and at best, masterwork items. The druids and clerics have to learn spells from a spellbook like a wizard does (not that the GM allows the PCs to be clerics), so either I only memorize healing spells, or we spend what little gold we do get only on healing potions. It’s cumbersome almost to the point of deciding to leave the game.)
So, it seems that most of my time has been spent thinking about D&D, and not about D&D in this game. Unfortunately, when that happens, writing here ends up being the thing that suffers. Hopefully I’ll have more time next week to get back here in force.