Crack Your Brain

Regarding the earlier post Bumper Cars, Sterling requests,

"You describe a number of elements functioning in the setting, a number of elements that I think most of your audience could manage, and what I would find especially helpful is a breakdown of your method.

"When you're creating a piece of your setting like Brunswick, Whitebirch, Elias, Waterrock and his brothers, and that owlbear, their motivations and plans I imagine you starting by piecing together in your head bits of film you've cut from movies.

"Please describe what your method really looks like. Where you start, your layering-up technique, and your subsequent refinement once players interact with those elements.

Okay, how do I start?

Take a place.  Any place.  We want to flesh out the space and give it a purpose for being, so that when the party arrives they will feel something emotional about it.

Every story that's been written faces this problem. The reader/viewer knows NOTHING about the characters or the setting; we have to get both of these things established, and in a way that an audience will like them and keep watching, as fast as we can.  The longer we take, the less likely the audience will go on caring.  The faster we do it, the less information we can relay, and thus the more insipid and disinteresting the characters will be.  Thus, the challenge is to squeeze huge amounts of information into seconds, by using very interesting phrasing, shots, momentum, locations, etcetera.  I talked about this in a couple of posts at the start of this year: here and here.

This problem exists just the same in D&D ... with the caveat that players will usually give a DM much more time than an audience will give a book or a film.  However, I have learned that playing by hard core exposition rules works much better than slacking, just because the players will let me.

"Bits of film" serve as shorthand.  I have thousands of films and books in a reservoir floating in my head, with effort taken on my part to understand how other writers have solved problems I want to solve.  When I was very young, and wanted to be a writer, every voice I heard on the subject screamed the same thing over and over: "If you want to be a writer, READ."  So I did.  As much as I could.  I'm still reading.  And since movies are a way of cramming visualization into knowledge as well, I watch a lot of films.  This last three weeks I watched Percy vs. Goliath, Boss Level, Land, the Courier, Nobody, Bad Times at the El Royale, the Mitchells vs. the Machines (terrible) and all of Jupiter's Legacy (meh), none of which I'd seen before.  If I add movies I've seen before, and seen again in the last two weeks, I'd add Men with Brooms, Hiding Out, Miss Sloane, Rambo II (was on netflix; hadn't seen it in 35 years), Knight and Day, Radio Rock, Bachelor Party, Counterfeit Traitor and the Secret of Santa Vittoria.  I play either movies or music when I work or play games, so I go through at least one movie a day ... usually two, sometimes four or five.  The list here is not complete.

Some will recognize a few of these movies and cringe.  Some will drop their jaws and scream "WHY!?"  Because, whatever the reader may personally feel about any of the films mentioned, they were all put together by artists, by people who cared, by people who worked very hard to solve those problems I just mentioned and because I am open to change.  I sometimes watch films I know I'm going to hate just because I won't hamstring my artistic potential by only watching films I "like."  It does help that I like a very wide assortment of films ... VERY WIDE.  Dramas, comedies, action flicks, whatever, from every decade stretching back to the 1920s.   The only film genre I watch very little is horror ... because it is so gawdawful redactive that every time I push into that bubble, I'm just watching the same half-minded shit I watched thirty years ago.  Jeebus, if you must copy someone, copy Rob Zombie.  Enough with the Wes Craven school of jump scares.

Okay, okay, that's lots of back history.  Probably not needed, except I'm trying to make the point, with "bits of film," I go to a HUGE library that far surpasses the comparatively tiny collection of fantasy and science fiction.

Which means ... hm ... when reaching to create a place or a person, I think in gestalts, not examples.  If I try to explain a key point to someone, I'll pick a film as an example.  I'll ask, have you seen Inside Moves.  And when they say "No," I'll try for Regarding Henry or Leaving Las Vegas ... because if we've both seen the film I can make the point I'm trying to make with audio-visual aids.  But when I'm creating Waterrock in my head, I'm well out of any particular film.  Waterrock is not just one character from one movie; he's an amalgam of dozens of momentary flickers of characters, most of them not even native, tempered by what native history I'd heard and hopefully understand.

Now, let's take that little piece of the story.  Waterrock wanting to kill Whitebirch for the sake of Quickotter's love is a cliche and not very meaningful.  So, in conjuring Waterrock in my mind, first and foremost, I want to avoid the obvious.  I don't want to get stupid about it, like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but there's definitely a vibe where Waterrock's got to have deeper sense than just a blind wish to kill.  There's got to be room where he can be reasoned with, by a player who tries and succeeds in coming up with a rational argument.

Still, Waterrock is in love with Quickotter.  Or thinks he is.  And he's convinced his brothers to help.  Now here, again, I've got scores of examples of stock hoods standing behind tough guys, who have as much character as a post; that is, again, a cliche I want to break.  These brothers deserve personalities of their own.  And here, as I write this, a thought pops into my head without my willing it: the two brothers represent two sides of Waterrock's motivation.  Where does that come from?  Oh, only about every literature class I took in university.  Still, not a bad idea.  I didn't invent it by any "method" ... it just popped up there, like I said.  But the "method," if I had to define it, is deciding if that's something I want to use or not; and if it something I want to use, then how?  Is it a devil and an angel standing on Waterrock's shoulders?  God no.  But one being more supportive than the other: that seems believable.  What would the supportive one say?  Well, if you were Waterrock's brother, and you supported him, then what would you say?

Look.  You've got to put yourself in the shoes of the man.  You're not saying things to support a plot.  You're not picking your words for their symbolic meaning.  You don't know what's going to happen.  You only know your relationship to your brother, and what he intends, and what you think you'd say ... damn the rest of the universe and its motions.  In the real world, when you speak, you don't think about an ongoing story, you don't try to fulfill some checklist of exposition ... you say what you feel and what you believe.  Well, do that!  Only say what you think Waterrock's brother feels.  What Waterrock's brother believes.

And what is that?

Well let's rub our hands together and think about this.

We know that everyone is different from everyone else.  True enough, the variance between some people is wider than between others, but it stands to reason that Waterrock's first brother ought to be different from his second.  They all had the same mother, so the variance doesn't need to be excessive, but it's more interesting for the players and for you if they have sufficient variance that they have their own personality.  Desirably, every person in the setting, within reason, is different from every other person, at least the persons that appear to the players.  Even the owlbear ought to be at least a little different from another owlbear, if you can dig down and find that capacity.

Difference alone isn't enough.  If you keep chalking up characters based on difference alone you'll get a box of very dull alternately coloured beetles but not much of a drama.  Look at the example from Bumper Cars.  Everyone has their own motivation.  They want different things.  That's where conflict begins.  Let me put that another way:

"Conflict" happens when someone says or does that another person hates.

So when picking motivations, look for conflicts.  Waterrock loves Quickotter.  Whitebirch loves Quickotter.  Quickotter loves Whitebirch.  Waterrock hates that.

Now, what might Waterrock say or do that his first brother actually hates?  Or dislikes?  Or is uncomfortable with?  Overall, I'm using "hate" as a word to spark the reader's imagination, but hate is really a scale, not an absolute yay or nay.  You hate when your brother does [blank] but that doesn't mean you "hate" your brother.  You fight with your mother because she says [blank] ... but it could easily be something you dislike her saying, rather than something you actually hate.  Understand?

The method I use, every time, is to A. Imagine these are real people.  B. Give them real motivations.  C. Mix 'em up.  Make the motivations conflict.

The details come from a vast store of practicing the advice to "read everything" ... or "see everything."  That applies as much to being out of the house, people watching, travelling, talking to strangers, trying new things, breaking old habits, putting your own misgivings on a shelf, etcetera.

Most of all, changing.  Always, always, always, changing.  Doing it according to what you see, what you learn, what you add to your store of knowledge and what you want to do.  If there's something you want to do now, that you're not doing, then don't lament that you "can't" do it or you "don't know how."  You don't know how because you won't change the way you look at the problem.  You don't realize the solution is staring you in the face, because you keep insisting the solution is hard to find.

Sterling,

I can't "explain" my method because most of it is stuff that pops into my head whenever I beckon for an answer.  "Hey," I say to myself.  "Why not hide something in the bed?  The bed is right there.  The party's going to see it.  Maybe, one of them will flip back the covers and search the bed ... what might I possibly put there that would add to the game?"

Well, where is the bed?  If something's in it, someone must have put it there.  Who?  Why?  What possible reason might exist for putting something into a bed?  Don't know.

Maybe I just need to think about it, until something pops up.

That's usually what I do.

Okay ... can we guess what the "subsequent refinement" is when the players get involved?  Let's go back again.  The player says something to the NPC.  Is it something the NPC hates or dislikes?  Judgement call, yes or no.  If yes, we have a conflict.  How would this NPC respond to this player, given what the player looks like, how strong the NPC is, etcetera.  We respond to things we hate all the time with fear because we judge the situation and perceive that we'd better shut up rather than challenge this scary looking dude.  Player characters are often scary looking.  They don't clean up that often, they fight so they have scars, their gear looks like it's been dragged through a burning forge and then an offal pit so, yeah, maybe not acting overtly.

But then, some NPCs look that like too.

So, we decide, does this NPC respond obsequiously?  Rudely?  Sarcastically?  Passive Aggressively?  Appealing to authority?  We've got lots of choices, tons of emotions to pick from.  And then, we listen to what the player says, and roll with the punch all over again.  We listen.  We react.  We don't make up the NPCs mind wholly, because the player might say anything.  But then, there's always a line we imagine that the player shouldn't cross.  Insult my wife?  Draw, you bastard.  Humiliate me?  Oh, oh, one day, you just wait.  Abuse the king?  Blaspheme?  There are lots of lines.  And not every response is an upfront challenge.  Remember: appeal to authority is always an option for any NPC.

The subsequent refinement is key.  The gameworld has to slosh and ripple in every imaginable way as the players paddle around inside it.  They throw a rock, we describe the waves.  They kick around as they swim, we decide if there are sharks.  And with each decision, we gauge the big picture: what would be a really good result that would shake the party out of their lethargy?  We have to always be a step ahead of the players.  We have to see what they want to do, five actions before they do it ... so that when they get around to do what's predictable, we can do something UNpredictable.  I talked about this at length in my book, How to Run.

Subsequent actions in the game comes as a result of situational awareness.  Skill at situational awareness arises from pattern recognition.  The more patterns you see (books, films, real life situations), that you make a part of your consciousness, the better the chance that you'll recognize a pattern as it unfolds FASTER than the players recognize it.  That gives you an edge over them, which enables you to handle exceedingly complex situations because you've already done much of the thinking beforehand that you need to do ... saving time and letting you think on a much higher plane (walking a higher path).  I'm not making this up.  This is how surgeons, police, firefighters, soldiers, jazz musicians and scores of other professions learn to do AMAZING things with ease.

You can do those things too.  The path is education, experience and effort.  Don't do the same things every day.  Don't read/watch the same sort of things.  Go on.  Get at it.