Nuggets

This is a difficult post to write.  This is because it would be so easy to misunderstand my reason for writing it.  Allow me to say that if it should occur to the reader that the reason why a person chooses not to read a book; or thinks to include a given book among their favourites; or fails to understand why some book is far better than they judge it to be, that I'm saying its because some person is stupid ... let me clearly state that this is NOT what I'm saying.  People read books because they have a reason to do so.  They like specific books because of their overall experience with books, and because some particular book speaks to them.  They dislike books not only because a book is "bad," but also because a book tells a story in a way that is unappealing ... and that is often because the book is difficult to read.  Books are not enjoyable when they're a trial; but the difficulty anyone has in reading a book comes from the number of books that they've read.  It's not necessarily a fault in the book itself.

For example, War and Peace is a very long book, with a complex narrative, containing many characters, which occurs in an unfamiliar time and an unfamiliar place, and handles themes that are themselves alien to many people in the present.  For this reason, for many people who don't choose to read a lot of books, who therefore haven't spent a lot of time reading books, War and Peace is difficult to read ... and therefore, not enjoyable.  But for those who have read a lot of books, and are familiar with books of the same time period, and related to the same culture, then in fact War and Peace is rather easy to read.  The gentle reader now may compare one's capacity to enjoy War and Peace with one's capacity to hit a 92-mile-an-hour fastball.  If we've been raised to play baseball, and we like baseball, so that we want to play baseball all the time, then once we've matured into a decent player it's not so difficult to hit a fastball for us, as it would be for many other people.  Think of War and Peace like that.

To speak for myself, I was raised in a home with more than 2,000 books, a great many of which were classic fiction from the 18th and 19th centuries, along with hundreds of technical and scientific textbooks.  I was also a child when television, for me, consisted of three channels, when home computers did not exist, when children were seen and not heard, and were not given money to see movies, and their interests were not considered when the television was turned on.  Therefore I had much time to read.

Moreover, of my own accord, I chose to be a writer, to spend a lot of my time writing, to fantasise that one day I'd be a famous writer, and for this reason I had cause to be a good writer.  Therefore, I spent a lot of time reading about being a writer, and practicing being a better writer and talking about writing with friends and teachers.  It would be natural, therefore, that I would accumulate more information about writing, and read more books, with an eye towards gleaning all there was to know about those books, for no other reason than that I passionately wanted this to be my profession.

This doesn't make me smarter.  It doesn't make other people, who did not fervently pursue writing, stupid.  It does not do, however, to merely say that my experience with books is merely subjective, and therefore no better than the subjective opinion of any other person; nor is it wise to say that we simply all possess a diversity of reading experiences, and that just because I happen to think a book is good, that doesn't make the book better than what another person thinks is a good book.  To wit: I can hit a "fastball."  Many others, for whatever reason, and certainly not due to incapacity, but because they have not taken the time to educate themselves about this specific field, or even care to have done so, cannot.  Not because they're stupid ... but because they had other interests.

If you're still with me, let's consider the process of assigning a book to a classroom of 16-year-old children.  Much consideration goes into which title to choose.  The book not only has to amuse those in the class who have spent much of their childhoods reading, but also those who have done a modicum of reading, and those who have done almost no reading at all.   An appropriate title is sure to be something like To Kill a Mockingbird, though that didn't used to be a popular title in Canada.  Other examples are Animal Farm, Catcher in the Rye or Lord of the Flies.  A particularly ambitious teacher might propose 1984.  As I remember it in my past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, most chose Animal Farm in the hopes that it would encourage the student to read 1984 on their own.

If we imagine such a book being given to 30 students, it's reasonable to argue that about 10 won't finish the book, or indeed read it at all.  In these cases, these students most likely haven't any history of reading.  They didn't grow up in a house with books, they weren't read to by their parents, they didn't obtain good reading habits early and much of their background is affected by the way in which television deals with stories.  It's not that these 10 are stupid, or even that they wouldn't get something meaningful out of To Kill a Mockingbird ... it's only that they don't know how to hit that fastball, so they either try and miss, or they don't try.

Next we have a middle 10 students who read the book with various levels of discomfort.  This section represents those students who diligently read all they've been given to read since school began, and therefore have a collection of school-assigned books to their credit.  They know how to read, and they can do so if they have to, but they rarely have to.  These students then grow older and talk sometimes about the books they read in school ... and are sure to identify that lexicon as the best books should someone take a survey.  Among the thirty or forty books these people have read, Catcher in the Rye is the best book that's ever been written.  For what they know, maybe it is.

The next 6 are those people who read regularly, who are familiar with the assigned text but just haven't gotten around to reading it.  In general, these people have read more than a hundred books, though many of these fit the category of "light" reading, which we can tentatively classify, for the moment, as plot-driven novels with emotion-driven characters doing things that are either romantic, extravagant or action-packed.  I'll forego giving titles.  Well-trained in reading, this group quickly manages the assigned book and either enjoys it, or reasonably considers it not to their taste.  Because this group does read books on their own, for pleasure, they have read enough to decide which flavour of book they like.

Of the remaining 4 in our classroom, most of all have already read the assigned book.  Often, this happens because the same book was assigned at another school, or in another grade, but let's assume that because these four are avid readers, who read upwards of 40 to 100 books a year, it's more likely that they've read the book because they're older sibling did, and the book was lying around.  Prior to the class, and the discussion in class, they've made up their own minds about what the book says, or why it was written, and there's a good chance they disagree with the teacher.

It's important to note that the teacher, however, probably hates the book, and not just because they've had to teach the same book to three different classes every year for the last 15 years.  The teacher has to follow an assigned syllabus that specifies what the teacher is supposed to say about the book, regardless of what the teacher might believe.  Often, if a teacher has any opportunity to teach some other book, that they haven't been able to teach before, they'll grab it.  This is the reason why I did not study Romeo and Juliet in Grade 10, like everyone else.  Our class studied Julius Caesar.

Yes, plays are books.

Where do I fit in the classification above?  Most often, in the did not read it category.  I learned early that I could achieve either a B or A- grade on a book I hadn't read so long as I wrote my reports according to some basic rules, based on the first 5 and the last 5 pages of a book, plus a visit to the library (where I was all the time) to read someone else's opinion.  This technique served me very well right up through university, though only in my English literature classes.  In Classics, there's no way to get around reading the book.

To this day, I've never actually read Lord of the Flies, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird or Catcher in the Rye.  Yet I've had hundreds of arguments about these books and never been caught out.  This is the first time I've publicly confessed to this dearth in my education.

Please don't write to make a query in the hopes that I'll answer.  The reason I haven't read these books is because the premise, as I understand it, sounds just awful.  Really, racism is awful and the frightening freakish boy next door is harmless?  You don't say.

My point to all this, to bring the reader on board with me, is to make a point about D&D.  Obviously.  But this is a big barn, and we're still walking around it.

Enjoining some ad hoc terms that have no application outside this post, let me start with a definition for "Story," a word I'm using for convenience and not in relation to any actual definition for the term.  A "story" (don't forget, a matter of convenience, Best Beloved) is a narrative that is plot-centric, in which a series of events are related one after another.  Chronological order isn't important.  Essentially, a story is a device in which the writer relates the plot's beats in this manner: "and then ... and then ... and then ... and then."  We went here, we fought that, we went there, we talked to him, we went there, we lost the fight, we ran away, we went here, we talked to her ..." and so on.  Nearly all of the narrative is taken up with events.

When most people talk about creating a "story" for D&D, this is what they mean.  A story works well in a video game format, because even if the game has a dramatic component, all the actual beats of the story depend on a computer's "if ... then" format.  If you say this to the girl, then she'll say that.  If you go here, then this will happen.  This framework fills about 95% of all the books that have ever been written, because it's easier to write a narrative whose focus is primarily what happened.

This doesn't mean that a "story" can't be a fine read, or even elaborate in structure.  I would consider Lord of the Rings or Asimov's Foundation Series to fit into this structure.  Asimov himself would be the first to argue this, and did often in essays he wrote.

Let's move on.  Our next definition is for an "Account" — which I'll use as a shorthand for a "character-driven" narrative.  These stress interactions between characters and the motivations of the characters rather than a series of events.  Funny thing; while looking about for a satisfactory term, the example list of accounts that I was given matched exactly the list I've already made above, for books assigned in school.  Coincidence?  No, obviously not.  Nearly everyone has either read, or sat in a class for a time, in which these books figured highly.  If we make an example of books, it's best to choose titles that most everyone's heard of.

A writer relates the account's beats in this manner: "he thought, she said, he felt, she wanted, she wanted ..."  What is thought or said or felt makes up the narrative, and from this the reader is meant to identify and related to the things being thought or heard or felt.  There's obviously nothing wrong with this.  It's difficult, however, to apply an account to D&D in any meaningful way, since the game depends greatly on what the players DO and not what the players feel.  Still, it's possible to encourage the players to feel things, and much saying and thinking is certainly involved in the game.  Unfortunately, nearly every attempt to "can" a meaningful account into a D&D adventure ends up producing a terribly maudlin, hackneyed, often laughable result, such that players are moved towards sarcasm and mockery rather than real emotion.

It's at this point that I'm going to step off a ledge.  It's a pretty high ledge, and there are pointy rocks below, but this is how writing can be.  The goal is to convey an idea that's hardly appreciated in literature discussions or classes, perhaps because of it's subtlety and perhaps because so few have read enough books to glean out what it is.  Generally, most discussions of books run to the theme of a book, or it's message, or the finer points of the character's interaction, or those incidents that remain with so precious to the reader that we're compelled to return to the book, to read it again.

This post is inspired by thoughts I had last night while listening to the audiobook version of A Tale of Two Cities, which even my daughter, who eats books like Les Miserables for breakfast, considers a fastball too hard to hit.  This is something like my third time, not counting the dozen times or so I read an abridged version of the book that was in my elementary school library.

I contend that the book is firmly about redemption.  As I go through it again, I hear proof of this in every chapter.  I won't elaborate ... it would take too long.  Suffice to say that each little glimmer that I encounter seems to fill me with a rather fine bit of pleasure.

I chose to listen to the book because, for reasons difficult to explain, I finished a 47-hour sojourn through Stephen King's The Stand.  Which is, by writing standards, a comic book.  King, as is his habit, spends an inordinate amount of time repeating details about the characters and about things that have happened to the characters in an aggressive, sometimes aggravating fashion.  He cannot make the least little reference to an event, or something a character said, without taking another three sentences to remind when it was said, where it was said, and why it was said.  There are no "glimmers" in King's works.  He whacks away with a hammer at a bell and calls it music.

The shift to Dickens is jarring.  Dickens says a great deal but never anything twice.  We are meant to parse every phrase, every word.  I find that as I listen, a revelation in the text will rush out at me that applies to the whole book, but doesn't especially apply to this scene.  There are characters who are affected, but these moments of revelation are not about what the characters think or say.  They're not about what has happened, or will happen.  They're about, in this particular case, redemption.  The process itself of being lifted out of misery or confusion into a better place, even if only for a moment or two.

However, the specificity of the "Nugget" described is of no importance here.  It's the nature of the nugget itself; that at various points of the narrative, something is said that elaborates on the matter at hand in a way that causes me to stop and review the author's intent, rather than continuing to read the book.  It's as though the author has just served an exquisite cut of meat in a deeply rich sauce, and before I can move onto the next course, I have to digest what's been said first.  It's much more rewarding that merely identifying with some character undergoing a struggle that I've also undergone.  It's far more compelling that seeing people go somewhere and do surprising things.

Yet I'm quite sure, quite sure, that most people have never experienced this "nugget" business while reading a book.  Not, as I say, because they're "stupid."  But because, I think, one must read a lot of books before finding it easy to read the sort of book that does this.  War and Peace, for example, does this quite a bit.

All this serves to make this very relevant point, however.  I think that Dungeons and Dragons does this.

As events unfold, in game, as part of the narrative both in the story and account sense, there are also narrative nuggets that cause players to stop, take a step back and say, "Whoa."  This can be any number of things.  The set of coincidences that are driven by random numbers, which can get freaky at times.  The startling moment of inspiration that one player has when threading a needle through some situation that seems the party cannot get out of.  The sudden comprehension that if A is true, B must be, which somehow seems to shake the pillars of the universe.

Have you had that?  Sometimes, D&D can function like a strange, narrative Ouiji board, with multiple persons pushing the events from here to there, painting out consequences or conundrums that would cross a rabbi's eyes.

And aren't they wonderful?

I think this is an intrinsic, unspoken reason why we play ... for the reason that often during play, we think of things, or do things, that seemingly come out of nowhere, in ways that defy our normal train of feelings and sense of chronological order.  It takes a very good writer to fit these moments into a narrate ... a better writer than me.  But I do just fine when I run D&D.  Stuff like this seems to pop out everywhere.

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Inconvenience

This wasn't a thing when the game was being run thirty years ago, but nowadays you'll find yourself as a DM coming up against something call "story inconvenience."  This is described as something that happens during the campaign that fails to move the story ahead or engage the characters, largely because they are more interested in doing something specific and your choices as DM are getting in the way.

There is plenty of legitimacy for this perception.  If the DM has sufficiently whetted the players' appetites for an adventure resolution, and is now jacking the players around for no reason, in order to spin out the adventure to keep it from ending, that's a bad thing.  If the DM decides there are going to be three crevasses that need to be crossed, one after another, because three sounds more troublesome than two, that's a bad thing.  Any time players are forced to repeat actions or experiences without acknowledgement by the DM that something needs to be done to maintain momentum through the experience, there's a danger the players will feel "inconvenienced" rather than challenged.  I have seen, and often heard, of DMs who gain gratuitous pleasure from making players fight six or seven randomly generated wandering monster groups between every narrative advancement.  So yes, I get it.  A game narrative should not play like a shaggy dog story.

At the same time, it is a failing to think that an RPG should function like a constructed play, following the strict principles as laid out by Chekhov's gun.  Not every element of game play needs to be necessary.  There is no requirement that every gun needs to go off.  A play, or a film, is constructed in a bottle, where only the cast members of the story exist.  An RPG's narrative does not need to be resolved and wrapped up with a bow in 120 minutes.  Loose narrative threads in an RPG are a positive feature, not a bug, because they will allow the players to pursue other potential adventures without needing the reset button of a particular home base or quest-giver.  Situations that exist for their own sake can be fun, unexpected, terrifying or highly beneficial ~ and can insert themselves anywhere into the player's activities without being either boring or excessively time-consuming.

For no reason at all, once I interrupted a party's narrative adventure by dropping them through a gate into a completely different game world, with no connection whatsoever to the events that had been ongoing.  The players had to adapt to the new world and solve the puzzle of escaping it, while participating in two or three adventures along the way.  This went on for three months, about 12-13 sessions, before they were able to return to Earth, and then complete the tasks that had formerly concerned them.  No one was bored; no one considered the deviation unreasonable.  Shit just happens.  The game's momentum was maintained and the players enjoyed the change of pace.

But ... inconvenience arises if I ever did it again to the same players.  Once is fun.  Twice is sadism.  The cruelty does no lie in the form of the adventure, but in its repetition.

We should beware thinking that inconvenience is anything more than the identification of some DM's tactic that was simply a bad idea.  To generalize all "actions for their own sake" as inherently wrong, because they suspend the pre-determined story line, is to misunderstand the artistic foundation of RPG-design.  Some car-chases inserted into movies are bad.  Some car-chases are awesome.  The determining factor is not "all car chases in movies are bad," though some think so; but that "only good car chases should exist in films."

An inconvenience is whatever the players think is inconvenient.  This has nothing whatsoever to do with what actually happens, or how relevant it is to "story."  We should not suppose that by implementing Chekhov's gun restrictions on adventure-planning, that we will rid our games of bad moments.  Many, many people react to sitting through a Chekhov play as an "inconvenience."

Simultaneous Plotlines

The traditional background for characters in literary novels will almost always be something banal and mundane.  This is because the novel's story begins when things get interesting; it is presumed that before things got interesting, they weren't.  Thus Pip in Great Expectations does very little before helping an escaped convict, Edmond Dantes is just a good sailor in The Count of Monte Cristo before being found guilty of a crime he didn't commit, Ishmael has never done anything of note before climbing aboard the Pequod in Moby Dick and so on.

Allowing player characters to make backgrounds out of whole cloth tends to encourage the creation of interesting and complicated stories, which we don't want.  The characters should embark upon their first adventures in D&D as empty vessels, waiting to be filled with memories of their earned exploits and deeds; they should not be old hands at this adventuring notion yet, particularly in a fashion where they can simply invent their purported expertise.  The practice downplays the value added by the game and puts pressure on the DM to provide real game events equal to the delirious fantasies of the players' imagination.  This puts the DM's foot in a bucket, right off, compromising the game.

If the players have no background of note, they must focus not on themselves, but on trying to make sense of the world they have been thrust in.  This heightens their attention towards details they are given; as yet, they have no goals.  They must find them.  The DM is thus free to effect a series of opportunities, which the players may freely grab because they have nothing "going" at the time they start play.

These opportunities need not be part of a single story ~ in fact, I would argue they absolutely should not be.  The world is a complex and vast place, with millions of stories going on at any time; the campaign is not a play or a movie intended to amuse an audience in the space of two hours, but a rolling narrative that is expected to last for 20, 50 or 1000 hours.  We have all the time in the world to insert hooks that lead to multiple storylines, which can then converge, or not, as we design.  While being pursued by an absurd number of bandits, the players stumble across an ancient book that explains the disappearance of a nearby island.  While passing through a village towards the island's location, still eluding bandits, a member of the party stumbles across a thief breaking into a house.  One of the residents of the house, a beautiful girl, falls in love with a member of the party.  The next day, now in the process of getting out of town, avoiding the girl, and the thief's brother, who is angry now that the thief has been arrested, the party stumbles across two of the bandits.  They escape the town, thankfully extricating themselves, and stumble across a travelling troupe of actors.  There they stumble across the author of the book about the missing island.  He's a drunk, and to get information of out him, they must help him get sober.  In the process of doing that, the girl in love shows up.  The player gives in, makes love to her, then tries to send her back home.  She goes, unwillingly; but is then kidnapped by the brother of the thief, to force a confrontation with the party.  And so on.  There is no one "story" ~ but rather, a narrative in which one plot line naturally enfolds into another.

The involvement of the characters is therefore catch-as-catch-can.  To follow any one course, they find themselves dragged into multiple petty difficulties, any one of which may offer an unforseen opportunity or bit of knowledge as the DM is able to provide.  There's never any chance for a lull, because while some one thing might be wrapped up (a deal is made with the bandits) there is always something else that is still ongoing (the thief's brother gets away).

A new plot hook can be introduced at any time.  Events can be significant or not, just so long as they remain interesting.  They don't need to be world-shaking.

But we can talk about those, tomorrow.

The Secondary Importance of Setting

Of late, in my process of examining games, I have been seeing a lot of "worldbuilding" content directed at video gamers or story writing.  Here is a fairly typical article; here is a fairly typical video.  The goals of this content are direct: to explain that "worldbuilding" is important, that the way the "world" is conveyed matters, then to give a series of personally adored examples in which the details of said content is fondly discussed.

What this content does not do is explain how any of this is done.

"Worldbuilding" is a big, exciting word that sounds like it is something crucial to the narrative process, so important that videos describing worldbuilding spend a lot of time explaining how good exposition is made or how good characterization is accomplished or choreographical techniques as an attempt to hammer down a term that did not exist in the creator's standard lexicon ten years ago.  This is a recent amateur word that has lately developed as a cultural fad but is extraordinarily lacking in two regards.

First of all, in telling a story, I do not have to create an entire world.  This was demonstrated definitively in the mid-20th century by a series of minimalist masters such as Edward Albee, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter, who used universally understood paradigms to discuss human behaviour at its core.  There was no need to build a "world" ~ the world already existed.  The attempt was to express it and explain it.

Secondly, a perfectly good word for the concept already exists, and has for thousands of years.  The word is "setting."

For fan boys, who are astounded at the immensity of setting for various science fiction, fantasy, meta-fiction or anime, this does not seem to be a word with enough scope, enough verve, enough dimension to satisfy the awe and stunned inadequacy they feel when experiencing settings of such creativity: and as such, they have invented their own word, a word that can bear the weight of their empathy and fetish.

Sadly, their own writing falls flat when attempting to explain how this building of worlds occurs.  Take this address:

"To begin your world, simply think of a blank canvas, ready for you to paint your picture upon. I find it useful to first think of one location which interests me. What does the terrain look like? Is it a mountain, riverbank, beach, valley, forest, desert or open plains? What type of people live there? In the mountain perhaps they are a mining town filled with many burly men. Or perhaps in a forest paradise with beautiful, slender people. Now we think of the culture and building style. What type of houses do they have? Wooden? Stone? Are they made with fine craftsmanship or do they look like they have been thrown together by novices?"

 This is it.  Having started, you're on your way to a lot of other questions that do not, in any way, suggest what the answers should be if you've chosen a mountainous forest paradise with slender people living in wooden houses they've only recently constructed.  But then, that isn't much to start on.  The problem with asking a would-be storyteller to answer a lot of random questions about who rules the place, how they communicate or what do they farm, is that we either get a hodgepodge of disconnected, unbelievable traits and cultural points of interest, or we get something very much like what the creator has experienced all their life: a typical farm, a typical city, a typical military structure or a typical dystopian fantasy.  None of which has any real insight, since this is a story that is going to be driven by its setting and not by its plot or its characters.

Consider this similar quote from another source:

"The first step to writing a setting is to brainstorm and make lists of various aspects of a setting.  Take about fifteen minutes and make a list similar to the following (time, place, environment):

• late at night ... in a haunted house ... dark, damp, creepy and old.
• in the future ... at Cape Canaveral ... heading for Mars.
• in 1620, the Colonies ... stepping off the Mayflower ... cold, forested, rocky beach.
• present day ... waking up high in a tree ... flat plains covered with snow.
• evening ... deserted street in New York ... foggy, rainy and cool.
• early morning ... at home, in your bed ... the house is empty.

"After brainstorming your list, choose the ideas you want to develop and write four settings (each one must be set in a different place and time).  After you have written your first four drafts, choose the one that is your favorite, then edit and revise the draft completely. If time remains, have a friend edit the draft and have him or her make suggestions."

Awful.  But more or less the same advice that can be found in a typical youtube video.  And the language of this later example is almost forgiveable, as it comes from a book called, Adventures in Writing, Grades 6-12.  It doesn't pretend that its not giving the most simplistic advice imaginable for impressionable young minds who, for the most part, are too simple to have read real books by the time they're in Junior High School.

(This book would have sickened me in Grade 8, about the time I was reading Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons by Kurt Vonnegut and If the War Goes On... by Hermann Hesse ~ books in which the choice of writing by writers figures prominently).

Okay, let's have a look at something more relevant to the actual problem.  This is from Interactive Storytelling for Video Games, by Josiah Lebowitz and Chris Klug.  Lebowitz is a professor at the University of Hawaii and Klug might be Gerry Christopher Klug, a game designer and theatrical designer; I'm not certain about that.

"Defining features of open-ended storytelling include expansive worlds that the player is free to explore for most of the game and an extremely large number of optional quests and activities he or she can take part in.  Because of how much time and attention are spent developing the setting and optional content, the main plot is often deemphasized, with most open-ended stories having relatively short and simple main plots featuring generic player-created heroes.  Some games, such as Grand Theft Auto IV, go against this trend, offering deeper plots and well-defined heroes, though doing so sacrifices a considerable amount of the player control and freedom found in other less plot-focused games like Fable II and The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind. Which of these approaches is best is a matter that's frequently debated . . . but as a general rule, the more freedom that is given to the player, the less emphasis can be placed on creating a deep, structured, and emotional main plot, and vice versa."

I want to unpack that specifically in terms of the setting, which is clearly not as important as videos and articles would have us believe.  The real concern is player engagement and player agency; and the reader will find a similar point of view if searching for discussions of setting with relation to theater or film.  "Setting" is the backdrop in which the action takes place.  The backdrop must be believable; it must be serviceable; it must not detract from the experience and it should be addressed with care and alacrity.  But it is NOT the most important element of the story telling experience and it is not what makes a work great.

We have drifted into a mindset where, having been fed great graphics through a heightened sense of film mechanics and technology, we're prone to deluding ourselves with giving these things more substance than they actually possess.  We're also prone to convincing ourselves, with special words to describe the setting, into believing that "everything" falls under the purview of the "world" we've created for our characters ... when in fact that world isn't actually very important to the plot or the characters.

Rather than preaching examples of how an immense and awesome setting has made some movies remarkable and worthy (which they are because plot and character were given the attention they deserved), we ought to consider how an immense and awesome setting has absolutely failed to support an appallingly bad plot or character arc.  Jupiter Ascending comes to mind, as does John Carter, the 2011 Conan the Barbarian abortion, Warcraft, Tomorrowland, 47 Ronin and the greatly disappointing and forgettable 9, which created a multi-layered setting of magnificent proportions, only to face-plant spectacularly as the characterization turned out to be wholly uninspiring.

The world you make for your RPG game, your video game or your novel/play should be good, yes; but the time you spend on it will greatly undermine the time you ought to be spending on your characters, their motivation and the goals they are seeking.  A setting won't save you if those things aren't in place . . . which is part of the reason why so many DMs can sustain themselves in long-running campaigns that are built on setting design that is absolutely shit of the first order.

Depth of Story

Of late, I keep encountering this meme that writers seem to like, that most soldiers in the various wars of the last century intentionally fired their weapons over the heads of the enemy, because they did not wish to kill their fellow man.

This is usually based upon a statistical argument, one that says a truly impressive number of bullets were fired without causing injuries; and this is in turn supported by anecdotal evidence of soldiers who have said that they refused to fire at an enemy.  All in all, it makes a nice argument for the humanity of humans, that even in war they'd rather not kill.

I don't know how this explains events in human history where soldiers have plainly proven their willingness to kill perfectly innocent civilians.  Custer's men certainly did not hesitate to massacre women and children at the Cheyenne camp on the Washita River in 1868.  Where was the humanity of humans when British Colonel Dyer's troops killed 379 unarmed men, women and children at Amritsar on April 13, 1919, wounding 1,200 others.  Dyer reported that his men fired 1,650 rounds.  Plainly his men did not fire over the heads of the crowd.  And when U.S. troops murdered, tortured and assaulted more than 347 unarmed South Vietnamese citizens at My Lai, I'm fairly certain that shots were not fired over the heads of the "enemy" by soldiers who were secretly unwilling to fight.

These are difficult memories to bring up.  Most would rather they were never recalled - and if recalled, only to be sure we promise never to do that again.  I don't bring up these events to indict the participants; history has already tried them and found them guilty.  But I wish to encourage the reader NOT to engage in false hopes that soldiers with guns are secretly not willing to kill.  That is a wishful thought, encouraged by those who need the crutch of wishful thinking to conceal the actual bloody carnage that results from there being weapons present.

I just finished watching the film Ghandi.  I consider the movie to be a masterpiece.  Most others, I find, consider the movie to be long, dull, somewhat preachy and in some instances, unforgivable in its inaccuracy.  Yet as I watch it, I am moved by moments such as the depicted massacre I've just spoken about and by the various other scenes of self-sacrifice, belief, virtue and endurance the movie depicts.  I believe that most find the movie difficult to watch because it demands something more of the viewer than most films.  It does not appease the viewer.  It does not say, "Here are some people just like you, so you can feel valuable as you watch and pretend you're as good as they are."

That's not possible with this film.  None of us are Ghandi.  Very few of us would be willing to endure the sacrifices that Ghandi's compatriots were willing to endure, much less what Ghandi took upon himself. There is nothing in the film that hides this.  The film says, "You don't rate.  If you're not measuring up to this, nothing you have done in your life has any value."

We don't make films like this.  Moreover, we don't encourage others to make films like this, not any more.  Youtube is filled with channels created by would-be filmmakers who have chosen to dissect the works of other people and say what makes them great.  But though there are many of this sort of film interpreter around, there are very few films that these interpreters seem to like.  The list is a very short one.  They all like Kurosawa and Edgar Wright.  And of course Martin Scorsese.  Most gush over Tarentino, ascribing all sorts of genius to the man that simply isn't there on the screen.  It is the same films, the same arguments about editing, the same repeated complaints about shot-reverse-shot, the same painstaking descriptions of composition and detail, soundtracks and the art of silence.

But what the filmmakers do not talk about is story.  They discuss story in passing, they talk about the importance of characters that the audience can identify with, but they don't talk about the nature of story and the cold brutality of stories that don't fit with the comfort level of an audience that wants to be wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket rather than face the harsh reality of the every day world and be changed by it.

The story that filmmakers want to tell now are stories about how soldiers shot over the heads of the enemy and not at the enemy.  Because that's what you and I would do, right?  We wouldn't intentionally kill others, right?  And if we did, we would feel bad about it.  We wouldn't enjoy it.  Because we're not made that way.

And if there is a mountain of evidence that argues that we are made exactly that way, because a billion others just like us have killed and enjoyed it, because the soldiers at My Lai were laughing as the children died, not because they were horrible but because they were just like us, because they were living in an insane world that did not include the possibility of any reaction except the kind an insane person would have - well, if that evidence is there, we ought to just ignore it.  We ought to pretend it isn't like that.  That the chemical weapons recently used in Syria aren't used all the time, by every side, because that would be more horrifying than a few children killed in a single attack.  It would be more horrifying because it would mean that children and others are actually being killed all the time.

But not in our movie.  Not in our story.  Not here.  Not on this earth that we think we know.  Because what really matters is how long the camera lingers on the face of the man who has just discovered his wife is cheating on him.  This is the universe we understand.  Small.  Bite-size.  A catharsis we can bear up against.  Nothing that is going to spoil our dinner.

And I wouldn't mind, because I'm just like every other person in the theater.  I was raised in this soft, silly environment too.  I ate a good, fat dinner too.  But I wish the filmmakers would try for something more than just feeding us emotion.  There's not much story in just emotion.  It doesn't measure up to what I would call filling.  Kurosawa and Scorsese are fair camera-pointers, but on the whole it is just cotton candy.  Not belly-filling.  Not mind-expanding.  Just candy.

And candy, you know, is for kids.