The Monstrous Difficult

So, a couple of days ago, I played at coming up with a budget for Badness.  I realize I'm a couple weeks late for being interstitial, so I guess I will just be early for next year; this kind of lives between TRPGs (Tabletop Role Playing Games - aka nerdy D&D shit) and fiction. 

And that's something I need to address, because the interstices between the two are deeper and wider than I think anyone who's ever given two shits about both has ever imagined.  Part of it is the actual writing involved.  Fiction writing is fiction writing.  Game writing, be it crunch (the mechanics) or fluff (setting, situation, tree monsters) is pretty straight-forward tech writing.  And they are different skills.  Or, at least for me they are.  I am much more confident in my ability to pull off fiction - unless my brain is set on tech, at which point I fail up the joint.  Anyway, that's the easiest difference. 

In fiction, you tell a story.  In TRPGs you give a group of people you will never meet and do not know some instructions you hope they will use to tell a story, and if it has any relation to the story you had in mind, trust me, that was only coincidence. 

The second really fecking important difference is that games are interactive.  This sounds about as subtle and occult as the sun rising in the morning, but this is something that almost EVERYONE EVER ALWAYS GETS WRONG. Something that I had to ask darkpaisley  to beat into my head recently.  When you are telling a story, people want to know what you have to say.  They will take what you offer, and I won't say it's passive, because the brain is always making decisions and judgments and processing what you take in, even when it's television.  Even when it's True Blood.  But they are not making it happen, so everything they process is something you made.  In an interactive medium, people want to, you know, interact, and any time they are not personally making things happen, they are going to be bored and disengaged.

To bring this down to a more specific level, the epic fantasy fan and gamer who will gladly wade through all eleventy-bazillion pages of the Wheel of Time will NEVER read your 5 pages of setting notes, and furthermore, it's not fair to expect this epic fantasy fan to do so.  This is why the internets is clogged with games that are setting based that no one will ever want to play; this is why the term "Fantasy Heartbreaker" exists.  This is also, to bring it back around to fiction, why slush piles are full of the dreaded "D&D Fantasy" sub-genre.  This is why my two most successful games to date were summed up in their entirety by one sentence a piece: 1) This is Not!Brittain, you are Knights of the Table of Indeterminate Shape, questing for a few of the scary crystal balls from The Dark Tower and 2) It's D&D just like in your very expensive rulebooks and you live in a city where pocket dimensions that are the dungeons randomly show up and you have to deal with them.  This is why all the shit I've done for the Provinces needs to be an epic multi-volume fantasy ...epic, and not a game setting. 

On the good side, this means the moment I get a protagonist, let the multi volume fantasy epic begin.  I just need a fecking protagonist...
Anyway, while I'm here, and realizing we are not getting to the part of the story where I tell you how to spend your badness budget (fiction writers - spend it on shit that moves the story or reveals the characters.  If you feel you have points left over, who cares?  I don't, you shouldn't and neither should all but your nerdiest fans who play Who Will Win on the internet when they should be touching their genitals*), I probably should tell you about those two weird terms I brought up in the last but one paragraph:

D&D Fantasy - as from a post on a forum told to me by skaorn  and horribly misquoted: dudes with renaissance weapons and armor, worshiping Iron Age Greco-Roman polytheistic pantheons represented by Dark Ages Germanic priests with modern ethics and priorities fighting brain sucking aliens and occasionally finding lasers and giant robots - and badly misunderstood versions of each aspect, I might add.  On the literary side, its represented by an understanding of Tolkien gotten by half reading a photocopy of a ditto sheet of a Terry Brooks novel + some Sword and Sorcery filtered through the two Conan movies and occasional mentions of shit Fritz Lieber and H. P. Lovecraft wrote, plus a generational x-factor.  In uncle Gary's time, it was new-wave and Moorcock.  When I started it was Mercedes Lackey and her contemporaries.  Now, I think it's grrm  as filtered through repeat viewings of 300 while on a sugar high, but those damned kids just don't respect my telepathic horse...  I don't know how prevalent it really is in slush piles, though to look at the submissions guidelines in many magazines it must be or have been very common.  I rarely encountered it at Fantasy Magazine, but sample size = 1 slusher and maybe 700 stories over 10 months, so take this with a grain of salt.  It is fantasy that uses a particular, established tropes that don't really hang together with no understanding of whence the tropes came.  But despite this and its many other sins, it is a real literary genre with real product on real shelves (e.g. the video game I am playing [Dragon Age: Origins], which is D&D Fantasy to a level that I never thought I'd see, even playing D&D).  The funny thing about literary expressions of the genre is that it was never meant to be a literary genre, it was just a mashup of all the things the people who originally put together TRPGs in the mid 70s thought was cool at the time.

Fantasy Heartbreaker - This is the gaming flipside of D&D Fantasy.  This is a fantasy game that breaks from the tropes established in the D&D Fantasy canon.  Or, more doomed, use the tropes with distinctive and idiosyncratic spins on it.  Instead of elves and dwarves, it's selkies and night-fighters, who are really humans but they get altered with spirits.  And bards aren't minstrels or Danny Kay style court jesters, they're keepers of law and educators and... Guys, stay with me.  I haven't even gotten to explaining the cosmology**!  They are doomed for two reasons, the first being that no one runs a TRPG unless they drew the short straw and have to (at which point, you will be playing in Westeros or Ferelden, I guaranfuckingtee) or they have their own setting ideas, at which point they will be throwing out yours.  Some really well established game settings do have their adherents (we play L5R, which is fantasy Not!Japan plus a little fantasy Not!Mongolia and Not!Korea and maybe even a little Not!ThePhilippines mixed up like the world's worst Asian Fusion chef's hubris), but you don't have one, and, no, even trying straight Sword and Sorcery against D&D is like trying an MMO against World of Warcraft.  It does not matter, it is doomed to failure.  You cannot remake D&D.  You can with your gaming group, but that's as far as it ever gets.  Why this is, I am not certain, but I suppose it stems from D&D being the seminal, if not first TRPG and it's genre being fantasy.  You have more wiggle room with Urban Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction, but there you are always up against the World of Darkness, Call of Cthulhu and whatever fucking incarnation of Star Wars they have these days (which is a horribly ungamable setting, but that's a different rant for a different time). 

Yeah, we are so not spending that badness budget today.  Sorry folks.

Another really important distinction between fiction and TRPGs is something I already hinted at.  Up above, when I rashly promised to start a fantasy epic in the Provinces, I mentioned that it would require me finding a protagonist.  That's a pretty big hurdle to clear right there, but there's some swamp and bear traps around that hurdle - when you are creating material for a game, the qualities you are looking for are different than when you're gathering material together to make fiction.  For fiction, you want to include stuff that matters to your story, things that advance the story and reveal the characters.  If you like exposition, then you can go for things that add depth or verisimilitude, but I am of the school that says if the characters seem real to the reader and the story seems honest, then you're good. 

In TRPGs, your target for material is something that is gamable.  Gamable is a quality that I have difficulty defining, but I can try - gamable means that the material your creating is not in motion, but has the potential to move in many different ways.  In a story, each thing you include has to move and in order to move it has to have a direction - otherwise it sits there until, hopefully, your editor scoops it out.  Those are the darlings you're supposed to be killing - the ones that, however awesome they are, don't move the story.  In gaming, you want those.  You want potential or implied conflicts, not actual conflicts.  Player Characters make those.  You want open-ended questions and no intention of answering them (these can be good in fiction, too, but in gaming, you want as many of these as your players' attention spans can handle [so about 1-3 at any given time] which is way beyond my chops to pull off in fiction.  Yet.).  And, actually, even that is a little too much, because what you really want is something that inspires the person who is running the game to make those.  You just want to catalyze someone else's creative process.  Or provide monsters for their PCs to kill. 

Making stuff that is gamable for you is not easy.  It's a skill.  Making stuff that is gamable for others is much harder.  Especially given that whole not reading your 5 pages of setting notes (not reading your more than one sentence of setting notes to be honest.  Even "Like Star Wars meets Pirates of Dark Water" has failed, thus far, to win me much traction and I've been floating that one since 1997). 

Taking stuff that is gamable and trying to write fiction out of it is like trying to choose a breakfast cereal if the cereal aisle was the size of the Costco in Idiocracy.  It is a ticket for an indecisive writer to analysis paralysis and if you're being indecisive that is not the best sign for your story, at least not at the point where you're indecisive - or, at least, it never is for me.  To a certain extent, making a TRPG is like writing a cookbook for hungry people who do not know nor want to learn how to use kitchen appliances.  Getting them to use the toaster is a coup.
*Then again, you can play Who Will Win on the Internet while you're at work and not risk becoming a registered sex offender.***
**Yup, that is the Provinces I am mocking.
*** Usually.