Lessons From The Dice Bag – Relationships and the Weird

I've mentioned in previous posts that I lurve tabletop roleplaying games. I tend to wind up being the gamemaster rather than a regular player. For those not in the know, the gamemaster plays the world, everyone in the world, arbitrates rules, maintains the social contract, herds the cats that are scheduling three or four hours of time for a group of 3-5 adults, and generally tries to make everything entertaining.

That's a lot of work! But it often leads to insights into writing fiction without the collaboration of my players. This happened enough that I decided to create a new feature where I share these Lessons From The Dice Bag. Here's my first example, a lesson I learned recently from Smallville.

Smallville

Let's get two things out of the way right quick. They are important for any discussion of the Smallville RPG. First, that show was godawful. That word means so awful even God, who pronounced all the Cosmos to be good, looked at it and was like, "No...just no."

Second, the roleplaying game is BRILLIANT.

Okay, with that established, we can move on. You may have noticed, I like my stories to have an element of weirdness. Magic, superpowers, aliens, monsters, Destiny, nosy reporters, whatever. Smallville the show had all these things (and yet it was still terrible...the mind wobbles). Smallville the game gives you all the tools to have those things.

But, and this is key, weird stuff didn't drive the conflict of the show, relationships did. Who couldn't tell the truth to who else because they were secretly an alien? Who secretly loved who? Who was a costumed vigilante in their spare time? Who was secretly spying on her friends "for their own good?" And, above all, how did this make everyone FEEL?

With all that going on, you might think the weird stuff was just set dressing for the relationships. But here's the lesson I learned from the game: In relationship-driven drama, the action and weird stuff isn't set dressing so much as it's a magnifying glass thrown on the relationship drama.

You want to do a Very Special Episode about eating disorders? Then a fat girl eats nothing but vegetables that have grown in Kryptonite soil until she first gets thin and then has to eat other people for their fat.

You want to see how a character would react to another character's declaration of love and adoration? Have a shapeshifter show up and make the declaration.

You want your whiny-ass main character to see that maybe having superpowers is actually really awesome and that saving people is a pretty great way to spend your time even if you don't get to play football in the meantime? Have a freak lightning storm steal his powers and give them to some less responsible kid.

Weird stuff is a magnifying glass that makes the relationship problems bigger (sorta like Christmas is for newlyweds). No! Wait! It's more like an exotic spice added to a dish. The spice makes the dish more interesting than it was on its own and makes the interplay of flavors already there more pronounced and interesting.

I don't do a lot of relationship-driven drama, but I now feel utterly prepared to do one. It will have weird things going on, but they won't just be floating around in the background being weird. Neither will they become the whole point and take over the story. Instead, they will be used as the spice, as the magnifying glass that focuses heat on an already volatile situation.

Come back next time and I'll tell you a VERY important lesson I learned from an oddball game called Dogs in the Vineyard.