From Tabletop to Paperback – You’ll Love the Arc So Much You’ll Plotz
Since I am a writer and make magic with words (spell and spelling come from the same root, same with grammar and grimoire), then I am sort of a wizard. And a wizard is never late, nor is he early, he arrives precisely when he means to. And he brings his blog posts with him. Finally, with no further preamble or nonsense, here is part two of Plots and Arcs.
The Good
In most traditional, GMful tabletop roleplaying games, the stuff we described in the previous post as Plot is actually happening all the time. It's the prime motivator of most sessions. There might be a Highly Visible Antagonist, but there might just as easily be a dragon nobody has ever heard of before sitting on top of a pile of treasure you want. A lot of very traditional RPGs have moved toward a place where your character's Arc matters, but a lot of them leave that up to you and mainly give you rules on how to kill things and take their stuff.
Because of that, this is where we gamers shine. When have you ever been able to get to the Dark Priest's enclave without passing through a troll-infested, haunted swamp? Or moved your mysterious and illegal cargo without outrunning an Imperial blockade? Or when as your decker cruised up to some sweet looking information and downloaded it without cracking the ICE?
What's more, all of this informs the Final Boss Encounter. Are you hurt? Are you tired? Did you use all your spells? Did some of your party die? All of these things impact heavily on how the end of your Plot happens.
"But wait," you might be saying, "you just called that the end of our Plot. What happened to the Arcs?"
Unfortunately, in most traditional, GMful tabletop games, Arcs are something that don't happen often or only do so when they've become the Plot.
The Bad
A lot of very entertaining RPGs are very Encounter based and Combat focused. That was actually the only way to play when I was a kid (at least as far as I knew in a relatively small city in northwestern Oklahoma before there was an internet to bring all the nerds together). But still, many of us had elaborate backstories for our characters because, since we read science fiction and fantasy novels, watched cartoons, and read comics book, that's how all our favorite heroes worked. Luke's dad was the big villain, Aragorn ran from his destiny and birthright, Superman was rocketed from his dying planet, you get the idea.
Clever and enterprising gamemasters would take this information and make it part of the game. You had to find and take revenge on your father's murderer, for instance. If that was your character, you were playing at least half an Arc. If it was the rest of the group, they were just playing more plot. Oh, maybe they had roleplaying reasons to do so since you were great compatriots and adventurers together, and that's totally great! But for play purposes, for most of the group, it was more plot.
Again, smart GMs moved that spotlight and looked for ways to shine it on different PCs. But even so, for the table it was Plot and for the spotlight character, it was half an Arc. Why half? Because it was just the stuff that happened without any emotional connection. Your hero found his father's killer, fought him in honorable combat, and won. You might take his stuff or make an enemy of whoever his boss was, and some of that would make a difference in the next Plot. But how did your hero feel about that win? Is he satisfied? Did it leave him unfulfilled? Is he still consumed with anger or has he discovered new found peace?
Even if you were an amazing player who really wanted to engage the fiction -- and did so, either in your own head or writing it all down for your fellow players to enjoy -- this was rarely reflected in the mechanics. The technology just wasn't there. If it didn't make you swing your sword harder or shoot your blaster straighter, it was "Fluff."*
And that can be a disconnect when you move to writing. Modern audiences are in love with character. They want the Plot to demonstrate the character's makeup and they want it to factor into or reflect his Arc, but the Story is effectively the Arc. We'd all be bored to tears without the Plot (because remember, it's the stuff that happens and makes the story exciting), but we're unsatisfied if we don't see how this is reflected in the character's emotions or worldview.
For the flip side of this coin, I submit to you without much comment Epics. Nobody cares how Beowful feels about things. Same for Achilles and Odysseus. They may have motivations that tie into their emotions and worldview, but there is no first person naval gazing going on there because audiences of antiquity wouldn't have cared.
Fluff is Story is Arc. That stuff that couldn't (until more recently; see the footnote) be reflected on your character sheet is the stuff that will make or break the resolution of your story. Gamers are amazing at Plot, and that's going to make the story exciting. The hobby may or may not have given a gamer-turned-writer the tools to manage the Arc, and that's where you make the resolution satisfying.
The Ugly
The Ugly is, as you may recall from part one, the Highly Visible Antagonist. Since the HVA is often directly tied to the Main Character (Darth and Luke, Sauron corrupted Aragorn's line, Humperdink stole Westley's girl) and is directly opposed to him/her, gamers can have a hard time getting a handle on what is and what is not a Highly Visible Antagonist. This is especially muddied when so many henchmen or situations feel like antagonists and are highly visible (high speed chases, bombs strapped to chest, dudes in white armor shooting lasers at you).
Don't get me wrong, guys, that's three fingers at least. I struggled and wrestled with this, found myself in arguments with my coach/publisher about it where I honestly didn't understand what I was doing wrong, and finally threw up my hands and waited for divine revelation. What I got instead of that was this post.
Because reading these two posts together, you can probably see why the HVA is such a difficult concept to grasp coming from a traditional tabletop background. A Story's Highly Visible Antagonist and its effect on the hero could not be reflected mechanically in a traditional game. You could make it happen, and I did at various times get those two things to connect, but it was not easy.
It took a special kind of GM and a special kind of player to first find each other in what has been a pretty niche hobby most of my life. Then they had to combine their forces to reflect the important emotional/story aspects of the PC in a way that, at best, ignored the rules and, at worst, openly defied them. Then they had to do it in a way that either swept up the rest of the group or, at the very least, didn't annoy the hell out of them.
Once I started playing a few Story Games (again, see the footnote) and started writing fiction with more regularity, I finally started to pull this together and understand why my highly visible antagonists weren't Highly Visible Antagonists. It's because most traditional, tabletop RPGs don't have a Story Question for my HVA to yell "NO!" to. Without that, nothing rises above the level of trying to kill the hero or make his life somehow miserable.
There it is! The Good, the Bad, and the cautionary Ugly! I've had another interesting technique swim into my vision this week that I'm calling Protagonist Powers. I'll be writing about that on Thursday, but next week I'll be back with From Tabletop to Paperback as we talk about Setting.
*Some modern roleplaying games, sometimes called Story Games, do an amazing job of representing the emotional state of your character. Margaret Weiss Productions's RPG based on the TV show Smallville is a stellar example of this. PCs in Smallville don't even have traditional stats, they have Relationships and Values. Lumpley Games's Dogs in the Vineyard strikes a strong balance between this by giving PCs more traditional stats, but also skills and abilities that are tied directly into your character's identity or backstory as well as relationships, all of which impact the rules with the same weight. Check these games out specifically -- and a host of other Story Games -- if you want a little help with Arc at the table.
