From Tabletop to Paperback – Setting Setting to Awesome
On Tuesday, I explained what exactly Setting is in terms of our previously discussed Plot, Arc, and Character. This time, as in most of the second parts, I get to connect that to the stuff gamers are already good at or the stuff that entices us into bad writerly places. Let's accentuate the positive, though, and start with the good news.
Integration: Fitting It Together
Very much in passing, I mentioned Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the last post. I mentioned it because taking a "horror story" and placing it in an American high school set in sunny California let the writers refocus the lens into a metaphor that "high school is hell." They did it with overbearing parents literally taking over their kids' lives, boyfriends that became real soulless beasts once you slept with them, and even hung a lampshade on the powerlessness a lot of teenagers feel by making the entire infrastructure of a city evil.
Each season, for the most part, also had what became known as a Big Bad. There was an obvious Big Bad Monster, but there was usually a Big Bad Situation or Emotion that tied into the Monster or mirrored it in some way. That's just good writing (note that I learned that lesson from the Smallville RPG as well). Every episode had a plot, and even when they didn't directly tie into the Plot, they still advanced things the Plot needed.
And the characters, oh my, the characters. These are characters that honestly wouldn't have worked in any other setting. Cordelia the Queen Bitch, Xander the good guy stuck in the friend zone, Willow the girl struggling to break out of other people's misconceptions, Giles the wise yet flawed father figure, Snyder the evil principal, and Buffy herself, the teenage girl who feels like the weight of the world is on her shoulders.
This is great storytelling because the Plot, Characters, and Setting are entirely interdependent while also being completely separate. They could not exist without one another, yet also can't be confused with one another. A Hellmouth creates plot, but it's a setting. Giles advances plot, but he's a character. You get what I mean.
This is the kind of thing that traditional roleplaying games do well. And they've trained us to do it well. You create or purchase a detailed setting, there's all kinds of useful information in there (often in terms of rules, see below), but all that starts morphing and changing as players pick characters and the gamemaster starts putting together plots (which usually hinge on the characters).
That's the way these three should work together. Setting always gives way to (or spotlights) interesting plot which always gives way (or spotlights) interesting characters. Remember that in the modern novel, Character is king. Actually, that's not a bad thing to remember at your table if you're the gamemaster.
The Dangers of Lonely Fun
Just to get this out of the way, this section is not a cautionary tale about...self love. Stay on point, gang!
The opposite end of this spectrum is Lonely Fun. I can't recall where I first ran into this term, but it has become a favorite of mine. If you are gamers of a certain age, you might recall your gamemaster walking around with reams of notebook and graph paper covered in pencil scratchings and lovingly stuffed into a massive three ring binder. The boy created an entire world complete with thousands of years of history, cultures, fashions, dangerous places, nobles, commoners, ecosystems, and heaven knows what else. And he did it all before you sat down at the table.
That sounds like a great setting, right? Well, it was until you realized he also already had a story all set out for you and it didn't matter what your characters were or why they did what they did, they were going to play through that story no matter what. And if you tried to go off script, you were either told a flat "no" or you were summarily executed, or he grabbed you by the metaphorical nose and led you back around the plot.
This is generally called Railroading and is generally frowned on as not always very much fun. At least when the GM doesn't hide it well.
The reason this is a problem in terms of writing is, if you are the kind of GM that has done this and still does this, then you're going to have a hard time with fiction. Your setting has become more precious than your plot or your characters. The sheer volume of detail has locked you into place. You've reached the "quagmire of detail" I mentioned in part one.
And you thought that could only happen with real world settings. Well, JRR Tolkien and Robert Jordan have bad news for you.
Rules as a Manifestation of Setting
You may have noticed that Setting has a tendency to influence tone and themes. Not only that, but how you choose to engage your Setting can often adjust the nobs on things like Realism (with attendant items such as Sexism, Racism, Military Matters, Weapon Knowledge, History, et al), Seriousness, Frivolity, and a billion other areas. For the gamer turned author, it can be helpful to think of Setting in terms of rules because in tabletop RPGs, the rules often tell you what the game is really about.
You don't run an "epic adventure" with Moldvay Dungeons & Dragons. It isn't a game of heroic adventures, it's a game of exploration and resource management.
I've refrained from playing superhero games for most of my life, not in spite of my love for comics but because of it. Only recently are superhero games interested in telling comic book style stories. But something like Heroes or Alphas, stories about people with superhuman abilities who are not superheroes, would work great in most systems.
A serious, emotionally charged Post-Apocalyptic game is better served by Apocalypse World than Gamma World. A gonzo "dungeon crawl" set after the Apocalypse is better served by GW than AW.
The fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is a pretty amazing tactical combat simulator, but it's tougher to make it work on games of courtly intrigue. If you want to be able to do both well, you might choose The Shadow of Yesterday instead.
Nighttime drama (with superpowers) is a genre I literally couldn't imagine playing at the table until the Smallville roleplaying game came out. And now making a game about "Values" and "Relationships" is baked right into the rules, no hacking necessary.
For those of you who use a variety of systems, you understand exactly what I mean. Deciding on a rules set immediately focuses what your game will be about and how it will be about that. For those of you who adhere to a single system, you might recall a time you tried to use it to tell a very different type of story (perhaps some D&D4e lovers tried to do Game of Thrones), and realized you were ignoring and houseruling so many of the rules that you might as well have written your own game.
You single system users, I name drop a lot of different games in these posts. Go try a few of them out and see how the game you play (that is, the story you and your friends tell together) changes or refocuses itself. You'll probably see what I mean.
For those of you who already use multiple system users, it will help to think of Setting as the rules of your story. Is a gunshot wound a reason to call an ambulance or a minor annoyance? Will using drugs or having sex immediately lead to a character death? Will there be swinging from chandeliers or a lot of talking behind fans? Can you make both equally interesting.
And if it sounds like I'm saying Setting encompasses genre and category, then you're getting the point. If you've never thought of rules as suggesting or even dictating those things at your regular game night, then that sound you just heard was your mind blowing.
Scene Framing and Location Descriptions
And to end this section on a truly grand note, get ready for the thing that every gamer is already amazing at when it comes to Setting. You are, I virtually guarantee it, already spectacular at describing locations and framing scenes. You do both of these a hundred times a night at the game table. You might do it more if your the GM or depending on how your group manages narrative responsibility.
Don't believe me? Then you either don't GM much or you just haven't though of your GM responsibilities in this way. Let's start with the gamemasters. Whenever you enter a new room of a dungeon, attend the funeral of a king, walk into a dangerous copse of woods...I'm belaboring the point. Every time you act as your players' five senses, you're describing locations. That's obvious. But every time you start the action and set the stakes for it, even if those stakes are as simple as "does the monster eat their faces," you're setting scenes. It could be said that your job as GM really boils down to Location Description, Scene Setting, and Rules Knowledge. So, essentially, you do this author stuff constantly, albeit in a very specific way.
Now for the players. Describing settings is not usually a player's job in traditional RPGS. But if you've ever said something like, "I want to grab a hot pan and hit him with it and I know there's one handy because you said we were in the kitchens," then you have take a tentative step into location description by suggesting an important aspect of it. And if you haven't ever done this, try it! As for scene setting, if you've ever said along the lines of, "That's it, I'm mad at the Duke and I want to confront him about his lies in front of all these people and damn the consequences," then you've set a scene. You named the stakes, the principle players, and it's up to the playing to decide how it turns out. And again, if you've never tried this at the table, do it!
To practice setting a scene better, start trying to integrate some new information you don't usually give at the table as practice for writing. Tell the players how a place smells next time. Or describe the texture of a piece of clothing rather than telling them what it's worth. And if your players eyes tend to glaze over from the volume of information when they enter a new place, try to pare down your descriptions until each thing you tell them has immediate impact. The bonfire makes this room much brighter, penalty while your eyes adjust. The smell of the garbage chute is noxious, check for sickness. The One Ring is heavy to both body and soul, take fatigue levels.
If you want some help with scene setting, there are particular rules that will require you to do that well and more specifically. I'd suggest Dogs in the Vineyard (the first game that insisted I set the stakes for a scene by making sure the conflict was about one, very specific outcome) or Smallville (the first game I played that made Relationships and Values things you could not play the game without; every roll is something intrinsically important to your character).
And with that, we come to the end of From Tabletop to Paperback's first third. Now you know the places where you, as a gamer, are strong and also those where you are weak when it comes to writing fiction for the first time. I may take a break and blog about other things for a bit before tackling the second part where I contrast a beginning author with no gaming experience to a gaming veteran who first turns to the tyepwriter. Thanks for reading so far and keep on the lookout for more!
