From Tabletop to Paperback – Prolegamena Part 2

Full disclosure, this bit is definitely for the gamemasters more than the career players. That's okay, though, there's still good advice to be had, and it starts here.

Hey! Career players! Yeah, you guys who show up every week with a handful of dice, a bag of chips, and an inability to recall non-player character names. GM SOMETHING!

First, you'll give your usual, beleaguered GM a much deserved break. Second, it'll give you a new appreciation for her work. Thirdly, you might discover you have a talent for it. And, last but not least, it'll make this chapter much more useful.

The Blessing of Lonely Fun

You may recall we discussed the dangers of Lonely Fun, such as finding yourself so bogged down in the details of a fictional world that your players are in a straitjacket of playing through your plots. Or maybe there's just so much cultural information, they feel confused about what's acceptable and what's not. If your wandering adventurers are trying to figure out what hat to wear on this day of the week, you might be doing it wrong.

But when you shift from gamemaster to author, Lonely Fun can be your best friend. There are still dangers, of course, but they can become strengths with a little work. For instance...

Writing is a fairly solitary pursuit (although I'll talk about ways to ameliorate that in future posts), so getting used to working by yourself might be easier on you.
Even better, you'll discover that so much of the work you do as a GM directly ports over to Pre-writing.
Best yet, so very much more of your prep makes it into the final piece (which, as a long time GM myself, I find to be decidedly NOT the case at the game table).

But let's talk about the good news before the great news.

Mastering the Pre-Writing

Real quick, here's a recap of the bare minimum pre-writing you ought to do.

Story Question
Character List
Scene List
The Climax
The Resolution

Now let's break them down one at a time.

Story Question

The odds are, when you pitched the game you wanted to play to your group, you had an initial arc in mind. It might have been a "how we met and became a team" arc. Or it could be an "introduction to the world" arc (even if The World is just the seedy underbelly of the city they'll never leave). Maybe everybody is up to speed on the the world and it has a built in reason to start as a team, so you get to jump right into a proper arc. In that case, you probably want to hook them as hard and fast as you can with something that sets this game apart from other campaigns.

If you've done this as a gamemaster, you're already figuring out Story Questions. "Will they gel into a team in time to survive the danger?" is a solid Story Question, and used to great effect in the first Mission: Impossible movie. "How will the noobs handle an introduction to a larger world?" is also a good Question. Think about Starship Troopers or even Ghostbusters.

The "everyone's up to speed so hook 'em hard and fast" Story Question is a bit too nebulous for specific examples. But since every GM I know considers that the meat of the RPG sandwich, I probably don't have to give any. You're already thinking of your best campaigns and retroactively applying Story Questions to them.

See? You already do this all the time. You may not do it well, but that's because RPGs shouldn't be plotted as tightly as a novel and the Question can change quickly or without warning because of what your players do. That's fine! Specific Story Questions are still a place I struggle, but I'm getting better at them all the time. And my games are getting better as well.

Character List

Characters are both easier and harder when it comes to connecting GM skills with writer skills. The harder part is that, as a GM, you're used to your group handing you a pile of main characters. You don't have to make them up all by yourself! Finally, some work the GM doesn't have to do. Amiright?

Although coming up with characters isn't exactly a foreign concept to GMs, they just tend to be antagonists and secondary/supporting characters. Still, Batman & Robin aren't nearly as interesting without Jim Gordon and the Joker, so don't discount the importance of antagonists and supporting characters.

To switch gears, GMs grow very used to taking a disparate group of weirdos and figuring out how and why they would work together. Sometimes this is accomplished with world building (creating an organization or important NPC for the heroes to work for) and sometimes with plot (the heroes don't know why, but the same unseen group or person wants them all dead). This is where it gets easier as an author.

If you're creating a story where the Plot, the Character, and the Setting all lean on one another as I've discussed before, then your characters might be a disparate group of weirdos, only this time you've created them to be weird in ways that will make for interesting and exciting stories.

I don't have to sit with six character sheets in front of me and ponder how I'm going to get them to care about one another. Since I'm making the characters from scratch, I already know which ones will rub the others the wrong way, or who the group will think of as a dumb hick, or who is secretly somebody else's half-sibling.

This is one reason I've become a huge fan of group character generation in my games. But that hasn't always been the case, and my ability to tie together characters I didn't make up -- most of whom have personalities painted in only the broadest strokes -- makes doing that work on the front end a piece of cake.

The Scene List

In a lot of rules systems, such as Savage Worlds or Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, the threats have pretty detailed stat boxes. You can wing them (I certainly have), but it's better if you have them worked out, collected, and handy. Or you have to plan skill tests out ahead of time just to make sure you aren't caught flatfooted. Which skill will I allow for building a makeshift bridge? How many agility or athletic checks should it take to swim the raging river? That kind of thing.

While these are fairly rudimentary examples of it, this is what planning a scene list looks like. You may wind up not needing those stats or your players may go such a different direction that your skill tests never happen. But you still looked at the characters, their goals, and how they normally approach situations, then made an educated guess about how they would choose to approach this situation.

Those guesses naturally led to particular scenes, all of which are links in a chain to the resolution, and require things like stat blocks, skill sets, or at least some planning of locations and secondary characters who might be present.

That's all a scene list is. How will my characters move from the Big Event that sets their story in motion to the Climax that answers my Story Question? If the Big Event is A and the Climax is Z, then the scenes are B through Y.

Now, as a GM, I never like to have a combat that's just about killing something. The fight has to tie into protecting or rescuing someone or something, or it has to be the outcome of a difficult choice, or it has to be tied to something on a character sheet. Otherwise, it's just throwing dice around and doing math. Who cares?

Similarly, as a writer, I need to think in terms of Scene Questions. How is this scene moving my characters toward the Climax? In other words, how does answering this Scene's Question add a brick in the wall that will eventually answer my Story Question?

Now, like I said above, a lot of times, the scene prep I do as a GM is thrown right out the window. My guesses about how the players would react to a situation might have been educated, but they were still guesses. And guess can (often) go wrong.

The same thing can happen, to some extent, when I start writing my novel. Sometimes unexpected new ideas occur to me or a character's voice fleshes out and I realize she would NEVER do the thing I'd planned for her in the scene list.

That's okay, it happens! But if you know where your characters need to be after that SNAFU, then it's easier to replace the defective link in the chain with a newer, stronger one.

I'll talk more about how that happens and what to do about it after I discuss Climax and Resolution.

But this post is getting a bit long, so I'll save those two pre-writing items and the big wrap up for next time. See you then!