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Friday 4 March 2016

Game write-ups

Game write-ups make for notoriously bad fiction. It’s not that surprising. “What happened in last night’s game?” someone asks, and we’ll trot out a great wodge of incident. But a story is much more than incident, as the Master reminds us. Incident – that is to say, the plot – is just the foundation. On that a storyteller builds the real narrative, which is a personal journey of change. Fighting a shoggoth has to mean something. You know this; you’ve seen “The Body”.

The best games would anyway make the worst stories. Fiction is designed to have endings that are “surprising yet inevitable”. We know Luke has to hit the thermal exhaust shaft, we just don’t know how he’s going to hit it. But we don’t want games to be inevitable, we want them to be like a second life. And our lives, engrossing as they are to us, don’t have the neat symmetries and moral and thematic patterns to be found in a work of fiction. The only way to achieve that effect in a game is if the referee (“games master” to me evokes a low-wattage sadist in a rugger shirt) twists events to come out the way he or she wants them to – which is the antithesis of good roleplaying. Not only must it be possible for defeats to occur, but they might be pointless. Shit must be able to happen - as, in our play-through of this adventure, it most definitely did.

All that aside, background incident is a useful resource to a writer. A lot of creative writing graduates could do with more of it. So in theory it should be possible to grow a good work of fiction out of a roleplaying game. Raymond E Feist infamously based a lot of his early novels on Tekumel campaigns. Still, we were talking about good fiction… I have been pestering Paul Gilham to turn his blisteringly brilliant Ghosts of London campaign into a novel. Paul demurs because I’m sure he realizes that all that meticulous plotting, vital though it is, is only the start. He’d need to break it all apart, insert a character with a need to change, and let us see the succession of plot events as the conduit for that change.

I did none of that with this write-up for our current 1890 campaign run by Tim Savin. It’s just the bare events of the game, albeit in the voice of my character. But it might be of interest because it’s based on a published scenario (“The Night of the Jackals” from Cthulhu By Gaslight 3rd edition) and because it gives a glimpse of our own games, which some of this blog’s readers have enquired about. Tally ho.

 

12 comments:

  1. One thing I'll say in mild disagreement is that your viewpoint character doesn't necessarily need to change. He just needs to observe and participate. Probably the best example of an "unchanging" protagonist is Jack Reacher from Lee Childs' excellent series.

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  2. Presumably somebody experiences change in those novels, though, John? I imagine they set up one or more characters specifically for each book and Reacher functions as a sort of catalyst for their change. I don't know, not having read any. My knowledge of the series comes solely from the article "Reacher Said Nothing" in the London Review of Books.

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  3. Oh, yes, Reacher is very much a a catalyst for change. Violent, painful, mostly fatal change.

    In many ways, Reacher is a near-perfect game-PC stand-in. He travels constantly but has very few possessions (whatever clothes he's wearing, a wallet and usually a folding toothbrush). He acquires and uses items as needed but divests himself once his needs are met and travels on at the end of each book.

    My overall point was that you don't really need a viewpoint character who needs to experience some growth or change. You just need someone with a motive to be an active participants in the book's events.

    That motive needn't be big or profound. Reacher's initial motive for engaging in the events of his latest adventure, Make Me, was his curiosity about why a certain town was called Mother's Rest.

    I'd urge you to take a look at a couple of Child's books. They're really good.

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    1. I suppose a game could be written up in that way - with the player-characters as catalysts - though the principal NPCs would need to be more fleshed-out than they often are so that the reader could see an emotional reason for what happened in the story. I'm assuming there that the PCs don't change and develop, but actually they often do. The difference between that and a series of books is that you can rely on the players to be up to speed on how previous events have affected them (think of a drama like The Shield or Breaking Bad) whereas Lee Child deliberately avoids anything that would force the reader to follow the books in a given order. He wants a new reader to be able to jump in anywhere - the equivalent being a story-of-the-week show like Star Trek TOS.

      Btw here's the link to that article. It wasn't called "Reacher Said Nothing", that was the name of Andy Martin's book - anyway, worth a read:

      http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n03/christopher-tayler/i-just-hate-the-big-guy

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    2. Btw my character in that write-up is kind of in the Reacher role you're describing. He's motivated to investigate the murders but is not greatly changed by his experiences - until the end, anyway, when the usual tiresome Call of Cthulhu rules took control away from the players and told us we were all now mad. But that wouldn't have made any more satisfying an end to the story than it did to the game (I hate being told by dice rolls how to play my character) so I left it off the write-up.

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  4. You could embrace the madness and declare that the character suffers from Antiacrophobia (fear of staying in one place?) or travelphilia (desire to travel constantly). Give him a toothbrush and a wallet and you have Reacher by Gaslight.

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    1. Antiacrophobia..? A fear of pits or low places, surely? :-)

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  5. I couldn't find the actual name for the phobia so I took a shot at creating one. Probably should have been antiagorophobia, I suppose.

    Perhaps the character could get infected with lycanthropy or vampirism and become a Reacher Creature.

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    1. That's technically claustrophobia, isn't it? Hmm, maybe oikaphobia would do - except that's been (mis)appropriated to mean fear of household objects; it should mean fear of home. Equally, stasiphobia should mean a fear of staying in one place, but some idiot has appropriated it to mean fear of walking - which ought to be something like peripatetiphobia. Say, this is fun.

      At any rate, wanderlust seems to be the defining Reacher Feature? :-)

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  6. The defining Reacher Features to my mind are a desire to move on coupled with a refusal to BE moved on. If left alone, Reacher will go on to somewhere else fairly quickly. If pressured to leave, he'll stay and ultimately destroy those he tried to pressure him.

    I suspect that Feature would remain with Reacher even if he were a Creature.

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  7. Haha Dave; you've clearly never read the Gord the Rogue novels by Gary Gygax! Actually, I'm kidding; they read exactly like the crappy recounting of someone's RPG campaign and they are terrible.

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  8. Haha Dave; you've clearly never read the Gord the Rogue novels by Gary Gygax! Actually, I'm kidding; they read exactly like the crappy recounting of someone's RPG campaign and they are terrible.

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