Forget about storytelling and your games will yield better stories

“Some writers try to envision the structure beforehand, and they shape the story to fit it, but this is so often a trap. You should not try to stuff your story into a preconceived structure… Structure should grow out of character.” -- Colum McCann

My friend had just paid several hundred dollars to spend a few days being taught the secret sauce of Hollywood scriptwriting by a self-proclaimed guru.

‘I’d pay to hear Kaufman or Mamet,’ I said. ‘But I reckon they’d start off by saying there is no magic formula.’

‘I knew you’d scoff. Here, I’ll prove it works. Give me one of your Knightmare novellas.’

He counted pages to the plot points, the mid-point, the break into two. ‘See? Fits the three-act story structure exactly.’

‘That’s not proof of your point, though -- quite the opposite. 'Cause I just wrote that book. I didn’t map out where I should put the inciting incidents and reveals and reversals. If you tell a story, sure, it may very well fit the structure - but that doesn’t mean that knowing the structure will help you tell better stories.’

Here’s an analogy you may have heard me use before. Toss a ball and it follows a parabola. But there is no rule in nature that fits the ball’s trajectory to the equation for a curve. The universe doesn’t do equations. Instead the parabola emerges because of the force of gravity making incremental changes to the ball’s velocity. Then we look at it, get our maths on, and say, "Ooh, a parabola."

So too with stories. The changes in velocity are the deep rules of human interaction. The three-act structure is just one curve that you might perceive from a specific set of interactions.

People are suckers for an easy fix. Hence snake oil, superstition, and Trump. And hence also role-playing game design, which has been tempted off into the shrubbery with the seductive promise of a formula for better stories. Things like this:

"Each player around the table gets to write one of the fifty-six Johari adjectives in one quadrant of your character’s Johari window. Pick your character's primary defining adjective from the façade quadrant. The player who gave you that adjective that now assigns your character a Goal, a Grudge and a Geis of her choice. Every time you evoke one of those, the player who assigned it to you takes over as GM to direct you in a scene with potential for a Character Development roll…"

My view on this kind of malarkey is that I turned up to play my character, not to author yours. More importantly, you’re going to get better stories – more interesting, more complex, more surprising, more emotionally affecting, and more transformative – by setting out simply to inhabit the characters rather than by sitting at arm’s length and pulling their strings.

I would never try to shoehorn an RPG session into story shapes when I’m running the game, much less when I'm playing. Let the game take the course it wants without self-consciously imposing story templates and from time to time it will really amaze you. OK, so it probably won’t end up with the tidy three-act form of a blockbuster movie. But what’s more compelling: watching a precision-crafted screenplay tie everything up with a bow, or experiencing life with its shifting, overlapping, unexpected patterns?

The other day I heard somebody talking about a ‘crafted narrative’ RPG system. ‘We enjoyed creating the characters more than playing the game!’ he said – as if that was a good thing. But it’s not, it’s a fail. If you enjoy creating characters, fine. Become a writer. Though, if you do, for pity’s sake don’t subject us to stories wrangled through a Hollywood paradigm. Writers soon learn that it’s more fruitful to let the characters drive the story organically than to try to corralling them with reductive mechanics like goal achievements and epiphany moments.

Human beings evolved to perceive in events the shape of a story, because then it becomes a lesson we can learn. The events themselves aren’t a story, they’re just a cascade of cause and effect. The universe doesn’t do stories any more than it does equations. The story is the parabolic curve mapped onto the events afterwards.

Likewise, the experiences you have while playing the game are the uncollapsed wave function, and all the more interesting for that. When players recount their adventures later, that’s when the storytelling happens. Each character will come away with a different story – for example in this write-up, which describes things from my character’s point of view. If you asked another of the players you’d hear a very different tale. You get it. You’ve seen Rashomon.

In short, you’ll get better stories if you don’t try to create ‘stories’. Because it really is the case that truth (or a simulated life) is stranger than fiction.

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

What is it about magic and colour? At a role-playing convention years ago, Greg Stafford described to the breathless Glorantha groupies a scene in a RuneQuest movie that was pitched to the deaf ears of Hollywood. Something has happened to remove magic from the world, said Stafford, and the movie would show this by switching from colour to black-&-white.

It made me think first of A Matter of Life and Death (the difference between monochrome and colour is used more interestingly there) but the very next neuron to fire recalled SPI's 1975 boardgame Sorcerer, in which wizards attuned to different colour frequencies vied for power by enticing each other to battle in zones whose hue favoured their own magic. Sorcerer created quite a stir among us boardgamers because it was SPI's first foray into fantasy gaming - which, as they usually catered for the hardcore wargamer, was a crisis of confidence brought on, no doubt, by the growing success of grungy dungeon games. If you're interested, you can get a glimpse of the rulebook here.

A few years after that, in 1986, Mark Smith and Jamie Thomson came out with the Duel Master series - for me, their best gamebooks, and probably my favourite gamebooks ever. The first (and best) of these, Challenge of the Magi, involved two duelling sorcerers of the Rainbow Land (part of which unaccountably overlapped with Warwickshire and/or the poems of Thomas Lodge) whose magic obeyed a chromatic taxonomy:

• Red for fire
• Black for death
• Blue for illusion
• Green for nature
• White for... um, "holy" stuff

There were two books. Each player took one and you chased each other around the map of the Rainbow Land, trying to fake out your opponent so he didn't guess the colours on which you were strongest. OK, in the era of videogames that probably doesn't sound too impressive, but we had to make our own fun* in those days. And anyway, books are like radio: the pictures are better.

To this day I never figured out how Mark and Jamie made those books work. There was some kind of crazed obsessive-compulsive genius at work in the amazingly detailed rules (which were, nonetheless, easy to use) and the complex intricacies of the flowchart (likewise). And they were meaty, these tomes: 800 sections each. And you got a solo option.

They should have been a massive success, but the tragedy of gamebooks was that the craze didn't last long enough to really support any of the interesting things they were evolving into. That's why it surprises me when some modern revivals of the medium seem to aspire only to setting the clock back to simple dungeon-bashing. By the late-'80s gamebooks were already way beyond that.

(For the sake of balance I should add that there are plenty of modern gamebooks that have continued to innovate in terms of rules, setting and, most interestingly, the depth and quality of the storytelling - just look at the quality of most Windhammer Prize entries, for example.)

Fabled Lands LLP has the rights to the Duel Master books and they are cherry-ripe for conversion to apps. A little bit of handheld tech is perhaps all they needed to get the success they deserved. Twenty-seven years on, we'll see what we can do.


* Although, as Mamet says, everybody makes their own fun; if you don't make it yourself it isn't fun, it's entertainment.

We need to talk about Blood Sword

I'm in a bit of a quandary. Maybe you can help.

As part of the worldwide re-release of our old gamebooks starting next spring, Jamie and I have been busy piecing the manuscripts together. Computer memory was at such a premium in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when everyone wore top hats and smoking jackets, that we didn’t keep digital copies of most of the books. Worse than that, most of them never existed in digital form in the first place, having been hammered out on typewriters or, in the case of Coils of Hate, written in green felt-tip on scraps of paper. (Oh yeah, you think I’m joking…)

So, we’ve been busy with scanners and OCR software, a laborious enough process but almost fun compared to the ensuing stage, when we have to reconstruct the entire flowchart, check it for errors, and then add logic markup for creating ebook versions.

And that’s where the quandary arises. Because the first few books we’re releasing will be Virtual Reality titles, including the new one that Jamie is writing now set in a Wild West of tumbleweed-haunted ghost towns, hard-bitten outlaws, immortal Conquistadores and heart-stealing Mexican vampires. The Virtual Reality system, as gamebook aficionados will know, is based on the skills the player chooses. Dice don’t feature, which makes it perfect for e-gamebooks.

And then we come to Blood Sword.

No wait, first of all you’re going to say, “What about Way of the Tiger?” Well, the fly in the ointment there is that we have the app rights to WotT (iOS, Android, etc) but not the ebook or print rights. And we’d like to get hold of them so as to include Avenger! and the other books in our new venture, but that’s not up to us. We’re trying.

So, Blood Sword. I’m looking at the old copies of those books and I’m thinking who, in this day and age, is going to want to wade through twenty-eight pages of rules before the adventure actually starts? And then there are the tactical maps –

Yes. About those tactical maps. How that happened was that Oliver Johnson and I had been talking to Elizabeth Roy, the editor in charge of Knight Books. (Coincidentally, a decade or two later she became an agent and repped Fabled Lands LLP for a while, but let’s not get distracted.) Liz was looking around for a follow-up series to Way of the Tiger. “It’ll need a USP,” she told us. I thought I had a doozy (or a duesy, if you’re a pedant) in that up to four readers could play together in a team.

Then we got to the big meeting and suddenly it wasn’t that simple. This was the latter part of the 1980s, and the marketing people were starting to take over the asylum. “Where’s the USP?” they said.

“You can play solo or as a party of adventurers,” I said.

I thought that was the clincher, but they continued to stroke their chins and play with their designer glasses.

“Mmm. No, we need a USP. Other gamebooks already do that.”

“No they don’t. Name one gamebook that does that.”

“USP, USP. Not listening. USP.”

Desperation is the mother of invention, as Plato probably said, so I found my mouth opening and waited to hear the fateful words my muse had come up with: “We’ll have tactical maps, a bit like a boardgame.”

Well, there was a rod to beat my own back. I grew to hate writing fight scenes into Blood Sword books because it always meant stopping and drawing a stupid little tactical map. And then, when the books came out, it turned out the maps had been printed at the size of a postage stamp, so good luck actually making any counters to push around that. It frustrated me to think of the thousands of readers who would give up because of those fiddly maps and never get to see all the wonderful adventures I was dreaming up for them. In Book 3 I even resorted to telling them, as near as dammit, to ignore the tactical rules altogether:

“If rules and numbers are not to your taste then you are at perfect liberty to ignore them.”

Twenty-five years on, am I really going to bring the maps back? Today’s gamers prefer simpler rules, and it’s hard to imagine anyone having the patience to move their counters around and wade through all those rules figuring out combat options. Life’s too short. Also, the story ought to be so compelling that you don't want to waste time on dice-rolling.

At least, that’s how I see it. But who am I to tell people how they should find their enjoyment? “Everybody makes their own fun,” as Rebecca Pidgeon’s character says in State and Main. “If you don't make it yourself, it ain't fun, it's entertainment.” Gamebooks are all about the empowerment of the reader, and if that includes the option to spend an evening geeking out with the dice and the pencils and the little tactical grids, well…

And then there’s the digital versions. I hate seeing dice roll around in a videogame or an app. That’s just the legacy of another medium creeping in. And the dice were only ever a way to represent statistical chances and skill-use anyway. Physically rolling them is one thing. Watching virtual dice clatter around puts me in mind of what Byron had to say about Keats’s poetry. (Best draw a veil over that; it’s not for repetition in polite company.)

So I’d rather convert all the Blood Sword books to something like the VR system. It’d be a lot of work, but they already have the character archetypes – trickster, sage, etc – so they’re halfway there. Well, a quarter of the way, at least. And then putting them into ebook format wouldn’t be nearly such a headache.

But hang on now. This is the twenty-first century. Publishing has evolved into something new and polymorphously liberating. I can release a new version of the Blood Sword books for the casual reader, and I can also put out a special “classic edition” with all the baroque rules for the hardcore gamers. And then everyone’s happy. We could even see about getting Russ’s permission to use his original illustrations in the classic edition – like the scary undead thing (above) that came from the meteor in Book 2.

Okay then. Sorted. Thanks for the chat, it really helped.