Two styles of gamebook design

A few people have asked about the differences between my Vulcanverse books (The Hammer of the Sun and The Pillars of the Sky) and Jamie's (The Houses of the Dead and The Wild Woods). When we wrote the Fabled Lands series our styles were pretty similar, so you can't always spot where I (or in several cases Tim Harford) wrote parts of Jamie's books. 

Nearly thirty years on, we write very differently and I'd be surprised if somebody playing the Vulcanverse books couldn't tell which of us wrote what. It would be hard nowadays for Jamie and me to split a book down the middle, as we did with The Keep of the Lich Lord, and not have readers spot the join.

On a trivial level, I notice that Jamie will put things like, "if you have codeword X, read on," so you get to see in the same section various alternative outcomes that you shouldn't really know. Of course, that only matters if you cheat by reading on when you don't have the relevant codeword. Here's an example from The Wild Woods:

On the other hand, I plan the logic diagram as if it were to be handed to a coder, separating each step in the process into its own section. In an example like the one above, I'd split those filters (the codeword, the title, the tickbox) into separate sections, like so:

One advantage of that is it's a lot easier to bug-check the book. If the Vulcanverse gamebooks are ever turned into a CRPG, in mine those logic gates are already fully planned. Jamie's approach uses up fewer numbered sections, and means less page-flipping for the reader, but it can lead to some very long chunks of text.

Jamie uses a lot more codewords; I use a lot more tickboxes. That's because tickboxes are fine for any non-global change, and so I tried to limit the number of times the player would need to refer to the codeword list (codewords being necessary for something that changes the world in more than one location). Neither approach is wrong; it's just a stylistic choice. And some people have told me that the "elegant logic" argument doesn't persuade them in favour of tickboxes because they don't like writing in their books.

Another difference is that Jamie's Vulcanverse books are much more comedic (as you'd expect of the winner of the Roald Dahl Award) so he'll have gods and other mythological figures talking in modern slang. No less a talent than Joss Whedon did the same thing with the Greek gods in his (unproduced) Wonder Woman script, and it's the entirety of Taika Waititi's approach to his Thor movies. Which is not to say that my own Vulcanverse books are without humour, but it's more character-humour in my case, so a bit like Thor: Ragnarok compared to the first Thor movie. Take your pick, or better still enjoy both.

Also, I do a lot more with companions in the Vulcanverse books than Jamie does. Instead of companions, he tends to have more localized character-based stories -- the insolent butler, the orphan you have to return to his uncle, the sick child whose father is destroying the woods, and so on. The trade-off is between highly focused mini-narratives and the more general interactions you get with companions, of whom only Loutro (in The Hammer of the Sun; I picture him played by Toby Jones, incidentally) is guaranteed to get a full character arc.

And there are differences too in the way we construct our books; Jamie tends to have fewer and longer sections. Still, just as you get different styles between the writers on a TV show, hopefully the variety only goes to enhance the whole.

How to stop your RPG sessions turning into Thor: Ragnarok

I’m glad it’s not just me. In this episode of the Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice podcast, Messrs Cule and Bell-West talk about how irritating it is when players break out of character for jokes and facetious banter.

Most definitely I’m not against joking at the table. In-character humour is not only essential and lots of fun, it’s pretty much the Turing Test of roleplaying. If you can see things from inside your character enough to crack a joke like him or her, you’re doing it right.

That's like the first Thor movie. All the humour there was great because it came from character. Later the film-makers saw that they’d get more tweetage if all the characters spoke like Joss Whedon was writing their lines – which in many cases he was. What even Joss forgot was that flip, high-school comedy shtick made sense for Buffy and the Scooby gang because they were high-schoolers. Coming from Thor or Captain America it’s just dumb. If it were a roleplaying game not a movie, that would be their players just not bothering.

But what do you do? Michael Cule asks if you should bang on the table. But you have enough on your mind running the game without taking on the role of kindergarten teacher as well, and as Roger Bell-West points out, once the suspension of disbelief is broken it's a bit late to get it back. Maybe instead we need to look at why players might want to break character. It means either they’re bored or else they’re embarrassed by the make-believe and need an escape. Listen to the podcast, it’s all discussed there.

Maybe part of the problem is the trend in modern drama for every character to behave like a teenager with ADHD. And maybe that is caused by the tweetability of 21st century life. People talk all the way through movies, TV shows and roleplaying games now because they’re accustomed to providing the world with a streaming commentary of their entire lives. Sitting still and concentrating on one thing for a chunk of time measured in hours must seem like Swamp Thing waiting for a judgement from the Parliament of Trees. I’m a lot less connected than the average person (you should see my cellphone) which may be why I’m mostly happy to stay in character for the evening.

Incidentally I'm not discussing this because my own players are offenders. We do have a lot of humour in most sessions, but it's almost always in character and we don't, thank goodness, have one of the compulsive comedians Mr Cule describes in his groups. That said, I've noticed that when side discussions spring up between a couple of players, time was they'd be talking about something in the game (very often in character, too) whereas these days it will likely be something they're watching on TV or saw on Facebook. Attention spans are rotting away the world over, or so the anecdotal evidence goes.

Cnut couldn’t stop the tide. All you can do is make your games more engaging so that players don’t feel the need to step out of character and make jokes. Throw in more outrageous surprises, and be less forgiving if players were nattering and missed what just happened. Or you could have NPCs react to all those funny meme references as if the character really said them out loud. A little time with the Inquisition (or your world’s local equivalent) is a surefire cure for compulsive hilarity.

And if that doesn't work, switch to playing boardgames, where there's no suspension of disbelief to break. In which case, here's just the thing.

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.

 

Ties that bind

What keeps the characters in a role-playing game together? When I started gaming, it wasn’t something we thought about much. With no template for how we were ‘supposed’ to role-play, we took turns. Each player got 20 minutes with the umpire (‘GM’ to you non-wargamers) and it took a few sessions before we twigged that by banding together we’d all get more playing time.

Having come by that route to the whole notion of group play, we were lucky to have begun with the best: Empire of the Petal Throne. In EPT's rich social setting there are many ways that player-characters might be colleagues, united by family, clan, temple, legion, or political faction - and usually more than one of those at once.

In our non-Tekumel games, Tim Harford has given most thought to group cohesion in the campaigns he’s run. I’ve spoken before of the Company of Bronze, a group of mercenaries held together by long comradeship and the desire to avenge the massacre of the rest of the company. In Tim’s Spartans campaign, we’re all survivors of Thermopylae who grew up together through boua and Crypteia to phalanx – a stronger band of brothers you couldn’t find.

Both of those campaign set-ups could be characterized as ‘Starship Enterprise’ groups. The characters are first and foremost a team. There may be rivalries or close friendships, but nobody gets left behind. In Tim’s Redemption campaign, however, he brought us together with a shared need (the clue is in the campaign name) and a means to achieve it. But, although sent out with nominally a common goal, there was plenty of scope for the betrayals, alliances and disharmonious aspirations that make for an interestingly fraught drama.

The Redemption idea works well for a quest campaign. The characters are thrown together, usually en route to some geographical objective, so to a large extent they are held together just by that plot momentum. But how about campaigns that aren’t built around a single goal? In Jakalla or Lankhmar or Lyonesse Town, characters inhabit a fully realized social milieu. Why should they stick together?

As I mentioned above, the characters could be held in a group by membership of the same factions or institutions. In a 19th century British setting, for instance, they might have gone to the same public school. That helps to explain a friendship in later life, but it’s not a sufficient condition. Tom Brown may or may not have hung out with Harry Flashman in later life – stranger things have happened, but more likely they’d belong to different clubs, different social sets, and pass each other with but a faint curl of the lip going up Pall Mall.

Still, you’d prefer not to have everything sweetness and light in the group. Conflict and rivalry make for sparkier character dynamics and more interesting sessions. In Tim Savin’s upcoming Victorian campaign, there’s a gathering thunderhead of mutual antipathy between my own Anglo-Indian aesthete (Who's Who entry above) and Oliver Johnson’s bulldoggish hearty. It promises to be fun. But players should never have their characters act in way that simply serves the entertainment value of the ‘narrative’. For the really interesting and unexpected developments that make role-playing unique, you need to think entirely from inside the character. So why would my and Oliver’s characters not simply decide to have nothing to do with one another?

A useful pointer comes from Joss Whedon. Xander and Spike loathe each other, but both care about Buffy. If you have one character in the group who is a really good friend, relative or dependent of all the others, there’s the gluon that will hold them together. Ideally it should be a particularly well-liked player-character, but at a pinch you could make it an NPC. Affection for a sweet little mutual godchild might make even Holmes and Moriarty grit their teeth and shake hands.

With the gluon character, you can have as disparate and mutually hostile a bunch of characters as the players care to (or happen to) create. They can’t escape from each others’ orbit, so the tensions can freely crackle around the group and nobody gets to just shrug and walk away. And trust me, that kind of role-playing beats multi-classed thief-witch gnomes doing Detect Traps hands down.

When a man is tired of Whedon...

Age of Ultron, then. I know you don’t want spoilers. How would I spoil it, anyway? You already know the arc of the movie long before you see it, because it’s the arc demanded by the sheer weight of franchises and star contracts, by the simple need to toss bread to the international circus-goers, never mind selling an SUV-load of toys to their kids.

Scientists create an artificial intelligence and it’s benevolent and means only good for mankind. No? How about: scientists create an artificial intelligence, spurn it, and in doing so teach it only to respond with loveless rage and destruction? Uh-uh, for something as sophisticated as that you need an 18-year-old girl. The AI tries to take over the (yawn) world, then. Hilarity ensues. (No, really.)

Taking over the world starts by Ultron getting into the Internet. Possibly that explains why he also becomes artificially dumb, as whatever the software you’re equipped with, the entire Internet doesn’t have the processing power or complexity required to simulate one human brain. That could explain why he wastes time looking for the Pentagon’s nuclear missile launch codes, which even with staff cuts are hopefully not actually connected to the freakin' Internet. And don’t get me started on how a super-genius AI copes with global bandwidth.

OK, so lots of dumb decisions later, the inevitable big-as-Dumbo climactic battle. My main takeaways from this are, first, that robots are pretty fragile, especially the armour-plated variety. You hit them with anything hard, even the butt of a gun, and it’s likely a limb will fall off. Also, they become weaker in proportion to the number of robots in the army. Oh, and they are really, really stupid.

Maybe the problem is villains, period. We know that the world’s problems go so much deeper than one bad apple, so the villain just seems like a trivial and ineffectual pantomime bully. And villains’ dialogue always sucks. It’s like everyone involved knows that the villain is a lame carry-over from moustache-twirling landlords in old silent movies, doomed to talk a good fight till the final prole-pleasing punch. Next up in this never-ending Marvel merry-go-round: acromegalic alien beetroot Thanos. Oh god, kill me now, just don’t monologue like a silkily smooth thesp for five minutes before you do it.

Second takeway: if you’re putting a new superhero into a movie, you really need to give them powers that the viewer can easily grasp. You need it to be show not tell. Spider-Man shoots webs, climbs walls, and is strong and agile. Reed Richards can stretch. We don’t have to know exactly how strong the Hulk is, but we know he can bust stuff up and lift a really big weight. Being flesh rather than metal, no limb will ever fall off him. Well, maybe one tooth, if a building is dropped on his head.

But when we’re told that a character has powers of “telekinesis, telepathy, other psionic effects” then we are never going to have a clue what they can do. Whatever the plot requires, probably, just as long as they prance like a tit while doing it and a CGI geezer is on hand with his particle effects package in Autodesk Maya.

I said hilarity ensues, and I wasn’t kidding - unlike Joss, who never stops. Each character has a stock of quips. It soon feels relentless, as though Buffy Summers has taken over everyone’s heads and given them a snappy teen one-liner to see them through the gruelling times when the sticky tape holding the story together looks like giving way. The cinema audience laughed and laughed, but that doesn’t mean much. The same kind of people also gave a snigger when Nero set Christians on fire. I just thought: Joss, baby, don’t you want me to care? I think he was desperate. In between all the shouting and ‘splosions and the damned soulless CGI, he just clung to what he does well.

What he does well, he does very well. The scene when Cap tries to lift Thor’s hammer, the look on Thor’s face. That’s gold, a lovely character moment. A shame, actually, that it turned out to just be set-up for a payoff scene that came later. The payoff wasn’t nearly as good and in retrospect it cheapened the earlier scene. Oh well, it came towards the end – and then again, the same payoff with added joke, in case we missed it the first time.

And a nice scene between Clint Barton and his wife, gently ribbing him for failing to notice an Avengers office romance. (And by the way I’ve never seen any evidence in real life that women are so much better tuned to that stuff than men. Possibly they’re more interested in feelings, on average, unless that’s a myth too, but they’re certainly no better at intuiting them.) And here I was thinking Joss was really down on gender clichés after his remarks about that Jurassic Park teaser. Anyway, quibbles aside, he does that stuff well and the “Hawkeye” line was perfect.

And then – like hope flitting up from the bottom of the jar – there’s Mark Ruffalo. Oh, such brilliance in every expression, every line reading. He’s worth the price of admission just on his own. If only Joss could give us a Hulk movie. A Banner movie, I mean. Fewer characters, more time to develop a story, more character moments so that when the stomping and growling kicks off we might actually care. That would be worth your 15 bucks for sure.

Look, I honestly don’t have the time or the will to review the movie, but Sady Doyle did and I agree with much of what she said. Here it is if you’re interested, but I know it won't change anything.