How real is make-believe?

Which strikes you as more real: Bambi or The Deer Hunter?

When William Goldman talked about “comic book movies", he didn’t mean the MCU. This was back in 1983. He didn’t mean movies like Superman either – a movie he’d been invited to write, incidentally, being a Golden Age comics fan – or not only Superman, but also Raiders of the Lost Ark, Gunga Din, E.T., Star Wars. And The Deer Hunter. If you want to know why, and how Bambi doesn’t classify as “comic book” storytelling and The Deer Hunter does, read what Goldman has to say about all this in Adventures in the Screen Trade.

Andrew Gelman, a statistician, raised a similar point on his blog recently:

“I was rereading Lord of the Rings […] and was struck by how real it felt. […] In contrast, take a book like Golden Hill […I]t doesn’t feel ‘real’, whatever that means.”

You may not have read Golden Hill. Not to worry, I read it for you. Prof Gelman is right, there is an artificiality to its picture of 18th century Manhattan that feels like a TV drama with machine-tailored suits and the wrong haircuts and makeup. This often seems to be the case with historical fiction. Compare The Essex Serpent, set in a late 1800s that never feels real, with The Odd Women, actually written in the late 1800s, which rings true throughout.

Prof Gelman seems to be focussing on prose style, which mainly has to do with whether the author is using a storytelling voice or not, but I’m more interested in stories that set out to describe a milieu that feels like our real universe rather than a “story universe”. Contrast the 1968 novel Pavane with almost any steampunk story (a genre of which it might well be the progenitor). Keith Roberts set out to tell us about something that could happen. Steampunk is usually predicated in let’s pretend – here is a fun universe for cosy adventure, even cosy misery, but you are never expected or intended to think of it as real.

For a very real story (David St. Hubbins might say “a bit too fucking real”) try George Gissing’s The Nether World. In the hands of Dickens we'd accompany a well-born character into the nether world of poverty in Clerkenwell the late 1880s. Dickens would give us their perspective of the monstrous characters and comic turns to be found there. And I like Dickens, but Gissing has an entirely different approach. We see the characters through their own eyes. We see how poverty brutalizes them. There's no sentiment, no avuncular author nudging the plot to satisfy the readers with warm life-lessons and unrealistic outcomes. Gissing's humour is sparing and far drier than Dickens's and he gives us an angry, despairing, unforgettable journey through this hell. Which is not to say it's a story without hope, only that the good is achieved at great effort and only sparingly. 

Once you start using this filter you see lots of examples. As SF, Children of Men is more real than Black Mirror which is more real than Babylon 5 which is more real than Star Wars. Breaking Bad is more real than Better Call Saul, less real than The Shield, but all three are far less real than true crime dramas like Rillington Place or The Staircase, because real life is messier and more surprising than the predictable twists and tropes of genre fiction.

Either can work, by the way. Goldman is careful to make that point. Gunga Din was his favourite movie of all time. Excalibur is one of mine, and there the characters screw and sit down to dinner in full plate armour. I used to enjoy the occasional game of Call of Cthulhu even though its 1920s is far less real than the entirely created world of Tekumel in Swords & Glory.

That reality – or authenticity, if you prefer – is what I’m aiming for with my current Jewelspider scenarios like “A Garland of Holly”. There’s still fantasy there, that’s not the issue. It’s that the society and the characters don’t feel like something set on a stage for you to watch and be entertained by. Instead you are there in the midst of them, the NPCs no less real than the player-characters. Events happen with the “ruthless poignancy” that C S Lewis admired in Homer. Like in life.

Crafting characters and stories

The current trend in indie roleplaying is to keep at least one eye on the authorial view of your character. I played in a recent game where a player used a retcon rule to ensure their character appeared in the right place in the nick of time to foil an NPC villain's master plan. Somebody on Twitter (or X if you're a member of the Musk family) was proposing that a player should get to write the monologue for the BBEG of the campaign. Even the rules of some indie RPGs are built around "satisfying character arcs" and other Hollywood-exec jargon.

It's not to my taste. I don't like retcons because they break immersion. Taking an authorial view of your PC doubly so. I prefer narratives that emerge in the moment; they're more exhilarating to play in and less trite to experience. I didn't even know what BBEG stood for till I Googled it. My campaigns rarely have anything as simplistic as a Big Bad (that's for kids' TV) and in any case they wouldn't waste time monologuing (has nobody out there seen The Incredibles?).

When Pelgrane Press got the Dying Earth licence, we talked about some Dying Earth gamebooks and I must admit I came up with an authorial approach. Paul Mason had to point out to me that the main effect of putting the player in the author's role would be to distance them emotionally from the events of the story. That might be why it's favoured in indie roleplaying, in fact; the ultimate safe space is when you don't have to commit to the character, the same way that Mystery Science Theater 3000 allowed nerds to ironically distance themselves from movies they'd be embarrassed to admit to liking.

But even if you don't play in authorial mode, it's handy to know about plotting and characterization. If you're refereeing the game you'll at least want to go in with a storyline in mind, even if it's just a safety net that you'll never use because the real story will be shaped spontaneously by the players' actions. And character-creation tips aren't only useful for designing NPCs. Players can benefit from starting with some traits and foibles, even if (as often happens) those drop away later as the character becomes more real to them.

Which is why I recommend Roz Morris's Nail Your Novel series. All right, yes, I am married to her. But I wouldn't let a little thing like that sway my opinion. I use Roz's advice when writing my own stories, both in book form and around the gaming table. You can try out her 100 tips for fascinating characters free. Let us know how you get on, and which style of roleplaying you prefer.