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.

Different strokes

Games designer, critic and journalist James Desborough put up this video in response to a furore at UK Games Expo back in June. James's points are pretty much what I think myself about all the fuss, but that's not why I'm linking to it here. What I am particularly interested in is his succinct definition of "indie" vs "traditional" roleplaying from 9m 55s on.

In the former, the players get together to tell a story (if you've worked in a writers' room or collaborated on a novel you'll know how that goes) whereas in the traditional form of roleplaying it's not authorial. You play a character. The umpire (or GM, or referee, or MC, or whatever) creates situations. Your characters do things in response to those situations. In retrospect, that can be seen as a story (or a plot, as in, "The king died, and then the queen died of grief") but nobody knew what was going to happen in advance. There was no author. The story emerged from what the player-characters said and did.

Personally I prefer that because my day job (one of my day jobs) is being a writer. I don't want to repeat that in my downtime. Also, I play RPGs to discover and be surprised. The stories that are generated spontaneously from players' in-character words and deeds are more unexpected and more interesting than the ones we'd get if we sat around applying the cookie-cutter of Campbellian story paradigms to the pastry of a story set-up.

That's a personal preference, of course. I bristle if I hear players talking about their story arc and whether it's time for another player to move their relationship on in order to incite a plot point. But then, I'm not much of a fan of genre drama or fiction, and much of that "indie" take seems to derive from genre shapes for stories. As Roger Bell-West says here (at 1:26:20) in such games the goal is not to simulate any physical reality, but to simulate a genre.

In any case, every gaming group is entitled to play in whatever way they most enjoy. There's no One True Roleplaying religion. It gets interesting (and matters) when proponents of one style run up against and misunderstand the playing style and intentions of the other -- as seems to have happened in the Things From The Flood game at UKGE. But if you want to know more about that, continue watching James's video from 12m 12s onwards. I have to say, though, that I ran a Powered by the Apocalypse game (Gregor Vuga's Sagas of the Icelanders) and my players enjoyed it in a thoroughly traditional, in-the-moment, inhabit-the-character style, with absolutely no authorial discussion or narrative analysis. Maybe we were getting PbtA "wrong", but it worked, and I might post some of the scenarios now that the nights are drawing in.

Games people are playing

I haven't played it, so don't take this as an endorsement, but indie developer Panic Barn have announced a "post-Brexit Papers Please" called Not Tonight. Apparently they're expecting "a flurry of negative reviews". Well, all publicity is good publicity, so that's a better thing to hope for than the crashing silence Jamie and I got in response to Can You Brexit?

Probably the mistake we made is that we made our political gamebook (there's a very nice custom "character sheet" for it here, incidentally) fairly balanced. The media really aren't interested in something unless it gets them spitting with outrage. You can judge for yourself in this episode of the Brave New Words podcast from Starburst magazine. The presenters start the show with a trigger warning, if that's any guide.

Speaking of trigger warnings, the trailer above opens with footage of Nigel Farage. In my house that can provoke a reaction that scares cats and breaks crockery. But hey, your tolerance levels may be different.

Other interactive things I haven't played include Charlie Higson's stab at a Fighting Fantasy book, The Gates of Death. It's for younger kids than the original '80s FF fandom - or maybe kids are just kiddier these days. Anyway, apparently that means fewer gory/scary encounters and more pop culture references and bottom jokes. Try it on your kids and see what they think. You may first need to convince them it's not a Miss Marple mystery, though, judging by the cover design.

I'm told by Mark Lain, aka Malthus Dire, that his gamebook Destiny's Role is the first of a planned series. There is very little about it on the web, but from the Amazon product page I've gleaned that this book comprises four different adventures in different genres, including a noir-style private dick scenario. (That's dick as in detective, of course, not what it would mean in a Higson book.) Marco Arnaudo's video review below should give you an idea of what the adventures are like.


French company Celestory, who seem to be a European answer to Choice of Games, have announced a forthcoming academic book called Interactive Story which will be published in both Europe and the US around Christmas 2018..

And while we're doing a round-up of games and gamebooks, let me put in another plug for Martin Noutch's excellent Steam Highwayman, in part inspired by Keith Roberts' SF classic Pavane. The Highwayman is building up pressure for another outing, so if you're a Fabled Lands player and you're into steampunk, this is for you.