Monthly Archives: December 2011

Help Me Ruin My Vacation

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Starting on Friday, I have 11 days of vacation set up. Of course, I’ll still be doing a little White Wolf work during that time (because “vacation” really means “a chance to catch up on work”), but I really do want to try and relax. So, the first announcement is that I’m planning to be less available on the Internet during that time. I have vacation responders set up for both of my email accounts, I won’t be on social networks as much, I won’t be updating this blog, and so on. I’m not going to be completely off the grid, but I do need some time away and live in my own head for a bit.

Part of the reason I’m doing that is that I want to finish off my Hamlet short story, and then roll right into revising and expanding my book of Tour de Holmes essays. Aside from comments on each of the stories, I also have in mind a discussion of Smart Watson vs. Dumb Watson, the popularity of Moriarty over the other (and sometimes more visible) villains in the canon, Holmes’ cocaine use, Watson’s wives, and (if I hate myself enough) the chronology of the cases.

So, faithful audience, what topics of the Sherlock Holmes canon would you like me to discuss/rant about in such a manuscript?

Mechanics and setting

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motion gears -team forceMichael Cunliffe once said to me "I’d be very interested in a post about whether (or how to) use mechanics to suit setting in RPGs – how do you use dice rolls to provide not only dramatic, but thematic effect for players."

And I obey.

I’ve had an informal maxim in my head for years now as a game designer, and with every year that passes and every design I work on, I’m more and more certain it’s the right one. I’ve never really written it down before, but it goes something like this:

Mechanics drive player behavior.

On the surface, this sounds simple – a game about westerns should have rules about gunfights if it wants to have dramatic gunfights, and so on. But it goes deeper than that, I feel. Games feel different depending on what mechanics they use. This is more explicit with board games, card games, video games, and less flexible genres of game, but even the flavor and tenor of role-playing games are impacted by their choice of mechanics.

Take games of a similar genre, such as Boot Hill and Dust Devils.1 Both are Western games, but each is focusing on something different, whether the design is intended or not, and as a result you get different games. While there is a tried-and-true tradition of hacking or drifting rules in RPGs, what the game focuses on in terms of mechanics will consciously and subconsciously impact how the game is played. While some players can (and will) resist against the tide of mechanics, most will gladly be swept right along, and will indulge in the gameplay the mechanics present and reinforce. And a chunk of the feel and setting for an RPG is created by how the players act within it.

So yes, mechanics should help establish the setting in RPGs. But as a designer, how can you do that?

First, you have to know on a very real level what your setting needs to have enshrined in a mechanic. I believe every version of Dungeons & Dragons has alignment, even if the actual system has gone through various changes. The reason, though, is simple: the difference between "good" and "evil" matters in that game. Even if it doesn’t often come up in the game (and in my experience, it doesn’t come up much at all, aside from the odd "Detect Evil" spell), the fact that it exists and that there are parts of the game that work differently depending on that choice means that in D&D being good or evil is meaningful to the game, and therefore to the setting.

Next, you have to make sure those mechanics matter. Every version of Vampire has had Humanity as a mechanic. And not only a little mechanic, a small number tucked away on a character sheet, but a large ladder of dots. It generally takes up a fair amount of real-estate on a character sheet, and many fans of the game will remark on it being a core element of the game. The actual mechanic isn’t used that often compared to other parts of the game, but when it is, it’s often a significant moment. You can literally lose your character on a bad dice roll, so you’re encouraged to take actions that keep you from having to make that roll. If you make that mechanic matter to the player on a fundamental level, it will impact their game.

(As a side note, I once was in a chronicle of Dark Ages Vampire while I was also playing in a different campaign of D&D. There was a fair amount of overlap in some setting elements, such as "medieval hero uses unusual powers to deal with problems," but each game felt very different at their base because of the different emphasis in mechanics. Similarly, I’ve played an Exalted game under the same Storyteller who ran Dark Ages Vampire, and again they were very different feeling games because of the mechanics.)

Finally, the rest of the game needs to reinforce this mechanic. Paranoia is good at this. Although different editions emphasize different parts of the setting,2 the setting always reinforced and encourages the kind of player-against-player backstabbing and treachery that the rules encouraged. Everything about the game – even the name – backs up and supports this player dynamic.

This is why, I think, small games with a few mechanics and a strong direction are doing well these days – if you have a good vision for the game and everything else supports that vision, the game is stronger as a result.

  1. I just finished up working on Tales of the Far West and I’m rereading The Gunslinger, so yeah, I’m on a Western kick right now. Shut up. ↩
  2. And, I feel, end up making the game feel different each time, something that Paranoia XP explicitly drew on ↩

You Call That Writing?

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(I’m finally dipping into my backlog of blog requests. This one is from Ryan Macklin.)

I call myself a writer. I’ve had a number of titles over the course of my life, including “developer” and “designer.” I’ve worked on video games, role-playing games, fiction, non-fiction, television, podcasting, and I’ve even written a few programs in my day.1 But if someone were to ask me who I am or what I do, I inevitably say I am a writer.

But here and now, in 2011, “writer” is about as specific as “human being” as a label. So much goes into my work as a writer these days that has very little to do with prose. Granted, I do a fair amount of activities that comprise “proper writing.” I have kept bound journals for years, and I use them quite often to keep track of notes and write down ideas. Every computer I have ever owned has had some kind of word processor on it, and these days even my phone has one. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about grammar, word choice, story construction, or something else related to the craft of writing. But there are so many things that have changed.

  • “Writers are loners who need solitude.” That’s always been an unfortunate stereotype, I’ve found (even notorious loners like H. P. Lovecraft had a thriving community of correspondents), but it’s increasingly untrue across the board. Whether you self-publish, are traditionally published, or work full-time for a company as a writer, the need to be engage in a community (of fans, of other writers, or just other people) isn’t just easier, but necessary. You can call it “networking” or “monetizing a community” or “coming with tribe” or whatever buzzword you want, but it comes down to the fact that being a writer means you need to talk to other people. Period.
  • “Writers write.” Well, sure. But they also market. They research. They learn how social networks work (because of the previous point). They make a website. They teach themselves new software. They support and promote the work of their friends and peers. They struggle with Kickstarter or find an agent or file their taxes. Writers still write, but writers also need to be businesspeople, because the days in which someone else being able to take care of everything are gone.
  • “I’ll focus on the writing, and someone else will make it look good.” More and more, understanding of the aesthetics of the final product is important. What would look good on a cover? What font is best to use? How should things be formatted? In a world where a few mouse-clicks can change the entire formatting of a document, people are less likely to struggle through an ugly manuscript even if the words are strong and powerful. Writers have to think about the visual context of their work more and more, and many times have to create or modify that context themselves.
  • “Writers drink.” Well, that’s still true.

It feels like professional writers are increasingly required to be jacks-of-all-trades, learning a little about a lot of skills and using those to apply back to the craft of writing. While it sounds daunting, it really isn’t. It’s balanced by the fact that it’s easier than ever to get people to read (and buy) your work. Before it could have only happened through a publisher, but now you can upload a document to Amazon and start selling it. The fight isn’t to get it out there — the fight is to get it noticed. And more and more the only person who is going to help you get noticed is you.

I think this is a good trend, over all. We need to get out more, lest we become feral wordmonkeys stewing in our cages and snapping at passersby.  We need to learn a little more about what it takes to get our beautiful work into the hands of others, lest we think that all other disciplines are easy compared to the weighty work of crafting worlds. We need to realize that there’s a whole world out there, lest we come to believe that sitting at a desk and waiting for people to throw money at us is a sound business plan.

I still think of myself as a writer. I just define “writing” a little more broadly than I used to.

  1. That day was long ago, however — I’m in the process of learning how to program all over again. ↩

To the Far West: Writing is Rewriting

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Last time I ended up with a shitty first draft. And it was shitty — I changed my mind in the middle of the story twice, I didn’t like the name of one of the characters after I typed it out a dozen times, and overall the whole thing was a mess. So now it was time to make it better.

First off, I should mention that I generally write first drafts in plain text, either using WriteMonkey on the PC, or PlainText on my iPad. I do this because both work well with DropBox (so I can move between software packages as needed), both have just enough features to be useful, and both lack a particular feature — easy ability to jump around in the manuscript. If it’s irritating to scroll back a few pages and check something, I’m more likely to just push forward, which is what I want for the first draft.

At this stage, though, I need to jump around and edit, so I saved the whole thing as a Word document.1 The second draft was very simple — I took the comments I made to myself in square brackets and turned them into Word comments (getting them out of my text), and did a quick readthrough to get rid of grammatical errors and insert styles. Again, this is where the plain text draft helps me — since I can’t bold or italicize in plain text, I have to do this pass to make sure my formatting is accurate. I also found a few more notes of things to correct, and culled a couple of notes that were redundant.

I then broke my notes up into two categories: local and global. Local comments related to a particular scene or chunk of the manuscript (like “make sure to reference the detective’s bag here”), while global comments were things I needed to check against the whole manuscript (like “avoid an over-reliance on eyes,” which is a tell2 of mine). Draft three then was taking on the local comments, and draft four was taking on the global comments. Finally, draft five was an overall polish and revision. Sometimes I do additional polish and revision drafts, but time was running out and I was getting a bit sick of looking at it, so I kept it to one pass.

It might seem counter-intuitive to change small things before large things, but it actually makes sense to me. If there’s a large thing that really needs to change first (like the character’s name I mentioned), odds are I’ve already decided that it needs to change, and I’ll do that in the second draft as I’m working my way through. If it’s really big, I have scrapped part (or all) of a first draft to address the problem, because usually if it’s that huge, I’ve written myself into some kind of corner. Either way, those kinds of problems never make it past draft two, so by starting small and working my way up, I’m fixing more urgent problems, and then making sure that it all fits together nicely later. If I went the other way around, it’s possible that my small fixes would break something larger in the manuscript, and I wouldn’t notice it.

Also, a trick I’ve picked up from when I was podcasting Whitechapel: for my polish pass, I read the story out loud to myself. I have caught so many errors and style flubs through this one technique that I simple cannot imagine writing fiction anymore without doing this step. It takes longer (and in my case, makes your wife look at you a bit strangely), but it really does work.

And so, five drafts later, I have the first draft for the editor. In the past editors have either taken my first draft entirely or made minor edits without needing my input, but I never assume that. I always expect that I will have to do even more revisions based on editorial feedback, which might include going back to draft one.

Writing is rewriting. Lots and lots of rewriting.

  1. I have in the past used other software like OpenOffice for this stage, but I find myself coming back to Word time and again. ↩
  2. A tell is what I call a quirk of style that comes up time and again. Once in a while it’s clever and interesting, but most of the time as a writer you want to reduce your tells as much as you would when playing poker. ↩