Late-night-at-work thoughts on writing and gaming ...
Watching some monster SQLs execute, tweaking here and there, and thinking ...
What is it about long journeys and gaming? Seems like whenever I get stuck in some form of transit for hours at a time, I end up writing a module. One year my collaborative partner & I wrote four modules, one after the other, driving to and from conventions together. Put me & T in a car together for 12 hours, then a hotel for the weekend, then back to the car, and you end up with a tournament adventure.
Put me in a boring, noisy distraction-less plane for 10 hours and you get lots of bits and pieces knotted together in a sort of open-weave structure that is ready to be fleshed out for a tournament. Not having T around makes it harder for me to focus on one element at a time - he's a great foil for my INTP thinking patterns - but makes for a much richer story once you comb all the loose ends into some semblance of neatness. Even if my working notes come across more like afghans crocheted by Aunt Agnes on acid instead of a sturdy framework for a championship module that'll be played by serious power-gamers and min-maxers who don't just poke at the loopholes, they drive tractor-trailers through the damned things.
On the plane back from Ireland I had run out of challenging Sudoku puzzles, and it was daytime unlike the outbound trip, meaning sleep wasn't an option. So it was grab a pad of paper and start sketching. By landing-time I'd worked out the setting, backstory, major encounters, several minors, several possible outcomes (and impacts), and most of the "vested interest groups" that generalize the behavior of the NPCs, critters, and so on. Lots of motivation and explanation stuff ... how did they get here? Why are they staying (or leaving?) What's their angle? What's their desired goal? What's the relationship -- if any -- with the other encounters? Sure, the *purpose* of this encounter may be "chance for infodump if he's handled properly", but give the guy a logical reason for being there in the first place. And for sanity's sake, make it a reason that's consistent with the guy, the encounter, the module, and the world and events. That kind of thing is what I love to work out, sometimes to the detriment of the "getting it FINISHED" (which is where T and his control-freak traits come in. He's one of the few who dare to rip something out of my hands and start working on it even tho I'm "not finished yet! Just need to work out this one last ..".)
This isn't a masterpiece by any means. I'm going to be challenged to keep it from being more than a standard overland dungeon crawl with a few twists. Let's not even get into the difficulty of inserting parody elements after-the-fact instead of letting them develop as the story is fleshed out. We'll have to take some standard monsters and develop variant forms in order to fit the plan (luckily that's SOP for tournaments -- helps mitigate the rampant meta-gaming players do, and makes it less likely that a character can claim "I know what they're vulnerable too, my guy has fought them before!").
writing wise ....
Part of my working-out involves coming up with a full-fledged story for the backstory. I find that gives it more of a living, connected feeling. Plus, it sure as hell makes it easier to write the adventure itself when I have a detailed prequel!
Somedays I wish I could actually *write*, as a story, the backstory or game story for these adventures. If there were a way to do it without making it something that, to paraphrase jimhines describes it, is so much like a transcript of a gaming session that you can hear the dice rolling in the background ... Sometimes making up the backstory is so much fun the actual adventure itself becomes secondary.
Then I remember how much work it was just getting through English Composition classes, and change my mind. And the aftermath of English class wasn't joy of better writing (as if we ever use those 5-paragraph essay forms again), it was the torture of realizing I hated reading for months afterwards. It made reading not fun, a chore - something to be AVOIDED. I'm not going through that again. If it means my backstories remain a collection of typed notes and stream-of-consciousness puppypile of sentence fragments and run-ons, so be it. Long as *I* know what I wrote there, I'm OK.
Then again, it's the adventure that will have the "party" feel - a cleric, magic-caster, thief, fighters. They meet up in a tavern and go do things one-two-three. Whereas my backstories almost never involve "parties". Genocidal warlords, repentant ex-paladins, alcoholic unicorns, displacer bees, ninja ferrets, dwarves whose libraries include all 12 volumes of "ELVES GONE WILD!!!" and magic-users who really wanted to be Boy Scouts ... but they don't go out and do things in parties. They just go out and *do* things, sometimes with armies, sometimes with buddies, often alone or wishing they were alone. It's AFTER all that, the adventure starts and the real "party" of PCs comes along to deal with the aftermath.
The players never see more than slices of the backstory. The GMs see more of it. T gets subjected to, oh, about 50%, tops, during our negotiations over edits to the adventure. So all that work, and I'm the only one who reads or uses the majority of it.
OK my SQL batch is done time to submit the analytics run, go home and get to bed. In the morning I'll have a nice batch of reports and statistics to look at, yay for automation! Meanwhile, I've already made up the time lost to taking Monday off.
What is it about long journeys and gaming? Seems like whenever I get stuck in some form of transit for hours at a time, I end up writing a module. One year my collaborative partner & I wrote four modules, one after the other, driving to and from conventions together. Put me & T in a car together for 12 hours, then a hotel for the weekend, then back to the car, and you end up with a tournament adventure.
Put me in a boring, noisy distraction-less plane for 10 hours and you get lots of bits and pieces knotted together in a sort of open-weave structure that is ready to be fleshed out for a tournament. Not having T around makes it harder for me to focus on one element at a time - he's a great foil for my INTP thinking patterns - but makes for a much richer story once you comb all the loose ends into some semblance of neatness. Even if my working notes come across more like afghans crocheted by Aunt Agnes on acid instead of a sturdy framework for a championship module that'll be played by serious power-gamers and min-maxers who don't just poke at the loopholes, they drive tractor-trailers through the damned things.
On the plane back from Ireland I had run out of challenging Sudoku puzzles, and it was daytime unlike the outbound trip, meaning sleep wasn't an option. So it was grab a pad of paper and start sketching. By landing-time I'd worked out the setting, backstory, major encounters, several minors, several possible outcomes (and impacts), and most of the "vested interest groups" that generalize the behavior of the NPCs, critters, and so on. Lots of motivation and explanation stuff ... how did they get here? Why are they staying (or leaving?) What's their angle? What's their desired goal? What's the relationship -- if any -- with the other encounters? Sure, the *purpose* of this encounter may be "chance for infodump if he's handled properly", but give the guy a logical reason for being there in the first place. And for sanity's sake, make it a reason that's consistent with the guy, the encounter, the module, and the world and events. That kind of thing is what I love to work out, sometimes to the detriment of the "getting it FINISHED" (which is where T and his control-freak traits come in. He's one of the few who dare to rip something out of my hands and start working on it even tho I'm "not finished yet! Just need to work out this one last ..".)
This isn't a masterpiece by any means. I'm going to be challenged to keep it from being more than a standard overland dungeon crawl with a few twists. Let's not even get into the difficulty of inserting parody elements after-the-fact instead of letting them develop as the story is fleshed out. We'll have to take some standard monsters and develop variant forms in order to fit the plan (luckily that's SOP for tournaments -- helps mitigate the rampant meta-gaming players do, and makes it less likely that a character can claim "I know what they're vulnerable too, my guy has fought them before!").
writing wise ....
Part of my working-out involves coming up with a full-fledged story for the backstory. I find that gives it more of a living, connected feeling. Plus, it sure as hell makes it easier to write the adventure itself when I have a detailed prequel!
Somedays I wish I could actually *write*, as a story, the backstory or game story for these adventures. If there were a way to do it without making it something that, to paraphrase jimhines describes it, is so much like a transcript of a gaming session that you can hear the dice rolling in the background ... Sometimes making up the backstory is so much fun the actual adventure itself becomes secondary.
Then I remember how much work it was just getting through English Composition classes, and change my mind. And the aftermath of English class wasn't joy of better writing (as if we ever use those 5-paragraph essay forms again), it was the torture of realizing I hated reading for months afterwards. It made reading not fun, a chore - something to be AVOIDED. I'm not going through that again. If it means my backstories remain a collection of typed notes and stream-of-consciousness puppypile of sentence fragments and run-ons, so be it. Long as *I* know what I wrote there, I'm OK.
Then again, it's the adventure that will have the "party" feel - a cleric, magic-caster, thief, fighters. They meet up in a tavern and go do things one-two-three. Whereas my backstories almost never involve "parties". Genocidal warlords, repentant ex-paladins, alcoholic unicorns, displacer bees, ninja ferrets, dwarves whose libraries include all 12 volumes of "ELVES GONE WILD!!!" and magic-users who really wanted to be Boy Scouts ... but they don't go out and do things in parties. They just go out and *do* things, sometimes with armies, sometimes with buddies, often alone or wishing they were alone. It's AFTER all that, the adventure starts and the real "party" of PCs comes along to deal with the aftermath.
The players never see more than slices of the backstory. The GMs see more of it. T gets subjected to, oh, about 50%, tops, during our negotiations over edits to the adventure. So all that work, and I'm the only one who reads or uses the majority of it.
OK my SQL batch is done time to submit the analytics run, go home and get to bed. In the morning I'll have a nice batch of reports and statistics to look at, yay for automation! Meanwhile, I've already made up the time lost to taking Monday off.