Working with "weak" characters

One of the most challenging things about being a gamemaster compared to a writer of fiction is lack of control over the protagonists. Not in-game control, but planning control… you're never guaranteed that the characters are going to have good (or any) plot hooks that you can work with. Roleplaying characters, instead of being richly detailed as you might expect, often have little detail in my experience. They often have no real motivations, no goals, and often the player doesn't even have an idea of what the character's daily routine is.

All the books on fiction fundamentals basically say that you can't tell a good story without good characters. And here the gamemaster is stuck trying to set up a situation rich with story potential when the characters are still very shallow and vague. Most players are more or less open to suggestions, but when the character has little personality or background details, it's hard to even know where to start making suggestions. If they were characters in a story I was writing, it'd be easy to make them more interesting, because I wouldn't have to worry about offending the player by making suggestions that run counter to their assumptions about the character. (Assumptions that they often cannot articulate, but they know a idea that runs counter to those assumptions when they see it.)

It's difficult not to become annoyed. By not taking the time to create more fully-realized characters, the players push more work onto the gamemaster. "I can't think of anything interesting. Here, you make it interesting for me, but don't mess with my character." When it comes to crunch time, it's always the gamemaster that has to deliver, not the player.

I've had a "creating good player characters" article on the back burner for a few years now. Someday I'm going to have to finish it.

Struggling with adventure prep

I recently started a superhero campaign with Fudge, and we've got two really shaky sessions under our belt. Thanks to busy summer schedules, I've had weeks to prepare for this session and I've been struggling with it. Mostly I've put it off because I've had no inspiration and it's not been doing a very good job of brewing subconsciously. (Usually some times not intentionally thinking about a project produces something… but it's not helping this time.)

One of the things that causes me to struggle with a campaign and preparing adventures is not having an overarching theme of some kind. And if I don't already have an idea when the campaign starts, it's often difficult to apply an arbitrary theme. Characters with well-defined motivations and goals help a lot, but I'm faced with a lot of "blank canvas" issues on this one… "we're a superhero group, we fight crime" leaves me so many options that I have trouble deciding on a direction. This happens mostly because I'm wanting to tie plot elements into the characters' backgrounds, motivations and goals. I don't have a great deal of that to work with with this batch of characters. Everyone's pressed for time and there hasn't been a great deal of work put into any of the characters. (Or the campaign, so I can't blame my players too much.)

I've started the first adventure with the only strong plot hook I could find in the three characters, and after many weeks of brain-storming, I've come up with a theme for at least a multi-adventure sub-plot. It may become the main plot with unrelated adventures woven in between, but it'll work well as a sub-plot if I find something else to take the main slot. I've an ideas for a stronger main plot, and I've got the character hooks to keep it from being totally arbitrary, but I'm not sure if I want to go in that direction or not yet.

New writing blog

I've started a new blog to capture my thoughts about NaNoWriMo and my writing in general…

http://raven.phoenyx.net/writing/

NaNoWriMo

Like many gamers, I'm a fan of sci-fi and fantasy novels, and was into them before I discovered gaming. And like many gamers, I secretly harbor a desire to write a novel, or even write a best-selling series and say goodbye to the day job to embrace the bitter-sweet agonies of writing for a living.

Of course, like many gamers, I've never actually written a novel, or even a passable short story. I do have a bookshelf full of writing how-to books, many of them purchased under the guise of GM aids for creating characters and plot. (And I highly recommend some of them for that purpose. I should list some of my favorites here soon.)

But the point I'm working up to is this. Next month is National Novel Writer's Month, or NaNoWriMo. It's not a month set aside to honor existing novelists… it's a month to create novelists. Specifically, would-be novelists are challenged to write a 50,000 word novel in just 30 short days. That's nearly 1,700 words a day. Last November, I was up to my eyeballs in school work, but I put it on my calendar for 2004, and now in a short two weeks, NaNoWriMo begins again. I still have some school issues, but I'm trying to decide if I can arrange my schedule to cram in a few thousand words a week.

Why? Well, Chris Baty, the founder of NaNoWriMo, wrote a book on the subject… a guide to NaNoWriMo entitled No Plot? No Problem! A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days. And he points out a basic fact that I've come to realize on my own… deadlines are very powerful. What GM hasn't realized the power of a deadline on Friday night, when a Saturday afternoon game hanging over his head? Deadlines make things happen. NaNoWriMo sets a deadline for writing a novel, and then Baty gives some helpful tips on getting others to enforce the deadline for you.

It does one other important thing. It gives you permission to write utter dreck. I can't seem to break through the "getting started" barrier because I know my initial work will be horrible. I fiddle and waffle through the first thousand words because I can't get the beginning "just right." But hey… if you write it in just thirty days, you can always say, "Hey, I wrote it in thirty days, just what did you expect? I had to write the opening in just one evening!" The important thing is to break through the barrier of perfectionism and fear that you can't write anything worth reading. Get the words down and sort it out in the rewrite later. (Which you get to do after November, of course.)

If I do take it on, I'm not sure what I'm going to write about. Probably some crappy coming-of-age story set in one of my game worlds. But hey, it'll be my crappy story, and I'll have the satisfaction of actually finishing a novel, instead of fiddling with the beginnings of a novel over and over again.