How Role Playing Games Should Be Played

I found this story in a forum I frequent. It unfortunately was not sourced, so I can’t send a shout out to the players involved, but it was so awesome I felt everyone needed to read it:

“So there I am, watching my group bicker (in character) about how to get into the Temple of Akargon to retrieve the Rod of Improbability that’s rumored to be there. The little one (she’s 7), comes in from the next room, taps on one of my player’s shoulder to get his attention, and says “I’ve got the key I can sell you.”

Now, most groups would probably drop out of “game mode” at this point, humor her, and get back to playing. I don’t play with most groups.

The player says to her (still in character) “What do you want for it?”

“Five thousand gold” she replies, “and an ice cream cone.”

“An ice cream cone?! What’s that? More to the point, where do I find one.”

“There’s an ice cream store over near the school, but they’re closed now.”

“What if I just give you six thousand gold instead?”

“Okay, six thousand gold…and an ice cream cone.”

“No. No. I meant six thousand gold and no ice cream.”

“No ice cream, no key.” she says with her hands on her hips and a scowl on her face.

“I’m not sure it’s worth it. We could just kick the door down.”

“If you don’t have the key, the guards will kill you. They’re really tough. You’ll never get to the door to kick it.”

“According to our sources, there are no guards. Besides, a few soldiers shouldn’t be much of a problem.”

“They’re statues that come to life if you don’t have the key.” [note: this is news to me]

“We can handle a couple statues if we have to.”

“There’s a thousand of them.”

Another player chimes in (also in character). “If she’s even half-right, we’re going to need that key. I say we get her her ice cream. We’re wasting time.”

First player: “Okay, little one, we’ll get you some ice cream. How do we find you when we’ve got it?”

“I live here, silly. I’ll be in my room.” She says, and heads off. [another note: the characters were having this conversation in a burned out ruin in the middle of a barren wasteland]

The characters head off on a quest for ice cream (minus one player, who went to the store to buy ice cream and cones).”

To one of the obviously best groups out there: Keep being awesome.

Can You Stop the Inevitable?

I want to talk about one of my favorite board games.

It’s not my favorite because of any one thing I normally use to appraise my games, but because the combination really makes it stand out.

Pandemic from Z-Man Games

Pandemic is about a group of people trying to prevent a global pandemic from wiping out humanity.

Quick Primer

Pandemic is a generally abstract game in which the disease is represented by wooden cubes. At the end of each player’s turn, a deck of location cards is revealed one card at a time to reveal where the infections are spreading. Players take turns moving around the board curing cubes, collecting location cards, and trying to get together enough research to develop a vaccine for each of the four diseases.

The cooperative nature of Pandemic is awesome, making for a real bonding experience unlike some more famous games on the market. The difficulty can scale from easy to ‘legendary,’ allowing all skill levels to enjoy it. Due to the random nature of the game, with both roles and the infections themselves, the game is great for replaying.

In Pandemic, the rate that the infection spreads is determined by an Infection Rate, which starts at two. So at the beginning of the game, you only reveal two new infections per turn. In the player deck there are a number of Epidemic cards (From four to six, or eight with the expansion) that when they are drawn do some fairly significant things. The first is that they draw the bottom card from the infection deck and place three cubes on that city. Then, they shuffle the infection discard pile and place it on top of the deck. And then they increase the infection rate tracker.

This creates a rising tension. As the game goes on and you get closer to your goal, the game starts getting harder. The viruses spread faster, the board slowly gets congested, and the player cards start to run low. I’ve even see players panic and fall apart during a game, making the climax turn into a death spiral of bad choices.

Another mechanic I love is the roles. Each role has a special ability that only they get to use. This allows strategists to appreciate the game a bit more, but also adds to the overall ‘story’ of the game. For example, how a medic, researcher, and scientist deal with the board is quite different from a generalist, dispatcher, and operations expert. To a creative mind, a whole series of stories could be developed out of multiple games of Pandemic.

Being Bad

Only one thing keeps you bad at any task.

We can move from bad to good.

Don’t quit, or you’ll never make it.

Sunday Mash-Up!

Doing a tiny ‘mini-announcement’ today, but I’ll be participating in the next Round of Words in 80 Days. Writers out there who aren’t involved, please check it out, starts July 4th!

By now, I’m sure everyone has heard about J.K. Rowling’s move to self publish the e-books for Harry Potter. This is pretty cool news from an observation standpoint, but of course comes littered with controversy. The Passive Voice has been kind enough to round up a bunch of the news into one place.

In the continuing drama of the publishing industry’s ‘David and Goliath,’ a book store has openly announced they will not host author appearances from authors who have been published by one of Amazon’s imprints.

With information on both of the above pieces of information, J.A. Konrath puts for more on his opinion of traditional publishing’s ‘death spiral.’

Jami Gold wrote a piece on What Makes a Character Unlikable. This was pretty useful for me, considering my current WIP has a character motivated by pretty selfish reasoning.

This isn’t new, but it’s remarkably cool: A self-aware robot that can react to personal injury.

A friend of mine linked me to this 1736 Canting Dictionary. Very cool, spectacularly nerdy.

TED Music:

On The Music Wars

Selling In One Sentence

The log line. The one sentence summary. The blurb. The ‘elevator pitch.’

As a writer, I hear talk about these all the time. As a general creative individual I have to ‘sell’ ideas. As a former salesman I had to master the pitch for whatever it was I needed to sell.

It’s both the hardest part of a sell and the easiest. It’s the easiest because once you master your pitch the hardest part of presenting ideas, opening the conversation is over and done with. It’s the hardest part because it’s never right the first time!

In sales, the advice is always about benefit. You need to tell the person why they’ll benefit from giving you their money. I’ll throw out an example from my time as an employee for Movie Gallery. We had a program called the Powerplay, which was essentially a prepaid discount program. What we were selling was a monthly program, the benefit was always about savings.

In other places, the benefit is generally implied, for example, novels. The benefit is ‘entertainment.’ So you need to sell it differently.

It goes around a lot about what makes a good story. It’s characters, it’s conflict, it’s plot. That’s not the point. Your not enticing return readers with your log line, you’re out to catch new readers in the book store version of cold calling. (For the record, phone sales are terrible. Even if you’re dealing with repeat customers!)

I’ve found, while perfecting things for the Snowflake Method that I used to use religiously, is that the log line is really a summary of the book. It’s the answer to that dreaded ‘what’s this book about?’

Armed with the realization of ‘what’ I was trying to write, I then needed a ‘how.’ I’m a fairly formulaic individual, I like having patterns and using the shortest path between two points. So I needed a theory that let me develop log lines quickly. That lead me to some of the key things that draw readers into the plot.

Character

I started with character, because it’s pretty obvious. Readers love characters. Viewers for television love characters. Even roleplayers love characters. Identifying with a character is one of the easiest ways to fall in love with a bit of unreality. So that’s the first thing I focus on with both my stories and my log lines. Which character drives the story? Which one is the easiest to identify with?

Conflict

Conflict was the next easy one. It kind of developed from character since a character needs to be doing something, and conflict is the natural outcome of that. There’s also a subschool of thought on fiction that conflict is the real driving force behind all great fiction.

Stakes

The stakes were the hard part of the puzzle for me. Conflict is all well and good, but if the conflict is there for the wrong reason it can really throw a reader off. Over time, I came to realize that sometimes what’s at stake in a conflict is as important to the reader as the conflict or characters. So I added that to the equation and found talking about my works in progress really fired people up.

So it’s that simple: Character + Conflict + Stakes. Mix all three and serve. To give an example, a friend of mine was having issues with her novel, pushing certain elements in her one sentence that weren’t doing it for her. After some talks, I put together this:

“A journalist is pulled into a time-traveling conspiracy when his fiancee’s brother is implicated in the death of a world leader.” Flyday

This sums up nicely the three points above, and even hints at deeper issues.

Like all creative endeavors, it takes time and practice, so try it out, poll your friends, or Twitter, and make the best log line you can!

Lunatic Writers: Getting It Out

I have a confession.

I’m a perfectionist.

No, seriously, I’m that horrid type of perfectionist that if I can’t get it RIGHT I won’t do it at all! Read More

We Must Do that Thing We Love

I have a friend. I like encouraging this friend. She’s got plenty of potential. But we were discussing dreams today, and she told me she didn’t have any.

I was floored!

How can anyone have no dreams? Dreaming of the future makes us human!

It was worse, though. I asked why she didn’t try to make writing a career. She obviously loved to craft her stories.

“No way. I love writing too much to make it a living.”

She imagines the deadlines, and the salesmanship that being a writer requires more and more, and couldn’t stand it!

Why do we settle for something we hate when our passions lead us so well to things that make us genuinely happy?

There’s a saying that I’m sure some of you have heard before that gets passed around my family pretty often:

You have to love what you do, but you can’t do what you love.

I’m throwing a flag on this one. I accepted it as truth, like so many children will when that beloved family member imparts a bit of wisdom. No longer.

We absolutely must do what we love. Passion creates drive, and drive is the only thing that can help us weather the storm of uncertainty that is the current economic environment. We may never be rich, but we’ll be happy.

At the same time, we have to be practical. It’s very easy to bend things to our passions. In college, when I’m allowed to pick my subject for research, I pick something to do with the publishing industry. In one case, it’s the economics of ebooks. Another case was a company analysis of a Forbes 100 company, I chose News Corporation, the holding company that owns The New York Post and HarperCollins. We can turn the dull into something we’re passionate about.

So let’s do what we love. Let’s find a way to survive doing that thing that drives us more than anything else. The internet has created a huge open market, now’s the time to take advantage of it.

Updates: Editing After Publishing

Why would you update a blog post after you push it out? Shouldn’t you have done the best you could the first time? Wouldn’t a new post on the matter be better?

Some good questions, and important ones. One thing I’m sure doesn’t get noticed here is I do edit my posts now and then. Some good reasons to edit your posts:

Updated Information

If something changes, you want the information you’re sharing with your readers completely up-to-date. Feel free to edit bad information and replace it with good information! It’s a service to your readers, especially if it’s a highly rated page.

Clarity

Sometimes, what you think works, doesn’t. If you get commentors asking what you mean, fix it. Make it more clear for further readers what it is you’re talking about!

Additional Resources

Did you find a great article or video that expands on your topic? Share it with your readers. Help them get the most out of your information by sharing more great information!

So, why not use a new post? Well, it depends on the post. If you’re not expanding significantly on the original point, it could just create two (conflicting) pages on the same information on your blog! Don’t do this to your readers if you can help it. Help them find the information they’re looking for as easily as possible.

As for the ‘do not’: Don’t edit posts to save face. Your readers will notice. If you screw up, the best way to save face is to accept it and apologize. Readers respect authenticity and even the best make mistakes.

Question for You: Have you ever gone back over your archive to update information?

The Red Pen, the Schmitte of Writers?

Writers all know the feeling:

You give your manuscript to a trusted critique partner, and wait with bated breath.

It comes back covered in red ink, but that’s not really the end of the story, is it?

The red ink reminds me of a practice that used to be popular in the Germanic countries: academic fencing.

Quick history lesson, academic fencing is a form of swordplay intended to show the worthiness or manliness of the fighters. There were no winners or losers. The two fighters would stand a fixed distance from each other and attempt to strike the other.

The strikes were aimed at the face, specifically the left side. The strike, and subsequent scar, were called Schmitte, which means smite.

Schmitte were considered character building.

In the writing world, we love to hate the red ink. Hate to see it, hate to find out what it says. But we use it to build the character of our works. Knowing what’s wrong in the eyes of another reader helps us firm up soft spots, leaves the manuscripts with scars that are more pleasing to read.

So perhaps we should start looking at the red ink as our own Schmitte, looking forward to the after effects that mark our piece as better than before.

Question for you:

What are your personal feelings on the Red Pen?

The Profit Motive Is Good For You

I’m kind of a late comer to the party of the ‘e-book pricing debate’ but it’s really getting out of hand. One side literally is racing for the bottom. Make it as cheap as possible; more people buy it that way. The other thinks that the price each individual buys a book for somehow denotes its worth. Both groups are dead wrong! Read More . . .