Storytelling » DarrellHardy.com

Planting Story Seeds part 3: Consistency

Today I’ll be wrapping up this series of posts on creating stories for storyworlds with a few notes on consistency. (And I’ll not even mention hobgoblins, except to point out that “Consistency Hobgoblin” would make a great band name.)

It almost goes without saying that any stories developed from a storyworld should be consistent with what’s been established for that storyworld. If we’ve established that the lizard-headed politicians eat babies, they should be baby-eaters in your story. If the special crimes unit is known to be feuding with the mayor’s office, it should be awkward when they’re all forced to join the same intramural basketball team. If you’ve told us the the Force is a “energy field created by all living things,” you should think twice about making it the byproduct of microbes in your next story.

Most of this is continuity. Once you’ve established the mechanics of a storyworld element — what it is, how it works, how it smells, its relationship to other elements — those things should remain consistent across all stories from that storyworld. You might think it doesn’t matter, but in this age of wikis, messages boards, and the tightly woven network of people who love your stuff enough to meticulously pick every nit, it matters a lot.

Beyond continuity (which I’ll admit is pretty obvious), stories from the same storyworld should have a consistent genre, tone, and theme.

Consistent genre means that if you’ve established your storyworld as one of science fiction, your story shouldn’t feature unicorns and elves. And if it’s based on the real world (but with more serial killers and grizzled FBI profilers), you’d best avoid vampires, witchcraft, or elves. Know the genre of the storyworld, and don’t include elements from other genres — especially elves.

Consistent tone is a bit trickier, as tone is harder to pin down than genre. (“It’s horror, yes, but it’s slapstick horror: bloody, but funny-bloody, not dark-bloody.”) Once you can define your storyworld’s tone, make sure your stories match it or you audience will be confused and possibly irate.

Consistent theme requires you to identify your storyworld’s themes — which can be tough, since themes sometimes stay hidden until they’re drawn out through the creation of the stories themselves. (And forcing a theme from the beginning can come off heavy-handed and, well, forced.) It’s okay to let the themes develop organically, but as they do, roll them back into the storyworld so the stories that come after remain consistent.

Consistency can be a challenge. But it’s a lot easier if it’s something you plan for from the creation of the storyworld itself.

Planting Story Seeds Part 2: Windows

In part 1 of this series on creating stories for storyworlds, I wrote about choosing the right combination of story and platform. Today I’d like to look closer at the story itself, and how the storyworld can shine through it.

When is a story more than just a story? When it provides the audience with a glimpse at the rest of the storyworld.

Metaphor time!

In the kingdom of the storyworld, each story is a building. It’s self-contained, with the standard requisite floor, ceiling, and walls. But if you look out the window, you can see other buildings and other parts of the kingdom. You don’t need to understand the things you see (“Why does that building have a mustache?”), but if you do (perhaps because you’ve already visited there), it gives you a greater understanding of the house you’re in.

In this metaphor, a “window” is any reference to things outside the immediate story.

Star Wars did this this with its casual mentions of the “clone wars” and the “Kessel run.” The TV show Lost built an obsessive fanbase by packing each episode with windows. Comic books, with their tightly interwoven continuities, do this all the time. (I remember reading a Spider-man comic in which it was snowing in August. It was irrelevant to the plot, but interesting, and an editor’s note told me it was all explained in the latest issue of The Avengers.)

Storyworld windows serve four major functions:

Immersion: Glimpses of the world beyond the story help suspend disbelief. Characters have lives outside the story — places they’re from, people they know, things they’re planning to do when the story is over. These little details make the elements of the story feel more solid and real.
Intrigue: The audience should be curious about what they see out the window. What’s a “clone war” or a Kessel? What was the Dharma Initiative trying to achieve? Why is it snowing in August? The answers to these questions don’t matter to the story, but asking them can keep the audience engaged long after the story is done.
Story Hooks: Everything you see out the window is another potential story. Thirty years later, we can tell the story of the Clone Wars in a TV series. We can detail the objectives of the Dharma Initiative in an alternate reality game. We tell the story of the snow-blowing super-villain in next month’s issue of The Avengers.
Reward the Inquisitive: Of course, it’s possible that the questions posed by windows have already been answered, and your true fans — the ones who read the wiki, post on message boards, and follow you on Twitter — know those answers. This knowledge doesn’t weaken the story (knowing the “clone wars” doesn’t take away from the scene in Obi-Wan’s sand hut), but ideally adds depth and meaning to what’s already there. For that person, a throw-away detail (“I hate snakes!”) has deeper resonance because she’s aware of the greater context (“His mom was mugged by a snake in that short-story I read!”).

Okay, one last bit of window metaphor before I find some other dead horse to beat: Windows are cool, but you can’t build a house out of them. The story comes first. Tell a good story, then worry about the view into the neighbor’s backyard afterward.

Characters vs. Archetypes: Round One!

Back when we were all much younger, I wrote that storyworlds don’t need specific characters, but should focus on character archetypes instead. This might may have led you to suspect that my brain had been replaced with shiny objects. After all, hugely successful storyworlds such as those of Star Wars, Harry Potter, and even Downton Abbey are full of specific characters. In fact, you can’t even have a story without characters — they’re sort of essential, since it’s their actions that create the plot.

It’s all true. Well, not the part about my brain, but the point that characters — specific characters — are key ingredients to any story. But I’m not talking about specific stories. I’m talking about storyworlds.

Storyworlds must contain all the stories that could be told. That means infinite stories, driven by infinite characters. Infinite means that trying to create all those specific characters is the road to madness. It’s better to paint them in broad, archetypical strokes.

Think of it like this:

Stories revolve around characters.

Storyworlds revolve around character archetypes.

For example, if you want to tell a story about a farm boy discovering his destiny as a mystic knight, that’s great. You’ve created a cool character (the farm boy) with a cool story. But that’s just one story.

On the other hand, if you create a storyworld that includes the mystic knight archetype, you’ve suddenly opened yourself up to a whole expanded universe of unique characters and their stories. What about the mystic knight who falls from grace? Or the one on the impossible quest? The one with the strange affliction that makes the other knights shun her? The one who tries to retire and open a bakery, but is stalked by enemies from his past?

One character can give you one story.

One archetype can give you more stories than you could ever tell.

The Most Pretentious Business Card Ever

I had to order new business cards last year, but found myself stumped on what exactly to put on them. “Writer” obviously. And “Game Designer” was kind of a no-brainer. But I wanted to say something about how I develop intellectual properties — and not just for the games or stories in which they first appear, but with an eye towards expanding them into other projects and media.

“World Builder” came close. I am, in fact, quite good at building worlds. But in video game development, that term can refer to a person who literally builds the world with 3D modelling software — like a “level designer” but working with a much larger canvas. That sounds like an awesome job. I’d love to try my hand at it someday. But I’ve never done it, and wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m actually competent at it. If someone handed me a copy of Maya and a design document, saying “Knock yourself out, kid,” I’d probably just curl up in a corner and weep.

“World Builder” also suggests something a little more limited than I prefer.

For me, it’s not just about creating the history, characters, and setting of the world. It’s about stuffing those things with enough story potential to launch a dozen games, three lines of novels, a TV show (with its own inevitable spin-off), and an experimental webseries starring puppets made of cheese.

It’s not just a world, but a storyworld. And it’s only as good as the stories it can inspire.

So I came up with “Storyworld Architect.”

The word “architect” suggests more of a big-picture focus than the term “builder.” Not to say there isn’t a ton of “building” involved in the process — there certainly is — but the emphasis is different. Broader. More architectural.

And yes, more pretentious…

…But still better than “Cheese-puppet Master.”

Five Classic World-Building Mistakes

I like playing God. Specifically, the parts where God says, “Let there be a planet stuffed with people and plants and animals and giant stompy mechs piloted by Japanese schoolchildren.” I’ve designed a ton of imaginary worlds. And in doing so, I’ve made more than my share of mistakes. Today I’m sharing the worst of those mistakes, in hopes that you can, as the kids say, learn from my fail.

Mistake #1: Too much world

This is one of my classic mistakes. It’s fun to create worlds, but it’s easy to create more world than I actually need.

If a story requires a hunter from the Zysson tribe, I’m tempted to write pages of background for the tribe — their history, their spiritual beliefs, their ritual love of spoons — but if the hunter exists for the sole purpose of telling the main characters, “The bad guy went that way,” I’m totally wasting it. What’s more, I’ve now tied my hands. What if I later need the Zyssons to hate spoons? Then I’m either rewriting what’s come before or ignoring what I jotted in my notebook (which makes the effort double-wasted).

How much world do you actually need? How much does your audience need? Do that much, and no more. Sure, you can have pages of notes labeled, “And maybe this too because it’s cool,” but don’t lock any of that down until it’s actually necessary.

You never know when you’ll come up with something even more awesome. Leave room for it.

Mistake #2: A world too weird

It kills me a little bit to list this one, because I love bizarre settings. Give me an alien universe with its own arcane social systems and funky laws of physics and I’ll eat it up. So I’m certainly not saying it’s a mistake to go weird.

It’s a mistake to go too weird for your audience.

The problem is one of accessibility. The stranger your world, the harder you have to work to make that world accessible to your audience. If every name has an apostrophe in it, every sentence includes at least one word without vowels, and every chapter requires its own glossary, you’re going to have your work cut out for you.

Part of knowing your audience is knowing the medium. It’s one thing to deliver the world in a 256-page roleplaying game sourcebook. It’s another to do so in a series of 256-character pop-up windows in a Facebook game. Take it from me; you can’t do much heavy lifting in 256 characters.

Mistake #3: A world we’ve seen before

It’s okay if your world is at least a little generic. It helps with that whole “make it accessible” thing I keep harping on. If you can say, “It’s like Middle Earth, except…” the audience has an idea what to expect.

That said, if whatever comes after “except” isn’t an exciting twist that sets your mind ablaze with new, unique story possibilities, the world may be a bit redundant. “Like Middle Earth except Elves hunt Hobbits for meat and sport,” sounds intriguing. “Like Middle Earth except the Dwarves cast spells,” sounds like a pitch for someone’s (*cough* my *cough*) middle-school D&D game.

Mistake #4: A world without conflict

World peace is great if you want to actually live in that world. It helps keep the kids safe and the property values high. But it’s terrible for a world to play in.

The whole point of world-building is to create a setting for interesting stories. Stories — at least the ones you actually want to read or hear– are driven by conflict. And it’s a lot easier to find conflict in a world full of the stuff than in some peaceful utopia.

I’m not saying every storyworld needs to be a war-torn dystopia. But even the most mundane settings should have some conflict brewing in the background: suburban neighbors bicker over property lines, farmers fret over the lack of rain, college freshmen suck down a heady brew of confusion and self-loathing as they paint their nails black and question every life choice that’s led them to this point.

I could write a whole post on this topic (and I have), but it’s time to move on.

Mistake #5: A world that doesn’t make sense

Finally, the primary job of any storyworld is to allow the audience to suspend its disbelief. If the audience isn’t buying it, it doesn’t matter how much conflict, accessibility, or elvish cannibalism the world has going on. You’ll never get the audience through the door if they’re tripping over the logical inconsistency on the front step.

Rivers flowing away from the larger bodies of water? Villages on frozen mountain peaks where they couldn’t possibly support themselves? A theocratic kingdom that should have self-destructed in the first generation? If your world makes the audience pause and ask, “Really?” you’ve got a problem.

Yes, your world can break the laws of physics, sociology, and plate tectonics. But when you do, make sure you’ve got an in-world explanation for the apparent break. You can get a lot of mileage out of “It’s magic!” but if you don’t invoke those words, it looks a lot like “It’s a mistake!”

Speaking of mistakes, if you have any mistakes of your own to share (or mistakes of mine that I haven’t listed), please pass them along in the comments. We’ll all point and laugh, er, thank you for contributing to the conversation.

Level-up your game – with story!

I was recently asked to give a short talk on two of the three subjects I know best: games and writing. (Sadly, no one wants to hear about my third area of expertise: Batman trivia.)

Since I had an hour to prepare, I threw some notes together before speaking, to reduce the amount of inevitable “Um… oh, and one more thing,” common to whenever I try to just wing it. My resultant ramblings were coherent enough to keep me from being lynched or booed from the stage, so I figured I’d share the notes here before throwing them away, in hopes of spreading some wisdom.

Um… oh, and one more thing. I should mention that these were mostly written about video games, though they can apply nearly as well to tabletop games too.

The Role of Story in Games

Story is to games what ketchup is to French fries.

You don’t need it, but it makes the experience that much better. French fries are still good without ketchup, but ketchup can really bring out the flavor of the fries to raise them to the next level.
It can’t save a bad game. If the fries taste like soggy, grease-soaked twigs, drenching them with ketchup won’t make them taste any better.
A little goes a long way. If you drown your fries in ketchup, you won’t taste them at all. All you get is one mouthful after another of pure condiment. That might be okay if that’s what you’re looking for (they’re called “visual novels,” they aren’t really games, and you can find them in aisle six), but if you’re selling the customer delicious French fries… go easy on the red stuff.

In games, story plays its role by performing three main jobs: attract players, provide context, and create a connection.

Attracting Players

Stories sell games. When I know nothing else about a game, it is its story that pulls me in. It’s the story that dictates the art on the box front, the blurb on the box back, or the icon in the app store. Players will come for the story and stay for the gameplay. Again, it’s not absolutely necessary (Bejewelled has zero story, but seems to be selling just fine), and it’s won’t guarantee a sale, but if it convinces a player to click the link or pick up the box when he otherwise wouldn’t, then the story is doing its job.

Providing Context

Stories tell the player why he’s doing things in the game. Why am I trying to stop this train? Oh, because the President’s daughter is aboard, and it’s going to crash in 60 seconds. Why am I killing 10 rats? Because rat spleen is a key ingredient in the shaman’s secret health potion recipe, and he always needs more spleens.

(Tabletop Note! This is especially important in board games to keep them from being too abstract. Why am I moving the blue cubes from this space to that space? Because the cubes are medical workers, preventing an outbreak of clown flu in that space. Of course, if you want to go abstract, there’s a market for those types of games too.)

Creating a Connection

Story can help create an emotional connection between the player and the game’s characters. This is hard to pull off. (Some would even say it’s impossible, but I’d point to an army of cos-players who say otherwise.) The point of creating a connection is to deepen the player’s experience, and to raise the emotional stakes within the game. And if all story is useless ketchup, this stuff is the utterly unnecessary ultra-fancy dijon ketchup brewed by monks in the Himalayas and brought in by helicopter.

Time’s Up; Move On

Games don’t need story. But games with story can be better (more fun, exciting, and memorable) than those without. Used wisely, story can take your game to the next level. And isn’t that what we all want? Second-level French fries!

If you have your own notes, please post ‘em in the comments. I love to see other folks’ take on the subject.

Through a Crystal Darkly

We hadn’t intended to watch The Dark Crystal. We’d been looking for The Neverending Story, or possibly something with monkeys, to watch for an impromptu Family Movie Night, but Netflix Streaming was, once again, failing us. So we picked the weird-but-technically-family-appropriate 1982 fantasy film, The Dark Crystal.

My daughters were dubious.

“What is this?” asked Thing Two, in the same tone of voice she uses when she finds something on her supper plate outside the regulation nuggets and noodles.

“It’s cool,” I said. “It’s got adventure, and magic. And puppets.”

“This looks seriously creepy,” said Thing One. At ten, she recognizes creepy when she sees it.

Menacing Muppets

Thing One is right. The Dark Crystal is a seriously creepy-looking movie:

The vulturous, skeletal Skeksies are pure nightmare fuel, and could only be more horrifying if you gave them clown noses and a key to your house.
The giant beetle-like Garthim are, well, giant freaking beetles that can apparently smash through any wall like hideous multi-legged Kool-Aid men.
Even our alleged hero Jen (who is, by his own admission, not very good at his job), is an early settler of the uncanny valley: his movements say he’s human, but his weird muppet-goat face says he’s definitely not.

Thing Two dealt with this tidal wave of creepiness by wandering into another corner of the room, turning her back to the TV, and firing up some game apps on her mother’s Kindle Fire.

Her older sister stuck with it. “This is really creeping me out,” she said. “But I can’t stop watching.”

Lessons of the Dark Crystal

After thinking about it, I realized the movie’s real problem is not that it’s creepy, but that it’s inaccessible.

Consider:

It starts with two minutes of voice-over explaining the background, while we’re shown images of a weird, alien landscape.
The first scene with actual characters in it features the Skeksis getting crystal-powered energy beams blasted into their eyes. This is apparently a good thing.
We don’t even meet our hero (the closest thing the movie has to a relatable human character) until ten minutes into the movie, after having our minds blown and eyes seared by Jim Henson’s circus of animatronic horrors.

It’s okay if your story and world are creepy or weird. But you need to transition to that space from the mundane world. Don’t throw the audience into the deep end. Lead them gently down the stairs at the shallow end of the pool, giving them time to adjust and become immersed.

Or, to abuse a different metaphor, don’t smash them through the wall like a Kool-Aid man, but usher them through a door in the form of a relatable character or situation. Your audience will thank you for it. And your story’s wall will remain more structurally-sound.

2d100 Words in Praise of Randomness

There’s a reason that, for ages, dice have been intrinsically associated with games. It probably has to do with weird fertility rites of ancient Celts, but the important thing is that games thrive on randomness. Whether it’s shuffled cards, rolled dice, or procedurally-generated computerized orcs lining up to be killed, games cry out for the unexpected.

Some might say that too much randomness in a game is a bad thing. To those people I say: You’re right. But that’s not the point of this post.

Without randomness, gameplay becomes a pattern to be repeated until mastered. I loved Super Mario Brothers, but I would have loved it more if I wasn’t able to simply memorize every level. Throw in some random goombas where they weren’t before, and I’d be surprised and delighted. Instead, I’m running, jumping and tossing fireballs with my brain switched off.

Randomness helps level the playing field between players of different skill levels. Yes, you’ve been playing Magic: the Gathering for so long, your first deck is old enough to drink in most states. And yes, I’ve just cracked my first starter deck this morning. But if you don’t draw the right cards out of your randomized deck, this noob still has a chance to beat you.

On a related note, randomness lets players take chances. No, you probably shouldn’t charge that machine gun nest with your sword-wielding Hobbit. (Who brings a Hobbit to a gunfight anyway?) But you can still try, and if the dice roll your way–if you get lucky–you might end up with a Hobbit behind enemy lines holding a captured M-60.

But the best thing that randomness does for games is help create stories.

Rolling a natural 20 when your Dwarven fighter needed it most? Drawing the King you needed to finish that winning hand? Stumbling onto a dragon while running from giants in Skyrim? These are the incidents we remember–the stories that we tell–and they are all blessings of randomness.

This, more that anything else, is why I love a healthy level of randomness in any game I play or design. There’s a place for chess and the like, with their pure, beard-stroking strategy. It’s a good place. A fine place. It’s just a place without many memorable moments.

If you have any tales of randomness to share, please leave 3d20 words on the topic in the comments.

Lemme tell ya about my character

Yes, yes, we all know I’m crazy about player stories in games. They increase engagement, virality, and other social gaming buzzwords I’m not going to bother listing here. But I’ve been thinking about tabletop RPGs this week and how, even more than video games, they are all about player stories.

After an RPG session, what do you have? Achievements on your account? A high score on a leaderboard? A sackful of virtual coins to spend on virtual gear? Nope. You can’t even go back and play it again. All you have is your story. And even if you played through a pre-gen module, it’s still a unique, personal story that only you and the others at the table can tell.

It was these stories that got me in RPGs in the first place. As a kid in grade school and middle school, I had a friend who was big into D&D and Marvel Superheroes. He’d come to school with these amazing tales of his adventures: how he fought a dragon, or beat up a bad guy by throwing a car into his face. Awesome! It was these stories that made me want to play.

Today, countless RPG players are doing the same thing on hundreds of blogs and message boards across the Internet. Sometimes it’s a brief anecdote. Sometimes, it’s a full “actual play” record of a game. And now with services such as Obsidian Portal, it’s easier than ever to share full accounts of whole campaigns and browse the stories of other players. I’ve spent hours reading through other peoples’ game write-ups, and you know what? For almost every one of them… I wanted to play that game.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stories are powerful selling tools. Let’s use these tools to sell the games we love.

RIP Buddy, the Minecraft Dog

I like dogs. Not enough to own one (when they breed one that uses a litterbox, I’ll consider it), but I love the idea of the faithful, shaggy-haired companion who greets me with a joyful bark, plays with the kids in the backyard, and protects the house by shooting bees out of its mouth.

So I was pleased to hear when Notch added dogs to Minecraft. Okay, not dogs exactly. They’re wolves, but if you feed one of them bones (which you get from killing skeletons, of course), there’s a chance it becomes domesticated. Hearts appear above its head, and a red collar appears around its neck.

It’s a wolf with a collar. That barks when it sees you. That, my friends, is a dog.

I was tickled when I domesticated my first wolf. He followed me around, and I fed him pork. He kept me company while I worked on my bridge over the river project – though that might have been because he couldn’t navigate the stairs to get down. I began to regard the creature as “he” and definitely a dog. I didn’t name him, but whenever I talked to him (don’t judge me!), I referred to him as “buddy.” So I guess that was his name.

The bridge was finally done. I strode down the far side onto the newly-claimed island, Buddy at my side, and despaired at how thickly forested it was. A skeleton or zombie could spend all day in the shade of all those trees, and a creeper could be lurking around any one of the dozens of trunks. I pulled out my axe with a sigh and got to work, but the sun was setting and I really just wanted to be finished.

And then I remembered the flint and steel in my inventory. Why chop down a forest when you can burn it down?

Foosh! The first tree went up. Foosh! Foosh! Two more. I smiled at the thought of watching the forest burn through the night: me and my dog, safe on the bridge, the virtual heat from the flames on our faces as the fire licks up at the sky.

“Come on, Buddy,” I said to the computer screen as I looked around for my red-collared companion.

I didn’t see him, but did hear his yelp of pain.

Was he… No… He’s not…

But he was. On fire. Standing under the burning trees, his fur in flames, yelping and whining as his hit points burned away.

I considered trying to put the fire out. But hitting him (which is how you put fires out) would only hurt him further. Could I shove him into the water? Maybe. But there were trees between here and the river, burning trees, and –

Buddy gave one last yelp, then vanished in a puff of smoke.

“Stupid dog,” I muttered.

I put up a sign at the foot of the bridge, dedicating it as a memorial to a dog too stupid to not go into the fire.

I think I’m done domesticating Minecraft wolves for now. It’s a great mechanic, but I just can’t take the drama.