Overarching Plots: Why Aren’t We There Yet?

Posted by Ravyn on January 26, 2012

During my riff on overarching plots in general, I pointed out one question that is vital to the writer of the overarching plot at every event (and, for that matter, is one of the few that should be answered event by event, rather than once and for all at the beginning). By this time we’re in the plot, and therefore we know the major conflict, whether our audience does or not, so the question is as follows: “Why can’t we just resolve the major conflict now?” What is it in-plot that’s keeping the major conflict from being just taken care of at this moment?

When concocting an answer to this question, I find it very important to make sure that it’s an answer that the characters can take some sort of action to deal with. I’ll admit, it isn’t always possible–“The lunar eclipse required for the ritual isn’t for another three weeks” isn’t exactly a circumstance under anyone’s control, for instance—but in general, and particularly when dealing with PCs, you’re going to want to make sure that the main characters have something to do that feels like it’s making progress.

There is, however, one exception to this rule, and that’s “Nobody’s figured out what the major problem is yet.” This sort of complication to the major conflict makes for an interesting balance of factors; on the one hand, you might have impatient people trying to figure out where the story is, but on the other hand, if the characters and the situations they’re getting into and out of are engaging enough—or if it wasn’t clear that there was supposed to be a metaplot, maybe a little foreshadowing but nothing more—people are likely to have a lot more patience for events that in a more focused plot would seem like digressions. (I may come back to this later.)

For most RPGs and a somewhat lesser number of stories, “We’re not powerful enough yet” is one of the primary answers. The enemy’s higher level, built on more XP, a greater Rank, pick your poison, and either way any confrontation involving the main characters and their primary antagonists would stand next to no chance of ending in a victory for the forces of protagonism, narrative immunity be hanged. It’s a valid reason, but for the plot-oriented creator/GM for character-oriented players, I would strongly recommend not making it the only reason—unless it makes in-character sense that the characters consider their best option for dealing with the difference between their power and their opponent’s to be running around getting into fights, not having a more actionable reason that just happens to involve racking up the requisite XP in the process can throw off the suspension of disbelief. For writers, the equivalent is probably “The story hasn’t gone on long enough yet”–which I suppose is a valid excuse if you’re in the middle of NaNoWriMo, but does demand a little extra justification if you expect the story to go over with an audience.

Why can’t the conflict be resolved immediately? Think about the answer carefully; it’s going to matter!

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Overarching Plots: The Major Conflict

Posted by Ravyn on January 25, 2012

In general, if you’ve got an overarching plot, you should have—one might even say there has to be—a major conflict. Something has to tie all those little plot threads together, after all! But how much do you actually have to plan beforehand, and how much can you leave to your subconscious mind, the actions of your primary characters (whether your creations or your game’s PCs), and your overall inspiration?

It’s important to know what general form the major conflict will take. Note that this does not mean that you need to know every detail about the major antagonist, his plans, what the main characters can do against him, what his contingencies are, so on and so forth, at the very beginning. In fact, unless you’re working on an overarching plot where mystery is an important enough element that you need to seed clues in from the very beginning—and possibly not even then—I would suggest leaving a certain amount of wiggle room as you work on the rest of your skeleton and start in on creating the story or game itself. (I for one have never had an overarching plot in which I did not have to determine at least one detail—including at one point the antagonist’s name—either at the last minute or in retrospect of the event it referred to but before it needed to be finalized.) You can have something as vague as “The main characters, outsiders in a society which is not yet accustomed to them, use their external view to help them hunt down a traitor to said society”, “A gaggle of prison escapees in a large city dodges feuding nobles as they solve a mystery that could turn the entire city upside down”, or “New transfers to a highly regarded school discover their teachers have a dangerous secret.” Neither does it mean that there needs to be only one major conflict (some of my favorite books have woven together three or more), nor that the major conflict has to be clear from the very beginning of the narrative (more on this later).

What danger does your primary conflict pose? Without the stakes, it can be hard to properly motivate PCs or keep a reader engaged—or, for that matter, make sure a character’s motivation is consistent with the situation. Threats to life, limb and the existence of the world may be common, but bear in mind that there’s plenty else that can be thrown on the table. Love, fortune, dignity—no concept is safe.

Consider also what sort of event might serve as the climax. While this can be (and in fantasy, often is) a battle, that’s not the only option—there are plenty of examples of conflicts resolving with something else. The webcomic Digger climaxes in two well-done verbal confrontations and a knacky bit of crowbar use, Lois McMaster Bujold’s A Civil Campaign climaxes with a political body voting—one can have appearances in court, long runs, cunning tricks. Knowing what you want, though, allows you to start setting your tone to fit your desired result—if, for instance, you want a nonviolent resolution to a situation, you may wish to stress the importance of the rule of law in the setting and/or the potential for the antagonistic characters to see reason, and you will probably want to avoid instilling bloodlust against the antagonists in the protagonists.

Not only will knowing your major conflict help focus the direction of your narrative and figure out what you need out of your main characters, but it will likely help to motivate you to keep going; I, for one, have found it a lot harder to invest in a storyline where I don’t really know yet what’s being threatened or how. Plan what you can, then run with it!

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Overarching Plots: Calibrating Scope

Posted by Ravyn on January 24, 2012

Yesterday, I talked about landmarks and steps that a plotter who isn’t interested in full-on outlines could use to guide herself through an overarching plot. Today, I’m going to go into more detail on one of the steps: determining a plot’s scope.

Scope is, as plot variables go, somewhat messy; there are a lot of things that it can encompass, all of which we need to take into some degree of account.

Particularly in a roleplaying game, the first thing we need to consider is scope of power level. With the system causing the characters to constantly improve, it’s necessary—we have to figure out where they’re starting, who we need them capable of going up against by the end, and what we’re going to have to do with the pace to get them from the first to the second without accidentally killing them en route or making the whole thing into one gigantic cakewalk. My emphasis on the necessity for a roleplaying game doesn’t necessarily mean a writer shouldn’t take it into account, either; you don’t have to look far to find examples of series in any medium that haven’t suffered from some degree of insufficiently thought out or excessively open-ended scope.

On the other hand, there’s the kind of scope that determines just how much of a given setting is affected. Some stories stay entirely within one region, or even one city; some encompass entire worlds, and even go beyond into alternate planes. This type, geographic scope, is an important consideration for a worldbuilder, since it gives her a sense of how large a map to draw, how many different places to detail out, and how important those places are going to be.

Then there’s how the plot affects other characters, or population scope. Sometimes this twines with geographic scope; theoretically, you’re going to be touching the lives of more people if you’re on a quest to save the world than if you just plan on solving mysteries in a large city. On the other hand, sometimes it’s inversely proportional to geographic scope; while they’re in the same general location as thousands of people over the course of their travels, the protagonists never stick around long enough or get thoroughly enough involved with the people in the places they’re visiting to actually leave much of an impact. (Heck, think about all those video games in which you’re saving the world and the shopkeeper can’t be bothered to give you even a five percent discount!)

If you know what sort of scope you expect your plot to take, you’ll find it easier to know what to do about the way your plot expands itself—when to speed up, and when to stomp on the brakes. Don’t neglect it!

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Overarching Plot for People Who Hate Outlines

Posted by Ravyn on January 23, 2012

If you’re the kind of person who plans everything out in advance naturally, big overarching plots probably come relatively easily; they’re all about planning ahead and knowing how to make everything fit together, event by event by event. But not all of us are outliners; I know I’m not and probably never will be! How, then, can those of us who hate doing outlines still manage to come up with overarching plots worthy of our ambitions? I’ve found the best way is to put up a few road signs and guide to them; we can still take advantage of our comfort with improvisation, but this way we know where we’re going and can signal it from the beginning.

If you’re going for an overarching plot, one of the first things you’re going to want to think about is scope. This is particularly important when you’re dealing with a game rather than a story; after all, your characters are going to be steadily progressing mechanically, and you’ll want to make sure that your plans don’t break the story/pacing—and that the story/pacing doesn’t break them. Figure out who the Always Bigger Fish are, and how many of them are going to stay bigger fish; what places people are likely to go, and how far the effects of their actions are going to reach. After all, scope covers a multitude of sins. This will give you an idea how to balance pacing with progression, and what sorts of opponents to center the final confrontation around.

At around the same time, you’re going to want to come up with the major conflict. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to know exactly who your antagonist is, though it helps; it also doesn’t mean you need to know all the details of what they’re doing, though that also helps. What’s necessary is just a vague idea of what kind of opponent they are and the primary threat they pose—and at least one general scenario for what the climax is going to look like and an optimal way to get through it.

Do you know what the biggest difference between an overarching plot and the Issue of the Week is? The overarching plot can’t just be resolved with a few actions. Now, and at every step of the way thereafter, you’re going to have to look at the current situation and ask yourself, “Why can’t this just be resolved now?” While “The enemy is too powerful!” is a good reason, I strongly recommend having another reason in place as well, so the group can be directly working towards their goal while incidentally dealing with the issue of not being strong enough. “The enemy is far away” is a good reason. So is “We haven’t figured out what the conflict is yet”, or “We know who it is but we don’t have proof so they’re still untouchable”, or “We need to find/acquire/destroy X item.” Just make sure that they do have some sort of immediate goal; there’s nothing quite as balky as a PC who can’t figure out what his objective should be!

If you’re feeling particularly ambitious, I strongly recommend coming up with a checklist of things you want to definitely have happen by the time the characters reach the final climax. Sometimes, this is going to take the form of things that they need to do to be able to get through the ending confrontation with something approximating success (like the “find/acquire/destroy X item” condition in the previous paragraph). Other times, it’s the introduction of new characters or settings, events that make more of the storyline make sense, revelations—things you need for the plot, and things you want that are still relevant. If you know what to try to include ahead of time, even if you don’t know when and how they’re going to come up from the beginning, you’ll spend the whole time with the back of your mind working on how to make sure they happen. Never discount the subconscious when it comes to getting your plots to line up.

Not being the kind of person who outlines doesn’t mean you can’t do long, overarching plots; it just means you have to approach them differently.

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The Generic Villain on Poses

Posted by Ravyn on January 22, 2012

You are The Main Villain, and it’s your time. The part where you reveal yourself to those foolish heroes who choose to defy you. You’ve got your best armor/biggest coat/creepiest prosthetics/most intimidating combination of visible magic effects, the spot where you’re supposed to come in is just right, and all you have to do is appear, strike about one sentence’s dialogue worth of pose, and they’ll all be quaking in their gloriously destined boots.

What can possibly go wrong?

The first thing to consider, before you’re even at a point where you need to pose, is the question of “What am I going for with this?” Nine times out of ten, the answer is some form of intimidation—but intimidation fails a lot, often due to people choosing a pose or other form of presentation that gives the wrong message.

Unless you are The Fop of Doom (don’t scoff; I’ve known a lot of demons who’ve done some degree of pulling that off), you don’t want your opponents to think that you’re deliberately posing. That gets lampshades thrown at you pretty quickly, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this industry, it’s that in most cases, lampshades are a lesser form of kryptonite to us unless we’re the ones wielding them. As soon as someone points out that nobody should be able to take you seriously, your efficacy might as well have been swiped wholesale. Instead, you need to take the bodily arrangement that most surely gets across your intended effect and internalize it, so when you reach the part in your dramatic entrance where you pause with some sort of light or greater darkness at your back, it all naturally falls into place. This does, I admit, mean practice, but really, I’m sure we can take some of that out of the time we generally spend brooding or talking over our plans for the sake of villain cutaways. Note: if your opponents are prone to posing, you’ve got a lot more slack; you just need to limit your posing to the amount of posing they do. (And if they do anything that could reasonably be called transforming, your job has probably become a lot easier.) I’d still recommend practicing; there’s no blow to your dignity quite like having to break a perfectly good pose to move your foot/deal with the wrenching feeling in your back/recover your balance because your center of gravity is in the wrong place.

Female Hands of Darkness: try to avoid anything that makes it look like you replaced your spine with a semi-solid chain of nerve-impulse-transmitting ectoplasm. Wait. Let me rephrase that. Female Hands of Darkness: if you MUST use a pose that makes it look like you replaced your spine with a semi-solid chain of nerve-impulse-transmitting ectoplasm, make sure you’re doing it for creep factor rather than because it is The Sexy Thing To Do (I’ll be back to THAT in a moment). And if you’re doing it for creep factor, I strongly suggest going for something that is completely humanly impossible rather than just pretending to be humanly possible. Otherwise, people are going to do things like ask if that hurts or try to get the phone number of your chiropractor.

Speaking of which, The Sexy Thing To Do. We’ve discussed this before, but let me make one thing clear—if what you’re trying for is an intimidating pose, and your schtick is not My Sexy Will Destroy You, for the love of the Dark Powers don’t make a special effort to show off your assets! If you’re going for intimidation, the result you want to get is [cowers before that], not “I’d tap that.” And while one does occasionally get opponents with phobias of specifically-sexy opponents, don’t assume you’re going to have them unless you have reliable confirmation. Common sense, people, do you have it?

There’s more to making a good entrance and striking an effective pose than that, but taking these into consideration should at least keep the heroes’ first response to you from being some variation on “who’s this loser?” or [uncontrollable laughter].

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Impractical Applications (Variations on a Perfect Location)

Posted by Ravyn on January 21, 2012

When I was doing this week’s perfect locations riffs, one of my primary inspirations was a rather odd spot I worked with about five years back. Odd, partly because I used the changes to it as a mood-enhancer twice, both with different versions of the place, and because one of those was for a piece of writing that I don’t think more than one of my players (if that) has ever seen. Looking back on how I tweaked it, though, was a useful source of mental examples.

The site itself was one large plaza, paved, surrounded by buildings save for specific entry points. I might have been subconsciously basing it on somewhere in San Diego, but if I was I haven’t the foggiest idea where. When I first ran the place, though, it was hosting a very large party. It was dark out—I seem to have this thing about dark skies and big parties—but the place was thoroughly lit, with everything from paper lanterns to trained fireflies. People—or rather, entities, as getting on for half of the attendees were some form of god or spirit—were everywhere, making it harder to really get a sense of the size of the place or to get a bit of privacy. So—dark, colorful things that provided their own light, lots and lots and lots of colors, sounds and smells, a great deal of talking and cheer.

The first time I contrasted it was in game. It was the following day, and the group was going to see a friend of theirs who had been falsely accused of theft during the party itself and was being held in a building nearby. By this time, the plaza had been cleaned up, all the decorations and temporary structures completely removed. The people, of course, were long gone. The sun was out, giving the white pavement an almost sterile effect, and there were—they needed—no secondary lights. The idea was to get across an image of bleakness, of silence, of absence.

The second time I used it wasn’t in game at all. It was the following summer, I was looking for work, and one of the positions I’d been looking into wanted a writing sample. Lacking anything I could really use, I instead hastily dashed off a vignette involving a conversation between Lysha and Shizuyo, in the immediate wake of the party. As with the first alternate version of the site, I made it sunny out (no, this didn’t create any time paradoxes), but unlike the first version, this one wasn’t sterile. The guests had gone, yes, and most of the hosts likewise, but the mess was still there, crepe paper and sagging lanterns, scraps of food and who knew what all else, strewn across the pavement like detritus from a battlefield. Aside from my two conversationalists, the only living things there were there to clean up, and they did so slowly, at a distance, sluggishly sweeping the refuse away. After all, it wasn’t harsh I was going for this time. It was worn out.

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Perfect Locations: Marring Perfection

Posted by Ravyn on January 19, 2012

(Do I even need to tell you what prompted this post?)

When last seen, the broken walls of the old buildings had shimmered in the starlight, haunted by the soft strings and fluting of the lone musician; now the musician is gone, and in the sunlight the walls are merely ruined stone. The carnival last night was filled with entities of all species and levels of divinity, carousing and dancing and sipping their drinks, fireflies and paper lanterns filling the plaza with light; now the sun beats down on a deserted patio scattered with limp castaway strips of tissue, garish remnants of its earlier glory. Where once was a dead land, trees reaching up like gnarled claws to pull the distant clouds down into their sea of dead grass, now green has spread like a wave over the meadows, and the flowers are all the brighter for the gentle rain that soaks every petal.

This is the greatest strength of having chosen the perfect version of a location: the potential for contrast. Establish a place in its perfect form, and people become accustomed to it. Small details change, and it doesn’t seem quite right. Significant details are removed or modified, and the entire tone goes with them, made all the more obvious for the importance that the use of the perfect version has given them.

One of the things I’ve found most useful when trying to set up the contrast between the perfect version of a location and whatever impacting change I plan on using later is knowing how to vary it up. If you only change one or two of the details, keeping the rest of the location equivalent to its perfect version, then it still feels like a variation of the same place; it’s just that it stopped raining. Or it’s later in the day and the water is only sparkling rather than doing the molten gold impression it does just after dawn. Or there’s a slightly less rambunctious set of students on the playground. You’re still using details that get the overall theme together, but the ones you use now aren’t pushing for quite the same, or quite as strong, effect. If the location shows up a lot, changing one detail at a time and resetting those that were changed before, people will take an average, as it were, allowing you to reinforce the perfect location while neither actually pushing it nor letting the location get too stagnant.

And then, when you want the strongest impact, you upend it entirely. The air of wonder and mystery depended on darkness? Dump the noonday sun on it. The slow drizzles to which the place was prone, with water slowly trickling from every fern, gave it a melancholy air? Freeze it with a layer of snow, and take away the cloud cover. One of the most important minor characters had made the place her own? She’s not here now, and (depending on the situation) might not be coming back.

Nurture the perfect location with small variations, and then shatter it with rapid change. The contrast will strike your audience more deeply than any chain of simple adjectives.

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Perfect Locations: Who’s There?

Posted by Ravyn on January 18, 2012

My participation in RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations continues!

Light levels in a scene may be one of the most subtle ways of creating the mood for the perfect version of a location, but they’re not the most counterintuitive way; that honor goes to the people who create a location. After all, people aren’t part of a location, per se; they wander off, or just plain don’t show up, and it might seem like a bit of an insult to think of someone as living scenery. Even so, there are some locations that are defined by the people in them: either the class of people who occupy them as a whole, or the one or several individuals that make the location theirs and by being there make it matter.

Sometimes, of course, it’s just having people present that matters. A construction site would look odd without its workers; a school playground just isn’t the same without children; a battlefield isn’t really a battlefield if nobody’s battling on it. At this point, the locals are living scenery—they can be characters in their own right, but they don’t have to be. They’re interchangeable, and their effect is a result of there being, well, a bunch of them.

At other times, there’s a specific character (or at least one member of a very specific type of character) who serves as the living scenery. A shop might be defined by its shopkeeper, for instance, or a classroom by its teacher; whether the character interacts beyond being someone who can be interacted with for the purposes of the location is unimportant, just that that person is, like always—and like they should be for the perfect version of the location—there.

Then there are characters from whom the setting just can’t be separated, usually because the place is where one goes to talk to them. It’s not just that if they’re missing, it looks a little odd—the entire tenor of the place changes. They’re not just there, but interacting, either changing the scene by their presence or actively engaging whatever viewpoint characters happen to wander into their sphere of influence. It doesn’t matter if they’re sitting at a desk, running around cleaning the place up, or actively For instance, one of the major characters in my game is almost invariably found in his office. Only one person has ever successfully knocked on the door, and that only when he was out; every other time, just before they’ve reached the door to knock they’ve been told “come in”.

Do you have any locations that are further refined by their occupants?

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Perfect Locations: Seeing the Light

Posted by Ravyn on January 17, 2012

This series was written for RPG Blog Carnival: Fantastic Locations.

When I used yesterday’s post to introduce the idea of the perfect version of a location, one of the mood-contributing factors I discussed was light. It’s easy to forget, as an element; we’re used to always having at least some around us, and to not being particularly concerned with where it comes from unless the bulb’s gone out again. A lot of people don’t describe it when setting their scenes, unless it’s doing something particularly symbolic. I remember, as a kid, being absolutely shocked that there was an entire book about seeing and painting light (and not being sure what to do with the copy that had been given to me).

And yet it matters.

First, there’s the issue of presence or absence of light. When I was talking about fear, long ago, I mentioned that one of the reasons why horror tends to run to limited color is that the closer it gets to grayscale, the more it brings out the use of rods over cones in our eyes, the same way trying to see in the dark does. When I’m dealing with mood, I often try to figure out which of several general categories of ambient level I’m dealing with (Next to none, not quite enough, enough, a bit too much, and OW my eyes.) I find most of my work with the supernatural to be at everything but “enough light”–the overly bright ranges tend to be good for getting across an image of overwhelming power (or overwhelming something, anyway), and the dark ranges are good for mystery and (with local light sources in particular) the invocation of wonder.

Pure light levels aren’t all we want to deal with, though. Think about clouds and smoke, and the effect they have on the color spectrum. We all know that under clouds things tend to have more of a gray tinge to them than when the sky is blue as far as the eye can see, and that firelight, sunlight and artificial light get us different ambient appearances, but there’s more than that. Have you ever seen that peculiar yellow tinge the world seems to have when it’s just rained, when the clouds are still there but the sun’s shining through them and between that and everything being darker when wet every color is more intense? How about the way that point sources of light in pea-soup fog tend to bleed into the air around them until they run into another color, like a spectral mosaic? The way that after dark, rain seems to fall only from the streetlamps, or how motes of dust in the air are only visible in that beam of morning sun through the half-curtained window?

Low light levels also give you the option of contrasting no/some light with more light. Watercolor artists and people with inspirational messages absolutely love the effect when a single sunbeam breaks through cloud cover, a practically visible spear of white that leaves puddles of brighter colors on the landscape below. One of my favorite tricks for evoking a sense of wonder through clearly magical locations is taking light levels in which we shouldn’t be seeing color, and then having color anyway—magic manifesting as patterns or motes of light, buildings of sufficiently supernatural construction that they reflect the little light there is or glow in their appropriate colors, grayscale places where someone decorated with something that shows up in its proper brilliant blue or stunning gold.

We may not be taught how to look at light, but we should cultivate an eye for it anyway. It’s one of those subtle little details that can turn one mood into another with just a few words.

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Perfect Locations

Posted by Ravyn on January 16, 2012

This one’s back to writing for RPG Blog Carnival. I love the way it makes me think about aspects of the theme I wouldn’t have looked into.

One of the things that a lot of people forget about making locations, fantastic or otherwise, is that the locations themselves are in a constant state of flux. The time of day changes, the weather, the people or animals present, the various metaphysical forces, and the location changes with them, in look and feel—a stagnant location can look nifty, but after a while it feels more like a set than a place in its own right.

Before I think about how a location can change, though, I think about what I want people’s primary impression of it to be—a “perfect” version of the location that gets across the mood I want it to convey and the main associations I want to give to it. Usually, but not always, this will be the first form in which I present the location, so as to take full advantage of how its changes affect it. Sometimes, though, it simply won’t be at its perfect state yet when first introduced, and on rarer occasions I’ll have perfect conditions for two versions of the location (most often something like ruined and intact). It’s all about the impact.

To get a perfect version of a location, start by choosing the mood or theme to play to. The fewer words you can get it down to, the better, but don’t overdo it—sometimes it really does take a more complex underlying concept than simply loss or wonder, size or stillness. Three words, sometimes describing different aspects or themes rather than being directly related, tends to be my average.

Next, figure out what the location itself is, as both structure and environment. Materials and decoration, shapes and arrangement, texture and composition, and of course all the little things lying around—any of these can have an impact on the overall thematic effect.

Never neglect light! It’s one of the most pervasive features of any given location, and changing it, whether what you change is light levels or color spectrum, can make a world of difference. Think about the time of day you’re looking for: are we talking midday? Dawn or dusk? After dark? False dawn? Think about the weather, as well, and don’t get so wrapped up in the colors that what’s in the sky creates on the earth that you don’t look at the colors of the sky itself. Indoors, think about what your light sources are and what colors they create; as I recently learned from an incident in the kitchen, one bluish bulb in a ceiling structure full of yellow bulbs can change the light in the room entirely.

Some perfect versions of locations are defined not by what’s in them, but who’s in them. Sometimes, this is just occupants in general: the flood of humanity (or sentient beings in general) in a market, children on a playground, birds in a forest. At other times, the difference is in the presence of one or more specific individuals: the musician who haunts the ruined buildings at night, the librarians constantly moving amid the books and answering questions, the warrior who always seems to be around or under this one particular waterfall.

Keep a close eye on the factors that contribute the most to the mood; they’ll come in handy later when the location isn’t in its perfect state. Think like an artist!

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