Articles from November 2009
Posted by Ravyn on November 30, 2009
There’s a long road to be traveled, a whole city to search for a missing objective, training to be run through, a magical ritual to be setup—in short, a long and arduous task that nobody really wants to detail out. This is a job for a montage—but how do we make the montage interesting?
The first [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Scening, Technique, Voice and Style |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 29, 2009
Everyone knows that one of the most important skills in a villain’s bag of tricks is intimidation. Whether she’s blatantly fearsome, innocuous yet creepy, or something else entirely, she has to be able to strike fear into her foes when she wants to. We all know that, so we all try. But we don’t all [...]
Categories: Generic Villain |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 28, 2009
This week, character arcs were at the forefront of my mind. Due to my inspiration being mostly character-oriented, I deal with those a lot; most of my PCs, and even a decent number of my NPCs, have gone through at least one character arc, possibly more. But one of my favorite arcs is that of [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 27, 2009
Character arcs don’t just happen out of nowhere, and for good reason. Having somebody just wake up one morning and say “I’m going to change some aspect of my personality!” would be a bit odd, wouldn’t it? You’d expect a cause, even something as improbable as a dream about antelopes, breakfast materials and blackmail, wouldn’t [...]
Categories: Character development, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Plot, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 26, 2009
Most people seem to see change in characters as a permanent matter—that once a change is made, it stays made, and the character carries on in that new path. It’s understandable to do that at least a little, particularly since the more action-oriented audiences would probably get sick of it and want to move on. [...]
Categories: Character development, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: original posts | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on November 25, 2009
It doesn’t seem right if a character begins and ends the story as the exact same person, does it? But figuring out what kind of change they’re likely to go through is difficult in its own right, particularly for people whose strengths lie more in the range of events or settings. There are just so [...]
Categories: Character development, Characterization, Characters in the world, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: original posts | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on November 24, 2009
I hadn’t been going to post this one for a while, but then I blundered onto ChattyDM’s riff about managerial skills and GMing, and he asked for it in the comments. Never let it be said that I turn down perfectly good requests.
The fun thing about writing and role-playing is that there’s no field they [...]
Categories: Characterization, Cross-discipline, Description, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Technique |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 23, 2009
One of the things I’ve always been fascinated by is character change. I know it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but I can spend hours just looking over the behavior of a character and seeing how it compares to when she was created. Making mistakes and coming to terms with them, dealing with old traumas, [...]
Categories: Character development, Character dynamics, Characterization, Characters in the world, Description, Dialogue, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: original posts | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on November 22, 2009
Last week, I talked about making deals with the heroes, and things to keep in mind when doing so. But there’s another important element to making those sorts of deals, and that’s being the kind of Hand of Darkness the heroes are willing to make deals with and not necessarily kill on sight. Tricky? Yes. [...]
Categories: Generic Villain |
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Posted by Ravyn on November 21, 2009
My game’s one of the things that taught me the most about the dangers of waiting for the proper moment. It’s pretty much inevitable when you’ve got a game full of people who all have latent hammish qualities, a wide range of typing speeds, and nearly no communication outside of the primary IC and OOC [...]
Categories: Impractical Applications |
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