Posts belonging to Category Technique
Posted by Ravyn on March 13, 2012
Most of us have seen something that qualifies as Serious Business. It’s not going to change the world, it’s not life or death, it might not even seem like anything more than a simple pastime, but to the people who care about it—the football fans who close their businesses when the two state colleges’ teams [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: plot, roleplaying, serious business, World-building, writing | 
2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 8, 2012
I’m not going to even consider quoting Tolstoy on this one. Happy families are not all alike, save to the kind of person who sees happiness and assumes it a default state, an absence of any effort to reach that point or of crisis to tear it away. Social dynamics, similarly, are never exactly alike—it [...]
Categories: Character dynamics, Characterization, Description, Exercises, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: character dynamics, Characterization, Exercises, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 7, 2012
Let’s face it, assassins are ubiquitous; you have to work at it to find a genre in which they aren’t hiding behind a post somewhere. And since they pop up in a lot of plots, it’s important to know how to handle them in those plots: how to make sure the assassin gets done what [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: foreknowledge, plot, roleplaying, Things You Might Want To Know When..., writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 6, 2012
It might have been played up just a bit too much in order to provide motivation. Or maybe it’s to justify the fact that everybody with a name, a backstory and/or an even remotely solid set of stats seems to want to get their hands on it. Whatever the reason, it’s clear that the item [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Motivation, Tactics, Technique |
Tags: artifacts of anticlimax, motivation, roleplaying, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 1, 2012
To be intimidating might be the hardest job a character can have, particularly as the characters he’s supposed to intimidate get more and more powerful, and the audience more and more jaded. I’m one of that jaded audience, I suppose; my characters take no small amount of work to unnerve, and it doesn’t help when [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, Mood, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, intimidation, mood, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 27, 2012
I first ran into the idea of the Hedgehog Concept in a book on businesses and how they succeed—but hey, what am I if not prone to interdisciplinary approaches? According to Jim Collins, the idea of the Hedgehog Concept is inspired by the idea that the fox has many tricks, but the hedgehog can always [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Motivation, Technique |
Tags: hedgehog concept, meta, motivation, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 21, 2012
One of the things I find most fascinating about having multiple rival searchers in a search plotline is the strange bedfellows it creates. If you’ve got more than three or four different parties trying to get the same thing, there are bound to be alliances, people working together—at least for now—to increase their chances. What [...]
Categories: Character dynamics, Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Secondary characters, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, search plotlines, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 20, 2012
It may not have been the first search plotline factor I mentioned, but the possibility of rival searchers, along with being a sure source of tension, is one of the most complicated potential elements of a search plotline. Each rival searcher only adds to the complexity.
How many are there? If you’re going for a straightforward [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Secondary characters, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, search plotlines, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on February 16, 2012
When I talked about the questions we need to look into when constructing search plotlines, one of the ones I covered was what sorts of skills are required to find the object of the search. What I didn’t note is the interconnectedness between that and the obstacles to the successful completion of the search—after all, [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, search plotlines, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 15, 2012
In a sense, “Where is it?” can be an optional question for the object of a search plotline—or at least, one that doesn’t necessarily require a very precise answer. Motile search targets, after all, have that obnoxious tendency not to stay in one place, and the answer to where they are might be “in this [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, search plotlines, writing | No Comments »