Posts belonging to Category Plot
Posted by Ravyn on March 4, 2013
Weather is one of the easiest things for a writer to forget. It’s all around us, but while it impacts us, it doesn’t always impact us much—modern conveniences tend to work around the worst of it, unless it’s reached the point of catastrophe. As a result, a lot of us—particularly those of us in “Weather? [...]
Categories: Description, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: plot, roleplaying, scening, weather, World-building, writing | 
3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on February 18, 2013
All of the conflicts I’ve seen work have made two major points to the players/characters: It has to be you, and it has to be now.
It has to be you. This is probably the most important of the two, playing as it does to the egos of the players—and to the verisimilitude of the overall [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, GM Advice, Motivation, Plot, Technique |
Tags: conflict, GM Advice, motivation, plot, roleplaying | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 22, 2013
I talked yesterday about what makes a temptation plot interesting—but while it went into the theory and the meta-game rewards, it didn’t talk near enough about the execution. So let’s talk about what you need to think about when you’re putting together a temptation plot.
The first thing to keep in mind with temptation plots is [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, Technique, temptation, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on January 21, 2013
We’re all familiar with the temptation plot—the offer of something important to a character in exchange for some often minor-sounding price—do something she wasn’t supposed to/didn’t want to do, don’t do something she was supposed to/did want to, stand aside for just five minutes at the right time…. yeah. Those. The ones where, regardless of [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique |
Tags: plots, roleplaying, Technique, temptation, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on December 10, 2012
Is there any writer—GM—creator of any sort who has not at some point dropped a metaphorical mountain on at least one member of her cast? I don’t think so. Tragedy and trauma may not be quite as ubiquitous as ants in San Diego, but they come pretty close. It’s pretty easy to tell why mountain-hurling [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, Mood, Plot, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: emotional trauma, plot, roleplaying, Voice and Style, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 20, 2012
Yesterday, I talked about building a world around characters, rather than building enough of a world to mold characters into and moving outward from there. I’ve been toying with this recently, and I’ve found a pretty good sequence for trying to grow outward from one or two characters to a plot and a world.
I start [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, Concepts, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, plot, Technique, World-building, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on November 19, 2012
I’ve always looked at putting together a story in a fresh new world as starting with the world, getting enough of it together to give yourself ideas, then sticking characters in it, then letting them bounce off each other until you have something approximating a plot. Wasn’t that how all the people with the really [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, plot, Technique, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on October 29, 2012
UZ’s guest posts continue!
There is a form of dishonesty that has gained popularity in recent writing, which for lack of a better term I will call the Broken Bridge technique. This is where the story presents a question that feels compelling, puts off addressing it and ultimately fails to answer it, but [...]
Categories: Concepts, Exposition, For Writers, Plot, Technique, Voice and Style |
Tags: guest posts, metatext, Technique, UZ, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on October 16, 2012
Yesterday, I talked about the idea of culture as character. To say that I’m a fan is a bit of an understatement—one of the things I was thinking, while sitting through the panel that set off yesterday’s riff, was that I keep trying to angle for an RPG of manners. It’s not just one appealing [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, World-building |
Tags: concepts, culture, plot, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on October 15, 2012
When I was volunteering at Conjecture, there was one panel that I had decided the moment I saw the schedule that I was going to see. I would carefully schedule my break, I would barter time with the other volunteers—but I was going to go to that piece on Fantasy/SF of Manners and Culture as [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Plot, Technique, Thematics, World-building |
Tags: concepts, culture, plot, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 4 Comments »