Instead, we can use the null action—instead of not showing the character doing anything, we show the character doing practically nothing.

While most actions tend to be notable, a null action isn’t; if anything, it’s more important to dwell on the character’s relative lack of activity. That doesn’t mean she isn’t doing anything at all; it simply means she’s not doing anything to push the story along. If they’re talking, she might shift her posture, or change her expression, or look pointedly at someone. If something’s going on in the other room, she’s probably sitting (or standing) and waiting, maybe doing something minor to cope with her impatience. If she’s hiding while two people just above her are looking for her, or talking about something important, odds are she’s listening closely or dealing with minor issues that might threaten her ability to hide (random insects, painful foot cramps, the realization that she’s in a clump of poison ivy… you get the idea.)

What this does, first off, is ensure that the character is still visible. In an online game, this both serves the purpose of signaling your continued presence as a player—one of the biggest weaknesses of online games is that it’s impossible to tell who at the other computers is paying attention if they don’t do something—and lets you say “I should have a turn around this point, but I waive it for now”; some null actions can even be used to indicate whom you are ceding the turn to. In a story, this is mainly useful in reminding the audience that the character is still present and still alive. (Unless, of course, the object of the game is to make the audience forget the character is there, in which case, feel free to ignore all previous instructions!) In addition, writers can use null actions as a way to heighten tension, particularly in the case of characters hiding from other characters—it’s easy to focus on the characters being hidden from/eavesdropped on, but since every null action is still technically an action, that both brings attention back to the hiding character and increases the perceived risk that they’ll be spotted. As an added bonus, a character can still be characterized through null actions; one person’s usual idle routines are often notably different from another’s. What’s not to like?

But a vast majority of play-by-posts tend to die away before they’ve gotten very far—and, at least in my experience, most of them do because, without peer pressure right there to make sure that the posters are still posting, the flood of posts turns to a trickle, and then to a point where nobody but the biggest diehard in the group, the kind who goes around telling everyone “It is your turn, POST ALREADY”, would consider the game anything but dead. This, needless to say, isn’t much fun for the player who gets to keep everyone moving.

How do we avoid this, or avoid its more common opposite, the tendency of players to just assume that the game is dead even if it’s just everyone waiting for everyone else to make the next move?

My take is that what the group needs are guidelines—ways to make sure that they know the game actually is going, and that people have some sort of recourse if there’s really nothing they can do. In short, a sort of social contract for the play-by-post.

And what might this cover?

• Posting frequency. How often are people expected to post? Do they have deadlines?
• Order (if it must exist). Some people insist that everyone take turns, some that people go as they’re available but everybody gets a chance, but it’s good to know what the standard is so that you don’t have three players waiting because the one they’re expecting to go thinks the fourth should go first but the fourth is waiting for the one everyone’s expecting to go because she doesn’t think she can do anything. I’ve seen games die for less.
• What happens if someone isn’t posting? What does the group do, and who’s stuck with the job of riding herd on the other players?
• How does the group handle people breaking the code?
• If there’s one set GM, what happens if he or she’s unavailable for a while? At what point does the rest of the group just plain give up?

Since play-by-posts don’t have the immediate social pressure that face to face and play-by-chat games have, they open themselves to a certain number of risks in keeping going. Knowing ahead may not completely mitigate these risks, but having plans ahead of time will certainly help people to figure out how to handle them.

But that doesn’t mean the question shouldn’t be asked—just that we need to beat our questioners to the punch, and ask ourselves before we need to be put on the spot. Then, it stops being a threat, and starts being a source of inspiration.

“How does that even work?”, when I direct it at myself, has given me a number of ideas. When I found myself attempting to reinterpret werecritters, trying to figure out what form their shapeshifting actually took (particularly where the mass went; for all that I love shapeshifters, they’re really difficult for a science major to rationalize) gave me several unique approaches to the species and a plot idea. I’ve been known to get most of a magic item’s visualizations around trying to figure out what sorts of components and structures would allow it to actually do whatever it does.

“How does that even work” has given me a city’s water source, and a threat thereto, and reasons to do more research that led to one of my favorite fun facts. It’s in the process of giving me a map (can you really do underground canals in this kind of environment? What are my alternatives? Hm, this looks feasible and pretty spiffy).

If I know how something works, I know what it can’t do; what needs to be done to keep it working, and how difficult that is; how more can be made, and how the item or rule or what have you can be broken. Knowing how something works sometimes means I can utilize a part of its working to put it to uses for which it was not intended, or find a way to alter it in order to extend the scope of whatever it’s actually meant to do or change its function entirely.

“How does that even work” is vital to a mystery. It’s the fridge logic that makes the best clues—the things that on the surface seem completely reasonable, when you come back to them, can be the little inconsistencies that throw the case wide open.

Don’t be afraid of “How does that even work?”; it can be your closest ally. Instead, make sure you get to it before anyone else does. There’s no shame in being questioned if the questioner is also you.

The main use? Every now and then, it’s important to a plot that something small be just… forgotten, or at least not followed up on until it’s too late to keep it from sparking something else. This is one of those things that both writers and GMs need to watch out for; GMs need to make sure the something small actually is forgotten by their players, while writers don’t have to worry about their characters not leaping off the rails and remembering, but do need to make sure that that particular event or detail slipping a character’s mind at a certain time is reasonable and not a sign of terminal thoughtlessness. If someone as obsessed with deadlines as I tend to be can not notice the site is back up, then it should be possible to use what happened to do the same to a fictional character, right? For purposes of concision, I’m going to call whatever it is that’s been forgotten a slipped detail—here’s how to make sure it gets slipped.

The first thing you need is to make the slipped detail seem relatively minor and relatively distant. That way, people aren’t harping on it constantly; it’s there, and it’s relatively important to someone, but it’s not the kind of thing that looms in everyone’s consciousness. Likewise, while it might be time-sensitive when it happens, in its first introduction it’s anything but. It’s not going to be for a while, it’s not all that urgent.

Then make sure there are more important things going on right now; there’s nothing to distract people from an important thing in the distance than an urgent thing in the present. It doesn’t even need to be fate-of-the-world to distract a character; it just needs to be important in the character’s worldview, so they’ll pay more attention to it than whatever they’re supposed to be missing, and time-sensitive, so they need to deal with it now rather than thinking over all the things they need to do. It’s amazing what kind of effect urgency can have!

Get them used to an easily routine to handle whatever they’re supposed to miss, then have the time they miss it not quite apply as normal. Take my own adventures in not noticing the site: since I moved here, we’ve had occasional problems with site outages at the beginning of four months, one of which is May. When the site went down in May, I assumed this was one of those cases—that what I’d need to do was go poke the owner of the server and she’d take care of the rest. So all I needed to do was send an email asking what was up, and I wouldn’t have to worry about anything until I’d heard back from her. Only the problem wasn’t the usual problem, and the server owner was on vacation—so it quietly solved itself before she got back, and I, waiting for an email and too distracted with other things to check the site, completely missed it when the site restored itself.

In the end, the detail’s slipped, and it seems like something that could have happened, rather than needing to be or feel forced.

So how do we arrange to be selectively villainous?

The first thing to do is to find a clear conflict between two definitely-delineated sides. Race, nationality, class and powers (or lack thereof) are the most common divisions, as they result in easily delineated sides with relatively limited overlap, but you can get inventive.

Got that? Now, take a side. You’ll need to be able to justify the side you took—it helps if that side has a semi-legitimate grievance—whether you actually believe in it or not. I find it better if you really do agree with them, because then it’s harder for the prots to come in and shift you out of whatever position you acquire, but you can get away with wanting to end both sides eventually but looking like an ally to your chosen side now. If you can identify a protagonist, or at the very least a “good” side, you may as well set up camp opposite them, but if not, don’t worry: your deeds will probably create one soon enough.

Now, impress the side you’ve got. Your best shot is a combination of three factors: One, you clearly believe in their cause; two, you’ve got the chops and the motivation to do something about it rather than just maintaining the current status quo; three, you’ve got an idea nobody’s had (or been willing to do, or something) before that will lead to your side winning. Feel free to be vicious; a good bloodthirsty approach satisfies your side’s hardliners, often gives you an advantage against opponents who are trying to maintain the moral high ground, and lets you keep the villain in selective villainy. The key is to make sure that either your tactics don’t completely break your side’s moral code, or that you can find some other way to justify them (decreasing overall collateral damage, it being an equivalent to something the other side already does, the tactic being the only option you have left—these might even be true in a manner of speaking, but all that really matters is that you can back up your words) so that you impress your people rather than shocking or offending them. One or two well-placed good guys on your side can break your PR if you’re not careful.

Being selectively villainous is pretty advantageous to us—it gives us better PR, a nice slice of moral ambiguity, and often some people under us who are as devoted to us as those obnoxious heroes’ sidekick/fan/whatever types are to them. Plan well!

Old-timers might remember Anathema, one of my better pieces. It’s not that swords that kill things that can’t usually be killed are particularly rare in fantasy, mind you. Heroes of Destiny find them with almost obnoxious regularity. Anathema, though, had the advantage of being occupied by a very argumentative double-entity in the form of its least god, a rather distinctive design (relatively unornamented, but of an alloy of materials that shouldn’t have been possible without a god’s hand in the mix), and the fact that its creation was a case of direct divine intervention.

Then there was Lisbet, primary weapon for one of my PCs. The item’s actual name was a lot longer and more pretentious-sounding—its owner and its creator were both from groups that lived by pretentious-sounding names—but for reasons of concision, and for reasons of its owner’s characterization, it was more often known by the name of its primary occupant, the owner’s soulforged and very vocal sister. I could have given this character a sword, and it would probably have worked just fine—but a bone-graft that turned into a weapon seemed far more interesting, a source that would give her a strong attachment to it (and would occasionally let me have the character ‘translating’ for someone else) made for much more unique characterization, and it was pretty easy to justify the boosts it provided including a little bit of healing and a little bit of social savvy because of the nature of the occupant.

It’s not always weapons, either. One of my more recent projects was the… sixth in my line of clothing armor with added bonuses. This one, Cydonia’s Mercy (named because quince once had a reputation for protecting people) was designed as a healer’s pseudo-armor; it protects, it reduces the cost of magic for healing or plant-related applications, it looks like a green coat-robe with really nifty red and silverish embroidery down the front, and while it wasn’t actually designed for Samar (its original owner, the primary healer in the city it was found in at the time that that city lost its population, did far more with the plant-related applications), it still fit her and her concept pretty well.

First off, it helps to know how much the student already knows. If you assume too little knowledge, you tell the student things she already knows. Not only can that come across as condescending, but if making sure the student learns is time-sensitive, the increased learning time from the review can push you closer and closer to the deadline. On the other hand, assuming the student knows more than she actually does will leave the student frustrated and you constantly backtracking to explain concepts you thought were self-evident, assuming you can even figure out that she doesn’t know or guessed wrong from context. It’s a delicate balance.

It also helps to know what the best way of teaching the student is. Teaching isn’t one-size-fits-all, after all! Some people work better with visual demonstrations, others with lectures, others with hands-on trials; some need to have instructions and explanations provided in painstaking detail, while others work best if they can ask questions and still others just need to be lightly guided into figuring it out for themselves. Then there’s taking into account their prior experiences with the subjects, learning disabilities—while you can try to apply the same teaching style to everyone, or pick the style that works best for you and hope that makes up for any difficulties it might present to the student, it’s not going to work near as well as learning to teach in the way the student best learns from.

What does the student need to know? If your time is limited, you can cover everything and make sure it all sticks, point by point, but if time is short, you might need to prioritize parts and let the others slide. Never forget, though, that some concepts absolutely need to build on other concepts before they make sense at all; you can try to teach all the rules of grappling to a newbie tabletopper, or try to teach a beginning writer to choose the best ending for a short story, but it won’t do you any good if the former still doesn’t know how to make an attack roll and the latter doesn’t get the concept of plot. (Real-world writers and GMs may wish to take note of this.) You have to strike a balance between what the student needs to know as soon as possible and what the student needs to know in order to learn what she ultimately needs to know.

Thinking before you teach may not eliminate the time and frustration, but it should certainly decrease it.

Stay tuned for more Things You Might Want To Know When!

I was looking at it today while coaching one of my friends through a scene that she was having trouble writing—issues with the subject material. Kind of thing that happens a lot when you’ve never actually done [fill in the blank], particularly when the blank is outside your comfort zone a bit. And that got me thinking. I already use visualizations for action scenes, applying the elements and principles of visual art to making the most important moments of my actions particularly spectacular, but what about everything else? That gave me the Comic Method.

The idea is pretty straightforward. If you’ve got a scene in which the most important part is the dialogue, and you don’t want it to look like it doesn’t have a clear referent, try imagining it as a comic, one or two lines of dialogue per panel. If you can keep pictures in your head, do it there, but if not, feel free to grab some scratch paper and draw little stick figures, give yourself a sense of what’s going on. Once you’ve got that, see if you can add something that hints at the picture as a narrative beat. Try to avoid the panels that are nothing but talking heads; you can have one or two of those in a scene, but most of the time your characters should be doing something, even if it’s not much of a change from what they were doing last time. Think of it this way; how often do you just stand still facing someone when talking?

What this does is force us to look at the scene through the eyes of someone who needs to make it as interesting visually as it is to listen to. Comic artists can’t hide behind their dialogue alone; since they need to include visuals, it gives them practice at thinking about what it is that their characters are up to between their words.

Do this enough, and you’ll find yourself thinking about what the characters are doing by sheer force of habit—and that, in turn, will make your talk-heavy scenes a whole lot easier to envision.

What it boils down to, in the start, is that we are dealing with speculative fiction. I’m not completely against the idea of almost everything operating under a set of clear and replicable rules; if I was, I wouldn’t be a science major! On the other hand, for some people, having magic (or sufficiently advanced technology) as predictable as science stifles some of the enjoyment. My tastes lie somewhere in between; I want my magic to appear to have enough rules that I can attempt to puzzle them out, and that I can tell a deus ex machina from a surprising but inevitable use of metaphysics, but not be too constrained. Just as we have bumblebees capable of flight despite the mathematical evidence to the contrary, so too do I want my magic systems capable of things that its users do not quite understand. If our world still has things that we don’t understand, why shouldn’t a world we create?

Putting the fantastic into one’s creations also gives the audience a better sense of what they and their effects might look like. Consider D&D’s +3 sword–no non-numerical enhancements, mind, just a simple +3. We know it aims better; we know it hits harder. But what do we visualize as it does so? Or do we just take its better aim and harder hits for granted? On the other hand, if you write one +3 sword as inherently attracted to blood, another as holding the spirit of the world’s greatest swordsman, another as having been forged and reforged to come closer to the Platonic ideal of “sword”, another as being blessed by a god to be a mortal echo of his own divine weapon–then not only can you better see what it is these magic swords do, but it makes them different, not a large batch of +3 swords all on blue light special this week at MageMart. This in turn matters because we ourselves are accustomed to a world of mass production; set against this, items that are uniquely shaped for their own purposes, regardless of the similarity of their effects, create a further contrast against the world that we know.

Last, and perhaps most important for me, the fantastic creation is like a signature for the creator. If all the worlds I let myself travel to have the same sorts of magic, and the same sorts of items, what use is there changing between them? But if in one, people are seeing emotional damage as physical, and in another sympathetic magic ties the condition of the statue by the field to the crops in its shadow, and in a third there is an item that must be kept under the tongue–nowhere else–to protect from a certain type of magic, then I know I’m looking at something new, that the world’s creator is trying to make it something more than a shadow of the other fantasy worlds. Effort matters.

That, then, is why I prefer my items fantastic. How do you like yours? Why?

So the first question is, how can we fight it, both in items and in magic in general? Here’s my take.

First, try for unique effects, or at least unique combinations of existing effects. I don’t know about most of you, but if I’m given a choice between something that gives me a straight bonus and something that lets me see everyone’s mental state manifesting as representative animals and their mental damage as physical injuries to such creatures—well, three guesses which one I’m going to choose. Items or magic with their own personalities can also give this effect, but those should be used sparingly; more than one or two in a party starts getting a bit improbable.

If you can’t make it mechanically unique, then at least make it look different. One of the things I think is pretty cool about Legends of the Wulin is that if you look at the various external kung fu styles, you’ll notice that at least three out of the five techniques of each is just some variation on a bonus to one of six stats—and that a lot of styles have different techniques that do the exact same thing, but the way they’re described, you’re going to get entirely different visuals. On the other hand, making it too obvious that two things are the exact same effect can really dampen this; one of my little niggling pet peeves about Exalted 2^nd Ed was when they took two Lunar Charms that were admittedly pretty similar to existing Charms in the Solar and Dragon-Blooded arsenals and just renamed them into that—particularly the Essence sense, which in 1^st Ed had been fluffed as being by scent rather than by vision. It loses a lot of style when two effects from entirely different sources manage to look identical.

Story, story, story! This one tends to work better for magic items, but it can be applied to magic in general with a little tweaking; what it boils down to is to recreate the wonder by giving whatever you’re looking at a unique history. It doesn’t even need to be all that dramatic; sure, some items were used for some world-shaking event, but some are notable just for who created them and how the wielder views that character, or who bought them for whom as a gift.

Leave them with a few secrets. There’s no mystery in a +1 sword or a standard grimcleaver; they always do exactly what the numbers say they’re going to do. But a spell that sometimes does something different, for some bizarre reason, or an item that occasionally manifests a new ability, that does what it does in a way that seems improbable, or has an off-the-wall requirement—that’s interesting. People start asking why; maybe they start experimenting, or start drawing their own conclusions about how the item or magic works.

Keeping the wonder in magic and magical items is tough work in a regimented design system, but it’s worth it.