Posted by Ravyn on June 17, 2013
Originally posted on August 11, 2010.
What’s the difference between conversation and combat?
I found myself asking that of one of my friends, while thinking about UZ’s recent question on keeping all participants in a conversation involving more than four characters at once. I have difficulty with that sort of thing too, so I didn’t [...]
Categories: Concepts, Cross-discipline, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice, Technique |
Tags: combat, comparisons, concepts, conversation, group scenes, reprise, roleplaying, writing | 
No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on June 4, 2013
A tweak here,
A change there,
Question this assumption,
Another consideration,
Why?
How?
What?
Do you truly mean that the way it sounds?
I do not critique because I hate.
Rather, I love,
And love halting, crude, clumsy,
A tangle of hands and bones and emotions,
Love, ill-executed, might be as painful as hatred,
But one cannot help but love, can one?
I see castles in the sky,
And to [...]
Categories: For Writers |
Tags: random poetics, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on June 3, 2013
It’s fascinating how important a phrase “I want” can be.
In many of the stories I read, “I want” just isn’t a thing. The characters have vague desires, yes, but most of what they end up going for is more “Do not want” than “I want”. Reactive rather than proactive, unless they’re the antagonists. It’s something [...]
Categories: Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers |
Tags: freewrite, roleplaying, want, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 29, 2013
I’ve been overthinking one of my primary characters for a while now. To be fair, in that game, it sometimes seems like almost any sort of characterization beyond finding a motivation to save the world is overthinking. And the character is more than capable of overanalyzing things herself, and just enough of an outsider to [...]
Categories: For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Player Advice |
Tags: overthinking, roleplaying, writing | No Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 23, 2013
This is somewhat similar to my old “driver’s license” exercise, only slightly less restrictive. What it boils down to is this: even if we don’t necessarily all agree on what colors there are and what categories they fit into (this coming from a person who was raised on the Crayola marker spectrum who occasionally gets [...]
Categories: Characterization, Description, Exercises, For Writers, Technique |
Tags: Characterization, description, Exercises, Technique, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 22, 2013
Most cities in fantasy worlds have a vested interest in people not getting into fights to the death at the drop of a hat. It isn’t that different from the real world in that respect, after all. And one of the easiest ways to do this is to limit access to weapons. So that got [...]
Categories: Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice, Places, World-building |
Tags: fantasy worlds, roleplaying, weapon control, World-building, writing | 1 Comment »
Posted by Ravyn on April 9, 2013
Most of my posts on building worlds have been at least one post per topic, sometimes a full series—which is nice and all, but not very good when covering things that don’t need ages of explication. So instead, I’m looking at simple questions with far-reaching ramifications that make for an interesting way of characterizing a [...]
Categories: Cultures, For Roleplayers, For Writers, World-building |
Tags: cultures, roleplaying, World-building, writing | 5 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 2, 2013
Yesterday I talked about ensuring that the audience is rooting for the character you want them to, with techniques focusing on the antagonist. But as came up in one of my points, the protagonist is often—if not predominantly—a good part of the problem. So what can we do with protagonists to keep them in the [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Writers |
Tags: Characterization, protagonists, writing | 3 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on April 1, 2013
One of the things I notice a lot, both in the chapter-by-chapter snarks I treat as a guilty pleasure, and in general reviews, are stories where the audience has a clear character to root for in mind, but for whatever reason, that character just isn’t the protagonist. For whatever reason, the antagonists are coming across [...]
Categories: Characterization, Characters in the world, For Writers |
Tags: antagonists, Characterization, writing | 2 Comments »
Posted by Ravyn on March 25, 2013
When I was talking last week about sympathetic antagonists, one of the disadvantages I listed was that it was easy to slip somewhere and end up with an antagonist that just doesn’t come across as sympathetic. Let’s face it, when it comes to antagonist sympathy, subjectivity is a more dangerous opponent than the protagonists. But [...]
Categories: Character archetypes, Characterization, For Roleplayers, For Writers, GM Advice |
Tags: character archetypes, Characterization, roleplaying, sympathetic antagonists, writing | 1 Comment »