Screaming in frustration

Image provided by Freeimages.com/ralaenin

Since I only got back to work on CM late last week, I decided at the last minute that I might need an extra week to finish up the Tavern Generator. So I’ve brought this post forward from it’s originally-scheduled position later in the month. This is yet another of the articles I wrote while on “Holiday”…

I was musing this morning on the fact that, in many ways, writing for an RPG is one of the most difficult creative activities one can pursue. More than anything else, this is the reason why not everyone is cut out for the role.

Rigid Format

Consider the rigidity of the format, for a start. Only on rare occasions can you hand-wave events to have them transpire in the manner most felicitous to the telling of an entertaining story; most of the time, you are bound to follow the game mechanics with some measure of rigidity. This means that if a particular result is required, you have to impose the logic of those game mechanics and alter the initial circumstances until the outcome matches requirements – something that is counterintuitive (reversing the flow of cause and effect) and far more difficult than simply having the outcome required for dramatic purposes, transpire.

Uncooperative Characters

You often hear novelists and scriptwriters complain about characters having a mind of their own, being uncooperative and stubborn, or taking over the story and moving it in unexpected directions. Ha! If they only knew…

Writing for an RPG is, by definition, writing with protagonists that are beyond the control of the author, who have minds of their own that are entirely separate and distinct from that of the GM. Even their capabilities might be, to some extent, unknown to the GM – this is especially true at the start of a campaign, but occurs regularly to some extent thereafter, simply because the GM has to do his writing in advance.

Multi-thread Anticipation

The upshot effect of the free will of the players is that any RPG Adventure is not one story, it’s several in parallel; like quantum states collapsing into a certainty, or Schroedinger’s Cat, however, the actual form that will result after the collapse is totally unknowable until that moment has actually been played.

Various articles here at Campaign Mastery have talked about Time Travel and Alternate Histories and the “critical moments” when decisions (or chance) can radically alter outcomes; this describes the reality of an RPG perfectly, and is one of the reasons why this perspective on time works so well for RPG applications. For long parts of the story, it will be more-or-less predictable; but then you will come to a critical event which can unfold in any of several different ways, with different outcomes, and become completely uncertain. Once past that critical moment, a new direction of plot is established, and things return to relative predictability – at least for a while.

The problem for the GM is that he has to encompass as many of these alternate tomorrows as he can anticipate – and every one that fails to materialize is therefore overhead, adding to the workload of the writing process without providing any tangible benefit to the storyline.

Many GMs solve this problem very cleverly, using something you might call “convergent plot evolution” – best summed up as “you can take the high road or the low road or even the side road, but the destination will still be the same.” Some simply live by their wits, while others adopt a blend of the two approaches – living by their wits while trying to steer the ship in a given general direction. Still others take the position of “I’ll get you into a fine mess and leave you to find your own way back out” – in other words, they set up an initial situation and leave resolution of that situation to the creativity and interaction of the players. Personally, I adopt a hybrid of that approach and “convergent plot evolution” in terms of the broader context – so the outcome of any given adventure is in the hands of the players, and I’m content for it to be so because the plot has already served it’s purpose in terms of advancing the broader narrative, the overarching plot thread.

But it all still rests on the efforts spent anticipating and preparing for the multitude of possible plot directions that the PCs might follow.

The vagaries of session length

Writing for an RPG is unusual in another respect: you don’t know how much time you need the story to occupy. It’s completely unpredictable. Novelists can – within reason – simply write until the story comes to an end. Short stories are more restricted, but nevertheless can be any suitable length within the parameters of the form. TV scripts are – in theory – far more rigidly defined, but 10 seconds of padding here and there can always be added in by the editors, and there are often ad-libs and varied deliveries filmed that take slightly different time frames; so a second can be added here or trimmed there from any given scene. Repeat hundreds of times and you could alter the running time of your story by as much as ten minutes an hour – or tweak it until it is exactly the length required. Which means that there is both a minimum and a maximum number of pages of script, but within that range, there is plenty of flexibility.

RPGs aren’t like that. You can know at the start of a day’s play that you need to reach either a resolution of the adventure or a break-point (a point at which the story can be interrupted, frequently a cliff-hanger, but it can also be a moment in which nothing is happening). But you don’t know how many pages of material you will need to fill the interval in between, and may not even know when writing the adventure when play will commence or end – making the scheduling of break points much, much harder. On session-length grounds alone, I could argue that writing for RPGs is the most difficult form of them all.

Screwed-up page

Image provided by Freeimages.com/Adam Ciesielski

Innovation and Creativity

One problem that is common to all forms of writing but is more acute in television scriptwriting and RPGs is the need to constantly innovate and be creative. A novelist might write one, two, or even three novels in a year. Someone writing short stories might need to write a new story of publishable quality once a week, and find a home for that writing. A television script writer might need to fill 26 or 36 episodes a year with new stories – though there is usually a team of writers doing so, reducing the workload on any one pair of shoulders. If a GM runs his campaign once a fortnight, he will also need 26 new stories a year – but without anyone sharing that workload. And if he runs his campaign weekly, that’s 52 “episodes” a year to be filled.

I only run my campaigns once a month, but I have multiple campaigns in operation at any given time – sometimes that number is three, sometimes four, and at one point it was ten! Right now, I only have two, with two more in hiatus. This is a comfortable level that I am able to manage given my physical condition and the demands of Campaign Mastery.

For convenience, let’s say 50 new plots a year is typical. Over a five-year period, that’s 250 new story ideas. Over ten, it’s 500. I’ve been GMing since 1981, so even at just the average rate, that’s 1700 stories. The struggle to be innovative and creative is constant, and not everyone can do it, and few can keep it up year after year.

broken pencil

Image provided by Freeimages.com/Phil Ragen

The Necessary Scope

Every writer does research, and 90% of that research never makes its way onto the page – though it can often be recycled for some other purpose. When writing a literary work, verisimilitude is essential (and that requires research) – but the scope of that research is limited to a relative handful of subjects; unless it directly affects the plot or involves details of a real-world setting, it can largely be hand-waved or created out of whole cloth from the imagination of the artist.

GMs, on the other hand, are expected to be Experts In Everything, and the entire world needs to be fleshed out to at least some extent because you can never know in advance exactly what you’re going to need. You can dodge this bullet somewhat by creating as you go – so long as you’re willing to risk writing yourself into a corner with contradictions – but even so, the scope demanded of writing for an RPG is greater than almost any other literary form (historical fiction might match the RPG in this respect, hence the caveat).

And, even less than other literary forms, the RPG writer is unable to predict or restrict what they are going to need to know. The last thing you want is to have to stop the game because “I haven’t figured that out yet” – but continuing on without that research being complete is when most of us get into the deepest trouble.

The Hanging Judges

Let’s be honest, in most forms of entertainment, the critics don’t matter. Sorry, critics, but it’s the truth. People will either like or dislike any creative product with or without anyone else’s opinion, and if the opinions are biased, or perceived as same, third party opinions will be discounted completely.

The best reviews always furnish the reader with enough information to be able to make allowances for any bias on the part of the reviewer – and we all have such biases; I’ve never met anyone who was completely neutral in their likes and dislikes.

RPGs aren’t like that. You are writing directly for a very select and small audience, your players, and your game will live or die on their verdict. Fail to entertain them too often, and they will find something else to do – or some other game to play in.

With any other form of literature, it doesn’t matter if half the potential readers hate what you’ve written, so long as the rest love it. The more approval, the better, quite obviously, but you have the capacity for at least some genericism in your target audience. When writing for an RPG campaign, the target audience is so small that even ambivalence can only be tolerated for so long.

Fortunately, the fact that you are all friends usually comes to your rescue – you will have a much clearer idea of your target audience’s foibles, likes, and dislikes before you even sit down to start writing, and can target them more effectively as a result.

That’s one reason it can be so traumatic adding a new player to the mix – you may or may not know their preferences, but even if you do, the adventure will almost certainly not have been written with them in mind. They inevitably change the table dynamic, and hence the tastes and reception that your efforts will engender.

Unlimited freedom – within limits

Unlike most other forms of writing, the GM has one saving grace to get them out of trouble: within these very narrow constraints, they have virtually unlimited freedom. Don’t like the way Elves are portrayed in your chosen game system? Change it. Don’t like the pantheon of gods on offer? Replace them.

There are no editors or censors or network executives to be appeased, the only compromises to be made are those of practicality, and what you have the time to do.

Not even novelists have this degree of freedom.

The Rewards

Being a GM is one of the most difficult pursuits you can adopt. So why do people do it?

First and foremost, it’s usually a lot of fun to revel in that unlimited creative freedom. Second by a very small margin, it facilitates a social interaction between the GM and his friends. The biggest reward that you can earn as a GM is a player saying “that was a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to next time.”

That’s the reward: getting to face the challenge all over again, because you have surmounted all the obstacles and entertained your audience.

Burnout happens when that is not enough to keep you going. When a former GM tells me that they used to run a game, but don’t any more, there are only three possibilities that leap to mind: either their efforts weren’t right for their target audience, or were technically deficient in some area, or they forgot that the GM has to have fun, too.

GMing should not be all hard work. Yes, there’s plenty of that, but the rewards are otherwise not enough to sustain you over the long haul. It’s very easy, when it stops being fun, to keep going because of social pressure; you may not be having fun anymore but the players are still enjoying the campaign and don’t want it to stop. This only makes a bad situation worse, a death-spiral of apocalyptic proportions that can lead a burned-out GM to quit the hobby altogether for years, or to simply renounce the GM’s chair forever.

Always remember that the first person you have to entertain is yourself, and the rest becomes much easier. In fact, it becomes merely the hardest form of literary pursuit imaginable. And every GM can perform three impossible tasks before breakfast…


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