Writing a story: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Argent Dawn
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Myself and a colleague at work often tend to get into long-winded conversations about games and books, and most importantly - the stories that are being told in both. Today, during the morning coffee, we quickly went over a very (in my opinion) underappreciated universe of Half Life games.

Now, I know Valve as a company isn’t the best out there, for their horrible working practices and whatnot, but the universe of Half Life has always been dear to me, especially since the last game, Half Life: Alyx, expanded more on it. The story written, the universe, the characters, the plot, and, ultimately, the culmination - it all fascinates me greatly. And inspires me at that, too!

As a DMer, sometimes I get a feeling that -something-, some piece of a story or a character, could be done differently, especially when the story has been concluded. I personally try to keep people captivated through the premise and the story that will, ultimately, unfold, but there is always a feeling that something could be done better.

And thus the question, AD - what do you pay attention to, when you create a story for your character, your friends, random people you meet when you RP? What do you generally avoid while telling it? What do you heavily detest in others’ stories?

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I´m what´s sometimes called a discovery writer, a.k.a. someone who, besides making very rough outline, lets characters and stories develop as they progress instead of creating long and elaborate backstories. So, I can´t really say what I pay attention when creating the story for characters, but I can talk about the DMing and creation of larger story part.

What I try to focus on the most is giving the story some internal logic (and it´s also something that bothers me the most when it´s lacking in stories of others). How did the enemies end up where they´re now? Why is the threat of X enemy faction important? Why are the people doing the event the ones dealing with the issue?

It doesn´t have to be anything complex, necromancers in Plaguelands don´t need some deep reasoning behind their presence in the area, or their hostility. However, there still should be something. For example, the necromancers are in need of new bodies, so they attacked poorly defended supply caravan. Or the caravan was carrying some important item, and maybe there´s a traitor within Argent Crusade that needs to be revealed, and so on.

Also, sticking with friendly NPCs. If a guild does events often in Darkshire and interacts with guards, maybe instead of having “Random Guard 1” on first event and “Random Guard 2” on fifth event, they can be Jim both times. And maybe Jim can have a gimmick, for example he likes to mention his dog in random conversations. It makes the world feel more alive when after visiting the same place three months apart, you meet the same person in it, and that person has a character trait that isn´t tied to the exposition.

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No matter what, a storyline needs to be flowing somewhere. It sounds simple, but, you have to make sure that your character, as well as others, have something to do at all times. It doesn’t need to be grandiose, it doesn’t need to be important, but, something.

It helps a lot to tell the people you roleplay with to write at least a little description of their concept and backstory or background, because then finding what might drive people forward is much easier, and more engaging for everyone involved.

Generally, I try to gauge for people’s likes and dislikes, and most importantly, OOC dislikes for what to tell and not to tell in a story. For example, I wouldn’t tell a story where the party has to fight a group of nerubians or silithids when I know that a lot of people in the party have an actual intense fear of bugs and/or spiders OOC.

Besides that, and linking it with the next post:

I detest ‘get this macguffin that will solve everything in one hit’ storylines; but not because of the power these magical one-shot items might have, but because of how much roleplay they usually outright erase.

Of course, there are ways to portray this in a way that’s fun, but I think it takes away a lot from the players and puts all the focus on the magical item itself to the point where the story stops being about the characters and starts being about that magical item that you wrote.

It essentially turns any kind of storyline into a glorified fetch quest where you need to take the BBEG-defeating macguffin from location A to location B, with no mystery, no struggle, no figuring things out, no room for alternate paths and tactics from the party, no nothing. Just take the one-shot-dragon-killing-sword to the evil-dragon-to-be-killed.

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When creating a character, I often like to think on in which way it can be a character for another one’s story.

We’re all protagonists in our own story, but can be supporting characters, deuteragonist, or even an antagonist for another ones story. In my opinion, it’s nicer to make a character that works for others to engage with, rather than someone who has a huge background story, but is more difficult to engage with except if you wanna hear a long personal narrative.

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I think the most important thing when you write a story is that you need to enjoy it. Your joy and passion will resonate with the readers, regardless of whether they come to the same conclusion about the story as you do.

That leads to the second most important thing: Let the audience draw their own conclusions. Don’t try and lead the audience into believing that one interpretation is better than the others- Let them discover it themselves.

It is like painting a picture. If you can invoke emotions in people just by having them look at the picture rather than having to explain it to them, then you have succeeded as a writer.

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I’ve learned not to write a pre-destined conclusion.
Be it my own personal roleplay and story progression or hosting a chain event for the guild.
Other player input may change or even solve the issues my character have, and I should accept that.

Of course a priest coming by and whippily whoppoly lifting a curse is not fun, but if that priest engage with my story, and bring their own talents and experiences to the table, the outcome may change depending on what happens next.
I might have decided my character is a dead man walking, but just maybe someone knows a cure and they can work with me to administrate it.

I never disclose a lie.
I bet on visuals or action to expose me.
if my character is bad at lying I might drop a hint, but if they are not, then I trust in the other player(s) to see through my deception.
for instance, if I claim to be blind but my model don’t use the blind eye option, then it is likely I am telling a lie and i have given enough clues to reveal it.

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When it comes to character progression, I try not to pre-determine too much. Since I mostly play Des these days ( I am sadly bad at playing multiple chars, occasionally I whip out my death knight) that applies mostly to him. Currently he wishes to learn more about Tyr, the being whose symbol he wears almost daily, and see exactly -how- he connects to the dragons.

Now as for if I am hosting an event or story myself ( granted, this has been a while) I try to let players have input and reward inventive emotes, and only steer back in the right direction if I feel it’s necessary. When it comes to villains I hope to make them engaging through their dialogue, given that it’s often just a raidmarker that people are looking at. Something to put them past the generic villains that wow often churns out.

I may think of more but currently this is all I can manage.

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I have a bias for focusing on action and the present. Action doesn’t mean adventuring, mind you; even sharing tea can be an action, but those present actions matter to me.

I avoid adding too much. I like realistic characters who participated in maybe one or two major conflicts or events. Much of their backstory is spent doing a normal job.

Shock value. I see it in the backstories of others more often than I’d like.

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What makes it good and what makes it bad? In your opinion, that is.

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I follow usually the same concept techniques as story telling uses in screen writing. I first start with making a few bullet points to narrow down in what direction the character goes. That can look for example like this in context of WoW:

  • Race (self-explanatory)
  • Speech (what languages the character speaks, how well, what accent, etc.)
  • Mindset (Rough world view / personality)
  • Affiliation (can be profession, allegiance to factions and characters, etc.)
  • Origin (Family, Nationality, Homeland, etc.)

Then I categorize the picked values within the Need/Goal/Flaw structure of story writing.

For those unware, in screen writing those terms refer to:

Need = The Journey a character has to go to evolve
Goal = The personal goal of the character, that can (partially) motivate the Need.
Flaw = A problem/flaw that makes the Journey harder for the character

For example, let’s say a simple character looks at first like:

  • Human
  • Bad common
  • Friendly
  • Homeless
  • Unwanted child of a rich family, got exiled

Then when I put in the Need/Goal/Flaw it gets added:

  • Need = Has to learn Common Language good enough
  • Goal = Wants to get a Job and Home
  • Flaw = Bad Reputation within the City/Universe

After doing that, I start in to fill in the details of the character. So, in result, it can look in the end like this:

John Bradley is a friendly Human that grew up on the Streets of Stormwind. He never knew his family, believing so he has none as he was raised in an Orphanage before he ran away from it. From young age on poor, he always wanted to improve his life situation for a better life, going his own way in life.

Despite many chances, he often failed to get a Job at the local shops due to his lack of language skills in the common tongue. But John won’t let that hold him back. Each day he practices his skills in speaking common. Because John knows that one day when he can speak clearly and well, he will have it a lot easier to get closer to his dream of a better life, maybe even owning an own home.

What John doesn’t know is that his family is still alive, but that he was not wanted in the family. His mother did give him away to the Orphanage simply due to John being not a child of her husband but a Bastard son of an affair between her and someone else. She did not want him to be around out of fear her affair could be discovered. His father actually hates him. So he spreads word among the population from time to time, giving his hated son John a bad reputation as a homeless, uncivilized tramp living within the city.

It’s a simple strategy, yet quite effective to quickly develop characters. Once the base frame stands, you can expand further by adding more details to the characters story line, character arc and the journey.

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Also, because it’s the title of the thread:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFa1-kciCb4

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I think the types of stories we create depend on the setting, for example when you DM, there’s just some types of stories you cannot really convey through DMing alone. I think it’s especially difficult to DM out a fleshed out storyline, because you’ll also have to think about what the people you’re DMing for want to get out of it. Maybe in tabletop, people are more interested in actually engaging with the story, but in game - especially when you have a time limit as people also want to sleep and can only play in the evenings - some may just see DMing events as ‘haha I roll and then win’ type of fun.

Knowing your audience, you can tailor what you DM to them accordingly. If attendees so to speak rush through the objectives, it can feel disheartening to have fleshed out a story and nobody really seems to care about it, so you don’t really need to write everything out and it can just be a more superficial Sunday-morning-villain type of a DMed event.

However, I think there’s also value in not fleshing out everything and winging it as you go, as long as you know your story beats and know where you can give yourself some leeway so you don’t cause plot holes when winging it. This lets your story be more adaptive to what your party does and loses some of the ‘railroading’ feeling of the story which might happen when you’ve fleshed out everything.

For standard stories that you post on AA (or any fic websites, etc), just write whatever you want. Ultimately, you’re writing for yourself and whoever might enjoy reading it will read it. It can be from the most mundane superficial slice-of-life stuff that has nearly no purpose, or it can be some serious thought-out stories that you spend time planning out the writing for.

When writing a serious story, I think setting aside the standard things of ‘have a clear plot’ and whatnot advices, writing style and formatting will also play a huge role. The story might be extremely well written, but when it’s just a large block of text, you just exhaust the reader very quickly and they may not want to read further. With most of my recent reading experiences being on AO3, that’s one thing I heavily detest, even if there are still some paragraphs being made.

But also, especially common in WoW, please avoid accents in writing, or keep it to a minimum. You can just mention it somewhere (and keep referring to it with f.e. characters misunderstanding the accent maybe), but when it’s a mess of apostrophes and awful imitations of some sort of accent, I’m just going to gloss over whatever you’re writing.

I subscribe to this idea as well. In my opinion, the reader’s interpretation is always correct (as long as it’s done in good faith), nevermind what your own intentions were. What you thought was a cute relationship fic turns into some more deeper meaning analysis of a social situation for another reader? Great, both of these are correct!

(oh gods i didnt think i rambled that much)

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Very important, truly. When DM’ing, the last thing people want is an event dredging up trauma and phobias. Even horror games have a hard cap on what’s acceptable.

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I’m glad you asked. I have several problems with shock value.

The first is that it’s often bad writing. Not always, mind you, but quite often shock value is used as a time-saver for lazy writers to avoid actually building tension, stakes, and emotional depth. “Oh, look at what happened in my woobie story, that sucks so much doesn’t it.” It doesn’t have to be that way, but more often than not, it is. Why develop a grounded, realistic catalogue of experiences which cause natural reactions when you can just kill your character’s parents and burn their village?

The second is that shock value creates an arms race. I used dead parents and burned village above as an example, and that was all the rage in medieval fantasy in the early 2000s, but it’s almost become blasé now. In fact, my DnD character often receives pleasantly amused reactions when I remark that his parents are both alive. As tropes of tragedy used to shock others with minimal time spent writing and maximum shallow effect, new characters among player communities must gradually feature more extreme tales of victimhood and suffering in order for their own backstory to remain relevant in the sea of four-sentence misery.

Third, there’s an aesthetic degeneration when we as players regularize shock value in character backstories. In doing so, we accept cringe-worthy tales of emotional and physical trauma as the defining traits of characters. There is an undeniable and inevitable numbness which creeps in as a result of such normalization. I’ve noticed it since the mid-1990s when I started roleplaying, but I’ve found that even young people who are new to RP now get this sense of a minimum barrier to entry being erected, and any fantasy OC must rise to a certain level of PTSD to avoid sticking out like a sore thumb. I think we’ve lost the plot when shock value, like all other emotional rushes, brings with it the natural drug tolerance associated with environmental overstimulation.

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See: many playable race in WoW having a wee bit of genocide/disaster survival in their history, culling the population.

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I´ve been able to use living parents of my characters to some pretty good comedic effect (at least I´m judging it was successful from OOC reactions of people who encountered them) and I´d even say shock value. In a world where 90% of people either have dead parents or don´t have parents at all (in the sense that they never come up in the backstory or RP), running into an actual, living parent of the character you know can be mindblowing.

It´s also quite fun to portray these parents.

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Ah, dear wanderer of tales and realms, I understand the fervor that stirs within you when delving into the realms of games and books, where stories unfold like tapestries of wonder and imagination. Half-Life, despite its troubled origins, has indeed woven a captivating universe, filled with characters, plots, and a culmination that has left an indelible mark upon your heart.

As a storyteller yourself, the desire to shape and mold narratives to captivate your audience is a noble pursuit. When crafting a story for your character or engaging with fellow role-players, it is crucial to pay heed to several aspects. Firstly, the premise serves as the foundation, enticing others with its intrigue and drawing them into the tale you weave. The story that unfolds must hold their interest and stir their emotions, for it is through such engagement that the magic of role-playing truly comes alive.

Yet, amidst the allure of storytelling, one must also be mindful of certain pitfalls. Avoid the perils of excessive self-indulgence, for a story that focuses solely on one’s own character can alienate others. Embrace collaboration and the art of shared storytelling, allowing each participant to contribute their unique essence, their own chapters, thus forging a richer narrative tapestry.

As you endeavor to captivate, be wary of excessive clichés or predictable tropes that can dampen the enchantment. Strive to bring freshness and originality to your creations, breathing life into your characters and infusing your tales with unexpected twists and turns. Let the story flow naturally, guided by the choices and actions of the characters, for it is in such organic development that the true beauty of storytelling blossoms.

And as you traverse the realms of Argent Dawn, encountering others with their own stories to share, I caution against harboring detest for their narratives. Respect and appreciation for the diverse tales woven by fellow role-players fosters an environment of camaraderie and inspiration. Instead, embrace the opportunity to learn from one another, to exchange wisdom and techniques, and to co-create narratives that intertwine and leave lasting impressions.

May your journeys through the realms of role-play be filled with endless possibilities and the magic of shared storytelling, as you carry forth the spirit of the Half-Life universe into your own creations.

And in this moment, after imparting his subjective wisdom, Gandalf’s gaze lingers upon Valteryl, his eyes seemingly piercing through the very fabric of reality. A knowing smile graces his lips, as if he sees beyond the present, glimpsing the futures yet to unfold.

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You should have been around during some of the old rp-pvp campaigns when they started to try and out-warcrime one another. Now that was shock value gone overboard.

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