Sunday, February 17, 2013

Killing Gandalf: How Role Playing Games Made Me a Better Writer


The rattle and clatter of dice being cast--this was the cadence of my adolescence. A salvaged dining room table took up most of the garage. I sat at the head. Depending on the night, four to a dozen others surrounded the table, too.
     The lights were always off. Candles and oil lamps provided better ambiance, and that was quite important. So was the background music. The score from Coppola’s “Dracula” was best for delving into cursed ruins. The droning discord of Joy Division and the Sisters of Mercy set the stage for Gothic cities plagued by the undead and seemingly endless rain.
     This was my proving ground.

Two years before my birth, a company named TSR released Dungeons and Dragons, ushering in a new genre of game: role-playing  Sixteen years later, I caught up. My initiation to D&D came as a matter of chance during my second year in middle school. I was in the school library, browsing through the newest additions to the Choose Your Own Adventure rack.
     “Some of those are based on a game,” a boy said. He was a lanky kid with hair like straw and a wide mouth. I didn’t know him. He introduced himself as James, and spent the next half hour trying to explain what a role-playing game was. When the bell for the next class rang, I still had no idea what he was talking about, but I was intrigued.
     “I’ll show you tomorrow,” he said.
I checked out the book his sales-pitch had prevented me from finishing, and spent the rest of day trying to wrap my head around the concept.

“The cave ends in a strange wall. It looks man-made. What do you do?” James asked.
It’s been over two decades and I still remember my confusion. “I guess I leave?” I said, uncertain.
James sighed. I apparently sucked at this game.
“What? It’s a dead end!”
“Maybe you should search for hidden doors?”
Hidden doors? Who hides doors? “Okay. I’ll do that, I guess.” The table was strewn with oddly shaped dice. A pyramid-shaped one generated numbers from one to four. Others had eight, ten, twelve, or even twenty sides. I was instructed to roll some of them.
James inspected the result, and declared that I’d found a hidden entrance. “It opens just enough to slip through. It’s dark and dank on the other side. Will you dare to pass through the narrow opening?”
     I dared.
     A few minutes later, a band of trolls ushered my very first character into the afterworld. It was a messy end for Simon, the level one human warrior. For me, it was a beginning.
The concept finally clicked.
James and I hadn’t just played a game. We’d told Simon’s (tragically short) story.

Role-playing games involve two kinds of participants. First, there are players. Think of them as actors, playing individual roles in a larger narrative. The second kind of participant has many titles. I prefer “storyteller”. If the players are actors, the storyteller is the director.
     After a few weeks of playing, I found where I fit in that paradigm.
     “How can all of these mindless, flesh-eating monsters live in the same dungeon without killing each other?” I asked. “Also, why does the tribe of Orcs live there, too? What do they eat? Why don’t they just move? Do they really want to kill everyone in the local village just because they’re evil? They have to have a better reason than that! Maybe they want better farmland? Wait. Did the humans force them into the caves? Hey! Are the seemingly innocent villagers really the villains here? Those bastards! Orcs are people, too…”
     James sighed and answered my barrage of questions with the suggestion that I try storytelling.
     At first, my gaming group consisted of James and his brother Jacob. By my sophomore year in high school, I had around a dozen regular players. We gathered during lunch, after school, and spent weekends in marathon sessions that often ran over twenty-four hours.
It was fun, but it was also instructive. This was how I learned to write--organically and intuitively. None of us knew terminology like “character arc” or “character depth”. Instead, we learned from experience that characters with flaws, quirks, and complex back stories were just more interesting.
 That lesson hit home after a several month campaign ended with the players defeating my story’s primary antagonist--a necromancer bent on destroying the barrier between life and death to restore the family he’d tragically lost. “I am going to miss that guy,” one of them said. “I really hated him!” The other players agreed and began talking among themselves about all the horrible things the villain had done--killed their friends, tortured love interests, tricked them into hurting innocents.
They had loved hating him.
A couple even felt sorry for him. “He just wanted his wife and daughter back…”
I sat back and listened, internalizing it. I wouldn’t have used the word “investment”, but that’s what it was. Twenty years later, those players still occasionally mention the necromancer when our paths happen to cross.
Other lessons were less easily digested.

Imagine this. You’ve toiled for weeks to write a brilliant story. The antagonists are complicated, the moral ambiguity is compelling, the danger is thrilling, and the plot is layered in Machiavellian twists. You begin to tell your masterpiece, and your protagonists do everything wrong. There’s a joke among gamers to depict this scenario*.
Storyteller (to Frodo’s player): You put on the ring, becoming invisible. What do you do next?
Frodo’s Player: I kill Gandalf and search his body for treasure.
     When you write fiction, you have complete control over the cast of your story. They do what you want, when you want, precisely the way you want. As the storyteller of a role-playing game, that never happens.
In the beginning, this meant a lot of thinking on my feet. As I became more experienced, I learned to look at story construction differently. Instead of linear story development, I started to consider the different directions every scene could take. In order to have plots that could survive the proverbial death of Gandalf, I effectively wrote a dozen stories for each one that my players experienced.
For example, a scene plan might look something like this:
The player’s characters are summoned before the king to be given a quest:
If the players accept the quest, the king is a benevolent man that just wants them to rescue his daughter from the evil cult that kidnapped her. If they refuse, he’s a cruel tyrant that will use hostages to compel them, and the daughter wasn’t kidnapped: she ran away. If they try to kill the king, then the king will really be a demon in disguise, and the woman isn’t really his daughter. She’s a priestess that knows his true name.
The important part is that they go after the “princess”.
It was a lot of work, but it forced me to consider things from different angles--to think in ways that I normally wouldn’t. Often, just trying to think ahead of my players resulted in better storylines than I’d started with.
What if the seemingly innocent villagers really were the villains?
I still think this way when I write.

By the time I started college, my group had shrunk to a core three or four. We played on weekends--or whenever our work and school schedules permitted. Even that became less frequent, but I still had the desire to tell stories. I had given up writing in favor of storytelling games. Without that outlet, I went back to the world where everyone, heroes and villains alike, did exactly what I wanted.
     Only, the world I came back to wasn’t the one I’d left behind. My heroes were no longer unblemished. My antagonists were no longer evil for the sake of giving the hero someone to fight.
     I was no longer just a writer.
     I really was a storyteller. 


The origin of the joke...

Tuesday, February 12, 2013

My Speculative Origin Story

For me, it all started with an invisible line.
    As a kid, I was acutely aware of invisible things. By day, I defended my backyard from them in pitched battles. By night, I trapped them inside my closet by blocking the door with a mushroom-shaped ottoman. I never noticed the line. It was a different kind of invisible.
   The line, which divided my street neatly down the middle, marked the extreme edge of the school district. All of my friends lived on the other side of it. When we graduated from our elementary school, they all went to one school. I went to a much different one.
    My elementary was nestled in the heart of middle class suburbia. The students there wore clothes from places like Dillard’s and Macy’s. Only two kids in my entire grade had qualified for reduced lunch. Everyone felt sorry for them.
    My new school was a different paradigm. One of the buildings, a two story concrete corpse in the middle of campus, was condemned and boarded up. Most of the students ate lunch for free. There were three carjackings within a four block radius during my first nine weeks. 
    I stood out like a bull’s eye. On my third day there, I got into my fist real fight. Years before, my father, a retired career military man, prepared me for this eventually with a bit of sage advice. “Swing first and put everything you’ve got behind that punch,” he said. “If the other guy’s still standing after that, you’re screwed*.” Turns out, he was right.
    I came home with two black eyes, a bloody nose, and a split lip. I also got suspended for fighting. Two days later, I went back to school and experienced another first. I’d never heard the phrase “being jumped” before. Turns out, it sucks. The four boys that jumped me were suspended and, in according with the school’s policy on fighting, so was I. Again.
    Upon returning from my second suspension in as many weeks, I found myself in something of a precarious situation. I had no friends, and the chest-thumping coalition had marked me as persona non grata, or as they called it, “get him!” With the constant threat of being jumped (and suspended) looming over me, I started looking for someplace to go--someplace where I wouldn’t be found.
    Ms. Care, the school librarian, was a perfect storm of apropos attributes--the kind of person you simply cannot use in fiction lest you face that most scathing pejorative “cliché”. She was mousey and ancient. She wore bifocals, of course, with a little chain that ran from one earpiece to the other so that she could wear her glasses as a necklace if she so chose. As a finishing touch, a medical condition physically prevented her from speaking in anything more than a raspy whisper.
    Her lunch break coincided with mine, which meant that the library was closed at that time every day. Ms. Care locked the doors, and passed the time behind her desk, reading new books and eating unidentifiable things from Tupperware containers. I knocked on her door, and to my surprise, she let me in with no questions asked. She did it again the next day. And the next.
    By the third or fourth day, with nothing better to do, I resorted to reading. The library had two floors. The first was dominated by nonfiction, so that’s where I began--with books that had titles like “Gunmen of the American West”, “Great Battles of the Civil War”, and “The Life of a Medieval Knight”. A week or so passed this way. Ms. Care would let me in, lock the door behind me, and then return to her lunch, never once inquiring about my purpose. For my part, I spent the time learning a lot about nothing in particular.
    One dreary afternoon, Ms. Care deviated from the script. “Would you mind putting these books where they go for me?” she asked, gesturing toward a small, perfectly stacked pile of books on the returns table. I was delighted. It was a chance to repay her kindness. “These go on the second floor,” she rasped. I collected the books, all small hardbacks, and set about my task.
     I thought I was doing a favor for Ms. Care. Ah, but she was a clever one. In her quiet, unassuming way, this was just another example of her helping me. You see, the second floor was where fiction lived, and every book she gave me belonged in the science fiction and fantasy section. I went up the stairs with about a dozen books. I came back down with three.
     One was by Isaac Asimov. The other two featured dragons prominently on their covers. Ms. Care smiled in her gentle way, and stamped them with their new due dates. I returned all three the next day and promptly checked out replacements. This became my habit, and every day Ms. Care would smile and give me few stacks of books, always science fiction and fantasy, to put back on the shelves.
     Eventually, the resident ruffians forgot about me. I can’t really say when it happened. I wasn’t paying attention. There were new worlds to discover, arcane beasts to confront, and the occasional damsel (or planet) to rescue. One again, I was immersed in a world of invisible things.
     Time went on, and Ms. Care began openly recommending books. I unfailingly read them. Rather than eating her lunch in peace and quiet, she would invite me to join her at her desk to discuss my impressions of her suggested readings. We spoke of things like magic and plotlines. She never once spoke down to me.
    When boxes of new books would arrive, there were always a couple of works that seemed almost deliberately chosen to pique my interest. In retrospect, I’m sure that they were. Ms. Care would let me open the boxes, watching me like a parent on Christmas morning. That was how I discovered Rose Estes. She wrote delightfully gimmicky books commonly known as “choose your own adventure”.
    For the uninitiated, these books allowed the reader to direct the story by choosing which page to read next. Will you fight the dragon? If so, turn to page 12. Want to run for your life, instead? Turn to page 45. Ms. Care had purchased three of Rose’s books--The Pillars of Pentegarn, Dragon of Doom, and Mountain of Mirrors. I spent the rest of that day exploring fallen empires, battling frost giants, and bargaining with a dragon to save the world. It was glorious.
     No, it was more than glorious.
     It was inspiring.
     The idea of participating in a story, of deciding what happens next, led me to a new frontier. The blank page. When I’d filled a dozen of them with the beginning of my first story--the tale of a knight commanded by a mad king to singlehandedly rid the realm of dragons--Ms. Care was the first person to read it. I sat nervously across the desk from her as she read, struggling to obey her single commandment--“Don’t say anything until I’m finished.”
    “Well?” I asked the moment she sat the last page down.
    My grasp of grammatical conventions was poor, and my spelling and penmanship were worse. In short, my writing was a red pen’s dream. Despite that, Ms. Care looked up thoughtfully and asked, “This is good, but how will you maintain the action in the next part?”
    “More dragons!” I replied. And that’s exactly how I did it, too.
    When I returned from the summer break, Ms. Care was gone. I would later be told that her throat condition had been some kind of cancer.  About a month before the semester started, Ms. Care had crossed another kind of invisible line.
    But thanks to her, I remain acutely aware of invisible things, so I can still see her. She’s on every page I fill with words.


* "Screwed" wasn't precisely the word he used, but I think I've conveyed the spirit of it.