[AE.Writing, AE.RPG2FictionPipeline] Telling Stories Without Dice: Entering The Tabletop-to-Fiction Pipeline
Last week, while brainstorming some ideas about TTRPG (tabletop roleplaying game) design and theory, I spun out some thoughts on Twitter in a thread that started like this:
How to conceive of a TTRPG character (1/)
— Alexandra Erin, PhD, MD, EdD, JD (from UATX) (@AlexandraErin) November 9, 2021
What’s one thing your character is great at? What’s one thing your character is good at? What’s one thing your character is okay at? What’s one thing your character is bad at? What’s one your character can do that no one else can?
The questions I spun out in that thread grew out of my current TTRPG project, which has an informal tagline in my head of "If you can imagine a character, you can play this game."
This prompted some observations from another Twitterer:
One thing I’d really love is a breakdown of how to translate this to conceiving characters for single-author works too. I feel like I have a lot of experience writing game characters but I don’t know how to make that work for me as an author or screenwriter. https://t.co/FwFrSv3yG0
— Seathan MacMhathain 🏳️🌈 🏴 🏳️⚧️ (@yrbroshane) November 9, 2021
I think to me my biggest obstacle in this translation is the lack of mechanics outside game writing. When I write a character for a game, I’m basically coding. They need to support and be supported by the mechanics they live inside, and the limitations help a lot.
— Seathan MacMhathain 🏳️🌈 🏴 🏳️⚧️ (@yrbroshane) November 9, 2021
I found this perspective interesting in the way it challenged my assumptions. Sometimes I encounter something that is so completely outside my personal experience that it feels, on sight, like it must in some sense be wrong... but I can't actually articulate why. Obviously the speaker there was not incorrect in saying "this is a difficulty I have".
As a queer kid of the non-driving gay variety growing up in a small town in the days of dial-up and dinosaurs, I had far more interest in RPGs than I ever had people to play them with. I bought them! Just as often as I had money and a ride to Omaha and the Dragon's Lair. I read them! Sometimes to literal actual pieces. I kept them by my bed and then on my bed and then I would spend long insomniac hours imagining myself running them and/or playing them.
I would use their character design processes to create characters in order to test my understanding of the system and give some solid parameters for those flights of fancy, which over time became less "imagining myself participating in a roleplaying game with these characters" and more "imagining these characters participating in adventures". And because it was the part of the game that I interacted with the most and because I invested so much of my time and energy into them, I internalized them to the point where in junior high I could sit with a notebook in study hall and fully stat out an original superhero character with accurate point values.
And as I grew up and started writing, a lot of those characters became the basis of characters in my writing. Mostly side characters... it transpired that as an adult I was more interested in the characters I created as an adult than the ones I had dreamed up in study hall. At this point I still turn to RPG character options for inspiration, but as a starting point. I am more likely today to base a character around the idea presented by some character class or superpower or type of magic than I am to try to make a character who would be playable under a particular system.
But I did, once upon a time, while away my hours making up stories about characters I'd created following the instructions in an RPG manual, and I did, once upon a later time, write stories involving those characters.
So after securing permission to quote the tweets here, I made plans to write a post about how to do those things, which I had expected would go out sometime around last Wednesday because this had been such a huge part of my teenage existence and my early writing career that I would obviously have quite a bit to say about it.
I haven't had much to say about it, previously, mostly because I'd never thought that much about it beyond the fact that it had happened. I did not let that dissuade me, though, because it was obviously really only because I'd never thought about the how and why of it all much before, and once I started thinking about it, then the words would flow.
It transpires that thinking about a subject for the first time is less straightforward than I had imagined. It wasn't hard! It was easy. Once I started thinking about it, I could scarcely stop... and hardly steer. It took me some time to work my way around to the part that I might be able to transmit as practical knowledge, but now that I have started thinking about it... well, I was right: the words have flowed. Are flowing. Will not stop flowing.
It helps that at the same time that this happened, I've been over here trying to figure out how the writing stuff even works with ADHD-medicated brain vs. how it worked (when it worked, if it worked) with untreated ADHD, and I'm also working intermittently on a gaming project that lives in the intersection between "imagine a character and make up stories about them" and "design a character in a game system and then play the game with them" (hence the Twitter thread that kicked this all off), and the result is that over the past week I created a rather disjointed 5,000 word volume of text that ranges wildly over and around this and related topics. I'm working on editing it into two or three separate posts, more for the sake of clarity and cohesion than strictly out of concerns about the word count, but I wanted to at least introduce the topic and set the stage for those posts here. Future installments won't necessarily follow directly after this one, but whenever they come out, they will include the tag I introduced for this one "RPG2FictionPipeline".
All that out of the way, here's an initial stab at providing a general answer for the query:
My incidental and accidental path described above might not work as well for everybody else who might be wondering how to deliberately go from TTRPG creativity to literary creativity as an adult, but I suspect my starting point might work for many: start by imagining an actual roleplaying game being played with your character.
If trying to imagine how an asymmetrical collaborative experience would go when you're the only one real person who would be participating in the exercise is itself too broad or feels hollow and pointless, I'll reframe and narrow the parameters down a bit into an exercise that one might hypothetically try, that could possibly compress the things I gradually experienced over time into a replicable process:
Imagine the character was to be played by someone else, in a session that you would run, using a scenario of your devising that was created for that character in particular. It is your job to think up challenges that will challenge that character's capabilities, and very specifically their capabilities... interesting challenges for that character to overcome. Those capabilities are known to you. You can interpret and quantify them according to the rules. You know or can figure out what things are trivial for them, what things are uncertain, and what things are unlikely.
And if the character has any backstory or lore attached to them, beyond the mechanical descriptions of abilities... well, your scenario is designed for that character, so naturally it would incorporate any plot hooks or story seeds that come along with that character.
You can add another character or two to the scenario, following the same logic. It doesn't matter if you don't have a fully balanced optimized party (if the game has obvious parameters for such) because you are tailoring the challenges directly to these characters in particular, not an abstract idea of an adventuring party.
And because there's neither any actual players to go off in directions you didn't anticipate nor any dice to provide improbable results you weren't factoring in as a possibility, you can devise your scenario from start to finish as a single linear chain of events, without worrying about what happens if it goes off the rails.
If you were to actually lay this game scenario out in writing in any form, from an outline of scenes and significant events to a fully finished (albeit very linear) adventure module... you would have an outline for a story about some of your characters.
If you wanted to turn that outline into a prose story... well, you would not be particularly well-served by trying to transcribe how it would play out as a game.
Tabletop tactical combat, for instance, tends to be a lot of bland attrition punctuated by moments that could be narrated as a key part of a fight scene. I would suggest compressing most turns and actions in a form like "Jaer pressed back hard against the attackers, while barely avoiding the worst of their blows." or "The battle raged fiercely around the room, a tumult of activity impossible for one set of eyes to follow." or whatever. One sentence to give a mood to the action and confirm that it's still happening in between any cool moves or pivot points.
And when a character in a TTRPG does exceptionally well in dealing with the kind of obstacle they're best at dealing with, it often means the story moves on very quickly without dwelling on it or making a big deal out of it. The players at the table might celebrate jubilantly when the resident expert treasure hunter safely opens the elaborately locked and trapped vault door with ease on the first try, but the whole attempt might be summed up in the narrative as: "I roll to open the vault... nat 20." and "The vault door opens."
Which... before anybody who might be reading this feels the need to email me and say "Well actually if there's a clutch nat 20 you should always elaborate on that in the narration, if not let the player narrate their own triumph." Sure. Yes. Fine. I agree, that is better than not doing that.
In a story where the outcome is known in advance by the teller, though, there would probably be build-up from before the point the outcome has been communicated to the audience. The narrative weight of anything that is the equivalent of "a very timely and very high roll on something this character is good at" should ripple backwards in time through the prose rather than being the result of improvising on the spot in response to a 5% chance paying off.
Of course, that brings me to another point: while you could roll dice to see what happens next in the story (and I certainly wouldn't tell you not to, especially if you're conflicted or unsure about how something should go), most of the time you will probably be deciding the results for yourself. And if you get hung up on that, just remember: any result that is possible is possible and could therefore come up at any time, no matter how improbable it may seem. The odds of a 20 being rolled three times in a row on independent rolls of a 20 sided die is one in eight thousand but most people who play d20 games on a semi-regular basis will see it happen, and we've all had fight scenes or whole session where everybody is rolling really badly or really well.
On that note, when it comes to other numerical aspects of a game... like the stated range or area affected by a magical spell... remember that when the story is taking place in your head, the way to determine if someone is within the 60 foot range of the hero's spell isn't by mapping out the area as scaled in feet or meters and getting out a ruler. Do you want to tell the story of what happens when the spell is cast on the target? Then the hero must be within 60 feet of them, or able to easily get to that point.
To whatever extent having an actual distance in mind matters to you, you can easily figure out the farthest away they could be for all the things you want to happen to still work under the rules and then just pick a closer distance that makes sense. And if you find that all you need to know is if they're in range or not: yes, they are in range.
And most importantly, I would say to remember that characterization choices are much less bound up in the mechanics and that one of the biggest ways you would want to consistently embellish a game-based story outline is by imagining how the characters who are experiencing the various events you've outlined would respond to them, and to each other.
Perhaps for each scene, pick one character who you think is most likely to have something to say about the setting or situation at the outset. And then pick another character who you think would have something to say to that, and possibly so on, as much as you like. This isn't just a good way to establish voice and character, but to include additional details about the scene without having a wall of text at the beginning: have the characters mention it in their dialogue. ("Is that pony... made out of diamonds?") This is a narrative technique that's very hard to work into a roleplaying game, but very effective in prose.
And then any supporting characters ("NPCs") in the scene might react to this, or some other obvious or apparent aspect of a character or the group, thus beginning any interaction necessary to transition the main characters ("PCs") from reacting to the scene to acting within and upon it.
That's your entryway into the heart of the scene, where you already know what needs to happen and can, ideally, write that sequence of actions and reactions and events in a way that incorporates some characterization.
When that's finished... you know from your scenario/outline where your characters need to go next and/or what needs to happen next. If the action doesn't automatically carry the characters into the next scene and you're not sure how to get them there, I'd suggest considering two different questions:
One: If you knew that a character had shown up at the next place in the story to do the next thing that happens in the story, what would you guess had driven them there? If you have a good answer for that... write that into the story. Have the character express the drive directly, or have someone else remind them of it.
Two: If nothing springs to mind that would have made any or all of the characters head in the required direction, ask yourself: what would it take to get them there? A taunt from an enemy? A threat? Awareness of a danger facing someone else who had no idea of it? An opportunity? A hint? A riddle? A challenge? Figure out what someone could dangle in front of or throw in their face, and then have somebody... another character or a sudden startling realization from within... do that.
With all this said... while I have written a lot of things that incorporated characters or other inspiration from roleplaying games, I've never explicitly turned an RPG scenario into a story in the way I've described above. These are my ideas about one way it might work to do that, based on the more gradual and less deliberate way that my RPG daydreams transmuted themselves into prose. Having now thought about all this I have an inclination to try it out and see how it works, as I experiment with writing processes and forms.
And also with all this said... I do feel that anybody who tries to transition from tabletop creations into freeform storytelling would be well served by being less than completely literal in terms of interpreting and applying game mechanics. Limitations can provide a solid foundation for building upwards from and a sturdy structure to build outwards from, but they work best when they are seen as potential starting points as well as ending points.