It is again the end of the quarter; another dozen articles have been written since I last looked back, and it’s time to look back again.
Behind the scenes at Valdron Inc, we also track the quarters. At the end of each, our president is supposed to send a report to our stockholders, letting them know how things are progressing. It is this idea of regular reports that interests me.
I have written of the idea of having characters file reports elsewhere. Some years ago for Wounds Unlimited I suggested that requiring players to prepare such in-character reports was a viable tool for Re-educating the Power Gamer (the article survives thanks to RoleplayingTips.com), by getting the player to think like the character between games. Facets of the idea have appeared in Valdron’s Game Tip of the Week. The idea of players filing written reports from their characters works in many ways.
As the aforementioned article suggests, it encourages the player to think in the mindset and perspective of the character between game sessions, as he again role-plays the character in written word. If you’ve got players who tend to use their characters as pawns to accomplish goals during the game, this can help move them more toward considering their characters as people they pretend to be.
The reports also serve as a history of the game. Certainly you can use character journals or referee records to keep such a history; but the idea of doing a history in an unusual format often renders it more realistic. We’re not reading a biography of the character; we’re reading the written reports of a soldier, providing the information his commander requires. It feels more like real history, even if it contains fantasy elements. If you’ve ever read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, you may have some feel for this. Stoker wrote large sections of the book as letters, newspaper articles, and journals of the characters. This makes the narrative seem a bit more like history; it also empowers the reader to imagine the horror of events which would lose impact were he to attempt to describe them. Similarly, the Ken Burns PBS Civil War Journal read from letters and journals and other documents of the age, giving personal reality to otherwise cold facts.
Such reports can also be a way of developing the character. As players think about what their characters have done and been, they start to see trends and characteristics they might otherwise have missed. These often appear in the reports even before the referee notices them in play.
The referee can often see in the reports a reflection of what the players enjoyed; those high points will be remembered and recorded more often than not. Beyond that, if the players write in character, the referee may read their suspicions, their thoughts, their directions and expectations, on these pages, and be able to improve his game to meet and challenge them.
It’s not usually difficult to convince players to write such reports. Many character types have superiors of one sort or another, whether through organized armies or organized crime, and the non-player character superior can easily insist on such reports. Quite a few adventure scenarios begin with an employer offering to pay the characters for undertaking some important mission, and to say that the employer wants to be kept informed of their progress is obvious. Even those for whom such conditions do not apply might be asked to write regular letters home to parents or siblings or teachers, so they won’t worry. Encourage your players that the short time it would take for them to create these brief pages about their adventures will be worth much in helping you craft the ongoing adventures. Also, explain it not as homework, but rather as an opportunity to play the game between sessions, to be their character for a few minutes before the next gathering. It’s part of the adventure, and can be just as much fun if presented and taken right.
But we have a report of our own to do tonight; it has been three months since we talked about Continuity and so looked back over that quarter. Since then a dozen new subjects have been presented.
- Civil Planning took a look at why roads go straight and why they so often don’t, finding the logic to the designs of city streets and country highways, and filling in some of the gaps of what’s likely to be found along the way.
- Bits is a bit of a crazy idea, an approach to improvisation which suggests creating useful pieces for which the use can be determined later.
- Ephemeral Illusion examines an approach to running games in which the referee is always in control but causes the players to believe that their decisions matter. In considering the techniques, the notion that a game could be designed that way is shown faulty.
- File Cards provides some practical ways to use the common office supplies to facilitate game play.
- Peace suggests that non-violent solutions to game situations have a lot to commend them. Some examples of how to avoid combat are presented.
- Child’s Play considers how the social mechanics of make believe might work, and suggests we should stop saying that those games had no rules.
- Encounters recognized that no matter who we are or where we are, we are likely to randomly encounter not wandering monsters but people we know.
- Food comes back to what characters eat, particularly when they aren’t human, and how to create seemingly alien or fantastic foods for game settings.
- Kahanamaku is the name of a Hawaiian surfer honored on a postage stamp, and the starting point for a discussion of our heroes and what they say about us.
- Rivalry looks at another dimension of both friendship and enemies, the idea that characters could admire and respect and even like each other while at the same time being in competition with each other, perhaps bitter enemies.
- Spin looks at the subtle use of language to describe what something is, or what someone wishes for it to appear to be.
- Occurences explores how to bring those little good and bad things that are constantly happening in life into the game world, and figure out when they happen to the player characters.
This report marks eighteen months of this series. As always, I invite your comments and insights, your ideas for future discussion, your objections to these thoughts, on the forums or by e-mail.
Thank you for your continuing support.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
