Roll for initiative, folks! Brandon, Dan, and Howard all play tabletop role-playing games, and sometimes even play together. The question of the hour (well… quarter-hour) is “how can these games help your world building, storytelling, and anything else having to do with good writing?”

If this ‘cast doesn’t make you want to play RPGs with your friends, congratulations on a successful Saving Throw vs. Dark Podcast Magic. If this ‘cast doesn’t make you want to sit down and start writing, you have our condolences. That’s not the saving throw you were supposed to make!

In the spirit of not-necessarily-related personal information: This week we learn that Howard is moister than Dan.

In related news, see the Writing Excuses crew this coming Saturday, February 13th, at the Life, The Universe and Everything Symposium at Brigham Young University in the Wilkinson Center. We’ll be there for the full symposium, but on Saturday we’ll actually be recording in front of an audience. You’ll also get to meet Bob Defendi, who gets mentioned at least three times in this episode.

Audiobook Plug: Nation, by Terry Pratchett

Writing Prompt: Don’t write about players being sucked into their RPGs. That’s been done a lot. Suck the RPG characters out into our world, and see what happens.

This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by Audible.

Visit http://AudiblePodcast.com/excuse for a free trial membership*.

*Note: From the Audible website, here are the terms of the free membership. Read the fine print, please!

Audible® Free Trial Details
Get your first 14 days of the AudibleListener® Gold membership plan free, which includes one audiobook credit. After your 14 day trial, your membership will renew each month for just $14.95 per month so you can continue to receive one audiobook credit per month plus members-only discounts on all audio purchases. A very small number of titles are more than one credit. Cancel your membership before your free trial period is up and you will not be charged. Thereafter, cancel anytime, effective the next billing cycle. Any unused audiobook credits will be lost at cancellation.

Powered by RedCircle

Transcript

As transcribed by Mike Barker

Key points: Role-playing as a player can help writers understand character motivations. It can help writers learn to wing it. It can teach writers to look for different, clever, non-obvious ways to solve problems. It can help provide a “test environment” for ideas. But beware! Role-playing can be so much fun and addictive that you aren’t writing. Also, beware of trying to copy a great role-playing session or game directly into a novel. Role-playing characters, tone, etc. are not always appropriate for a novel. Remember, role-playing games are for fun. Novels need realism.

[Brandon] I’m Brandon.
[Dan] I’m Dan.
[Howard] And I’m rolling for initiative.
[Brandon] This was a podcast suggested by Mister Wells. Or was it? Was it by you? One of these two jokers suggested it.
[Howard] Go ahead and blame Dan, but it was my idea.
[Brandon] Because Howard…
[Dan] If it’s awesome, I get the credit, though.
[Brandon]… pointed out that all three of us have done an extensive amount of role-playing. By this, we’re talking, for those who may not know, about things like Dungeons & Dragons and whatnot. We’ve been doing it since we were kids. It has affected our storytelling, and us as individuals. We want to sit here and analyze: has it helped us, has it hurt us, what has it done for us, and can our listeners use the role-playing game… the experience to make them better writers? How has it helped us? Do you think role-playing has helped you to become a better storyteller, Howard?
[Howard] Absolutely.
[Brandon] Well, that’s the end of the podcast.
[Howard] There we go. And we can go home.
[Dan] That’s right. Don’t ask closed-ended questions.
[Howard] No yes-no questions, please.
[Brandon] Closed-ended? What? Go on…
[Howard] I’m sorry. The role-playing games that I have participated in have been fun for me because, once I got past the “Oh, I’m going to roll some dice so I can kill the monster,”… once I got into the “Oh, my character has motivations.” My character… what my character really wants to do in this city is teach the dwarves how to make pie. And that… I role-played that… I’ve told this story before, not on the cast, but I role-played that with Bob.
[Brandon] Really? That’s what you wanted to do, you wanted to teach…
[Howard] My barbarian wanted to teach the dwarves how to make pie because my barbarian loved pie and the dwarves wouldn’t eat it. The dwarves went, “Pie? That’s fruity, elf-y stuff.” I said, “Guys, you can put bacon in pies.” Now you can tell the dwarves who are of the church of Orrick the barbarian by the shine in their beards. These are moments in games where your character comes to life and you realize there is something fun here, beyond the dice. For me, I think the big thing is character.
[Brandon] So playing as a player helps you to understand character motivations for your storytelling.
[Howard] Well summarized.

[Brandon] All right. Dan, what about you?
[Dan] Yeah. A lot of the same things. I… role-playing helped me become a storyteller because it taught me… if people understood what role-playing really was, they would push their kids into it, I think. It teaches you such wonderful social skills and how to tell stories and how to interact with people and how to read and all of these things. I learned all of that through role-playing. A lot of my characters come from games that I have done. If you read my books and say, “Well, I can see a lot of these common elements among his characters.” Yeah, that’s also who I role play. That’s how I learned to do that. As a GM, though, beyond just playing a character, being a GM helps a lot. Being the game master and guiding the story…
[Brandon] What has it helped you specifically?
[Dan] Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to think of.
[Howard] I know it’s helped.
[Brandon] I know with me… what it has helped me do, but apparently not Dan, is wing it.
[Dan] Ah, dang it.
[Brandon] Because when you are playing as a GM, you will have this group of characters who will all be going off in random directions, not wanting to do what you want them to do.
[Howard] We talked about how, Brandon, you are an outliner. You will outline the story… I don’t want to say you’ll outline it to death, but you’ll outline it to the point that you pretty much know what you are going to write. A role-playing game does not work that way.
[Brandon] No. And it is useful… sometimes, you need to… even if you are an outliner like me, you need to be willing to wing it in your fiction. You get to a point, and you say, “You know what? This next point that I had planned out is really, really lame. The characters really wouldn’t do this. What would they do?” Some people talk to this as the characters taking off with the story. That’s not how it happens with me, but I do get to that point sometimes and say, “OK, what would they really do?” At that point, I’m winging it. Sometimes I go and I rebuild my outline. Sometimes I just write the scene and see what they would do. Role-playing and dealing with a bunch of characters who… you’re never sure what they’re going to decide to do…
[Howard] You’re never sure what they’re going to do.
[Dan] That’s like the hallmark… that is the first rule of being a GM, is that no matter what… no matter how you think your players are going to solve a problem, they will solve it differently. You’ve got to be able to roll with it.

[Howard] The other thing is that… you need to remember… is that as the GM, you may be the storyteller, the principal storyteller. But this is a shared experience. It is everybody’s story. They have outlines, they have back stories, they have motivations that they’re probably not telling you about.
[Dan] On that note… the fact that my players will always find a different way of solving a problem has taught me as a writer to look for other ways.
[Brandon] Right. To anticipate and…
[Dan] If there’s a problem in my book and I’m thinking, “Oh, well, obviously the characters are going to solve it this way…” I’ll stop and say, “No. Nothing is obvious. I need to find something different, something more clever, something that no one is expecting.”

[Brandon] It’s always fulfilling as a GM when I have a list of, OK, I think these are the first three things they are going to try, and two or sometimes three of them are the first things that the characters try. That teaches me, OK, I’m learning to anticipate what people are going to be thinking. If it can be the fourth thing or the fifth thing or something like that, then you have really succeeded because in fiction, if you can do this, if the reader is reading along and thinking, “OK, they’re going to try this.” Then the characters do and it fails for a legitimate reason, they’re going to be like, “Oh, wow, this is a more complicated, difficult problem than I thought.” The same thing happens in role-playing.
[Howard] We… I’m role-playing a playtest for Bob Defendi’s Echoes of Heaven campaign. A few months back, we got sent back in time by an artifact, and were participating in history and managed to break history. Bob looked at that… we got to the end of that fight, and Bob said, “Well, we’re done for the evening because what happens next requires me to sit down and do some writing. I need to talk to a couple of you privately.” What grew out of that… what grew out of that moment was so much more interesting than anything else Bob had planned. It was fantastic. It involved a paladin repeatedly murdering one of the other characters while both of them were in hell. It was awesome. It couldn’t have happened in a… the writer sits down and writes the whole story environment. We had to sit down, we had to break Bob’s story.

[Brandon] One other thing… we’ll do a break and then come back and do things against… but there’s one other thing that I think it has really helped me with. That has been the simple coolness factor. I will try out ideas with my role-playing group and see if through… actually going through a narrative, these things are actually cool. If they are, they will show up in my books. My role-playing groups will read my books and say, “Hey, I know this. Wait a minute.” It’s not actually… in many cases, it’s not me taking an idea from the role-playing group and saying, “Oh, that would be cool in a book.” I don’t do that. Really, I have never done that. But what I have done is said, “Oh, this is an idea that I have been playing with maybe using in a story. I’m going to throw it out here and see if it works narratively in the role-playing session and see how they attack it from different ways. Then I’m going to take this element and I’ve kind of… I’ve given it a dry run, so to speak. I can take the training wheels off and put it in an epic fantasy book and see if it works there.
[Howard] Speaking of dry… in the role-playing game last night where…
[Brandon] Where you invented an entire new dialect?
[Howard] We invented an entire new dialect in talking with the slugs, because the slug king approached us and said, “Which among you is the moistest?” The dialogue and the dialect grew… it was very, very, very amusing. Rivers and oceans and sprinkling and water and all this…
[Dan] It worked well. Testing out a system on players is a great way to stress test it for fans. The kind of people who will obsess over the technology in Schlock Mercenary or a magic system in a Brandon Sanderson book. If you’ve given that a good rugged test with players who will do anything they can to break it, that works really well.
[Brandon] Let’s pause for a break. Howard has our advertisement today.

[Howard] Nation by Terry Pratchett. I just read this, I got it for Christmas. I loved this book. It’s not a Discworld book. A lot of people look at Terry Pratchett and they think, “Oh, no, I can’t pick up Terry Pratchett because the Discworld is just too huge.” Nation is a stand-alone book. I’m pitching it to you for two reasons. One, it has a stand-up-and-cheer heroic moment in the middle of the book that is absolutely brilliant. It’s one of the best I think I’ve ever read, and I’m not going to tell you why. The second reason is we are coming up on our Hero with a 1000 Faces podcast…
[Brandon] We will do that eventually… sometime.
[Howard] We promise we will do that. It’s just so big, we all need to review it.
[Dan] Brush up on it.
[Howard] Workshop on it a little bit. We are going to do that.
[Dan] We’re doing it for you, readers. We’re giving you time. Of course, we’ve read it.
[Brandon] Of course, we did our homework.
[Howard] Nation by Terry Pratchett. Audiblepodcast.com/excuse for your free trial.
[Brandon] Pratchett’s a genius. Absolutely a genius.

[Brandon] We will get back into it. I want to talk about has… are there foibles or problems with role-playing and being a novelist? Are there worries, are there problems…
[Howard] Problem number one is that role-playing is so much fun and so addictive that it is very easy to do it at the expense of the writing you should be doing.
[Brandon] I’ve heard that from people before, too.
[Howard] It happened to me. I was running… my Thursday night campaign… I played in a Thursday night game for about two years and realized that I wanted to run the game for a while. As I started running the game, I realized that I was learning all kinds of things, I was having a great time, the players were having fun, but I realized that my play day had become a workday, and that I was pouring as much energy into one role-playing session as I would pour into an entire week of comics. It was sucking time away from the writing. After about four or five months, I had to give it up, and that was sad.
[Brandon] I’ve had to learn to let go. With my… when I GM… I still GM, but I don’t let myself prepare as much as I want to, because I would spend an entire day telling these great stories.
[Howard] That’s because you just know that the players are going to disappoint you by not following the outline.
[Dan] Are not going to do it. Brandon and I are in the same… and now Howard… we’re all in the same role-playing group.
[Brandon] And let me tell you… wackiness ensues.
[Dan] It’s bizarre.
[Howard] Oh, boy.
[Dan] Brandon and I actually alternate weeks for that reason. Neither one of us has the time to be a GM every week because we need that brain time, that head space to do other things [inaudible]
[Howard] I’m just glad that last night I was moister than Dan.
[Brandon] Yeah, you were a lot moister than Dan.
[Dan] Far more.

[Brandon] I want to talk about another foible which is only half a foible because really it gets at a larger problem. I’ve seen people before try to turn their role-playing session into a novel. They’re DM, or they have this great session, or even there’s just one of the characters… it all goes fantastic… they have a whole lot of fun. Then they sit there and say everyone should be able to experience this fun, I’m going to write a novel of this. They are encouraged by the fact that there are several high profile cases of this working. Dragonlance, of course. But recently Steven Erikson’s Malazan books all were based on a role-playing world that he and a friend built together. The reason that this is half a foible and half not is there is no problem with doing that. There’s really nothing intrinsically wrong with saying let’s take these great ideas and turn them into a novel. The problem is assuming that everything that was fun for your role-playing group will then be fun in the novel as well.
[Dan] I think a lot of the time when you’re trying to translate it over, what you’re not bringing over is all of the interaction and the in jokes that made it work for your group. So you’re presenting ideas that were fun, but in a completely different context.
[Brandon] Right. You will have this wonderful session where something completely off-the-wall will happen and you will all be loving it. The reason, partially, it is so much fun it is because it was so unexpected. Because you wouldn’t expect the characters to take it and run with it and make it this wonderful, fun experience. Then translating that to a story, the reader is not going to have the same sense at all.
[Howard] One of two things is going to happen. You either are going to telegraph it so that it doesn’t feel random, or it is going to feel random, it’s going to be so random that the reader is knocked out of the story. I’ve said one of two things is going to happen… I mean, it’s also… you can walk that line perfectly and end up doing it exactly right. That’s probably what Steven Erikson did. Just executed really well.
[Brandon] Anything done well is going to sell.
[Dan] Anything that works, works.
[Brandon] My suggestion to you would be, as opposed to doing that… if you have built this great world for your role-playing characters to go through, that world can become a basis then for a novel. That’s great. But don’t try and take one-to-one correlations… in fact, I wouldn’t even try to take the characters that happened in the role-playing session because they are going to be tied to the people who played those characters.
[Howard] I actually think the safest thing to do is to take the role-playing game and treat it as a 1000-year-old history. So that you’ve got world building and you can call back to the time when the great so-and-so did the great such-and-such. That gives your world flavor without forcing you to map your outline.
[Brandon] That’s a great point. What we’ve got to keep in mind here is what we say always, which is that ideas are cheap. The role-playing session has lots probably of great ideas, but remember the skill to write a novel is what you are trying to build as a writer.

[Dan] Another problem that can arise… we don’t have a lot of time left, but… another problem that can show up is that the kind of character that works well in a role-playing setting does not necessarily translate into a book. One of the other reasons Brandon and I are alternating as GM is because if we are both characters at the same time in the same campaign, our characters are so weird that it derails everything.
[Brandon] We have two really weird characters and then…
[Howard] I’m already starting to worry about Dan and I as characters in the same game.
[Dan] That could happen.
[Brandon] This brings up something else though. Role-playing games can switch tones very easily, the characters… the players will just go with it, you can be incredibly silly one moment… and you will probably be silly quite more often than you can get away with in a novel. Because in a novel, the idea is to get across realism. In a role-playing game, the idea is to just have fun.
[Howard] That’s… the flip side of that is true. It’s very difficult in a role-playing game to do the drama that is so poignant that it makes you cry. To his credit, Bob Defendi has pulled it off two or three times in the Echoes of Heaven setting.
[Brandon] Bob is known as one of the great GM’s of all time.
[Howard] Bob is world-class.
[Brandon] I’m going to do our writing prompt.
[Howard] Awesome.

[Brandon] There have been plenty of  “you get suck… players get sucked into their role-playing game” sort of books. Guardians of the Flame by Joel Rosenberg did this. It’s kind of become a cliche in fantasy. So you’re not going to do that. You’re going to have role-playing characters get sucked out into our world, and see what happens.
[Dan] Very nice.
[Howard] Roll for initiative.
[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You’re out of excuses, now go write. Or play. Whichever you want to do.