Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
Welcome everyone to another Writer’s Room. I hope the past few months have treated you well! For me it’s been an absolute storytelling whirlwind ever since the completion of the Steinkreis rebuild. I don’t think I’ve ever pitched quite so many stories in a single narrative, and I don’t know that I’ve been a part of quite as many pitches back as I’ve been blessed to have - first and foremost a big writer’s room shoutout to the regular group of players who have been joining in this narrative and pitching some of the best events I’ve seen run on Thain! I can tell we’re all studying in the same classroom on this one, so much of what I’ve talked about in past writer’s rooms is on display here and it’s been massively encouraging to watch people take an active hand with the setting.
It’s also been enormously educational. Being surrounded by good storytelling gives you a lot of opportunities to reflect on things that are working - whether it’s on personal goals you’ve set for yourself or on things you’re just noticing the importance of for the first time because of those stories. This writer’s room has a surprising amount of ground to cover for this reason - I’ve discovered, thought about, and decided to write up a couple connected topics. The first is connected to a goal I set for myself on refining one of my own storytelling strengths, a principal I refer to as “The Small is the Big” and how I set out to build it into a new skill of “Representative-Narrative-Symbolism”, along with a little talk on how complicated I found this to be.
I hope you’ll entertain me while I talk about these topics - they are as always not lectures to anyone in specific but just observations, ruminations on my own experiences during role play and ways that I want to share what I’ve been discovering with everyone else here.
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[The Small is the Big]
At the start of the year I set out to find ways to improve my storytelling strengths, as well as identify and improve my storytelling weaknesses (a whole separate topic that I’ll cover another time!). Strengths, the things that I’m good at, aren’t just things that I feel comfortable with doing - they’re things that I feel like I do naturally, putting them into my storytelling without even really noticing that I’m doing it. A lot of role play to me is in what you're consciously doing, but that doesn't mean I don't unconsciously do things: these things are often strengths (and just as often also weaknesses I haven't identified yet).
It probably seems arrogant to start a writer’s room talking about this kind of thing, but I can promise every reader of the Writer’s Room that you have strengths like this too - everyone has something that they’re good at in headspace style role play: Maybe you’re good at instinctively finding complications in a scene, or good at managing conflict when it’s pitched to you. Maybe you’re very mindful of past scenes and incorporating them seamlessly into current ones. There are thousands of skills that make up great role play, and while I know a lot of character-driven-headspace style RP requires a lot of [i]active[/] observation, engagement, and thinking (it’s very rare to just autopilot through an entire scene on just instinct alone and have it go as well as it could if you’d been engaged in high level thinking about every post you type) there are some things that every writer just naturally does.
One of my strengths that was brought to my attention at the start of the year was “Making many small moments in a scene and in a story”. I had to think for some time about what the real value of this strength was, and what it looked like - to just naturally put lots of small details into a scene. I broke the strength down into two methods: One was to create small, simple scenes that had high additive value; the other was the narrative description of small things that grew into a bigger picture. A story series I’ll talk about a bit in here is Harry Potter - a story series that influences me a lot in this respect, one that I reread annually and that I expect most people here have also read.
Firstly are scenes with high additive value. I’ve talked before about baking the pie and eating it - about how the normal pace of my storytelling is usually to first run a large event in which “things happen” and the pie is baked, and later to do follow-up scenes with characters in which “things are discussed” and the pie is eaten. There’s a third type of scene though that I think I undervalued, possibly because I was just doing this without noticing - digesting the pie, in which “things breathe”.
These scenes often have no agenda, but they enable things to return to a resting state. They’re full of small moments where characters notice or observe innocent things about one another, where storytelling happens through glances of eyes or accidental admissions or just the way two characters talk. Harry Potter is full of these scenes. They give silent context to who the characters are when nothing is happening - Harry sitting in the common room, the students fretting over what assignments and workloads they have, suffering overwork from all their detentions. Harry Potter is full of these slice of life scenes, and they contextualize our heroes to us in a deep and meaningful way. A story about a student / child made into an often reluctant hero only works if we contextually see them this way - if we consistently have reminders of who they are in between the action scenes and the reaction to the action.
Setting aside time to do this in an already busy event world can be hard. Telling a really compelling character narrative filled with emotional beats takes dozens of events (as I’ve found recently, the more people you add to this mixture the more ingredients and baking time you need, too!) but it’s necessary to work it in. Maybe it’s just there at the start of an eating the pie event, or the start of the baking. You work it subtly into the scenes at the start or in stand-alone scenes in between these narrative meals you’re planning. It’s starting a scene with your character trying to learn to read, cleaning out their desk while they go over what happened in a prior scene, or maybe it’s having them enter the scene returning from a hunt covered in mud and blood and too tired to talk at first. Small pieces of context for who they are, what they do between scenes, what makes them the person this story is about. Eventually these small details amount to a whole person, the small becomes the big - it's hard to imagine a deep scene that lacks this context, the characters would be so easily interchanged and replaced.
The story itself is of course about the decisions a person makes - but the details around who the story is happening to have to be sprinkled in. Another version of this is the description of small things that grow into a bigger picture: it’s describing the time of day, what a character’s eyes are doing, what’s happening while the scene is going on. There’s a great scene in Harry Potter where Harry and Minister of Magic Rufus Scrimgeour are talking in the Weasley’s garden. They’re arguing about something, and juxtaposed into the conversation are these regular descriptions of a garden gnome trying to pull a worm out of the ground.
Aside from telling a story in which a gnome player lives in his rightful state of nature, the purpose of interrupting the drama with this somewhat humorous picture is many and varied. It breaks up the argument for us some, as the audience, never allowing it to culminate to total tension. We know both characters are stubborn and intense, but they don’t start shouting at one another here. The same scene without this humorous juxtaposition would almost beg for shouting. It’s also a narrative symbol- something gross and banal struggling for something weaker than it, only for it to wriggle away at the last second tells the overall story of Harry’s battle with the Ministry and its latest head in just a small repartee.
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These details are things I know I do without stopping to think about them too often - but how can this strength be refined? It’s touched on here in the tail-end, but my answer that I want to develop a skill for this year is in Narrative Symbolism.
Narrative Symbolism is actually surprisingly hard to get right in a Neverwinter scene. When I started writing my character Johannes, I knew that his central character conflict was going to be a person who wanted to follow the rules and rigidity of the Flames of Andarus, but who was constantly having to observe and be tempted by the appealing freedom to pursue whatever they felt was right that other characters enjoyed by not being part of (or answerable to) an institution the way that Holy Knights like Johannes are.
What I wanted to experiment with in my regular attention to detail was how to symbolize this through description. A symbol of this that I decided on is Johannes’ own hair - unruly, messy, and constantly being pushed flat. It finds its way into scenes where Johannes himself is struggling to choose between what the Flames require him to do, and what he wants to do - trying to push his hair flat, to look presentable and knightly and ordered as he wants to appear to be.
Throughout my writing in the latest storyline I’ve been working on, I’ve struggled to incorporate Narrative Symbolism - to refine the “small” that I was putting into my work and through many small brush strokes, make a bigger picture. As a story about shadows, there are constant themes of light and darkness - descriptions of candles and firelight doing things, casting certain shadows, evoking certain images in a scene. Characters move through those shadows, they step into them or out of them. Light and fire produce specific results - when fire is present, it is because scenes have become or are about to become chaotic and disordered. When darkness falls and fire is extinguished, the threat ends, but something safe goes with it. These small details, I find, add to the scene in a wide variety of emotional ways that evoke specific feelings for characters.
There are dangers that I’ve found to this narrative symbolism too however: It eats up a lot of post space. It can be distracting to constantly narrate a candle, or describe a character’s eyes moving too many times in a row, or have a character messing with or fidgeting with something seemingly without explanation. It requires mindful repetition across scenes to become embedded in the subconscious space of a broader story or narrative and gain meaning to the audience. There are specific moments when it can add to a scene, and moments when it can subtract from or distract from one. Because posts are constantly moving and the scene is rapidly evolving with multiple people typing, windows come and go for these things quickly, and sometimes you choose right (and sometimes while trying to learn when is the right time, you choose wrong).
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Picking up a strength you already subconsciously depended on and choosing to refine it also weakens you a bit as a storyteller, whether you like it or not. Being able to react to what happens in a scene and make good choices both for your character and in what you’re giving to others requires a lot of your mind. Staying in your character’s headspace and voice requires some of your mind. Trying to think out ahead of just the scene requires some of your mind. Things like narrative imagery require some of your mind. Depending on your passive strengths, things you do unconsciously without noticing, and your active ones - things you commit yourself to doing each scene - I’ve found it’s very challenging sometimes to take what was a passive skill and make it something you’re now actively trying to apply more, in a wider variety of ways. It can mean that you’re thinking about that when you should be thinking about other things. You slow down as a writer and as a poster. It’s a challenge to keep pace sometimes, as you’re trying to juggle the many things that make a compelling scene - but as I’ve practiced it, it also becomes more natural.
I'm not sure I'm quite skilled enough to identify my own unspecified strengths and weaknesses easily - it's also always nice to have others around you that can bring these things up. Talking about where I can improve is really the place where I get the most useful feedback, groping around in the dark and hoping to improve is an exercise sometimes in frustration. I can't imagine a reason to do something as complicated as storytelling if I'm not trying to get better, so I often solicit feedback from others both semi-annually and at the end of scenes. I'm sure on some level these things aren't terribly important - I think I was still telling good stories without focusing on Narrative Symbolism and how I use my strengths in a scene, but I also know that growing those strengths (and overcoming my weaknesses) is an ongoing process, and one day I'll look back and wonder how I was satisfied telling stories that didn't do these things and more.
As always in the writer's room when I come to the end of what I have to say, it doesn't mean the conversation stops. I'm always open to others giving feedback on what I've learned, what you think and whether or not it seems like something you're going to try to focus on. There shouldn't be a terribly long length between this one and the next topic either - its' one I've started writing on in conjunction with this one but that went on a little too long. Until then, I hope everyone keeps on writing, and this encourages you too.
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
Welcome everyone to what is shaping up to be a large series of Writer’s Rooms! There’s another one or two in the barrel after this post, but I wanted to part them out a little at a time here - if you’re anything like me, going through these topics can be a bit like drinking from a firehose. Funnily enough that’s a lot like what this last year has felt like in terms of my own personal growth as a writer, too - trying to internalize the myriad of opportunities to grow as a writer that I’ve had, while probably only keeping what my brain can hold and my attention span can find. I hope you’ll forgive me a series of these posts! There’s so much great stuff to talk about. Today’s topic is key to a personal realization I’ve had while toolsetting over the last year - a big part of what I look for in stories that make it into the module are stories that follow these rules, rules I wasn’t really aware I was using until I thought more about it recently. I’ve started to call this “Worldbuilding where you are”.
Where am I? Let’s start from the base one-line elevator pitch of what Thain is from our vision page: “Thain is a world of challenging survival.” Let’s extrapolate out what this means a bit: It is challenging to survive on Thain. The monsters outnumber the men and women both in numbers and in strength, and the things that stop them are cooperation and security. Security is hard-pressed, resources limited, power finite, and few if any attempts to spread security to the broader island are successful forever. Cooperation is difficult to achieve in a world where everyone has different ideas of what security means, how it feels, what it looks like and what should be sacrificed to gain more of it..
In writing, as we’ve talked about a lot, character goals are rarely realized - most of a character’s real story is the struggle to realize them. Once you realize the goals, the story ends. Worldbuilding is remarkably similar to this: the story of a world ends if the world ever reaches equilibrium. If the people of the world learn to cooperate every time and beat the monsters with ease. If civilization conquers and spreads, and every settlement and player faction becomes big and powerful. This doesn’t mean things can’t improve: it doesn’t mean the world can’t advance or civilization score points, but for the story to survive in a PW, the final conclusion of the story must be broadly unattainable. There will never be a “Safe” Thain, governed by powerful people who all get along - or the story ends. Danger and problems perpetually push characters inward, forcing them to collaborate and tell stories together.
This brings me to “Worldbuilding Where You Are”. This is where we are: In a world of challenging survival - but we’re striving to be more narrow even than that. “Where you are” can be character specific too: does your character live in Sandburrow? The Landing? Steinkreis? Hamley? We’ve done a lot of rebuilds this last year where as a build team we tried to give a story to each of the settlements, and I considered making this topic part of the recent developer diary - but I think this is really more of a personal growth point and realization that I want to share with you, the readers of these scribblings:
What I’ve realized is that when I sit down to design a narrative around a settlement, the first question I ask myself is “How big and physically powerful is this settlement?”. Each settlement can be categorized into “Large” or “Small”, and the sources of its internal conflicts and the conflicts it often presents characters with are correspondingly drawn out. Above we broke down the challenge of civilization’s survival to two things: Cooperation and Security. In fantasy I find that it is narratively common that small settlements struggle to maintain security, while the story of a large settlement is the struggle for cooperation: how a place with security decides what to do with it. Winterfell is small and must be protected. King’s landing is a place of political intrigue. Gondor has a leadership crisis but can hold off the orcs, Rohan is broadly united but must weather the fight of its life.
These sources present characters with unique internal conflicts - for example in the above example of Rohan, Eomer must decide whether or not to obey the laws his king has put forth when assessing if Aragorn and his party are safe to let into Rohan. The primary challenge of security drives his internal conflict, which drives character growth and in a more abstract way can sometimes even server as the basis for something as large as a full character arc.
In good storytelling, I find you often play not to your strengths but to your weaknesses: the real meat of every story is how our weaknesses contextualize our strengths - by spending dozens of events on your weaknesses, your strengths become obvious and feel earned. Steinkreis is a city plagued by politics - its security is in big part the result of a lot of people with high levels of motivation and power, but the same people within it will always struggle to agree on how best to maintain that security, what choices could be made to extend it to other parts of the island, to what degree Steinkreis has that responsibility, what level of risk is acceptable, whether there are moments to compromise the laws that greatly contribute to it in exchange for a chance at more. This becomes the problem of Steinkreis: The problem of how a great city tries to spread civilization and choose regularly between laws and good.
If I were to design Sandburrow tomorrow, as a small settlement, the first question I would have is “what sorts of challenges does a place that is not Steinkreis-Iron City-Greenvale-sized have in surviving Thain’s world? If Sandburrow exists (as it does currently) effortlessly in spite of being small, the world doesn’t feel like a place of challenging survival at all. If the build plays up the dangers of the South Coast - of the undead, the spirits, the fey, the high-seas and more - then Sandburrow gains a problem: the problem of how Sandburrow survives. The answers to this will more often than not take the shape of the settlement’s inner conflict -
Why is this important to me as a player? I’ve found it influences a ton of my player events and the stories I run. When I see people pitch me a story that really drops my jaw, I think one of the things that always stands out to it is whether or not it aids in contextualizing the world. Does a story in Steinkreis that’s being pitched to me feel like it adds to the problems of a place like Steinkreis succeeding? Will it make the characters in it struggle with their conscience, with the city’s mission, with its overall desires and goals, or is it a lay-up for everyone?
Could there be a time when a Kreis-guard should let someone go even though they’ve clearly broken the law? How do two Magistrates of different noble houses struggle to agree on the right punishment for a crime? Is keeping the city safe worth a potential loss of civilian lives? How do you approach someone who is dangerous to others due to their sorcerous blood, but who isn’t at fault for it? These are all great pitches I’ve seen this year that really embodied “Big cities struggle with cooperation”.
If I pitch a story to someone in Hamley, it’s going to assume the dangers surrounding them are physically great and often tragically overwhelming. Personal stories will probably detail a person’s relationship to the monstrous world encroaching upon it. What sorts of compromises are required to survive when you lack power and security? What sorts of struggles are born in trusting due to those compromises? Small settlements struggle with survival - and survival is often fraught with hard choices, internal conflicts, and differences of opinion.
At a glance, I think the module has an abundance of large settlements: Hammersong, Mora’chel, Steinkreis, Greenvale, Iron City, and The Watch. It also has a variety of small settlements: Chudrak’dum, Sandburrow, Hamley, Poisonwood, The Northlands, and the even smaller “settlements” of places like Castra Aurelia, the Grey Iron Mining Camp, the Celestial Temple or the Wastes Encampment that we can assume are under even more rigorous, constant pressure than even places like Hamley. Pitching to any of these places (or with a character from them) is, I think, going to get the most memorable events by using the above outline.
So I’ll open the floor here, since it will probably be another week before the next Writer’s Room is ready to go - what are your thoughts here? Do you prefer one type of story to another? Does it help to see something like this in deciding where you want to base your stories and what kinds of stories you want to tell? Do you disagree what what’s up here, and if so why? I’d love to hear from people about this - as a person for whom worldbuilding is a big part of Persistent Worlds, the only thing better than getting to do it is getting to collaborate with others on it and talk about it!
Registered Member #25613
Joined: 2:30:16 am GMT 12/16/21
Posts: 23
As a player I don't think I necessarily have a preference between bigtown stories and smalltown stories - if anything, I like a good mix of both for the variety, I think the different challenges allow me to express different sorts of characters or even the same character in different ways. You mention playing to one's weaknesses (it's come up a few times, in fact) - I rather like taking a character that is suited to or prefers one type, but compelling them to face the other. This is pretty much what ended up happening to me - When I started on Thain proper last year, I started with a monster hunter who has some kind of unimportant backstory about not being a monster hunter. He ended up getting drawn fairly heavily into Kreisian politics, thanks largely to a few hooks that allow him to negotiate challenges, but the inability to use his key skills is strongly felt. It works quite well, like improvising the wrong tool for the job but doing it anyway, and of course as you said - every now and then when that key skill is required, the accomplishment feels earned.
To respond more broadly... When I think about worldbuilding and the sorts of settlement profiles you describe, I tend to use principles of realpolitik as a starting point - the assumption that politics is inherently pragmatic, all actors are rational etc. Assess the situation from a given perspective - say Hamley has to worry about threats x y z and has assets suitable for x but not y. Cool, I can work with that - I can think about where PCs might fit into that, and how leadership negotiates different challenges and then throw in the emotional component - Does Huren Dael have something to prove, that would prevent him from following the optimal (and boring) course? What about the different groups of people who work for him? The general vibe below that? There's always something.
Applying this to large settlements, I kind of see them as several small settlements clustered together - Steinkreis (nominally) has a hierarchy of power (King, Great Houses, their people, knights, other nobles etc - not in exact order), but no man rules alone and SK's layout of NPCs rather neatly illustrates who holds which strengths, who is dependent on whom. Collectively yes, the settlement has a cooperation problem - but the individual components have a security problem, albeit one couched in the laws of the city. They all need power to maintain their own position, and power is a zero sum game. This works regardless of how you divide the city - House vs House, caste vs caste, institution vs institution. Apply the emotional component and you have a right mess to work with!
That's not to say that the stories between bigtown and smalltown won't be fundamentally different in the way you describe, or that every story is going to come down to some sort of security dilemma - really this is more of a different lens.
Looking at it this way, I think a lot of the stories I've seen lately about competing powerbases and divided loyalties kind of allow you to see or even play out both sides of that conflict in a way that say, a threat to a small settlement might manifest as a somewhat impersonal force of nature - if say Mora'chel were to roll up on Sandburrow, even assuming a genuine reason reflecting team drow's needs that I myself might enjoy puzzling out, Sandburrow end would probably never find out nor even need to investigate - it would all be rather secondary to stopping the alien threat.
I guess when I put it that way, it sounds like I prefer bigtown over smalltown - I really do enjoy both! That said I have been seeing a good amount of the former and I'm probably more comfortable using the player tools to tell those kinds of stories.
Registered Member #25529
Joined: 3:52:11 pm GMT 10/09/20
Posts: 245
Welcome back everyone to another writer’s room. A few writer’s rooms ago we talked about the structure of an event-series of stories as being “Baking pies” and “Eating Pies” - I’ve been meaning to come back around to this a bit as I’ve had a lot of scenes this year to run in “A Flame Will Find Them” to get something close to real emotional payload built into the storyline - and I’ve noticed over and over again how critical these underrated Eating the Pie scenes can be to really helping a story run. I hope you’ll endure yet another writer’s room this month on an observation of my own progress as a writer, and an invitation at the end of this storyline to talk a bit more about it to anyone who wants to.
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A quick recap before we dive into the topic so that we can cover the language being used here: In the past I broke out “Baking the Pie” as an “event” style of story. An “event” where you are baking pie usually (but not always) involves some kind of plot development, these are usually an opportunity to pressure a character or characters somehow. I’ll list out some of the “Baking the Pie” scenes here in “A Flame will Find Them” just so that you can get a sense of what I’m talking about them:
Dmitry comes to the Flames Chapel with rift infection trapped in his hand, requiring that it be cut off by Magistrate Alastor Erlich and his student Johannes. His friends help him through the ritual.
The Flames-led squad investigates rumors of a cult in Lowtown and stumbles upon the ritual as it is almost completed, partially thwarting it
While seeking out one of the lowtowners who were infected by the released magics of the ritual, Bunny and Dmitry are accompanied by Justicar Isebrand into the Watch, where the lowtowner they are seeking explodes horribly and infects Isebrand with her death.
The squad pursues rumors of the ritual book that the dark ritual was found in, in pursuit of a cure - they argue at length over which Inter-city faction should be responsible for it.
While pursuing another infected lowtowner, Johannes is gravely wounded, requiring Nicolette to reveal some of her healing magics to the Flames as she is begged by Magistrate Erlich to bestow her blood on Johannes in contradiction of the Flames’ laws.
Erlich is put on trial for his heresies and the squad has to try to get him off.
There are also “Eating the Pie” events - events that follow a plot-driven scene in which two characters sit down with intention behind their meeting and discuss what happened somehow. There might be a narrative agenda here - something you want to get across about how a character has changed or remained the same. These events rarely require any setup at all - they can be two characters in a tower, or on a road, or in a quiet room off to the side somewhere. Unlike baking events that can often be broad and open, eating events often work best narrowed to two or three of the characters who baked together whose events must now be digested. It can involve confrontation or reconciliation, and it centers on what happened in the past event and the decisions that were made.
There have been to my count over forty of these plot-development-style Baking the Pie events run in this series across the last few months, but well over a hundred eating-the-pie ones - and something that I’ve noticed about them as we struggle to cram enough days in the week into keeping the plot moving forward as dozens of threads appear is the added pressure of having pie-eating scenes that allow characters to empty their plate and make room for the next topic we bake is almost all the challenge of satisfying storytelling.
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I think a lot of times when I watch event series get run, this is something that gets lost - it’s something I’ve been guilty of in the past. When you have a lot of plot to run and a finite amount of time to run it in, the tendency is to always run the plot and just hope that it tells the entire story - but in player events especially eating the pie together feels vitally important.
Eating the pie is where a lot of the emotional connection really takes place in a story. If you want to tear up when a story is finished, it’s not going to be because you baked together but because you sat at a table and ate together. There are a wide variety of complex reasons why this is hard to do, but I’d like to list out why I’ve found that it’s vital:
Firstly, plot events leave a character elsewhere than their status quo. Pie-eating events let you empty the plate you baked into for something else to take its place: they help the characters settle back into equilibrium, giving the plot beats a sense of completion and preparing them for whatever they do next. Imagine doing a very high concept event that takes the player into the astral plane and just ending with them returning to Steinkreis - eating the pie after this sort of event together is absolutely vital to helping the character contextualize what they’ve been through and give them a sense of being ready for whatever comes next. It’s closure, and it’s equilibrium. It lets a character arc breathe.
Pie eating events create emotional connections: going through something together is important but showing the ways that it has changed a relationship are also extremely important things to do.
It shows who a person is - being put under pressure is only half of a person’s personality. How they contextualize their behavior to others, and what ways that they justify their decisions are equally important parts of who a person is. You don’t just want to know what Dmitry is like when his hand is cut off - you want to know how it makes him feel afterward.
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These pie-eating events are very valuable, but they’re also sometimes very hard to do if the character themselves is likely to create conflict just by being in the place to eat the pie. A place I’ve found them to be a struggle sometimes is in running an antagonist, especially an MPC. I take a lot of cues in this method of storytelling from Kallista - I think Kira told one of the most emotional stories of a monstrous character I’ve seen on NWN and she did it in a way that really impressed me. Kallista would very rarely showcase how an event made her feel by walking into a quiet scene with you: by necessity any scene she entered got louder because of who she was: because of the nature of people on Thain’s reactions to monsters and because of what she wanted from people.
This was almost certainly why Kira created Lauren, the young girl who would grow up to diverge in her story ultimately from Kallista’s. Lauren was Kallista’s confident - the person Kallista could open up to who would then open up to others: After a scene with Garrik, Lauren would appear to him to tell him that “Mother was furious after your last fight”. Although Kallista herself couldn’t eat those pies, Kira’s creation of an intermediary allowed her to do it anyway, and so create deeper rivalries and character relationships. Making Nicolette was a byproduct of a need to connect Kallista to her enemies narratively.
Kallista would also often use the nature of Thain’s magic in interesting ways: she would have mirror magic that she spied with that others might spy back with. She lost her scrying orb to Eleshandrea, who could use it to feel back what she was feeling. She would arrange scenarios where characters would deceive her and enter her tower or confidences, upping the danger but giving the character a rare opportunity to see how she lived, what she hated, what she loved, and what she feared.
Playing Ath’ragnoon as the overarching mastermind of the Flame Will Find Them storyline has created a lot of burden on me to figure out how to eat the pie through other characters. I’ve counted on Nicolette’s history with Ath’ragnoon to help him establish himself to others in this plot - explaining who he is and what sorts of things he wants - but with Ath’ragnoon my method of connection is usually through mindscape events: supernatural stories where Ath’ragnoon and the PC in question find themselves both in the character’s mind, as the PC tries to navigate the ways Ath has anchored himself inside. It is both baking and eating: Ath asks the PC to trade something emotional of theirs for the same emotion of his own, usually several times across the mindscape as a means of navigating it (creating bridges, opening doors, removing anchors, etc.)
Finding ways for Ath himself to enter into these moments is hard though - it could be characters flitting into his own dreams as they slumber, it could be him flitting into theirs. There is a necessity as his presence in the plot grows for him to reap the emotional connections he is making: to make himself available for the hate and frustration he is festering and also for him to further discover ways to manipulate and damage others. There is an extent to which I can use Johannes to help a character return to their equilibrium as Ath provokes them, playing two characters off opposite ends of the plot - but there is also an extent to which Ath himself must continually increase his connection to the people he is manipulating as the story moves into its next act where he features more centrally and obviously as the villain instead of just the mastermind. Maybe he too will need a Lauren as people pursue him into the depths of the world or the Watch or wherever else he flees to. Maybe he needs an internal mirror of himself that characters can see between scenes as he grows, feels, and changes.
It’s important to give everyone this context - without those scenes there is no emotion behind his defeats nor any at his victories. A strong lesson around eating the pie is finding creative ways to do it that allow you to do it no matter who you are, with whoever you’ve run stories with.
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What are your feelings? Do you prefer the pie eating scenes? Do you prefer to bake? Can you see a world where just baking pies all day is preferable? Let me know what you think below!
! Registered Member #20
Joined: 8:30:40 am GMT 02/25/04
Posts: 7123
Immersion vs. Participation
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Monte Cook (one of the designers of D&D) writes on his substack about two different approaches to roleplaying in an RPG: Immersion vs. Participation.
The immersion approach is the way most people learn to play and define what an RPG is. The GM creates a quest/story/mission/situation/obstacle and the players control their characters as they attempt to complete the mission or overcome the challenge. The GM role and the players’ role are strictly defined and don’t overlap.
The GM says, “Such and such is happening, what do you do?” In fact, this could be just as easily called the “What do you do?” approach. Some players might play a role and embody their character when deciding what to do, while others might simply play their character as a sort of surrogate with their character reacting to the situation the way the player would. There are as many ways to do this and describe this as there are games. The terms used differ, but the important distinction is this: the players experience the story that unfolds, they don’t create it.
Call it a storygame, collaborative storytelling, or anything you wish, but the participation approach recognizes that the players have agency and want to have an input into the story. The story might unfold based on the mechanics or it might arise mainly out of player goals. It can have a GM-instigated story, but the players will have input as well.
The GM might still ask “What do you do?” but players are more rewarded based on if they create a good story, and less rewarded based on if their character succeeds instead of fails. (Although there can be elements of both.) A player might make a sub-optimal choice because it fits their character’s story.
The players feel less like a character in a book or a movie, and more like the team in the writing room. To contrast it with the immersion approach “close-in camera” analogy, the participation approach is all about the wide shots and the panoramic view. The player sees the bigger picture, and it’s much more than just what their character can see and interact with.
I’ll quibble a bit with Monte’s naming choices here, as I think the participation style can be really immersive in the conventional sense. Participative stories still hit very hard emotionally. But the central point he's making key. Summed up, the Immersion approach is about asking “What would my character do?” and the Participation approach is about asking “What’s the best thing for the story right now?”
I think a lot of people come into NWN with a pure immersion approach. They try to look at things exclusively from their character’s perspective, and react accordingly. This is natural, as the immersion approach is the first thing many people learn when it comes to D&D. Even now, many servers actively try to discourage player participation, decrying it as metagaming.
But in NWN, where you’ll rarely have a DM narrating your every move, the participation approach becomes vastly more important than in traditional PnP D&D. If you ever find yourself looking at epic or successful characters and wondering why their stories always seem to take off, I can promise that a huge amount of it comes down to their willingness to be an active participant in their own narrative. Telling an NWN story means having a willingness to step outside your character’s own perspective and think about what’s best for the world as a whole. It means learning to approach the game as a writer, and not merely as your character.
To better clarify the differences, let me offer some specific examples:
Failing on Purpose
An immersion-driven player generally won’t want to fail on purpose. If you’re playing solely from within your character’s head, there’s no reason to fail unless the challenge is genuinely beyond you. Someone playing exclusively from their character’s perspective will probably have to rely on the module or “a DM” to create failure for them.
A participation player won’t have this problem. They’ll fail when it’s narratively appropriate for them, and use that failure to show development and growth.
At the start of his essay, Monte offers a great example of someone failing on purpose:
It was 40 years ago (or so). I’m running a game of 1st Edition AD&D and the characters have just encountered a barbed devil (I think it was a barbed devil, anyway… it was a while ago). It had a cause fear ability and one of the players had to make a saving throw to resist it. He rolled a success but then looked at me and said, “I kinda feel like I should have failed that. I feel like my character (he probably said “my guy” because we often said that as teens) should be really scared and should run.”
I remember that moment so clearly because that was the first time I’d heard a player express a desire like that. Call it true roleplaying. Call it suboptimal play. Call it story-first. Call it player agency. There are lots of names for it now. Whatever you call it, this was the first time I encountered it.
Monte acknowledges here that this is more advanced than a lot of D&D roleplaying. A player who only knows the “What do you do?” style probably would never think to make their character run away without failing a fear check. The player in Monte’s example is being an active participant in their own story, changing the scenario in order to tell you something about them.
And this will reap dividends for that player in the story later. Suddenly, Monte the GM has something to build on (the character's cowardice, their fear of devils, ect) - there are new directions for the narrative to grow. There are many narrative reasons to fail on purpose. Maybe by emphasizing a character weakness now, you’ll be able to show a strength later when they overcome it. Maybe you can use your character’s failure to give someone else an epic and heroic moment. Maybe you just sensed that the scenario was going too smoothly and wanted to mix things up.
Whatever the reason, sometimes failing on purpose is hallmark of the participation style of play.
And characters who are willing to do this tend to have an easier time telling epic stories in NWN. They’re more fun to DM for and more fun to play with. Failure makes characters deeper and more identifiable. Failure makes them feel human. And if you only rely on the DMs or the module or the setting to give you that failure, you’re greatly limiting the means you have to tell your character’s story.
Emphasizing character distinctions
A common situation I see in NWN events is this - the players join a party, and everyone seamlessly gets along and cheerfully accomplish their goal together.
This is fine, of course - you want this sometimes. And if you’re playing exclusively in the immersion style, this approach makes a lot of sense. In the immersion style, your goal is the same as your character’s goal - to complete the challenge that’s before you. Creating needless strife within the group is obviously bad and counterproductive for an immersive player.
But conflict within the party that differentiates the characters can be deeply valuable! Without it, everyone looks the same. If this were a movie, the heroes wouldn’t always get along. Heroes in movies and books argue all the time. Luke Skywalker and Han Solo are rivals, even as both try to stop the empire and ultimately become fast friends. Steve Rogers and Tony Stark are constantly at odds even as they try to work together to stop the big villain. Harry Potter and the rest of Gryffindor are constantly coming together and breaking apart. These frictions within the group make things interesting and varied, giving each character their own memorable spin. They make things better for the story, even if it’s harder in the moment for the characters.
Players who play in the participation style become good at emphasizing the things in a group that make their character unique. This sometimes means conflict, but not always - sometimes it’s just expressing very different ways of achieving the same goal. Their paladin will push to find a lawful way of achieving things, even if it’s easier to just defer to the rogue’s more convenient lying and cheating. Their elven ranger will express racism and dismissiveness towards the humans. A participatory player look for ways to weave their flaws and limitations into the story, and in doing so, give the sense that the party are all unique individuals and not just an undecipherable mass of “adventurers.”
Strong participatory players will play up the aspects of their character that differentiate them. If I’m playing an halfling bard in the same party as another halfling bard, I immediately want to look for the thing that sets these two characters apart, the wedge between them that makes them distinct. Is one a master and the other an apprentice? Is one frightened and the other brave? What makes yours stand out?
Thinking this way will help you. A party of people playing with the participation style are usually a lot of fun to run events for. They’re always trying to bring things to the next level, and you never know what they’ll do next. While a party of people playing for immersion often will come across as too similar to one another, collectively pushing through the various objectives while speaking a few platitudes about hope - words that fall flat when no one in the group is actually thinking about giving up.
Creating Challenges
A purely immersion-driven player generally won’t usually create a lot of challenges for themselves. Players coming out of D&D often expect the DM or the setting to be the ones to exclusively do that. And they’ll approach whatever challenges the setting presents from the player perspective of trying to beat them as efficiently as possible.
A more participative player will use the player tools to create scenarios that make their own character’s life harder. They’ll create their own villains and hardships, and they’ll naturally build and lean into scenarios that ask hard questions of themselves and others.
In NWN, creating your own challenges is often the key to making your character grow. Rarely will a DM be sitting just above you, perfectly tailoring challenges and narrative to fit your exact needs as a player. This is nice if you can get it, but realistically you usually won’t - and a big part of epic storytelling is in being willing to make the scenario harder for yourself. To find ways to show why the setting might be bigger than your character, to show places you still have to grow.
Creating good challenges doesn’t necessarily mean you have to run big setpiece events that use a lot of complex player tools. A challenge can come from a single NPC, a single scenario you paint for yourself or someone else. What it really takes a measure of genuine self-awareness. A lot of people make characters who match their own mindset towards the world in many respects. Knowing what hard questions your character needs to be asked in order to grow (so you can help build scenarios that ask them) requires a certain level of self-examination - identifying the flaws in your character’s own thinking. The question you’d ask of a lawful paladin is different than the question you’d ask a chaotic free spirit. The best challenge for the arrogant friendless sorceress isn’t the same as the best challenge for the socially-adept rogue. Creating good challenges for yourself requires stepping further into this participation style, until it’s easy to live outside your character’s own frame of reference.
And similarly, it’s very important to be creating challenges for others too. A lot of players fall into the trap of running events or scenes that primarily pitch to themselves, and don’t leave any space for any of the attending players to make an interesting choice.
This entire skill of conflict creation is vital for storytelling - without it, you’re stuck waiting for the DM to tell you your story, hoping they’ll pick up on your clues.
Closing thoughts
Of course, none of this is required. It’s fine to keep solely to the immersive style if you’re fine with waiting for someone to come along and DM for you, and if you’re not troubled with waiting
But I think a lot of players want more. They want big epic stories and big epic moments, to be the next 23 or 26 character. If you want to tell the big epic story in your head, finding a way to be more of a participant in your own story is always the first place to start.
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The Price of Death
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What is a life worth in your scene?
In raw NWN mechanics, death is often very cheap. PCs typically kill many dozens of living creatures each day while going about their business and travels. Something as simple as a pirate bounty might lead to the bloody violent deaths of literally dozens of humans, and basically no one cares or treats these deaths as real deaths. D&D characters wade through seas of blood, including their own, and frequently crack jokes about it, going through life utterly unaffected by the carnage around them.
But a story does not have to be like this. In a murder mystery story, for example, a single death might be an incredibly important story-defining event. A single death in a murder mystery can be the defining event for the entire story. It can be analyzed by the characters and the reader from a thousand different angles. It can be shocking and painful, a source of trauma for the characters that cuts them to their core and echoes throughout their motivations.
How individually expensive death is in your scene and for your character is important to establish. When you are telling your character’s story, other people will look to you and try to understand this about you.
Within your story, here are some things you might do to make death more expensive:
Kill characters rarely and only with narrative buildup,
Spend time getting to know characters before killing them.
Kill characters more slowly or through more personal means - for example, if your character has a laborious and dangerous physical conflict against another named character in which victory does not come quickly, this makes the death more impactful when it happens.
Express big emotional reactions to death - your character or other characters are shocked or emotionally impacted by death. Express big narrative reactions to death - other characters take big actions to prevent deaths, or as a result of them.
All characters, even brave ones, act fearfully of death on some level.
And here are some of the things you can do to make death feel cheap:
Have the characters treat death as meaningless - for example, taking enormous physical risks because ‘they’re bored’.
Don’t bother to get to know characters before killing them.
Tell a story where every character is able to kill very easily and without consequence
Put your character in situations where they should die, but have them escape easily and without consequence.
Kill characters too often - for example, if every small event you run implies the death of dozens of nameless Kreis guards
Assume that every character kills large groups of NPCs without establishing much reason or purpose to their deaths.
Undersell the dangers of conflict (for example, a lot of joking around during big fights)
Have a death on-screen that you don’t bother to justify or explore
All of these choices come together to create the price of death around your character. In general, the more expensive you make death in your story, the more serious and grounded your story will feel. If you want your story to feel like a serious part of the world, establishing a price of death and keeping that price relatively high is an important aspect of achieving this.
This means that for antagonists, it is often a bad idea to kill too much or too indiscriminately. It is easy to imagine that your antagonist will always feel like a more serious threat because you kill a lot of nameless NPCs, but this is rarely actually true. Your antagonist must first raise the price of death around them - take the time and effort to establish why any particular death should matter to the players. Only once you have done that work will the deaths your villain causes feel more impactful than the deaths of kobolds on the road.
And on a similar note, the same goes for healer and savior characters - if you make healing too easy for your healer character (or too easy and common in general), injuries in the world will start to feel unimpactful, and all of your powerful abilities will feel narratively meaningless. If your character is constantly saving lives too easily, then saving a life will feel worthless to them.
Making death more expensive also allows you to set up more variation of tone in your scenes - if death is generally very expensive in your scenes, then a scene where a lot of death occurs quickly can feel very impactful and harsh. While if death is cheap, every conflict scene feels roughly as impactful as every other one, and having a lot of death occur will not tell the players anything about how they are meant to feel.
Of course, not everyone wants to tell more serious or grounded stories - but if telling a more serious story is an ambition of yours, establishing a high price of death is one of the keys to making it work.
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Unreality
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If Steinkreis invaded the Watch tomorrow, what do you think would happen?
1. The Kreisian forces would win. They’d easily take the Watch (which has no army to defend itself) and cause enormous damage to the livelihoods of the people there. Maybe they’d burn down the mansions in Raven’s nest and become an occupying force, leading to even more suffering on the part of Watch denizens who must now live under a cruel and oppressive Kreisian regime.
2. The Watch would win. The Kreisian knights would all die horribly to the various monsters and thieves. Maybe the Watch would come together to expel them, and the knights who didn't die would flee in horror of what they saw, only to die later from the plague.
Would the actual result be more like 1 or more like 2? The module doesn't give a specific answer on this question. We could guess, based on NPC one-liners and relative area sizes and so on. I certainly have an opinion on which way it would go if I actually ran this event tomorrow. But I could also imagine someone else on the DM client choosing to play this out the other way.
The answer to this question, until the module gives hard specifics, is that there is no answer. It depends what the event-runner decides to do in the moment. This type of answer is what we’ll refer to as unreality.
Unreality is all the answers you fill in about the world to questions where the module doesn’t specifically establish hard truth. Unreality might be your answers to faction questions like “Who would win if Steinkreis invaded the Watch?” It can be your answers to character questions like “How does an average person in my faction view my PC?” It can be your answers to environmental questions like “How long does it take to get from Hamley to Steinkreis on foot?”
An important thing about unreality is that it’s flexible. The answers to these questions are likely to change from character to character, player to player. They might even change from scene to scene, where in one scenario a journey from Hamley to Steinkreis is quick, and in another scenario it’s slow.
And yet, the answer to these questions can be very important. Having some idea of what might happen if Steinkreis invaded the Watch is important for relations between Watch character and Steinkreis characters. The probable answer to this question would greatly affect how Watch and Steinkreis characters would be likely to interact with one another. Understanding the unreality around a character is often vital to understanding who they are and why they do the things they do.
In the player event world (and to some extent even in DM events), we generally agree on a soft interpretation of unreality. We all agree that at least for this plot, the Watch doesn’t want to be invaded because it would be bad for them, or we agree that Steinkreis is too far away to help Hamley with its problems.
But recognizing the unreality that's around you is an important part of good decision-making in roleplay - whether in pitching to others, or simply engaging in normal conversation. Your roleplay will be stronger and more engaging if you’re able to understand and acknowledge the unreality of the characters around you. Especially if you want to effectively pitch to a character and tell stories, you understand as much as you can about how each character in your scene sees the world.
In module builds, we often try to take into account the unreality of players. When rebuilding a settlement, we’ll often look at the unreality within the players of that settlement and try to find ways to make it into module reality.
DM events and DM-granted items (especially epic items) are another way we sometimes do this. An item with a custom description and character power are often used in order to bring a piece of a character’s unreality (for example, their abilities or character theming) into module reality, for a character we see going the extra mile to tell stories to others. A narrative concept like Nimmeril's light becomes more "real" (and likely more impactful in a given story) once module items represent that it is real.
There are limits to this, of course. The more fundamentally plausible a piece of unreality is within the world as written, the more it can be acknowledged by other players and builders. Someone claiming that their character has 10,000 nukes all pointed at the Crossroads or that they’re secretly the heir of Steinkreis' throne probably isn’t going to get their unreality acknowledged in the module or in events.
For smaller more manageable unreality, understanding and acknowledging the unreality of other characters is a key part of strong decision-making in roleplay. One of the quickest ways to make someone have a bad time in your event is to contradict the unreality around their character, even in small ways. A single sentence that suggests your character just hasn’t been understood can be frustrating! It can ruin an entire scene, if it’s delivered in the wrong moment. It’s important to take the time to understand the unreality of others you want to play with, and to really see where they’re coming from and how they view the world.
Exactly how best to go about scouting out another character’s unreality is its own topic - one I’d like to get more into in a separate post.
In the meantime, I just wanted to give a name to the concept itself.
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Theme
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If you want to write great stories in the Thain module, it’s important to understand the themes of Thain’s world.
This is difficult right from the start, because Thain has been written with many themes in the past. The original Thain module was a (sometimes careless) mix of low-fantasy elements, like the darker themes of Steinkreis or the witch-hunting Blood Guard, with high-planar elements, like the main quest where you go into the Abyss and fight Gorrath.
Over the past few years, we made the conscious decision to go specifically in only one of those directions - the lower-fantasy setting of challenging survival and difficult choices. Our “Let There Be Blood” event from two years ago saw the closure of planar portals across Thain, but the thematic changes run deeper than that. A big part of our goal in the last few years have been about not just making history through new events like LTBB, but adjusting the overall feel of the module towards something that is more consistently low to mid fantasy in tone.
This means planar events and incursions growing more rare as a practical matter. But it also means recontextualizing more planar events and characters into something that’s a clear fit for the Thain module as it currently stands. Gone are the days when Steinkreis had a petting zoo with a beholder in it, and Bargus Telmoran used the shadow plane to dump his garbage. A “planar researcher” character in the old days might have been teaching at a Harry Potter style magic school educating little children about cantrips, while the same planar researcher in the modern module would probably be shunned by the general population and probably struggling with the madness that comes from mortals interacting too closely with the beyond.
None of this means your character and stories can’t ever use magic, or reference the planes. It’s mostly a question of how you present them. A world where magic is strange and costly and dangerous can still have magical characters, but they’re going to be written very differently than a world where magic is clean and common and safe. This affects everything from the way your character talks to the ways they try to solve problems to the facts of the world you choose to let them know.
As a starting point, these are some examples of the kinds of stories that are probably a good fit for the themes of the Thain module as it’s currently written:
Stories of challenging survival, where the characters and settlements are struggling to find ways to survive their dangerous surroundings. For example, a story where Hamley’s walls are pressed by dangers from the north.
Stories where characters struggle for resources or freedoms. For example, a Kreisian character might struggle against their settlement’s law, or a Watch character might struggle with physical deprivation.
Stories that emphasize that magic is dangerous and costly, treating it as more than mere technology.
Stories where the monsters feel like monsters. For example, a story where farmers chase a werewolf out of town is likely to emphasize the monstrousness and danger of the werewolf’s curse over the idea that the farmers are all racists who only need to learn to co-exist with the werewolf. Of course, we can still humanize the werewolf’s story, without lionizing it or implying that the monsters are the only real victims.
Stories that emphasize the planes as dangerous and unknown places. The average person probably does not know what “the planes” are and even experienced warriors would find them strange and difficult to visit.
Stories of humans making difficult choices about their mundane situation. In this world, there are difficult tradeoffs to make between safety, security, and power.
And these are some examples of stories that might struggle to feel applicable to the current setting:
Stories of “adventurers.” This isn’t to say characters in the Thain setting don’t have adventures or face challenging struggles - merely that a character saying “Let’s go adventure!” often sounds wrong. In a challenging setting where people struggle to survive and death is permanent, the characters should generally expect to prioritize survival and have a real appreciation for their own life.
Monster stories where the monsters act consistently harmless and human-like (ie: A friendly Deekin kobold with no ulterior motive.)
Stories that treat magic as safe and available technology (ie: a responsible character using magic to wash their dishes.)
”Menagerie” stories that combine a bunch of disparate elements and end up weakening the impact of all of them (ie: A ghost, a werewolf, and a gnoll walk into a bar…)
Telling a story that feels too outside the themes of the setting isn’t the end of the world, or the end of a character. The setting can survive many stories like this, and everyone's preferences will vary. Any setting has a certain amount of elasticity and can be adapted to many types of stories and themes. But it can make things difficult in the long term to go too far and too consistently outside of the world's themes. It may be harder for other players to interact with, as the character will feel too different from theirs. It may be harder for DMs to build events around your character or for other players to acknowledge and work within your unreality.
But this can often be solved simply by recontextualizing your character in a different way. I smiled recently when I saw a few players approaching even a simple bounty differently. They argued about whether the bounty was worth the risk, treating the risk of death as a genuine threat. One player asked what was in it for them and another had to pay them to come along. And while they still ultimately did the bounty, they played up the danger and risk of the world throughout. This kind of thing is a perfect fit for Thain’s setting as it stands, and it doesn’t require any radical alterations of your character to get there.
If you’re not sure how a particular story fits into this theme, or have questions about how you could adjust a story idea to be a better fit, feel free to reach out! I’m always happy to answer questions like this. In any PW there are going to be contradictions, and I do want to help people find a way to work within the setting whenever possible.
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Power
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How powerful is your character relative to the world around them?
Are they a gang leader or political mastermind who rules over others, beloved and uncontested? Are they a knight who’s saved the city dozens of times, respected by all? If they’re an explorer, have they already explored the whole world?
Or perhaps you could be someone more mundane. Maybe they’re just one small part of a larger criminal enterprise, part of a larger world of crime that they have to contend with. Maybe as a knight, their concern is with more local rivalries rather than battling the epic city-threatening demons. If you’re a healer, maybe it’s costly to heal even one person, rather than a simple task to heal dozens.
When people start using the player-eventing tools, there is an impulse to use them to immediately grow your character’s power and importance within the setting. Maybe you create a bunch of NPCs that all answer to your PC and do everything you say. Maybe you build yourself a big mansion, or you create city-destroying monsters to slay. Maybe you fill the world with signs of your character’s powerful magic, or maybe you emphasize your riches and power and connections.
I think this path of building up your character’s raw power through the player tools is almost always a mistake. Making your character immediately very powerful and successful and influential is mostly going to limit your opportunities for heroic storytelling. You’ll quickly find yourself with fewer stories to tell, and nothing to do with all that easy power you’ve given yourself.
Almost every character would be better off starting smaller, and staying at a lower scale when possible. You want to use the player tools to build up the world around your character, and tell stories that draw in others and give them choices. If you focus your efforts on building up the world and creating the context your character lives in, others will do a fine job telling you that your character is important.
On the Staff side, we go back and forth with how much to actually push back against this sort of narrative power-building. Contesting people’s unreality from the Staff side is a mess of judgment calls. In general, we tend to rate this kind of self-granted importance as having limited meaning in Staff events. I think an underrated value of the epic tier system is to shorthand a character’s setting power. This does mean building up power in the setting takes a long time and isn’t guaranteed, but that’s also by design.
Fortunately, there are many ways to tell a story where your character is weaker, and this usually works better for heroic stories. For example, maybe instead of telling a story about the powerful gang you’re in charge of, you tell a story about a powerful gang you’re involved in - a gang that some stronger NPC runs. Maybe your character disagrees with the leader certain things, but has to do what they say. Now your character has some real hardships, they have to compromise with aspects of their criminal life. This gives you a lot of potential story hooks.
Or if you are a leader, maybe you’re not an uncontested leader. Maybe another gang member is constantly trying to take over from you, and you can’t just get rid of them because they’re equally powerful and dangerous and you need them. This is a more interesting premise right off the bat.
(And of course, don’t give into the temptation of just unseating the disagreeable gang leader and putting your own character back in charge - this just gets you into the same too-powerful place. Instead, figure out how to work with them, how they become a part of your character’s life!)
Or maybe you tell the story of other criminal gangs who oppose you and what they’re trying to do and why they matter in the setting. This creates a stronger dynamic for other PCs to interact with than if your character is just the recognized boss - do they side with the other gangs, or with you?
If you’re a knight, you could create an epicly powerful demon who threatens to destroy your settlement - but defeating this singlehandedly isn’t going to make your character feel big, it’s just going to make your city feel small. It leaves you with few interesting choices to make, and telling a story where your own PC becomes massively powerful and influential will always feel a little soft. What if you instead told a story of your mundane rivalries with another knight, and used that to explore why life among the knights is more difficult and complicated than it first seems?
Even just making your character be poor and struggling instead of rich can be a strong character choice. Lots of characters in the setting naturally need money and resources. Being poor and struggling gives you a lot more individual motivation than being rich and bored.
Reducing your character’s power can make your story seem more mundane, but in practice it actually gives you a lot more to do. The character who is already extremely well-connected and uncontestedly powerful in their area has little to try to achieve in the world other than affecting module change, which is always going to be rare and difficult. But a character who is smaller and struggling might have a million goals they want to achieve, which others can help them work towards. They can find challenge and interest in working against their rivals, surviving against their enemies, even just putting food on the table every day.
And even in cases where your character is powerful, you always want to find ways to moderate that power and limit it, instead of reveling in it or building it up. When Nicolette Adair helped bring about the rise of a new king of Steinkreis, it would have been very easy to frame her as an uncontestedly powerful political figure in the days that followed. Instead, I wanted to spend the following months building up her political enemies - making the Flames, the other council houses, and so on all seem more powerful than her, and capable of forcing her into difficult political choices. This was a very intentional decision and I think it worked out well - Nicolette as some uncontested Hand of the King of Steinkreis would have little left to do. While building up her political opponents and rivals continues to give her challenges and narrative struggle.
When in doubt, go smaller. Build up the world around you. Deepen the setting, develop your enemies, your challenges, find reasons why your rivals are powerful or right. Develop all the things that make your character’s life hard and create narrative for others. And let your PC’s relative power in the world be left as a question for others to answer.
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Weakness
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In what situations would your character be likely to fail?
D&D often teaches us to think of weakness in terms of the physical. “Red dragons are vulnerable to cold damage.” But in a well-written story, the physical weaknesses tend to be the least interesting kind. Bilbo does not escape the dragon because he read in the monster manual that he should use his cold-damage dagger to break the dragon’s hide. He escapes because Smaug is greedy and arrogant and distractible, and Bilbo uses these personality flaws to his advantage.
D&D also teaches us that failure is a bad thing to be avoided. But in a narrative world of stories, this is rarely true. Failure is an opportunity for growth. Understanding why your character might fail, and who they are when they fail is important. It gives them dimension and nuance.
Well-written characters tend to have many weaknesses of various kinds, weaknesses that frequently cause them to fail. These might be physical weaknesses or skill deficits or fears or emotional vulnerabilities that impact their decision-making for the worse. Some characters are cowards who flee at the first sign of trouble. Some of them are vain or cruel or antisocial or illiterate or bad with names. Some are disempowered by their situation (for example, being a commoner in a situation where it would be useful to be a noble.)
If you’re playing solely in the immersion style, the temptation will be to minimize your character’s weaknesses, or to have none at all. In order to succeed at the challenges before you, you’ll be tempted to try to give your character a high stat in everything - or at least to let the party’s face do all the talking while your antisocial character hides in the back.
But as you lean more into the participation style, you’ll find that your character’s weaknesses become more valuable to a story than their strengths. The things they need others to help them do will give you story moments to build on, chances to make your character relatable and opportunities to let others take a role in your story. An antisocial character having to muddle his way through a speech is often more interesting and relatable than a social butterfly easily gliding through the same moment. Characters are at their most interesting when the story plays to their weaknesses, rather than exclusively to their strengths.
In any open roleplay world, there will always be those who only want to excessively show off their character’s power and coolness and rightness. But if you want to write a successful character on Thain, you want your weaknesses to be on display at least as often as your strengths. I should be able to look at your character and immediately know where they might fail. You want to think about these weaknesses, be consistent with them, and they will become the basis of events and stories others might run for you.
And likewise - you’ll find that the frequency and salience with which you show your character’s weakness will directly determine how effective they are seen to be in their areas of strength. A character like Mira Endaris is able to be regarded by the setting as an exceptionally powerful healer precisely because of her weaknesses in other aspects of life. Mira’s healing is powerful in part because she is a sickly child, naive and vulnerable to political manipulation. A version of Mira who was also a great warrior and scholar and military leader would not be seen in the same light. She could not be as powerful in the areas where she needs to project power.
(One of the biggest mistakes in 3rd edition D&D was to build the Cleric class as mechanically lacking in weaknesses - presenting it as a superpowered healer who is also a powerful warrior and durable tank and effective mage. I understand this choice was made because the D&D designers were concerned that not enough people would want to play the “support class.” But this choice tends to leave Cleric players in particular struggling to figure out what their weaknesses actually are.)
Something that defines successful characters on Thain is that they need others. If there is no humility or vulnerability in a character, there can be no genuine growth. Even in your areas of strength, it is important to think about where you might be weak. A warrior who struggles to narrowly win a fight will usually be more interesting to interact with than one who effortlessly dominates and controls every scenario.
Giving your character specific weaknesses is also a great way to bring others into your story. A common problem for player eventers is that they want to tell a piece of their character’s story, but don’t know how to bring others into it beyond just having them show up to watch. Playing more of your character's weaknesses is often a great way to do this, because it gives them a reason why they might need someone else’s help. What if there’s something they don’t know how to do, so they ask for advice? What if they fail, but others are there to help them through that failure? Now you’ve given other people a reason to care.
[ The Island of Thain ]
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