Gaming fiction revisited

[Christoffer Lernö]

We've been over this subject a few times already I know. I could dig up the original discussion I wanted to post this on, but that would be against the forum guidlines :)

Not everyone is put off by game fiction in an RPG book, that's what I've been told anyway. I wonder if those are the same people who don't really play their favorite games too often, but love to read up on sourcebooks and try to GM/play occasionally and then never feel it lives up to what they read in the books (long sentence there).

Anyway, I found the link from a column in rpg.net I wanted to post.. "Condensation of All Game Fiction" by lizard. I feel he's spot on.

[ADGBoss]

I know alot of people made good points when I asked about Game Fiction, though I thought that some believed that any game designer who wants to write fiction into his or her game is getting off focus.  I do not think this is the case. Although much game fiction IS written for self satisfaction "see i wrote a short story" I think it can be added into a game during the design process... to add setting and feeling...

It does not always work though and like Art, bad fiction can really hurt a game and turn off a user as well as Fiction which is poorly placed in the book.

Sean
ADGBoss

[Jack Spencer Jr]

That's pretty funny, and unfortunately all to true. It just goes to show that gaming fiction isn't bad so long as it's *good* fiction. Bad fiction is still bad fiction no matter where it is or what it's for.

It also doesn't help that this is gaming fiction stock situation #2. I mean I've read that several times before and it does not get any better with each retelling. It's trite. It's the author trying to give a sense of the world, that the PC is a badass, that it's an "adult" or "mature" game, that there are bad guys and to have a really cool fight scene by dropping a hat which ultimately feels pointless.

Here's a handy response that I've been dying to use on such a piece but haven't had a chance. I stole it from My Dinner With Andre:

(after read said fiction) "What you should do with this is put it in a hole and burn it and cover it up with earth because the devil's in it."

Anyway, I think that what gaming fiction needs to be is just good fiction. I guess if you find yourself trying to give a sense of the world and how the game is played, you're going about it all wrong and your results will disappoint.

[Christoffer Lernö]

While fiction can help a writer get direction during the dev process, I think it's like you say Jack - in the end it doesn't reflect the gameplay much.

Maybe if game fiction was the LAST to be written, after the would-be game fiction writer actually had played he game 10+ time and knew how a game would play out, and then actually bothered to write a fiction that reflected that.

On the other hand I think we all know that a lot of games are so bad that such fiction might not be much of an improvement.

So, bad games will keep on providing fiction as a way to try to pretend it's not and good games.... well hopefully people will take a clue and write up what happened in an adventure rather than write a story on their own.

(Incidentally I'm reminded of the stuff in Actual Play from Donjon adventures. I mean those game reports KICK ASS, with a little modification they'd work as game fiction and most importantly they'd actually reflect what happens in the game!)

[Ron Edwards]

Hi there,

This is a good time for this topic to come up, for me. Historically, I've been quite the foe of fiction in RPG books, most especially if it was not an actual story but an "excerpt" from a non-existent story.

By and large, my view remains unchanged ... but with a recent twist. Now, I'm thinking that complete stories (beginning, middle, end) are good things no matter when or how they might be found: in a paperback publication as such, in a game book, written on a dungeon cell wall, or found under a rock. Story? Whole story? Good story? Cool.

So my third print supplement for Sorcerer includes a full short story to illustrate some principles I'm presenting and to engage people's interest. Talk about going out of one's comfort zone ...

Best,
Ron

[TSL]

I think part of the problem is the second one feels compelled to write anything that can be labeled "game fiction".

In a sense, I'm seconding Ron - a truncated story or viginette is not really a completed fiction piece.  It's a piece of game fiction. :)

I've written a lot both in and out of character in the last few years.  I do find it funny that gamers frequently demand that a fictional story appearing in any given system or supplement - must be "possible" within the rules of said system/supplement.

Personally, I think it is more important to write a good complete story and if the ideas within it are sound [and they should be if it's a good story] then retro-actively add them to the game.

[Epidiah]

Generally I think game fiction, if it should exist at all, should demonstrate the same economy of language that one would find in a haiku. Length is extremely important to me, and anything longer than a paragraph usually isn't read.  

The piece should have a single goal in mind, and never stray from that goal. If it is suppose to set mood, then have it set the mood. If it is suppose to illustrate an unusual power, let it illustrate the power. But don't take the opportunity to advance the story of a sample character or introduce world-specific idiosyncrasies too. That would be too much for one blurb. The key is to avoid straying into asides about the game or its world, or to hit the reader with too many concepts at once. Short and sweet, just enough to turn the imagination on, but not so much as to overrun it.

Frequency is important as well—the less often the better. I'll skip even a paragraph of game fiction if I run across too many of them. For me, the fiction works only once or twice a chapter. That is, of course, assuming there isn't a new chapter every page. If the fiction appears in an area of the rules that aren't meant to be read straight through, such as a spell, skill, or power list, then it may be feasible to increase the frequency.

Admittedly, one of the reasons why I dislike longer pieces is because I have yet to read a well-written one. Short game fiction is of course vulnerable to this as well, but by virtue of its brevity, it is less likely to offend. It is easier to ignore little bad pieces of fiction that huge chunks of bad fiction. If the fiction is great, then you have nothing to worry about. However, even if you are a tremendously skilled writer, I'd rather your longer fiction appear outside the context of the game then within it.

That being said, bad fiction doesn't entirely discourage me from picking up a game. Even if the rules themselves are intrinsically tied into to fiction, such as the case with Castle Falkenstein. After a while, you just get used to ignoring it. And there are of course exceptions. I did so enjoy reading The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

[Walt Freitag]

Okey-dokey, here's the "Condensation of all game fiction" in haiku form:

"Young ass-wipe, foes come.
Ah! You have kewl powerz too.
Now we may begin."

- Walt

Edit: I realize this version might have left too much out. How about:

"What's that?" "Fuck... Force." "Huh?"
"This, dork:" *ZAP!* "Wow!" "Oops, foes!" *Crunch!*
"Force, eh?" *ZAP!* "Good start."

[Blake Hutchins]

Yup.  It's hard to put anything of substance in a paragraph.  I'd rather have a complete story, a well-rendered and complete scene, or Dune-esque fictional quotations, not a smattering of paragraphs.

Witchcraft does game fiction very well, I thought.  As do Falkenstein and Blue Planet, the former creating a complete story and the latter using scenes to provide a lasting flavor of the S-F alien world setting.

Best,

Blake

[Epidiah]

I agree that it is hard to put anything of substance in a paragraph, but it certainly is not impossible. I may be taking a fairly pessimistic approach to game fiction, but this is how I see it:

If you assume that your game fiction is going to be good, then the length doesn't matter that much. Short short fiction can be just as powerful as regular short fiction. The book Micro Fiction, edited by Jerome Stern, has some wonderful examples of this. However, if you assume that your game fiction is going to be bad, then the length should be as short as possible.

If you can't objectively determine whether the game fiction is good or not, go for the short short fiction. It decreases your odds of annoying the reader.

All of this is complicated when you take into account the variety of readers you will have. There is no way of telling if the reader will like the style of fiction you have included. For example, I can not stand the fiction in Castle Falkenstein and it all but ruins the feel for the game for me. I had to actively avoid reading it. However, I love the genre and the game itself. You don't want to leave that sort of minefield for potential readers.

About the only thing you know about the vast majority of your readers is that they are reading your game because they are interested in a game and the fiction will be an added bonus at best. Personally, I would use it sparingly.

[M. J. Young]

Every time I see a thread about "game fiction" my mind immediately runs to things on the order of the Forgotten Realms books--books of adventure stories written to take place in a published game setting. (In fairness, I don't know whether Forgotten realms existed as stories before it became a game world; it has this place because it's the first one I could think of which about which I did not know otherwise.)

As my first novel based on Multiverser is about to go to press, I obviously think that there is merit in that sort of game fiction: if you can write a good book which stands as an independent work of fiction and also has a tie-in to a decent game system, that's a good thing. From a certain perspective, it may be a better thing than trying to write a game that ties in to a book (but that may be my impression that such games have generally failed to reproduce the feeling of the stories they attempt to emulate).

In general, I don't use game fiction in rules or settings books. It's not that I couldn't write it; it's that as a device for conveying information, it is usually less effective than most. And since I tend to think of "what I'm doing now" in very narrow terms, when I'm reading a rules or settings book I'm there to get information so I can run a game. Fiction is an ineffective means of giving that to me.

That said, in The Second Book of Worlds, I included a substantial piece of fiction. It seemed the best way to convey a difficult world concept.

I had come up with an idea for a time travel problem as a world setting, a Groundhog Day/11:59 sort of recurring loop, with sufficient background to explain it and a challenge for the player(s) to unravel and undo it. I started working on it with someone who contributed some clever ideas to it. Then, while the world was still in the developmental stages, I wrote a short story based on the world--but absent any connection to the player characters, or the effort to undo the loop. It was published at the (now defunct) RPG Review site, and subsequently copied to my time travel site. Progress on the world, meanwhile, continued. But when it came to putting the world on paper, it seemed that the best way to get the referee to find the rhythm of this setting was to include the short story. It is clearly offset, so the referee can easily skip it; it's about five pages of text (the total length of the scenario is about twenty pages). It gives personality to the people, feeling to the setting, meaning to the events.

But this is a peculiar situation. The character is entering a world in which everything is going to repeat itself, day after day after day, exactly the same but for whatever changes he makes. In a sense, the referee will be telling that story, and modifying it on the fly in response to the player's actions, but then telling it again, modified by the new set of actions. He has to know the story, because the setting is about the story.

When we did game versions of The Most Dangerous Game and of Prisoner of Zenda, we recommended in the text that the referee read the originals (or possibly, in the latter case, view a film or video version). With this particular world it was more valuable, and less available--so we put it in the book. We also included a timetable of events, explanations of some of the obvious questions, a snapshot of the world beyond the immediate vicinity, a secondary scenario to use if the players manage to bring "tomorrow", and a player aid in the form of notes about time travel which will help solve it. But the core of the world is found in the recurring story.

If the fiction is going to convey something the reader needs to know, and does so in a way that is ultimately more efficient than most other options in this context, it's probably a good choice. Of course, it still has to be well written--if your text is not well written, it doesn't much matter whether it's bad fiction or bad rules writing (although bad fiction will probably stick out, because we've got a lot more experience with good fiction). But even if it's good fiction, if it's just making the book longer without telling us something we can't find otherwise, it's probably a waste of space--and our time.

Anyway, those are my impressions.

--M. J. Young

[Jared A. Sorensen]

So my third print supplement for Sorcerer includes a full short story to illustrate some principles I'm presenting and to engage people's interest. Talk about going out of one's comfort zone ...

Huh. Next thing ya know you'll be playing a chick.

[Blake Hutchins]

No argument it's possible to craft a compelling paragraph, but short-short stories with beginnings, middles, and ends typically run something like two to four hundred words, not the length of your typical single paragraph.  In my experience, short-shorts are challenging to get right.  When they're done well, they're excellent, striking examples of creative fiction.

They aren't easy, however.  Most short bits tossed in as game fiction are vignettes, not complete stories.  Writing a compelling paragraph that accomplishes a neat bit of color or that illuminates a part of the setting or system, well, that's tough.

Best,

Blake

[Demonspahn]

I like them but of course I write them.  In fact, Dreamwalker started out as a rough idea for a game but to pitch it (to myself, as well as to my friends/co-designers and later to playtesters) I wrote a short story to demonstrate how the game would play out during a typical session.  The story ran a little long but we included it in the book anyway because it seemed like a better way to convey certain in-game concepts than just explanatory text.  Admittedly though, the jury is still out on the story's actual quality so this might be a bad example.  

Some better ones would be the short story at the beginning of Shadowrun 2E, the diary excerpts from Little Fears and the fiction throughout AFMBE.  Each one conveys the setting/theme in a friendly, non-sterile manner and makes you actually want to run (or play) the game.  I guess that's what I look for in game fiction---I want to be drawn into the world that is described and that is just hard to do when aside from the fiction, many traditional RPG's read like a technical manual.  

A prime example (for me, anyway) is Weird Wars II.  I was really looking forward to that game.  When I bought it, I realized it was a great historical game but some more flavor fiction would have done wonders to enhance it's readability for us non-historians, especially because it was dealing with supernatural creatures in a historical period.  Sure, there were plenty of tips on what to do, but actually seeing a session written in play would have added to the product as a whole, I think.  Still a great game, though.  

Also, I've said it before, but I don't think bad fiction actually detracts from a game, at least not as far as sales.  Case in point, I recently purchased WW's Aberrant.  The first umpty pages are filled with some (not all) really _horrible_ game fiction/flavor pieces but that would not have stopped me from buying the game.  The same with Weird Wars II.

Another thing to consider is the publishing format.  If it's a PDF, I say include it because there's no extra page cost.  Also, you can always edit it out in later versions if it gets too much negative feedback.  If it's a printed product, hand it around to non-gamers and see what kind of feedback it generates.  

Well, that's me.  :)

Pete

[Alan]

Hi,

First, I think we should focus on fiction in rule books and suppliments.  Novels and stories published elsewhere are really a different issue.

The fact is that most fiction in rule books is second rate and shallow.  It's function is usually just to portray the superficial aspects of setting and situation, rather than what makes a story great: theme (or premise, as master Egri would put it.)

Much of the discussion of narrativist role-play here has rediscovered what fiction writers have know for ages: Story Now, Conflict, Tension all the time, Personal investment.  Unfortunately, in these areas, even a lot of pro fiction is lazy.  

Given that it's hard even for profesionals to write gripping fiction, I'm not surprised that game designers, most of whom have never sold a short story to a pro market, don't succeed.

So my third print supplement for Sorcerer includes a full short story to illustrate some principles I'm presenting and to engage people's interest. Talk about going out of one's comfort zone ...

All my above comments aside, fiction that demonstrates some deeper theme of the game can work for me.  Sorcerer is a good candidate for this.

You're brave, Ron.  I shudder ever time I sit down to write.  In fact, I'm putting of my daily session right now.  See ya . . .


- Alan