For Roleplayers Who Start Writing | Hacker News Reader

For Roleplayers Who Start Writing

mythcreants.com

63 pointsBerislavLopac26 comments

All of this is true if you write to be read.

I used to write a lot when I was younger, but this was always painful. My friend and family would go "meh" when reading what I wrote (they're not avid readers themselves), other writers would "love it", then want to change everything, and I started to second guess everything I was writing, to the point I didn't love it anymore and procrastinated more and more until I had to admit to myself I just stopped writing.

And then, a few years ago, I started playing dungeons and dragons, in play by post games. It was fun, and I did enjoy writing again, even if it was casual writing.

Then it hit me : why not play solo and go a bit further? I started playing alone, doing both the game master and the players, all written (while still continuing other games with people, of course). And this was _incredibly_ fun. It was the same feeling that I had when I started writing younger, but with no obstacles anymore. Plus, because of the dice rolls, even I was not sure what would happen next. I take weeks to create characters with detailed personalities and backstory, I drop them in the story, and I discover them, because it's only when they face a given situation or talk with a given character that it becomes obvious how they will react.

I would recommend that to anyone who loves writing. There's nobody to tell you it's too short, or it's too long, or this section is not detailed enough, or this one is boringly full of details. If you write only for yourself, you can focus on the best things in writing : imagination, and having fun.

> I would recommend that to anyone who loves writing. There's nobody to tell you it's too short, or it's too long, or this section is not detailed enough, or this one is boringly full of details. If you write only for yourself, you can focus on the best things in writing : imagination, and having fun.

Exactly :) I used to write a lot, and worried myself to death over what others thought of it. Eventually I realized that I just had to stop caring about that -- if I wrote for me and me alone, it was so much more liberating and enjoyable. Doing things like participating in NaNoWriMo[0] has actually started being enjoyable again: I don't need to worry if my writing is "publishable" or "good" or some other standard, I can just write whatever I want and not care.

[0] https://nanowrimo.org

That's awesome :) I wish I had realized that earlier instead of dropping everything.

This makes me wonder if the ability to be detached from outside opinion is not what's the most important thing to evolve in writing. Baudelaire and Lovecraft come to mind, they both managed to go on for a whole life despite harsh reception in their time.

>There's nobody to tell you it's too short, or it's too long, or this section is not detailed enough, or this one is boringly full of details. If you write only for yourself, you can focus on the best things in writing : imagination, and having fun.

You say this, and I agree, but if vanity published books such as the amazingly 'high quality' Fairasia, which I have no idea how I was unfortunate enough to end up with, say one thing,.it's that editing is important and you should be ready to cut out ideas because not everything you write is good.

I keep it only as an aspirational example for any other book I buy or even stuff I write myself, I can always say, no matter how bad it is, it's not Fairasia.

https://books.google.ca/books/about/Fairasia.html?id=nRMKAAA...

I'd really like to take the time to scan this book, I feel like many memes could be created from it.

I try to think like this. However I have this notion, which could be wrong, in that you ought to share your work with others to get feedback on how to get better. It's happened to me a lot in other domains like programming: I'll work on a thing, be proud of it and release it only to get fairly critiqued on this one detail I never noticed until they pointed it out. Sometimes these are so fundamental I end up going back to the drawing board.

I don't understand how to get that kind of insight completely alone. I'm convinced there will be things I will just not notice by myself. Then again expecting to be read is a huge mental blocker to the order of not producing anything at all, so I guess it's partly a trade-off.

And sometimes I'm unable to convince myself I'm improving or doing the right thing, which presses me to expect to be read more. Personally I always want to get better, and a likely failing of this is I see less value in what I do if I can't see improvement.

> other writers would "love it", then want to change everything,

That’s what writers do. Like you, they have many ingrained habits and preferences, as well as an active imagination. In my experience the best feedback comes from relatively uninformed readers - they’re not shy to make criticism others might find silly and will tell you if they don’t understand something.

And when they understand your writing, you’ll know most people will.

This is a brilliant idea! Thank you so much. This sounds similar to approaching worldbuilding as a first and foremost fun activity for the DM, not as something to impress the players with. Your idea, including dice rolling for yourself, sounds like even more fun.

I’ve wanted to try D&D, but don’t know anyone else that plays. Are there other mediums to play in (i.e. is “by post” still a thing)?

Additionally to what others mentioned, Dnd Beyond [1] has a quite active play by post board on their forum. It's great to get started, but games tend to rarely go to the end of the campaign and stop after a few months. It's still a good thing as a first experience.

After that, I would recommend to find friends to play by mail. Somehow, I noticed players less easily give up the game when they're friends. Simply by talking regularly about your first games is usually enough to get other friends interested. Just don't push it on them and let them come by themselves, as it's quite a commitment and will be felt as a burden if they feel they're playing with you just to be nice to you.

[1] https://www.dndbeyond.com/

Yes, play by post most certainly is still a thing. Most RPG forums (e.g. https://forum.rpg.net/) have a play by post subforum, and https://rpol.net/ is a forum dedicated to play by post.

There's also live online play e.g. on discord or roll20. Each table is different, do a search for groups on social media and ask about what their games are like.

This is a cool idea. I might try it with all the time I have on my hands lately.

Could you tell me about your method for this?

Sure! Regarding creating characters and using the party, they are very few things I do differently from when I play play-by-post games, actually. Mostly, I sometimes roll a dice to decide who will react to a given situation if I feel some characters start to overshine the others.

The main difference is on the DM side, about how to build the campaign. I run the game in Faerûn, using the awesome Forgotten Realms wiki [1] to provide material. I don't try to follow everything from it exactly, but this provides a source of outside content, so that when the party reach a place, I discover much of it as well. I have also a high-res map of Faerûn that I load in inkscape to put tokens on it to show where the party is, and what there is around.

I made myself a NPC generator, based on the suggested rules in the "This is your life" chapter of Xanathar's Guide to Everything, with personal additions for commoners' life. When my party reach a place, I'll generate about twenty characters, and look at their generated lifes. Quickly, there'll be groups of characters that have similar events in their life, and imagination will take the relay to explain those similarities and produce a story for them. I change everything I want in those characters, the generated content is just a suggestion, but I think randomizing the most things possible is key to keep entertained in a solo game - that and adding outside content you discover on the go. It allows to emulate the exploration aspect of a game as a player. Plus, as a programmer, building generators/randomizers is half the fun :)

There are also difference in gaming rhythm and splitting the party. Since I play alone, I can play whenever I want, I don't have to synchronize players. So there will be evening when the story move forward a lot, then days without activity. If nobody is waiting for you, that's OK. Also, when you play alone, it's OK to split the party - because here as well, nobody is waiting. So it means I don't have to force characters to stay together if they don't get along, and I can imagine more complex scenarii where multiple things happen at the same time and various characters will follow various paths.

Regarding preparation, just like regular DM work, you spent way more time in preparation than in game. Maybe a bit more, because PCs are more than just NPCs, and you need to know them well and constantly refresh your mind about who they are.

A last thing about battle : I make maps in inkscape, with tiles, and play it as a tactical game. The one thing I noticed is that I have to make the difficulty level way harder (I play twice the difficulty of the "deadly" level for a normal difficulty encounter). This is because the coordination between PCs is insane, since you play all of them. I could force on them ignorance of what the others try to do, but since I like a lot tactical games, I find it more fun to just raise the difficulty. This also means they get way more XP than usual, so I use milestone progression instead.

[1] https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Main_Page

Oh, and another thing I found useful : I keep note files where I log what each character know about other characters. Trying to remember who knows what drove me insane, initially :)

In the end, this isn't /writing/. Call it what it is: daydreaming.

There's nothing inherently wrong with it, but the value of /writing/ comes from the fact that writing is, in fact, read. Those are two very distinct activities.

If I write, I'm pretty sure it's writing :) You can make an ideology out of it if you want, but you're the only one responsible for it (but granted, you won't be alone there).

No ideology, just words with meaning which are not wholly subjective.

This is one of the most incorrect statements I've read on HN. He or she is writing, full stop. Demeaning it this way is just gatekeeping and serves nothing except to make you more bitter.

To the OP: keep doing your writing, I have a good friend that also loves writing based around gaming and it has kept him sane and happy for a long time! Plus, he's become an amazing writer during the process!

Good article. On the last point, about delayed gratification when writing: one way, and perhaps the way to complete a long writing project is to enjoy what you are writing, which means you are writing the book that you would enjoy reading. I've tried multiple times to come up with a novel idea that would sell but I ended up never pursuing them. Once I started thinking really hard about a story that I wish someone else had already made, I got started and enjoyed the whole process.

A corollary to this is that you must know what kind of stories you like, which means you have to develop your taste. I don't mean "taste" in the sense that you have the same opinions as New York Times critics. I mean that when you watch a movie or read a book that you enjoy, try to understand what parts of it you enjoyed, what parts of it you didn't enjoy, and how you would change it to make it better. This doesn't just apply to literature. In developing your artistic taste, you could try to understand exactly what part of an awesome painting evokes feeling in you.

After I started thinking this way, I came up with a story that might not appeal to most people but sure as hell felt moving to me. I realized that the story could be told better in a visual format instead of in prose, so I started practicing art again. I'm a perfectionist who hated drawing when I studied art in school, but now that I have this idea in my head I feel very little inhibition in practicing. Instead of wondering how to make my story sell better or second guessing every mark I make, I move forward because if I hesitate I feel like I'm letting down the characters in the story I want to be told.

Most good rules always have an exception, Malazan[0] is a fun set of exceptions to these.

If you're not familiar, Malazan is a series of high fantasy novels and they're quite good. Well, they're excellent apart from the first book which is usually what kills the series for people. Just start on the second book if you're interested in trying out the series.

Malazan started as a setting from some campaigns and grew from there, so this feels pretty appropriate to bring up.

- It has an absurd number of characters. On your first read you will lose track of who Widdershins is. Hell, between books you'll probably forget who Bottle is. This is a listed of named characters[1].

- A bunch of events that happen in earlier books don't make sense at that point. The setting slowly unveils its magic system and world between each books. By the tenth book, most things that were confusing are justified.

- Character motivation is usually upfront except for a few characters that define the majority of the plot's direction. Those characters are complete blackboxes. Some of those are viewpoint characters that become non-viewpoint characters.

- Jokes are sometimes appropriate in even the worst situations because its appropriate to that set of characters.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Malazan_Book_of_the_Fa...

> Just start on the second book if you're interested in trying out the series.

Can you keep going from two onward or do you have to go back at some point?

Gardens of the moon is sort of required for Memories of Ice. A lot of the characters pivotal in Memories of Ice are introduced in the Gardens of the Moon.

If Malazan book of the fallen is for you, you'll know after reading book 2.

Although, in all honesty: I wouldn't start with Deadhouse Gates. Although it contains one of the best plotlines in the series, it also contains the worst character, and she drags stuff down a lot. Were it not for having read through the first book, I would've probably stopped because of her.

The first book has context that I'd say is required to fully enjoy the third book. So, second->first->third->...

Most the downside of the first book is the quality of the writing; it was written before author really nailed the formula. If you like the second book, the first book will be fine because you get fed more nuggets of information about the broader setting.

If you're planning to write a RPG as a story, Microscope[0] is very well designed for this. I've been playing it recently across multiple groups, and it shines for the "big-picture" usecase. It is often used as a "bootstrap-your-actual-RPG-campaign" scenario builder. You play with your group for a few sessions, and you end up with a world complete with plothooks, campaigns, motivations, challenges etc.

The expansion set, Microscope Explorer[1], optimizes the rules a little bit for World-building, but that's entirely optional - You can easily go miles with just the standard rules ("Just Play Normally" is part of the expansion here).

Also, random related trivia: Expanse[2], the famous book series that was adapted into the (now) Amazon-run TV series is a RPG game written down. This explains a lot of character actions that are very much player/character driven, and not plot driven.

[0]: http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/

[1]: http://www.lamemage.com/microscope-explorer/

[2]: https://www.cbr.com/the-expanse-series-rpg/

Pretty much all of my life I have been trying to write, even managed to publish some shorter works and, ironically, ultimately ending up in a 25-years long software engineering career due to writing (it's a long story). I've also done plenty of roleplaying, across a number of different systems (including several of my own).

But the main roadblock in my writing has always been my problem to find a story. I can build worlds and invent interesting characters to no end, and describe cool scenes and situations -- but any attempt to have some kind of a coherent story has always ended up looking like, at best, a second-class rip off of one or another of my favourites works of fiction... :(

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