One of the first things I learned while putting this together is that it's a very different kind of writing than I'm used to. In writing fiction, I am the absolute god and creator of this world. I can determine every single little nuance, script every line of dialogue and clever exchange, anticipate every action. But tabletop gaming is collaborative storytelling, which means setting up a framework and giving the players room to maneuver. Despite that, I think I took away some important lessons that can carry over into my individual writing as well.
A premise only gets you part of the way there.
I went into this game with an awesome premise already in hand: a maze of a hotel filled with bad dreams. Who wouldn't want to explore that? And the players loved that part. But getting to it? Not so much. I'll admit that I struggled with the setup, and it came across even less successfully than I'd hoped. Now, they stuck with me because they're my friends and it was my night to run, and because it was my first time doing so and they were willing to cut me some slack. Readers don't owe you that much. If you're not going to engage them right from the get-go, it doesn't matter how much cool stuff lies ahead. Those first chapters are critical.Characters are people too.
I thought I'd done a decent job in getting everyone to the hotel, and I'd established that this occult researcher was the main draw. But I hadn't established that the story depended on getting everyone into the room where she was speaking. One player, perfectly in character, figured that he could just wait in the bar while the guy he was tailing went to the talk. Another, also perfectly in character, said that he planned to wander in late, since he was only interested in killing time and not really in the topic."Eep," said I internally, and then aloud, said, "Umm, no, that's not really going to work."
Again, they went with it, but that was definitely railroading, and that's just not good storytelling. Characters should never be there just because you say they need to be, because there's not a story otherwise. Obviously that's the meta reason, but they need to have their own reasons to go along with what you need them to do. This is especially bad in gaming, because railroading makes the players feel like they don't have any say in what's going on and that their actions are meaningless, which makes them less engaged in the game. But readers of your unilateral story are going to catch on to those little glitches as well, and it pulls them out. "Why would the hero investigate that murder himself, instead of letting the police handle it?" "Why did the love interest suddenly go all clingy and jealous?" "Why did the villain pop out of the room like that?" You have to be able to address those questions satisfactorily, or your readers will disconnect.
Too many great ideas, not enough room in the story.
As we were setting up the very beginning of the game, I was talking with my husband rather cagily about his character, because he'd set himself up a secret agent backstory that he wasn't sharing with the rest of the group. One of the players, himself an experienced GM, half-jokingly theorized that my husband was going to end up being the monster.I swore. Loudly.
Why? Because that's brilliant, and I never thought of it. It would be a great twist as a player, to have one of your friends and teammates turn and start openly working against you, pitting you against each other. (Well, as long as your group doesn't hold grudges about what happens in-game.) And if you're going to collaborate like that, a spouse is the natural person to do it with.
Not gonna lie, I gave serious thought to working that in. But I let it go. Setting up the scenario had already been quite a challenge for me, and I couldn't really flip everything on the fly to incorporate a major new element. Besides, it wouldn't have been a surprise anymore.
The thing that made setting up the scenario difficult in the first place was that there were too many damn ideas. In addition to the mechanic of finding your particular nightmare rendering you unable to use the map that lead back home, I contemplated having that also start turning the character into a monster. Interesting idea, but couldn't work out the logistics, so scrapped it. I rolled up and discarded almost a dozen NPCs, all bringing different angles to the story. The daunting part of it wasn't a lack of ideas, but an overabundance and a lack of a clear through-line.
Along the same lines, I came up with loads of nightmares for them to face. Spent a lot of time reading a lot of creepy shit for inspiration. But there wasn't time to get them all in, either from a gameplay perspective (we had to wrap early because the husband and I had to work early today) or from a story perspective (there are only so many doors you can open before everyone just wants you to get on with it). With such a premise, there were pretty much infinite possibilities for what could go into the rooms. But stories aren't infinite. You have to pick and choose, and put it together in a way that makes sense.
Be prepared to be outsmarted.
The thing about running a game for an experienced group is that even when they're not openly metagaming (that is, having their characters act on knowledge that the character wouldn't have), the characters are still dangerously genre savvy. It was a little disheartening when the characters pretty much immediately figured out that they'd been pulled out of their hotel and into a "creepy alien" one. And when the hallways started moving around on them and one of them pulled out some dental floss to tie to the door and create a trail?That was a "GM quietly crapping her pants while trying to look cool" moment.
But you have to be prepared for those. In gaming especially, but also as a writer. Sometimes one of your beta readers (if you're lucky) or post-publication readers (if you're not) will point out a particularly clever solution to a problem that never even occurred to you. Or sometimes, in the heat of writing, your characters will suggest it themselves. I once had worked out a fight scene so that a character used the couch as cover to fight off some intruders, then pushed the couch down the stairs when he had to fall back. In actually writing it, he skipped straight to pushing it down the stairs to hinder them from getting in at all. It made more sense to do it his way, but I had to rethink how the fight would proceed.
It's not a bad thing to be outsmarted. You just have to be prepared to answer for it, and to incorporate it when it comes up. So with the dental floss thing, I worked it out that it always ended up behind her, even when she tried to follow it back. A more experienced GM might have let it work and run with it, but I tried at least to let her explore the option, even though I wasn't prepared to work that into the story.
Turn up the heat.
As part of the scenario, I included a roving pack of ghouls as sheepdogs of sorts, able to herd the characters along and get them moving again if they sat on their haunches for too long. (Chandler's Law is "When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." The Cthulhu corrollary replaces the gun in the hand with loads of teeth and claws.) It's a good element to have, but the critique I got at the end was that I didn't use it effectively enough. I was focusing more on my cool and creepy rooms, and the players felt that the attacks needed to be more frequent and more focused to keep momentum up. Having them pop up randomly a couple of times didn't work.In planning this, I talked a big game about how I hoped to end up with the characters mostly insane or dead, but when it came down to the wire, I pussed out. I didn't force as many Sanity rolls as I could have done. I let some of them avoid going into the rooms instead of using the tools at my disposal (the NPCs, the monsters, the shifting layout) to drive them inside. I didn't exact nearly as much punishment as I could have done for failed rolls. I didn't do enough to separate them or turn them against each other.
In the end, I was just too damn nice, and you can't be nice to your characters. You have to pull out all the stops, and when you think you might be just a little too cruel, turn the screws again. The harder the challenge, the greater the satisfaction for overcoming it. It's not nearly as memorable to breeze through a game as it is to have it viciously beat you down time and again until you emerge victorious. It's the same even for a reader who isn't controlling the character themselves; they're still living vicariously through the suffering and the triumph. Give them a win to savor.
They're not going to pick up on everything.
Once I'd worked out the basic goal of the game, I was pretty pleased with myself. It's a sadistic catch-22: You have to explore the rooms to find the map to get back home, but if you go into the wrong room, you can't read the map anymore.And none of them put it together. It took them a while to work out the way that the map related to what was in the rooms, because I had to balance giving them enough information to connect the dots without solving the puzzle for them. But still, none of them commented on what I thought was one of the best parts of the premise.
It sucks. But it happens. You just have to give them the pieces and let them have their own take on it, rather than take their hand and say, "No, look! See how brilliant I am!"
