{"id":54,"date":"2008-09-09T12:48:01","date_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:48:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gm.thuranni.net\/?p=54"},"modified":"2008-09-09T12:48:01","modified_gmt":"2008-09-09T19:48:01","slug":"link-review-of-quests-theory-and-history-in-games-and-narratives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/?p=54","title":{"rendered":"Link: Review of Quests, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives"},"content":{"rendered":"

Never expected to link to a slashdot review here, but this seems pretty damn relevant: Quests, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Basically this outlines how quests in games have degenerated from being meaningful to just being filler.\u00c2\u00a0 I pretty much agree with everything mentioned in the review and am linking to it so I don’t have to type it up myself later.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

I found myself nodding in agreement with most of what was said.\u00c2\u00a0 Scratch that, I agreed with all of it.\u00c2\u00a0 Quests are supposed to have meaning.\u00c2\u00a0 There should be a reason why they’re part of the story.\u00c2\u00a0 To paraphrase one of their examples, Frodo didn’t have to skin 12 bunnies before he could put on the One Ring.\u00c2\u00a0 And even if he did, Tolkien wouldn’t have mentioned it, because it has no bearing on the story<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Writing is as much about story omission as it is about telling.\u00c2\u00a0 Actually that goes for all art.\u00c2\u00a0 Many moons ago I was interested in going to art school.\u00c2\u00a0 I had a decent amount of talent and could recreate the smallest of details.\u00c2\u00a0 What I couldn’t do was filter out details.\u00c2\u00a0 This made it impossible to draw a good sketch that highlighted only two or three characterizing details.\u00c2\u00a0 I had to draw every last one of them for it to look accurate.\u00c2\u00a0 In the end, all I was doing was creating pictures, not art.<\/p>\n

A story also has extraneous details that can be eliminated.\u00c2\u00a0 A good author will know just how much detail to include to keep the world vivid without drowning the plot in detail.\u00c2\u00a0 And a bad author will write The Wheel of Time.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m sorry, that was mean.\u00c2\u00a0 Robert Jordan received quite a bit of criticism for the inclusion of a few too many details.\u00c2\u00a0 He could have told the same story in half so many pages if he could cut out some of the unimportant bits.<\/p>\n

Video games, especially MMOs are written like Wheel of Time.\u00c2\u00a0 They go over each and every thing your character does in excruciating detail.\u00c2\u00a0 If an RPG is supposed to be a story, does it really need to include your character’s fight with a\u00c2\u00a0 pack of free range chicken?<\/p>\n

But these little quests aren’t just unnecessary, they’re also distracting.\u00c2\u00a0 As soon as you get on the collect 104 chicken beaks quest, you forget about the main story until this irrelevant task is complete.\u00c2\u00a0 Because of how the game is written, the chicken beaks will not come up again.\u00c2\u00a0 Their sole purpose is to be filler.\u00c2\u00a0 If a bad story is one that didn’t trim the fat properly, what does that say of a story with more fat artificially inflated into the story?<\/p>\n

So what does this have to do with GMing?\u00c2\u00a0 Cut the fat.\u00c2\u00a0 Get rid of the stuff that’s irrelevant.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s only diluting your story.\u00c2\u00a0 I don’t do random encounters in my games any more.\u00c2\u00a0 What would I?\u00c2\u00a0 They don’t push the story forward.\u00c2\u00a0 They only distract from it.\u00c2\u00a0 If the players need a fight, there are any number of factions that can attack them.\u00c2\u00a0 But not every fight needs to derive from a story already in the game.\u00c2\u00a0 It does get a little tiresome to have everyone you’ve pissed off sending out assassins.\u00c2\u00a0 Fights can appear random, but integrate them into the story after the fact.\u00c2\u00a0 Use some enemy that’s out of place and then have the players investigate what a mind flayer was doing in the town water supply.\u00c2\u00a0 Fine them for killing owlbears in the king’s private hunting ground.\u00c2\u00a0 Or use random encounters to tell stories with your PCs.\u00c2\u00a0 We recently saw some paladins riding down orcs unprovoked.\u00c2\u00a0 Party members took different sides in the fight.\u00c2\u00a0 Others stood still and watched.\u00c2\u00a0 The fight itself was a one shot deal, but still had meaning.\u00c2\u00a0 It doesn’t matter how you put it there, but each scene in the game needs to mean something in your story.<\/p>\n

Sorry for the rant.\u00c2\u00a0 I really meant to end it after the suggested link.\u00c2\u00a0 Honest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Never expected to link to a slashdot review here, but this seems pretty damn relevant: Quests, Theory, and History in Games and Narratives. Basically this outlines how quests in games have degenerated from being meaningful to just being filler.\u00c2\u00a0 I pretty much agree with everything mentioned in the review and am linking to it so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[29,35,38,89],"class_list":["post-54","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-links-and-articles","tag-meaning","tag-quests","tag-roleplay","tag-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gm.sagotsky.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}