RPG-based fiction

[naomikritzer]

ukelele asked in response to my last post:

I'm curious -- "RPG-inspired fantasy tends to be written inside kind of a mental box. A lot of the stuff in that box doesn't really make sense -- the D&D worlds don't hold up that well on close inspection." -- care to elaborate?

My reply got long enough that I decided to make it a new post.

There are a lot of issues that come up when someone writes fiction based on RPG campaigns.

First, even if you're using a really well-designed, well-thought-out world, what makes for a good playing experience rarely translates well to fiction. Just to throw out one example: in RPGs, you usually have a pretty large group of people. (Not always, but often.) Stories usually have to focus in fairly tightly or readers just can't keep track. The game I participated in that would translate best to fantasy fiction was GM'ed by probably_lost from 1995 through 1997. There were bits and pieces that really worked as narrative, but one thing that would have had to change, were Curtis to want to turn it into a novel, was the number of characters. There were six or seven of us, IIRC, all tromping around together. It was a great group and the perfect size for an RPG (at least for one Curtis was GM'ing) -- we had complimentary attributes, and conflicting attributes. But even in a novel, you don't want seven major characters who are all on stage at the same time.

Second, the "formula" that the most satisfying stories are usually built around, IMO, is character change. Part of why Curtis's game would work as narrative fiction was that several characters (including the one I was playing) went through profound changes. This is relatively rare in RPGs, and even more rare in an RPG that includes an alignment system, which tends to encourage people not to change, at least not in any fundamental way. (As a side note, this is part of why Deep Space Nine was far and away my favorite of the Star Trek franchise: characters changed, and changed in important ways, and their relationships shifted accordingly. *nostalgic sigh*. That was such a great show.) This is not always true, but serious character change can sometimes make a character unplayable in the game that the player is really enjoying.

Third, a hell of a lot of the worlds you get out of a box (especially, just to name names, the worlds you get with a D&D or AD&D based system) are not thought out particularly well. Think about the economic system and the way gold gets thrown around. Also, Orson Scott Card notes in his book on writing SF/F that fantasy works best when magic has a price -- because otherwise, mages become insanely powerful and there's no real check on that, and no real acknowledgement that absolute power really does tend to corrupt absolutely (that's apparently solved by the alignment system, in which absolute power corrupts absolutely if you're Chaotic-Evil to begin with, but it's really no problem at all if you're Chaotic-Good.) Again, this structure works well for playing a game; not so well for writing fantasy.

The whole concept of the assassin's guild is very common in RPGs, and yet makes very little sense when you stop to think about it. Killing people is illegal pretty much everywhere. Certainly, historically there have been (and continue to be) people who specialize in individual murder, but most tend to be part of larger organizations (the CIA, say, or the KGB, or the Mossad; or the Mafia or Yakuza; or the IRA, or Hamas, or the French Resistance...) that is dedicated to some larger goal. I am not 100% certain that a real assassin's guild has never existed anywhere, but I find the idea really questionable.

And this character is so obviously an AD&D assassin, complete with all the thief-class skills that a real contract killer isn't going to need but lacking in the social engineering skills that they would need. (And incidentally, I worked for a while at a business -- an ice factory in Madison -- that hired a lot of ex-convicts. One of my coworkers there was a former fence. He'd received an entire truckload of little cans of motor oil, so clearly this was not a sideline for him but something he did quite regularly. And you know, Tom was a great guy. Really, really likeable with kick-ass people skills. Criminal businesses are still businesses, and reward many of the same skills that other businesses do.)

(This is a major tangent, but years back I heard this absolutely fascinating piece on NPR where they interviewed a drug dealer. She did home delivery of marijuana for a major criminal organization, in NYC. She had health insurance benefits and sick days. If she got busted, she had been trained, during her orientation, to immediately call the on-retainer corporate lawyer; however, she wasn't particularly worried, as she was doing home delivery, not street sales, and Giuliani had made it pretty clear that he wanted it off the streets, period. Oh, AND, they had little customer loyalty punch-cards, just like a coffee house: buy 10, and your next is free. I was just in awe of how efficient this all was. The woman was very cheerful and upbeat; she said they were great employers and this was a very good job.)

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, getting back to the RPG issue.

It's also very noticeable, reading this now, that I knew nothing about the weapons in the story. If you're being sent out to commit murder and will be murdered yourself for failure, a crossbow is a really stupid choice of weapon, just as a handgun would be unless you're firing at point-blank range; even if you're damn good, they're just not going to be particularly accurate. Snipers are a modern phenomenon. This is a chronic problem with RPGs. Fights need to last a while to be fun, so they tend not to work the way a real fight does. (And don't even get me started on hit points. I had a D&D character once who got stabbed, while not wearing armor, by about 23 people at the same time, and survived. Not only that, if the DM hadn't remembered the 23rd person, and she'd been stabbed only by 22 people, she still would have been standing, conscious, and able to act on her next turn.)

Anyway, one of the hazards of playing a lot of RPGs is that it can get you into a certain lazy mindset. (It clearly did for me.) As a player, I didn't question the existence of an assassin's guild, so as a writer I also didn't. Among other things, this meant that I didn't stop to think about what I could come up with that would be better. If I wanted a story about a girl who was trained from age four to be a cold-blooded killer, she could have been recruited and trained by the Queen's intelligence service, or by the intelligence service of a rival power. She could be a member of a larger criminal organization, and she could work as a killer for them. She could be a member of a terrorist group -- religious, or political. There are all sorts of possibilities that are actually interesting, but I didn't explore them because I was thinking inside the box. The box that comes from TSR with a big red dragon on the front. That box. And that's what I was talking about.

Comments

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Well! I had stereotyped ideas of what you might have meant by that statement, but your ideas are much more interesting :). Thanks!

[peacockharpy.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd had something like this at hand the first time I was faced with critiquing someone's RPG-turned-bloated fantasy epic. You explain it so well, and not being a gamer myself, I didn't have the right vocabulary to explain to this guy exactly why there was a problem.

(Not that the writer in question wanted to hear it anyway... he was rather young and rather convinced of his own brilliance. But then, so was I when I was his age.)

[nonnihil.livejournal.com]

I am not 100% certain that a real assassin's guild has never existed anywhere, but I find the idea really questionable.

The only well-documented example I know of is the "Murder, Inc." organization of the '30s-'50s. That was basically a contracting/outsourcing operation -- various organized-crime syndicates mutually outsourced the killing of police informants to each other to make sure that the killer would never be someone known to the victim or the local police, and that practice become so widespread that its organizers made it a business of its own. While it was not as "legal" as many fantasy assassins' guilds, it existed in a fairly stable legal state: Illegal, but sufficiently hard to prove or do anything about that it even survived after books and movies were made about it that even used the real names of its leaders and members and real details of their crimes.

Like the drug-runner you mentioned (and in contrast to the rather less well-run drug gang documented in Levitt and Venkatesh's brilliant paper on drug gang economics (http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittVenkateshAnEconomicAnalysis2000.pdf)), they provided competitive salaries (not just per-killing stipends), pensions, insurance benefits, and first-rate company lawyers. Perhaps half of their members were not killers but support staff -- drivers, lawyers, hotel operators, etc. -- and never killed anyone. Their actual killers had to make up for that, killing perhaps dozens of people apiece (or far more, if you believe their brags from the witness stand). They survived by meticulous planning of alternative methods and escape routes, killing in public and accessible places, working in teams whenever possible, and by regularly breaking contracts if they didn't like the odds or were bribed. In short, utterly banal and the opposite of the fictional assassin. More Dilbert than D&D.

They kept it up, living in public, killing in public, for 27 years. It was the expansion of the FBI and rapid communication between cities that did them in: Killers were mostly caught in the cities they fled to, not in the cities they killed in. So it's not totally unreasonable that a fantasy world with political divisions and limited communications might have a moderately stable and public professional assassination business. It just wouldn't be structured in nearly the way that fantasy insists on structuring such things.

[naomikritzer]

Oooooooh, this is fascinating. I have to say, it does not surprise me at all that such an organization would exist in the modern world, for precisely the legal reason you outline -- a lack of connection between killer and victim that makes the crimes much more difficult to solve. It also makes perfect sense to me that most of the people who worked there were support staff (that's true at almost any big organization) and that it would be a remarkably mundane place to work in many ways.

If I ever do write about an assassin's guild, I will be sure to look this group up.

[maggiedr.livejournal.com]

Very interesting post, and helpful to me. My major work is a novel series based on a universe created as a collaboration. The universe is intended to eventually be a shared one but my novel storylines are my own creation. In some respects, it has been helpful that my only RPG experience is a couple of online games. But I see from reading your essay that there are specific pitfalls that might make the stories "feel" RPGish. Which I do want to avoid.

Back to your story. I didn't catch the RPG effect because I haven't experienced that type of gaming. I did see the cliches that are common to fantasy fiction, including the assassin's guild. What was interesting to me was that there a germ of an interesting idea that could be explored further. Why did were the twins separated? Why were assassins contracted to kill the priestess? Sure, the priestess gave an answer, but didn't really answer the question. I could see the story progressing with the Assassin trying to come to terms with what she'd done, as well as discover her true past.

After my experience at Odyssey workshop, I believe any story can be salvaged, although I don't mean to imply that you should. (I saw stories worse than that there.) I still feel a bit guilty over one of my first crits, because I assumed that the writer was a gamer and her story felt very RPGish to me. I even wrote "The elf has +dex?" near a fight scene. Turned out the writer knew nothing about RPGs, nor had a clue about how common elves are in fantasy gaming and fiction.

I guess the lesson here is that we all need to be familiar with the genres we are working in, to avoid cliches and predictable tropes.

[naomikritzer]

That is an excellent point. I have at times seen problems in stories that weren't the real problem -- I have thought some stories were fanfic with filed-off serial numbers, for instance. It's kind of interesting the things that can call up the wrong mental file in our readers.

My favorite example of this: there was an (excellent!) story critiqued at a workshop I ran last year that included a young girl who gets to travel through space. The character's name was Dora. One of the people in the workshop said, "You know, I know this has NOTHING to do with the TV character, but you CANNOT have an explorer character named Dora. You just can't." The writer sighed and said, "I named her after my grandmother." We all agreed that this was unfair, but thanks to Dora the Explorer, she just couldn't do it. (If you don't know who Dora is, ask a four-year-old. She's as ubiquitous as Barney or Elmo these days. Probably more so.)