Tales of the New Slayers

So I’m a fan of Joss Whedon’s writing, as you already may have guessed, first falling in love with “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” late in its run.  Before seeing it I figured the same as a lot of people, that it was cheesy campy tv.  But then my elder brother, Frank, raved about the sixth season musical episode, titled “Once More With Feeling.”  I sang in High School and a bit at university, and did some musical theatre, so I know how hard it can be, so the idea that a writer for television shot a musical episode and used the original cast’s voices captured my interest.  I watched it when it aired again, and the depth of the characters blew me away.  The wife and I started watching regularly and we were hooked.

Being a geekazoid from early childhood I’ve had a long-standing love of role-playing games, so when Eden Studios released their game based on the Buffyverse, I checked it out.  The rules were some of the best I’d ever seen (and I’ve seen quite a many) and the writing was the best.  I read the rulebook cover to cover in a couple of days.  As you might imagine, rulebooks not generally the most engrossing reading.

Now, cue the flashback music again.  A couple of years ago, TiVo grabbed an excellent Frontline documentary titled “The Merchants of Cool,” and it started my wheels spinning about how kids are preyed upon by marketers, the basic gist being that kids are twisted into believing that they’re rebelling by balding forty year old suits who bilk them for their money.  That’s not horrible on the surface, but dive into the muck of your memories.  Maybe you went to school somewhere like I did, where fashion largely determined who spoke to whom, or if they could speak to you at all.  If your memories are anything like mine, even if you only observed the spectacle, you might agree with Joss Whedon when he says that, High School is a special kind of Hell.  

So with the Buffy RPG in my hands and that Frontline documentary in my head I got to writing, and the result was my little semi-rural town of Farmingham, NH, a somewhat small town close to New Hampshire’s Lakes Region.  Per the conventions of horror fiction, Farmingham was about to become a victim of monsters — not the slobbery kind, but the balding forty year old type who don’t care whether it’s morally acceptable to shape the preferences of children for profit.  

After about twelve hours of writing, I had a piece of Interactive Fiction titled “The Consumer” in four acts, beginning with a teaser and ending with a coda, all very proper and script-like, except the bulk of the document wasn’t.  In Interactive Fiction, you the writer don’t control the characters; the players do.  I created seven characters, including their backgrounds, but what they would say and what actions they would attempt rest with the people who will play them.  For the writer of Interactive Fiction, that translates into carefully controlling the environment, since that’s something you do have control over, and lots of planning.  Much of the work in writing Interactive Fiction involves imagining every possible permutation of player action, and planning for it.  

Let’s take a simple example.  Say the plot you’ve constructed involves the player characters foiling a bank robbery.  You create two bumbling would be bank robbers and you begin the scene with the Cast having lunch at a restaurant across the street from the bank.  The character who gets the tab learns that the credit card machine is down and she’s run out of cash, so you inform the player controlling her that unless she wants to start washing dishes she’d better get across the street and get some bills from the ATM at the bank.  

When she walks in to get her cash, she’ll be ordered to hit the floor by the robbers and the rest of the cast will be drawn into the crisis.  Easy as lying.  Until your player says, “That’s ok.  She wasn’t planning on paying anyway.”  What?!  As your eyes go wide with confoundeditis, she continues, “Yeah, the service here sucks, and I ordered my barbeque burger medium rare and I got it well done.  So screw ‘em!  Now I have to be inconvenienced during my lunch hour because they’re having technical difficulties?  I’m complaining to the manager and I’m not paying!”  

Isn’t this a pretty pickle?  The lesson here is not to count on your players to do anything.  Instead, have contingencies ready in case they don’t do what you expect.  If they don’t go into the bank, can you fill the same plot need by having the robbery come to them?  In the case that, for whatever reason, the cast doesn’t enter the bank you can decide that the robbers decide the bank is too big a target, so they chose to rob the patrons of the restaurant instead.  If you really need the action to take place in the bank, don’t start the scene in the restaurant.  Start it in the bank with the characters there.  Once you call “action” and the cameras are rolling you lose control, but before hand

Of course, you didn’t describe the service or the food, so as the Director you could cry foul, but that would be squashing your player’s creativity.  You’re not the only author here, remember?  You left a void when it came to the details of the restaurant, and nature abhors a vacuum, so your player filled it, and that’s great.  Go with it.  You now know more about that restaurant that you did before, and since it’s got some character of its own, it can become a fixture in the environment, a location you can return to.

Try to anticipate any wrench the players might toss into the works, and unless there’s no other way around it, roll with your player’s creativity.  Your episodes will run smoothly and your players will enrich your setting.