A Little Randomness Into the System

For the first time in a long time, I’m sitting down at the gaming table not as a GM, but as a player. Courtesy of my SoCal Gaming Club, the Dead Gamer’s Society, I’ll be enjoying a short run game of Mage: The Awakening (2nd Ed for those of you keeping track at home).

I created a character for the game recently, roughly around the same time I was developing and outlining my current feature film project. And the process of creating the character helped feed into my creative juices for development.

And I owe it all to a little randomness.

PLACEHOLDER

Hi all!

My laptop is currently in the shop, and the iPad version of WordPress is giving my some very weird formatting issues. Rather than spend an hour I could be spending writing trying to fix it, I’ve elected to wait until my laptop is out of the shop to post this week’s column.

So look towards the end of this week, where you can learn about the importance of a little chaos in the system.

Final Fantasy XV: A Dissection, Pt. 2

Hey there.  Go ahead and park your flying sports car or tie down your Chocobos.  I’m just prepping dinner.

Jesus this looks good.  Like, I’m a good cook and I don’t make anything that good.

Last week we dived into Final Fantasy XV, with a focus on what worked in the most recent entry in the long-running franchise.  The goal, as it always is here, was to search for things we could learn from it.

What did it do right, and how can we apply that to our own work?

But now we need to the other thing.  The part where we try to understand where things went off the rails so we can avoid doing it ourselves.

Final Fantasy XV: A Dissection

Around this time last year, I had received Final Fantasy XV for Christmas and was blazing through it. As a long time fan of the Final Fantasy series — the games that arguably got me into storytelling — I was excited to see what the latest installment held.

This past week I decided it was time to bite the bullet, admit I wasn’t going to finish the game, and put it up for resale.

To be clear — FFXV is not a bad game.  Far from it — it does some things amazingly well. And other things it does not.

This is, I suppose, something of a retrospective or a dissection.  Final Fantasy XV. What went wrong.

But, maybe more importantly, what went right.

5 Stories for 2018

2017 was not an easy year to be a storyteller. It was not an easy year for anyone, really. But to focus in on my area of expertise, it was a hard year to be a storyteller because it was a hard year to tell stories.

 

So I want to start this year off with five stories for 2018.  Five counter-narratives that seem especially relevant as we enter into the new year.

The Promise of Cold Opens

Hi all.  It’s been a while, I know.  Forgive me, I was on an extended contract job that kept me busy as the proverbial bee for a few months.

But I have returned, and it’s high past time that we started talking about storytelling once again.

Now, pour out a cold one, and don’t tell me no lies. Today’s topic? Cold opens and promises.

Screwing Up

One of the great advantages of gaming is that it allows you to spectacularly, gloriously, cock-up.

In your creative career, you are going to have some bad ideas. That’s fine. Good, even! Everyone has bad idea. Look at your heroes. Those paragons of story who inspired you when you’re at your lowest.

They had some truly horrendous idea. Indiana Jones in the fridge ideas.

 

In case you didn’t see Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I think the picture speaks for itself.

 

Forget the Plan

GM’s love to use their notebooks as perpetration props. “In these pages, I hold the Adventure of Ages.” Maps, NPC stats, and clues. These are all well and good. A session without some idea of where it’s going is an aimless, disconnected thing, made up of a band of disjointed brothers and sisters who have no business having lunch with each other, much less saving the world.

But, by the same token, a show without a plan, or a script without an outline is a pathetic thing, a Frankenstein’s monster of plot holes and forgotten story threads.

 

Unless you’re playing Promethean, where being a Frankenstein’s Monster is literally the point

Pacing

Netflix and the advent of bing watching having changed the game on this, but as the MST3K episode “Diabolik” taught us — Pacing. Is. So. Very. Important. If you don’t get the reference, that’s alright — we’ll be talking about the importance of Mystery Science Theater 3000 in due time. Until then, pretend that was funny. I’ll wait for your pretend laugh.

 

You’re going to laugh SO HARD when you see this. So. Hard.

 

The Lone Writer

There’s a myth out there. A ghost of an idea that was never alive. Picture it in your head – the lone writer at their writing machine, picking out quiet words of genius. Do you have the picture? For me, it’s Bogie at his typewriter from “In a Lonely Place”. Hey, I’m a Bogart fan.

Your first clues should have been the love of Scotch and my tendency to dress like it’s some hybrid of today and the 1940’s