When last we conversed, I laid out a few no-no’s to writing about your gaming campaign. Now, I’m going to talk about some of the advantages to using a campaign to explore writing material. Bear in mind that I’m talking about my specific experiences with a very specific group of role players, some with whom I’ve gamed since the early 90s. In short, I run with a long term group that has a great deal of trust and familiarity with each other. We are willing to sacrifice rules for story, points for harmony. My experiences might be the same, or very different than your own. As a consequence, your mileage might vary for some of the things I say.
With that said, for certain values of campaign and certain values of players (ie mine), I find gaming an excellent tool for exploring characterizations.
There are many ways authors explore characters. There are many sheets and rubrics for us to fill out. We have dialogues. We make doodles. We go onto the interest and find pictures who look like our characters. One of the best aspects of writing from role playing is the improvisational factor.
When I create a character, I have some idea how that character may interact with other characters, but I don’t know for certain how this works until I start the story and put the characters in juxtaposition with each other. A good role playing group does this hard work for you. If my friend Lisa has a character, she puts it down on paper, and I have a type or a concept from her. If I support Lisa with a non player character run by me, her game master, she will interact with my character in surprising ways I didn’t expect. We are involved in improvisational theater, and I learn about both characters. Characters are explored in this way through action and dialogue, and the characters come to life in ways that they don’t if I am just hammering them out on the page.
Now, in the end, I may not use the name of Lisa’s character, or her actions. I may base a character on what I’ve seen Lisa do in role play that I think is interesting. To me, this is an interesting, fresh way to get more information about characters. It’s as inspiring as reading, and appeals to my acting nature.
What does Lisa think about this? Well, that’s a good question. Most of the people I know sort of enjoy seeing themselves and their characters in fiction, or seeing material based on their characterizations. However, this is an area in which an author must be careful. If you borrow a character a player has plans for in a publishing capacity, stealing that character can potentially get you into ethical and legal trouble. I would suggest being very upfront about your intent. If you have doubts about whether a player would feel comfortable about you using their characterization, I would change the names, the concepts, or not use the character.
In my case, I’ve written several short stories and novels based on my friend’s characterizations. They are very good actors. Some of them are accomplished at character roles. Others, like the aforementioned Lisa, play a particular type very well. Using a character from a role playing scenario is no different than watching the world and noting actions. You yourself are putting what you see into a unique alchemical mix that makes it your story.
However, as always, remember courtesy if you are inspired by others.
While gaming does characterization very well, setting can be fairly problematic in gaming based fiction. We’ll talk about that in our next installment.
Cath
