Rehab for Roleplayers - Part 4

Welcome to Rehab for Roleplayers, a series of articles aimed at helping roleplayers more successfully make the transition into writing fiction.


Part 4 - The Epic Adventures of Level 9 Druid


Have you ever attempted to explain RP, particularly your own RP, to somebody who isn't involved in it? Most of you would have experienced something like my last conversation of the sort:

PERSON: So, what's this RP thingy about, anyway?

YOU: Well, you see, I play a character who's a 326-year old vampire, only she's not one anymore, because of… well, long story, but anyway, she's in love with this pirate who's also a werewolf, because he was dying, and so my character had him turned into one to save his life, because, you know, he didn't want to be a vampire, and of course she never told him, and we've played this for 5 RL years now, it's the greatest love story ever, and they're outlaws, and run about killing and plundering, and…

PERSON: *having tuned out upon hearing the word 'vampire'* Is this a thing like, where you dress up in costumes and have sex?

Roleplay is really hard to explain. Mainly because, in the vast majority of cases, RP is a "you had to be there" experience.

People who were not there just will not get how exciting and detailed and full of feeling and clever wordplay it was. Nor will they understand why you're so proud of your Level 9 Druid having pwned a Level 17 Mage, and the incredible amount effort and creativity you put into stalking him through the City of Fungal Dread for two whole months, fighting lizardmen and were-whargs all the way, and a slew of other dangers for six months before that, just so you could have this epic battle which then led to… led to…….

Sorry. Where was I? Oh, yes:

If you're a habitual roleplayer, you will at some point have been handed a transcript of somebody else's long-ass RP, and had to pretend it didn't bore you to the point of self-deletion. Hard, wasn't it?

I think what makes telling RP stories to other people difficult (particularly off-game, non-roleplaying people) is that an RP story is intimately woven into the fabric of the RP 'world' in which it's based.

So Level 9 Druid's latest campaign may have wowed the leggings off all your RP buddies, but won't be quite so thrilling to somebody who wasn't there, and is not aware of just how hard that was to pull off, or that nobody's ever reached the Unreachable Mountain before, because of that 6000-year old curse which you lifted with the Spell of Amazing Footwork, which can only be gained in the Dungeon of Massive Peril, which is a whole 'nother story.

The off-game reader (let's call him OGR, for short) wasn't there for the 2000 or so pages worth of prior RP, and is not familiar with the game's 10-year-old, overwhelmingly intricate historical canon and lore. The OGR is not intimately involved with the story, and experiences barriers to feeling so,  therefore doesn't have reason to care as much as you do about the characters and their struggles.

But this doesn't really matter in RP, because RP is primarily concerned with communicating a character's actions to roleplayers who are present at the time of play.

It might be inflicted on the OGR afterward, but it wasn't written with them in mind.

Not only that, but Level 9 Druid himself was most likely pulled out of his creator's nethers at sign-up and, as Level Noob Druid, probably had a vague and sketchy background designed to fit in with a communally shared game-world, or none at all, and his story was created during play wholly in and for that context.

Even if his player created a huge and complex history, it's only background to justify who he is and how he fits in with the game.

So far we have several issues which might make the translation of RP logs into fiction difficult:

1) A shared, and therefore impossibly intricate background of game lore (which is also usually copyright to the game owner).

2) A character tailored to fit in with an already-existing world and a huge amount   of prior RP which justifies his present actions.

3)  No set plot to begin with, characters vanishing halfway through who had to be written out, others showing up halfway through who had to be written in, the Level 2 Barbarian who tagged along and insisted on being the hero, what a wanker, and the blasted mods changing the rule about Spells of Amazing Footwork during play, so a whole section had to be retconned (may their codpieces itch eternally).

Also, as RP is usually structured by each player taking turns at posting and thereby influencing the development of a particular story arc, there will be various styles of writing involved, and the majority of posts will be written from each of the character's own point of view, in turn. So:

4) The logs will be highly inconsistent in style.

And let's not forget:

5) RP tends to be incredibly boring to 99% of off-game readers.


- So how can we to turn "The Epic Adventures of Level 9 Druid" into a novel, then?


I'm glad you asked. Let us consider the Five P's:

1: Plot

You'll need to make some definitive decisions, like:

a) Where in Level 9 Druid's story your novel will start.

- Try to start it somewhere exciting, and not at his birth in the Doomed Village of Childhood Hardship. Your character's bio sheet will probably not make for an engaging Chapter One. You don't need a massive lead-up of history to introduce your main character. Throw your reader into some kind of present action, right from the get-go.

b) How the story will end.

- Decide this before you start writing. I've already discussed why elsewhere, but to recap: if you don't have an outcome to write towards, you're likely to end up dithering around with no real purpose, wasting a lot of time. Decide on an ending, and stick to it. Make it an ending which leaves your reader excited about the story and satisfied with its conclusion, and make sure loose ends are tied up in or by the final chapter.

c) How the story will unfold.

- Will you make it a linear plot, which carries the story from point A to point Z, without a lot of variation from that timeline? Or skip to flashback scenes every third chapter? Or mix up the narrative a bit, so it's actually two or three stories running at the same time, but which all tie in together?

- Every good story (apart from arty-farty French novels, post-modernist feminist manifestos and the like) needs one major conflict to drive it, and several smaller ones to keep readers reading. Let your story have peaks and troughs, introduce your conflicts one by one, or complicate the major conflict over time, and build toward some kind of resolution, to keep things interesting.


2: Pacing

Remember, you have a whole novel in which to reveal details of Level 9 Druid's life and character, as well as details of the plot. Mystery turns pages. If you explain everything in great clumps of text during Chapters 1-4, your reader will have no reason (or desire) to read Chapter 5.  

- Also, you don't need to tell the whole of his life story in the scope of  one book. You may find it less daunting to deal with one period in his life, and the major conflict he faces within that period rather than taking on the task of a multi-generational saga for your first book.

One of the most common problems for roleplayers is feeling overwhelmed. I mean, some of these characters have been running for years, and there's just SO much that's happened. Choose a small slice of that story, something which had twists and turns, and which is not reliant on a pile of game history for its existence or understanding of what's going on. Maybe you'll need to give it a new ending. You do NOT have to remain faithful to the original RP, it's and probably best you don't, unless it had a wowser of a conclusion.


3: Place

It's probably best to avoid using the original gameworld if it's not entirely of your own construction because a) the canon is likely huge, complex and unwieldy to explain, and/or b) the names and details of the world are copyright to the game's creator.

Extricating Level 9 Druid from the world for which he was specifically designed can be really hard. He might not even make much sense, in his present form, outside of that environment. Be prepared to make the changes necessary to keeping the story from being bogged down in the canon of the original RP, even if it means the end product is something very, very different.

It might be very worthwhile to give him a different setting altogether. Think about your character's personality and habits. Might he suit the present real world,  1940's Chicago, or the Wild West? What about making him Level 9 Biomechanic – In Space! Or Nonus Druidus, from Ancient Rome? You could put him anywhere, if you're translating him from RP character to fictional character.

If you cannot possibly bear to change a single detail of your character or his story, or your character depends too greatly on other people's RP contributions to make sense without them, then consider leaving him to RP, and creating a whole new, fresh, shiny character for the purpose of writing fiction.


4: Purpose

a) Decide who you're writing for.

- Teens? Adults? Males? Females? A mix? What mix? A book written for teens shouldn't contain hardcore cussing, graphic gore or explicit sex. No editor in their right minds will allow that book to be marketed to teens. A book written for adults ought to explore, as the story goes along, issues that are more complex than whether Level 9 Druid gets to kill all the baddies, marry Level 5 Dryad and live happily ever after. If you are a teen, or not far from it, it may pay to write for teens. If you're an adult writing for teens, don't be condescending; you probably hated that as a kid, and so will the kids reading your book.

- And if you set your book in a war zone, with lots of artillery fire and descriptions of machinery and hand-to-hand combat, you can assume that the majority of women will find it dull going.

- Likewise, if you've focussed on Level 9 Druid's love life, and made him a sensitive, passionate guy who may or may not sparkle in sunlight, don't expect your demographic to consist of adult men.

b) Decide what genre you wish to write.

- Just as RP is not limited to bog-standard fantasy, with elves and dwarves and dragons and the like, neither are novels limited to a single genre. Western, Romance, Sci-Fi, Noir, Horror, Historical, Action-Adventure (military, spy, war), Crime, Mystery… Is there a different genre into which your character might neatly fit?


5: Point of View

- Will you tell the story in the first person (I am Level 9 Druid, and this is my story.) or third person (Level 9 Druid scowled at Level 17 Mage. "I'm going to pwn you now," he said, waving his staff at his enemy.) Second person (You look in the mirror and smile. You're one hell of a Druid, you think, remembering the day you pwned that uppity Mage.) is hard to pull off, especially in a novel, and even moreso in a first novel. Avoid it, for now.

- Is it in present tense or past tense? A lot of RP is written in present tense (Level 9 Druid grins wickedly as he casts a Lesser Spell of Undressing on Level 5 Dryad) while the majority of novels are written in past tense.

- Who's your Narrator? Is it Level 9 Druid himself? Another character, reminiscing about their epic journey to the Unreachable Mountain? Or is there an omniscient, invisible being telling the tale (most often used)?


I do not intend this article to be a guideline for novel-writing, but rather an exercise in looking at RP differently, for the sake of making it into fiction. Of course, there's an internet full of resources out there which will more fully and adequately explain any and all of the above points— do please use them. Read a lot of different ones; everybody has their own tips and tricks, and so it's very worth surfing around.


In Part 5 I'll be discussing RP character clichés, and various problematic character types.