Thread by @melisscaru

So as you probably know from my SUPER SUBTLE HINTS in my viral fighting in ballgowns thread, I'm a larper & a tabletop gamer. For each like this Tweet gets, I'll post a thought about the relationship between roleplaying games & writing and how gaming has shaped my creativity!

One of the biggest differences between running games & writing novels is that gaming is fundamentally collaborative. While in writing it sometimes feels like your characters have minds of their own, in gaming they LITERALLY DO.

You can learn SO MUCH from this.

A good game runner (GM) has to be willing to let the players run with their crazy ideas and weird priorities and take the plot in directions you never expected.

Learning to let my cherished plot ideas go and be flexible as a GM has been a HUGE help to me as a writer.

If you can scrap your game plot to kill the Dark Lord because the PCs decided to redeem him and actually figured out a way to do it, you can scrap 30K words in the second act because you thought of a way to make the stakes much higher and intensify the conflict.

(Oh, hey, I should number these.)

4. One of my most important revelations as a writer came directly from gaming, years ago. I realized I was better at plot as a GM than as a writer, and was trying to figure out why.

It was because as a GM, I was always thinking of player fun.

5. As a GM, I thought all the time about how to spring surprise twists on my players, or make them cry, or give them hair-raising "OH SHIT" moments, or layer in mysteries for them to solve.

As a writer, I wasn't thinking about my readers in the same way. But I needed to.

6. I had been thinking of my stories in a vacuum when I wrote novels. I had to think of the reader experience in the same way I thought of the player experience. It's a vital layer of the story, just as important as the arcs of the characters...the readers have their own arc.

7. Once I realized that THE READERS WERE THE PLAYERS, I could think of them in the same way—rubbing my hands with evil glee as I imagined their reactions to a scene—and I got MUCH better at plot. My direct connection with people experiencing the story in gaming taught me that.

8. Here's a recent gaming-inspired writing realization! In larping, I often have to appear as multiple different characters, and my rule is that you want 3 unique costume things to be recognizable as a specific character. (Can be clothing, accessories, hairstyle, etc.) (1/2)

9. This avoids having characters who are just Blue Shirt Chick or Ponytail Chick, which can be confusing AND bland.

The same guideline can apply to character descriptions! Having a few key memorable details does wonders. (eg, Kathe: feather cloak, yellow eyes, dicolored hair.)

10. One thing I learned from playing characters created by others was how important it was for me to understand a character's motivation. I write supporting characters much better if I spend a little time roleplaying them in my head to get a feel for their goals & how they think.

11. Speaking of motivations, running political plotlines in games taught me that motivation is the KEY to writing political plot in novels. You need multiple characters and/or factions with believable & conficting goals and methods. Then the conflict practically writes itself!

12. One thing I learned to watch out for in games was the temptation to introduce a plot with a bang, then have a bunch of scenes that were basically like "Yup, this problem is STILL HERE" wihout advancing the plot or changing anything. Also a problem to watch out for in writing!

13. One way my mindset is very different for games vs. novels is that in a game, sometimes I'm just creating a situation and seeing what the players do, while in a novel I'm working with a much more linear plotline (though my characters may still surprise me sometimes).

14. Games and novels both work better when you can make the stakes personal! I learned in games that if my players interacted with "common folk" characters, they'd care much more about saving the world/the costs of war/etc, for instance.

15. Or they'd be much more into taking down a villain who did something to personally piss them off first, like messing with their friends.

Same thing is very true with novels—"save the world" feels really abstract, while "save THIS CUTE DOG RIGHT HERE" is OMG IMPORTANT.

16. Agency is a big concern in both games & novels, but it operates differently. In a novel, you want to make sure your main character is driving the plot.

In games, it's complicated. Sometimes you're responding to PC initiative, and sometimes you're creating the illusion of it.

17. In a novel, it's important to know what your character wants and make that the driving force that propels them through the story.

In a game, sometimes you have NO IDEA what your heroes want and have to literally go ask them!

18. And of course, a novel usually has one protagonist, or a handful of them at most, whereas a game has as many protagonists as players...sometimes over a hundred for some games I've been involved in. The needs here are VERY different.

19. In a big game, you have to always watch out for not making some characters more protagonist-y than others. You don't want some of your players to feel like main characters and others like sidekicks. But in a novel, that's okay, so long as you don't go all Mary Sue.

20. People who've played my larps have definitely recognized some scenes that wound up in my books. The candle lighting thing at the Conclave in THE DEFIANT HEIR, for instance, is totally from a political larp plotline I wrote/ran (though the circumstances were very different).

21. I go about worldbuilding very differently for games than I do for novels. When I'm worldbuilding for a novel, my worldbuilding tends to be inextricably intertwined with the plot. While for a game, the world must support nigh-infinite possible plots. But YMMV on this one.

22. I know as a reader, I love reading fantasy/SFF where I can imagine other stories in that world, or gaming in that world. And I think that it's important to be able to envision other stories in that world, too!

(FWIW, I could totally run an Eruvia tabletop.)

23. When I'm GMing tableltop games, I have to distinguish characters without costuming etc, so I do it with voice and also things like gestures and body posture. This is fantastic practice for being able to give characters different voices on the page.

24. One thing I really miss in writing that you get in gaming is getting to actually SEE people's realtime responses to your story. When you spring a Horrible Surprise on your players, you get to see them freak out about it! Or if you make them cry, you SEE THE TEARS!

25. The closest I've gotten in writing was when a friend reading my book basically livetweeted her responses via DM as she read, which was AMAZING. She was like "I should leave you alone" and I was like NO PLEASE, KEEP GOING. 😂

26. I had to come up with a lot of place names REALLY FAST to fill out the map of Eruvia, suddenly needing names for all the "I'll get there someday" places for the map. So I scrambled the character names of some of my PCs from a larp I ran for a bunch of them!

27. Larps taught me about the power of presence and how to weild it like a weapon, which is something La Contessa does constantly and Amalia manages occasionally.

28. Larp combat is pretty different from real combat, but it's still definitely taught me some things which are useful in writing fantasy fight scenes, like the decisive importance of things like surprise and morale.

29. Writing has taught me some things that are useful in running games, too, of course. Like how giving characters a terrible decision to make can create an intense and defining moment for them.

30. Having a compelling through line in a book is crucial for maintaining dramatic tension. It's just as important for a game character, but can be much harder to manage because you're not in control of plot pacing as the player & the GM has lots of PCs to keep track of.

31. I sometimes hear fellow larp PCs talk about how they're enjoying every event, but they feel like they have nothing specific to look forward to at the next one and thus have trouble getting enthusiasm up. They don't have a through line! You need this in novels, too.

32. In a novel, you have to think of both the reader AND the character. The reader needs something they're anticipating that keeps them turning pages. The character needs goals & drives that push them onward so they're not just sitting around waiting for something to happen.

33. One thing I think novel writers who GM games have to watch out for is making sure that when you have a really cool, nuanced NPC, the story doesn't become about them instead of about the PCs.

34. This is a delicate balance because in games AND novels, your story really benefits from supporting characters having their own goals & drives, their own stories. But in a game, you need to make sure that no matter how compelling the NPC's story, you still center the players.

35. Of course, in a novel sometimes you'll have that side character who winds up running off with the story! But you can always revise to give them a viewpoint or something if their story is that strong...an option you don't have with a game NPC.

36. The ability to revise is of course a HUGE difference between writing and games. When I write, I do a lot of my best work in revision. When I run a game, I don't have that option. The first draft is the final one, because it plays out live!

37. In both games and writing, I find having a goal my POV character/PC can act proactively on without needing to wait for plot to hand me a way to move forward is crucially important. Otherwise there are times when my character is just puttering around with nothing to do.

38. The time I most run into trouble with this in novels is when I know as the writer that there's a big pivot point coming, and my character's goals will change. But the character still needs to be working toward something, even if that something is going to be blown up soon!

39. Going back to combat, there are a bunch of other things larp combat has taught me about writing fight scenes.

Like the tense leadup you often have in an initial confrontation, before actual violence breaks out.

40. Or how much time can go into things like repositioning, where no blows are being exchanged but a lot is happening tactically as lines, stances, and attention shift.

41. Or the value of bluffing & distraction to control & direct your opponent's attention! This is, like, half of what Amalia does in fights, since she doesn't have the combat capabilities her friends do.

42. Or how much more compelling and dramatic a fight scene is when it's not just "and then they stabbed each other a lot until one side won," but something emotional is at stake..something else is going on, and there's another layer to the fight.

43. One thing that can happen a lot in both game & novel writing is you get an idea for a beginning and an ending, and you're vague on what happens in the middle.

Adding some seriously exciting twists in the middle that dramatically change things is great for both!

44. One advantage to having years of running tabletop under your belt is you get a lot of experience coming up with characters on the fly as the PCs decide that no, they are NOW BFFS WITH THIS RANDOM BARTENDER or whatever. Super handy for quick characterization in writing.

45. When I'm writing, I miss the instant feedback on what's working you can get with GMing. Like, I can tell right away if PCs really like a character, or if a plotline isn't really engaging them, and I can adjust on the fly. This is SO HARD TO GUESS when you're writing!

46. Distributing information and exposition is DRAMATICALLY different in writing vs. gaming. It's one of the places where there's almost no crossover (at least in how I do it). I think part of it is that in a game, PCs have more control over how they receive & process info.

47. If I put out a 10-page text prop talking about the origin of magic in a larp, no one has to read it unless they're interested. Those interested can read it when and where they want to. Those who are kinda interested but want the short version can get a summary from friends.

48. In a book, if I stop for 10 pages to ramble on about the origin of magic, every reader is stuck plowing through that right now, interrupting whatever else may have been going on in the story.

This is why managing info dumps is a friggin' art and science in SFF writing.

49. One thing every gamer knows which SFF writers should try to keep in mind is the degree to which if you give someone magic or technology, they will think of any possible way they can to abuse the crap out of it in ways the designer never intended. 😂

50. It's the old "They had time turners and they just used them to let Hermione take extra classes?!" problem.

When I introduce a magic thing in my stories, I try to think "Now OKAY, what would my PCs do with this?"

51. Okay, if you've read this long, you deserve a prize, so here's me in costume as an Evil Fairy Queen. 😂

52. For me, game plot & novel ideas usually come from the same kind of seed...An idea for a cool scene or moment, a feeling or image. Then I build out from there to see how we get there.

But beyond that, the creative process is different for me, & draws from different wells.

53. Game plot for me is all about near-infinite possibilities...There are a lot of plots going on at once, and I don't know which the players will seize on more than others. I don't know what the players will do or where the plots will go. They'll create their own plots, too.

54. Being a GM is like being an oracle who can see the infinite branches of possible futures and try to hone in on the futures that are currently most likely, but that's always changing.

Which is super exciting and cool! But very different than writing a novel.

55. When I'm writing a novel, I feel like I'm constantly homing in on some hidden truth, chipping away at the marble to unleash the form within, bringing the story into sharper and sharper focus, evolving the pokestory to its final form.

The lines converge instead of diverging.

56. I suspect this is why some people are AMAZING game plot writers, but struggle more with writing novels with a beginning, end, & clean through line down the middle...and others are great novel writers, but struggle with adapting as PCs interact with and change their stories.

(I have to take a break from this now to get actual writing & other work done...Will try to come back and add more to catch up with the likes later! If you have any particular questions or topics you'd like to hear my thoughts on, feel free to ask!)