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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sialia" data-source="post: 1340588" data-attributes="member: 1025">Well, unless the judges are a lot sweeter than Zhaneel and Berandor, at this point the bragging rights mostly consist of "I didn't suck as badly as my opponent." And somehow, I'm just not counting on the judges being sweeter.  Nor am I actually especially interested in sweetness for it's own sake. It's interesting to hear about what worked and what didn't work.  Writing these stories was the reward for doing this contest for me. I learned some things that I can use again forever, that I really needed to know. At least two.  1. I used to try to build my stories by creating characters and then take one long thread of thought and try to knit a plot for them. This almost always failed. The characters would be interesting but they would sit around and talk forever and do nothing and go nowhere. I didn't know where I was trying to take them, and just kept hoping something interesting would occur. It rarely did, or at least it would only result in amusing episodes, and not a rise toward climatic action. For these, I created good characters and then took a series of "beads" (key moments I wanted to develop), crafted them first, and then ran the characters and the plot string through them. This works fabulously, and because I was able to repeat the trick three times, I know it was not a unique fluke. It's similar to how Piratecat has told me he crafts a module. There are a series of things he wants the players to get to, but they have freedom to be themselves and get from point A to Point G in whatever way seems to make the most sense.  Being able to concentrate on a theme at the same time as the characters and a plot comes from knowing that each "bead" can have both a literal meaning and also metaphorical meaning. It doesn't matter which comes first, as long as you eventually find both. So I can introduce the rocks first just as rocks, and then have characters discuss them later. Or I can have Noachsvernvorel work the second level of her hands at the moment they arrive in the story. Generally, I prefer not to use any focal thing in a story which I have not previously established is present in the world. So my stories run long because I want to introduce the basket of heads before I use them for the nightmare sequence. 2. When I was at a party Saturday night, I got to chatting with a scriptwriter from LA. I didn’t discuss my story with him specifically, but I asked him how to create a thought that was neither so predictable that the audience could see it coming miles off, nor so erratic that they couldn’t follow it as it unfolded. His advice was to go deeper into the characters. Each person has his/her own motivations. If you know what the character wants as short term goals, as long term goals and also as underlying needs, then you will be able to find the way that the character will try to solve his/her problems in a way that is unique to that individual. This made perfect sense. It’s why GMs are continually surprised by their players, and players are frequently surprised by GMs. The more you are inside somebody’s point of view, the more it seems like there is an obvious thing to do that is only obvious to that person. It's what saves a plot from being to linear, where it seems that the characters have no choices at all and are being railroaded through the sequence of beads. Now, with a little more time, once you’ve gotten there, you can show the story to some other readers and then try to get a sense of how far you had your head up that character’s, um, ‘persona’ (hi, grandma!), and then you can try to help the audience get there, too. What did you need to know about this character to be able to follow her train of thought that I forgot to tell you about because I was so far in her that it seemed obvious to me? The other way to “go deeper” for me was to go back and re-research my characters classes, levels, inventories, and the ecology of my monsters. If you know what’s in their toolkits, how they work, and you know what they want to achieve, it is easier to make them do something interesting and plausible with what they have to work with.</blockquote>

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