Posted by Joshua on Feb 5, 2009
Since Freemind and other such mind-mapping tools are getting some RPG Blogosphere loving (such as FreeMind Tips for Game Masters, and Free Your Mind…With Free Mind), I figured I’d give another plug for my favorite light-weight GM note-taking and campaign planning software tool: TiddlyWiki. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s worth mentioning again, since not everybody who reads this blog assiduously combs the archives looking for the pearls of wisdom that might lie buried there. Plus I think it was posted before I joined the RPG Bloggers Network.
I’ve tried mind-mapping software before… heck I used TheBrain back when it was a DOS program… but I’ve never found it a great fit for the way I like to do campaign planning and notes. Basically I tend to think in “bags”, rather than “graphs.” I have a bunch of thoughts and notes all related to each other over here, and then another bunch of thoughts and notes related to each other over there. They’re all in heterogeneous clumps of things like all the PCs, NPCs, rooms, traps, setting, clues, for one particular location or adventure. They’re not naturally organized into parents, children, and siblings, at least by my notion of natural. If I try to draw all the lines that might make sense to me, it becomes a mass of little islands with everything in one island directly connected to everything else in that island and then another island of stuff with no bridge in between unless I deliberately add one just to keep my mind map connected. What can I say, my thoughts are very clumpy. It’s not that I can’t get anything done with mind mapping software, it’s more that I feel like I waste a lot of time deciding where something goes in the web or moving it around, while not finding a lot of added value in setting up those vertices or using the software to follow them. I end up clicking too much and writing too little.
Wikis are much more my style. Lots of text, and just drill down on whatever terms you like to elaborate on, ad infinitum. But wikis can be a pain to set up, particularly if you want to be able to use it while you’re not connected to the web. Enter TiddlyWiki.
The implementation is a wiki, but it’s a wiki that requires no back-end or host. It’s just a single HTML page with javascript that lets it update itself dynamically; all you need to use it is a place to store it (such as a thumb drive or your hard drive) and any modern browser. You want a new TiddlyWiki? Copy the HTML file and rename it and you’re good to go. Change the contents of a couple of pre-defined entries and you can personalize the title, subtitle, and so forth.
TiddlyWiki bills itself as a “reusable personal web notebook” , but conceptually it’s more like a stack of virtual 3 x 5 cards, 3 x5 cards that can wiki link to each other or to anything on the web and be tagged arbitrarily, much like blog posts, and text searched. You want a new 3 x 5 card, either click on a link in an existing card, or click on the New Tiddler button (for no real reason, they call a card a “Tiddler”), and start editing. You can hide or display multiple cards at once, search the wiki for terms that occur anywhere in a card, add or delete tags on a card, and so forth. Like with blog posts, there’s no real organization or hierarchy other than things being tagged with keywords. It’s that simple. Other than learning the specific wiki markup, there’s almost no learning curve unless you get into customization.
Speaking of which, it’s possible to customize TiddlyWiki quite extensively, from redesigning the whole graphical look of it, to adding plugins for new functionality, to writing macros, or even writing your own plugins. For instance, Berin Kinsman, of the Uncle Bear RPG blog, has two TiddlyWikis available for download, specifically customized for use in RPGS: Worldbuilding 101, and TenFoot Wiki. The Worldbuilding101 TiddlyWiki is a great way to think about a new setting, and is worth looking at even if you’re going to use mind mapping software or even (gasp) paper and pencil.
I really like TiddlyWiki quite a lot, and have been using it extensively for my games. Many of the posts you see here about Elves & Espers started their life as Tiddlers in the TiddlyWiki I carry on my keychain, and I’ve been fiddling around with writing a plugin, which I’ll talk about some other time if and when I finally get it done enough to share.
Posted by Joshua on Feb 5, 2009
Over at Exchange of Realities, Ravyn writes about the dangers of “Designated Love Interests”… that is, NPCs that are designed to become the love interest of one of the PCs.
The problem with a lot of advice along the lines of Limyaael’s is that people read fiction for a lot of different reasons, and I can point to a huge selection of literature that demonstrates that Limyaael’s preferences are not shared by readers looking for romance in their fiction in the first place. Readers want what they want, and not what some PhD LitCrit candidate thinks they should want. Contrariwise, PhD LitCrit candidates want what they want, and are under no obligation to enjoy pot-boiler romances just because the masses do. But people looking for writing advice are well-advised to carefully consider which audience they’re writing for. My sister Elizabeth is a published romance novelist, with a half-dozen novels to her credit, and one of the first things she had to learn was there really is a tight limit to how much tweaking the conventions readers will put up with before they’re dissatisfied by the fact that whatever its other merits, the book is no longer what they want when they pick up a romance.
What’s more, RPGs aren’t simply a form of fiction, and there are a lot of players who play so that they can revel in the cliches. They want their good to be good, their bad to be bad, and their fated lovers to be damn well singled out by fate in no uncertain terms. You’re not doing those kind of players a favor by creating a subtle, nuanced portrayal of a realistic sort of person that their character plausibly might or might not fall in love with if this were a work of fiction where the author controlled both sides of the interest as well as everything that happens to them.
The point is that you have to know your audience. There isn’t a good way and a bad way to do romantic interests in a game; there are a bunch of ways, and different players may want different ones, or the same player may want different ones at different times depending on the genre or how they see their character. The real danger in a Love Interest is not that the character won’t bite and that will spoil your plot, it’s that you’ll choose a way that isn’t what the player wants, and even if the plot moves along its rails the game time will be wasted if not spoiled.
Generally speaking, I think the best way to avoid that is to solicit player input. You want a character that the player’s PC will fall in love with? Have the player help design the character and the general outline of how they’ll interact. One huge advantage to this is that if the player isn’t interested in having that sort of thing happen in game, for whatever reason, you find out then and there and can drop the whole matter. You also get explicit guidance from the player on what the character will find attractive (which is by no means what the player personally would find attractive), as well as just how genre-iffic, and how detailed or abstract, the whole approach to romance should be. I find that even players who care deeply about playing In-Character are really open to out-of-game discussions about how they as player would like the game to go and the psychology of their character.
The down-side to this approach is that you lose the spontaneity. There is something particularly satisfying about relationships with NPCs, of any sort, that arise dynamically out of play and not because the GM or the GM and player together contrived it in advance. After all it’s precisely the actual real-time play of the game that’s the reason we play out the game in the first place instead of sitting around the table collaborating on a novel or a play. To the extent that important things are moved from game play and into game planning, we risk diminishing the game.
Still, with all the ways that in-game romances are fraught with peril–not just for your preferred plot, but for the cohesion of the game group as a whole–I think the wisest course is not by creating a really attractive character and crossing your fingers and hoping, but by knowing your audience, which includes knowing whether they want in-game romance at all. And the best, quickest, and most reliable way to know your audience is to openly ask them.