Level 30 Yinzer

I admit, I’m only halfway through The Hunger Games (by Suzanne Collins).  I know there are two more books in the series so far, and I am already eager to tear through them.  The author has done many things that I complained about when I tried to mine The Room for inspiration.  The characters are compelling, the vistas strange, interesting, and with just enough familiarity to not put me off.

I can already tell you that what I have read would make an amazing short campaign for D&D.  The players’ backstory runs like this: You have long been an oppressed citizen of the state, which every year holds a lottery called the Reaping to draw random people from the slums to participate in the Games.  The Games are a huge televised event, yet despite the pageantry and fame and esteem of them, they are truly meant to illustrate to the poorest citizens that rebellion will be met with destruction, and that their cruel overlords have ultimate control over every aspect of their lives.

The hook, of course, is that this year the names drawn from the Reaping were those of the players.  They will be whisked away, treated like royalty, fed like they’ve never eaten in years, clothed and styled to gain the adoration of fans within the elite Capitol city, trained and tested to see where their abilities lay (and this gives the GM the reason why the Games seem so precisely tailored to the player’s strength’s and weaknesses), but ultimately thrust into the controlled environment of the Games–where only the last man standing will be the one to leave with riches and glory, not to mention his life.

Once the Games have begun, I imagine the plot going a couple of different ways: if the players band together, clearly they can more easily take out the competition.  The Games are filled with traps and hazards as well, though, so at any time the GM can up the stakes by making the encounters more or less difficult.  It is also at the GM’s discretion how many other players there are in the Games, and setting up how the players can take them out.  It would all come to the same point, however: once the competition is eliminated, the players will be expected to fight each other to the death.

That may very well be the epic climax of the short campaign, too.  It’s certainly not a bad place to end things, if a bit gruesome (and the book is gruesome, so I would not recommend using this as inspiration if your players aren’t comfortable with the brutality of it).  However, it’s not impossible to imagine the players craving more; who are these oppressors, why are they so powerful and the rest of the lands so poor and slavish?  What gives them the right to this tyranny?  I can foresee the players using their time in the Games not to hunt the other players (although conflict would be inevitable), but instead to look for an escape from the Games themselves, an escape from the oppression, and an opportunity to disintegrate a government that would be so cruel and casual with the lives of its peoples.

As I said, I’m only halfway through the first book, and while I hope that this is the ultimate goal of the novels, I don’t actually know how the author intends to resolve it all.  I just know that I have been inspired, and would find an adaptation of this plot to D&D just as compelling and interesting.

What about you?  Are you comfortable with a brutal setting of man against man, or do you prefer your monsters to actually be monstrous?

I have terrible friends.  First they make me watch Twilight: New Moon (you can see my report on that at Sarah Darkmagic’s blog), and then they follow that up with The Room.

I still have full body shudders when I dwell overlong on the movie itself, but after a couple days of temporal distance I have begun to see the value of it.  However, rather than write a detailed reflection of what I learned, I think I will sum up in a top five list so I can avoid the pain of remembering the movie too clearly.

1. Do not insert huge plot hooks you have no intention of resolving.  A moment from The Room to illustrate this:  The protagonist’s fiance’s (whose name I cannot remember, so let’s just refer to her as Idiot) mother (whose name I also cannot remember, so let’s just refer to her as Uber Idiot) at one point declares to her daughter, Idiot, that she has breast cancer.  Idiot replies with “Don’t worry, you’ll be fine,” and the cancer is never spoken of again.  That’s a pretty life-changing event, and it’s unfair to your players to drop a bomb on them like that without any attempt at explaining it further.

2.  Do not drop  major plot points on your players without foreshadowing OR follow-up.  Example: the neighbor child, Danny, ends up on the roof in a violent struggle with a drug dealer.  There was no previous indication that Danny had a drug problem (such as erratic behavior, haggard looks, obsession, inexplicable disappearances, etc), nor was the topic ever spoken of again after the dealer fled the roof.  In the immortal words of Tommy Wiseau in a later scene, “This is bullshit!”  Players, as well as movie goers, crave resolution, and leaving the PCs without one makes for terrible plot.

3.  The star-crossed lovers plot only works if both the lovers are sympathetic in some way.  If the protagonist is (by all accounts) a nice guy, and the woman he’s in love with who has spurned him is a total bitch, everyone will just laugh at you for killing yourself over her.  “She’s so beautiful” is only a valid excuse if the ’she’ in question is a succubus and you’re under some sort of compulsion to worship her.  Otherwise, a normal person would tell the abusive partner to bugger off, and an abnormal person who devotes himself to such a relationship is hardly someone your average player will sympathize with.  If you want your players to become involved in your plot, you must create sympathetic and compelling characters.

4.  People will notice if your special effects suck.  How do you translate the inept green screen effects from The Room to the D&D table?  Give suck-ass descriptions.  Proper nouns and adjectives go a long way to adding flavor to your encounter set up.  Allow me to draw from my high school english class, as well: ‘thing’ and ’stuff’ are not descriptive nouns.  Also ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are not descriptive adjectives.  The shaky green screen effects were ultimately a terrible distraction from what was going on, just as inadequate description is ultimately distracting in D&D as players try to sort out where they are and what’s around them before they ever get to the action in front of them.

5.  Less is more.  Having said that it’s important to be descriptive, information overload is the opposite end of that problem.  Often in The Room, random events and blocking and objects in the room that were irrelevant to what we can assume the movie was trying to convey also broke the immersion of the movie.  A few short strokes to outline what you want your players to see is often sufficient-especially if you make them count.  Try limiting your “box text” to just three or four sentences.

And, that’s it.  No, not the entirety of what I took away from The Room, but the end of my ability to ruminate on it any longer.  The movie is terrible.  Watching it with Rifftrax is a bare improvement.  I didn’t even touch on the four seperate instances of TOTALLY UNNECCESARY SOFTCORE PORNOGRAPHY.  I think it’s self-evident that we can leave those out, and let us never speak of this again.

Have you seen The Room?  What horrible mistakes of an excuse for fiction have you nonetheless been able to draw inspiration from?

Recently, I wrote a guest post on Sarah Darkmagic’s blog regarding some inspiration I had for DnD from an unlikely source.  This got me to thinking about themes in general, and finally I was able to find a direction for the blog section of our site.  We search for clever ideas or interesting theories not because we want to stand out, but because we want to be inspired.  Looking back, as I’ve developed my ideas and style for this blog, that seems to be the main chunk of what I’ve posted about: the things that inspire me.

Having a solid direction is great, and definitely leaves me a lot more confident about our blogging future.  You can look for more posts on mining media for DnD ideas, for sure, and as always our link roundups will be full of inspiring things from other people as well.

Starting Again:

Recently WotC produced a new red box starter set for 4th edition.  It’s something we’re actually quite keen on, if only because a part of our goal is to bring new players into the game.  Thus, we relished the  positive reviews given by Sarah Darkmagic and ChattyDM.

Building Up:

We have a deep seated love for DIY D&D, and so it was with great glee that we read about Icosahedrophilia’s home-made 3d terrain.  Neat, simple, and effective!

Clever Twists:

Ok, so it’s rare that public drunkenness and cleverness go together at all, but that doesn’t mean it never happens.  We enjoyed reading about the Drunken D&D game at Gen Con, and were really enchanted by the clever twists they put on play.

Jeff’s Gameblog had a post about a D&D LARP that sounded amazing--too bad it was a dream only! But in the days of increasingly smart phones and media, it sounds totally plausible.

Chatty DM had an entertaining post about letting kids have free imagination to roleplay, and understanding that when they get it wrong, they’re actually getting it extra right.

Filling the gaps:

We were excited to discover yet another resource for filling in the gaps between the bits of D&D we come up with on our own, and RPG Blog II was kind enough to direct us to Wikimedia Commons for some lovely landscape imagery.

Stargazers World pointed us towards Dragon Avenue, another online resource for free D&D materials.

We also cannot help but toot our own horn-Sarah Darkmagic allowed us to write a post on her blog on extracting ideas from terrible plots.  This has given us new direction here on this blog–you can expect to see more inspiration drawn from media around here, too.

Zak from D&D with Porn Stars had an interesting dissection of how he builds up NPCs, one that sounds useful and, blessedly, a crapload less  work than trying to write up an entirely new human being.

Loose Ends

And since we seem so keen on spreading D&D blogger love, we’ll put a hit on Sarah Darkmagic again for her attempt to put up hits for Robert J Schwalb.  You know, website hits, of course.

And, because it is still our intent, once our portfolio is sufficient, to use this site to raise charitable funds, we cannot help but be delighted by other gaming related charities, such as the Extra Life Charity Drive as reported by Game Politics.

Of course, there’s more!  There’s always more!  Tell us in the comments, what inspired you this week?