Level 30 Yinzer

WARNING:  POST BELOW DOES CONTAIN SOME SWEARING.  If you care.

I know his site has caused some controversy before.  I mean, it’s right there in the title:  PORN PORN PORN.  The subject of pornography is a complex subject and, frankly, one I’m not really interested in discussing here.  Perhaps someday I will endure some pornography that inspires me to write something about D&D, but given that it’s unlikely, at least, I’ll leave the porntacular bits to the Book of Erotic Fantasy , and talk about Zak’s D&D style, which is what he blogs about anyway.

Because, honest to Bahamut, Zak’s blog has to be my favorite D&D blog that I read.  I don’t watch I Hit it with my Axe, if only because I don’t have the time at home, and cannot break through the draconian internet filters at work, but I devour his blog posts avidly.  Zak is brilliant, a beautiful writer, great with evocative ideas, smart, funny, and inspiring.  Our games of choice don’t even overlap-I play 4E exclusively, and Zak has his own blend of rules borrowed from older editions and even other games entirely for this arcane mix of verisimilitude, minutiae, and outright fuckery.  He writes so well, though, that even though those older editions completely turn me off to actually play, I’m able to see the allure for others, why they got into it, what made it exciting for them and for him.

Ok, this has turned into some sloppy love letter to Zak.  Rather than sit here and wax poetic about the many virtues of him and his blog, I think instead I’ll let him speak for himself for a moment.

What often inspires you the most? What’s one thing recently that inspired plot in your game?

Plots don’t really inspire me as much as things with a certain style. I feel like if you get too hooked on a plot you start railroading things, whereas if you just have a handle on the style of thing you want to do, then you can just decorate the set with things for the PCs to fuck with and then pull plot twists out of the bag at will because you’ve got a handle on what kind of story you’re in. Like for my Mutant Future//Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles thing it was this Clutch song:

http://dndwithpornstars.blogspot.com/2010/08/katana-monster-truck-radiation-taste.html

And the dungeon that my PCs are in right now is inspired by this Borges story:

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?