The Blog of Roon

Ginger opines that play-by-email games may “salvage RPGs as an art form in the age of computer gaming.” This in response to an Ampersand post that claims “I’m convinced, years later, that we took role-playing to new heights of both depth and technical achievement.”

They could both be right. I don’t intend to support or dispute either statement. I quoted them because they dovetailed with a back-of-the-head series of thoughts on written gaming, spurred also by Steve’s remarks on blognovels. I meant not to write until I had my thoughts in better order, but who knows when that will be.

I have never been in a campaign that never involved fluff-writing on my part. (My personal definition of “fluff” is “prose set in the context of an RPG campaign.” Others’ definitions may differ.) Not even once. Moreover, the more involving the campaign, the more I write about it. Which is not to say post hoc ergo propter hoc; it’s just as likely that writing itself binds me tighter to the game.

These hypotheses are likely to be tested, as I am intentionally curtailing my fluff habit as regards my gaming-buddies’ campaigns. (It’s past time I did that. ’Nuff said.) I don’t know if not writing will decrease my interest, or if I will instead figure out how to sublimate the desire to write fluff into other gaming behaviors.

I do wonder how it will affect my characters, though; it seems to me that I do much, if not most, of my character development in writing. Shirley, for example, has developed verbal mannerisms that do not resemble mine in the slightest, yet are not pastiche or otherwise imitative of existing literature as far as I am aware. (My mind is a pack-rat’s nest, though, so Shirley may contain riffs on a long-ago read that I can’t consciously recall.) It’s just how Shirley talks.

My fluff addiction might explain why I never got into computer games. No writing to do. Not even a universe openended enough to allow fluff. (Though that could well be a calumny; I haven’t played any up-to-date computer games.)

Though I am hardly unique in my propensity toward fluff-writing, I cannot claim that fluff is a universal component of gaming, either. One of my tabletop group’s GMs actively dislikes fluff; for him, a good roleplaying experience resembles a good stage improvisation, not a good fantasy novel. Keeping that in mind, let’s dig in and talk about fluff…

Someone—probably Ginger—has noted by now that my definition of fluff includes what goes on in a play-by-email. Intentional. Unquestionably there are differences between fluff that is PBeM exchanges and fluff that is ancillary to a tabletop game or LARP, and I intend to delve into these differences in a bit. The reason I use the big umbrella is that the differences sometimes blur.

For example, the Grand Ellipse is a PBeM, and the writing I have done for it shows all the stigmata of PBeM style (again, stick with me, folks; I fully intend to discuss what those stigmata are). That said, I wrote a long piece for the Ellipse a while ago in which Shirley details his personal history to his fellow Ellipsoid Margaret. That piece was just plain fluff, much less—er—stigmatized. Yet its context was a PBeM.

(Oh, and if y’all were wondering at all, Shirley and Margaret are indeed An Item. The course of true love is not exactly running smooth—but it could not possibly have anyway. They are doing about as well as they can, all things considered. I mean, believing your life is in danger from a gun-wielding international criminal can kinda put a crimp in the romance.)

Play-by-email fluff—that is, connect-the-dots prose from various PBeM posts—is often not very good writing, read after the fact. This is not a reflection of lack of skill either at writing or gaming; it’s an inescapable function of the cooperative, decentralized nature of the beast.

When I write for the Grand Ellipse, I do not act or speak for Margaret or Esperanza (Li’s NPC, Margaret’s lady’s-maid) if I can possibly avoid it. Alisa naturally extends Shirley the same courtesy, and Li as GM can’t take either of our characters over without rousing suspicion and possibly ire. This means that the Ellipse writing is often diffuse, wandering, purposeless; nobody can quite know where anyone else is going, and there are no preset plots or character arcs to control direction.

(If, incidentally, you get the impression that this is an apologia in advance for the Ellipse writing of mine that Li is eventually going to post online—you are absolutely correct. I know I suggested posting this stuff in the first place, but I confess I feel like the proverbial long-tailed cat in the rocking-chaired room about it. I love writing fluff, but I regularly cringe at what I write.)

Another issue with PBeM fluff is piecemeal conversations. As good email correspondents, Li and Alisa and I snip out parts of emails that don’t directly relate to the immediate response. We do, however, write several parts of a given conversation at once; for example, I might toss out several of Shirley’s hypotheses regarding the latest turn of events in a single email, and Alisa/Margaret would respond to each. As pieces of the conversation age, they get snipped out of subsequent email.

The problem being, of course, that we don’t keep track of the shape of the entire conversation; the various topics often don’t transition into each other intelligently or even intelligibly. C’est la vie virtuelle.

PBeM fluff often features odd speech acts and crude point-of-view moments governed not so much by narrative necessity as game mechanics or the need to telegraph an action or strategy to another player. Again, if I want Margaret to come to Shirley’s conversational rescue at some point, I can’t just write a line of dialogue for her. All I can do is telegraph that Shirley needs help, and hope that Margaret will respond.

(Sometimes it’s just easiest to handle this sort of thing with out-of-character comments, but too much of that tends to leach the fun out by making responses too predictable.)

Finally, PBeM fluff is almost always written in the present tense. I hate that, myself, as I find present-tense prose bloody awkward both to write and to read. My non-PBeM fluff is invariably past-tense. Still, present tense does seem to be the standard, and in the immediate context of the game there is some sense to it, so I succumb.

Fluff that is about the game, rather than fluff that is the game, need not suffer the just-listed problems. I must say it sometimes does anyway. Such fluff, speaking broadly, comes in two flavors: chronicle fluff that turns a game session into prose, and expansionary fluff that zeroes in on something the game passed over, be it a character moment, a bit of history, a retcon, an alternate history, or a tangent invented out of whole cloth.

Chronicle fluff particularly falls prey to the diffuse directionlessness of PBeM writing. The only way to tighten it up, in my experience, involves some retconning and some judicious excision—at which point the chronicle is no longer quite a chronicle, is it?

Steve, I hope this gives you some idea of the pitfalls of attempting a multiply-authored blognovel. Not an easy undertaking at all. Everyone, I hope it is clear that I make no claims whatever of deathlessness as regards my to-become-public-someday Ellipse prose. Indeed, its mortality may be its only grace.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 30th, 2002 at 10:10 am and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.