Subtext storywriting8/25/2023 Prescribing player character actions is the game writing equivalent to too much exposition in fiction writing, and it leads to railroad GMing. In any good adventure, there are multiple ways to succeed, and some of them-maybe even most of them-are things the adventure writer hasn’t thought of. Maybe they kill every pirate on board and fly the pirate starship to the alien temple. Maybe they blow a hole in the side of the hold and toss the idol into space for retrieval later. Why? Because it makes it seem like there is only one way for the PCs to succeed.īut maybe the PCs get their hands on a teleporter. An adventure writer might be tempted to then explain: “The way to get the idol out is to get a hover platform and follow the path to the airlock.” This, I might argue, should be subtext. A storage chamber near the hold has some hover platforms that could support the weight of the idol, and there’s a path through the starship corridors that the PCs could use to take it from the hold to the airlock without being seen by too many cameras, with doorways wide enough to allow the idol to pass through. The idol is enormous and inside a pirate starship hold. In a sci-fi adventure, the PCs are trying to steal back an alien idol from some pirates and return it to its rightful temple. However, sometimes designers go a little too far and say too much.Ĭonsider this example. Blatant “expository” writing is a good thing when it comes to telling them what’s really going on. What does practical subtext have to do with game writing? In adventure design, we don’t want to avoid explaining things to the GM. Theme is a big topic we can (maybe) cover in the future.įor now, I want to focus on subtext on a more practical level. But that’s not where I’m going with this. You can do that with games too, and doing an internet search suggests that such things are precisely what people think about in terms of subtext in RPGs. Ask someone what the subtext of the Lord of the Rings tells us about the theme and you’ll get one of many different views, each with their own examples-it’s about war, it’s about industrialization, it’s about pastoralism, and so on. For example, I’m not even getting into the kind of subtext that connotes a theme. This, of course, is a ham-fisted, reductivist way of considering subtext, which can mean many different things. That would be unrealistic and expository. Gandalf doesn’t say, “I’m tired after fighting against the minions of Sauron, and I never thought we could win but we managed to pull it off thanks to some hobbits,” even if that’s what he means. Subtext is used to make dialog more realistic, to make dialog scenes richer with meaning, and to avoid blatant exposition. If you ask me tomorrow if I’ve been busy and I say, “A bit,” and then ask Gandalf after the War of the Ring if he’s been busy and he says, “A bit,” the subtext with both of those identical answers is entirely different. Subtext can be conveyed by tone, description (mannerisms in terms of a character), or sometimes just context. I’ve been thinking about subtext in fiction writing and script writing lately and it occurred to me if you stretch the concept a bit you get a quick little insight into a worthwhile game design principle.īut first, what is subtext? Essentially, it’s the dialog that a character doesn’t say.
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