Storytelling Advice

Hey y'all, I've never actually posted here before, but I've been keeping tabs on what people have been doing. I've played a few of the player made campaigns/RPGs that are currently released while many of them are very noble efforts, I thought I'd offer some advice to people who have made or are making campaigns and RPGs right now. I'm a theater major, so mainly I wanted to offer some advice on what at current is the most universal flaw in what I've seen thus far - storytelling. I myself would love to make a campaign, but being a senior, I'm too busy/lazy to do it. For that reason I shall live vicariously through you creative minds out there, and offer some tips to help you make your stories more interesting and thus that much more enjoyable.

Keep note that this is really, really long and rambling, but hopefully you'll get something out of it. I'm partially writing it for people who haven't been familiar with the first two Warcraft games, so bear with me.

GENERAL STORYTELLING TIPS

George Lucas once said that a special effect without a story is flat-out boring. And he is quite correct. Even if your layout is superb, your triggers flawless, and everything balanced to perfection, you can still fall flat if there isn't a story being told, or if it's being told poorly. So, here's how to begin:

- Introduce your characters. It can just be a .txt file, but regardless of how you do it, it's a lot easier to start a campaign if we have some idea of who the hero is that we're controlling, and what the surrounding situation is. Alternately, you can introduce your character in an opening cinematic, giving us an idea of where the action is taking place, who the characters are, and what the immediate conflict is. DON'T put a quick three sentence blurb on the loading screen and then thrust the player straight into things. If you want your campaign to be more than a bunch of neat maps, you need to bring the players into the story in the first mission.

- Create an inciting moment. An inciting moment is the point in your story, usually early on, that gets the main plot moving along. For example, the inciting moment in the Warcraft III Prologue is when Medivh tells Thrall to sail west to Kalimdor. It establishes the action for the Orcish campaign, with Thrall finally landing in Kalimdor. In the Human campaign, the inciting moment is when Arthas first encounters the Undead, leading him down the road that ends with the summoning of Archimonde in Undead mission 8. The inciting moment doesn't need to be in the first mission, if your campaign is long enough, but it should happen somewhere within the first third of the campaign.

- Be aware of what is at stake. Stakes are very important in storytelling, because they make the actions and decisions of the characters interesting, and keep the players playing. However, it's often possible to skew the stakes in such a way that ruins the story, or even makes it comedic. Keep this in mind when determining the difficulty of your missions: If the stakes are lower than the difficulty of the goal being achieved (ie saving Timmy from an army of twenty Archimondes), it's just silly. It's also silly when the stakes are far higher than the difficulty at which they're achieved (ie having to kill twenty Timmys in order to stop everybody in the world from dying instantly)
Another problem arises when dealing with stories set in pre-established universes. When writing stories in established worlds (like the world of Warcraft, or the Star Wars Universe), it sometimes is a bit much to raise the stakes drastically high. Your characters don't have to be trying to keep the world from blowing up. Indeed, in the world of Warcraft, it diminishes the core story if you make your characters more important than Thrall or Arthas. The Star Wars novels are an excellent example of how ludicrously high stakes ruined the expanded universe. For those of you who haven't read them, almost every Star Wars novel or series placed the entire New Republic in dire jeopardy by some new, super-powerful threat. How often is Luke Skywalker going to save the galaxy from some Death-Star like superweapon just in the nick of time? Not only does it strain credulity, but it can often ruin the feel of the world, which is often a major turnoff. Sometimes it's fine if the fate of the whole world rests on your character's shoulders. They could be just fighting for their life, or the lives of their people, or fighting for personal power, etc...

- Make your characters active rather than passive. When I first played Warcraft III, I somehow felt as if the Undead campaign was inferior to the Human campaign, despite some very fun, solid missions. It then occurred to me, the Human campaign had a much better story. Why is that? Because in the Human campaign Arthas (the character you're in charge of) makes the decisions that bring him to claiming Frostmourne in mission 9. He chooses to slaughter the plagued citizens of Stratholme, he chooses to follow Mal'Ganis to Northrend, he chooses to burn his own ships rather than return to Lordaeron, and he chooses to claim Frostmourne even though he knows he will pay a price. Your objectives are Arthas' objectives.
Then comes the Undead campaign. Guess what? Arthas isn't in charge anymore, Tichondrius is. Go there, do that, kill him, raze this... Granted, I don't know how one could capture the flavor of the Undead if Arthas wasn't a pawn in this campaign, but it makes for far less compelling storytelling if the character you're made to identify with doesn't call the shots. For this reason try to guide the plot by the decisions and objectives of the main character. That's not to say that things can't happen outside the control of your main character, but your main character should at least be the one who decides how to react to a given situation.

- Learn how not to write dialogue and plot. I've seen on quite a few occasions uses of expository dialogue. Here's a basic example of this:

JIM: "Hi Bob."
BOB: "Hello Jim, my brother in law. How is Susie, your wife and my sister?"

The problem with this exchange is obvious. Jim and Bob know how they're related, and they know who Susie is. The only reason Bob would say what he says is to tell us (The reader, player, audience, etc... ) that they are related. In other words, it's not true to the story. A good example of how to deal with this can be taken from the Human campaign. The manual explains how Arthas and Jaina had a love affair not too long ago. However, nobody brings it up in the game. And why would they? There's no need to. Yet at the same time it illuminates the relationship between them. Not only does it make the two missions they share together more interesting, but it also makes sense of the beginning of Human 6, when Arthas sounds hurt when Jaina decides to leave rather than see Arthas slaughter the town. While movies and plays usually shouldn't resort to presenting us with information before the story begins, in the case of Warcraft III campaigns I think it's a good idea to establish the backstory, though others may opt to use other, more cinematic devices.
Anyway, dialogue. When you're writing dialogue for your characters, it can be useful if you try to think of it in terms of giving each character an objective, ie something they're trying to accomplish through their words and actions. In most cases this isn't hard, considering that Warcraft III is a lot about killing stuff. However, in the case of non-battle scenarios, or conversations between allies, it can serve you well to think of your characters as trying to accomplish something, rather than just sitting around spouting out information that everybody already knows.

- Use cliches to your advantage. Cliches aren't always a horrible thing, but like many dramatic devices, it's better when they're reversed at an opportune moment. Blizzard does a lot of this. Arcturus Mengsk, who we at first take to be the usual rebel leader type, turns out to be a maglomaniac. Kerrigan becomes Queen of the Zerg. Arthas the royal Paladin becomes a Death Knight. The bloodthirsty Grom Hellscream dies after overcoming the rage that Mannoroth had put into him. And so on and so on. The reason that the campaigns don't star characters like Uther the Lightbringer or Antonidas is because they're cliched. They have nowhere to develop as characters. If you're doing your job right, your main characters will not be the same as they were when the story began. Use plotting and dialogue to reflect this change.

- Proofread your scenes. If you're writing in a different language (And I've seen quite a few cases of this), be sure to find somebody who's native to that language who can proofread the campaign for you. It's just sorta jarring when you go off to fight the 'Undeads'. It's like when Ewan McGregor's accent slips in Black Hawk Down - it just takes you out of the story for a bit. Yeah, it's a nitpick, but an easily remedied one.

NOTES ON THE WORLD OF WARCRAFT

As if I couldn't blather on more, I just wanted to bring up a few continuity points for some people who want to write in the world of Warcraft. I write this here because I recall seeing a mini-campaign released not too long ago that completely butchered the Warcraft storyline. It involved Arthas 'discovering' the existence of Orcs (!) and was clearly made by somebody who hadn't read the story. So, to be more **** retentive, I'll include a few points here.

- Don't put Blizzard heroes into your campaigns. Somebody else posted this same note, and I repeat it here. For one, it's easy to butcher the character. For another, it defiles continuity for canon nuts like myself. Thirdly, we already know their stories, and it's better if you come up with a new one of your very own. Fourthly, if you put voices in your campaign you're bound to sound nothing like the original. Have your characters talk about them, maybe get letters from them, maybe throw in a cameo if you need to, but by no means try to throw them into the mix. Poeple won't appreciate it. We're just jerks that way.

- As an addendum to my previous point, don't make campaigns that are supposed to be 'sequels' to the original campaigns. Once again, we won't appreciate it, especially when the real expansion comes out and your story no longer fits by a long shot. And yes, we're still jerks like that.

- Review the storylines. Yeah, there's some discontinuity between Warcraft II and the Warcraft III manual (Stratholme moves a hundred miles, Lothar dying in a parley vs. dying in battle, timelines, gasp!), but overall the whole thing is there. In other words, just know a little something about the setting of your campaign, in terms of history, inhabitants, etc... One particular mistake was in the mini-campaign Escape, which I enjoyed, though in the second mission the arch-mage feigns all knowledge of the Undead, who would be very well known by the point that they were razing all of Lordaeron. A nitpick, yeah, but still disruptive.

Ok, I've been writing for way too long. That's how badly I don't want to do my work. :) I'll leave you with a few ideas for story settings/plots:

UNCHARTED ISLES: Set your campaign in some forgotten place that survived the maelstrom, ie an uncharted isle.

SATYR CAMPAIGN: As a Satyr, you must lead your people to prepare the way for the return of the Legion.

KHAZ MODAN: A campaign set in the mountains and caves of Khaz Modan would be pretty cool, since we didn't see much in Warcraft II.

AZEROTH: Even though the manual says it's been rebuilt, there could be plenty of story leads involving now razed Orcish settlements, artifacts, etc...

NORTHREND: What happened to the Humans in Northrend after Arthas disappeared? What about the Nerubians?

Ok, I'll stop. Now.

-Weremuppet

yeah, those are all pretty good rules, the only exeption I think would be for certain characters in the warcraft series that were never in a game, like blackhand or kil'jaeden, you wouldn't have problems with the voices there, but you could still butcher the character unless it is done welll, so I still wouldn't reccomend it.