Telling a story, now before I go on I'd want to point out that I don't consider myself to be any kind of a writer, but making up stories that my models can be used in is something I enjoy doing. Now there are many ways of going about this & in this post I'm going to take a look at the ones I use.
The Game Story, this is the most common way of doing things, where someone will play out a game & instead of doing what is known as a battle report, which is away of explain how the game played out & in some cases using the report to explain to people how the rules of the game work. Most of you will know how these kind of stories come about, so there's not really a lot for me to cover here, but that said turning games into a story is no less challenging then any of the other ways of telling a story. Lets look at what I think are the pros & cons of this kind of story.
Pros (1) You get to play with your models, (2) You get the unknown factor, (3) You've a whole table setup & can look at ways of getting the best pictures, (4) You've got a rules set to guide the action, (5) You might be playing the game with another person. (6) The challenge of turning the game into a story. Now I've no doubt that there are a lot more pros then the ones above as there will be with the cons, so if you'd like to point them out in the comments please do,
Cons (1) Set up, this can take a lot of time, (2) You have no control over the dice rolls which could lead to the hero's death, try turning this into a pro by making it a glorious one 😊 (3) In the excitement of the game you forget to take pictures. (4) Rules, having to stop the action to look something up. (5) You might run out of time. (6) Put away time.
The Hybrid Story, this works very well with RPG type of gaming & is probably my favourite type, as you can use it in anyway you like, now I'll try to explain how I go about doing this further on so bear with me please 😊 RPG's are games that can by played with or without the use of models & just like table top gaming come in all different types. Now while this is a look at Hybrid story telling I think I need to cover how RPG's work a little bit, while RPG's like table top games have rules there not as restrictive, eg if I was playing a table top wargame & the enemy were making their way through a passage way in the mountains I couldn't try to blow up the side of the mountain to bring it down on top of them, in an RPG I could try to, but at the same time if my character was a primitive man I couldn't expect him to be able to make a bomb to blow the side of the mountain up with, any GM worth his salt would never allow such a thing. While RPG are basically designed to be played with a couple of players & a GM, it is possible to use some of their mechanizes to play things out solo.
Pros (1) You have a lot more freedom in what can be done. (2) You don't need to set up a table top. (3) You have as much time as you want to do this. (4) You can decide what you want to play out & what you don't. (5) You don't have to worry to much about rules but be honest with yourself, see primitive man above. (6) No put away time.
Cons (1) You don't get to play a real game. (2) You won't most likely be playing this out with other people. (3) You'll need to set up different scenes to take pictures. (4) You'll most likely use more then just one rule set. (5) You'll need to decided when to make dice rolls. (6) The dice throwing you a curve ball 😂
The Pure Story. This is where you just tell a story, there's no need to worry about rules or rolling dice, these would be pros that you could add to some of the others above, but at the same time they can be cons. While you have complete control over things you also get no surprises & while I put getting a curve ball in the cons above it can also be a pro in a lot of cases.
Right that covered what I used over the years to tell stories here but that really doesn't help Vagabond, so now I'll try to answer his questions. The first thing I would say is do whatever you enjoy the most, if that's playing out a game & telling a story about it then that's the way to go like wise if its just telling a story, then do that.
Where to start ? Ask yourself what do you want to do, do I want to do a story around stuff I already have or do I want to do a story were I paint up new models & make up new terrain, the later can be a good hobby project, or even like Vagabond you might be trying to go in a different direction altogether.
Story & setting, setting is most likely going to be based on the models you have, the story however can be anything you want it to be regardless. But I only have WW2 models, no problem think, A Band of Brothers, Where Eagle's Dare, Kelly's Hero's, Finding Private Ryan, all very different stories but all in the same setting, don't be afraid to use books of films or even games to get ideas, RPG games are great for ideas & even a lot of two hour wargames are great for building stories that's, & that's why me have remakes 😉
I've got my idea now what ? Ask yourself how are you going tell the story (Gaming, Hybrid, Pure or something else) & how long do you want it to be, how long you want it to be is important as it will dictate the pace of the story. If its a short story you'll need to decide what is most important to the story, if its a long store you can spend more time on things like developing the characters. Creating characters & developing them is something I really enjoy, but that is something I'll cover in another post, suffice to say here you will need to do a bit of it for any story.
Pulp Alley's Perilous Island was a campaign I played out & use to tell a story adding little bits here & there to develop characters, while The Dream Stone was just a story I told & while it was short I think it was the best I came up with. Here's an out take from it to show how little character development it needed.
Jim Dale was neither a good man or a God fearing one but compared to the things that have haunted his dreams these last 6 nights he reckoned he was a saint, the dream had started the night of the day he'd bushwhacked the old prospector.
Those few lines told us all we needed to know about Jim Dale for the story to work, in the last story I done The Illuminati Treasure, we had two characters that I'd used before & so could build on them. Now this story was done using the hybrid systerm, the story was already there for me to use as it's a RPG adventure for the Hollow Earth RPG systerm, that's not to say I just took that story & added my characters, while I stayed true to the idea of the story I changed it a lot & made it shorter.
So now to the meat of things, how do I make this hybrid systerm work ? well as there's no GM you really need to create possibilities to drive the story, a bit like those books where if you turn right you go to page 36 if left go to page 46. If you remember the story really started with a man who had been shot crashing his car & handing a notebook to Karl just as the bad guys who shot him turned up. At this point of the story there was really only two out comes, Karl & Esther could jump into the car & drive off been chased by the bad guys in there car, or they could try & fight off the bad guys. I was really hoping for the car chase as that was something I'd wanted to do for a long time.
In the end the dice decided it would be the other way, now as I was only doing this over two parts I decided that instead of doing the whole fight thing I'd just have the bad guys shoot Karl in the leg take the book & leave, at other points through out the story I played thing out, like in part two when I did do a car chase (this one was not in the story btw) & the fight near the end, both of which I might point out I used different rule sets for. So that's a little insight as to how we do things here at N&D & I hope that it might be of some help to anyone thinking of going down the story telling route or even to them that already do that kind of thing.
As always my thanks for dropping in & if you'd care to leave a comment it would be welcomed 😊
