Writing Excuses Transcripts

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/06/06/16-23-rules-and-mechanics/

 

Key points: Rules and mechanics are important in tabletop games, where players and game masters interact directly with the rules. Computer games can have some behind the scenes parts. However, the same principles apply to both. First, stick to a few core mechanics. This helps people learn them easily, and transfer skills between different characters. Repetition is important, to make sure everyone understands what is being talked about. Be aware of three types of players, the ones who just want to get to the action, the ones who want a story, but not all the nitty gritty, and the ones who will spend enormous amounts of time and energy on very small points. As a designer, make the tools simple and let players come up with cool ideas using them. What's going to make it fun at the table? If you're adding new rules, anchor them to elements already in the game. Look for the holes, and fill them!

 

[Season 16, Episode 23]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[Cassandra] Rules and Mechanics.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[James] Because you're in a hurry.

[Background rumble, laughter]

[Howard] And we're listening to a distant motorcycle.

[Dan] Obviously, not in much of a hurry.

[Laughter]

[James] Let's keep that.

 

[Mary Robinette] Oh. Hi. I'm Mary Robinette.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[James] I'm James.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

 

[Mary Robinette] This is the episode we're recording after lunch.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Rules and mechanics. Rule number one, people get drowsy after lunch.

[James] All right. So, rules and mechanics, this is more important with tabletop games, where both the players and the game masters are interacting directly with the rules. With computer games, you can have a little bit behind the scenes. But a lot of the same principles still apply. So, one of the things I think about when thinking about mechanics is that you want to stick to a few core mechanics or principles. For instance, in Dungeons & Dragons, you're kind of always rolling a D20, a 20 sided die, and higher is better. That's a very simple mechanic that, of course, it's used in a bunch of different ways. But that basic idea is the same. The reason you want to keep it that way is because it helps people to learn, and it allows people to transfer their skill between different characters. So if you know how to play a barbarian, then you probably, even if you don't know all about the spells the wizard has, you at least know the basic idea. So I think of this kind of like an arcade fighter game or something. All the characters are going to have different special abilities, but if A is punch for one of them, it's going to be punch for all of them. So that'll allow you to easily transfer your abilities. But, Cass, what do you think about first when thinking about mechanics for a game?

[Cassandra] Oh, queerly enough, it's very similar. Although a bulk of the work is often done by the designers in larger studios. Maintaining the idea that there is a sense of symmetry is important. One of the things I learned writing [branching areas?] for video games is, for example, the importance universally of always repeating keywords in every single line of dialogue. I remember having this incredibly long frustrated fight with my manager about it, though, I cannot keep repeating the same words in every single line of dialogue. He's like, "Yes, I understand. But this is how games work." Because when you play a game, your brain is actually divided between so many other things. You're looking at environment, you're thinking about your quests, you're  thinking about how your characters are moving, where you want to go. It's easy to get distracted. I did not believe him until this one quest line I was developing, I'd worked with a designer for six months on that very specific quest. One day I was like, "All right. Would you help me playtest this quest chain?" Again, remember this is the man who he's worked with me from scratch on this for six months extensively. He plays through the whole thing. Now, this quest has a single robot. I repeated the name of this robot about seven times. I missed it in one last line of dialogue. My designer, when he was done, he turns around and he looks at me and he goes like, "Oh, do we mention the robot anywhere?" I'm like, "Oh, my God."

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] He was right. This is absolutely necessary. I remember swearing so loudly, people two rows down in the office turned around and were wondering what was going on.

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] I think it's kind of… Dovetails neatly into the necessity for sanitizing language and copying existing solves that. I think it's very, very obvious in tabletop RPG's.

 

[James] Yeah. I know this is something, Dan, you've complained about this to me before…

[Laughter]

[James] When you were learning how to write for stuff like Pathfinder and Starfinder. There's all this standardized language, and you're copying all of these styles, and when you start writing for tabletop role-playing games, they'll often give you a giant style guide that you have to learn. It feels really counterintuitive to a prose writer, because you're always told to mix up your word choice. Don't be repetitive. But the reason why repetition is so important in tabletop games is that it makes it easier for everybody to understand exactly what's being talked about, and you got players interpreting the rules from diff… On their own. So by hammering out the language once, you can avoid problems and people know that… If you say creature most of the time and suddenly you say monster for one rule, people are going to think that that means something different when it doesn't actually. Mary Robinette, you wanted to speak to that?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. So this is actually a mechanic, a real world mechanic, about the way our own brains are designed. That we are designed to look for threats. Right? Out in the wild. Anything that is repetitive is not a natural thing, so we pay attention to it. So anything that breaks the pattern, that is again a point at which we pay attention to it. So a certain type of repetitive thing… It's like as soon as you identify it, you tune it out and it becomes unimportant. But the things that break that, those are the things that suddenly pop into focus. So that's one of the reasons… Not just when you're thinking about that in… Four-game writing, but also in narrative, when you want to make conscious choices about that repetition and where you deliberately break that repetition.

[Howard] It's worth pointing out here that there are terms that are supercritical within whatever set of game mechanics you're writing to. For instance, the word resistance is so often a game mechanic that is tied to whether you have resistance to magic, resistance to fire, resistance to all-out… Whatever. Naming a political organization the resistance in that game setting is absolutely contraindicated. Don't do it. Because now you've overburdened that domain, and it's guaranteed that you will be confusing some of the players.

[Dan] I do want to go back to one thing really quick, because, as James said, I have whined to him extensively about having to write inside of certain style guides for games. I just think that that's a good thing to point out, if you are primarily a prose writer, a fiction writer, and you want to get into game writing. Be prepared for a very different editorial process. I'm accustomed to, with novels, just sending something that is incredibly bare-bones, and then knowing that the typesetter and the editor are going to make it look the way it's supposed to look. We usually don't have to deal with formatting at all. Depending on the game company you are submitting to, you do have to deal with formatting. It becomes very important. So, that's just something to keep in mind.

[James] Well, some of the style guides that Dan has raged against are things that I actually wrote or worked on when…

[Chuckles]

[James] I was the executive editor at Paizo.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, you're that James.

[James] Yes. But, yeah, it's important because you gotta remember that the rules are a puzzle that a certain type of player is going to be constantly, and… Actually, I think Cass is this type of player… Is going to be constantly looking at to see like how can I find the loopholes or the interesting ways to like hook these rules together. If you have any un… Or any ambiguous language, players will absolutely figure out how to exploit that. There was this idea among a certain type of player that if a game can be broken, it's like your moral imperative to break the game. So, like by finding those loopholes. So you'll have players who figure out how to use your rules to break the game in such a way that they no longer have fun, and then they will yell at you because it is your fault. It is your fault for allowing…

[Dan] Yeah. Brandon…

[James] Them to poke themselves in the eye. So you have to come to it with that idea.

[Dan] Brandon is not on these episodes with us, but he's absolutely that kind of player as well. Pure power gamer, rules lawyer, break the game.

[James] I'm shocked.

 

[Dan] Anyway, let's take a break real quick.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] For our game of the week from Cass.

[Cassandra] The game of the week is Disco Elysium. Where it kind of opens with you as an amnesiac, trying to put everything together. It's a really weird, dark world. But the reason that I wanted to draw attention to it is it has this really cool mechanic called the Thought Cabinet. The Thought Cabinet is basically, like, you can put points in different thoughts, like feminism, your sense of drama. That changes how your conversations go. That one itself is really interesting. Something I've never seen before. But depending on how you build your Thought Cabinet, it can also mean that when the various parts of your brain argue with each other, and we've all had that, like, different sides of us, like, maybe this idea is better and that idea is better. If one side of your brain is weighted very heavily in, let's say drama, you will absolutely think that drama is the root whether you like it or not. It should feel punishing, but it always ends up with you kind of going, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense. I am a drama queen."

[Dan] That's great.

 

[James] I love that. So, actually, brains is a perfect segue, because, Cass, we were talking in preparation for this about sort of the different types of gamers. I'm curious your thoughts on that?

[Cassandra] I think there are a whole variety of them, but one thing that was really interesting, a piece of knowledge that was passed on to me by the manager was talking to me about the robot thing, in fact, is, with video games, there are very often three types of players. The first type of player is the kind of person who just wants to [garbled see for twitch?] who wants to get to the action. He wants to mess around and not paying any attention to the plot. It's easy to think that these kinds of players don't care about story, except they do. So you have to build games or somebody who only wants a surface level story can look at it and go, "Okay. I understand the narrative. I am going to blow shit up." The second type of player, I think, is the one that most of us who like reading falling to. We want to do the action bits, we want to push the game along, but we're interested in a story. We are not necessarily interested in the nitty gritty like why one faction dislikes another, but we want to know that there's two factions that hate each other. The last category of players, I think, is very easily described by let's say Bloodborne's fan base, where you have people looking at one or two lines from a piece of armor and you go to the subReddit and it's 600 pages of people arguing how those two lines correlate to a thing that is solved five seconds ago before a certain boss. Yet, because… All of these three types of players need to be catered for in every game, because if you don't, one of them will complain and there will be a problem with a capital P.

[James] Yeah. Well, I also think it's important just to think about when you're crafting your tools… So, like, whether it's for computer games or for especially for tabletop role-playing games, making the tools simpler makes it easier for players to come up with cool ideas using them. It's often really tempting for you as the game designer to build out these big Byzantine systems. But it can also be just as much fun to just create something simple and allow the players to figure out all the different ways that they can use that to tell different stories.

[Dan] Yeah. So, we've been talking a lot about rules like core game mechanics, but a lot of the time when you are writing an adventure or a… In a campaign supplement, you get to add new rules to it. I recently had the chance to run a group through a Pathfinder campaign that starts with a circus. It was really fun, because at the beginning, they just present, these are the rules of the circus, you have whatever other adventures you get into as well, but you still have to have this circus. Then, as you travel around from town to town, you need to be as entertaining as possible, because that's how you support yourselves. It just presented some very simple rules for how to measure the entertainment value of your circus. Then the players just have this sandbox to run around in and say, "Oh, well, based on how these mechanics work, I can come up with a new act or we can get a new animal or something exciting that way." It was a lot of fun.

[Howard] In the Gods of Vaeron Typecast RPG campaign, I think it was late 2019 when one of the game mechanics we adopted was, okay, if combat isn't over in three rounds, we've done something wrong. That's… Dan, you reminded me of that with the whole the circus has to be entertaining. We have an audience here and we are principally storytellers. If we are grinding around the table rolling dice for an hour in order to resolve something that's really only about 45 seconds of story, we've failed our audience. So Dan had to create behind the curtain game mechanics and level balancing that ensured that these encounters would go quickly.

[James] Well, that's… That raises the point that it's important to think about the cool factor when you're introducing a new item or a new ability or something. What's going to make it fun at the table? A +1 bonus to hit is like maybe useful, and maybe a certain type of player is excited about that, but it doesn't feel like anything in the story. Whereas something like a… In the Starfinder campaign I'm running, we decided that for all sonic weapons, you have to choose what song you're blasting people with. So you're shooting them with a dubstep cannon or Total Eclipse of the Heart or whatever. Suddenly, that turns combat into sort of an improv comedy routine. Right? So giving people that option…

[Mary Robinette] We… Years ago, at the first writing retreat, Writing Excuses retreat, which was at my parent's house, we came up with croquet LARP as a game. You… It was this giant… Two giant teams of croquet players. You could multi class by switching the head on your mallet with the handle on your mallet. Each color represented a different class. But in order to activate the power that came with whatever class you had, whether it was like wizard could teleport, thieves could sneak through barriers, you had to shout your power word or something like that. So, like, my dad, who was playing with us, every time he… For people who have not met my dad, he looks like Doc Brown but southern. He was playing a wizard. So any time he needed to teleport, he would point a finger up in the air and go, "Gadzooks!"

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It was… That little bit of fun added to it. It wasn't just, "Oh, you get to do this thing." It's that you had to do something fun and silly. Everybody got to pick their own power word. Like someone else was like, "Aaooga!"

[Dan] Now, speaking of which, I do need to point out, since we talked about different types of players, we all learned… I think even Mary Robinette was surprised at this… That her father was totally the power gamer rule breaker type.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, my goodness.

[Dan] In ways we did not expect. It destroyed the game. It was delightful. But…

[Mary Robinette] It was… He is basically 12. Or eight.

[Cassandra] What I think all of this kind of points out is that there's so much importance in keeping the rules and mechanics incredibly simple and incredibly elegant. Because if you have something that is unnecessarily complex, you can't really have opportunities like this. People spend too much time learning about rules as opposed to having fun. Which, I guess, depending on the [setting?] is not terrible. But, there's a place and time for everything. What do you think, James?

[James] Yeah. I agree completely. But I also… I'm sort of like a rules-light guy by nature. But I also think it's important, coming from a game like Pathfinder and Starfinder, where those are very quote unquote crunchy games, for there's a lot of rules and a lot of carefully balanced mechanics. So if somebody's listening to this and going, "Yeah, but how do I write for those?" I think one of the easiest things you can do is when you're creating new rules, you can balance them by anchoring them to elements already in the game. So if you know that a level 2 gun does 2D6 damage and costs 50 credits, then you know that a different level 2 item that you come up with is probably somewhere in that ballpark. Probably does about that much damage, etc. You can also create new items or new abilities by sort of looking at the rules, learning them really well, and then saying what are the holes here? Not necessarily intentional ones, like the fighter doesn't have magic. Like, that's an intentional hole. But if there's a fire wizard ability and an ice wizard ability, you can… Maybe you say, "Well, what about an acid wizard or an electricity wizard, that kind of thing?" Finding thematic or mechanical holes in a given rule set can allow you to create new things that players will be excited about. We should probably wrap it up there, since we're a little bit over time.

 

[James] Your homework this week is to do exactly that. Pick a game you're familiar with and design three new rules elements for it. So that could be new cards for Magic: The Gathering, new feats or character abilities for a tabletop role-playing game. Even, like, a new power up for Super Mario. Try to think through all the ways that your ideas could be fun. Then try to think of all the ways that a player could use them to totally break the game.

[Dan] Awesome. That sounds like great homework. I look forward to crazy new rules being devised. This is Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/05/16/16-20-branching-narratives/

 

Key Points: Branching is what separates role-playing games from traditional stories, by letting players make choices. Like choose-your-own-adventure games. It's easy to let possibilities multiply out of control, so you need to plan the endings and the pruning. Make sure you know the intersections or checkpoints that keep the story on track. Let the players make meaningful choices. Tie the big beats (story, character, or whatever) to the checkpoints where the paths converge. If you put something important on one path, make sure other paths have something of equal value. How do you make branches fun? One trick is branches within branches. Another is responses by NPCs that help make them persons, not just information sources. Use conditionals and callbacks to show that choices make a difference, that they have consequences and ramifications. Avoid hat economies, choices need to matter. The best reward is consequences. Leave room for the players to make interpretations. Objectives or item collection can give an illusion of control, an apparent freedom of choice, while still pointing the players in the direction you want the story to go. Consider using access as a consequence to help control the direction of the narrative.

 

[Season 16, Episode 20]

 

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[James] Branching Narratives.

[Dan] 15 minutes long.

[Cassandra] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[James] I'm James.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Cassandra] I'm Cassandra.

[Howard] And I want to go left.

[Laughter]

 

[Dan] So, we're talking about branching narratives this week, which is a big part of the player choice we were talking about last time. Cass, where do we start with branching narratives?

[Cassandra] Branching narratives is, I think, over the years something I've learned to see as both almost a poem and a puzzle. It needs to be this elegant, very spare thing, but there's just so much thought that goes into it. It is really what differentiates a role-playing game from a traditional story, because branching allows the players to step into the narrative and make their own choices. Kind of like those old classic choose-your-own-adventure games. But every time you give a player a choice, you're kind of splitting off into two different realities. On paper, this doesn't sound too bad. Life is an infinite split of possibilities, after all, but if you're writing a game, you will not have a life if you follow that momentum. So every turn and every binary decision, these can quickly multiply out of control. As such, you need to have certain things figured out. Such as the ending where you plan to have people go, any early failures, and you need to kind of prune it, to make sure it fits the kind of format that feels both dynamic and elegant, and is still leading a player towards the information you need them to go. But if you do too much of it, players will notice that they're being… Well, you're leading them along. Sorry. James?

[James] No, like, I'm with you. I think, like what you said about pruning branches, you always need to be bending those branches back toward the main story you want to tell. You want to have things divide, but you want to think of it like links in a chain potentially. Where characters make a choice, and their paths diverge, and you can totally see the hand gestures I'm making, because podcasts are a very visual medium…

[Chuckles]

[James] But you diverge and then you bend those choices so they come back towards an intersection that I think of as like checkpoints that let you keep the story on track. So, for instance, if you give the players the choice of talking to the witch or talking to the Dragon, they can head off in those different directions, but you know, as the writer, that whatever they do in those two interactions, they're still going to get request to go find Bigfoot. So then both of those paths will converge again on Bigfoot's lair. So now, suddenly, you've branched apart, people got to make a meaningful choice, but now they're back headed towards the direction you want to tell.

[Howard] Yeah. For my own part, it's been helpful… I love the term pruning that you used, Cass, because there are… At times, you have to prune and remove possible choices, just in order to keep yourself sane. Other times, what you are pruning is choices that are no longer available because of a choice that the player has made. Then there's the decision, like with Bigfoot's cave, this is the thing I'm not going to prune no matter what gets cut or chosen elsewhere, this piece of the tree remains because I need it. Often it's helpful when outlining these things to make decisions ahead of time as to which pieces you just can't prune and which pieces you will be removing, you'll be swapping out, or, if they decided to kill off an NPC versus talking to them, you have the option to file the serial numbers off of that NPC and have them show up elsewhere, so the dialogue you've written, the clothing you've designed, whatever, those assets can be reused.

 

[Dan] One thing that I want to throw out really quick as a resource, if… It was very hard for me initially to get my head around how to write a branching narrative like this, and specifically how to outline one. Until I realized that there are several websites that have mapped the full flowchart of all of the original choose-your-own-adventure books. You can Google those…

[What!]

[Dan] And they're these beautiful little just kind of line drawing look like a subway map kind of things. They really help you to wrap your head around this idea of how the story can branch apart and then checkpoint back together. It kind of helps visualize it in a way that helped me a lot.

[Cassandra] I did not know that existed.

[Mary Robinette] I'm just like the effort it was taking me to not Google that right now is…

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] I want you to appreciate that I am not going down that branching narrative path.

[Howard] Well, I did Google it because I'm going to be told to include it in the liner notes.

 

[James] Well, I think one trick that's important to remember for that is to, in the story you're telling, tie the big story beats or big character beats or whatever that you want to make sure are in there, you want to tie those to your checkpoints. So you want to make sure that if there's a crucial piece of character development, it doesn't happen on just one branch, because you want to make sure that… To tell a successful story, if you know you have to hit certain key plot points, you have to make sure that they're at those points where all the paths sort of re-converge or else you need to do it separately in each of the paths. But doing it multiple times is expensive.

[Cassandra] I would also say that if you're insistent on let's say not sharing a narrative beat or like something important to the story at a certain checkpoint and, like, you want to keep it exclusive for one node, the other node should have information of equal value and consequence. Players don't necessarily mind it if they miss something if they get something else in return.

[James] Yeah.

 

[Dan] Okay. Let's pause here for our game of the week, which I believe is coming from Howard today.

[Howard] It is. Several years ago, I decided that I wanted to create a Schlock Mercenary role-playing game. It's something that I'd been asked about for a decade and a half until that point. So I sat down with Alan Bahr and we created the Planet Mercenary role-playing game. We looked at the possibilities of licensing a game engine from someone else or homebrewing our own. Ended up going with homebrewing. Because one of the things that I wanted to be able to do is create game mechanics that gave characters… Gave characters? That gave players the tools they needed to tell a story in the spirit of the Schlock Mercenary comic space opera. I wanted it to be funny. So we created the Mayhem deck and a whole bunch of fun materials so that… Our goal was I want you to be able, with your friends, to play a Schlock Mercenary game and have it feel like I'm there telling jokes with you. That was a pretty high bar to clear. I feel like we cleared it. Of course, I'm the authoritative source here.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Alan recently with… He went on to form Gallant Knight games and has done lots of role-playing game design since, has released the Tiny Planet Mercenary rules set which uses many of the same tools that we created, but is in the… It's a much smaller format. So there's Planet Mercenary and Tiny Planet Mercenary which are both tabletop role-playing games in the Schlock Mercenary setting.

[Mary Robinette] Isn't it pronounced [squeaky voice] tiny planet mercenary?

[Laughter]

[Howard] Now it is. I think Alan might request that soundbite from us.

[Laughter]

 

[James] All right. Thanks, Howard. So, I want to know, Cass, how do you make these narrative chains fun? How do you make them fun and interesting?

[Cassandra] Oh, there are a lot of different techniques. You… Once you know the scope of what you're working with and how much you can play around with those dimensions, there are a bunch of weird little tricks. The simplest one being having branches within branches. When you're talking to the witch, who will eventually lead you on towards Bigfoot, there could be a whole subsection where you kind of coax her into discussing who she is, why is she there, and that can be a whole thing. Or… This is something that shows up in one of the games that I wrote that unfortunately fell through because AAA is full of games that die without anyone ever knowing its name.

[Laughter]

[Cassondra] I had a character there with prosthetic limbs, and there was always this option where you could ask him, "Hey, why do you have a prosthetic limb?" And he would give you progressively sillier and sillier answers constantly. I think for about 50 or 60 loops. Finally, as you get to the end of it, he just goes, "Really, this is none of your business, snoop," and just shuts off that entire dialogue chain, stopping you from repeating that whole thing again. Little tricks like that show up very often in video games to really build up a sense of this is a real person versus just an NPC that is regurgitating information for its use. Has anyone else seen like interesting things in branching narrative design?

 

[Mary Robinette] I have, but I actually wanted to pause to ask a question that I should have asked last episode. You used the phrase AAA games and I realized I have no… I can extrapolate what that means, but I don't actually know.

[Cassandra] Oh, basically games by companies like Ubisoft, Warner Bros., Bioware, things that tend to involve 100, 200, 300, or, in Ubisoft case, several thousand people in its production. So, usually, really, really high budgets, of a number that absolutely terrifies the crap out of me.

[Mary Robinette] Great. So it's a metaphor that is related to baseball, not to automobile repair?

[Chuckles]

[Cassandra] Yes?

[Or batteries]

[Dan] AAA games are the ones that can help you get your car off the highway.

[Howard] All games are physics simulations.

 

[James] So, having never worked on a AAA game, I want to throw out something that you can do that is cheap, and it doesn't require a team of a thousand people, which is conditionals and callbacks can be a really great way to make things feel significant. What I mean by that is when the players make a choice, just putting some sort of little tag or reminder in their so that later on in the game, something can be different depending on their choice. So if you insult the witch and the first scene, when you took that branch, just having something towards the end of the game where you run into the witch again and she goes… She clearly dislikes you because she remembers that you said that thing. That can be one line of dialogue, but it suddenly makes the player feel like, "Oh, this is a real world with real consequences. Because a choice I made a long time ago is continuing to have ramifications." It wasn't superexpensive. It didn't lead to a whole new branch. It was just one thing that was tweaked. Similarly, if somebody picks up a different item or gains a different ability or even just has like a shifted NPC attitude, anything you can do that calls back to a decision a player made earlier feels like a reward, even if they didn't get anything. Because you're reminding them, like, "Hey, we're paying attention to what you're doing. Your choices matter."

[Howard] Yeah. One of the things that you see a lot in big MMORPG titles is what my friend Bob calls a hat economy. Which is, you can spend money to get hats, to get costumes, to get outfits, to get whatever. These have no bearing on the story. They're just this is how I want my character to look, and I have spent the money, so now I have a new costume. When you present a choice to a character, what they get needs to be more than just a hat. It can't just be, oh, I beat the game wearing red clothing. Oh, I beat the game wearing blue clothing. The choice has to matter.

[Cassandra] The best reward is always consequences. I am curious if anyone else has tips and tricks and things they've learned from writing branching narratives?

[Mary Robinette] When I was working on… I did the dialogue for Hidden Path, and it was a game called Brass Tactics which is in VR. The thing for me that was interesting about it, because it was really the first time that I had attempted to do this, was that I needed to be able to really create space for the player in that they could interpret one of the lines of dialogue that the NPC was delivering to them, that they could interpret it in multiple different ways depending on their own emotional state in that moment. Trying to figure out how to sculpt things that felt like they were… That inherently belonged to the character who was speaking them, knowing that an actor was going to imbue them with meaning, but also then leaving enough space. So, like, sometimes it would be something as simple as, "Oh, is that the choice you're making?" That leaves room for the character… For the listener, for the player, to think, "Wait. Does that mean that I should make this choice? Or are they trying to fake me out?" It's… That's all about what the player is bringing to it. But whereas saying, "I wouldn't make that choice if I were you," that is not leaving space for the character… For the player to bring their own interpretation to it.

[James] Yeah. Going back to something that Dan had said in the previous episode about incentivizing players to sort of go the directions you want them to go. I think it's important, you can use things like objectives or item collection or other requirements to kind of maintain control of the story while still allowing an apparent freedom of choice, that illusion of control. What I mean by that is, like, let's say you got players that need to steal the crown jewels from a castle vault. You want to make sure, like, you detailed the whole castle. That's the game. You want to make sure that people hit all those areas and don't just bypass it. So you could force them to go linearly, where you say, "Okay. Well, they'll go in through the tower window, the fight their way all the way down through the castle to the vault, and that way they'll hit everything along the way." But that's a very linear, railroad-y sort of approach. A thing you could do instead is give them multiple options for how they break into the castle. Maybe they sneak in through the moat, maybe they sneak in through the gate, maybe they go in through the tower. But either way, if they somehow managed to get to the vault without going through all the castle stages, then when they get there, they discover, oh, you still need to get the key which is up in the Queen's chamber. So they're going to have to hit all those same encounters you designed, just from the other direction as they go back up to the top. So you still sort of force them to go through all the things that… The challenges that you designed, but you've done it in a way that made them feel like it was their choice.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I was thinking, as you were talking, that access as a consequence is a way of controlling the direction of the narrative. Shadow Point Observatory, which I'll talk about later, is one of those where your reward for figuring something out is access to the next layer of the puzzle. It also feels like… They also managed to tie consequences to feeling, like, oh, no, I'm not going to get there. But you can… But there's multiple paths to get to that access point.

 

[Dan] This has been a really wonderful discussion, but I'm going to cut it off here. Thank you so much. We have some homework now. I believe it is Cass.

[Cassandra] Yes. I would like everyone to write their choose-your-own-adventure story. You can use any of the multitude of pre-tools that are available on the Internet right now, including Twine, [Inkle?], and probably a whole number of things that I don't know about, because there are a lot of indy engines out there. Just check out the websites and see what it's like to make your own story.

[Dan] Great. That sounds good. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses, now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2021/02/28/16-9-crossing-the-revenue-streams/

 

Key Points: Successful artists have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets, earning money from many different revenue streams. First. look at other ways to write fiction besides just selling your stories. E.g., sometimes a publisher will pitch a series to you. Look for ways to avoid the pigeonhole, get new audiences, and work with new publishers. Watch for anthologies, and write to a theme! Tie-in fiction can help. Gaming companies need fiction, too. Balance new skills and audience versus money, money, money. Try to learn something, to grow your audience or as a writer, when you take on new projects. Second, consider ways to make money from writing you have already done. T-shirts, coins, merchandise. In-universe artifacts. How much work do you have to do to make money off it, and how much profit is there in it? Consider Kickstarter. Keep looking for other opportunities.

 

[16, 9]

 

[Dan] This is Writing Excuses, Crossing Revenue Streams.

[Erin] 15 minutes long.

[Brandon] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're going to need more than one stream.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Dan] So, one of the things that I think is common to every successful artist that I know of is that they have lots of different eggs in lots of different baskets. They are earning money from a lot of different revenue streams. So we want to talk about that is the final class in Brandon's intensive course on career planning and business information. So, Brandon, take it away. What do people need to know about multiple revenue streams? Why is this an important part of an author's career?

[Brandon] So, you need to find a way to make money off of your writing. This is the… This is what you're going to have to do. This is what… If you want to go pro. You don't… You don't have to, but, if you're looking at this as a business, one of the things you should be looking at is, how can I make money at this? The obvious answer is sell a book. However, for at least most authors I know, once you sell a book, you want to go full-time, you probably should go full-time to make a living at your writing, but you probably can't earn enough off of that book to go full-time yet. Indeed, even if you're a newer aspiring writer who's selling short stories and things like that, or maybe you're… Maybe you're a longtime writer who selling short stories. You are going to need to find a way to make a living or at least you're going to want to find a way to make more money off of your stories. So, this is ways to make money with your writing that aren't necessarily the obvious ways of you write your book, you sell your book, you get money for it. We're going to talk about all sorts of other types of revenue streams you can have as a writer to keep yourself going during those maybe lean years.

[Dan] So, I told the story to Howard last week, but when I went years ago to my 20th high school reunion, they did the little games, like who has the most kids and who's done this and who traveled the farthest and all that kind of thing that you do at a reunion. The question who has held the most jobs since graduating high school, most people were on like four or five. Except for me, the professional author, and my friend who became a professional filmmaker. We both tied with 14. That's not even counting all the freelance work that I do. So artists really need to hustle to pay all those bills.

[Brandon] Yup. So one of the first things we want to talk about here is other ways to be writing stories that aren't maybe necessarily the write a book or you write a story, whatever you want to write, and sell it. There are job opportunities that are still writing fiction in the area you want to be in that you can get. I wanted to have Dan talk to us about it, because Dan had the experience of a series that was pitched by a publisher to him, right?

[Dan] Yeah. This is actually… Not a lot of people know this, but that's where Partials came from. The publisher came to me, two editors, Jordan Brown and [Ruta Remus] at HarperCollins. They had an idea for a really great kind of post-apocalyptic dystopia YA series, and were looking for an author who fitted. So they actually brought that idea to me. It was not something I had considered doing, because at the time, everything I had written was horror, but number one, I really welcomed the opportunity to jump into something very, very different as a way of making sure I didn't pigeonhole myself as the serial killer guy. For a number of reasons. That's not the identity I was looking for. But number two, this was a chance for me to build inroads to a brand-new audience I had not yet been reaching, to a brand-new publisher that I had never worked before, to do just a lot of new frontiers. I really saw it at the time as a brand-new revenue stream. Then, when that whole YA career kind of crumbled in let's say 2014, that's the same… I used that same strategy again, let's find a brand-new audience and build a brand-new revenue stream, which is how I got into middle grade.

[Brandon] This happens a lot with anthologies, also. People will ask you if you want to be a part of an anthology or it'll go around in the community that an anthology is being made on this topic and they're accepting proposals or submissions. Once you become part of the community, you can get… Watch some of these forums or these newsletters or these things like that. This comes into the networking that we talked about in a previous week. But anthologies can be a good way to make money off of your writing other than just I'm writing a story and submitting it, you can write to a theme.

[Dan] Yeah. Tie-in fiction has also been really helpful for me. My only Hugo nomination for prose… For a pros category has come from tie-in fiction. Now, this can be hard. I've got a friend who rights Star Trek novels, and I was kind of grilling him for how can I get into this, because I'm a huge Star Trek geek. He basically said you have to wait for one of the rest of us to die.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] So these established properties can be hard to break into. But what I have done is I've made some pretty good contacts with gaming companies. I've written for Privateer Press, I've written for several others. The one that I've just finished is a Kickstarter for a board game called Cult of the Deep. They came to me and they said, "Hey, we're coming out with this thing. It's horror. We want to have some fiction built so that we can use it as part of the Kickstarter. Will you write it for us?" So always being open for and looking for these opportunities to write other stuff has been super helpful to me.

[Erin] I think that...

[Dan] Go ahead.

[Erin] I think that's something… It's really interesting, because it's a trade-off. So I do a lot of freelance writing work, some game stuff, I've done some writing for, like, Paizo, and I write for Zombies, Run!, the running app. So, things here and there. But what's… The balance is figuring out what is adding to your skill as a writer or expanding your audience, and what is just like I like money, money is fun.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] So, whenever actually a project comes to me, I play Say No to This from Hamilton, and I… A picture of my freelance client is like the woman saying, "I should say no, but I will always say yes." But I've actually had to say no to projects, because they are far enough off from what I'm doing that I'm like, "I'm not going to learn anything, I'm not going to grow either my audience or as a writer," which, I think either one of those are a good reason to do extra stuff in addition to the money.

 

[Brandon] so, the second big thing I wanted to cover is ways to make money off of writing you've already done that isn't necessarily writing prose. The reason I want to talk about this is because Howard is a genius at this. He has had to make his whole career off of monetizing something that people aren't paying for. Howard, what can you tell us about how to monetize things that are free, or get extra money out of something that you're charging a little bit for?

[Laughter]

[Howard] I'm… Okay, I'm laughing because, on the one hand, yes, the comic is available for free and we have all kinds… I say the comic. Schlock Mercenary, available to be read by you, fair reader, at no charge at schlockmercenary.com. Yes, it's free, and we sell T-shirts and coins and whatever else, but most of the merchandise that… The most profitable merchandise we sell is book collections of the comic. So a lot of what I'm doing is getting enough people hooked on the book that they want to own it in print. But there are things that the comic created, there are things that it built, that lent themselves really well to being an independent revenue stream. So that even if you didn't want a print collection of the comic strip, maybe you wanted this other thing.

 

[Dan] Awesome. So, can you tell us about our book of the week, which happens, very cleverly, to tie right into this?

[Howard] Why, yes I can. We created The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries, which is a sort of coffee-table book of very, very bad advice. Malevolent canon. It's often referred to in-universe. I've been making fun of the Stephen Covey, the seven habits thing. Then, years and years and years ago, Stephen Covey started going after anybody who was saying the seven habits of anything. Basically saying, cease-and-desist, don't do that anymore. We went ahead and did a retcon in Schlock Mercenary and started referring to them as maxims, and there aren't seven of them, there are 70 of them. Then I realized, you know, I might be able to make stuff out of this. So we made some twelve-month calendars. Well, print calendars aren't as big a thing as they were 15 years ago. So, about five years ago, we released the Seventy Maxims book, which we created as an in-universe artifact in Schlock Mercenary, and we did it as part of the Schlock Mercenary role-playing game called Planet Mercenary, which is itself a whole nother thing that is not the comic. The Planet Mercenary role-playing game paid the bills all by itself for like two and a half years. That is the best thing we've ever made. I mean, except for the comic. Which makes this topical.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The fun thing about the Planet Mercenary book is that my whole approach to it from the word go was, boy, it sure would be nice if I could make money off of my world book notes that I have to refer to all the time. I still refer to the Planet Mercenary PDF all the time. But, the book of the week, The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries. It is a lovely little coffee-table book that's great for starting conversations about things you should never ever do, please.

[Chuckles]

 

[Dan] Now, one of the things that I love about this book, and specifically about the plan that caused its creation, is I've always compared your maxims to Star Trek's Rules of Acquisition for the Ferengi. You made a decision that they did not make, and maybe this ties back to our art versus business discussion. You were able, because you eventually ended that list and codified everything in it, you were able to publish it. Star Trek has never done that. They're missing out on a big chunk of change. They could have, at the height of DS 9, sold copies of the Rules of Acquisition, hand over fist. They decided not to, presumably because they liked the flexibility of not having codified the entire list. But these are the kind of decisions that, as creators, we need to make. Do I want to leave this open? Could I turn this into something that I can sell? It's a really smart tactic.

[Howard] Let me look at… Let me talk about Paramount's decision, there. Back in 2006, Robert Khoo, who was the business guy for Penny Arcade comics. He's the reason there's a Penny Arcade Expo. Robert Khoo said, "No single source should ever be more than 60% of the revenue that you take in." Now, he was talking to an audience of self-employed, self-publishing web cartoonists. He was talking about things like Google ads and books in print and T-shirts and whatever else. But the advice really stuck to me, stuck with me, and it was super salient three, four years ago, when Google ads cut me off, and I realized, "Oh, no. That's a big chunk of my revenue." That's… Well, it's about 10 or 15% of my overall revenue. That did not end my life. Because we had multiple revenue streams. So the operating principle here is don't have anything that you're just super dependent on. With Paramount, making a book of the Rules of Acquisition, the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition, would have meant devoting a writer to the process of compiling that and making it special and wonderful. Ultimately, it never would have generated more than chump change, if you will, compared to the business that they were in, which is making a TV show. So they made a business decision to leave… I mean, what would have been for me, hundreds of thousands of dollars, to leave that on the table. But hundreds of thousands of dollars, that's… That gets like four episodes shot.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Howard] It's not very significant. So the decision about revenue streams hinges, for me, heavily in part on how much work do I need to do in order to make money off of this, and how much profit is there in the thing that I'm making. I love books, because they don't cost a lot to make, if I don't factor all of the time involved in writing them, but we can sell them… The profit margin is large on the physical merchandise. But for a print-on-demand T-shirt, the margin is very small. If my limited market of people is all busy buying print-on-demand T-shirts, I'm actually not making as much money as I would be if I could convince them all to buy copies of The Seventy Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries.

 

[Brandon] One of the things…

[Dan] [inaudible… Should all…]

[Brandon] That's interesting here to talk about is this idea that there are, once you are lucky enough to be getting fans and keeping them, there are people among them who want to give you more money then… They want to support your work. I remember when this first began with me. I actually got an email from someone who said, "Hey, can I just send you a bunch of money? I happen to just be very well-off and I want to just send you a tip." I'm like, "Really? You just are offering to send me money?" People like to support artists. So, having some of these extra products that you can sell is a good way to go. It does require time. Dan was the first writer I knew personally who made T-shirts. I know that T-shirts are… T-shirts are one of the harder things to do because you have to carry them in multiple sizes and they are just a… There's a saturated market of cool nerd T-shirts out there. So making a dent and being… Selling those is hard. But they are a nice… Like, one thing that we need that Paramount… Paramount needs it on a different scale. We need multiple revenue streams, in that if something collapses, we aren't destroyed by. When Borders went out of business, this was a big deal. Right? It's possible that other sources like that will just banish. So, even if T-shirts are a small amount of your business, knowing that you have that extra revenue stream can be very comforting. About three years ago, maybe, Howard came to me and I was talking about the leatherbounds that we do. The leatherbounds are one of the things I wanted to bring up here. I am in a privileged position in that I have a big enough audience to support a luxury product like this. I was talking about it, and Howard said, "Brandon, you need to do a Kickstarter on these." I'm like, "Why?" He's like, "Oh, Kickstarter has a lot more tools you can use. You can generate a lot more interest by offering rewards to people. Trust me, do a Kickstarter." I had never done one before. I went to my team and said, "Howard says we should do a Kickstarter, and Howard is the smartest person I know about this sort of stuff. So let's do a Kickstarter." Last summer we made almost $8 million on a Kickstarter.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] And…

[Howard] I got a free book.

[Brandon] And Howard got a free book. This… It was true. It was bigger than the money we made… The peace of mind knowing that we could now self-publishing any of my books if the publishing industry went belly up or something happened at Tor. That piece of mind is enormous, knowing that I have another way to reach my fans. Now, granted, it's through someone else's platform. That is scary. The fact that if Kickstarter went away, I can't sell them on my website as effectively as I can through Kickstarter. But it gives me someone other than Amazon, because the rest of my life is controlled by Amazon. 80% of my books are sold through this one store that if Jeff Bezos decides he doesn't like me and says, "Pull Brandon's books," then my career collapses. Well, not anymore, because I have learned how to sell my books through Kickstarter if I need to because of Howard.

[Dan] Fantastic. Good job, Howard. Yeah. So, this has been a really good discussion. I hope that what our audience takes away from this more than anything else is that you need to be looking for these other opportunities. Regardless of what those might be, and regardless of how big they are. I could never in my wildest dreams make $8 million self-publishing something the way Brandon does, but I do have lots of other work that I do, and lots of other little streams of revenue. So, even the little stuff helps and is valuable. You need to look for opportunities to do that. So, thank you very much for listening to this episode.

 

[Dan] Let's have our final piece of homework from Howard.

[Howard] Okay. I want you to look at… Identify the places where you are getting money. They may be checks from a publisher, they may be checks from Amazon, they might be… I don't know where you are getting money from. But identify each of those as a revenue stream. Then identify… Write it down… What is the activity that you are performing that is generating that revenue. If it's ad revenue on your website, then the activity is not necessarily writing, it's publishing things to the web. So, establish a framework for where the money is currently coming from. Now, start looking at the ideas, the concepts, the conceits, the whatever that are in your work that could be turned into other things that might make you money. Maybe it's a T-shirt, maybe it's a commemorative Christmas ornament. Maybe it's a… Maybe it's a flag that goes on the back of a pickup truck. I don't know. But make a list of the possible places that the ideas, the concepts, the conceits in your work could be turned into other merchandise.

[Dan] Fantastic. All right. Well, this has been Writing Excuses. You are out of excuses. Now go write.

 

 

From https://writingexcuses.com/2019/12/22/14-51-a-farewell-to-worldbuilding/

 

Key Points: Wrapping up the year of worldbuilding, what are some good examples? Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Annihilation. Amberlough. The One Ring role-playing game. Larry Niven's Known Space. Elder Scrolls Online Lore Master, Lawrence Schick, and lore from an unreliable narrator. What about pet peeves? Star Trek: Discovery breaking the worldbuilding with new technology without thinking about ramifications. People who have pet peeves about worldbuilding about the wrong things. Let the worldbuilding flow from the story, don't hit us over the head with it. People who don't think about interconnectedness and ramifications. Big mistakes in worldbuilding? Forgetting bicycles! Seven lady astronauts, but only six names.

 

[Mary Robinette] Season 14, Episode 51. 

[Brandon] This is Writing Excuses, A Farewell to Worldbuilding.

[Mary Robinette] 15 minutes long.

[Dan] Because you're in a hurry.

[Howard] And we're not that smart.

[Brandon] I'm Brandon.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

 

[Brandon] It is the end of another year. You are all done worldbuilding, and never have to do it again.

[Yay!]

[Ha ha ha]

[Dan] It's about time.

[Laughter]

[Brandon] No, this is the episode… we're just kind of wrap things up with a bow on it and talk about anything we think we might have missed. My first question, though, to you will be, "What are your favorite examples of worldbuilding through all pieces of media?" Is there just anything that you really love? Something you saw or read recently that you thought had fantastic worldbuilding? I'll go ahead and start. We're about a year out from it now, but when we were recording, we were recording this quite ahead of time. A few months ago, I saw the Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. I loved it. It is one of my favorite movies of all time already. Part of it was the just fantastic use of worldbuilding. You would think a cross-dimension plot where you have to deal with the fact that there are alternate realities… I've tried to write these, they're very hard… Would be difficult. You would think that introducing multiple brand-new characters would be difficult. They just knocked it out of the park. They used the things that visual mediums can use that really make me annoyed and mad, because I can't do it.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] To have a really distinctive… Yeah, I'm looking at Howard. A really distinctive visual style that accentuates your worldbuilding in interesting ways. If you haven't seen the movie…

[Howard] Having the opportunity to say this where I can actually go on the record and say this… To this point, pre-Spider-Verse, Marvel and many other companies have shown us what a super hero movie could be. Marvel finally came around and showed us what a comic book movie could be.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] They used tools that we've seen them touch on before.

[Brandon] The old Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it.

[Howard] Ang Lee Hulk tried to do it. The… 24 actually flirted with it a little bit. The fact that the gradients around a flashlight used halftone beads to suggest that the flashlight was itself shining on a cob…

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Howard] I got chills all the way through.

[Brandon] It was amazing.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] The way they used sound effects with the visual… Writing out the words, which you would think would be cheesy. You would think it would be like the old Batman TV show. It wasn't at any moment cheesy. It accentuated the story in really fascinating ways. Great worldbuilding.

 

[Dan] That's awesome. One of my favorites from this year was the movie Annihilation. I've not read the VanderMeer book that it's based on. But what really struck for me, what really hit home and clicked, was the way that the worldbuilding of the Shimmer… The premise is that there is this weird alien effect called the Shimmer. People go into it and they get lost. So this group of women scientists go in, and they… The world they encounter is so unique and complete unto itself, yet also perfectly engineered to expose and challenge all of the problems that they have as characters. I have never seen such a brilliant marriage of character arc and world as in the movie Annihilation. It's really just so well done.

 

[Mary Robinette] I talk about this book a fair bit, which is Lara Elena Donnelly's Amberlough. The worldbuilding that she's done in that, it just… It feels like a real historical place. It's small details. Like, the stuff that she does with gender, there are young women who dress in suits and they're called Razors. They're called Razors because they shave their heads. The cigarettes are… They're not called fags, they're called straights. Just small touches. It's so good. She swears she didn't do that one on purpose. I'm like, "You're lying to me."

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's just small things all the way through. A marriage of three people is called an old marriage. Because it's in an older style. It… These lovely things. Because it also normalizes it in a different way. It's just… Oh, it's such graceful details kind of all the way through. Multiple cultures with… She uses language and sentence structure to communicate that. It's so good.

 

[Dan] I'm actually going to mention another one on a totally different angle here. This year, I encountered a role-playing game called The One Ring. Which is obviously based on Lord of the Rings. So it's not that it created its world, but it translated Tolkien's world, Tolkien's Middle Earth into the mechanics of the game beautifully. Like, the way that Tolkien's book… Your ability to have or instill hope is even more important than your ability to kill a monster. I've never seen that done in a game. The One Ring captures it just flawlessly.

 

[Howard] I've got two examples. One of them is Larry Niven's Known Space. Which was my introduction to multi-book sci-fi worldbuilding. I'd read Lord of the Rings prior to that. But this was the first time I'd seen it in science fiction and the reason I love it is that it was used for short story after short story. It started to feel like home. Then, as an adult, I picked up a collection from Niven, and one of the things that was in there was an outline for a novel that totally destroys Known Space and says, "I'm done with it." Because he, and I think, Jerry Pournelle had talked about how many holes there were in his worldbuilding, and he just wanted to burn the whole thing down. He had this outline and then came up with the idea for Ringworld and put Ringworld in Known Space. His publisher said, "Ringworld's doing really well. You're not allowed to burn anything down, my friend."

[Chuckles]

[Howard] I love that. Because he took a thing which, yeah, the more I look at it, the more broken it is. It's broken in a lot of ways. And yet… For telling the stories that he wanted to tell, it continues to work. The other example, Elder Scrolls Online has a… Had a lore master, Lawrence Schick, whose job it was to take all of the Bethesda games, all of the Bethesda Elder Scrolls games and have a consistent lore within this MMO. The first thing he discovered is you guys have not been consistent. So he made one ironclad rule, which is, every single piece of lore we present to players is presented from the perspective of someone in-world who is an unreliable narrator. That is the only possible out that we have for this mess. What's fun is that as a writer, I can see this, as I consume the in-game lore and I love it. He just retired from doing Elder Scrolls Online. Which I assume means they have somebody waiting in the wings to do their lore. That is the sort of job which, if I were not currently making a living on my own IP, I would love.

 

[Brandon] Let's stop and do a book of the week. Dan, you're going to tell us about…

[Dan] Yeah. I want to tell you about Sakura: Intellectual Property. This… I'm going to talk a little bit more about the story behind this. I'm going to do it very quickly, don't worry. A very good friend of mine named Zach Hill passed away a couple years ago. Out of the blue, he was about 35 years old. Had a heart attack at work, no one saw it coming. He's a very good author. He was about halfway through this cyberpunk book called Sakura about a heavy metal rockstar android who gets hacked and turned into an assassin. So a couple of other local authors who are also good friends of his picked up the banner, finished that book, and it's out now. You can read it. 100% of the proceeds go to Zack's widow. None of it goes to the other people that helped finish the project and publish the book. It is a really cool cyberpunk. She is a heavy metal singer, and every chapter begins with a playlist where they will list three, four, five heavy metal songs that pertain in some emotional way to the chapter. It's really fun and very cool, and like I said, for a good cause and a good guy.

 

[Brandon] All right. So, back side of this podcast. Any worldbuilding pet peeves you have? That we haven't had a chance… Oh, Dan's…

[Dan] [laughter] Let's talk about Star Trek.

[Brandon] Okay.

[Dan] No.

[Mary Robinette] [laughter] And the angry letters begin immediately.

[Dan] Yeah. So. I mean, I don't want to turn this into a gigantic rant about Star Trek: Discovery, but I'm going to turn it into a small rant about Star Trek: Discovery.

[Laughter]

[Howard] I don't want to, but…

[Dan] But I also very much want to.

[Mary Robinette] [chuckles]

[Dan] One of the issues that Star Trek started running into as soon as it was kind of resurrected by the Abrams movies and then again for Star Trek: Discovery is the current creators, the current bearers of the flag, are so obsessed with the idea of Star Trek's past, and yet they continue to put in technologies that break the worldbuilding into a thousand billion pieces. There's no way to fix those. Someone like JJ Abrams, that is not what he is concerned about. He is trying to tell a very cool story. Continuity is a secondary, if not tertiary, concern. But things like in Star Trek: Discovery, which is not Abrams at all, it's CBS, they have a drive that will basically let a starship teleport across the galaxy. That breaks the world so hard. It's very hard… I, even if you ignore the rest of the series and you're looking only at Star Trek: Discovery by itself, that technology breaks everything. They do not consider it, and they do not deal with the ramifications. I would be fascinated by a story that took the I can teleport anywhere in the universe technology and actually treated it like a real thing. They just use it as an excuse to go wherever they want to go. So… [Aaargh!]

 

[Brandon] So, my pet peeve is kind of along similar lines in that I feel like people who have pet peeves about worldbuilding have pet peeves about the wrong things.

[Chuckles]

[Brandon] You have a pet peeve about the right sort of thing.

[Dan] Oh, thank you. Thank you for that caveat.

[Brandon] When people complain about worldbuilding that was done intentionally and is in service of the story. My big example from this season is World of Hats. It is a legit complaint that taking a planet and making it a monoculture is, in some ways, bad worldbuilding. But it was good worldbuilding for the stories they wanted to tell in the given episodes of Star Trek that that trope came from. Obviously, there are things to consider about this and stuff like that. But when someone complains about Star Wars and says, "Oh, it has a nice planet in the desert planet and a this planet… That's obviously just terrible worldbuilding." I say, "That is really good worldbuilding for Star Wars. That is what they're trying to do."

[Dan] It fulfilled the purpose that they are trying to get across.

[Brandon] It's not lazy, it's not bad, it is simply the type of storytelling that they want to do. Anytime we start saying… Giving a value judgment that this type of worldbuilding is great, and this type of worldbuilding should never be used… I mean, all you're doing is locking cool tools in a closet and saying, "No, you can't touch these. You can't use that circular saw anymore. Because we've decided that that one is good for no project whatsoever." So, that's my pet peeve.

[Mary Robinette] [garbled]

[Howard] That circular saw is in the closet because of the number of fingers it's maimed. It has nothing to do with its use. Well. It has everything to do with how people use it…

[Laughter]

[Howard] It has nothing to do with how useful it is.

 

[Howard] Boy, pet peeves?

[Brandon] You aren't required to have one. You can just be…

[Dan] I can just keep talking about Star Trek if you want.

[Howard] We've gathered that.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Fundamentally, for me, I want the worldbuilding to flow from the story. A movie trailer that begins with, "In a world…" That's okay. Because you've got two minutes to tell me… Movie trailer. But when your movie begins, "In a world…" I'm sad. I just let it… Let me discover it. Let me discover it. I think part of this is that Hollywood hadn't figured it out yet. They've got better. They've realized that people who come to these movies want to have that experience. But it's still… Every time it happens, it just makes me so sad.

[Brandon] You know what I think it is? This is just me guessing, but I think a lot of the stories that start with these things in the movies, it's because some studio exec got the movie and said, "I don't understand this," or "The audience will not understand this. Add a voiceover at the beginning that explains the entire story and maybe a little animatic or something like this in order to explain what our movie is, because everyone's going to be lost." Almost always those ruin it.

[Howard] So, in translating my pet peeve… You're mapping my pet peeve onto rich dude missing clues ruins things for other people. You're not wrong.

 

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. No, that is a… I have a pet peeve about that just outside of stories. So, for me, it's when people don't think about the interconnectedness of stuff. I get so annoyed when there is a piece of technology that shows up in one place and has no ramifications on anything else. Or when a character has knowledge… Like Hunger Games. This is not technology, but it was… I just couldn't get past it. The… So, first of all, there's the economics of Hunger Games which makes no sense at all. But the other thing was that she has all of this knowledge of botanical things and plants and things. Then she gets transported across the country, and all of it applies to this entirely new ecosystem. I'm like, "No, that's not how that works. That's not how that works, and also, blackberries don't grow on bushes, they grow on brambles." But I'm fine…

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I totally have no problems.

 

[Brandon] There's an old cover from the silver age of comic books where it's a young Batman and young Superman as kids…

[Oh, my gosh. Laughter.]

[Brandon] Looking at Batman's… Superman's Time Machine thing, where he's showing and saying, "Hey, look in the future, I'll become Superman and you'll become Batman and we'll be best friends." Every person who looks at that cover says, "You know what would be a good use for being able to look in the future at your friend's future is to tell him his parents get murdered in a little while in an alleyway. Maybe you could use it to solve crimes, Superman. Instead of saying look, we're going to be best buddies."

 

[Brandon] All right. We have ranted enough. Last question. Any big mistakes you've made in worldbuilding in a story that you would do differently now if you could change it.

[Dan] Okay. So. In the Partials universe, I wrote the entire thing and I did all this stuff. How are they going to get electricity to power their stuff? Are they going to be able to use cars? What are they going to have to do? The… one time that I really need them to get a generator started after the gas has already gelled… After the book was published, and I'd come up with all these different transportation workarounds, somebody said, "Why don't they ever ride bikes?"

[Laughter]

[Dan] So, yeah, I kind of forgot the really easy, ever present transportation system that does not require animal power or electricity or gas.

[Brandon] I told you before that I put bikes into the last Steelheart book specifically because you had had that frustration when you had published. I'm like, "Oh, I could put them in."

[Dan] I can do it now. [Garbled]

[Howard] This bike rider's for you, Dan.

[Brandon] There's a scene where they ride bicycles specifically because I heard you complaining that you hadn't managed to do that. I'm like, "Wow, thanks for failing, Dan, so that I won't." Anything else you guys got?

 

[Mary Robinette I can tell you a continuity error.

[Brandon] Oh, let's hear it.

[Mary Robinette] I told you about this before.

[Brandon] Oh, yeah. It's great.

[Mary Robinette] This is… So, this is one of those things where you do all of the re… You think it through and still you manage to make a mistake. It gets past your editor, your proofreaders, your beta readers. It gets past apparently all of my fans up to this point. Welcome to my world.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] In the Lady Astronaut book, I talk about the seven original astronauts. The Artemis Seven. I thought about that. There's seven men, and then we have the seven women astronauts to match the seven men. So I'm working on the new book, and I needed to have all seven women there. I'm writing down the names, and I can only come up with six of them.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] There are only six women.

[Brandon] Somehow we all missed it. I hadn't…

[Mary Robinette] [garbled] completely.

[Dan] Oh, wow.

[Brandon] They're  called… You mentioned seven women in the room, but you only named six of them. Repeatedly.

[Mary Robinette] Yup.

[Brandon] Yeah.

[Dan] Oh, that's so great.

[Brandon] Someone…

[Dan] It's because they left an extra plate at the table for when Isaiah shows up.

[Howard] Someone's bad at math, which is unfortunate.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] Right. They're saying that they're all being hired as computers, but my main character's forte is math. She's like, "There are four American women, and three…" I'm like, "Nope. There's three American women."

[Dan [Well, clearly, there's another one who's just very quiet.

[Mary Robinette] And she has the same name as one of the other characters. That's why sometimes one of them… Sometimes it's Betty, and sometimes it's Renée. It's two different people they're talking about the entire time.

[Dan] That makes perfect sense.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I sat there and I stared at it. I can't… There's no fix.

[Brandon] That's the best one I've…

[Mary Robinette] There's no fix at all.

[Brandon] Ever heard of. I… We all do this…

[Dan] That's so great.

[Brandon] But that's the most amazing one.

[Dan] What you do now is you run like a campaign. "Who is the seventh Lady astronaut?"

[Howard] Actually, the Artemis Sven.

[Laughter]

[Mary Robinette] It's a typo!

[Laughter]

[Brandon] All right.

[Dan] This is clearly six lady astronauts are worth seven male astronauts.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. Yes, exactly.

 

[Brandon] I'm going to wrap this up. Thank you, everyone, for listening. There will be an episode next week. It will be a wildcard. So we are done with the topic of worldbuilding. Next year, we're actually going to come back with a new… Slightly new format that we're going to do for a few years. Because we've done a good job these last five years of really kind of tackling our kind of master class on writing.

[Howard] We all think we've done a good job, anyway.

[Brandon] We like to think we've done a good job. Starting with Write a Novel, then the Elemental Genres, then we've done Plot, Setting, and Character. So we're going to take a different approach on it next year, so… Show up in two weeks and we will tell you how were going to do that. For now, we're giving you no homework. Because, enjoy the holidays, and enjoy the end of the year. Get some writing done, or just relax.

[Mary Robinette] Or, if you want to buy a gift for someone, I'll just point out that the Writing Excuses Cruise is open for registration.

[Brandon] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go have a nice holiday.