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physalian · 6 months

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Take A Risk and Don’t Write a Chosen One

This trope stands the test of time for some very good reasons: Audience wish-fulfillment as they live vicariously through the hero, automatic plot-induced agency for your protagonist, and automatic legitimate reasons for your protagonist to join the whirlwind adventure of the day.

I like chosen ones. We all have our favorite famous chosen ones and I’m not here to say the concept of a chosen one is bad at all.

However.

Those “automatic” windfalls that come pre-packaged with the trope can lead to the author taking shortcuts, or not thinking they have to put in more effort to write a compelling character, because they’re the “chosen one,” what more do you need?

Not writing your protagonist as commanded by the powers that be to participate in the plot forces you to get creative with why they’re here, what they want, and how they entrench themselves in the story. And most importantly, if the gods haven’t chosen them to act, they must now choose themselves to act.

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I have never read Harry Potter and after its author-who-shan’t-be-named flushed her reputation down the toilet, I never will. I’ve seen the movies, they’re ok. I have no nostalgia-driven love for this franchise, and most of that comes from watching Harry be an incredibly boring protagonist.

Book readers correct me, but Harry is the poster child of “only exists so the audience can live vicariously” with generic heroic traits and nonexistent or at least unimportant side quirks and distinguishing hobbies, interests, or personality tics. He’s “brave” and “courageous” and “determined”... as most child protagonists of children’s books should be. He has zero flaws that come back to bite him in the ass. He acts the way he’s supposed to, not the way he should want to, as an independent being.

He’s the least interesting character in this entire cast, and I can’t stand Movie Ron. Ron, Hermione, Neville, or Draco would have made much more compelling protagonists and so much of this relies on the “Harry is important because the plot demands it” crutch.

Why is he the chosen one? Because his birthday happened at the right time of year? What is the story trying to say about the dichotomy between him and Voldemort? What about his personality, his wizard-societal stances on the many faux pas in this series, or the choices he makes, that makes him the chosen one? Why should I care?

You know who’s a great chosen one? Percy Jackson. Why? Because he understands the screwed up world he lives in on page 1. Being a demigod isn’t everything he ever dreamed and despite what Disney + wants you to believe, he’s got a crap bio dad who’s as disappointing in book one as Percy expects him to be.

He’s not even the chosen one by the end of the original series, and what a fantastic twist that was.

An infamously self-chosen protagonist has her own iconic hero quote: "I volunteer as tribute". Katniss is a nobody. She's not the evil president's daughter, she's not the child of a famously martyred revolutionary, she's just a girl who refuses to bow down to the reaping, refuses to let her sister get slaughtered, and volunteers for a death match that historically sees anyone living to survive another year cowering in relief. Yeah, she has some convenient skills in her archery and survival knowledge, but those matter because her district is starving, she learned through necessity.

Every second of her story, Katniss is fighting for her right to exist, and she only becomes a "chosen one" dragged around by the powers that be when she becomes marketable to the grand scheming of the actual revolutionaries, when, before, she didn't care about politics, she just wanted to save her sister. She matters because she chose compassion in a world where survival demands only serving yourself.

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It’s so, so easy to start planning your book and make your cool fantasy world and figure out how your protagonist fits into it. So easy to say “well they’re the long-lost princess and the only heir to the throne” or “this magic amulet from her great great aunt is the key to saving the world” or “she’s the villain’s secret love child and the only one who can stop him because blood magic” or “this vague prophecy picked this little desert slave boy to bring balance to the Force”.

None of these stories are at fault for writing chosen ones.

But push yourself to let go of that crutch and come up with other reasons for why your hero is the hero. Usually this character has been isekai'd into magical-fantasy-land or magical-hidden-fantasy-urban-underbelly and you can still write that character.

Refusing to make them the chosen one demands one thing first and foremost: How is this outsider going to fight for their place to exist here? What do they bring to the table with their hobbies or interests or unique skillset that happens to be mighty applicable and useful in this new world? What is it about their personality that draws these strangers in? What do they want from this new world, and what are they willing to do to get it?

This choice demands you give your hero agency (though whether you give into those demands is up to you).

More importantly: I think it gives your audience agency, as they still live vicariously through their hero. Sure, lots of kids have lost their parents and live in horrid conditions like a cupboard under the stairs, but none of us will ever be “chosen” by omniscient wizard prophets. Harry would have immediately been a more compelling protagonist to me if he’d stumbled upon magical shenaniganry and fought for his place as some forgotten nobody mudblood.

Harry would have shown us his courage, instead of the story insisting he has it, we promise, just don’t think too hard about it.

Stop giving me characters who accept their destiny because God said so. Give me characters who fight tooth and nail for a destiny they discover on their own and I’ll root for them to succeed even more than someone compelled by force. Not everyone can be a chosen one, but everyone *can* choose themselves and decide to act.

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With that said, I have an announcement! I have a new book in the works bereft of a prophecy-ordained hero. It’s time I put all my sagely writing wisdom to the test in a shiny published paperback myself. If you’ve learned anything from my blog in your writing journey, please subscribe for updates on the upcoming novel!

#chosen ones #character design #writing advice #character development #writing resources #writing tips #writing tools #writing a book #writing #writeblr #fantasy #urban fantasy #scifi #harry potter #percy jackson #katniss everdeen #the hunger games

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olgadrebas · 1 year

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6 ways to give yourself feedback to your character concept art 👀

Put the 🧙 on a background from the game in your target style.

Place your 🧙 in the middle of a row of 5 comparable characters in target style.

Send your concept to the target device (mobile phone, TV) and view it on that screen in the size in which the 🧙 is supposed to be in game.

Imagine your 🧙 animated: can they run? Jump? Fight? Will any model's parts penetrate other parts during the most frequently used animations?

Place your 🧙 next to other 🧙's from games in similar style - is its game function readable? Is it simple enough (complex, threatening, etc.)? Is it possible yet to “tune up” the readability of their function?

How can you simplify the design w/o losing the readability of its image or function?

#concept art #character design #character art #art tutorial #concept art tips #drawing tips #art help #art resources #how to draw #game art tutorial #video game art #visdev #character

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howtofightwrite · 10 months

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So, uh, I know that this place is mostly for writing, but making your own TTRPG system kinda qualifies as writing, doesn't it?

Either way - here's a fighting-related question that came up during my process making it. Is fear an important aspect of combat? Small-scale combat, to be specific, not the kind where you see a thousand of knights fight another thousand of knights.

Would wounds (or even hits that are strong enough to be felt through armour) inflict noticeable stress to a well-trained soldier? Would it be bad enough to, potentially, make them panic, even if they aren't in any actual danger yet? Or would that mostly be a problem with inexperienced fighters, and training/combat experience could make someone relatively desensitized to that sort of thing?

It's probably worded weirdly, I know, but, in general, what I'm trying to ask here is - should one consider stress/fear as a thing that might change the tides mid-combat, even if cowardice (or anything similar) isn't a major character trait for neither of the combatants?

This one isn't really writing, it's a game design question, and fully answering it is going to require digging a lot deeper into what you're trying to do with the game. It is entirely reasonable for your character to still suffer some lesser injuries from hits their armor absorbed, and for you to have a secondary mental stat that gauges your character's mental ability to keep functional. Warhammer's Morale and the Storyteller system's Willpower stats come to mind as examples of this. Also Call of Cthulhu's Sanity stat, though that's a little more involved.

So in game design, you need to decide how you want combat to feel. And, this can be anything from gritty realism to a fun power fantasy. In fact, the genre of your game will heavily determine how you want your systems to shape your experience.

I can't remember if Warhammer tabletop does this, or if I'm conflating it with Gladius and Dawn of War, but, in Warhammer your units actually have a separate morale hitpool. Obviously, for a lot of armies in Warhammer, keeping your units fighting against horrific, unknowable abominations is a major theme, so a main system (and a part of every unit stat card) is how much stress they can take before they have a complete nervous breakdown, and start running in the opposite direction. In fact, in tabletop, the game actually has multiple systems evaluating whether your own units will actually follow their orders at all. The difficulty of commanding troops against impossible threats is a central theme of the systemic narrative Warhammer is trying to create, so it gets multiple top level systems.

Compare that to D&D, where there are no top level systems regarding the mental state of your characters. They signed up to fight unknowable abominations, and magpie their way through the world, so when they encounter something genuinely unnerving, that gets special rules on that monster. It's not part of the power fantasy of D&D (most of the time.) So when it does show up, it just gets attached as an addendum to an existing rule system or as a special rule for one creature.

So, what does your game system want?

If you want a small scale, sword & sorcery brawler, you probably don't need to model their mental state, or how afraid they are. You really need to know if their morale is high, and when it is high, you can probably handle that with simple conditional buffs. In fact, this is probably a system where you wouldn't even want to model a low mental state, unless things are truly dire, or supernaturally oppressed. (Again, with special rule cases for that, because it's not going to come up very often.)

This probably should have been a few paragraphs earlier, but just looking at an RPG's character sheet can often tell you a lot about what the designer intended for their game. The things your players are going to have to interact with regularly need dedicated systems. Stuff that comes up rarely, shouldn't get dedicated systems. (And, this is a very real issue with a lot of RPGs, where there are a lot of different systems to keep track of, that could have been scrubbed out and set aside as flavor or special rules. Including with D&D.)

If your primary focus is a kind of horror RPG, then you need those extra systems. You're going to be dealing with them constantly. You might want an attribute called Resolve (or whatever) to specifically model how well a character handles dealing with horrific situations, or seeing their friends ripped to shreds. You might also have a separate tracked HP pool (similar to how Darkest Dungeon handles it) specifically focused on their ability to manage psychological strain.

If you're going for that, psychological damage can be a lot more deciduous in a tabletop environment, because you cannot armor yourself against that. Characters might be able to have some psychological resistance through strenuous mental conditioning, but again, as the game designer, you control exactly how much a player can stack up, so you can balance around the absolute maximum damage that a player could mitigate, while also keeping in mind how much the raw damage would do to a defenseless character.

You could have a rule system where characters can pretty reliably soak off most of the physical damage, but suffer serious attrition due to psychological (or, even magical) damage that they couldn't mitigate.

How armor works in your game is a similar situation, where the rules need to follow the kind of experience you're trying to create. However, unlike dealing with psychological strain, armor rules also need to consider how easy they are to implement at the table. A lot of CRPGs use % based armor mitigation, and that's great, if you have a computer that can crunch those numbers for you. If you're at the table and rolling 3d8, it's going to be a lot more awkward to figure out what 43% mitigation will do to your resulting values. So, it's a lot easier to simply say that armor subtracts X from incoming hits. Like, “Armor 2 means that each incoming attack does two less damage.” This starts to run into a balance problem. In theory, a character with sufficient armor might be able to mitigate all incoming damage (and you will have players who stack defense with this specific goal in mind. You can't escape that.)

This leads to one of my favorite solutions for this. I think it was J.E. Sawyer's Fallout 3 that never happened, but the idea is that if you're taking damage from hits, and your armor is absorbing that, it goes into a second, less severe, damage category. To use the example of White Wolf's Storyteller system, you convert lethal damage into bashing. It can still kill your characters, but it reduces the overall effect of that damage in the moment, makes it a lot easier to recover from, but also doesn't let them just walk in and soak all the damage without issue. So, for example, your character has Armor 4, an enemy swings on them for 8 lethal damage, and 4 points of damage are converted to bashing. (When their lethal + bashing damage reaches their HP pool then they're downed or knocked out), but they're not in danger of dying unless they take more lethal damage, or are suffering from some ongoing damage effect (like bleeding.)

Another, more lethal option I really liked from a D20 system (so, basically 3.5e D&D), was Star Wars's vitality system. The Wizards of the Coast Star Wars RPG had two HP pools. One was the normal hit dice per level based on class from D&D called Vitality (if you ever wondered why your HP in KotOR was called Vitality, this is why.) The second pool was Wounds. This was equal to your Constitution score. So, if you had CON 12, you could take 12 wound points. If you ran out of Vitality, damage would apply directly to your wound pool, and if you ran out of wound points, you were dead. Just, dead. No downed state, no stabilizing, you were toast. And, here's the thing that I might be misremembering, but if you critically hit someone, instead of multiplying your damage, your damage bypassed their vitality and went directly to wounds. This meant you had a fairly normal D&D rule set that could turn lethal with very little warning. Still a concept from game design that I like to keep in mind, because it creates a very dangerous feel in combat. Because of how the flavor was written, Vitality damage didn't even necessarily mean your character was being directly harmed. Taking damage from vitality might mean your character narrowly escaped getting hit by a blaster bolt, or that they effectively parried an incoming lightsaber attack. It still had the effect of wearing characters down over time without automatically meaning that they were suffering absolutely implausible amounts of injuries (though it could, also mean that your character had suffered minor cuts and scrapes or that their armor had taken a few hits for them.)

Something that gives the player a bit more control over their own durability would be to give items HP pools of their own. This isn't a normal item deterioration ruleset, but rather you're giving their armor a fixed amount of HP, that it can absorb in their place. So, to refresh that example above, if your character has Armor 4, and they're hit for 8 damage, instead of taking 4 bashing, they might choose to have that damage dealt directly to their armor. (And, this is a case where the decision to how to deal with that damage could be in the player's hands if you wanted. It gives them some proactive agency while taking damage, which is rare in TTRPGs.) You could even use this for a blowthrough rule, where if a character takes more damage in a single hit than their armor's remaining HP, the armor is destroyed and offers no protection from that attack. This, again, plays more into horror, as their armor will be wearing down over time, and if they're not performing regular maintenance to try to keep it working, could potentially fail them in combat. (It also creates a very cathartic moment for players to sheer through an enemy's armor, dropping them on the spot.)

All of this can and really should be, tuned for your systems and numbers. I have biases on exactly how granular I like my TTRPGs, but that doesn't mean you're tied to those values, and some people really do like the triple digit HP pools of high level characters in D&D and Pathfinder. I'm not going to say you're wrong for that, because I don't think you are, but obviously, something like Armor 4 means something very different if you have an average HP of 8-12, versus, if you have an average HP pool ~72.

So, when balancing combat to create the experience you want, you need to keep track of average combatant HP, average attack damage, and the mitigation options characters can use. At this point, you then need to decide how you want these to relate to one another. All of these values are relative to each other. From a gameplay perspective, there's no difference between a game where characters have 10hp, and each hit connects for 1 damage, vs a game where players have 40k HP, and each hit connects for 8k. It's the same game, the only thing that's changed is the amount of numbers you have to scribble onto the page while tracking damage. If you think your characters are too resistant to incoming damage, you can increase the amount of damage attacks do, or limit the amount of mitigation they have access to. Limiting mitigation can take the form of simply reducing how much damage resistance they can get, or it can function by adding additional considerations to their mitigation (as mentioned above.) (Granted, the Vitality system is a bit of a nuclear option, because that will change your combat to be exceedingly threatening, without becoming instantly lethal. Which, might be what you want.)

You have a lot of freedom for how you shape your players' experiences, and with a bit of creativity you can provide a unique combat experience for your players.

-Starke

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#writing reference #writing advice #writing tips #Game design #how to fight write #starke answers

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ionlybleedbubbles · 1 year

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Writing tips deep in my heaps of cringe, that are actually good (imo) :

When writing in third person, don't say what a character cannot do while talking from their perspective. Frame the idea by telling us what they can do, or through the opinion of other characters. For eg. Instead of saying "Mattie was bad at flying planes", say "Mattie preferred cars to planes, and would much rather his brother do the plane-flying." See? Now you've even managed to drop in a nod about his brother. You could also say, "Kevin felt safer when Mattie's brother flew the plane than when Mattie did." Put the blame on Kevin - don't judge Mattie yourself. As a narrator you must pretend to always be on your MCs' side. Ofc, this would vary with different styles of narration, but this is a general rule.

Show how important a character is by how much time you take to talk about them. You would describe your MCs well, and bring up their hobbies and interests. You wouldn't describe a background character as much. You can use this to humanize or dehumanize characters. You may initially talk very little about the main villain yourself, and rely on dialogue among the other characters. This makes the villain feel like a force rather than a person. As the story progresses though, and you decide you want to drop in a *hairflips dramatically* sad back story, you can humanize the villain, and make them more understandable as a person.

Learn from art. Try describing different sceneries or portraits as practice. Also practice writing comic books or manga as stories. Visualizing your story as comic or manga panels can really help you understand pacing and paragraphs. Take note of their vibrance and positioning.

Learn from people's mannerisms and how they are received by other people. For eg, when we ask my dad a question, he pauses to gather his thoughts before speaking. Out of respect, we wait silently during this pause. This shows how confident and charismatic my dad is. A friend of mine only verbally roasts people within our friend group, and apologizes profusely after. This shows she is both empathetic and extremely quick-witted. I could create well rounded characters based on just examples as simple as these.

This tip is what I like to call 'the fake solution' and is employed by many famous authors. For this, you force readers to make assumptions. Maybe about how the magic system works, or about who the villain is. Make it seem like the characters have come to a conclusion and that conclusion is the final solution to conflict. Then tear down those assumptions and create a whole other ending. Similar to the red herring, except this time it's all in the characters' heads and dialogue. Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn trilogy is a good example of playing with assumptions forced upon readers by the writer.

In your first chapter, focus on creating potential. You don't have to jump into the heart of the action right away, but you have to make sure your readers understand the potential for this action. For example the opening chapter of Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Boys is relatively low paced, but it leaves you with questions. It makes you wonder who the boy who talked to Blue is, and how Blue will deal with life after such a strange prophecy. This makes you need to continue reading, to find answers.

For good worldbuilding, study at least a little bit of history. Wars and military tricks make for good free prompts. If your world contains vibrant races, make sure you research and incorporate the history and implications of racism, social hierarchy and trade. Understand how this will impact travellers and mercenaries (audiences love those). Make up your own old wives' tales and coping mechanisms.

Understand that the best stories are written around an idea rather than a character. Your protagonist is simply the face of your story. The weather of the world reflects on the protagonist's choices and health. Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games focuses on the dark side of media and politics and how they are used to control a people. Notice that by the third book, Katniss, our protagonist, is doing very little herself, though her few moments are loud and powerful. Katniss could achieve nothing alone. It takes a whole bunch of people to fuel the revolution. Note that it is completely okay to write a character based story, if that's what you like. But there are tons of those. If you really want to make an impact, make an idea-based story.

Respect all your characters equally. You may love some characters more than others, but remember all your characters are representatives of people. Make sure each of them has a voice and a chance to prove themselves.

Use prose to your advantage. Let the length of your sentence define whether the sequence is fast paced or slow. For example, if your want to show surprise, your sentences must be short. Instead of saying "She snatched the last dagger and stared at it, observing each engraving", say " She snatched up the last dagger. Each engraving was sick, gnarled. "

That was a heck of a long post, but that's all from me. Feel free to add your own or contradict anything I've written.

#writing #writing advice #author #teen author #brandon sanderson #mistborn #raven boys #maggie stiefvater #the hunger games #suzanne collins #writing tips #worldbuilding #character design #character traits #writing research #fiction #fiction writing #story

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