Soliloquy
An act of speaking one's thoughts aloud when by oneself or regardless of any hearers...
This week, instead of a new episode of The Handbasket Ride, I’d like to indulge in a little meta-discussion about the game, and where I’m currently at with. I may do this from time to time (but not too often, I promise!)
As the subheading above states, a soliloquy is that part of a play where one of the characters stands alone on stage and talks through their thoughts, trying to determine their next course of action. Shakespeare’s characters were notorious for them.
So, my Soliloquy posts are going to me talking about my thoughts on a topic out loud by myself, so the reader can see where I’m at.
What Is It You Truly Desire?
So I have a bit of a confession to make: right now, as I'm writing this, I don't have any more of The Handbasket Ride left to publish. I haven't written any in a while. There's a whole bunch of reasons for this. Some good, some bad:
Life in general's gotten in the way.
Work has been pretty full on lately, and by the time evening rolls around, I'm usually too tired to want to sit and write.
I've become hooked on playing Warframe, and it's easier to just blast virtual bad guys over and over, than it is to sit and write something.
I've picked up other gaming material (including Dragonbane, the second case file for the Blade Runner RPG, and several of the Mythic Magazine Compilations), and the urge to play with the new shinies is sometimes just too tempting to resist.
I've been getting back into my guitar practice lately and really enjoying that again too.
Now, all of these are true. But they still don't really cover perhaps the most fundamental issue I've run into with the story.
I'm stuck.
If we're honest, getting stuck when solo gaming is a pretty common thing. It happens to the best of us from time to time, especially when we're still fairly new to the hobby. I know that I've spiked a whole stack of solo campaigns because I've become stuck fairly early on and was just at a complete loss on what to do next. Hell, one of my first attempts at solo gaming - if you can even call it that - was me creating a character for the Bookmark NoHP RPG and then literally staring at a blank page wondering "what the hell do I do now?" for the next hour or so, before I gave up and packed it all away without doing a thing.
My first attempts at Ironsworn and Ironsworn: Starforged both ran to about 5,000 words each, and then I got to a point in both where I just sat there and wondered what to do next. Other solo games have had me write about three or four scenes and then run out of ideas about where to go next.
The Handbasket Ride had been very different. I powered through the first few scenes and kept going, with the words flowing relatively easily. To this point, I've already written (and now published) over 34,000 words of Eamon's journey, and there's still a long way to go.
But I'm still stuck.
It's taken me quite a while to nail down what the problem is, and in this case, it's actually nothing to do with Eamon. Or me, for that matter.
Instead, it's Summer and Albey. They entered the story via random rolls, and the truth is, I have no idea who they are yet. Summer uses the Devotee archetype, and Albey is an Outsider, and apart from their very basic stats, that's about all I have on either of them.
The crux of my current blockage stems from one very basic concept: I have no idea what either of them want. That lack of knowledge creates a story vacuum that's sucked all the momentum out of the story and bogged it right down.
For nearly thirty years (yes, I am old), I've been a huge proponent of the idea that a character's game stats are largely unimportant and uninteresting to me as a GM. What's far more important to me is learning what the character's goals are and what they are prepared to do to achieve them. It's is the key to constructing emotionally satisfying stories at the game table. I mentioned this back in my Substack welcome post when I started this blog earlier this year.
I first came across the idea in Chris Kubasik's brilliant Interactive Tookit series of articles in the late 1990s. I tried and tried for nearly twenty years to put that into practice until I gave the whole RPG hobby away in despair during 2014.
In more recent years though, the same basic ideas have found their way into the "mainstream" gaming hobby, with the publication of the book The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying. It's a good read, despite it being primarily aimed at D&D 5e GMs (and if you know me, you know how much I despise D&D, in all its forms). There's a lot of great advice in that book, and I do recommend it.
The advice in both of these references is basically the same: the story that develops at the table should stem from figuring out what it is that the characters want, and then the GM giving them opportunities to pursue those goals.
But in order to play that way, a GM needs to know what it is the PCs goals are, both in the short term and the long(er) term, so suitable encounters can be crafted to explore whether or not the PCs will achieve those goals.
All this brings me back to Summer and Albey. While I have their basic stats down, they're largely uninteresting to me, and just tell me how many dice I need to roll for them when I made a check. I have no idea what cause Summer is a devotee of, or what Albey has been doing as an outsider out in the desert, or why he's going to lead Summer out of the desert.
So, it's time for me to do my best impression of Tom Ellis' version of Lucifer Morningstar, and say to them:
(photo credit: Netflix)
I believe that once I've got a handle on what their goals are, I'll have a much easier time propelling the story forward again and getting Eamon closer to his end goal of trying to find his former girlfriend. Because I'll know more about what they want and don't want, we can introduce those things as threads and weave them into the developing story line.
So, next time on The Handbasket Ride, we'll have a brief interlude where I'll come up with their goals and maybe a bit more backstory for both, and hopefully set myself up for the next stretch.
I've often hit this wall in my solo RPGs. It's great to see you are slowly working through your block on the story. I look forward to reading the story going forward or whatever you start next.