Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

Over the weekend, I saw the movie version of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince . Having read the book previously, I wanted to see how the story was adapted for the wide screen. I am well aware that anything longer (or shorter) than a novella will not survive the transition to a movie version without serious changes. This is a situation that I accept, and I appreciate clever adaptations of written works such as that of Neil Gaiman’s Stardust . With the Half-Blood Prince , however, I was disappointed with the extra screen time devoted to some scenes and the inadequate time spent on others. While I do not intend to write a full review of the movie, I want to set down my thoughts on why I felt that certain scenes could have been written better. This blog post may serve as a guide on keeping one’s stories tight without making them feel rushed. Shifting the Balance of Power In the movie version of Half-Blood Prince , a couple of Death Eaters launched an attack on the Weasley family home...

This is my fourth and final post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my three previous posts to put this into context. A few years ago, I created a hakpak for NWN1 called the Vampire Hak Pak . Included with the downloadable file was a short demo module entitled “Vampire Kobolds from Outer Space.” I deliberately made the module silly because I didn’t want to waste my better ideas on a mere demo. Nevertheless, the plot follows the basic formula that I outlined in an earlier blog post on story writing. Act 1 . A band of wights attacks everyone in the village where the PC is staying. The PC has to find out where the wights are coming from before more of them return. Act 2 . In a nearby cave, the PC discovers a large group of vampire kobolds from outer space led by Count Alucard, another vampire kobold. The kobolds plan to turn all the villagers into undead creatures and have been creating wights for that purpose. While trying to chase down Count Alucard, the P...

This is the third in a series of posts on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my two previous posts to put this into context. Game designers don’t seem to have much difficulty in coming up with meaningful choices for good-aligned characters. Creating dialog options and story endings for evil PCs, however, has been something of a challenge. Few game designers seem to understand how to come up with evil options that aren’t petty and nonsensical. Because of this apparent lack in designing well-thought-out evil options, I’d like to tip the balance by sharing a few insights on creating them. The first thing to understand is that evil manifests in different ways. Serial killers are not the same as spree killers, and both are completely different from terrorists, even though they all kill large numbers of people. What differentiate “evil” people from each other are their methods and their motives. For example, spree killers don’t go on a rampage for no reason. Over a long peri...

This is my second blog post in a series on linking stories to games. Readers may want to read my previous post to put this into context. Few Branches Role-playing games from Bioware and Black Isle/Obsidian are noteworthy for allowing players to affect the outcome of the games’ story. Nearly all of the opportunities for directing the flow of the plot are presented through dialog. Most conversation options don’t affect the story, though. If we set aside conversation nodes that deal with gathering information from NPCs, much of what we’re left with are there just for flavor. For example, in the official campaign of Neverwinter Nights 2 , PCs may speak with Daeghun bitterly or kindly, but none of these dialog options will affect how the story turns out. They give players the impression that they are role-playing their characters, and a good number of these dialog options may change the PCs’ alignment. Even so, few of them will affect the story in any way. In the OC, how PCs treat their NPC...

Players of the Neverwinter Nights games sometimes complain when the role-playing choices open to their characters are limited. They want their characters to act the way they imagine they would when faced with the situations that the game presents them with. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, the options they would have wanted to take are sometimes not available to them. Perhaps the game designers had not thought of making those options available, or maybe they deliberately left them out because these options would have led to certain defeat. It’s also possible that time constraints prevented the creators of the game from implementing them. The question of what story choices to present players with is not a simple one to answer. With the current state of game technology, it is impossible to implement all possible choices that players may want. Nevertheless, this question has to be answered during the design phase of each game or module. This blog post is the first in a series wherein I...

This is the fourth and final chapter of my three-part series on story writing. (If that sounds confusing, let’s just say that I should have planned my blog posts better.) The content herein does not list all the techniques that I use when creating interactive stories. Nevertheless, there is enough material in this series to set aspiring writers on the path. Everything that I’ve written in this series of blog posts counts as suggestions. If my techniques don’t work for you, ditch them and try something else. Those who are serious about writing may want to buy books on how to craft fiction. Although most books on this topic deal with writing non-interactive fiction such as novels and screenplays, much of the material therein is applicable to interactive fiction as well. It helps to read a lot of fiction with an eye toward studying what the authors did that makes their work effective. Even if you aspire to write exclusively in the science fiction or fantasy genre, include a lot of mainstr...

This is the third part of my series on story writing. To put this blog post into context, readers may want to refer to my two previous posts. Having created the plot and decided on the setting of our module, we writers started pitching ideas for the main NPCs. By this time, we all had an idea of what types of non-player characters we needed; e.g., town mayor, companion #1, villainous mastermind, etc. All we needed was to provide specifics on personality, background, and character classes. At the bouncyRock website, the members of our team have a private forum for discussing all matters related to our project. We created a thread in this forum for anyone to post their character write-ups. Although we stated that more than one writer may post different write-ups for the same character, in actual practice, hardly anyone provided alternatives for characters that had already been suggested. If we had more than one candidate for each role, we could have chosen the one we liked best or maybe ...

When it comes to writing plots, I have some very definite views on the matter. I count myself fortunate that Dirtywick, Anduraga, and Indira Lightfoot have indulged me in expressing these views and applying the structure that I advocate. Here, I share the plot-writing method that I use. Readers who find this technique useful are free to apply them to their own work. Please note that this is not the only way to write a plot, but it is the method that I personally use. I once wrote in this blog that regardless of a story’s length, I find it useful to structure its plot as a three-act outline. In fact, I have a specific formula for how the acts are written. Act 1. The hero (that is, the PC) becomes aware of a problem to be resolved. Act 2. The hero tries to attain an objective, to which a strong antagonist is opposed. At this point, the hero gets a complication that makes it more difficult to attain the objective. Act 3. It seems that the hero has no chance to defeat the antagonist. Ne...

For the upcoming module from bouncyRock Entertainment, our writers’ first task was to come up with the story premise, from which the plot, setting, and characters were eventually created. The initial story development involved Dirtywick, Anduraga, and me. Eventually, we were joined by Indira Lightfoot, as well as a couple of other writers who later bowed out because of real-life commitments. One of these writers was ScarlettThorne, whom I feel deserves to be listed in our credits. ScarlettThorne created an intriguing non-player character that we will be using in our module. (Thanks for your contribution, ScarlettThorne, and best of luck in all your endeavors.) As may be guessed, having several minds trying to bring the story together was tough. Each of us had our own ideas on where to take the story, and since we had never worked together on a story prior to this, we had difficulties trying to develop it. I won’t go into all the details of what happened at our meetings. Instead, I’ll d...