We'll continue this series in the middle of chapter 2. For the first chapter and the first part of chapter 2 read issue #9 of the QB Times.
CHAPTER 2: THE STORY (Continued)
We'll talk about another important aspect of story writing now, the characters! The most important character in the whole story is the main character, the one the player will control. The player has to share the feelings of the main character, like when the main character is sad (because his girlfriend died) the player also feels kind of sorry for him. A very good example of sympathizing with a character is when the boy in Secret of Mana gets banished from his village, the music, the dialogue ... *sniff* It made it very sad... *sniff* I almost got tears in my eyes when I saw it...
Anyway, I just said another important thing when writing stories! To give the right feeling to the player you should carefully think about which music you want to have with the story because it sets the theme. It intensifies what happens in the story. Let's take my example from Secret of Mana, the boy gets banished from the village. Without the music the player might get angry: "What?!? Are you banishing me? You old fool! I don't even want to stay in this crappy village anymore!" But now that you have the sad music you feel sorry for the guy and that is exactly what the storywriter wanted! And what you want to happen when people play your RPG!
OK, now that's out of the way let's talk about characters. What you basically need is a good guy (hero) and a bad guy. You can have more good guys than one, like in Final Fantasy you usually have a party of characters you can chose. When designing characters you need to think about are they male or female, how they're gonna look (tough, sneaky, old, young), what kind of character they are (fighter, rogue, magician), what kind of weapons they use (fighter uses swords, axes etc., rogue uses bow, maybe a whip or so, magician uses staffs and daggers), are they able to use magic and how much? Also try to let the character have its own mind; is he/she cowardly and would rather run away in a fight (think of the twists in your story you can have with this! The hero encounters the bad guy when he does expect it and runs away... While a heroic character would stand and fight) or make him/her heroic... Or make him/her a thief, who robs people to get money and breaks into houses. You also could give the player the option of being heroic or being a criminal. When he robs houses and people his social standing would get lower which means people don't want to help him, shopkeepers keep their shops closed to him, etc.
The bad guy is also fun to create because you can make him as cruel as you want (Kefka from Final Fantasy 3, he really is BAD!). You can make him burn down some villages and have the villagers be put into slavery. What's also a nice thing to do is to give the bad guy some charming features (like Darken Rahl in the book Wizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind, if you read the book you know what I mean) so that he isn't the ultra bad guy, which is in my opinion kind of unoriginal because in every RPG the bad guy is ultra bad. Another nice thing you can do with bad guys is that they were good guys once but turned bad when they were seduced by power and/or money (Whoopie! Prequel story! Now you can make a prequel to your game with the story how the bad guy became bad!). Also you can make the bad guy very strong or very weak. If he's strong he has lots of magic (if it's in your game of course) and very good strength etc. But when he's very weak he has lots of strong bodyguards and when you finally meet him face to face he whimpers and jumps of a cliff (or something). Basically, let the bad guy do some cruel things but don't overdo it and make him have a cool feature (Kefkas laugh was hilarious!).
Now you know how to write an interesting story we'll talk about what you can and cannot do in a story. Of course you can't do obvious things that aren't right like your hero killing the bad guy at their very first encounter. Not only is this highly unlikely (because the bad guy is much more powerful) it also destroys the game because all of a sudden there is no bad guy to fight anymore. But things like things are obvious so I'll start talking about the more subtle things.
A common used twist in RPGs is that of one of the bad guys minions turning over to the hero (General Leo in Final Fantasy 3). You can't just say "Oh, I don't like my master anymore I like you better so I'll just turn over to you." There needs to be a good reason why the person turns over. You need to give the minion a good reason to turn over. This could be for instance that the bad guy used him to raid a village and capture all the villagers. The minion does this and when he's finished the bad guy no longer needs him so he puts him in prison, where he meets the hero who has been captured just before. The minion feels betrayed and the hero and he escape together, the minion joining the hero because he wants revenge.
The minion has a good reason to join the hero now. Also something you shouldn't do is make the hero too strong at the beginning of the game. Let him be a little weak and not able to defeat every boss he comes a cross without training (level building) first. Have him to learn some magic and weapon skills before letting him fight the boss (a very drastic way of doing this is when the hero tries to enter the boss' lair have him say something like: "Oh no! I don't have a death wish!" and walk away).
Another thing you shouldn't do in a story is make things predictable. A story that is predictable is very boring and dull. Lot's of twists and turns in the story make it interesting. Let me give an example of a predictable story: The hero has just helped the king to save his daughter (or something similar) and the king has promised the hero that he could marry his daughter. The hero brings back the daughter and marries here and they live happily ever after and don't worry about the bad guy anymore. Nice story, huh? No wait! That's predictable boring and cliché. To make it interesting you can do the following thing: The hero brings back the kings daughter but instead of letting the hero marry her the king throws the hero in his dungeon. The hero tries to escape the dungeon but fails. He doesn't know what to do so he just sits down a little bit. But then in the middle of the night the guard is suddenly shot by an arrow and a cloaked figure comes into play and opens the dungeon. The cloaked figure and the hero escape the castle fighting of guards and running over the walls. When they finally reach a save plays the cloaked figure removes his cloak and (Tada) it's the princess! The princess doesn't agree with her father and promises to help you defeat the bad guy in return for saving her.
OK, OK, it isn't the most original story, I know. But it's more interesting than the first story. One last thing, do not and I repeat do not overdo things. It's okay to overdo things a little bit but, please, do not overdo things too much as it makes playing a game (in my opinion) very frustrating.
When writing a story remember the following things:
Heh, this chapter turned out to be pretty long but I think I have said all I wanted to say now. Let's go on to the next one: The Tile Editor!
And that's it for this issue! In the next issue we'll probably cover Chapter 3 and maybe Chapter 4, which is about the Map/Trigger editor.
© Copyright 1999-2000 The QB Times.
This tutorial was taken from The QB Times with permission from the webmaster(s) of the site. You may not take this article and place it on any other website.