Progress on High Noon is speeding along at the rate of a snail stuck in molasses. Which is to say, very slowly. Much of this is due to the lack of a proper team — I’m frankly surprised at the lack of response from the Skotos community when I put up my “want ad” for builders and coders. I really don’t want to do all the building and object creation myself, and I’m not capable of doing the coding, not to mention that this kind of project is hard to accomplish in a creative vacuum, without other minds to share ideas back and forth. It’s beginning to look like a couple of people are coming on board, though, and I’ve sent off an initial list of coding needs to the stable of other developers and coders at Skotos, so maybe some concrete work will start getting done.

I haven’t been totally non-productive. My efforts have been directed at the story end of things. Though the basic plot has been set from the beginning, I’ve had to make a lot of decisions about characters. I’ve had two goals in mind from the beginning (as far as characters are concerned). First, to provide a flexible number of potential cast members that can accomodate a dozen players as well as thirty. Second, to give players substantial freedom with regards to how they play their characters, for the dual purpose of allowing more variation in the story during each run of the game (the sheriff might be the hero one time, the villain the next), and to let players feel more comfortable making their characters their own, instead of being constrained by a detailed character portrait.

Orignally, it was my intention to provide practically no character information at all, just names, physical descriptions, and the individual’s position in the town. Everything else would be up to the player. It didn’t take me long to realize that would lead to a game filled with chaotic boredom, as players wandered around wondering what to do until the climax happened. My reading of Lajos Egri helped me see the light, as did feedback from a few players and looking at some LARP (live-action roleplaying) resources. “Conflict springs from character”, and a well-made set of characters will create their own plots. Given time, a good group of roleplayers will develop characters that generate conflict on their own — I’ve seen it happen more than once over in Castle Marrach — but the limited time frame of High Noon necessitates that players be given more than a shell to work with.

I think I’ve come up with a solution that provides for easy dramatic development along with considerable player freedom of interpretation. Each character will have a background, along with a sketch of his or her relationships with the other characters. This information will presented in a factual way, without any attempt to insinuate personality or motivation. These will be left for the player to decide — you could play your school teacher as a stuck-up prude, a sweet young girl just looking for love, or a conniving tramp out to marry a cattle barron, whichever suits your fancy. The built-in chain of relationships will be devised in such a way that each character has multiple opportunities for conflict and development, and potentially any character (or all of them!) can become the main character of the scenario depending on how agressive the player is in pursuing the opportunities. No one should feel that they’re relegated to supporting cast or the chorus just because of the character they chose. In addition, each character will be given a basic in-character goal, which will help the player focus their initial efforts. Hopefully it will be made clear, however, that the goal is not something that has to be achieved in order for the player to “win” the scenario. This is not a goal-based game, but a story-based game, and success doesn’t always equal having your character achieve what he set out to achieve.

Naturally, settling on this course of character development has made the first of my initial goals — making a flexible number of characters — even more complicated. It was easy enough to come up with a generous number of name-and-description-only characters based on the various personalities one might find in the Old West to populate my town. Whoever the players chose, those would be the characters for that run on the scenario. But the decision to create chains of relationships between the various characters in order to facilitate dramatic conflict means I have a lot more work to do. It’s not enough to simply choose a random set of people and plunk them down in the middle of town. It has to be a cohesive set bound by alliances and rivalries that will hopefully not end up looking too manufactured.

To provide for the ability to allow groups of varying sizes to play the scenario, I’m planning to divide the cast into three tiers. Only when the first tier of characters has been occupied will the second tier become available, and so forth. The additional tiers will each carry along their own sub-plot, as well, to accomodate the increased number of players and the need to keep them occupied. Of course, this makes my relationship chains even more complicated. In a small game, I don’t want players feeling they are missing crucial connections because the second and third tier characters aren’t present. However, I don’t want second and third tier characters feeling like they are being left out of the primary story and are simply playing out their own little tale at the same time and place as the primary group. Admittedly, I have not yet wrapped my brain around how to accomplish this yet. I’m focusing on the primary set at the moment, and it may very well be that the idea of a flexible cast may have to be discarded down the line. If it comes to it, I’d rather provide fewer players with a cohesive plot then simply create empty opportunties for greater numbers. It’s not a good storytelling experience if it’s not a meaningful storytelling experience.

Egri’s book has been invaluable to me, giving me guidance not only for this project but some ideas on how to improve my prose fiction as well, and I very much want to write up a summary/review for this site. I haven’t actually finished it yet — while the theory is great, his presentation drags sometimes — but given I’m not engrossed in any novel-reading at the moment, maybe I’ll turn my attention to re-reading with annotations, so that I can put something practical together for others. We’ll see!