A brick joke is a seemingly underwhelming joke that, unbeknownst to the listener, serves as a setup for a punchline that is told much later. It got its name from the stereotypical form of two otherwise unrelated jokes connected only by their endings. In the first joke, a brick is tossed away, and in the second, it appears out of nowhere and lands.
Lately, I've been thinking about storytelling in terms of juggling bricks. If you consider a story to be a series of setups and payoffs, a "brick" would be any plot thread or element that plays a certain role in the story, "throwing" it would mean introducing it and "catching" would stand in for it playing its role in the story. Take for example the classic example of Chekhov's Gun: The rifle on the mantle. When it's first shown, the writer takes a metaphorical brick, writes "gun" on it and chucks it in the air. Later, when somebody grabs the rifle and shoots it, the brick falls down, the writer catches it and puts it aside.
So am I just describing basic storytelling in different terms? Well, yes, I am. I'm describing an abstract concept in concrete terms of everyday objects, makng it easier for the human brain to understand and work with it. The brick-juggling metaphor can tell you how to tell a story.
A good story, the idea goes, is like a good brick-juggling performance. The juggler should be doing something at all times - a scene which doesn't move the plot forwards, either as setup or payoff, should be cut. There should always be at least one brick in the air - if you resolve all plot elements in the middle of the story, you might as well cut the story in half. Letting the brick fall on the ground and break - abandoning plot threads without resolution - is viewed as sloppy, while catching bricks that were never thrown - pulling plot resolutions out of your own ass - is just weird. And the more intricate the juggler gets with how he handles each individual brick, the more interesting the performance gets. If you just throw twenty bricks, one by one, and then catch them, the audience will get bored quickly. Better get creative - bounce bricks back up, throw some sneakily, that sort of thing. Often, a performance is the most enjoyable when you can watch it again, knowing well what to expect, and still be surprised at tricks you didn't notice the first time.
Showing posts with label random thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label random thoughts. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Monday, January 7, 2013
Ten-Sided Master Race
d10s are the only dice that are worth having and using, all the other dice suck. d6s are baby toys, and who the fuck would in their right mind even use a d20? You could just as well roll a marble. d8s look like d6s that got the number of faces and vertices wrong and what the fuck is even a d4? What, you couldn't even afford a face that would, uh, face upwards? You have to read the value off of a point? At least d12s look cool, what with being made of pentagons and all. They're almost as good as d10s, but only almost.
Okay, now that I got the silly out of my system, let me get a bit more serious on this subject. I do believe that ten-sided dice are the best choice for tabletop RPG, a belief I share with Jacob, who nicknamed it rather beautifully "the glorious ten-sided master race". I don't know his reasoning, but my train of thought stems from what I think an ideal RPG should be like.
My ideal RPG would be focused on the role-playing aspect of the game, not on the sheet of paper that defines your character. It would be less about rolling high numbers and more aboput making the right choices in difficult situations. It should also not limit what kind of stories you can tell in them, by which I mean it shouldn't define special rules and, especially, rolls, because once it does, it starts to limit potential stories to a particular genre, or worse yet, setting. Fantasy RPGs are especially guilty of this when they start defining magic systems so interwoven with the central rules that if you take it out, the whole system collapses into an unplayable mess. For those reasons, I think the ideal RPG would have complex rules and very simple dice rolls. Ideally, one single roll.
So why should that one roll use ten-sided dice? Well, it's partly mathematics and partly convenience. Convenience, because some dice are simply "better" at giving random results than other. For one, the general shape of a die influences how well it rolls. I admit, this is a very subjective point, but from my experience, d4s and d8s are very bad in this regard due to their very angular nature. This would imply that the less angular a die is, and the more faces it has, the better it rolls, but there's more to it than just that. You see, most gaming dice aren't exactly fair. They're made in a device called "rock tumbler". Those interested can research the whole process in their own time, but for what I'm saying here it's only important to know that the end result is a die with rounded edges that is more dense in certain parts. While this irregularity only poses as a very small influence on the randomness of that particular die, it's still there and the easier it is for the die to, in physics terms, change from one state to another, the bigger the influence is. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable with hundred-sided dice (yes, they exist, although they're made using more fair methods), but it's mainly a big problem with modern twenty-sided dice. For example, my good ol' purple d20 tends to land on 18 and adjacent numbers (2, 4 and 5) more than anything else.
Following the above logic, the best choices for our one true die are d6, d10 and d12. So why do I choose the d10? As I said before, mathematics. In the most simple case, a one die roll, I don't think the scale of 1-6 is large enough to allow for convenient division. In a simple success/fail case, the probabilities only move in sixths, and the problem only worsens in cases where we have multiple results. In this regard, the 1-12 scale is clearly superior, because it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. So the d12 sounds like an ideal candidate, and in a way it would be, were I not human. But I am, and as a result I'm primed to think in base-10, which makes operating with numbers between 1-10 much easier, which comes in handy when you need to roll more than one die, not to mention that humans just instinctively understand the scale of 1 to 10 better than any other. There's also the ability to perform a so-called "percentile roll" (d%) that provides you with a scale of 1-100.
In terms of major RPG systems, at least those that I'm somewhat familiar with, d10s are important in Vampire: The Masquerade, and probably other World of Darkness systems as well, with what I think is a very beautiful roll mechanic, where the player's stats influence not an additive modifier to the roll, but rather the number of d10s that they roll. I have seen versions that use d6s rather than d10s, but I believe that was a homebrew "hack" of the game, not any official version. There are other major systems that utilize different kinds of dice, for example GURPS (d6) and the d20 system (guess), so don't think that the d10 is unviersally revered as the Jesus of dice. This is all just my opinion, so feel free to disagree.
Okay, now that I got the silly out of my system, let me get a bit more serious on this subject. I do believe that ten-sided dice are the best choice for tabletop RPG, a belief I share with Jacob, who nicknamed it rather beautifully "the glorious ten-sided master race". I don't know his reasoning, but my train of thought stems from what I think an ideal RPG should be like.
My ideal RPG would be focused on the role-playing aspect of the game, not on the sheet of paper that defines your character. It would be less about rolling high numbers and more aboput making the right choices in difficult situations. It should also not limit what kind of stories you can tell in them, by which I mean it shouldn't define special rules and, especially, rolls, because once it does, it starts to limit potential stories to a particular genre, or worse yet, setting. Fantasy RPGs are especially guilty of this when they start defining magic systems so interwoven with the central rules that if you take it out, the whole system collapses into an unplayable mess. For those reasons, I think the ideal RPG would have complex rules and very simple dice rolls. Ideally, one single roll.
So why should that one roll use ten-sided dice? Well, it's partly mathematics and partly convenience. Convenience, because some dice are simply "better" at giving random results than other. For one, the general shape of a die influences how well it rolls. I admit, this is a very subjective point, but from my experience, d4s and d8s are very bad in this regard due to their very angular nature. This would imply that the less angular a die is, and the more faces it has, the better it rolls, but there's more to it than just that. You see, most gaming dice aren't exactly fair. They're made in a device called "rock tumbler". Those interested can research the whole process in their own time, but for what I'm saying here it's only important to know that the end result is a die with rounded edges that is more dense in certain parts. While this irregularity only poses as a very small influence on the randomness of that particular die, it's still there and the easier it is for the die to, in physics terms, change from one state to another, the bigger the influence is. This phenomenon is particularly noticeable with hundred-sided dice (yes, they exist, although they're made using more fair methods), but it's mainly a big problem with modern twenty-sided dice. For example, my good ol' purple d20 tends to land on 18 and adjacent numbers (2, 4 and 5) more than anything else.
Following the above logic, the best choices for our one true die are d6, d10 and d12. So why do I choose the d10? As I said before, mathematics. In the most simple case, a one die roll, I don't think the scale of 1-6 is large enough to allow for convenient division. In a simple success/fail case, the probabilities only move in sixths, and the problem only worsens in cases where we have multiple results. In this regard, the 1-12 scale is clearly superior, because it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. So the d12 sounds like an ideal candidate, and in a way it would be, were I not human. But I am, and as a result I'm primed to think in base-10, which makes operating with numbers between 1-10 much easier, which comes in handy when you need to roll more than one die, not to mention that humans just instinctively understand the scale of 1 to 10 better than any other. There's also the ability to perform a so-called "percentile roll" (d%) that provides you with a scale of 1-100.
In terms of major RPG systems, at least those that I'm somewhat familiar with, d10s are important in Vampire: The Masquerade, and probably other World of Darkness systems as well, with what I think is a very beautiful roll mechanic, where the player's stats influence not an additive modifier to the roll, but rather the number of d10s that they roll. I have seen versions that use d6s rather than d10s, but I believe that was a homebrew "hack" of the game, not any official version. There are other major systems that utilize different kinds of dice, for example GURPS (d6) and the d20 system (guess), so don't think that the d10 is unviersally revered as the Jesus of dice. This is all just my opinion, so feel free to disagree.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
On the meaning of dreams
My dreams are a mess, and I believe that most other people's are, too. I hear that there are some who have tiny little organized dreams that follow the three act structure, but when I drift off into the slumberland, I am greeted by a chaotic clutter of ever-changing locations, people that I don't know and yet I remember them from my past and items that randomly appear and diappear off-camera. Only problem is, the human mind is incapable of accepting such chaos, and so we've had centuries of people trying to uncover the meaning of dreams. Do they tell us our future? Or do those things actually happen in some distant land? We don't know. Not even modern science can tell us what exactly causes these visions. So, as some poor schmuck with a blog, I am contractually obligated to explain what exactly they are.
Okay, don't expect anything groundbreaking from me. I'm going by the most commonly accepted hypothesis that dreams are the product of our brain sorting out all the thoughts and knowledge gained during the day. As such, I don't believe that your dreams can't tell you anything about the future or any voodoo bullshit like that. They can, however, tell you about yourself.
This is something that I figured out a few months ago after dreaming about my brothers threatening to put gum in my dolls' hair. Did I mention how fucked up my dreams are? I don't have any dolls and only one of my brothers is still living with me. However, I soon noticed that this dream could very well represent a specific thing I had been obsessing over around that time, and that's probably why I could remember that particular part of that particular dream. In other words, my hypothesis is that if you can recall a dream well, it is a metaphorical representation of something that is very important to you.
Now, the bad part is that it is a metaphor, meaning you have to decode it first. The good part is that the metaphor was made up by your very own brain, therefore it should be easy for you to do that. Therefore, I fully encourage you, dear readers, to try this at home. Take a dream you can recall and decypher its meaning. Or at least think about it real hard. If the dream really has a hidden meaning, it should come to you naturally.
What got me to writing this post was the dream had today, or at least the part I can remember. I, and a whole bunch of other people, went to my friends' wedding, but when we got there, it turned out to be a bit of a prank on the wedding goers. It was actually my wedding. Now ignoring the setting of the scene (seriously, why can't I ever have a night of mindless action and violence?), the thing that stands out the most is the trick played on the audience, and what I think it means is holding secrets as a storyteller.
I consider myself a sort of a showrunner for The Bell Tree's ongoing adventures, weaving complex stories into the narrative through varios means. And since we often work on the albums as a group, that means that I have to dispense information to the other members carefully, to make sure that I don't reveal how the story's going to end prematurely, while still providing enough foreshadowing so that they can figure it out themselves, and for a long time now I have been fearing that maybe I'm not giving them enough material to do so. But that's a topic for another day.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you obsess over something too much, your brain will take it, scramble it up into an incoherent mess and throw it back at you at night. That sneaky motherfucker.
Okay, don't expect anything groundbreaking from me. I'm going by the most commonly accepted hypothesis that dreams are the product of our brain sorting out all the thoughts and knowledge gained during the day. As such, I don't believe that your dreams can't tell you anything about the future or any voodoo bullshit like that. They can, however, tell you about yourself.
This is something that I figured out a few months ago after dreaming about my brothers threatening to put gum in my dolls' hair. Did I mention how fucked up my dreams are? I don't have any dolls and only one of my brothers is still living with me. However, I soon noticed that this dream could very well represent a specific thing I had been obsessing over around that time, and that's probably why I could remember that particular part of that particular dream. In other words, my hypothesis is that if you can recall a dream well, it is a metaphorical representation of something that is very important to you.
Now, the bad part is that it is a metaphor, meaning you have to decode it first. The good part is that the metaphor was made up by your very own brain, therefore it should be easy for you to do that. Therefore, I fully encourage you, dear readers, to try this at home. Take a dream you can recall and decypher its meaning. Or at least think about it real hard. If the dream really has a hidden meaning, it should come to you naturally.
What got me to writing this post was the dream had today, or at least the part I can remember. I, and a whole bunch of other people, went to my friends' wedding, but when we got there, it turned out to be a bit of a prank on the wedding goers. It was actually my wedding. Now ignoring the setting of the scene (seriously, why can't I ever have a night of mindless action and violence?), the thing that stands out the most is the trick played on the audience, and what I think it means is holding secrets as a storyteller.
I consider myself a sort of a showrunner for The Bell Tree's ongoing adventures, weaving complex stories into the narrative through varios means. And since we often work on the albums as a group, that means that I have to dispense information to the other members carefully, to make sure that I don't reveal how the story's going to end prematurely, while still providing enough foreshadowing so that they can figure it out themselves, and for a long time now I have been fearing that maybe I'm not giving them enough material to do so. But that's a topic for another day.
So I guess what I'm trying to say here is that if you obsess over something too much, your brain will take it, scramble it up into an incoherent mess and throw it back at you at night. That sneaky motherfucker.
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