Now that I’ve looked at how Dungeons & Dragons is an example of a transmedia property — or at the very least, similar to it — I can get to the good stuff. What can an understanding and experience with D&D teach us about writing for transmedia?
Start With a Rich Storyworld
Many transmedia writers have talked about this to great extent: a transmedia property isn’t about a single story in a static medium. You can’t get away with only knowing as much as you need to for one storyline. For a transmedia property, you need an entire storyworld that you can build many different stories within.
(As Simon Pulman and I have written about, Orson Scott Card says you should do this even for a single story — know the rules of the world.)
This is true of D&D just as much. Published campaign worlds like Forgotten Realms or Eberron need to be fully realized settings that allow DMs and players to create and tell hundreds, thousands of stories within. You might set up a particular location as the default starting point of a story campaign, but you can’t assume everyone will use it. Every location in the world needs to be rich with potential for stories.
This holds true as well if you, as a DM (transmedia producer, property creator) create your own world. There’s a lot of frontend work you need to do to make your world a fully realized, living place. Even if you know exactly where the player characters start and where you expect them to go, you need to have at least an idea of what’s going on around that. For one thing, it adds an element of verisimilitude — even if you don’t expect the king’s succession problems to figure in the plot, when the players hear rumours of it in the tavern, they get a sense that they’re in a real, working world (instead of a two-dimensional movie set).
Building on the movie set metaphor, you also can never be sure what your players are going to do at any given time. They may veer off your planned path (more on this in later installments) and if you don’t have your world fleshed out, they’ll see the two-by-fours holding up the building facades. Suddenly, they’ll find themselves in a place that seems far less real than where they were before, and the sense of immersion is lost.
And that’s the key. If there’s enough detail of the world in which the players are playing (the world that the audience is exploring in a transmedia property), it will seem far more real, and thus allow them to become immersed in it and the story. There’s nothing worse than someone who is immersed turning a corner, finding a blank wall and being torn out of the story.
Potential for Stories
I mentioned this briefly, but it’s worth looking at in more detail. When you’re creating a world for a transmedia property, just as when you’re creating a world for D&D, you need to consider the potential for stories — the potential to expand in the future. You may know the main story of your property — the driving platform, for instance — and know what parts of your world you need to understand for that story. But the worst thing you can do is create that and then realize you’ve written yourself into a corner and can’t expand it into other media, other stories.
But that means you do need to consider the potential for transmedia from the top. Tacking on transmedia after the fact is a recipe for disaster. Know your full story world and the potential within it; know the rules of your world and stick to them — the audience of transmedia will find inconsistencies if they exist. Note that I don’t think you need to know every single story within that world from the top — just know where the potential for those stories are so you can successfully build them later.
The Folly
I’ve run D&D campaigns before where I had only the briefest sketch of the world, the immediate setting, and a couple adventure ideas, without having fleshed out the world or where I was going with the story. I may have been able to run some interesting encounters, but a couple months into the campaign, I suddenly found myself scrambling to work in a story that wasn’t there at the start. I had to hand-wave some continuity changes, and insist that elements of the world were always present, just not noticed.
With enough good improv, this can work, but it’s a flimsy construct at best. A savvy audience will see through it immediately.
If, on the other hand, you’ve seeded in the workings of the world from the start, then when they suddenly become improtant, your storytelling mastery will pull your audience in and engage them that much more.
Next time: audience engagement. (The whole series: Part 1 – D&D = Transmedia; Part 2 – Storyworld; Part 3 – Engagement; Part 4 – Interaction; Part 5 – Differences; Part 6 – Resources)
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Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
November 24, 2010 at 11:56 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
“the potential for stories — the potential to expand in the future”
I realized over the summer that “transmedia” immediately clicked for me, not because of Star Wars, but because of D&D, particularly Forgotten Realms. I’ve engaged with that setting via pen & paper and video games; short stories, novels and comics; and I even wrote a few FR-based stories of my own. And I’d love to see a movie or TV series set there, too!
Have you read this article about FR’s update? http://bit.ly/e5BXzT
“4. It’s a fully realized world, full of history and legend.” The example of the sword is an excellent one.
Lucas J.W. Johnson
November 24, 2010 at 5:56 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I hadn’t seen that article in particular, but I have been a player in a 4th ed. Forgotten Realms campaign. The point about the sword is a good one — and I think one that could be extended beyond FR, for sure. Having that history enriches the immersion in the storyworld for the player who cares.
There’s also a danger to watch out for in that, I think, in that it can be taken too far. For example, perhaps we are wandering the forests of Cormanthor, and the DM is describing the scene and stops to say, “Oh, there’s this really cool tree that grows around here, hold on, let me find it…” And pulls out the 2nd ed. Volo’s Guide to All Things Magical and flips through it and says, “Ah yes, the roseneedle pine. It’s a pine tree, like a yew, but it never grows taller than a few feet, and in the spring it has little roselike flowers at the end of each needle. The roots end in tubers that make great fishing bait.” And meanwhile the players are thinking, “Great, but we really just want to get to the bandit’s camp so we can save some slaves.”
I think it’s awesome to have those details available to you, and if you can include them in your initial descriptions of the forest, it adds a great element to the story. But as soon as it disrupts the actual gameplay, and the flow of the story (the tuber thing is irrelevant unless we’re fishing), it becomes a distraction instead.
If I care about the history of the sword, or if it’s important to the story (or a story somewhere), then great. If not, sometimes I just want the +1 to hit and damage. Know where to pick your fights. This applies in exactly the same way to transmedia.
This is also why, though I love the Lord of the Rings, I can’t stand Tolkien’s prose.
(The roseneedle pine is real. There’s two long paragraphs about it. Page 62.)
dys·func·tion
November 24, 2010 at 2:13 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
Wave it off? I’m sure the people you played D&D with *never* noticed…
“What happens if I don’t go to the tower?”
“I guess you’ll never know…”
“Hmm…I don’t think I want to go to the tower…it’s really far away…”
“Just go to the tower.”
“But – ”
“Tower. Now.”
Lucas J.W. Johnson
November 24, 2010 at 5:58 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment
I totally never did that. Nope. Not once. Not me. I’m too good a DM for that nonsense. Mhm.
But that’s kind of my point. You need the contingencies for when that does happen. (More on that in my next entries!)
What D&D can tell us about Transmedia (Part 3) » Silverstring Media
November 26, 2010 at 7:30 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment
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