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I suddenly realised that I left SAD KITTEH sitting there for days – suggesting that I might have surrendered to my woe and given up. No such luck. I was this sort of cat instead:

And re-wrote and re-designed everything I’d lost. If anything, I think it turned out a little better this time round. It also took me much less time which means I might have learned something… well I guess it means I learned how to make exactly the same thing more efficiently on the second attempt. The trick to re-writing, err, writing though is not to try and recreate exactly what you had before but write something else, with the previous thing vaguely in mind. And nine out of ten times what you end up with is better than the thing you had before anyway, which is both reassuring and frustrating. It’s reassuring because you need not fear visitors from Porlock (unless you’re high, I guess) and frustrating because it makes you suspect that, in order to do it right, you ought to write everything from scratch at least twice.

Chapter Three is proving problematic – I stuck it in at the end of the of the planning stage largely in order to introduce a character so players would have more emotional investment in decisions regarding him they have to make later. This has left the structure of Chapter 3 rather loose, and I know it’s entirely my own fault, but then it’s also quite stylistically different from Chapters 1 and 2 so it’s not all bad.

I will write a post actually about the module at some point, so you have a hope in hell of understanding what I’m burbling about, but the main source of problems in 3 is the character I’m supposed to be introducing. He’s your half-brother, and basically he’s a bard. Or at least a sort of self-consciously edgy interpretation of a bard. But writing an apparently “charismatic” character is fucking difficult, not least because you can’t really tell what other people are going to find attractive. I mean you can use your own intelligence to write a intelligent character – not I hasten to add by suffusing is dialogue with pretentious polysyllabic persiflage but by just making him relatively smart and insightful about his world, although PPP is always an option. And equally you can use your own intelligence to write a stupid character. But charisma is a different proposition entirely – regardless of whether you’re charismatic yourself (although you lose all your points for self-defining as charismatic). And I’m talking about charisma-the-concept here, not charisma-the-stat. Obviously.

So there are two routes you can go. You can try to write a character a player might genuinely find attractive and charming, which is naturally terribly dangerous because somebody the writer finds attractive and charming is pretty much guaranteed to be somebody the player finds self-indulgent and annoying. Or you can have anything and everyone else in the world react to the character like he is the God of Chocolate and Orgasms, which case it’s even more annoying because then the character becomes The Hero of Being Cooler Than You, like Reaver in Fable 2. And as far as I’m concerned, a good RPG makes you feel like the most important person in the world. Not necessarily by making you uber-special or anything, but my making you feel like you genuinely matter, and have power and agency and other good shit.

Oh, yeah, and the basic template for a bard seems to be writing a musical version of Wesley from the Princess Bride

In short: I have no idea how to navigate this minefield of my own making. But I’ll figure it out.

And if I end up writing a twat with a lute so be it.