The Art of the Story Arc in Roleplay: Planting Roots, Building Legacies

[Kylarnatia]

The Art of the Story Arc in Roleplay: Planting Roots, Building Legacies

A NS Roleplay Symposium Lecture by Kylarnatia​

Introduction

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another year of the NationState’s Roleplay Symposium, graciously hosted once again by Greater Dienstad and The North Pacific. My thanks first of all to all those involved in bringing this event together, especially under the current circumstances. A special thank you to Ghant as well for inviting me once again to talk at this event and giving me the privilege of helping out in the moderation of the discussions and activities this year on our Discord server. I’m looking forward to seeing the fruitful conversations, knowledge exchange and fun that will come out of this year’s symposium.

For those who aren’t already familiar with me, I’m Kylarnatia, though most people know me as Kyle. I’m a twelve-year veteran of NationStates and have been an International Incidents Roleplay Mentor for a fair degree of that time, and I reside within the region of Gholgoth. I’ve spoken a several of these events in the past, on topics such as Non-realism in NationState’s Roleplay (2012), The Art of NationStates Empires (2014), ‘Falling down the Rabbit Hole’: A Lecture on Worldbuilding (2016) and Theologia: Religion, Mythology and the Essence of Belief in World Creation (2019). One similarity you may see across all these themes is how I like to work from a macro-level, painting over a broad canvass so then we can work down to the finer details. When approached about doing a lecture this year, I was asked if I could explain how I approach plotting “Story Arcs” for NationState’s Roleplay, and I’m excited to share that with you today.

I will say straight off the bat that I don’t think there’s any perfect form of storytelling, and nor do I really intend to necessarily touch upon the finer points of telling a story in this lecture. My hope is that, by showing you all the inner process by which I work in plotting my stories and the considerations I make while doing them, it’ll provide you with some useful tools through which to consider the stories that you make, be they purely for yourself or between your region-mates and beyond. Lastly, I’m drawn to this topic this year as I personally feel that - as we grow closer and closer to almost two decades of being a community, with no foreseeable reason to see an end in sight - we are going to enter (if we haven’t done so already) a state where there are multiple “game generations” on this site, and for roleplayers in particular, I think this presents an interesting challenge in terms of ‘legacy’ and ‘continuation’ in storytelling, and for ensuring that our regions carry on great storytelling traditions from one generation to the next.

Creating a Story Arc: The Roots, Its Trunk and The Branches

So first things first, what do I mean when I say Story Arc? To me, it means a thematic story that can encompass several other stories/roleplays, and takes place across a sizable span of both in-character and out-of-character space and time. It’s not a simple undertaking, and it takes a lot of commitment (but that doesn’t necessarily mean it has to be difficult). When starting to plot a Story Arc, you’ve got to be ready to commit to the long game; not all arcs necessarily have to be multi-year epics - we all have our own pace - but I think if you want to do it well, you also want to take it at a leisurely pace. Getting to explore all the possibilities of a story is an important part of making a successful story arc I feel, especially when as roleplayers we often not sole storytellers, so it's good to take time; it makes the whole process more approachable not only for you but others as well, as we will get to in a moment.

One thing a successful Story Arc needs from the get-go is a main instigator, who helps form the roots and create the trunk of our arc. While roleplay does benefit from freeform exploration and possibilities - and that doesn’t need, nor shouldn’t, be entirely lost in this - it helps to have some base for stability to ensure that there is some internal consistency, but also a constant refocusing on the shared investment of this storytelling. The instigator is not necessarily a director as much as they are a producer, or to follow the tree analogy that I’ll be following, a groundskeeper. It’s their responsibility to help tend to and help shape their arc, helping to prune and shape the branches in a way that forms most effectively with the tree so that it’s not too lopsided or messy, but also encourages natural and healthy growth, understanding their tree and watching over its growth with encouragement and inquisitiveness. In essence, they serve as the guide and caretaker of the wider Story Arc, and help on forming the wider themes of the story and help drive it forward, while encouraging their fellow storytellers to use what you provide as a base to create further stories which you help shape together.

So, if you are the Groundskeeper of your own Story Arc tree, where do you start? With the roots. They can of course be ones developed from scratch, especially if you’re bringing together a new group in its infancy, but if you’re part of a group that has been storytelling for any considerable length of time, I think it’s worth considering the ground upon which you’re standing; What stories have been told before? How can they be brought forward to relate to the present? Perhaps most interestingly, how could those events be interpreted in-character in a way that fits a broader theme which can be engaged with both on a player and character level, to bring out the best in both? Notice that ‘originality’ isn’t a concern at this stage, nor do I think it ever has to be; indeed, looking back as far as possible at the themes of stories your group has told before can help establish a commonality that gives people more buy-ins then outs, and makes the whole thing feel more ‘authentic’ to the world you have established. After all, if you and your friends enjoy particular types of stories (e.g. war epics, character intrigue, high romance dramas), why force yourselves out of your comfort zone? I’d also argue that by feeding through these common themes into the roots and trunk of a story, and being able to step back and look at them holistically, your branches can be formed to have new and interesting takes, while still staying true to the tradition of your group.

Once you’ve plotted out your roots, you then want to form the trunk of your Story Arc; these are the key, overarching events that form the very backbone of your story. They should be formed around either particular characters or events that will help be the driving forces behind the overall arc, and will help be the guiding posts from where it begins to grow until it reaches its eventual height and has achieved all that you and your community feel it has. So for instance, if one of your key roots is a long line of conflicts that has ravaged your nation or even your entire region, one of the key cores of your trunk would perhaps be a character (or characters) whose felt the direct effect of those conflicts (personal loss, geo-political loss and threat etc.) and is thus heavily influenced in their ambitions and decisions by that. Another root to add to that might be that they (or their nation) are at a particular crossroads themselves, either as a result of those earlier mentioned wars or because of some other manner, and as such this might explain why this core character chooses to act when they do. I don’t want to go as far as saying that they are the main protagonist/antagonist, because roleplaying is a medium (be it text-based, tabletop etc.) where everyone deserves a chance to shine, but I do think it helps when plotting an overarching theme to have people or events that stay central to that, so that everyone else has some footing and something to jump from.

The other important thing about the trunk of a story is that it helps to establish the very broad but decisive strokes of a beginning, middle and end. Again, the key here is to be fairly broad, because doing so will allow you to be as flexible and open as possible throughout and thus avoids the frustrations and difficulties that will sometimes inevitably occur in shared projects such as roleplaying; nobody ever wants to step on the others toes, but again one of the allures of roleplaying is being able to explore various avenues of cause and effect, and you don’t want to rob yourself or others of that. In fact, that can help to enrich the experience of the Story Arc for everyone, in knowing that there’s still a lot of open possibility. But it’s also useful to provide the groundwork, the essential pitch, so that everyone is sure of where everything is eventually heading. So if the roots of your story draw from themes of war, powerful figures and the idea of legacy, the trunk of your story may focus on a character who wishes to cement their own legacy, perhaps by doing what they think will help resolve the conflict while also resolving the personal and geo-political reasons as to why, at least as far as they can see (and we’ll get to that in a moment). So, your beginning is that you have a young and ambitious leader who pushes a defiant agenda, somewhere in the middle you might want to have a moment of crisis that cements that character’s struggle at its zenith, then the eventual end is a resolution of that personal and geo-political struggle. All of these moments serve as interfaces through which others can establish their own reactions and therefore consequential reactions that form the branches. You may decide on certain conditions already (i.e. an eventual winner to a conflict, etc.), but even then you can still keep that fairly broad; there’s no saying how costly that conflict might be, or what defines ‘winning’.

The branches, to me, make up perhaps the most interesting part of a Story Arc and can help form a great and memorable one. These are the beginnings of the consequential stories or moments that spring from the trunk and roots you’ve established, and hopefully through which you’ve helped to inspire your group (If you find this hasn’t happened, don’t panic; revisit the roots and trunk with them and see what works and what doesn’t. Nothing is unworkable without enough creative thought and exploration). These can be so broad and far-ranging that I don’t think it’d be too helpful to list examples, because you and your friends know your creative minds better and hopefully with the right groundwork the ideas will spring forth quite easily, but the key thing you need to know about branches is that they should be free to sprout, and particularly thick ones can become their own sub-arcs with enough creative input. The key thing though is that they don’t have to; sometimes small branches bear just as much good fruit as large ones, and can help to ground the story in much more immediate short-term consequences as opposed to always being slow-burners.

By the time you read the end of your Story Arc, you should hopefully also be able to sprout off various branches of your own. Some you’ll have envisioned from the get-go, especially if they’re continual themes from right down into your roots, but a lot of it will also become influenced by the way your Story Arc has been shaped by the branches - both big and small - contributed by everyone else. These endgame branches, however, should end the same way as you started; broad, overarching themes and consequences that can maybe one day form the roots of a whole new tree. The more accessible - and free to interpret - they are, the better, because as the nature and generation of your storytellers change, so will they reinvent the stories and traditions that come with them.

Building a Storytelling Legacy

I want to end this lecture by explaining why I like to build Story Arcs in this way, and why I’m so interested in doing so going forward. Again, I don’t think the methods I use fit universally, and I’m sure there are those out there who are perfectly content with writing stories moment to moment, and that is perfectly valid and no less rich than plotting out elaborate and diverse Story Arcs. However, what I will say is that in my experience of being on NationStates and being part of a community that has been around as long as the game itself, one thing that has kept them going is a shared feeling of not just communal identity, but also shared responsibility to, the community you are inheriting. If you want to establish that sort of ethos for your community, a rich storytelling tradition - which is easily traceable through roots - is one of the key pillars for a roleplaying group to live on for years beyond even the original founders intended.

I feel very privileged that I can be a part of Gholgoth’s storytelling tradition (which I’m sure is just the first of many out there on NationStates, but the one I can speak most from out of personal experience). Even if not entirely envisioned to begin with, the shared in-character and out-of-character sentiments of fraternity, and our shared fondness for things that serve as a near mystical caricature of the real world (sometimes satirically, other times critically), means that we’ve established a common set of storytelling roots for exploring broad themes of conflict, identity and purpose. In my own time as part of the community, I’ve tried to draw upon these themes in the creation of our current Story Arc, through which we are exploring the consequences of both past and present leaders, seeking to draw a line between the death and sense of loss felt on both a personal and geo-political level by the death of the Lord Dreadfire (the ‘main’ character of our founder, Automagfreek), to the post-Dreadfire order that has naturally developed, hoping to explore the seemingly cyclical nature of Gothic leadership, but also more broadly how legacies can continue to evolve even long after a person's death, and how that is sometimes not envisionable even to them. Stories quite often belie the non-linear and continually ebb and flow of time (i.e. the past does very rarely ever truly stay in the past; we draw on the past to sometimes construct our own present).

So in essence, you have to be prepared to accept that after a certain point, these things are going to be out of your hands. That’s okay; that is what you want, in a way, because it makes it more interesting to see all (or at least some) of the possibilities of what comes after. After all, a tree that is able to continually grow and reach the tree-tops to feed off the sun is more likely to remain even long after we’re gone, and if your biggest concern is creating a long-lasting community with a rich storytelling tradition, preparing for that eventuality is often the most exciting part of the whole thing, just imagining what could possibly come after. I think NationStates has only become richer for it as it creeps closer towards two decades, and I think it's things like this which I hope will allow it to continue for even more decades to come.