A random question

[Shadowed]

You're right that it's not metagaming, but the rest of my points still stand against your comments.

[NightCast]

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. Metagaming is using OOC knowledge of someone's character to have an advantage. Moreover, not writing from an omniscient perspective is limiting your spectrum.

How else could you write a comparison of emotions or thoughts? Including a comparison of how my character approaches battle differently than yours adds depth and spice to my post without your character having to include some ridiculous, stupid monologue about his life. Every great non-action, non-dialogue/monologue post ever made includes some kind of omniscience to it.

When you're roleplaying, you are mixing narration with your character's perspective. Otherwise, you are writing purely action and dialogue. And that is dull as shit.

I could take what your character thinks and put a new spin to it as an omniscient narrator, improving our thread in general. Being an omniscient narrator doesn't mean I'm going to have Luc know your guy is thinking "Hey, it's a good thing Luc does not know I'm weak against the color yellow and my alter-ego is Steve Johnson."

By utilizing information that is unknowable in a reasonable situation, you don't have to work at describing the other character. You have more options for word variation, and yes, the narrative can be overall more cohesive if you know every thought and action of your opponent's character. But when roleplaying, you take on the role of that character - the narrator is simply how you get this across.

By utilizing information through the narrative that the character cannot in any way find out, you're giving new light and depth to the narrative beyond what is reasonable for you telling the story through your character's perspective. You aren't writing some article examining both sides of a conflict; you're writing what your character does from his perspective.

To do otherwise is simply ridiculous, because it's not believable. Using third person limited omniscience, you only tell what's relevant to your character. Is it relevant for you to compare your opinions of the battlefield with your opponent's? No, because it has no bearing on anything. Sure, it might be pretty from a writing perspective, but this ain't poetry, buddy.

Also, please respond to Shadowed's post. He likes to debate and felt a bit left out that you passed them over.

[Cyrus the virus]

They don't, because they're not related. I'm not talking about my character's actions or thoughts, but a narration style of comparison between two characters or actions.

Meaning I can use your character's history and my character's history to draw parallels or opposites without your character, or even you mentioning anything in your posts. Not from my character's perspective but from the narrator's. Like "Steve, like Luc, had spent many years training for battles like these." etc. If Luc hasn't discerned this on his own, I'm writing from an omniscient perspective that NightCase appears to be arguing against.

So, yes, I will draw comparisons between our character's styles or abilities without my character knowing any of those things. Because that's not from my character's perspective, but mine. It's not my character who is making the observation.

I'll try to clarify a bit.

Erm, you shouldn't be writing a comparison between thoughts, unless it's in direct reference to what the other narrator said.

I know. I don't know what the character's thinking unless the narrator says what he's thinking. I never meant to imply that I know what someone's character is thinking more than they do.

Your example of battle isn't what I'm talking about, really. If I haven't explained it clearly in this post then I don't think I know how to.

[Cyrus the virus]

But when roleplaying, you take on the role of that character - the narrator is simply how you get this across.

I think this is where we disagree most. Your definition of roleplaying seems to be becoming the character, knowing only what the character knows, and using another perspective solely to describe actions. The focus on story on Althanas makes it necessary to tell a bigger picture, with your character as a part of the story. You need to step outside of what he knows in order to create a world around him.

By utilizing information through the narrative that the character cannot in any way find out, you're giving new light and depth to the narrative beyond what is reasonable for you telling the story through your character's perspective. You aren't writing some article examining both sides of a conflict; you're writing what your character does from his perspective.

Yeah, this is definitely what we're disagreeing on. I don't view battles as a competition of character versus character but as writer versus writer, and battles on Althanas work because people work together to tell a story, not to try and fight each other into an IC loss. If you and I wrote a battle where we only used what our characters knew, I assure you it would be much worse than one where we wrote from an alternative character-omniscient perspective.

To do otherwise is simply ridiculous, because it's not believable. Using third person limited omniscience, you only tell what's relevant to your character. Is it relevant for you to compare your opinions of the battlefield with your opponent's? No, because it has no bearing on anything. Sure, it might be pretty from a writing perspective, but this ain't poetry, buddy.

No, it's prose, and if you're here to write I don't see why you'd purposely make it worse than it could be. You're trying to write a believable fight about your demon-blooded prince of darkness who throws bolts of lightning, adding narrative beyond what he thinks and knows is going to make it much better and more involved. You used a pretty shitty example in the comparing battlefield thing, but what about comparing perspectives on a major IC event? Comparing emotions? Thoughts? Approaches to the battle? Reasons why they battle?

Also, please respond to Shadowed's post. He likes to debate and felt a bit left out that you passed them over.

I did, but it's not him I'm arguing against so I don't really see the point.

[Shadowed]

Meaning I can use your character's history and my character's history to draw parallels or opposites without your character, or even you mentioning anything in your posts. Not from my character's perspective but from the narrator's. Like "Steve, like Luc, had spent many years training for battles like these." etc. If Luc hasn't discerned this on his own, I'm writing from an omniscient perspective that NightCase appears to be arguing against.

When you're roleplaying, you are not an overarching narrative deity. Your job is to write what's relevant to the story from your perspective - roleplaying is entirely perspective based. You can tell a great story between two people, with each using their own perspective. Comparing histories is completely left-field; it's not something that could even be reasonably known by a reader, or a character, or anyone who isn't intimately familiar with the other person. Stories are driven by three things: Motivation, action, and interaction. As you're writing perspective-based, motivation is purely from your own perspective. Same with everything else. Would you really take a paragraph to go into the history of a nearby deer who you're going to use as a shield to stop a bullet? No, because that's ridiculous. Would you really go into someone else's history as a prelude to stabbing them? I doubt it.

So, yes, I will draw comparisons between our character's styles or abilities without my character knowing any of those things. Because that's not from my character's perspective, but mine. It's not my character who is making the observation.

Narrative. Voicing. Is. Bad. As I said, unless you are specifically going for a distinctive narrative voice, your narrator should be invisible. You're incorporating two primary things: what the reader would see or notice if they were standing there observing everything, and what the character you're writing about would know, think, say, do, etc. Read some fiction. Even books with multiple characters will write the scene from the perspective of one of them. Everything that is said, done, or thought is from that one perspective. Narrators do not have their own voice in the overwhelming majority of good fiction.

I know. I don't know what the character's thinking unless the narrator says what he's thinking. I never meant to imply that I know what someone's character is thinking more than they do.

Yet, amazingly enough, you know what he thought in the past. Hence why omniscience is such a slippery slope. You might know everything that Person Y is thought prior to you writing that post, but you don't know what he's thinking right now. "In stark contrast to Person X's calm demeanor, Person Y was boiling with rage; his mind saw images of his childhood home burning, brought back to his eyes by the words of Person X." Yeah, great. But now keep going. "Person X suddenly leapt forward, swinging a sword. Person Y, having an ingrained distrust of all shiny metal objects, was aghast with fear." See the problem? That would legitimately follow from your omniscient perspective, but there is no possible way that you can say any of that without bunnying. For stylistic continuity, it's ridiculous to narrate his thoughts in the first half of the scene, but have no idea in the second.

I think this is where we disagree most. Your definition of roleplaying seems to be becoming the character, knowing only what the character knows, and using another perspective solely to describe actions. The focus on story on Althanas makes it necessary to tell a bigger picture, with your character as a part of the story. You need to step outside of what he knows in order to create a world around him.

Roleplaying. You are playing a role. It's in the name. Everything should be from the perspective of that role. The narrator is invisible, because all actions are simple observation of what your character is doing. All thoughts are his own. All technical aspects of writing are done from his perspective. You cannot narrate the entire story alone, because you have zero control over the other character. It makes absolutely no sense, and in terms of technical writing and style, it's frankly ridiculous to even want to do so.

Yeah, this is definitely what we're disagreeing on. I don't view battles as a competition of character versus character but as writer versus writer, and battles on Althanas work because people work together to tell a story, not to try and fight each other into an IC loss. If you and I wrote a battle where we only used what our characters knew, I assure you it would be much worse than one where we wrote from an alternative character-omniscient perspective.

You're telling a story from two perspectives. The storyline remains cohesive, but the fact that you have two people doing it means it's perspective based. Otherwise I'd tell my opponent everything I'd do and have him write it for me to make it a better story. You're also severely missing the point of limited omniscience. I mean, drastically. It is not only what your character specifically knows.

No, it's prose, and if you're here to write I don't see why you'd purposely make it worse than it could be. You're trying to write a believable fight about your demon-blooded prince of darkness who throws bolts of lightning, adding narrative beyond what he thinks and knows is going to make it much better and more involved. You used a pretty shitty example in the comparing battlefield thing, but what about comparing perspectives on a major IC event? Comparing emotions? Thoughts? Approaches to the battle? Reasons why they battle?

You're making it better by not using your idea of omniscience, not worse. Why the hell would you compare perspectives about major IC events? You have zero influence, bearing, or relevance on the other character. In fact, not having that comparison makes for a better story, because your reader gets involved completely in your character. Imagine how shitty Star Wars would be if, instead of rolling to credits after the Yavin IV award ceremony, it went to a scene of women crying over the pictures of their dead husbands who were onboard.

[Jasmine]

I agree with Cyrus. It's not metagaming or bunnying or anything else of the sort to use your opponents name.

When I write on here, I'm writing a story. If I wrote purely from only what Jasmine can see or know, it would be pretty darn boring. The idea that 3rd person narrative is bad form is just silly. It's good writing to include everything around you.

For the narrator to say, "John swung his sword at Steve's head" is fine. It's third person narrative and makes it clear what John is doing. That doesn't mean that the narrator is responsible for writing Steve's reactions, facial, emotional or otherwise, because that would be bunnying/metagaming.

Now if John says, "Hi, Steve" and Steve has not introduced himself and there's no reason that they should know of each other, then that would inappropriate. But these are different scenarios.

3rd person omniscient narrative should not be dinged unless the narrator is crossing the line between narrator and character and letting his/her OOC knowledge affect how their characters acts and reacts.

[Cyrus the virus]

Would you really take a paragraph to go into the history of a nearby deer who you're going to use as a shield to stop a bullet?

This is an inane question and you know fully well it's not at all what I'm suggesting. If you want to have a conversation about this that's fine, but don't be silly about it.

Narrative. Voicing. Is. Bad.

No, it isn't. I don't really know how to argue against this except to say that you find narrative voice in many elaborate pieces of prose that exist and are good.

Your example doesn't really work for me. If my character is Y, sure. If my character is X, I wouldn't write a sentence about Y 'seeing' or 'remembering' anything to begin with. BUT, if I choose to write a paragraph regarding what character X's perspective might be if he knew about Y's past and what he might do had he any idea, that's fine. Because my character isn't gaining any sort of advantage and I'm not bunnying in any way. It's just adding a bit of added acknowledgment to Y's memories, and it would be interesting to the reader. So long as it doesn't drag.

I'm probably not making it as clear as I'd like to be, but I've never been good with explaining things like this.

Everything should be from the perspective of that role.

You show me a thread written entirely from each character's perspective, with no overarching narration or perspective, and I'll show you limited storytelling. The idea of writing a thread which includes an antagonist who you only see when the protagonist does is the definition of limiting, to me. And the idea that you insult my perspective by calling it ridiculous suggests to me that you're too closed minded to even entertain the idea.

I've written your style before, believe me. I eventually went from roleplaying to storytelling, and it is very rewarding. When your character wanders around a town leveled by disease, the difference between just another setting and a convincing catastrophe is all in what happens beyond your character. What happened before he got there, the NPCs who have lost loved ones. These things don't come across the same way if your character learns them through dialogue and then reflects upon them for the reader to absorb.

Why the hell would you compare perspectives about major IC events? You have zero influence, bearing, or relevance on the other character.

Because there's a world around them. How shitty would Star Wars have been if the death star had been just the platform Luke and Vader dueled on and not a massive spacestation inhabited by stormtroopers, commanders and Vader himself?

Imagine if we'd watched Star Wars from Luke's perspective while he played in the swamp with Yoda. The death star probably wouldn't be quite as interesting if we hadn't seen it destroy Alderaan (outside of Luke's perspective). Vader probably wouldn't have been at all sinister if he hadn't killed his own men (outside of Luke's perspective) or without all of his dialogues with his old boss-man (outside of Luke's perspective). See where I'm going with this?

[Mikeavelli]

I guess I’ll jump right back in on this, not with the whole quoting specific paragraphs and responding to them, but going with the general themes I’m seeing here:

On professional writers: I’ve read it done both ways, but usually the only reason a writer will go out of his way to describe a character rather than simply naming them is when he’s doing it to make a narrative point. This comes up a lot in, for example, mystery novels, where the writer will follow the point of view of several different characters over the course of the novel. Even though we, the reader, know exactly who’s being referred to, the narrative will keep that information hidden from us.

Terry Brooks (I’m on a Terry Brooks kick recently because he finished up his Genesis of Shannara trilogy, and I was a big fan of the series back when I was younger) – does this a lot too, but he does it really badly – resulting in a more confusing narrative than anything else. This might also be because it only comes up during fight scenes, which he’s pretty terrible at writing (relative to the rest of his work).

There are a lot of parallels there to written RP combat, you’ve got two distinct points of view with their own narrative behind them, but not knowing the name of your opponent isn’t usually a specific plot point.

Other authors will refer to characters by their proper name in the narrative as soon as it’s introduced in the narrative, despite the point of view character not knowing it. It’s just the stylistic choice of whether using a decorative description of your opponent adds more, and is worth the potential loss in clarity.

Both are appropriate, determined by the context.

[hr]

I brought it up in public because it’s widespread in Althanas, and I’m honestly really curious about everyones thoughts on this. I tried, -a lot- to find a way to write the original post that didn’t sound like I was just whining, especially since even though it came up in my judging, I don’t think it even affected the actual points handed out.

Hopefully I was successful.

[hr]

Now I get to weigh in on the whole extra conversation that’s sprung up here; describing extraneous things that none of the characters could possibly know in the context of the story. As before, If it adds to the story, go for it! Shadowed, in particular, seems bent on forcing a slippery slope where, if you can write about anything and everything without heed to what the characters know, you will run off on a tangent unrelated to the storyline, or you will reach inside another character’s head and describe their thoughts.

What I’m trying to say here is that there’s nothing wrong mechanically with using an omniscient narrator. Sure, all sorts of bunnying issues can come up if you’re using an omniscient narrator, or you can go off on a tangent poorly – but it’s the way you use that style, not the style itself, that is at fault here.


Also, I lied, I’m going to take one quote out of context:

Would you really take a paragraph to go into the history of a nearby deer who you're going to use as a shield to stop a bullet?

Douglas Adams did this; frequently, and hilariously. It is now, in fact, my goal to incorporate this very sequence into my ToC battle.

[Cyrus the virus]

Shadowed, in particular, seems bent on forcing a slippery slope where, if you can write about anything and everything without heed to what the characters know, you will run off on a tangent unrelated to the storyline, or you will reach inside another character’s head and describe their thoughts.

This is something I wanted to point out, but had no idea how. Stupid Cyruz.