Storytelling & Wargaming

[Gustavo]

Sometimes, some of us seem to have so many Klickys that it becomes quite difficult to make up meaningful stories.

I've attached a couple of photos from GW-PC to illustrate. How could anyone create a great story like the one Gus wrote with this many figures?

(Photos courtesy of Vincent, Playmofrance and GW-PC.)

All the best,
Richard

Hi Richard!

I've been thinking about this ...

He made a good job in customizing. Taking a look at his pictures, one of the few things I'd change -- not yet talking about story-telling -- would be the four generals, who look too much exactly alike, along with some other groups of soldiers, like this one ... However, in general, he makes klickys faces to look different from each other (like here, and here), and it's a beginning.

I agree with Playmofire: in a composition like that, maybe the story isn't so important (...).

To make a story you have to think about characters. You can't have a story without characters. So, it's about choosing whose story you're going to tell: a soldier's, or the story of a family in the castle, a servant of General Mack, perhaps ... Or master Tailor's (who doens't happen to have a good end ...)

So, you need a group of characters, names, and a plot ... That can be very simple. (Sir Elmo's stories are absurdly simple!) But it has to make sense ... (Sir Elmo's stories are part of something bigger.) So, characters, names, a plot, not necessarily in this order. Then, you'll have the story of the battle, but you will have to shoot actions of these characters. If the soldier, what happens with him, what deeds of courage he makes in this battle, or whether he hides all the time, or gets wounded, faints, and is helped by a maid of the town, after the battle, he wakes up and falls in love with her, but lo!: she's in the enemy field! (Drama!) ... Or, a family in the castle, how they are worried about the invasion, and thinking about how they'll better flee if the city falls but, wait a minute: where's young Wilhelm, the boy? He vanishes! So the family men split up and go after him, and the bigger brother, from the top of a tower spots Wilhelm in the village outside, and tries to go after him, but the city guard doesn't allow him to do so, because the gates can't be opened ... (Another drama!) Maybe to think about a funny story about a couple of soldiers who decide to rob the city treasure, during the battle ... They may get caught, in the end, or maybe they succeed ...

In a scenary like this, it'd be a story a bit like Gone with the wind (or, maybe, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), "in the middle of a war" a story about brave (?) charaters, struggling to survive ... It's great to think about it, it'd be a wonderful production!

Gus

[Richard]

Very interesting, Gus ...

You seem to regard the large groups of Playmobil figures, not as characters, but as part of a mobile and ever-changing backdrop or scenery.

Simple, but quite clever.

Thank you for some very good ideas.

All the best,
Richard

[Timotheos]

Actually somebody told me the entire photo shoot was somebody's recollection of a nightmarish acid trip.

[Martin Milner]

Very interesting, Gus ...

You seem to regard the large groups of Playmobil figures, not as characters, but as part of a mobile and ever-changing backdrop or scenery.

Simple, but quite clever.

Or like film extras?

[Gustavo]

Or like film extras?

Among the things I thought about "how to make a meaningful story with that many klickys" was that it might make more sense (to me ... maybe -- I was trying to figure things out) if I gave names to each & every klicky.

Then it turned out to be ... too hard a task.

But I think that many would have, at least, prenames. (For example, all the soldiers in the company of a soldier protagonist, for example ... And his closest mates, possibly more than prenames.)

There's two ways of making the thing more interesting: doing it as a movie, or doing it as a role-playing ...

In a movie, once there's money envolved to each thing you do beyond the story that involves main characters, you only think what's extrictly necessary. But with Playmobil we can spare time to think about things that aren't to be in the final narrative, I think.

The shooting that Vincent did has something to do with documentary. In such kind of narrative, we don't know the names of the soldiers, but only those of the generals, and important people.

A lot of thinking ... Sharing the pictures in the internet is interesting because you can play along a bit with some things that are published

 

G.

[Timotheos]

Among the things I thought about "how to make a meaningful story with that many klickys" was that it might make more sense (to me ... maybe -- I was trying to figure things out) if I gave names to each & every klicky.

Most stories, whether literary masterpieces or playmo photo-tales, tend to have the most success when limiting their major protagonists to three characters.

That doesn't mean you can't have more characters than that (especially as minor characters), but most stories need a backbone to give the reader an idea of what matters and who is worth trying to remember.

Even Russian novels follow this!
Crime and Punishment - the student, the landlady, and the inspector (after the landlady is murdered, another character steps in keeping the circle three-ish).

Hero of Our Times - In Lermontov's Pechorin short-stories, there is 1) Pechorin 2) the girl he is wooing and 3) either his rival for the girl or his friend, who narrates.

To manage a story with several characters like you are describing, you could break it down into substories, with each sub-story having its limited number of important characters.

Our minds they say can keep track of up to seven things at a time, so if you are aiming for a canvas with hundreds of "principal characters" the reader won't be able to keep track of them all. 

Maybe something like that could work: the reader could have the freedom to "latch onto" those characters who interest him and skip over those who don't.  But people who tackle the story linearly may feel over-whelmed, as with the proverbial "Russian Novel."

Or, you could present a series of short stories, all taking place with the war as background, with each short tale focusing around a different set of a small number of characters and the reader fully understands there is no main character, or else the main character is a background narrator, like in "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson, which is a collection of unrelated short stories tied together by one main character.

[Richard]

Great advice, Timmy!

Just wish that we would have known you BEFORE we wrote our last book ...