#plot vs story

Getting started with a writing project can be intimidating, especially when one is self-taught or has no formal writing training. Not to fear, I've created this writing tip series to help out! Without further ado... let's get started!

In this entry, I'm going to cover what I believe to be the absolute basics of tackling a story. These pillars are commonly accepted to be: character, plot, setting.

Characters are, simply, the "characters" of a story (like defining the word "the", there's no better way to put it other than that it's... "the"). Characters are any living or personified being that move the plot and inhabit the setting. In essence, a character can be anything. For examples of non-human characters leading narratives, see the Warrior Cats series or Watership Down. There are also examples of non-living beings like towns being characters in a story (the names of these stories escape me).

A protagonist of a story is the character that the story is about. Usually, the protagonist of the story will also double as the narrator or something adjacent to it, but there are exceptions to this. For example, in The Great Gatsby, Nick is the narrator but Gatsby is the protagonist. Although we follow Nick through the story as he recounts the events of the story, the events focus around Gatsby, his life, and his choices. As presented here, a narrator is a character of whom the reader sees the events of the story through. A story can have multiple narrators (called colloquially "multiple POVs") or none at all (within the Third Person Omniscient point of view, which will be discussed next issue).

An antagonist is a character that opposes the goals or views of the protagonist. Base level media criticism harps on this fact (because base level media critics know nothing else about writing), but hero is not synonymous with protagonist, and villain is not synonymous with antagonist. While this is often the case, it isn't always. If a villain were the main character of a story, then the villain would be the protagonist and the hero would be the antagonist. Deuteragonists are the characters who are the second most important, second to the protagonist. Secondary and tertiary characters are characters that play varying degrees of supporting roles other than that of protagonist or antagonist, which generally becomes semantic to dictate beyond the secondary zone.

A dynamic character describes a character who changes throughout the course of the story (usually as a result of a character arc, but not always) and a static character is a character that doesn't change throughout the course of the story. Just because a character is static does not make them worse, both characters have a place in their respective stories or single story. Static characters often perform a certain niche or invoke change in other characters in them or their environment. Dynamic characters make for interesting and engaging stories that make it easier for a reader to like them over watching them struggle over long periods of time (unlike static characters, who are sometimes likable right off the bat).

When getting started writing characters, especially with no idea in mind, I heavily suggest using character forms. Forms like these, while sometimes heavily specialized to certains genres or fandoms, help exercise both general and specific details of a character. When creating characters for a story, it is important to consider how certain character archetypes and individuals will play into the message or type of story you're aiming for. For example, a protagonist in their mid-20s may not be best for a story about the firsthand horrors of old age. On the flipside, an elderly character may not be best for a high stakes action adventure. These could both be subverted ideas, but in general, throughout these tips, I'm going to preach the concept of learning the rules before they are subverted.

For fleshing out characters, writing character exercises is a good way to get to know the character that you will--most likely--end up writing a lot for a full fledged story. Putting your character in different situations and writing how specifically those situations are handled can help a character be uniquely understood beyond the confines of a form.

Plot is the events of the story in the order they are laid out to the viewer. "Plot" and "story" are stressed differently here, as plot refers specifically to how the story is relayed to the audience. Where the story is the complete list of all relevant events, the plot is what we as the reader are shown (for example, bathroom breaks are part of the story, because we're aware that they happen, but they aren't actually verbalized to the reader, so they're not plot). Plot also dictates the order in which events appear. Some stories have events appear in non-chronological order. In this case, the story would be all of the events in their chronological order, and plot would be the order in which they appear to the reader.

The most important element of plot taught in elementary school classrooms is Freytag's pyramid, attached below.

Exposition is the introduction to the foreign world that the reader is being introduced to--in terms of this post, exposition is when the reader is introduced to the characters and the setting. The inciting incident is a single event in which something of this world is tipped askew, leading to the events and conflict of the rest of the story. In the rising action, we are building up and up in conflict until the climax, in which all of the built up tension is released. In a fantasy story, this will be your final battle. In a romance story, this will be your first kiss. In a thriller, your killer is finally revealed. The falling action deals with the fallout of the climax and settles the story for the resolution. In Freytag's pyramid, the rising and falling dictates the level of conflict or tension arising from a story. It is important to note that it is absolutely possible to throw Freytag's pyramid to the wind. In smaller examples, a series of stories may skip the resolution in the end of its first book and will skip the exposition of the following books, because the story is not yet resolved and later books need no introduction to a world we were just in (however, series sometimes go to the exposition phase just in case, whether we were just with them or not, like in event of a time jump). In larger examples, stories may end with the climax or hack off different parts of Freytag's pyramid freely. Your story is yours to amalgamate, but again, learn the rules before you break them.

For more in depth ways of starting a plot, the 27 chapter method is a bit of a more fleshed out Freytag's pyramid that's easier to follow. The 27 chapter method, however, is meant to be used more as a "general guide" rather than a gospel.

Lastly, and frankly, often toted as least, is setting. Setting is simply the time and place that a story is taking place in. For now, I'm going to store away the topics of actually building a world (ie, Worldbuilding) for another day, and focus here specifically on the active role the setting plays in a story.

A story can be set anywhere, but just like the conversation of what characters best fit a story, choosing a good setting could better enhance a story. Any story written anywhere other than a believable place that humans could be is often referred to as a fantasy book, as creating this in-depth world often means that the protagonists will be exploring it, hence, "fantasy"-- ie. not real. It is theoretically possible to create a story in a fantasy world that does not harp on its existence in a fantasy world at all, but this would be... questionable, and probably not a good use of setting. Fantasy stories taking place in fantasy worlds are often called high fantasy, whereas fantasy stories taking place in our modern world is called low fantasy. On the topic of time, stories set before the piece was written are called historical fiction.

Setting builds the characters in our story, as our characters are all defined by their relationship to their setting. If a character grew up in the setting created, the setting itself will have an impact on who they are. If your character is an outsider to this world, then a lot of this character's personal conflicts may deal with being at odds with the strange world they've been put into. The setting also informs not only the genre and characters, but the status quo. In exposition, we are often being introduced to the ins and outs of the way this world works, as it will either inform the plot and characters throughout the story, or will be broken by the end of the story.

When starting a story, setting is not often what authors start with. Instead of giving places to start, like with plot and characters, I will instead advise the author to start with their characters or plot and work backwards. Looking at this character I've created, what kind of world would they come from? Looking at this plot I've created, what world would it take place in? I'm going to go more into worldbuilding in another issue, but for now, I will leave it at that.

Hello. The plot of Pillars of Eternity is not good. It’s extremely bad. It's bobbins. It's so bad that it isn't just worthless, it actually makes other parts of the game worse. But, Pillars of Eternity is still the best role playing game since 2010’s Fallout New Vegas, also by Obsidian. These things might sound like they're in opposition to each other, because role playing games are all about the stories, right? I don't think so. And this is why:

Why the plot sucks

One: it's vestigial

Pillars is split in to three acts (I think the game says it's four, but it's really three). The difference between the acts is really just geographical - Act One is Gilded Vale, the Dyrwood countryside. Act Two is Defiance Bay, the Dyrwood capital, and Act Three is Twin Elms and Eir Glanfath.  The areas have different themes and focuses, but only in line with the geography: all the animancy stuff is in Act 2 because all the animancers live in Defiance Bay. The game's entire plot is just the markers between these geographic shift plus bookends around the whole thing: the bit at the start where that magic windmill makes you a superhero, the transition from Act One to Two where you kill that old man and steal his house, the end of Act Two when the king dies, and then the end of the game when you kill the baddie. That's really it, plus I guess a couple of conversations with Lady Webb and that ghost girl whose name I forgot. It's like twenty, thirty minutes tops in a game I spent 75 hours completing. I mean, I knew getting this game that the bulk of it would involve me walking along a sewer killing goblins, but just how little the plot relates to almost all of the game is surprising. 

Two: it's about a bunch of shit that doesn't mean anything

Your role in this game is to stop a guy's plot to steal a bunch of souls and squirt them in to a god. Also gods might not be real, even though they definitely are real, and also the guy's plot involves a smear campaign on animancy, a practice which might let humans kill gods, Nietzsche style, or make them irrelevant or something. Like yeah this is fantasy and there's going to be a bunch of made up shit but, this stuff isn't about anything. What's a god going to do with a bunch of souls? You get to pick what to do with the souls at the end, and it's like: put them back, spread them around, throw them away, hide them or put them in the bin. Those all kind of sound like the same thing? You have no fucking idea what you're doing. I didn't feel like I was making this big choice at the climax of my story, I felt like I was picking one of five identical-looking options at random without having any idea what any of them would do at all. Cool. 

And then the fucking gods. First off, I really hate this way of doing gods, which is basically the DnD way. It just does not make sense to me. So there's a bunch of gods, and they all do different things, so there's a god of death and a god of the sea and a god of war. Ok so far, it's like an indo European pantheon rip. But then, it's not. Like a town will just have one temple to only one god. Each god has their own priests and people just follow one god. Like if you're a sailor you follow the sea god, if you're a hunter you follow the god of the hunt. What if you're a sailor and you want to have a kid. That's out of your god's purview. Are you just fucked? What's the situation there? You're also double fucked, because the god of birth is illegal. And triple fucked, because he's also dead. What does any of that even mean? Can people never be born again? Why would you make that illegal? Why, out of 11 gods, would you have one just be the god of birds? Why is 'secret hatred' something that a God would be in charge of, and why is that a different god to the god of secrets. WHY IS THE GOD OF LAW ILLEGAL? Why is the god of death also the god of doors? And who would worship the god of doors?

Just, I hate all of it. Why would you only worship part of the gods? If you worship the god of crafting, you still know that people die, that isn't outside of your belief system, even though it also is: they're called different faiths and different ones are illegal in different places. Even though all the gods like, know each other and have friends and enemies. The only way I can wrap my head around this is if they're like pop stars? Like you can be a Belieber. You still know One Direction exist and you can acknowledge that, maybe you can listen to their song or whatever, but Justin Bieber is still your dude. But...can you..grow out..of worshipping a god? Are some of the gods big with teens? This is just all garbage.

And then yeah, right at the end of the game this woman tells you that the gods aren't real. Except her basis for this is that...they are real? Like, the gods aren't real, because they're real. They're not like real gods, like in real life, which aren't real. These ones are real, so they're not real. Is that really the best way they could have done that. And these are the only gods in the world. How is my guy in the game world supposed to understand that these gods in his world aren't real on account of how they're actually real, not like Ganesh. He doesn't know who Ganesh is. 

The third part of the story, animancy, that's fine. It makes sense and is the sort of thing you can actually have an opinion about in the game. Is this thing that will probably be good worth pursuing if a bunch of bad stuff will probably happen? Is it okay to muck about with people's souls, especially when you don't know what you're doing? Do you want to push for it, restrict it, ban it, use it for war or for science, for the country or for the world...it's well done. So of course they ditch it in Act 2 and focus on the gods and the souls. 

Three: the characters are bad

There's only really two - Thaos the baddie, and Iovara (googled it) the other one. Thaos is just nothing. He's powerful and he speaks like a powerful old man. That's basically it. He has no motive. It turns out he's just a catspaw for one of the gods. Is he getting anything out of it? It's not clear if he's even really in to it. He isn't really hateable or sympathetic, he isn't evil or misunderstood. He doesn't even have anything against you as the protagonist. He's just nothing. Iovara is mostly just exposition to fill you in on the bad story. Like she's sort of noble, I guess? She has integrity?  Except it's all for her dumb cause that the gods aren't real. You find her at the end of the game in some soul prison, where she's being kept because she says the gods aren't real, and check it out: if she admits the gods are real, THE GODS WILL LET HER OUT OF THE PRISON.  I don't want to be associated with this clown; I'm not on her team.

And now four, the baby: the story has nothing to do with you, or the game

The story is: a windmill makes you magic, you kill an old man, the Duc is killed and there's a riot in the big city, you kill Thaos and get control of all his souls. That's it, and it's the same every time. That's always the story. And that goes against everything else the game is about. This is a roleplaying game, and mostly a really good one. Simple, meaningless fetch quests can be finished four different ways according to what your character feels like. You can shape people's lives, bring up or down whole tribes or cities according to your actions. Except the actual plot of the game. That's set in stone before you even pick your haircut.

If you look at Fallout 2, another very good rpg, it's in a similar situation - there is a tiny, even smaller than Pillars, plot, and it's set in stone, and there's a massive game attached to it. And when you talk to Fallout 2 fans, they never talk about the oil rig or the president: they talk about New Reno. New Reno is a big city completely separate from the actual plot of the game. I don't think there's a single thing there with any connection to any of the whole Geck/Vault 13/Enclave stuff. It's totally irrelevant to the plot of the game. And it's the best part of the game.

It's where you get to start making decisions about your character. Want to shoot a porno or fight people for money? Always wanted to get in to organised crime?  This is the town to do that. And better yet, what you do changes things. If you become a prizefighter you get known. People call your name in the street and you're accorded more respect. If you join one of the criminal gangs, the other ones will hate you for it, and you'll probably kill a few of them. If you spring Myron out of his drugs lab his dealers won't be happy with you, but also the whole wasteland will be reshaped by the lack of the highly addictive drug he makes.

Fallout 2 starts you off with a quest and a trickle of clues to achieve it, and for a while you're just jumping through hoops, you're not attached. But after New Reno, you like your character. You've put your stamp on him and he's put his stamp on the world.  Who cares about the plot, that's nothing to do with me.

For those who don't know I should quickly explain Plot vs Story, these are two sort of woolly terms and it seems like everyone has their own slightly different definition of what is which, but people tend to describe plot as structure, and causality, and people describe story with words like characters, the 'how' of what happens, emotions.

What's happening with these games is, in New Reno, in Defiance Bay and all the Pillars sidequests, you get this great story-led stuff, it's all very responsive to your character. When there are twists they make sense, because maybe you got mad and started a fight because someone was talking shit to you, and so the whole caper fell apart, or whatever. The plot and the story are working in concert. And then you have these bits that're just plot. I think the best way to show this is, if you’ve played Pillars or Fallout or any of these, you know you get a bunch of dialogue options. And some of these are just questions or whatever but a lot of them are reactions, character statements. Pillars for example uses this Disposition system, where responses are categorised in to ten personality types. And this is awesome. People won’t just react to what you say directly to them, but also if you’ve been kind a lot before, the game marks you as a kind dude and people react to that too. The whole game starts to get shaped by your kindness, and it becomes part of the story. Except for the plot.

For example, my character in the game was quite mean. Didn’t have a lot of time for people and was pretty sassy. And in 90% of the game this works great. Well-meaning people would get frustrated with me and give up, volatile guys on a short fuse would get goaded by me or vice versa and we’d just end up killing each other for no reason and so on. But then I’m talking to Iovara in one of the big plot conversations. She’s opening up about her life, her passion, the fate of the world. And I’m just making fun of her to her face, saying really nasty stuff to her. And it doesn’t affect anything. She’s entrusting me with all these tasks when I’m massively inappropriate. She’ll even ask me to complete her life’s work, and I’ll make some mean joke, and she’ll just be ‘hey, this is serious! Oh, well maybe you’re right or something. Anyway, do that thing for me’. Like, this is a game full of branching dialogue, and then here you blatantly have all these branches being forced back to the same result by some writer, no matter how contrived or nonsensical or awful it is. The fact they even still have the different responses, even when it’s just some hollow charade, makes me think they were probably aware of this being an issue, but it looks like they just kept it anyway, letting you go through the motions of being an actor in your own story even when it’s all just smoke and mirrors. 

Like I said, this is pretty similar to Fallout 2. But Fallout 2 is a pre-9/11 game, pretty much black and white times. And even then it’s better than Pillars. Except for blowing up the oil rig and dealing with the end boss, the entire plot is optional. You can pick which bits to do, it can be done in a variety of ways, and even the end boss – if you’re more in to talking your way out of problems you can get some guys to shoot him for you, or you can reprogram some turrets to shoot him if you’re a nerd, and of course it’s a computer game so you can also shoot him a lot of times yourself. They were already trying to let the story lead the plot back then. And then in 2010 Obsidian themselves showed us with New Vegas probably the best marriage of story with an overall game plot yet. 

Fallout New Vegas takes a very different approach to its main plot than Pillars or Fallout 2, having it be an overriding, constant presence that takes up far more of the game. In Pillars and Fallout 2, the main plots are secret conspiracies that virtually everyone in the game is totally unaware of, whereas in New Vegas it's the main concern of the man in the street, it looms large over the world and everyone you talk to has their own shitty take on it.

The main difference, obviously, is you have choices in New Vegas. The plot isn't "you save the world," it's "you put someone in charge of Hoover Dam". And you can pick who! From a short list, of course. But it's a proper choice. It's not like "give all the souls to the evil goddess" in Pillars or "kill all the babies for no reason" in Bioshock. Each choice has various things going for it and against it, and the most popular option is fucking Yes Man so I don't think it's a question in danger of being definitively answered any time soon.

But it's not just that the player can follow one of four paths - the way it’s done is laden with story. You don't just get a terminal at the end of the game where you push a button to choose who you want. You get to see stuff from all sides and react to it, talk to people from each group and see what you make of them, and even when you start working for one of them, you can reshape them as you go. If you decide to support the NCR, you can see to it that they dominate Freeside with martial law, or you can make them work with the locals as equals. There are things you can't change, like Mr House insisting you wipe out the Brotherhood of Steel, but that's fine, stuff is like that sometimes, and the game lets you just ditch House and pick up with someone else if you don't want to. Plus the Brotherhood suck.

Basically - it plays like the rest of the game. It plays like the rest of Pillars, too. You can sound people out about the Dozens, Crucible Knights and House Doemenel, see what they're about, even start working for them a little bit before committing. And once you're in, you get to have your say. Keep the Doemenels in the shadows or push them out in the open? Muck around with those clockwork knight guys or not, you get to shape the plot with your story.

And this is precisely the thing that makes it a very good rpg. Thats what rpg means. Or used to mean. Guess it's kind of not a useful term now, not for this. Rpg now is more about the trappings and the look I guess. You still get a plot, though. Even a piece of shit like Skyrim has a plot: you're the Dragon boy, and you have to eat all of those dragons so that you can....I never finished Skyrim I don't know what happens. Jrpgs, which is like half of rpgs, never even try to fulfill the old definition, so I probably need a new one. Jrpgs can still be great games, of course. and while many were pioneers of the silent protagonist, there are some with excellent stories too. Just not stories you have any control over yourself. Even sacred cows of the western canon like Planescape Torment don't really fit the old definition. It's a great story, but it isn't your story. Pillars and Planescape both do the thing where you have all these past lives, and that's a big part of the plot.

Now in one of the dlcs for New Vegas you meet a guy and he tells you about something you did in the past. And I remember reading about how cagey the developers were about doing this, writing the character's story for them, because they knew it was kind of directly working against the whole rpg side. Here's a quote from Chris Avellone about it:

“I feel you should let the player write their own history. When we set up Lonesome Road, we only knew 3-4 things for certain about the player character, and in my opinion, that's enough to build an epic adventure around.”

I agree with this, and I can't help but think it's weird that this is the same guy who masterminded Planescape and was heavily involved with Pillars. I guess it's like past lives instead of your own past. But that doesn't really change anything in practice. It's still stuff about your character that you can't control that are affecting the plot and how other characters react to you. Might be your character's past lives, but it's still Your character. Hands off, CHRIS.

As Act 3 of Pillars goes on I found myself enjoying the game less. The game narrows in scope, focusing overwhelmingly on the main plot with Thaos and the souls, and, I just didn't care. It was getting in the way of the stuff I liked doing. The game began to feel like a checklist of stuff I had to do to finish it. And there wasn't a whole lot of stuff I wanted to do on that list. The game was at its best in Act 2, when the map opens up and you get all this freedom to explore the richly detailed defiance bay, and all the areas around there.

I know this sort of sounds like I'm saying rpgs should be big open world sandbox games but there's a difference - the game should still be all about dialogue, interaction, reactivity and so on. It should still very much have plot and story, just one that's led by the player. Lots of New Renos, New Vegases and Defiance Bays, not lots of draugr and hookers. But there is one big similarity with these big open sandbox games.