STORY WRITING TIPS (FROM ME. BUT I MEAN, ADD YOURS OR WHATEVER)

Some of my tips for writing stories / RPG writing.

Raise the Stakes:
Raising the stakes has the effect heightening the drama of the story after the player has already assigned an emotional value to the current goal. An example of raising the stakes would be if you were trying to win prize money to pay for a new tv, but then your kid gets sick and you need the money to pay for their operation.

Change the Immediate Goal:
Establish a goal / mission for the party, and just before they embark on it, someone barges-in to hand them a newly emergent mission with higher priority. This can be a variation of raising the stakes, since the new mission is more important than the previous one. This also has the effect of keeping the player guessing.

Characters Motivated by Seeds of Their Own Destruction:
This is just authentic writing. Characters who are motivated by their own mistakes that created their own suffering. This might manifest as being responsible for your child being kidnapped, because you took them to a big city and showed-off your child's talent, and now the character is extra motivated to get their kid back. Or it could be that a character is seeking revenge for their dead friend, but this character also gave their friend the push they needed that set into motion the events that would get them killed (e.g. encouraged them to be a racecar driver, and then they died in a car race).

Underscore the Importance:
You see this a lot in Naruto, where you get to a fight scene, and the story cuts away from the fight to either remind you or show you why this fight is so dramatic. That might take the form of a flashback to the happy moments in a character's life before they die in the fight. Or, it might show some flashback of the lives of the villains, to some time back when they were children and they first became friends when one of them protected the other from bullies.

The Hook:
A hook in storytelling is an event that is so juicy, dramatic, or mysterious that the viewer is then hooked and needs to see more. The X-Files had great hooks. Back before I was a regular X-Files viewer, the show would come on after NBA basketball, and before I was able to grab the remote to change the channel, I would see some wild hook, like the appearance of some actual real life gargoyle doing something in darkness, and I just had to finish the episode to see if gargoyles were real within the show's universe. Our community doesn't always stick to an amateur RPG and finish it like we do with commercial games, because they're playing the game on blind faith that it might be good, and the game could prove to be a low-quality waste of time; which is why the game has to prove its merits within the first hour of gameplay. For this reason, it's important that your game have a hook that keeps the player invested and frantically curious in the early going.

Illogical Mysteries that are Logical:
I noticed this a lot in the show Lost. A character will do something so completely illogical that it would seem like they were possessed or mind controlled or something. Why the hell are they doing that thing that makes no sense? It's so mysterious and intriguing, but you're gonna quit watching the show if they don't give you a damned good explanation for this. Later in the show, they do a flashback to like 7 hours earlier and tell the story of what that character was doing up until that mysterious point, and by the time it catches-up to the mysterious behavior, their motivation for why they were behaving that way makes perfect sense. So then you don't completely lose faith that most or all of the mysteries will eventually be explained.

Wrong Man Theory:
Alfred Hitchcock believed that there was something very dreadful about being accused of a crime that you didn't commit (especially murder). In Hitchcock movies like North By Northwest, once a character is accused of one crime, they don't turn themselves in to the police and try to resolve the confusion. Instead, they go on the run and attempt to prove their innocence, often committing more crimes in the process, or casting greater suspicion on themselves in the process, which digs the hole deeper. While all this is happening, the main character might be running from the real criminals at the same time that they are running from the cops. This phenomenon of digging the hole deeper happens again and again, amounting to a calamitous chain of unfortunate events.

Sustained Tension:
One thing that makes a show really bingeable is when a character is in a sustained state of trouble and never has a chance to come up for air. As soon as they deal with the problem in front of them, a new one immediately emerges like the next domino falling. If the main character ever gets too much security for too long, the story can become uninteresting. They should always be on the run from the villain, on the run from the police, trying to protect endangered villagers before the trouble arrives, attempting to pay a ransom, trying to cover-up a lie or a crime, racing against a clock, or some other kind of pressure.

Irrational Characters:
In reality, a lot of people have irrational motives or make irrational decisions. Not to mention, a lot of people make pleasure-seeking decisions or give to inaction out of laziness. A lot of novice writers make the mistake of writing each character to be dispassionate, rational robots that single-mindedly pursue their one goal. Characters making irrational decisions can potentially help you make leaps in advancing the plot in ways that, if your characters were totally rational, you would tie yourself in knots trying to think of how to connect A to B *logically*.

RPG-specific tips:

Artificial Urgency:
Create scenarios that have frantic music and countdown timers. This can make the player feel heightened urgency. If you don't complete the scenario by the time the countdown timer runs out, you don't necessarily need to force a game over (for example, even in the fail case, the characters could come-up with some last second workaround to survive the explosion). But making the player panic and play with urgency can increase the drama, the emotional engagement, and the fun.

Character Development vs Mobility:
If your RPG story spans cities across the whole world, then most likely each NPC in the towns is not getting a lot of spotlight or character development. If your RPG spans less area, and your party is revisiting the same towns many times, then each of your NPC's speak some dozens of pages of dialogue. This means that the player will begin to learn the NPCs' names, personalities, backstories, and they will be more humanized. And that also means more dramatic effect when you kill off an NPC. So, if you want NPC's that the player cares about, you need to restrict your RPG's world to hanging around a specific area. Another thing you could do is have NPC's who follow you from one town to another; which could be because they're stalking you, or they're coincidentally visiting the same cities, or they are a rival who's after the same goal, or they're an escort character who doesn't belong to your fighting party, or they were sent to deliver a message to you, or the villain kidnapped them and brought them to you as a hostage.