You all meet in a tavern

[marycatelli]

The immortal words with which so many D&D stories open -- and so a cliche that people try to avoid. An amusing list of alternatives here, but note that it ends: "Or the PCs could simply meet in a tavern..." Because, of course, it's an excellent way to get people to bump into each other. It's the place where travelers stay (if it's an inn as well) or eat. It's the place where locals socialize. It is therefore exactly the place where someone who wanted help would post the notice of the fact, etc.

It's less good for a story, of course, because in a role-playing game, players will suspend disbelief to get the party together. For a story, you not only have to give the characters motivations, you are starting out with a crowd and so will lack focus; better to start with one and let characters accrete.

Still, there are plenty of cliches in stories that, like meeting in the tavern, have a lot more going for them than many people assume. Take "monologuing." What could be more natural than Syndrome monologuing to Mr. Incredible? He wants Mr. Impossible's respect. He still loses his cool over being called "Buddy" by him. And how can Mr. Incredible know what marvelous things he has done and how much he ought to respect them unless he tells him?

The thing about cliches: respect them. A cliche is overused. That means it is necessarily used a lot. And nothing gets used a lot without their being reasons for it. Usually good reasons. Even if sometime clumsily deployed.

The Mentor dies. (sob) But you have to get him out of the way somehow for the Hero to grow up and come into his own. Named characters will turn out to be important, but if you clutter the story with dozens of names of the insignificant, the reader will go mad trying to remember -- and grow angry when they turn out unimportant. People tell the truth, legends are accurate, books contain the information needed -- because you don't want to spend forever digging up info in a dull and boring manner.

Comments

[dirigibletrance.livejournal.com]

I hate the tavern thing. It's so stupid. I always start games with the player's characters already knowing each other, or being siblings, or members of the same military unit, or all hired by the same patron to perform a task, or something else that compels them to be together.

In Rise of the Runelords, the part meets at a festival in town, and goblins pick that moment to raid and attack the town. Naturally, being the only heroic characters present, an adventuring party formed. There were also interpersonal bonds to keep us together, as well.

[marycatelli]

(Almost) always better when you don't have suspend disbelief.

Though I have to admire the webcomic where the DM said, "You all meet in a tavern," players objected, and so the DM said, "You all meet in a tavern -- and wake up the next morning in a cell."

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That list you link to up top has lots of fun and interesting alternatives.

But yeah, when people shout out that something is a cliché, whether that thing is a turn of phrase or a storytelling technique, I think there's a temptation to regard that thing as forevermore forbidden--but that's crazy! The trick is to tell your story in an engaging enough way. If you do, you can have all the taverns (and elves and dwarfs and rangers) and adverbs and foreshadowing and chosen ones, etc., you want. So then the question becomes, how do you tell the story in an engaging manner... to which the answer is (among other things), try not to use too many clichés. Hmmm.... but in the end, people figure out answers to these things, somehow. (Or, they don't...)

[marycatelli]

Very true. Alas, there are readers who will tick off the traits, go "it's a cliche" and stop reading. Sometimes even the engaging trick doesn't work. sigh

[stormsdotter.livejournal.com]

There's one thing you're leaving out--in a story, everything has to have a reason and make sense, unlike the real world where strange and random coincidences happen all the time.

[marycatelli]

Well, actually, all it has to do is appear reasonable and sensible. You can glide over its lack of reason and sense if you do it right -- still, the reader might deduce it later and be annoyed. The best way to make it appear reasonable and sensible is to give it reasons and make it make sense.

Strange and random coincidences can occasionally work in stories -- but not up front. You have to start off the story plausibly. Meeting in a tavern works only if they already know each other or if you give them some reason to work together. Like, the press gang arriving.

[cj-ruby.livejournal.com]

Great list, thanks for the link. I think I've used at least half of it to start a gaming campaign. :) I nearly always start my players in the action. Of course I stole this idea from how many stories start. I prepare a short setup, a paragraph or two, to describe the setting and situation that ends with the words, “roll for initiative.” (I hate games that start with the players taking an hour deciding what they want to do.)

I write a lot of RPG one-shots designed to be played at conventions and other events. I've found that cliches and stereotypical archetypes are your friends in this case. They help the players relate immediately to the setting and the characters, which gets the game off to a rapid start. Essential for a time constrained gaming session.

[marycatelli]

Hope it gives you good ways to start more. 0:)

And once the players get off to a rapid start, they will do the fleshing in that the writer has to do in a story.

[cj-ruby.livejournal.com]

Exactly. That's what I love about gaming. Seeing the different ways players interpret and build on a story. I love it when players surprise me – just as I love a story with a twist I didn't see coming.

[marycatelli]

Eh, while I enjoyed D&D and enjoy writing -- I didn't really enjoy DM'ing. Because it's a little hard to control the aesthetics of the story. Story characters can't sulk at the prospect of a riddle, or not think of the striking way to use a spell that the story turns on.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

My personal mantra is to try and dig deeper. Orson Scott Card says you should reject the first couple of ideas you get about anything because they're likely to be clichees - and he often has a point. (Sometimes the backbrain comes up with things sufficiently weird and wonderful, and discarding them would be criminal.)

I look at each idea in turn: is this just my shorthand for 'something happens' or 'they meet somewhere' or is it part of the story? (My characters are pretty much independent actors; I cannot force them into or out of taverns.) If something isn't just a placeholder, I try and go a step further. What's unique about the situation? (Characters meeting in a teahouse create a different atmosphere - suddenly you have different restrictions and a glimpse of a non-generic culture.)

Reaching for clichees is, far more often than not, lazy writing. If it's your scaffolding which you take down in future drafts, that's not a problem - but when you forget, it will be.

[marycatelli]

Except that then you reject an idea not because it is bad but because other people have used it.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

If it's somebody else's idea - if it hasn't sprung from _my_ story, my setting, my characters, then it likely *is* bad, and I ought to reject it.

That doesn't mean that nobody can meet in a tavern, only that there ought to be a bloody good reason for it, and by then it won't be 'a tavern' it will be a specific place with a specific clientele that says something specific about the world and the people who choose to meet there, and that offers opportunities for plot.

I've found that the more generic and clicheed an idea is, the more I need to interrogate it, because chances are I haven't thoght it through, and I'm just using a placeholder without imagining the setting/situation/character in any depth. And I find that reaching for a clichee tends to weaken writing. As a reader, I get very bored very quickly with them, and that goes for clicheed emotions and motivations just as much as for anything else.

That does not mean that you can't work with the clichee, subvert it, make it your own. It doesn't mean that sometimes shorthand isn't the best solution _because_ you don't need to explain and/or justify what is going on, just that Card's advice works as a safety net for me: the more clicheed an idea, the more I'm looking at it to see whether this really is the right solution, and how I can make it my own.

[marycatelli]

There are no original ideas. Springing from other ideas you have had is no guarantee it will be better than an idea from elsewhere.

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

There are no original ideas.

I think this is the point where we delve into philosophy. On the strictest level, you are correct. However, there are decidedly unoriginal ideas, so I'm not willing to buy into this theory completely.

I'll have to go away and think about this some more, so I can translate the feel into words that actually make sense, but the gist of it is that an idea that springs from my own work, that meshes with the world and the characters is likely to be much more appropriate than an idea that comes from stock clichees. And I am not argueing for inventing things from scratch altogether - that usually leads to square wheels while everybody else around is travelling on Segways - but on drawing upon appropriate sources and cultural resonances.

[marycatelli]

We've been delving into philosophy all along. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy.

0:)

[jryson.livejournal.com]

How about an elevator? Sales reps, job-seekers, computer service, every kind of expert, all sorts of reasons to be there.

Maybe the power goes out, no help comes, so they team up to escape and then to find out why the power has gone out and every body in the city but themselves have become zombies.

... or something.

[marycatelli]

Oh, yes, using force majeure can the story rolling.

Of course, it helps to remember that they would have had other things to do if it hadn't happened. Dangerous to have characters whose only motivation is the outside force.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, the crisis puts everything important to everyone at risk. Their friends and family are all zombies. Even worse, the ice cream is melting in their freezers.

[marycatelli]

First you have to remember to give them friends and family. Playes will assume their existence -- or possibly just identify with their characters.

[jryson.livejournal.com]

Oh gawd, it's got me started.

Regular patrons come to the tavern and find it padlocked.

Volunteers at a homeless shelter get a client with a strange, yet somehow believable story...

Patients in a therapy group decide they really aren't hallucinating...

[marycatelli]

Have fun!
0:)