Writing a story comes from a place of plot, building something for the characters to experience that the readers will enjoy. But when it comes to complex scenarios that occur during such stories, the initial rough draft will often be more plot oriented and inconsistent. To work out those scenarios, iron out the inconsistencies and retain the exciting plot, I’ve found it helpful to game out the scenarios.

Please note: a game can represent any scenario, but so far, I've dealt mostly with military battles and campaigns. Therefore, this blog post will speak mostly about gaming out battles. There are some games I have set up for non-campaign projects, but I'm still working through them, and I want to keep them secret for now.

What is a Game?

First, let’s establish what I mean by a game.

A game is a physical representation of a complex scenario from one of my books. This representation allows me to process the scenario, watching all its component parts.

To do this, I need:

A map of a geographical area. In some cases, I might make an organizational relationship. It largely depends on what I need to track. But so far, it’s been geography.

I need tokens to represent units, characters, locations. And participant in the game that I want to track. This may come with a key or stat card for the tokens.

A set of rules to guide the game. These rules will tell me how much time passes each turn, how far units can move, how terrain impacts movement, and things such as that.

A timeline to track the passage of time and events that occur each turn. One game I took pictures of the board each round and tracked everything. Another game, it was just notebook pages. At some point, spreadsheets will be involved.

There are also aspects which might be unique, or at least not universal, to particular games. Maybe one game I need to worry about supplies. Another game, the political relationship between factions. Most games might not require their own specific rulesets, but I should be open to building them if necessary. It all depends on what I’m trying to build.

Which leads us to….

Why ‘play’ a Game?

To be clear, the purpose of a game is not to roll dice and see who wins a contest. I’m not putting the plot of the story into question. But what I can do is use the game to watch and consider the complex situations and check them for common errors and opportunities.

1. Keep units moving realistically

It’s a very common error on my part in early drafts: people and ships move at the speed of plot. At the end of one rough draft, I realized an entire company of characters had moved thirty miles in an hour by horseback. It’s something I’ve become aware I need to pay attention to.

Since most of the games I’ve played so far have been military campaigns, movement rules are important. The general in charge of the dramatic campaign would know how to stagger his orders so all the units would — or at least should — arrive at their attack points at the correct time. Yes, things could get in the way, but orders are written with the best of intentions. Until I get in the way (see #3, below).

2. To notice bad decisions (for characters or author)

This works hand in hand with reason 1; my initial campaign idea is usually plot driven. When I lay it down on a map and start moving units around, I notice things that the decision-makers in the story would notice. For example:

• This company captured this village early, which means this road was cut. I can’t use the road later. Either the company can’t capture it early, or I have to find other ways to move things around.
• This officer made a decision that doesn’t make sense on the read through; she would have to trust that an enemy unit wouldn’t attack or move, and there’s no way she would know that. She has to make a better decision, or I have to explain a more flawed on.
• This unit spends much of its time in action without running out of ammo. How is it resupplying? Or is it resupplying at all? I’ll need to address this.

3. To see from unnamed character’s eyes

If early drafts of a battle are plot driven, they’re usually from the viewpoint of one or two characters. Units and other characters will appear and disappear as needed, and events will flow from their POVs.

But a battle involves dozens, hundreds or even thousands (or more) people, and many of them can influence its course through their decisions. By looking at the game from the top-down POV, I can see a dozen such decision points each turn of the game, with characters making choices based off incorrect decisions seen through personal biases.

Things happen behind the scenes that may not even be mentioned in the book, but they can influence how and where people and groups show up in the story. I may even think of entirely different ways to fight, flow or end the battle.

Influence on the Story

The influence is on subsequent drafts is pretty clear (at least to me, the one who has to read all the drafts, over and over again). Battles flow more realistically. Units deal with supply issues, casualties and travel times. Characters make better or worse decisions of incomplete information, and the impact of those decisions ripples across the battlefield, and the story.

Now, all I have to do is take my rough draft and incorporate the lessons of the game into the next draft. In some ways this is easy, as I have a wealth of new information to add to the story to tell the important parts better. On the other hand, there’s also a lot of extraneous information I may feel like flooding the reader with. And I don’t want to do that. Yes, I gamed everything out, but the reader doesn’t want to read about every decision 30 officers made over three days of battle.

Does that mean a lot of effort was made, recorded and wasted?

Not at all. It’s just hidden behind the curtain.

Gaming the General of the Pen

Here is where I would normally do a section on gaming a part of General of the Pen, but I realized pretty early that a good game would take too long to put as a section of blog post. So, I’ll make that the 11th chapter of this series.

Conclusion

The word game is not meant to leave the fate of the story to rolls of the dice. It is meant to add structure to the world and keep my storytelling realistic, or at least consistent. By using a map, tokens, and a set of rules, I can make sure the characters go through events that meet the needs of the story, but don’t take the reader out of it with ridiculous movement jumps, stupid decisions, or forgotten units.

Join me next time when I show you how this works by taking my original plot for General of the Pen and setting a game to it.

Until the, cheers!

Michael