Story Elements Part 3: Turning Points and Outlines
/The final installment of the storytelling series. This one is more Star Wars heavy, but hopefully helpful nonetheless.
Part 3: Turning Points and Outlines
In the last couple installments, we learned how to build a story around our character’s traits, adding sub-plots to the campaign, choosing an inciting incident, and finally, use of the MacGuffin to help drive the story. If you’ll remember, Jak Nightwing and his Wookie co-pilot, Rajbacca, have been attacked in a market on Malestair and forced into helping the Imperials find Jak’s old Rebel fighter squadron. Worse yet, Rajbacca may have set the whole thing up to get the bounty on Jak’s head. In this article, we’re going to learn about the importance of turning points and the dire necessity of outlining our adventure.
Simply put, a turning point is a point in the story from which there is no return. It is the point at which the character’s lives can’t and won’t be the same. Every story has them, and if we’re going to get specific, every movie has two of them. In “A New Hope”, for example, the first turning point occurs when Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru die and Luke decides to leave Tatooine. The second turning point happens when Obi-Wan vanishes and the team escapes the Death Star with Princess Leia. In “The Empire Strikes Back”, the first turning point happens when the Rebels escape Hoth and Luke heads to Endor for his Jedi training. The second turning point is when Han is encased in carbonite.
If you want to understand why movies very specifically have two turning points, and if you want to use the same technique to make your games more cinematic, you can look up Three Act Structure and read up on it yourself. The topic is a bit more involved than we need to get into here. (Robert McKee’s book “Story” is one of the seminal works on the subject and a good place to start.) All we need to know to help make exciting campaigns is that turning points not only help move the story along, but they provide your players the opportunity to make choices and grow their characters in new and interesting ways.
Note there that choice is key. While we used an inciting incident to get the ball rolling and force the characters into an adventure, the choices they make in the course of that adventure need to be allowed them freely. If one of your player’s wants to run headlong into an Imperial Garrison armed with only a fistful of limp noodles, that’s her prerogative. It may not be smart, but it’s their choice.
Turning points, however, need to be about more than just whether or not to storm a Garrison. They need to be meaningful, character altering choices (not that having a couple hundred blaster barrels in your face can’t be character altering.) Turning points need to be things like, do the characters choose to simply escape or help rescue the princess in the process? Do the players finish a smuggling run to a planet full of slavers and simply take their reward, or do they help lead an uprising of the slaves? Do the characters make a run on an Imperial Outpost on behalf of the Rebels, or do they switch sides and collect a reward from said Imperials? Will your player go to fighter pilot school, or take the leap and go start his Jedi training? These are the opportunities you can give your players, tailored around their interests and abilities of course, to help make the campaign engaging but also allow the characters to grow and change.
I mentioned in the last article that the MacGuffin can be used not only as an inciting incident, but it can also be introduced as a turning point. That’s what I’m going to do with Jak and Rajbacca. By the first turning point, Jak will manage to find his old squadron and briefly escape the Empire’s watchful eye. His old teammates will inform him that what the Empire is really after is a Jedi that’s been rolling with the squad, but he recently vanished. The squad requests Jak’s help finding the Jedi before the Empire does. The Jedi will be the MacGuffin introduced if Jak decides to help out. Maybe he won’t, and if he doesn’t that’s where it’s important to have a good outline.
Okay, I know, outlining is boring, but it’s essential to a smooth campaign. We’re talking about giving character’s choices, and sometimes it’s easy to know what they’ll decide to do. But, what if your player does something off the wall. What if we’ve set Jak up on a quest to find a Jedi that could possibly give Jak some training (remember that Jak is Force Sensitive, so this choice for training could be another turning point) and Jak decides not to help find him. Then what? Is the campaign over? Do we try to talk him into it? Do we force him into it? That’s not a good choice, especially since your characters don’t want to be forced into doing things they don’t want to do.
The solution is a solid outline. Think out all of your turning points and story points. What happens at each leg of the journey? What are the fall back positions if things don’t go as we, the GM’s, have planned? What are alternative campaign routes? If in the first scene, Jak rolls a lucky blaster roll and kills the Imperial Commander that’s getting the story rolling? What if he helps find the Jedi, but doesn’t want to do any training? What about the explosives on his ship?
I’ve set up a lot of questions that I don’t entirely have answers to. And I won’t until I begin to flesh out the story further and outline all of the points along the way. And hopefully with the tools I’ve provided in the last few articles have provided starting points for you to think about your campaigns in a new way. Hopefully I’ve made the storytelling process easier. So get to work outlining and remember that above all, the adventures should be engaging and fun.
