#new life goal: devise of a fanfic scenario where all the others get into that situation organically and believably. or whatever

[rochenn]

I fucking Love the visual of a character barely hanging on covered in blood beating someone to death with a long metal object but regrettably none of my blorbos would fucking do that. Like they wouldn't even get in that situation

[rpedia]

[Ask RPedia] Getting Together: How To Meet Your Characters!

Anonymous asked: Alright, I've been reading your stuff and it's all really helpful and you're awesome- I've gotta ask this though. How do I get two characters to meet and a story going? I can't seem to come up with good reasons for people to interact with my character and it's really frustrating. I've made starters, but I always end up stressing over not being able to come up with a plot good enough to keep anyone's interest for very long and never send them. Any tips or anything would be great!

Sounds like you’ve got some issues beyond the original question, which means you want to meet characters and keep them interested in each other, I’ll deal with that too, but first! Let’s discuss how to get characters to meet up, in situations ranging from ‘we work together’ to ‘we don’t even exist in the same universe canonically.’

So. There’s a bit of a spectrum here in terms of how problematic it’s going to be to even set up a scenario in which two characters might meet, let alone the chemistry of that meeting and how to keep it going. So we’ll try to consider some broad strokes here, remember that these get ‘harder’ so you can use anything from any section for the others, they’re just focused on the easiest way to do it each time. So you can make it harder for yourself if it’s... actually easier. I don’t mind. Use as tools, not as rules.

So what if they already know each other? If they’re people who are from the same canon, and may know each other things are a hell of a lot easier. You’ve already got a library of scenes and situations they regularly find themselves in, together, or have the possibility of finding themselves together in. Is there an elevator? A pool? A regular event? Something hinted at, or rooms, or anything really that has a chance to have them both in the same place at the same time? Look! They have a reason to meet up. You’re golden.

Do they not inhabit the same area really, but know each other a little bit? Well, you have a more limited, set of preconceived settings. You don’t know anywhere they both frequent, but that means you can make one up. Look at people they have in common, or situations they may be attracted to but haven’t been show in. Things that are logical, just... improbable. 

Have they never met at all, yet have a reason to meet up? This one’s easy, spot their commonalities. What do they have in common? Do they both love hot dogs? They can meet at a hot dog cart. Do they both fight? Make a fighting tournament. Whatever they both like, or dislike, they can find a point in this universe where that would push them together. If not, there’s always the next option up.

Have they never met and have no reason to meet? This seems harder, but hell it’s just a matter of situations converging instead of people. A series of convenient plots. Some kid’s mom hasn’t picked them up from school. They meet an aliens from another planet whose navigation system got bumped by their co-pilot, they land on Earth, and while there realize they need to pick something up anyways. They walk across town, and bump into the kid. They’ve met. Kid shows interest in the alien being awkward. Takes an active approach to bothering them, and follows them. Tada! If it can work for boring school kid and an alien from another galaxy, something similar that’s just a bunch of excuses to get them in the same place.

Are they actually in different universes, so you have to break something to force a meeting against all laws of physics and man? Now this one is fucking fun. Because you literally get to BREAK THE UNIVERSE. This tends to be deliberate as fuck, so you might have a third party or force elaborately pushing these things to happen, or having them happen as a side effect to some major event somewhere in the universe. Or a minor one that causes major side effects. Look, something happened, and now a portal opened. You go through it, or your universes merge seamlessly, or you wake up in a city you don’t recognize and there they are. Surprise and fear and loss and hell the universes splitting in two during science and magical bullshit that defies physics is well and enough reason to latch onto the first relatively friendly or manageable person you see.

Now that they’ve finally met up, somehow, someway, they have to interact and stay interested in each other. This comes down to a lot of factors, including chemistry between the characters, and chemistry between the writers. You’re gonna need to step your game up, make shit up! Make the world come to life, give them reasons to interact. One of your characters has to be an active participant, curious about the other. They have to lead the story. They need to pester them, while the other character needs to do something else so that the first character has a goal to ‘understand’ them. Let secrets out slowly, and make sure you drop shit that makes no sense. They need to have more questions to follow up on them.

This can be as simple as giving a weird name, and having the character wanna know why they’re weird. Or your character could say something additional. “This is my name. Now scat kid, I need to ___.” Then the kid asks about the blank, and yadda. It all depends on temperaments too. Two nice character, a mean one, rebellious, a kid, an old fart who is so tired of this shit? They’re all gonna react differently as fuck to each other. So react! React big! Ask questions about them, show curiosity, share your character’s life in pieces to force them to ask questions back. Engage in curiosity, and drag them into hell with you by feeding theirs. Once you’ve met up, you need reasons to keep talking. Choose activities to do together as background noise or a sub goal while you really tie them up in each other’s lives. Force the setting to force them both to stick together. Kid doesn’t know how to get home anyways, so the alien, who forgets where they were, has to take them with them INTO SPAAAACE, or fucking whatever. Whatever makes sense. 

I have a arguably terrible habit of always going for the same basic things. Sleep, eat, play, work. I love dragging characters to go get food in town, or go hunting, or cook in the kitchen. I like to be tired, and get weirdly existential, and fight to go to bed, or find somewhere comfortable, or curl up near people and just talk. I like to go do things, like see the sights, go to carnivals, events, mess around with things we’re given in canon (or have devised as canon) in such a way as to be inclusive to my partners, or just play tag or wrestle. Sometimes, I even work, a character might have to drag a tagalong to work, and they can function together finding out they work better as a team than solo. They can fight, teach, explore, whatever comes with the job with tons more fun than they can alone. Even if they just tell stories while they go out delivering packages, and laugh it up.

Try to keep a real basis of interaction underlying everything. Nothing is perfect, I’m sure you’ve talked to people and had arguments in your life. Not everyone agrees, and a heated conversation can get you guys bonded together once you come out the other side. Embarrassments, misconceptions, errors, just plain disagreements? They are, surprisingly, fantastic ways to keep a story going. If everything is just yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir... well. If you’ve been around this blog long enough you can say this with me: Crisis is Necessary. Keep things interesting by keeping goals and problems arising that you need to fix. A happy comfortable character has no motivation to change what they are doing, and therefore you write yourself into a rut and everyone gets bored.

See: cuddling for 8 hours, walking for an entire RP without talking, falling asleep and expecting your partner to respond to your sleeping posts, kissing constantly, or just being quiet together and ignoring each other. You’re better than that. Show it. Do things you haven’t before, break your rituals, change little things, or make big things happen. It doesn’t have to come from internal actions, like what your characters want either. External forces can shift the whole story. Daily coffee? They were closed for repairs. Elevator broke, you’re trapped together. Someone died, and you need to get out your emotions. They didn’t have your fucking brand. Oh, a war is going on. Look aliens invading. Jesus Christ I got a letter to Hogwarts.

Anything is better than the daily grind. It can be hard coming up with stuff because you get iffy about whether your partner will like it, or if you will. You worry yourself out of it, or maybe you’re burned out and have no idea where to go next. Just kinda... roll the dice on it. Open a dictionary website and find a random word, and go off that. Read a news report and let it fuel your imagination. Skim fanfics, and go write your own ending and concept or, how you’d do it better. Take your favorite appealing things and apply them to your character’s stories. You love pears? Your character hates them? Have them mistakenly eat a pear, and react to it. Let them call someone to talk about it and complain. Anything can be a story idea. Every little happening, magnified, and plastered into a bigger wider version cut and clipped to fit your character.

Now why would people lose interest in a storyline? Some of the common issues are, the story isn’t moving fast enough, the characters aren’t being empathetic, your partner is stonewalling you by not reacting or acting enough, your partner is giving you minced replies with no content to reply to, or you don’t feel the chemistry and you can’t summon the willpower to enjoy yourself. It’s okay if you just don’t mesh. It’s not the end of the world. If you don’t mesh many many times over, you may want to examine your approach.

Do you regularly offer information that continues the storyline, or do you tend to use precise replies? Precision is great for school work and official documents, it’s shit for creativity. Give more than you get. Do you tend to try and avoid things partners are nudging towards you without giving other options? That’s stonewalling, it stops the flow of information, and therefore the creativity and story. Do you tend to rehash the same things over and over again? That can lead to burn out and boredom and players will wander off. Some folks just can’t keep their focus on slow replies too, so you might ask yourself if you’d do better in a faster chat, or a slow journaling platform that may take a week to reply.

You need to stand up, push for story, and keep things moving. But at the same time... stories end. And continuing the same scene day in and day out is not a good bet. I personally play in an episodic style. I do a scene, then we cut out for the day (sometimes over the course of two days) and timeskip to the next “fun” part. You don’t need to play out all the boring inbetweens, you’re a writer.  Writers don’t explain how someone takes a shit unless it’s important to the story, that’s why it seems like no one ever goes to the bathroom in novels unless they find something important there.

Feel free to do Episodic play, each day is a new scene, or every time you complete a scene jump ahead. You might run out of steam over time anyways. Most of my longer roleplays last a couple years max before they move on. My shorter ones last one session in public and then we never really get into it again. Roleplay is a fluid creature, don’t blame yourself if it stops occasionally. Sometimes it’s just not the right time for it. If someone complains, or you regularly lose RP for no reason... there’s a reason. Look at yourself and figure it out, don’t just whine, ‘people never RP with me, they just quit or block me for no reason!!!’ because that’s a fucking red flag that you do something horrible you don’t even realize, or you have been told and think they’re lying. Hint... they aren’t, and you’ll scare away more players that way.

In any case, action! Reaction! Story! Build more than you expect to get through and they’ll pay attention to the little details as future story hints. If you drop a phrase now, you might not get to it now, but you can bring it up again in a new context when things get slack. Just have fun, and make things as big and vivid and round for the character as possible in order to keep folk around.

Remember, it only has to make sense to you and your partners, everyone else can go fuck themselves. Have fun.