Too long? Long enough?

Here's the briefing text for a hostage rescue mission I have;

QUOTE

The job description requests you meet the client face to face. You meet him at a small downtown cafe he specifies when you contact him. It is fairly quiet when you walk in, scanning the simple, elegant tables in the small room. You spot the client and walk over to his table. He's a well dressed older man with distinguished features. With him is a dishevelled, tense looking younger man who {G "regards you with deep suspicion" "looks away from you, almost as if he's ashamed for some reason"}. They look like they haven't been getting much sleep. The older man stands and shakes your hand, introducing himself as William Hardman and his associate as Joseph Brown, then invites you to sit.

"We appreciate your willingness to assist us," the older man says. "I think we'd all be happiest with handling things quickly-" He pauses to scan the table. Neither of you contradict him.

"Well," he says. "To be blunt, my daughter Melinda has been kidnapped. By pirates. You see-"

"We were on our honeymoon, and the bastards raided our ship!" Brown says furiously. His hands are shaking, and he is clenching them and unclenching them.

"Yes, well," Hardman says, his voice going rough. "Mister Brown's ransom has already been paid, which explains his presence here. My daughter however-I am not a rich man, {G "Mister" "Miss"} <PNN>, so when they sent me the ransom demand, I, well..."

"I understand," You say. "I won't lie to you, gentlemen," you continue, "this job will not be easy. Boarding a pirate ship is a dangerous job. I'm a professional, however, and I'll take every precaution to make sure I get her out safely."

"{G "You'd better be sure you get her out safely, or you'll answer to me!" "She shouldn't even be in there to begin with!"}" Brown exclaims angrily. "Brown, calm down!" Hardman snaps angrily. You can see they're both tense and close to snapping.

"Alright, gentlemen, I've almost got all the information I need," you cut in. "If you tell me where the ship is, I'll be on my way."

"They were headed to UIP-6. I overheard some of the scumbags talking," Brown says. "That's where you'll find them," he adds agressively, as if daring the world to prove him wrong.

"Alright, gentlemen. I'll contact you when the job is complete," you say, standing up. Feeling some compassion for them, you add "Try to relax, alright? I'll take care of the situation."

You leave.

I'm trying to shoot for a shorter, more pointed approach to description writing for my project, but I don't think I'm succeeding here. I was hoping to get the opinions of some writers; do you think this is too long? Long enough to do the job? Do you think there's too much "fluff" in this description? How do you think I could condense it? Or, do you think it would suffer from being condensed?

My goal for this scene was: to make the shortest possible description for this scene, while still establishing tone and character.

Hmm. I suppose you could conceivably make it shorter, though I wouldn't try. It seems just fine as-is. It's relatively short so few words are shared between the player and the two characters Brown and Hardman, and yet I get a relatively clear picture of what's going on while still being interested enough to continue (or want to continue in this case ;)).

This post has been edited by DarthKev : 23 May 2010 - 12:30 PM

Only thing I'm fuzzy on is why this guy chose Mr. Brown over his daughter for ransom? Did the pirates want, say, $50 for Brown and $100 for Melinda, and he only had $75 to spend? And, perhaps I'm just channelling my inner Malcolm Reynolds, but a dangerous job like this should have an up front price negotiation.

On length though, it's fine.

QUOTE (DarthKev @ May 23 2010, 01:29 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Hmm. I suppose you could conceivably make it shorter, though I wouldn't try. It seems just fine as-is. It's relatively short so few words are shared between the player and the two characters Brown and Hardman, and yet I get a relatively clear picture of what's going on while still being interested enough to continue (or want to continue in this case ;)).

Okay, thanks for the input.

QUOTE (krugeruwsp @ May 23 2010, 03:08 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Only thing I'm fuzzy on is why this guy chose Mr. Brown over his daughter for ransom? Did the pirates want, say, $50 for Brown and $100 for Melinda, and he only had $75 to spend? And, perhaps I'm just channelling my inner Malcolm Reynolds, but a dangerous job like this should have an up front price negotiation.

On length though, it's fine.

Thanks for pointing that out, I see I made that unclear. I should have said, "Mr Brown's bounty has already been paid by another party". Whoever paid Brown's bounty apparently chose not to or couldn't afford to pay Melinda's bounty as well. The reason I didn't put any negotiations in is because you get the job from the Mission BBS, though, so you know how much the job pays when you take it on.

If you'd like any help, I'd be perfectly fine with rewriting a few sections

I reckon you get the idea across with the right amount of text. There was nevertheless one major bit of concern to me: you write "You spot the client", before going on to describe the client. To me, either the player guesses that this person is the client (in which case the "spot the client" wording needs to be changed), or the player recognises the client from a picture (in which case the "spot the client" and the description need to come together, such as "spot a man of such and such, bla bla resembling the picture bla bla").

I could imagine Brown slamming his hand on the table when he said they were on their honeymoon, but the action described after the words seemed less like an outburst of rage.

With respect to formatting, you should put the "Brown, calm down!" line in a new paragraph, because your previous example of an interruption ("You see-" "We were on our honeymoon") led to a new paragraph.

QUOTE

I reckon you get the idea across with the right amount of text. There was nevertheless one major bit of concern to me: you write "You spot the client", before going on to describe the client. To me, either the player guesses that this person is the client (in which case the "spot the client" wording needs to be changed), or the player recognises the client from a picture (in which case the "spot the client" and the description need to come together, such as "spot a man of such and such, bla bla resembling the picture bla bla").

Okay, yeah, that could be clearer. How about this;

QUOTE

The job description requests you meet the client face to face, providing a picture to allow you to identify him.

You spot the client, a well dressed older man with distinguished features, and walk over to his table.

QUOTE

I could imagine Brown slamming his hand on the table when he said they were on their honeymoon, but the action described after the words seemed less like an outburst of rage.

Well, I imagine he's trying to control himself, just not being very successful. He probably wants to do that, but because he's maintaining some self control all he actually does is what is described. I'm not sure if I will change that part, but I'll think about it.

QUOTE

With respect to formatting, you should put the "Brown, calm down!" line in a new paragraph, because your previous example of an interruption ("You see-" "We were on our honeymoon") led to a new paragraph.

Yeah, that formatting change works well.

Thanks for the pointers!

Not a fan of the present tense. Nor the second person for that matter, but that's pretty much EV standard. But the present tense has always just seemed a bit boring to me. While amazing things can be done with it, it's fairly limited since you more or less have to describe everything as it happens, since present means now. However, I'm betting most of your text that you already wrote is in present tense, so going back and changing it all would probably be a pretty significant workload. If so, don't worry about going back and changing it. This is probably just me making a comment based on my personal tastes rather than on any objective issues with the text.

Moving on, the length seems to be fine. Not too long, not too short. You probably couldn't condense it without getting (close to) EVC/EVO style mission texts, which I would argue were too short (though they did get the job done). Only thing I can say is that I don't feel particularly interested in the characters. Sort of like "Ok, I'll go rescue your daughter because this is a mission that pays me better over my other BBS options," not something like, "I'll get your daughter back for you, those pirates will pay!" Admittedly, this could be simply because the text is out of context right now, so I'm not sure how reliable that thought on it is.

QUOTE (JoshTigerheart @ May 24 2010, 02:03 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Not a fan of the present tense. Nor the second person for that matter, but that's pretty much EV standard. But the present tense has always just seemed a bit boring to me. While amazing things can be done with it, it's fairly limited since you more or less have to describe everything as it happens, since present means now. However, I'm betting most of your text that you already wrote is in present tense, so going back and changing it all would probably be a pretty significant workload. If so, don't worry about going back and changing it. This is probably just me making a comment based on my personal tastes rather than on any objective issues with the text.

Moving on, the length seems to be fine. Not too long, not too short. You probably couldn't condense it without getting (close to) EVC/EVO style mission texts, which I would argue were too short (though they did get the job done). Only thing I can say is that I don't feel particularly interested in the characters. Sort of like "Ok, I'll go rescue your daughter because this is a mission that pays me better over my other BBS options," not something like, "I'll get your daughter back for you, those pirates will pay!" Admittedly, this could be simply because the text is out of context right now, so I'm not sure how reliable that thought on it is.

Well, I have experimented with first person in the past, and didn't like it because it doesn't leave the player room to imagine who their character is. It requires that the story dictate the inner workings of the character's mind, which doesn't really suit this sort of game normally. Third person (past tense, logically) I have not used myself, but I have observed it in your work of course (Colosseum) and I personally disliked the effect (not to insult your writing in any way) because it specifically placed all the events in the past, and gave the impression they were occurring to other people.

To be honest, I'm not fond of the EV standard either. However, there is a reason it is the EV standard; it works. It's not always pretty, but it allows the player to define themselves in their own imagination to a degree without too much definition of their character and thoughts via the story. It also places events firmly in the here and now, which is important in a videogame. You must be immersed in the game as you play it; if you are continually reminded you are playing a game it's less effective, and I think that the EV standard is overall one of the most straightforward ways to promote that immersion.

If you have a different view on how these things work though, I would be interested to hear it. I don't often discuss writing techniques or theory with other EVN writers, so I find this discussion very interesting.

Re length, okay, thanks. I am trying to stay on the short end of the spectrum and remember this is a story for a game, rather than a story for a book, which Nova seems to have thought its story was/should be. At the same time, you need some space to create characters, so you can't get too short. I think 2400 characters is going to be my outside limit, trying to keep a 1200-1800 average overall, where applicable.

Re character interest, well, "Ok, I'll go rescue your daughter because this is a mission that pays me better over my other BBS options," is a fair statement, since you're not being approached randomly in the bar, but rather accepting a mission you've already decided to perform (this is the Briefing desc) and I guess I was going for a professional captain representation for the player in this scene. Still, there should be some acceptable characterization going on... Can you pin down what makes you disinterested? Is it the player response? Something in the scene handling? Maybe the other characters?

This discussion will likely influence how I approach the writing in the plugin, so I'm really hoping to get as much information about your responses to the description as possible. Thank you for the responses so far, everyone, they have been very helpful.

I think that it's pretty good, however there's always one thing that nags me in plugs it's that everyone always knows where the pirate is at any given time. "They were headed to UIP-6." However yes this is one of the better times I've seen this used. You might want to make them say that the pirates said something like 'Drop the cash off at UIP-6' (which would be very unprofessional of a pirate.) or leave it vague "They said they'd be hanging around in a nearbysystem until the cash was transferred to an account, but the feds couldn't trace it, so they can't do anything about it." or something along those lines.

I also feel like he feels rather calm for somebody who just had his expected wife kidnapped, if I was him I'd be furious and extremely depressed.

Also assuming if there's a government, this guy wouldn't be talking to you unless a) been angry at them for not getting it done quick enough, or the government can't do anything about it, refuses to, or is to occupied with a war or something to do anything about it.

Happy Huntin' :hector_bird:

Personally, I like the player's apparent lack of reaction. If I remember correctly, your TC puts the player in the role of a mercenary, right? So to the player this is just another bounty. Plus, as a mercenary, it's a generally good idea to get attached to anyone/thing as little as possible. So to me, it makes sense.

This post has been edited by DarthKev : 25 May 2010 - 02:14 AM

QUOTE (IT 000 @ May 24 2010, 07:58 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I think that it's pretty good, however there's always one thing that nags me in plugs it's that everyone always knows where the pirate is at any given time. "They were headed to UIP-6." However yes this is one of the better times I've seen this used. You might want to make them say that the pirates said something like 'Drop the cash off at UIP-6' (which would be very unprofessional of a pirate.) or leave it vague "They said they'd be hanging around in a nearbysystem until the cash was transferred to an account, but the feds couldn't trace it, so they can't do anything about it." or something along those lines.

I also feel like he feels rather calm for somebody who just had his expected wife kidnapped, if I was him I'd be furious and extremely depressed.

Also assuming if there's a government, this guy wouldn't be talking to you unless a) been angry at them for not getting it done quick enough, or the government can't do anything about it, refuses to, or is to occupied with a war or something to do anything about it.

Happy Huntin' :hector_bird:

Okay, good points. The point about the government is valid, I had thought about it, but decided to ignore the facts. I could say they weren't acting fast enough as you suggest though, and that would give it a certain realism. I'll have to look at the characterization a bit.

QUOTE (DarthKev @ May 25 2010, 03:13 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Personally, I like the player's apparent lack of reaction. If I remember correctly, your TC puts the player in the role of a mercenary, right? So to the player this is just another bounty. Plus, as a mercenary, it's a generally good idea to get attached to anyone/thing as little as possible. So to me, it makes sense.

Right idea, yes, but wrong plug. Good observations though.