Character sheets and Maps: Immersing or Distracting

[Darth_Halford]

like some creative heroes, I find myself keep going back to parts of my story Caverns & Taverns — CHYOA and making changes or additions. Namely, adding portraits, proper character sheets, and the like. A few bits have World Anvil pages and I've been toying lately with mapmaking, to really give it a more "proper" homebrewed RPG feel, and I'm currently having some doubts as to the utility of it all.

On one hand, mapmaking is a fun toy, and combing through different ways to make the conceptualized characters into real Pathfinder 2E characters is helping solidify that knowledge base for if/when I actually start to run games again (after I finish my degree). On the other hand, I recognize that just because it's neat doesn't mean it's useful. The amount of time I've spent on trying figure out map designs for story chapters that I've written that go 10-20 chapters deep without ever naming a single place have obviously pulled away from time I could be spending doing actual writing.

It also feels like something that if I was going to do, I should have been doing from the start of the project (which, to be fair, I never suspected I'd still be working on this 3.5 years later), and this feels a little daunting trying to play a lot of catch up with myself (which, to do properly, would hold up putting out more chapters for a long time)

 

[insertnamehere]

It's been years since I last looked at Caverns and Taverns, but if my memory of its style remains accurate, I think external material like maps and character sheets work well with it (but that's not true of most stories). I would just avoid writing the text in a way that assumes the reader is familiar with those materials, that is, don't use it as an excuse to avoid writing characters well or being clear about your world building. I would also avoid publishing maps that claim to offer a "complete" view of the world, unless they're intentionally coming from an unreliable source in-universe; you don't want to write yourself into a hole where there's no space to add new environments and cultures. That said:

pulled away from time I could be spending doing actual writing.

That's not a good way to approach a hobby like this. It's your own free time that you should do with as you please. Even if the maps you make aren't suitable for your story, you don't necessarily need to post them anywhere. Indeed, many authors put a great deal of work into creating their own private notes like this to streamline the overall writing process.

 

[Gambio]

Writing what you want instead of what you should is definitely an issue that I struggle with myself. And a lot of other people. It's why you see stories getting abandoned all the times.

I'm of two minds on this.

One hand, I found forcing myself to just fucking get on with it and do that high priority but not currently interested stuff surprisingly effective. My first draft of almost anything is absolute garbage, but it works as a foundation upon which I can build upon. I need to have something there, even if it's crap.

On the other hand, I'm a strong advocate of making use of these periodically highs you get to the fullest. As long as you are writing you are progressing. I think one of the worst thing you can do is not writing the stuff you want to write because you worry about the stuff you have to write because then you end up writing nothing at all.

 

[TheLowKing]

If you do publish your maps, make sure they have a purpose. For instance, Steven Erikson's Deadhouse Gates tells the tale of an army's grueling, constantly-harried journey from one end of a continent to the other (among other things). The map helps establish the utter hopelessness of what the characters are trying to achieve by showing the huge distance they have to traverse. In Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time series, the cast travels all over the various kingdoms, in parties whose composition shifts and changes. The map helps keep track of where everyone is and teases who might run into who. In Robin Hobb's Assassin tri-trilogy, however, the map is almost entirely superfluous. The number of characters is small, there is a clear, single protagonist, and the geography of the region is largely irrelevant to the reader.

I'm strongly opposed to published character sheets, though. I think info dumps are bad writing. You should convey this kind of information in your story, not as a separate thing. Even in this specific case, where you're literally crafting an in-kinda-D&D-universe tale (I think! I haven't read the story), your readers are not going to care about whether a character has 9 or 11 INT, except when it comes up in your story. And at that point you can just tell them, making the character sheet redundant. In fact, you pretty much have to tell them, or the story won't make sense.

That said, having these kinds of resources for your own use is always a good idea. It helps to ensure your story is consistent. And remember, you don't need to limit yourself to showing where the deserts and mountain ranges are, either: make maps of the buildings your characters frequent, of cities, of trade routes, of weather patterns and climates. Even beyond that, go beyond geography entirely. I made a map of the magic system used in one of my stories. As for your characters, don't limit yourself to their numeric stats. List their favourite foods, write down what their home town is, how past events that shaped their outlook, describe what their hopes and dreams are! The possibilities are endless.

 

[ToniDaring]

I may roughly diagram a setting, if I find myself needing to understand how things work, but if I go into too much detail, it always requires serious back-tracking as the needs of my story take me in unexpected directions. For characters, I do even less, usually discovering them as I write them. I begin knowing immediately evident salient features and overriding personality and motives, and the rest just fills itself in.

What I do need to track, often, is a who's who - particularly in keeping names spelled consistently. Here, I have fits correcting myself, with twins named Gurak and Karug inevitably ending up typed in haste as Garuk or Kurag or otherwise mangled. My space-wolves are worse. But, like I know which twin is chatty and which is more laconic. And I know my gay furry space pirates individually as well - no need for sheets. They are alive rent-free in my head.