No, I'm not asking what my motivation would be for making comics about GH2. If I did that I'd clearly be trying to steal visitors from the GearHead site to Ataraxia Theatre (no word of a lie- the brand new GearHead site is pulling in 3 to 4 times as many daily visitors as AT, despite being brand new and having almost no content*; last week, gearheadrpg.com was linked from both the P vs P and RichardDawkins.net forums).
No, I'm talking about the book Making Comics by Scott McCloud. Earlier this week the copy I special ordered at my local bookstore finally arrived. It's a great book. It's given me some good ideas for GH2.
Here's one: motivation for core story NPCs. The GearHead story generator is built around events; characters are used as pawns to enact these events, which means that most of them end up being fundamentally boring. What's needed are some measures of character development. The first one that springs to mind is motivation.
Why does the enemy NPC fight the PC? Why does the sidekick stick around? What does the love interest want out of life? If each character had a motivation tag, it would be possible to assign this information.
The first time you meet a character, no motivation might be set. In a future story component the motivation can be revealed. This motivation can change based on events in the story; accidentally kill Lalah Sune and Char's motivation goes from rivalry to revenge.
Motivations could also be applied to factions, and these could change depending on who's in charge of the faction at any given time. As long as Vannis is in charge of the Rocket Stars, their goal is simply to protect the Rishiri Dominion and prevent war, but if Jondi manages to wrest control their goal changes to subverting Rishiri and furthering the Aegis agenda.
I don't yet have a clear picture of how this will all work, but it seems like a natural idea. One problem, at least as far as faction leaders are concerned, is that most faction leaders are tied to quests and may not be available at any time for use in the core story. They should be, though- the movers and shakers should actually move and shake. I'm not certain how possible this is in the current event-based paradigm but I'm going to think about it.
*I know, it's comparing apples to oranges. One other key difference is the fact that I actively promoted the GearHead site, something Ataraxia Theatre hasn't had in a while.
