Pirate Prince
Despite the title of this post, this is not going to be about how we should all stop doing training threads. That would be silly. Instead, I’m going to look at why people tend to dislike training threads, and I’m also going to offer up some suggestions on how to make them better.
I realize that most people probably just develop their character’s powers on their own, by introducing them gradually over time in threads. I really, really dislike this approach, mostly because it feels almost like cheating, but also because I don’t feel confident about my character’s abilities if I can just yank something out of a hat to solve a situation. Ironically, having all the choices only makes the decision harder. Having someone teach your character will help to develop them, it opens the door to a very interesting type of relationship (that of a mentor and protege), and it can be fun, provided you do it right.
1. Group Training Threads
The main complaint I hear about training threads, especially group training threads, is that they’re boring. This is clearly evident by the rate at which threads of this type fizzle out as people lose interest and stop posting/forget they were even in the thread to begin with. They are seen as filler that a faction struggling to meet the minimum for an activity check might set up, but they’re actually useless in terms of storytelling. Your character will gain, what, one new power from being in this thread? Laaaame. It’s not worth the time and effort to write.
One of the reasons why group training threads seem so boring is because they tend to be very impersonal. You have one instructor teaching a whole bunch of students. It’s like sitting in a classroom, and we all know that school is boring. There’s a reason why in the prequels, the scenes we saw of Yoda teaching little twerps in the Temple didn’t focus on their training; it was about Obi-Wan trying to find Kamino or something. I haven’t watched Attack of the Clones in a long time. Anyway, compare that to the scenes with Yoda and Luke in Empire Strikes Back, where his training was the focus, it was just the two of them in a one-on-one setting, building on each other as characters. We learn stuff about Yoda and the Force, and we also learn stuff about Luke and how he thinks, his flaws, his fears.
You also shouldn’t focus only on the training. Ideally, you want to have the training be secondary to the story of your thread. For instance, let’s say the teacher and a group of students were on a ship that crashed on an uncivilized planet full of scary monsters and other dangers. Now they have to not only work together to survive, the instructor is also going to have to teach them skills to ensure their survival. Or maybe they’re on an assignment together with a specific goal—investigate these ruins and retrieve this artifact—and they are learning along the way in order to overcome traps and other obstacles. There are things you can do with group training threads to make them interesting, although as a general rule, a public thread is at risk of becoming chaotic as more and more people join in. You can do private faction threads, you know. Minimum of three writers required for it to qualify in an activity check...
2. Master and Apprentice
Due to the disparity between the amount of brand new apprentice PCs and the lack of master characters able (or willing) to teach them, your character will be lucky to find one. The NJO have actually built their narrative around the idea that there aren’t enough Jedi Masters to teach them, and so they’re a bunch of teenagers prematurely knighted and then shipped off to war.
As of now, I’ve only had the opportunity to write a true master/apprentice relationship only once, and that was with Starlin Rand, my Jedi Padawan. His master is Syd Celsius, a very interesting character with a unique skill set and way of doing things. All of our training threads together have been story-focused, whether they were on a simple mission to retrieve artifacts, cleanse some ruins, free captives, etc. The story would have twists and turns, such as when a former student of Syd’s turned out to be the main antagonist and captured Starlin, or Syd got possessed by the spirits of a coven of witches (a whole entire coven, my dude). Starlin and Syd established a rapport early on, learning more about each other as they went along, and their opinions and beliefs about each other, the Force, and what it means to be a Jedi evolved as their relationship developed, growing and changing and there’s just so much stuff going on in these threads, wow! And I’ve never been able to replicate their success!...
Anyway, I specifically want to draw attention to one of the techniques Syd (wonderful writer) used to keep things interesting. The two of them were trapped in a caved-in tunnel, the only way out involved passing through an area infested with very dangerous enemies, and Starlin was a brand new student with virtually no skills. They needed him to learn quickly, condensing months/years of training into just a few hours. So Syd took chalk and some torn up pieces of paper, wrote down different skills/abilities on each one, and was able to use the Force to imbue these pieces of paper with all of her knowledge of that particular power. She laid them all out before Starlin, and told him to pick five of them. He touched the paper, it crumbled to dust, and he absorbed the knowledge directly into his brain, sort of like how knowledge cartridges work. You might be thinking, “That sounds like cheating” but merely having the knowledge isn’t enough. He still has to practice it in order to be able to use it effectively. They did practice a little beforehand (conversing all the while about a variety of topics, with little character moments sprinkled in) but the bulk of the “practice” did come from them fighting their way out of that situation. The use of the strips of paper made it slightly more believable, and gave Starlin more of a fighting chance, while highlighting the severity of the threat they faced. This is the kind of creativity you should be going for in your training threads.
3. How to Write a Master
I mentioned previously that I feel like there aren’t enough Master PCs available to train. One of the reasons for this is because you have to gain a certain amount of clout before people will take you seriously. You’re projecting the kind of confidence that usually only comes with “age”—and by that I mean you have to have written your character for long enough that you know them like the back of your hand, and everything about them is second nature to you now. There is also an element of leadership, since their student(s) will look to them for guidance. It’s a much more demanding role to fulfill, let alone write, a person who can be all these things.
On the other hand, screw clout and screw having a reputation. If you have a character who has something to teach, get them in there and do it.
Well, now this slow Sunday is almost over, and I’ve apparently run out of things to say already. Uh… yeah. If you have anything to add, go ahead. I’m gonna go eat a snack.
I realize that most people probably just develop their character’s powers on their own, by introducing them gradually over time in threads. I really, really dislike this approach, mostly because it feels almost like cheating, but also because I don’t feel confident about my character’s abilities if I can just yank something out of a hat to solve a situation. Ironically, having all the choices only makes the decision harder. Having someone teach your character will help to develop them, it opens the door to a very interesting type of relationship (that of a mentor and protege), and it can be fun, provided you do it right.
1. Group Training Threads
The main complaint I hear about training threads, especially group training threads, is that they’re boring. This is clearly evident by the rate at which threads of this type fizzle out as people lose interest and stop posting/forget they were even in the thread to begin with. They are seen as filler that a faction struggling to meet the minimum for an activity check might set up, but they’re actually useless in terms of storytelling. Your character will gain, what, one new power from being in this thread? Laaaame. It’s not worth the time and effort to write.
One of the reasons why group training threads seem so boring is because they tend to be very impersonal. You have one instructor teaching a whole bunch of students. It’s like sitting in a classroom, and we all know that school is boring. There’s a reason why in the prequels, the scenes we saw of Yoda teaching little twerps in the Temple didn’t focus on their training; it was about Obi-Wan trying to find Kamino or something. I haven’t watched Attack of the Clones in a long time. Anyway, compare that to the scenes with Yoda and Luke in Empire Strikes Back, where his training was the focus, it was just the two of them in a one-on-one setting, building on each other as characters. We learn stuff about Yoda and the Force, and we also learn stuff about Luke and how he thinks, his flaws, his fears.
You also shouldn’t focus only on the training. Ideally, you want to have the training be secondary to the story of your thread. For instance, let’s say the teacher and a group of students were on a ship that crashed on an uncivilized planet full of scary monsters and other dangers. Now they have to not only work together to survive, the instructor is also going to have to teach them skills to ensure their survival. Or maybe they’re on an assignment together with a specific goal—investigate these ruins and retrieve this artifact—and they are learning along the way in order to overcome traps and other obstacles. There are things you can do with group training threads to make them interesting, although as a general rule, a public thread is at risk of becoming chaotic as more and more people join in. You can do private faction threads, you know. Minimum of three writers required for it to qualify in an activity check...
2. Master and Apprentice
Due to the disparity between the amount of brand new apprentice PCs and the lack of master characters able (or willing) to teach them, your character will be lucky to find one. The NJO have actually built their narrative around the idea that there aren’t enough Jedi Masters to teach them, and so they’re a bunch of teenagers prematurely knighted and then shipped off to war.
As of now, I’ve only had the opportunity to write a true master/apprentice relationship only once, and that was with Starlin Rand, my Jedi Padawan. His master is Syd Celsius, a very interesting character with a unique skill set and way of doing things. All of our training threads together have been story-focused, whether they were on a simple mission to retrieve artifacts, cleanse some ruins, free captives, etc. The story would have twists and turns, such as when a former student of Syd’s turned out to be the main antagonist and captured Starlin, or Syd got possessed by the spirits of a coven of witches (a whole entire coven, my dude). Starlin and Syd established a rapport early on, learning more about each other as they went along, and their opinions and beliefs about each other, the Force, and what it means to be a Jedi evolved as their relationship developed, growing and changing and there’s just so much stuff going on in these threads, wow! And I’ve never been able to replicate their success!...
Anyway, I specifically want to draw attention to one of the techniques Syd (wonderful writer) used to keep things interesting. The two of them were trapped in a caved-in tunnel, the only way out involved passing through an area infested with very dangerous enemies, and Starlin was a brand new student with virtually no skills. They needed him to learn quickly, condensing months/years of training into just a few hours. So Syd took chalk and some torn up pieces of paper, wrote down different skills/abilities on each one, and was able to use the Force to imbue these pieces of paper with all of her knowledge of that particular power. She laid them all out before Starlin, and told him to pick five of them. He touched the paper, it crumbled to dust, and he absorbed the knowledge directly into his brain, sort of like how knowledge cartridges work. You might be thinking, “That sounds like cheating” but merely having the knowledge isn’t enough. He still has to practice it in order to be able to use it effectively. They did practice a little beforehand (conversing all the while about a variety of topics, with little character moments sprinkled in) but the bulk of the “practice” did come from them fighting their way out of that situation. The use of the strips of paper made it slightly more believable, and gave Starlin more of a fighting chance, while highlighting the severity of the threat they faced. This is the kind of creativity you should be going for in your training threads.
3. How to Write a Master
I mentioned previously that I feel like there aren’t enough Master PCs available to train. One of the reasons for this is because you have to gain a certain amount of clout before people will take you seriously. You’re projecting the kind of confidence that usually only comes with “age”—and by that I mean you have to have written your character for long enough that you know them like the back of your hand, and everything about them is second nature to you now. There is also an element of leadership, since their student(s) will look to them for guidance. It’s a much more demanding role to fulfill, let alone write, a person who can be all these things.
On the other hand, screw clout and screw having a reputation. If you have a character who has something to teach, get them in there and do it.
Well, now this slow Sunday is almost over, and I’ve apparently run out of things to say already. Uh… yeah. If you have anything to add, go ahead. I’m gonna go eat a snack.
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