Why Choosing the Right People to Die is What Places Game of Thrones Over Walking Dead

Lead characters dying in movies has been a fad in TV series the past couple decades.  Some credit Breaking Bad as what broke that new ground, others credit the Sopranos... It really dates back to V in the 1980s, which would kill off main characters in the blink of a laser blast.

While this is shocking and certainly makes things unpredictable, the wise show runner is going to realize that killing off characters is not what makes your story worth watching.  In fact, it can work against you if you don't do it right.

The perfect example of these two extremes is The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones.

Walking Dead seemed to fall more in love with the concept of killing off its characters than it was with the characters themselves.  By season five, the writers had clearly run out of ideas on how to continue the series without repeating themselves, so they started killing off main characters arbitrarily.  They would introduce new story-lines only to cut them off by killing off the characters in that story-line.  This was a pity because, despite zombies seeming like they'd be a redundant antagonist, the idea of an apocalypse brings with it many concepts that could be explored in very interesting and entertaining ways.  It's a pity the producers decided not to do that.

The final straw for most viewers, me included, was the death of Glenn.  This may seem odd, because in a show where no one should be safe from being killed off, why should we turn on the show when it kills a beloved character like that?  For me, part of the reason was because the lead villain who killed him was so annoying.  Neegan was interesting when he was just a name that everyone rallied behind; an idea.  When we learned he was just a preachy cliché whose bat stood in for any real character depth, the show already dipped.  When he killed Glenn, we found that we would be losing characters that interested us and they'd be replaced with characters that annoyed us.

But in re-watching Game of Thrones I'm realizing there's more to it than that.  In this series, characters were killed off in such shocking ways, we were all taken by surprise and thought it was almost random who died.  But when you pay attention to the flow of the overall story, you can see that it's all carefully crafted.  Everyone who enters the story has a role to play, and when they fulfill that role, they can be dropped from the story either from death or from banishment.  But NO ONE leaves without their own journey, and their purpose in the story, being fulfilled.

For instance, when the Red Wedding happened, I actually wasn't surprised.  There was no way that the Starks could defeat the Lannisters at this point in the story.  It would be over then, and there were at least four more seasons to do.  The war they were waging would have to end with one or the other winning, and they couldn't keep the war going for that many years; it would be redundant.  So, they cut off the two heads of the family (pun slightly intended) and it becomes a revenge story.  In fact, if you look at it from the point of view of a classic novel, it would begin just after the Red Wedding.  The other Stark family members are scattered, and they've sworn revenge on the ones who murdered their parents and brother.  THAT is classic story-telling.

At the Battle of Winterfell I was so afraid they were going to kill off Aria, not because I like the character so much, (though I do,) but because doing so would have had the same effect as when Glenn was killed.  She has a character arc that has been developed.  We all spent hours, years even, watching her go through this journey.  We want to see that journey pay off.  Even though she's killed bad guys, she hadn't actually used what she had spent so much time training and learning.  Until she fulfills that arc, we will be waiting for it; and if they kill her off before she's able to, we will feel unsatisfied.

When a writer kills off a character, it's not just a surprise, it closes off potential story-lines.  Marvel became famous for not killing off characters, and as such they left doors open they were able to explore.  Breaking Bad killed off major characters, but in retrospect, one can see they no longer had anything important to contribute to the overall story-line.  They were sometimes in the middle of something, but they never had yet to fulfill their part of the story.

Walking Dead revels in killing off characters arbitrarily, citing that in real life, people die who had more to contribute to life.  That may be true, but if I wanted strictly real life, I'd watch security camera footage.  Something can be realistic while still having meaning.

The lack of the producers at Walking Dead understanding this, and the fact that those at Game of Thrones do is the reason the former is doing so poorly in the ratings, and the latter is doing so well.

#GameofThrones #GoT #WalkingDead #TheWalkingDead #HBO #AMC #Killingcharacters

RPG Storytime is at Last Coming Out

I started my series RPG Storytime on Youtube with the intention on doing one season of four different shows every year.  Each show would have six episodes per season.  Star Trek would be in the spring, D&D would be in the summer, Outbreak Undead would be in the fall, and Star Wars would be in the winter.

Somewhere deep down in me I knew this was unrealistic, but I hoped I would rein myself in enough to make such a schedule possible.

I didn't.  So it's taking longer to make the videos.  But something bigger has interrupted the schedule.

At a certain point I found myself writing one series while planning a game for another series while playing yet another and recording stuff for the other.  Added to that was another future series I'm planning on doing, and some other games I simply like to play.  It was getting confusing!

I also discovered that the Star Wars game, which I admittedly overdid a bit, has grown into many storylines, all of which need to be clear to the audience.  In fact, they all have multiple storylines, but the Star Wars one is the most complex.  I started realizing that if I told that in 6 episode chunks, no one would understand it.  I didn't even know what 6 episodes to play with one another.  Added to this was the fact that I wanted to get Outbreak Undead out of the way to make room for Deadlands.

So the decision was made to run entire series together, rather than 6 episode chunks over several seasons.  Outbreak Undead is first.  Its first episode back is today and will run until Halloween.  There will be a break while I finish the rest of those episodes, which will come out in December.  I'll have a couple other games, then I'll be running my Star Trek series until it reaches the end.

The one exception I'll have to this is Dungeons & Dragons.  I want to have some episodes come out when Game of Thrones plays, so I'll have a few episodes of it in the spring.  Then, once I've put out some other game videos I've meant to edit for a really long time, I'll begin releasing the huge epic of Star Wars, which will run until the end of the year, coinciding with episode 9 in theaters.

I'm planning on doing a separate channel that is only RPG Storytime which will play all the videos in order without interruption.  I'm not sure when I'll do that, but I won't start shows on that until the last ones are finished.

If you'd like to see Outbreak Undead from the beginning, you can see it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpaiVtbtoQQ&list=PLJ55yyr7uUQCa9GdXrvG7dhrEsh30kDV_

The Troubles with Telling a Zombie Story with Yourself in it

On my Bandwagon Games Youtube channel I do a series called RPG Storytime.  In it we play role playing games and I tell the story through narration, sound effects, and miniatures.  One of the games we do this with is called Outbreak Undead.  In it, players take the role of survivors during the zombie apocalypse.

One of the interesting features is a method by which you can create a character in the game based on yourself.  So you can literally be a character in the game.  This made for an interesting element in the show where the players on screen were the characters in the story.

We were all excited about this at first as none of us had ever played ourselves in an RPG before.  But the joy of this wore off as the realities of the concept set in.  When the players were faced with the reality of a zombie apocalypse and everything that came with it, the game became much more stressful as they were forced to think of all the people they would have lost in such a situation, and all the things they would need to do to survive, and save those they cared about who hadn't died yet.

When we play fictitious characters, and even, to an extent, when we create fictitious characters, we often don't think about all the aspects of life.  For instance, when you have a character in a game or a book, you don't think about all of their parents, their siblings, their cousins, their friends, etc.  You think of a select few of them.  The characters in this game had cats at home they were concerned about, and the thought of them being eaten by zombies was too much.  Had they been playing fictional characters, they wouldn't have that stress on them.

The high and low of it was that, though they went into the game excited to play themselves, the stress became too much, and one by one they wanted to switch to fictional ones so they could just enjoy themselves; and you see that reflected in the game.

Outbreak Undead, Second Edition is now on Kickstarter in case anyone is interested in taking a look.

How The Walking Dead Has Proven That Killing Off Main Characters Doesn't Improve a Story

You know you've got nothing left to say in your show when all you can do is tease the audience with "who's going to die next?"  Or at least, you should know this.  Unfortunately, the producers of The Walking Dead didn't realize this when they put together season seven; and the audience didn't help when they enabled them with a record-breaking first episode.

Audiences turned on the show later in the season as the show went through a record-breaking drop in viewership.  However, the audiences that turned on the show should have seen it coming long before that, during the end of season six.  First, the pacing slowed way down as the stretched out the story so it could end on its "cliffhanger," and the final episode saw the characters wandering through the woods for eternity, only to be captured yet again, and then we were all forced to listen to a drawn out speech by Neagan.  It was dull, uninteresting, and clearly intended to waste time.  But hey, he had a bat with barbed wire which had a name!  That made it all better, right?

And finally he beat someone unseen by the camera, and the season stopped there.  The intent was to make the audience wonder all summer who he had killed, and they played into that with all of their marketing.  It was the same sort of marketing that's worked ever since "Who shot JR?" in the '70s.  The difference is, with "Who shot JR?" and other more interesting cliffhangers, there was a mystery one could intellectually try to solve.  With Walking Dead, it was just a gimmick.

Like many shows today, The Walking Dead has thrived off the suspense gained through major characters being killed.  It's a tactic that started with the show V in the 1980s, and has caught on with audiences for making the story unpredictable.  However, this is a tool, and it should be used as such.  Placing this element front and center cheapens it, and cheapens the show by making it all about "who's going to die" rather than "what's going to happen in the story?"  Deaths of characters should support the storyline, not the other way around.  But the writers and producers of The Walking Dead seem to have forgotten that, even into the first episode of season seven, which did nothing but continue to tease the audience with "who's it going to be?"

By the time Neagan quit yapping, I didn't care who it was going to be.  I just wanted him to shut the hell up and get on with it already.  And when he did, it seems as though the show expected us to be impressed with their willingness to kill off beloved characters.  But that's what they've gotten wrong.

The death of a beloved character can work when used correctly.  The Red Wedding in Game of Thrones worked because it took the story from being about a straight revenge war into being one of a family who's scattered throughout the kingdom rising up against a tyrant who's in charge.  The deaths served the story.

What purpose did killing Glenn or Abraham serve?  It just means we don't get to take the journey with those characters anymore.  Shows like this have forgotten that the concept of a story is to take a journey with some characters, and at a certain point, when you take that away, audiences simply lose interest.  Which they did.  The show lost more than seven million viewers throughout the season.  It took them a little longer than it should have for them to come around, but at last they did.

The lesson they should learn is, it takes more than a named bat to make an interesting story.  Unfortunately, though, it seems they haven't learned that lesson, as they've continued the Neagan story onto season eight.

Head slap.