scrape_r_rational/data/cache2/2yjc41.md

## [META][BST] Ideas are cheap, writing is hard: Can we use this to make a story?

* Author: u/FakeOutrage *
* URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yjc41/metabst_ideas_are_cheap_writing_is_hard_can_we/
* Score: 12

* Created: 2015-03-10T07:37:52

### Post:

So I was reading the ['Rational Harry Potter, with school-age Dumbledore as the protagonist'](http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yiegk/rtbst_rational_harry_potter_with_schoolage/) thread, and the responses were basically, 'that sounds awesome, I'd love to read it'.  As /u/alexanderwales pointed out, though, 'Ideas are cheap. Writing stories is hard' [\(there is more to this comment so check it out\)](http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yiegk/rtbst_rational_harry_potter_with_schoolage/cp9zntc).

Most ideas are never going to go anywhere.  A small fraction of ideas turn into great stories.  But if a particular idea doesn't become a great story, I think it'd be better to continue an interesting idea, even poorly, than to have no story at all.

I'm thinking of something like a combination of worldbuilding and Words of God.  For example, /u/Rangi42 is currently the foremost expert on rational!school-age!Dumbledore, so I might ask them, "Where do you see the story starting?" or "What kind of discoveries might Dumbledore make?".

I find it's handy to have some pointed questions to guide my thoughts - even something as simple as "What happens next?" or "What if *this* happens?" If you had a bunch of interested people asking questions, and an 'author' dedicated enough to at least answer them (if not write a proper story), you could at least get a skeleton that's an interesting read.

TL;DR - Readers ask questions, Word of God answers, assemble into a 'story'.

Disclaimer: This resultant story/skeleton may well not be a 'rational' one, given the probably lack of long-term planning.  I put it here because this is where I got the idea, and members of this sub are the ones likely to have interesting questions/answers.

Edit: [I'm going for the prototype/experiment here](http://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2yo2xe/bstrt_first_impressions_looking_for_directions/).

### Comments:

> **u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer** [+8]  *Utopian Smut Peddler* (3 hours later)
> 
> Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
> 
> In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
> 
> Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
> 
> “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
> 
> The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
> 
> Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
> 
> Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
> 
> L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.

> **u/qznc** [+8]  *Chaos Legion* (an hour later)
> 
> That sounds like free-form (no dice, no stats, etc) roleplaying.
> 
> Rational roleplaying is very hard on the dungeon master. I once mastered a session, where I had a dedicated evil overlord player against the rest of the players. This means I did not have to plan all the evil plots and could concentrate on the consistency and atmosphere. The evil player literally had a list of "Avoid if evil overlord" things.
> 
> It accidentally was one of the best sessions I had, but that was probably not due to the format. There was a very cool twist at the end:
> 
> The plan was to assassinate the evil overlord with slow contact poison on a suitcase. Most of the players were killed before they reached him. Two players before the overlord, who wants to question them about more attackers and their plan.
> 
> "How many are you?"
> 
> "F**k yourself!" the more heroic player answers.
> 
> Overlord shoots the answering player in the head.
> 
> "Minion, open the suitcase!", then to the last player, "You can answer me ad die swiftly or be tortured for a long time."
> 
> Minion opens the suitcase and examines the McGuffin documents inside. Since the suitcase did not explode or anything, Overlord takes the documents.
> 
> "Time is up. No talking? Then take her to the torture chamber and kill her slowly."
> 
> The End. Players lost.
> 
> In the post-mortem discussion of the game, one player had an idea. There was contact poison on the suitcase, so the minion surely got it on his hands. From there it surely got on the documents and the overlord took them.
> 
> Ok, epilog changes. After a heroic suicide mission the good guys are all dead, but the overlord was successfully assassinated.

>> **u/FakeOutrage** [+5]  (2 hours later)
>> 
>> The main difference I envision between this idea and direct roleplaying is that the scale would be larger - not limited to one scene at a time.  Sort of like the tale of the guy who wrote all the interesting parts of the story first, then reread before adding the boring bits, then realised he had a complete story already.  
>> 
>> Getting bored of picking apart each of Dumbledore's discoveries of the properties of dragon blood? Skip back and ask about his first use of accidental magic.  Told all there is to tell there? Skip forward to Albus vs Gellert vs someone else in the Triwizard Tournament!

>> **u/Transfuturist** [+1]  *Carthago delenda est.* (19 hours later)
>> 
>> Could you elaborate on the difficulties you had GMing a rational session?

>>> **u/Chronophilia** [+4]  *sci-fi ≠ futurology* (21 hours later)
>>> 
>>> I'm guessing that you lose the narrative privileges that make Level 2 Intelligent characters possible. You can't predict your players, you can't predict the dice, and you can't write the story out-of-order to make sure all the foreshadowing is in place - the GM's plans have to unfold in chronological order, the same as his characters'. You can no longer use authorial fiat to build the world around a character and show them solving a difficult puzzle, at least not outside backstory. In short, you lose the ability to write a character who is *cleverer than you are*.
>>> 
>>> And since there's (usually) one GM and several players, the players combined should be more intelligent than the GM. This makes it very hard for the GM to impress the players with his rationality.
>>> 
>>> A rational PC, on the other hand, is fairly common - they're usually munchkins too.

>>>> **u/qznc** [+2]  *Chaos Legion* (a day later)
>>>> 
>>>> That particular session was more than 10 years ago. Long before rationality was an important topic for me.
>>>> 
>>>> I think the biggest thing is that you cannot plan from the end. In HPMoR, Yudkowsky knew the end from the beginning. It was foreshadowed at the beginning of chapter 1. In an RPG you just provide an interesting setup and see where the players go with it. It is more about sandbox/simulation than story telling. The tricky part is to have interesting stories emerge. It often works in RPG and also games like Minecraft, but imho it depends on player more than on the GM.
>>>> 
>>>> If you want a rational*ist* RPG, you could setup a rationality mentor NPC, but by construction it is only as intelligent as the GM.

>>>> **u/Transfuturist** [+1]  *Carthago delenda est.* (21 hours later)
>>>> 
>>>> So, the issue is NPCs? Because I would only see the other roles as describing setting and mediating disputes between players. If you have all rationalist characters controlled by players, that is, having factions that are guaranteed to oppose each other, I don't see an issue.

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