Top 10 Influences on Play Style from Literature, Art and Cinema

[I am putting up a series of 'Top 10' posts in the lead up to my 2,000th post here at Monsters & Manuals. You can read the first post in the series here.]

We are, all of us, used to thinking about our influences in the sense of substance and the creation of mood and atmosphere. We are generally easily able to reel off lists of books, films, TV series, pictures and so on that we have tried to emulate in some way or which have exerted some effect on how we approach content creation in the context of DMing. 

But we do not tend to think very deeply about the way in which the things that we read, and watch, affect how we actually play the game. Is what happens 'at the table' influenced by the media we consume? I believe that it is. Here is my Top 10 of literary and cinematic influences on my DMing style:

10. Heat. Over the years, I have noticed that, during the sessions I run, the times when the players are most engaged, focused, and 'present' are - aside from combat - when they are actively engaged in planning out some wheeze or other, be it a heist, ambush, assassination attempt, etc. There is a conspiratorial mood that sets in when a group of PCs are supposed to be plotting something, and these are the moments when the identification of player with PC becomes most complete and the conversation which the players are having between themselves most closely reflects that which the PCs would surely themselves be having at that particular point in time. Lots of films capture the 'a tightly knit group of rogues put their heads together to plot something vaguely nefarious' vibe (everything from The Sting to the vastly underrated David Mamet masterpiece Heist), but Heat is one of my all-time favourite films and therefore gets the final nod.

9. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I watched the absolute shit out of this film when I was a kid and it somehow seeped into my bones as a result - I don't think I am quite able to picture in my mind's eye a medieval fight scene without it somehow ending up looking like it involves Kevin Costner and Alan Rickman trading blows while Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio shrieks in the background. Whether this comes across to the players, I am not sure, but I strongly suspect that it colours how I describe a fight scene whenever called to do so.

8. Gladiator. Gladiator was released in the cinema when I was a student at university and I can still remember the day that I saw it very vividly. All of my friends had gone to see it the previous night and I for some reason hadn't gone with them (I presume because I was working), and they had come back from the cinema raving about it as the greatest film ever made in the history of cinema. So I went to see it in the middle of the afternoon by myself and loved it so much that I immediately went and bought another ticket so I could see it back-to-back. Obviously, Gladiator remains a ridiculously entertaining film full of great cinematography and beautifully choreographed fight scenes, but people don't comment enough on its exceptional script - the dialogue is marvellous, and the actors speak every line as though they are carving an epitaph on a headstone. I love the idea of fantasy characters talking as though they have just stepped off the set of Gladiator, and am always sad that I am never inventive enough to really pull off 'At my signal, unleash hell!'

7. The Fighting Fantasy books as a gestalt. Individual Fighting Fantasy books may have their moments of inspiration, and lots of them have wonderful art, but in terms of actual play, their strongest influence on me has been at the level of ambient mood. To play a Fighting Fantasy book straight (i.e., without the liberal use of fingers and bookmarks stuck between pages) is to confront random, blameless death, time and time again, until one achieves a zen-like state in which matters of life and death simply lose significance when set against the bigger project of working one's way to the end. The main character as such becomes an irrelevance, and his deaths take on the aspect of Bill Murray's suicides in Groundhog Day - they are just incidents that have to be accepted, and dealt with, so that that the show can go on. This is something that I am sure I have carried into my approach to DMing in terms of my attitude to PC death: so your PC has died - so fucking what? Roll a new one and let's get on with things. 

6. MR James' short stories. Almost ten years ago (ten years!) I wrote a post about MR James in which I compared him favourably to HP Lovecraft. I meant that in a conceptual sense, but actually MR James is also technically a much better writer, because he knows how to surprise the reader. He's just good at what you might call 'boo scenes', when the ghost reveals itself and the viewpoint character (inevitably) gets a horrible shock but somehow recovers. I always enjoy those moments in games when the players know something bad is about to happen, or likely to happen if they do X or Y, and are just waiting for the 'boo!' moment.

5. The Way of the Gun. This Christopher McQuarrie film is not an unqualified success, but the action sequences have always stuck with me - and are what I tend to aim for in particular when running a Cyberpunk 2020 game. There is a childish machismo about gun violence on display that, for all its superficiality, is nonetheless exciting. There is intelligence behind what the characters do, and I like that.

4. A Song of Ice and Fire. Yes, it's almost embarrassing to cite George RR Martin's books in any context nowadays, given the ubiquity of the Game of Thrones TV series (I'm happy to confirm I am yet to watch a single minute of it), but it is important to give George - before he became undisciplined - his due: he knows how to craft a compelling plot. And this is largely due to two things: making sure that all characters, even relatively minor ones, have motivations and goals of their own; and making sure that whenever one problem is solved by anybody, at least two new ones are created. Taking these principles too far is undoubtedly the reason why his books have become so sprawling, but there is no doubt that the result is a technique that really sweeps the reader along. 

3. John Howe's illustrations, particularly of the works of JRR Tolkien. There is no more inspiring artist working in fantasy illustration than John Howe, for the simple reason that he knows how to create, with his pen, the quality of vastness: the sense that a fantasy world is indeed a world, and not just a few lines and squiggles on a made-up map. Viz:

This is a feeling which I always try to communicate (however successfully I have no idea) - the idea of size, of scope, or scale, of the opening out of wide vistas and the beckoning to distant horizons, which is surely one of the things that is most compelling about the fantasy genre itself, and has been since its beginning.

2. The Planet of Adventure series. The books set on Tschai are among my favourites of Vance's work, not least because of the effortless way in which he manages to create the sense of a world which teams with different cultures, peoples, societies, languages, nations. Hence:

Coad was a busy town. Along the crooked streets, in and out of the ale-coloured sunlight, moved men and women of many castes and colours: Yellow Islanders and Black Islanders, Horasin bark-merchants muffled in grey robes; Caucasoids such as Traz from the Aman Steppe; Dirdirmen and Dirdir-men hybrids; dwarfish Sieps from the eastern slopes of the Ojzanalai who played music in the streets; a few flat-faced white men from the far south of Kislovan. The natives, the Tans, were an affable fox-faced people, with wide polished cheek bones, pointed chins, russet or dark brown hair cut in a ledge across the ears and foreheads. Their usual garments were knee-length breeches, embroidered vest, a round black pie-plate hat. Palanquins were numerous, carried by short gnarled men with oddly long noses and stringy black hair: apparently a race to themselves; Reith saw them in no other occupation. Later he learned them to be natives of Grenie at the head of the Dwan Zher.... Once Traz grabbed his elbow and pointed to a pair of thin men in loose black trousers, black capes with tall collars all but enveloping their faces, soft cylindrical black hats with wide brims: caricatures of mystery and intrigue. 'Pnumekin!' hissed Traz in something between shock and outrage. 'Look at them! They walk among other men without a look aside, and their minds full of strange thinking!'

I am endlessly fascinated by the sheer variety that exists on our own world, and I always aim where possible to try to conjure up a similarly plausible sensation of multifariousness in the way in which a setting is described, and imagined. Vance achieves this in part simply through the inventiveness of his descriptions, but also through having obviously thought carefully about detail: how one actually sketches out a person's features, attire, mannerisms, gait. This is something to emulate - the ability to make a world seem as though it is inhabited, rather than a piece of canvas on which are pencilled a few crude shapes and figures.

 

1. The Man Who Would Be King. Is there a more D&D film that has ever been made (I include actual D&D films) than this one? A platonic ideal of rogueishness, and in that sense absolutely ripe for mimicry and inspiration. 

As ever, feel free to make your own suggestions in the comments!