Vox Felicitas IV — Force Fields and Gargoyles

On last week’s episode of Vox Felicitas, I spoke about and elaborated, in great detail, one of the techniques I use for writing stories down. That technique was called the Why Rule — for those of you who are new here, the Why Rule is best described as ‘Chekhov’s Gun on steroids’. See the article I linked for more detail!

Today I’ll be carrying on the topic of creativity kickstarted last week, albeit down a slightly different tangent. If you’ve been following Vox Felicitas since day one, you’ll know that I play the exponentially popular table-top board game Dungeons & Dragons. Yes, the very same game which features in stories of stereotypical geeks, in warnings about dabbling in the occult, and which originated a classic piece of advice: “never stick your genitals into a leering green devil face”.

But before I discuss D&D, which has witnessed a remarkable resurgence in the past few years with the help of web shows like Critical Role and popular video games like Neverwinter and Baldur’s Gate, I will open this blog post by discussing the concept, in creative writing, of technobarf.

Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself: “What in the Nine Hells is ‘technobarf’? Is this something the author of this blog has just made up on the spot?”

To address the latter query first: yes, I just invented the term this minute. But the concept itself isn’t a new one: some people have different names for it. The one that has been tossed around a lot is ‘the info-dump’. However, it was decided that for the purposes of this post, ‘info-dump’ is too vague. One could interpret a character profile as an ‘info-dump’, for instance: a generic pileup of information about the characters that inhabit the narrative. So a new term was devised just for those science fiction authors who are guilty of it.

Moving onto the second query: technobarf, put tersely, is the practice of explaining the workings of a piece of technology in the setting with a single monolithic wall of text. Vomiting forth needless information that doesn’t really do anything but distract the reader from the ongoing narrative, in other words. The only people who would really care about such splerges are those of an engineering or scientific bent who would understand what is being said about it. But even then it often doesn’t work out unless the author is also of an engineering and/or scientific bent. That’s because most amateur writers will get the technical details wrong anyway and end up looking stupid when inevitably called out on it.

For the above reasons, technobarf should generally be avoided in literature unless you know how to make it work. It can be done well, but only in specific contexts, such as an in-character instruction manual or when a character needs to explain how the piece of tech works. Not to mention, films can (sometimes) get away with an exploration of their tech without breaking suspension of disbelief. This is because movies have a much faster pace than prose, moving from one scene to another in a matter of minutes if not seconds. If you’re watching a movie like 2012’s Avengers Assemble, you don’t get a lot of time to consider things like “Wait a minute, how can a barrier of pure energy be completely impenetrable?!” before you’re worrying about how the heroes can possibly beat the alien invasion force that is currently causing massive amounts of property damage.

Which leads me straight onto one great method of averting the entire issue of technobarf altogether and why I mentioned the impenetrable energy barrier specifically. That barrier in Avengers isn’t elaborated on in immense detail. Indeed, it isn’t even elaborated on in more detail than “Oh, it’s a barrier of pure energy and it’s completely impenetrable”. The secret? Allude to the operation of that tech, rather than go into stupid levels of detail. Let the full workings of the technology being described be left to the readers’ imagination.

It must be advised that this nifty trick is not, however, a free ticket to create nonsensical tech; there should be some scientific basis behind it. The best part is that you often don’t even need to go to college and get a doctorate in STEM subjects (though it does help): a trip to Wikipedia or any other information website will often suffice.

For example, a quick Google search of ways to defend against laser weapons offers a neat trick using superconductor wire-laced body armour: the shooter would need to pump enough energy to destroy the entire armour all at once to prevent the energy from dispersing across the armour’s entire area and then re-radiating into the air. As an example of how to showcase that in your piece, have a bad guy no-sell an otherwise lethal blast from your protagonist’s laser pistol, then have the protagonist exclaim (or think), “That guy’s armour vest must be laced with superconductor wire!”.

Will that work in the real world? Well, until we invent room-temperature superconductors, we probably won’t find out. But the basis is sound, and that’s really all you need to appease most readers who would otherwise get bored or go berserk at a badly-coordinated deployment of technobarf. Most people reading prose or watching a movie simply do not care about the exact mechanics of the technology — merely that it works. Remember that you’re writing a story, not a schematic.

Now that that’s over and done with, I’ll return to the topic you’re all waiting for: yesterday’s (7th of May) session of D&D. You already know I play D&D every Thursday, sometimes more often. What not so many people here know is that, yesterday, I got my first chance to play as the Dungeon Master — the supreme overlord of the table, He Who Must Not Be Named, the architect of the game world, and the judge, jury and executioner of gameplay. Our normal DM had been feeling a bit overwhelmed by the lockdown (apparently there’s an unpleasant bug going around) and burnt out — so, being a good friend, I offered to step up and take the helm.

DMing has a lot in common with creative writing, not least of which you do have to have some skill in creative writing (or at least a very good basis to operate from) in order to excel at it. Planning out a session can take a long time; for me it took a week to conceive each encounter with monsters, think of suitable lines for the characters, devise elaborate dungeons for the players to fight through. And then play-test the dungeon yourself to make sure the players don’t get reduced to a fine red paste in mere seconds by the myriad traps, monsters and God knows what else they may find in there. (I ended up having to blag one player’s character sheet on the spot. It was quite an experience!)

Come D-Day for my elaborate new dungeon and world to fight in. The premise of my session is remarkably simple: my player character, the obligatory cynical necromancer, is kidnapped by a pair of vicious gargoyles using a bandit ambush as a distraction to make their move, and taken to the Big Bad’s tower for nefarious reasons which shall be elaborated on next week. They’ve still yet to get through the dungeon, so no spoilers here!

I composed a small army of the dead to impede the party’s advance. By any standards, they’ve got a hell of a fight on their hands. Elite undead soldiers stand by the gates, halberds at the ready, while a platoon of skeletons lies in wait behind the gate with swords, shields and bows ready to rain down hell on them. And if they don’t butcher the players, there are ghouls lurking underground, waiting to spring up from the dirt and maul the players to death.

Great was my surprise when one player, an explosives expert, managed to sneak over the log walls protecting the fort, throw an obscenely powerful black powder bomb (20d6 damage, for the record) amidst the skeletons, and then proceed to blow apart the skeleton soldiers. He also demolished the better part of the gatehouse and sent the wights flying forward, making an unceremonious landing flat on their faces — where the rest of the party was waiting for them with battleaxes, halberds, and a remarkably feckless panther.

It’s never uncommon for a DM to face that one player who has a knack for scuppering your plans for the party (Koal the Kobold is an expert on this subject matter), but this spectacular display of creativity made me fully realise just how open-ended D&D can be. If this were a video game, even the D&D-derived Neverwinter, there would be a pre-determined path for players to go down and that would be the only way of doing it. After all, there’s only so much you can put into even a triple-A title.

But D&D is so much more than a game — it’s a story, an expression of creativity that allows us to remember that, with the lockdown that’s bringing everyone down, we are in fact human. Our ability to create, and not just in a table-top game, allows us to keep moving forward and overcoming the toughest obstacles that stand against us. My hope is that the lockdown will help us remember that, and take our knowledge of such into the post-coronavirus world so that we can work towards bettering our collective existence.

I know I’ve written a little more than usual this week, but I’ve had a lot of fun writing this week’s edition of Vox Felicitas — and I hope Wizards of the Coast appreciate all this accidental free advertising they’re getting for their game! Thank you for reading, be sure to applaud if you liked the story, and I will see you all again next week.

~ Harry