> >what prevents both this and the Sagas from being a readable story
> >... is that there's nothing to get the reader interested in the
> >characters. There aren't any characters. Just a list of names.
>
> Pretty clearly you haven't actually read any of the good sagas.
There's a big thick book of the Icelandic Sagas on the shelf that I think I managed to wade through to the end of. And the Orkneyinga Saga somewhere. Can't tell you what or who any of them are about, nothing at all stuck in memory.
> Egil
> (not surprisingly) is a major character in Egil's Saga. Njall and his
> pal Gunnar in Njall's Saga. And while women don't go adventuring,
> there are strong female characters in Laxdaela Saga.
OK, will try to track them down. Maybe it's going to be like beer. I thought for years that I didn't like the stuff. It turned out that what I didn't like was *cheap* beer.
> > > Personally, I'm not a huge fan of internal dialogue.
> >
> >So how do you do the IC for HQ personality traits,
> relationships, mental
> >abilities... in fact, most of the system?
>
> IC? If this means Internal Conflict, presumably it's, um, internal.
>
> Oh, In Character. You've lost me then, I don't see the relevance
> between doing things in character and with external dialog.
We've already discussed this, and I don't see the point you're trying to make here. In-Character writing to express internal feelings, such as "hate Lunars", "love mother", "easily unnerved by blonde women", whatever. Either it's internal dialogue, or you end up with someone standing there expressing their innermost feeling to some NPC, or to a wall, which probably isn't all that appropriate. "To be, or not to be", is great writing, but the realism is limited by the constraints of a stage. None of it would have been spoken aloud.
> > > Do I "know" how characters "feel" in a movie, television
> or in real life?
> >
> >I don't know - I certainly do in books. The character who's
> being used asview-point at, least.
>
> One style of book, at least. You're assuming an omniscient viewpoint,
> I believe.
No, most books I read the viewpoint is internal to one of the charaters, possibly swaps between different characters. So you get the internal feelings of that one, plus the bias they put on the events they're viewing. Now swap viewpoints, get the bias of a different character on the same events, learn about both of them from it (and possibly about the events). That sort of thing.
Assuming we're talking about fiction, not history, of course.
> In any case, I will now confess that I make the campaign sagas. I
> only have time to do so during the game. And their purpose is to keep
> track of what happened.
Yes, that was very clear. As I said at the start of all this, this is comment, not criticism, quite obviously in the case of your campaign chronicles they're not readable fiction because that was never their intention. They just mirrored the "Saga Style" so perfectly that they could be used as an example of it.
In fact, they're heading towards the AngloSaxon Chronicle, in places. "And in this year XXX and YY fought at ZZZ, MMM died, and there was plague in Britain and Ireland." And one goes "huh? Who was on which side? Was the death connected with the battle, why, why...?" but the purpose is simply to remind the reader which year we're talking about, by reference to (then) well-known events.
Wonders to self - what was the purpose of those Sagas?
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