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The best stories have an ending. And if you want to tell a decent story in a roleplaying format, you're going to need some sort of an ending eventually. The problem is that most endings have a pretty strict sense of finality to them, and really ending your roleplaying kind of implies that your character is riding off into the sunset and possibly sipping martinis. (Depending on the game, they may be space martinis. Lots of things are possible.)

So you want to end the story without ending your character's story on a whole. That's a good approach and one that can be handled. But it's also one that's a bit easier said than done, hence my devoting an entire column to it. So let's talk about creating a satisfying ending that manages to wrap up a story without subsequently wrapping up every aspect of your character.

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A couple of weeks back, I wrote an article about dealing with a major ongoing storyline in an MMO. For those of you who neither read the article nor can spare the time to click the link and read it now: It talked about the problems presented by having a storyline and offered a few different solutions for handling such inconsistencies. Of course, as I noted, very few of these problems apply to open-world sandbox games that have no sort of ongoing developer-run story for you to stumble around.

No, those games have issues entirely their own, starting with the very nature of player-run stories.

A completely player-driven story has the advantage of not having several issues that can crop up when dealing with an ongoing in-game story, but it also still has some serious problems. There are still issues that you're going to have to have answers for when you're in a game that lets you craft the world to match your whims, and unfortunately the methods for doing so aren't quite as straightforward as the methods for dealing with an in-game storyline.

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My days of playing Magic: the Gathering are... well, they're not over, exactly, but I'm certainly not in my heyday any longer. Despite this, I've made no secret of the fact that I still avidly read Mark Rosewater's Making Magic column because the stuff he says in the column is applicable to game design in general. There are a lot of ideas that I've drawn out of there over the years, and one of the ones that's stuck with me is the Timmy-Johnny-Spike split that Rosewater's quite fond of explaining at length.

For those of you not interested in reading a decade's worth of columns just to understand what I'm talking about, the three names in questions are the so-called "psychographics" for Magic's audience, three psychological snapshots of why people play and enjoy the game. They're useful tools for understanding the reason certain cards resonate well with some players and not with others. And they're applicable to almost everything -- even roleplaying.

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The night before I started writing this column, I finally managed to clear Chapter 1 in Star Wars: The Old Republic with one of my characters. I overcame great obstacles, beat back horrible odds, and defeated a great menace to the galaxy. I was hailed as a hero by the authorities in charge, and while it had been at great cost to myself, I was now more than worthy of respect, accolades, and the gratitude of a galaxy unaware of how close it had been to almost insurmountable danger.

But then I finished the quest.

This problem is not unique to Star Wars: The Old Republic at all, though. By the end of my career in World of Warcraft, I had slain several unique individuals dozens of times on multiple characters, including several kills that were noted by NPCs as being once-in-a-lifetime achievements. Final Fantasy XI made me a pivotal figure in historic events that I could then jump right back into any time I had a friend doing the same quest. And let's not even get into the chronological strangeness that can erupt in Lord of the Rings Online. What's to be done when there's an ongoing story that your character is part of and not a part of?

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Over the past 80-odd columns, I've covered ways to improve dramatic tension, to provide interesting character interplay, to improve out-of-character communication, and to enhance the experience of roleplaying. What I have not covered, somewhat to my surprise, is an important but often forgotten component of good roleplaying: humor.

I realize that there are circles in which humor is anathema, where the mood moves between "somber" and "depressing" with nary a chuckle between, lightless pits into which no good cheer is allowed. Far be it from me to say that you're doing it wrong if you happen to be one of those people, but there's a reason why people don't want to join you in a roleplaying session. You guys are kind of depressing just to be around, and your roleplaying has all the verisimilitude of a goth kid's poetry while his parents are getting divorced.

But let's not kid ourselves. Doing humor effectively anywhere is hard, and in roleplaying it's made even more difficult due to a variety of circumstances. So let's start out by examining some common pitfalls and laying some ideas down for what you can do to make your humor go over better in a game.

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Over the past two weeks, I've been essentially playing politics. That's a bit glib, sure, but if you have a better term for arguing two sides of the same issue over the course of two separate essays, I'd love to hear it. Of course, turning around and arguing the other side of my own points is something that I've been doing for years now; it's really not surprising.

For those of you just catching up, we've been discussing player-generated story in games -- whether it deserves to be the only form of story and whether or not it's any good at that goal. Today, I'm going to try to wrap up this discussion forever, or at least for the purposes of this little mini-discussion. That requires a bit of re-framing, since I think that like a lot of other issues, this one isn't nearly as monochromatic as we like to pretend it is. There are virtues to both sides, and the real danger lies not in preferring one but demonizing the other.

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If there's one thing that I've proven incapable of doing with tabletop gaming, it's remembering the names of NPCs.

Not the ones related to this week's adventure, mind you; those I remember just fine. But throw out a big signature NPC and I suddenly find myself completely blank. It's bad enough that the only character I can think of off the top of my head is Caine from Vampire: the Masquerade, who mostly occupies a spot in my head for totally unrelated reasons. I can't help but think that if some clever GM tried to insert a major storyline character into an adventure, I'd wind up being the guy in the party who asked someone breathtakingly important if I could borrow some money.

In the case of MMOs, I often have a bit more of an advantage. After all, Statesman and my character have a bit more interaction in City of Heroes than my characters in other games have with the setting-specific NPCs that I'd really like to be able to name off the top of my head. But even though I can remember who Thrall is, he suffers from the exact same problem as all the others -- as long as I'm not playing him, he's just plain not important.

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There's a notion floating around the MMO mindspace, one that you've no doubt heard over and over again, especially in light of the recent heartbreaking closure of Star Wars Galaxies. It's the idea that creating a capital-S story in an MMO is by definition a flawed enterprise. According to this argument, the whole point of an MMO and the point of good roleplaying is to create a story that's unique to the players. Real memorable stories should come from players, not from developers.

I could just write "no" here and be finished, but instead I've gone into full-on rant mode on this one. About a year ago, I wrote up a piece explaining that players are not individually storytellers, not even if you're roleplaying. That extends further, though -- a group of roleplayers does not suddenly become a storyteller, like a version of Devastator that's made up of literature majors. This isn't right, and it's doing a great disservice to the things that roleplaying actually does well.

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There are blanks spots in the lore.

This is not news to anyone who has been reading this column for a while. I've talked about dealing with the lore twice, both times pointing out that there are spaces for you to drive your character. Sometimes it's comfortable, and sometimes it's like wedging a needle into your gums and trying to kill a dental nerve at the root. But whether or not it has parallels to my recent dental surgery, there are places in the lore where you sort of have to just fill in the blanks.

Unfortunately, this creates major issues when you intend to interact with another player, which is something that will be happening roughly all the time in roleplaying. So you might very well come up with an answer for something that isn't just different from everyone else's answer, but you might wind up with an answer that's outright mutually incompatible with someone else's. And while you sometimes can take comfort in the fact that the lore will eventually steamroll both of you, sometimes it's just the two of you trying to deal with a part of your fictional world that is now being disbelieved by someone else.

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Every game world has a basic setting premise. Your character in Guild Wars can come from all over Tyria, but he certainly doesn't come from Alderaan. Even though your captain in Star Trek Online is proficient in unarmed combat, she cannot bend the Matrix to her will. And no matter how similar the settings might seem, when WildStar finally comes out, you will not be able to claim that your character used to smuggle cargo on a Firefly-class vessel out in the black.

People do these things anyway. People gleefully import characters wholesale from other settings and expect it to be accepted that they come from another time and place, often bringing with them plenty of baggage. It's flagrant disregard for the rules of the setting and the game as it exists, and it's a hallmark of bad roleplaying...

And yet it doesn't have to be. This is an element of fiction that's always been very popular, and in some games (such as most superheroic ones), the idea of slipping from one world to another doesn't seem that far-fetched. So let's talk about why it tends to be done and how you can actually do this without being obnoxious.

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The problem with providing systems for roleplayers is that pretty much every system developers try hits snags. Case in point: Star Wars: The Old Republic's Legacy system.

For those of you who haven't yet heard about the system, please let us know how you're getting the site in 1980s Siberia. But I'll gloss over anyway: The core element of the system is that when you hit a certain point with a character, you pick a surname to unlock as your "Legacy" for all characters on that server. As you advance with more characters, you gain more benefits from the Legacy and so on and so forth. What we're really concerned with is the surname part because that's the part that matters to roleplayers.

Being able to make a character's overall tree a tangible thing is a powerful element. It allows you to actually play a family, or at the very least, a linked coalition of characters. Unfortunately, while the idea works well, the problem is that surnames are so important that I almost wish that the system had a different way of tying the elements together.

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A couple of weeks ago, someone raised a very reasonable question about characters in EVE Online -- do they date? They're all clones, they're born pretty much just to pilot ships, and they have a culture that keeps them in some variety of ship pretty much all the time. So do they date? Do they even know what differentiated genders are all about? Would they be capable of having a child in the conventional sense? Would the concept even occur to them to try?

The problem is that we look at these characters and see human beings because they are human beings. They behave, by and large, in ways that we understand human beings to behave. And yet there are some pretty huge obstacles in the path of their natural behaviors, things that the developers don't seem to address. When you start to think about it hard enough, not only does it seem like they shouldn't date, but it seems like they wouldn't even know where to start dating. And if the idea of dating doesn't exist, a lot of our assumptions fall apart.

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We're told, at a young age, not to judge a book by its cover. The problem with that statement is that when you're out buying a book, the cover is pretty much all you have to go by. Publishers understand that, and while a great book can overcome a lackluster cover, pretty much every book goes out of its way to try to attract your immediate attention. There are entire schools of thought on cover design for precisely that reason.

The same goes for your characters in a roleplaying setting. You can develop a deep and engaging character with a lot of different potential stories, but without something to draw in other players, no one will ever know. You need something to get other players curious, something to get them invested and interested in what you want to do. You need a way to show them from the beginning that this isn't just another generic warrior or mage or whatever. You need a hook.

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When Ms. Lady first got into MMOs, she had a very firm opinion on roleplaying, filled with subtleties and coherent arguments. Her overall thesis was "roleplaying is dumb," backed up with further evidence such as "you're dumb for liking it" and "let's talk about something else." This lasted until she really tried it, at which point she changed her thesis to "roleplaying is awesome" and supported it with "I was dumb to say that" and "you'd better not put this in an article several years from now."

What I'm getting at is that we roleplay in-game together. Quite a lot, actually, to the point that a good number of my roleplaying anecdotes involve her in one capacity or another.

Roleplaying in a committed relationship poses its own unique set of issues, however, the sort that just don't happen when you are roleplaying with people who live at least in another house. So here are a few tips to ensure that while you and your significant other will probably still argue about pointless things, roleplaying will only be an infrequent guest star to the stupid argument party.

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When I was younger, I got very excited at the thought that therapists would ask people to roleplay. In my mind, this was a great idea. After all, if Joe and Jane go to see a marriage counselor, they could walk out of the session realizing that each of them always has the other's back, especially when facing down an ancient red dragon as a cleric and a fighter. Plus, it's something for the couple to do together. It wasn't until I was older that I found out that the roleplaying under discussion was something different.

At least, it's theoretically different.

I've talked many times about how roleplaying is many things to many different people, but one of the big potential pitfalls comes when you're roleplaying with people you know because some people play characters that are still, fundamentally, part of the player. And if you're plaing alongside someone whose characters are more personal than yours, it can cause some very odd disconnects that you might not even recognize until after the fact.

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