Category Archives: Gaming

Beginnings in Games

22 Friday Jun 2012

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Let’s say you have a story you want to tell using the medium of a tabletop roleplaying game (TRPG). Good, good. The world needs more GMs. (And also note that some of this post is also relevant if you want to tell stories with other kinds of games as well.)

Where do you start?

No, I don’t mean where do you start your preparations for the game. I mean where in your storyline do you bring in the player characters (aka the PCs; aka the protagonists)? I’ve already done one post about general advice for starting a story, but games have their own needs sometimes in conflict with general storytelling advice. So here are some considerations I ponder before starting up a game.

Length of Story

How long of a story you want to tell, or perhaps more pertinently how many sessions you want to spend telling it, is probably the single greatest consideration. If you plan to run a multi-year epic story that tracks the rise of the PCs from mere peasants to near demigods, you need to tie them in a lot earlier in the storyline than if you plan on just running one or two sessions.

Even for a one-shot game (one where you play a single session with no continuity with other sessions), where you can start much close to the end of the story, you probably need to do more than just start with rolling initiative for the climactic battle. I mean, you probably could do that, but you’re going to struggle with making that into a story that engages your players. I suppose that is the gaming equivalent of flash fiction (stories of about a thousand words or less).

How to Introduce the PCs

Tying in with the above point, how and when in their careers you bring in the characters matters as much as where in the storyline. What I mean is, do you bring in the characters at the start of their careers (at 1st level, if you’re playing a level-based game) or sometime after they have gained some experience?

In medias res: Yes, you can start a game in medias res. Be prepared to answer (or better, work with your players to answer) a lot of questions early, though.

It can be a lot trickier because you have to then work with your players to establish how they got into that situation. And I’ve seen some people complain about these kinds of starts as “railroading,” which I disagree with on the principle that railroading (that is, the GM exerting so much control over the game’s plot that the players can do nothing to change it) doesn’t exist–only poorly set expectations.

The classic way to start an adventure, “You’re standing outside the entrance to the dungeon,” is definitely a case of in medias res. Why the characters are at the entrance to the dungeon and how they got there are glossed over completely, if addressed at all; all that matters is they are there and they have a dungeon plunder. While that certainly worked just fine in the 70s and early 80s, and the method definitely still has its place and adherents, it seems these days that people expect more from their RPGs.

Starting a game in medias res might be with, “Roll for initiative,” but that doesn’t seem as common (although it was recommended as the beginning of choice in the gamemastering section of the old West End Star Wars RPG). Anyway, starting a game with combat can really get your players’ attention. (And although beginnings aren’t as important in games as in fiction having a memorable start doesn’t hurt.) The real trouble with starting with combat, though, is making the beginning so awesome you can’t maintain the same level of excitement throughout the rest of the game.

You look trustworthy!: Then there is the equally tried-and-true method of telling the party’s (that is, the group of player characters) coming together. This doesn’t have to be terribly creative or extensively roleplayed, but it’s a great way to start a long-term game. This is the equivalent of starting the story the day the main character’s life is thrown into upheaval. Except, since it’s an RPG, you’re talking about the day that several peoples’ lives changed and brought them together. This can be an in medias res opening, with all the PCs coming together to defend their home town from an invasion, or it can a much more laid-back start, where they are drawn together by some other, milder, method (posted announcement, town crier, contest, mutually witnessed event, or whatever). This method works perfectly well for characters just starting their careers (i.e., 1st-level), but it can also work for more experienced PCs who just happen to finally meet.

My Olde Friends: The other side of that coin, of course, is the “You’ve all known each other for several years” method. The main problem with this approach, though, is that the way people who have known each other act comfortably together takes time to develop both in real time and in the imaginary space of RPG characters. What I mean is, characters who have known each other for years are going to act a certain way around each other. It’s hard to capture that kind intimacy and trust with characters you just created ten minutes earlier. That said, this method opens up a lot of storytelling opportunities for both you as the gamemaster and for your players. It’s particularly good for characters who aren’t just starting out, but childhood friends who decide to band together to become adventurers also works.s

…

This post is quite long enough, I think, but there’s more to be said about starting out. I haven’t even gotten to the mysterious man in the darkened corner of the tavern!

I’ll have to revisit starting your game again in the near future. And then I can move on to the most important part of your campaign: the end. Oh, and I guess I really should talk about why I think the idea of railroading is bunk. Lots to say, and with the excitement I have for D&D Next I’ll probably start talking about storytelling in games more often moving forward. :)

The Star of the Show

15 Tuesday May 2012

Posted by in Advice, Ann, Gaming, Inspiration

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This last weekend, I was an at excellent live action roleplaying game. The theme was a pulp adventure, so there were lots of high stakes and drama, but one thing that occurred to me as we ran through the adventure is that there were approximately 25 main characters in this story. They were all unique characters with their own motivations and depth, and watching us all funneled through a storyline was quite the interesting experience.

LARPs are an art form all their own and nothing I say here should be taken as a criticism of it, but it got me to thinking about story media in which there are singular–or at least smaller sets–of stars in the show, and how we define them.

One of my particular weaknesses in building characters is that I like to make plain Janes who have interesting people they support around them. I think this tends to be because I, personally, prefer to be in the role of a supporting cast and crew (which I’ll talk more about next week). That’s all fine and good in life, but when you’re building a star for a particular story, you’re looking at a different spectrum of qualities.

For example, one of my first LARP character ideas for this game was a young woman who had basically been raised on an salvage/mercenary airship, who had an eccentric godfather as the captain and lead of this crew. She was a sometimes adventurer, and otherwise jill-of-all-trades support. I mulled over this idea for a few weeks, but knew it was missing a spark. Ultimately, I realized she was a support member for a cast of more interesting NPCs who would not appear in the game.

Now, in her own story, she could emerge as the star of the show, or perhaps I could take a deeper look at the cast and have someone else emerge as the star of the show and let her remain as support, but none of this would have worked well in a LARP, in which there are 25 stars of the show–each with their own wildly divergent personal storylines. So I’ve kept the idea for a later story.

In an archaeological fantasy novel I was plotting some time ago, the main character was a concubine who had a secret an archaeologist very much needed. I puttered on this story for a while as well, and eventually when talking to a friend, she succinctly said, “So your main character is basically just a plot device?” and I realized I needed to take a deeper look. In that case, I decided she would make better support cast to the archaeologist, who had more at stake in this story.

Even in an ensemble cast, such as the trio from the Harry Potter books, there is a primary character, even if the supporting characters are just half a step away. Harry, in those books, has the most going on, and he has the highest personal stakes among the trio. In the Lord of the Rings, there is a huge cast, but eventually they are broken into smaller groups with their own emerging leaders. I’d say Samwise Gamgee and Aragorn emerge as the stars of the show when all is said and done. (And I suspect others have convincing arguments for other characters in the lead.)

It’s possible to have multiple stars of the show, but I believe one is likely to be slightly brighter than the others, and the star is not always the Point of View character. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson are classic examples of this: Watson is the point of view because he is someone the readers can identify with, whereas Sherlock is not.

All that said, how do you find the star of your show?

Consider:
1. Which protagonist has the most stakes or personal investment in the story?
2. Could story/end result happen without that protagonist?
3. Are there specific, important things that character does in the story that can’t easily be replaced by or delegated to someone else?

These might not be the only litmus tests to define your star of the show, but they should help you get on your way. Do none of your characters “pass” the test? Or one specific one you want to be your star? Consider the star qualities, and rework that character so he or she can shine.

Antagonists in Games

20 Friday Apr 2012

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Telling Stories in Games Series: Part III

Since I spent a couple weeks talking about antagonist and I haven’t done a Telling Stories in Games entry in a while, let’s combine the two!

Who are the antagonists in your campaign?

The Final Boss

Let’s start at the end of your story. Presumably you’ve thought that far out, yes? Or at least you know who your Final Boss is, even if you don’t have the specifics worked out yet how your player characters are going to get to—much less defeat—said boss. If you aren’t planning on having a completely open-ended campaign with no set Final Boss and you haven’t yet worked out who or what your PCs are going to take down at the end, you should probably figure that out. In most stories, the beginning is the most important part, but I’ve found in general that stories told with RPGs (tabletop or computer) make it or break it with the conclusion. So start with the end of your story and know who the Final Boss antagonist is.

Midbosses

Before the player characters get to the Final Boss they will almost certainly meet a number of lesser antagonists along the way. Let’s call them Midbosses. These Midbosses might be lieutenants of the campaign’s primary antagonist, but more often they should be primarily serving their own purposes. Either way, they present challenges to your PCs along the way, giving your players the much-needed sense of accomplishment and progress as they work their way through your story.

And speaking of story, each of these Midboss antagonists needs his or her or its own story. You have the overarching storyline of the campaign, presumably, and waiting at the climax of it is the Final Boss. Unlike what I said in my first antagonist article, the primary antagonist of your campaign needn’t be at least as interesting as the player characters. Usually, this character’s goals are grandiose and simple: conquer the world, kill all the people, destroy the thing. It’s the people along the way who your player characters meet and overcome who you can use to create really interesting stories.

So for these Midbosses my advice stands. Each one needs to be interesting. If you can make their backstories more detailed than those of most of your player characters, you’re doing well. The trick with having antagonists with interesting backstories in RPGs, though, is disseminating the information. How to share backstory with your players is a topic for another day, but assume that about 90% of what you create will only ever be known to you.

But suffice it to say: your Midbosses need interesting backstories. You can get away with not much of a backstory for your Final Boss because, in effect, your entire campaign builds up a reason for the players to care about defeating their greatest antagonist. Your Midbosses, though, often work independently of the Final Boss, at least to some extent (even if they are minions thereof), and so they need their own motivations and backstories.

Midbosses who do their own thing from the very beginning–who are threats to the player characters without tying in to the main storyline–definitely need good motivations for doing so, but just as importantly you need to find a good way of making these side quests interesting and important to your players.

On the other hand, Midbosses who are more or less loyal to the Final Boss tend to be at their most interesting when they not only serve the campaign’s main antagonist but also have their own agendas. Their personal agendas need not be aligned with those of their leader, but it’s hard to make them believably loyal if they actively work against the Final Boss. It can be done, but it’s hard to do well.

Monster of the Week

At the bottom of the antagonist pile, you have those who essentially serve as “monster of the week” for your player characters. These are the main characters in their own little dramas, but the scenarios they feature in are one-shots that rarely tie in with the rest of your campaign, so in the grand scheme of your campaign they are minor characters at best. How much backstory do you give these guys? That depends on how much you enjoy creating backstories, but they need to be interesting enough to make your players care. Often, you can just imply backstory with a few carefully dropped comments or hints, saving your players a long soliloquy by someone they’re just going to beat up on for a little while.

Who Gets What

So what am I getting at here?

When you’re thinking about your campaign and the antagonists you want to throw at your player characters, focus your backstory efforts on the Midbosses—the antagonists who trouble your PCs for a story arc of multiple sessions but who are neither the campaign’s primary antagonist nor just one-shot monsters of the week. You don’t need a lot of backstory for your main antagonist—in most RPGs, just being evil is enough—nor your throwaways. But the antagonists your PCs spend several scenarios and numerous sessions hunting down and defeating really carry your campaign and are the ones your PCs tend to focus on most.

And remember in all of this that an antagonist isn’t necessarily a bad guy, or evil, but merely someone who opposes your protagonists (the PCs). This can be the captain of a city guard, a crazed alchemist, a dogged reporter, or anyone who has a reason to make the player characters’ lives miserable.

Set Expectations

24 Friday Feb 2012

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Telling Stories in Games Series: Part II

I enjoy telling and experiencing stories in a variety of media. I’m also a big fan of storytelling experimentation and innovation, both in what stories are told and in how. My love of experimentation with stories in games pretty frequently runs afoul of what my players want. Ultimately, those games end prematurely, either through player unhappiness or my own apathy (or both). I’d say more of the games I run end in failure (I mean, opportunity!) than conclude naturally, although my success rate has increased over the past few years.

I attribute that increasing success to properly setting expectations. If you are planning on telling a story with a game (from acting as the GM of an RPG to creating a new story-based Facebook game) you will increase your chance of success by setting a reasonable expectation for your players.

Start With the Basics

The most basic pieces of information you need to share to start setting expectations for your game and story are those common to every story in every medium:

  • The name of the story (or “campaign,” if you prefer)
  • The system you’re going to use
  • How long you expect it to last (weeks, months, years?)

How you share this information is up to you. (I recommend email.)

More Details

That information is all well and good, but it doesn’t really say much about your story. Even a fairly evocative name (like, say, Warmakers) gives only a single hint to what your story is about (unless you’re into ironic or clever names, of course). So you need to give your players more to go on. Your primary goal is to make sure your players know the kind of story you want to tell. To do that, start with this kind of information:

Focus
In the first part of my Telling Stories in Games series I talked about focus. Your players need to know the kind of focus you intend on running up front. I won’t rehash that post; just go ahead and read it. :)

Freedom of Choice
Setting-focused and plot-focused RPG stories rely heavily on the illusion of free will. Players like to think they can do anything, but in reality they usually want to help you tell your story. Let them! But you need to let them know up front how much they can expect to alter the plot.

If you have a full story outline for your game, let the players know ahead of time that you’ve got a story you want to tell with them. You obviously still need to give them actual freedom of choice now and then (oh yeah, that’s definitely a future article), but if they come into the game knowing you have an agenda, they will forgive most of your heavy-handed attempts to steer them back on course.

This is the kind of gaming that some people decry as “railroading,” but I argue that (1) railroading is a myth and (2) the complaints about it come from a lack of setting proper expectations. (In fact, I feel this so strongly I have “The Myth of Railroading” listed for a future entry in this series.)

Of course, you can overdo your storytelling and not give your players any meaningful choices. That isn’t a roleplaying game. It’s not even a shared narrative. It’s oral storytelling with goofy props, and while there are times when such a thing is appropriate and appreciated, the gaming table is never one of them. (See DM of the Rings if you need a humorous example.)

The Warmakers game I ran some years ago had a destination in mind. No matter what the players did, the finale (but not its outcome) was set. How they got there and what they could bring to the party were completely up to them, so they had lots of freedom (oh no, I mean lots of freedom), but everyone knew from the beginning where the story was heading.

Tone
If your style of storytelling in games is not unknown to your players, you might not even need this part. And even if you do list it, you don’t need to use a lot of details. For example, my default story tone is “light-hearted but with a dark undertone.” How much that undertone moves into the primacy of the story depends on the players and the story.

Scope
How grand a vision to you want your story to be? This is going to be limited somewhat by how long you expect it to last, but those two factors aren’t necessarily connected. Let your players know if they can expect their characters to possess godlike powers or if they’re going to struggle to buy a box of instant noodles to split.

Consistency and Change

If you plan from the beginning on changing some aspect of the story, hint at that by saying “The story will start as…” or “The tone will initially be…” Telling the players that your story is going to be one way and then presenting it in another is a pretty good way to lose players. Nobody likes the ol’ bait-and-switch. On the other hand, if you warn them up front that some aspects of the game might change over time, they at least are forewarned.

Of course, people change over time, and so do their interests in their stories. If you want to change some aspect of your story, let your players know as soon as you can. In my experience, at least, players are open to change as long as they are warned ahead of time and allowed to give some feedback. Announcing a change right as you make it is not a good way to treat your players. Advanced warning is the key.

Final Challenge

You have some categories of information you should share with prospective players in your game, now let’s see what you have to say! Write out the expectations for a game you’re running or considering to run and share with the rest of us in comments. I’m interested to see!

The Three Foci in Games

27 Friday Jan 2012

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Oh hai, I’m moving my posts to Fridays. Ann will occasionally post on Thursdays, so from now on we’ll be posting two to three times a week: Tuesday, sometimes Thursday, and Friday.

Telling Stories in Games Series: Part I

There’s a chance you didn’t know this, but most (but by no means all) of my writing and editing experience comes from tabletop roleplaying games (TRPGs). When Ann and I mapped out what we wanted to do with this blog, I knew that I wanted to do a series of posts about telling stories in games (I’m going to aim for one or two per month). The recent announcement of D&D Next (aka 5e) makes this series seem somewhat more timely than it would have been otherwise.

Overlap exists between telling stories with games and telling stories in other media–after all, a story is a story is a story–but some differences persist. Everything Ann and I cover in Story Papers is applicable to game-based storytelling, but I’m not sure the reverse will always be true. Still, even if you don’t play games with a narrative, you might find something helpful in these posts.

Last week, I talked about the Three Foci of Stories as a sort of baseline for all future theory-based articles I write. It seems reasonable, then, to start off this series of telling stories with games in the same way.

Setting Focus

Last week I advised you to avoid setting-focused narratives, unless you’re Tolkien (and even then…). Well, for game-based stories, you can just throw that right out. Setting-focused narratives have been the default for at least fantasy roleplaying games since the invention of the genre in 1974 and they remain popular today in most genres I’ve experienced.

If you’ve played a fantasy roleplaying game on the tabletop or as an MMO you are already familiar with the concept:

  1. The characters are in a settlement with a problem.
  2. The characters go to a nearby bad place and “clear it.”
  3. The characters uncover some clue that leads them to the next bad place.
  4. The characters travel to the settlement closest to the new bad place.
  5. Repeat 1-4 as much as desired, making the problems and bad places larger and more challenging as you go.

That’s a pretty bare-bones macroscopic example of how such stories run.

A small-scale setting-focused story–say, a single adventure–instead details a single location (or if it’s really elaborate and ambitious, several). In fantasy RPGs this is probably a “dungeon;” in science-fiction RPGs a spaceship, spaceport, or a point of interest on a planet; and in modern-day RPGs it might be an office building, some old ruins, or a military base. Whatever the location is, it and its history are at the center of the story.

The first RPG adventures dispensed with any kind of external plot at all and simply began the adventure at the door to the dungeon. Questions about why and how the characters arrived there were irrelevant; the point of the adventures were to explore a new location and uncover its mysteries. Modern sensibilities require a little more plot than that, but a “dungeon crawl” remains a story about a place and what goes on there.

And remember that being setting-focused doesn’t mean your story is limited to one small part of the setting. A story of exploration is setting-focused (maybe with some character focus on the side), whether that exploration covers a single underground complex or an entire world.

Plot Focus

RPGs today are often more interested in plot, especially if they aren’t of the fantasy genre (and even then, plot-based adventures seem pretty popular). Many plots involve saving someone or something from someone or something else–giving the otherwise non-heroic characters a chance at being something more than mercenaries or self-absorbed jerks. The monomyth provides a basic example of an outline for these kinds of stories in any medium, although in games (at least in tabletop roleplaying games) you have to alter it somewhat to account for multiple primary protagonists.

The scope of what the characters save tends to increase as the overarching story progresses. First it’s just a village, hijacked airplane, or doomed freighter adrift in space. Eventually, it’s the entire country, world, or galaxy! (Not always, of course; sometimes the scope only increases to the next-largest nearby town.)

As I talked about last week, plot-driven stories are everywhere. Examples abound! Some of the more common plots that work well in games:

  • Save this place
  • Free the people
  • Stop the bad guy from regaining power
  • Throw down the bad guys
  • Rescue the princess!*
  • Slay the dragon**
  • Destroy a MacGuffin
  • Recover a MacGuffin
  • Escort the important person
  • Take this there

Many of those plots work in multiple genres, even if they appear on first blush to be specific to just fantasy or science fiction.

Character Focus

In many ways, a purely character-focused game lacks story. Or, rather, it lacks a story told by the gamemaster, narrator, storyteller, or host (whatever your title is). A pure character-focused game is pretty much a free-form roleplaying session, where the players take on their characters’ personas and simply interact. You might have a plot you want to introduce, but if the players are having fun in their free-form roleplaying there’s a good chance they will completely ignore it (don’t let it bother you; sit back, watch, and enjoy!).

That’s a pretty extreme example, though, and only barely constitutes an actual story. It’s most likely to happen as a break from your plot- or setting-based story, when the characters have a chance to just interact and the players are in the mood to really get into their characters. These kinds of “filler episode” sessions can be important to the pacing of your game and the enjoyment of your players.

If you want to try to run a game that is largely character focused, you’re definitely going to need the cooperation and interest of all your players. Some might take to the idea and provide long and detailed backstories as well as goals, desires, wishes, and fears of their characters. Others might just show you a character sheet. You’re better off, in that case, with running a plot-focused or setting-focused game instead and integrate player-created stories as best you can. This idea deserves its own post, really, so I’ll come back to it in the future.

Final Challenge

Here’s a challenge for you: Start with a story seed of your liking. Now, produce a one-page outline for it focusing on setting, a one-page outline for the same story focusing on plot, and finally a one-page outline focusing on characters. If you try it, let me see what you came up with!

*Actually, for all that it is considered a cliche in fantasy, I’m not aware of any professionally produced RPG scenarios that blatantly use the “rescue the princess” trope.
**Also an under-utilized trope.