Bonus 40 - Storytelling in Role-Playing Games

Catching up on episodes as I am a bit behind. Really enjoyed this episode. I did a lot of roleplay during my 20s and early 30s but it has really evaporated over the last 8 years, mostly due to children, work, and obviously covid. Hoping to get back into it soon, as our boardgame group has really kicked off again recently and we're hoping to morph that into some roleplay. We generally played a lot of CoC, Warhammer FRP 2nd ed, Shadowrun, Rogue Trader, and many others. Hoping to try out some Traveller, as that is one I have always wanted to have a go at.

As a GM i love Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition for the simplicity of the rules so that i can focus on telling whatever story i want to. There's something really beautiful about the way that a game is created by both the GM and the players and my approach is to facilitate that by having a general story in my mind and moveable events that can occur in different situations to direct the game where i want while allowing the players to feel like they have the freedom to exist as their players in the world being created for them. I'm not a fan of playing the real railroad type stories where the GM forces players to follow a set path because that's what they wrote or are playing off of because as a player i find that annoying. The best thing is the way that players will make up things for the world i could never have thought of certain details and events which by responding to I am lead to be inspired to create and react with story ideas that seem to come out of nowhere that are far superior to what i could have come up with by myself sitting at home. It's an incredibly inspiring experience running a great game with the right group and it's something i enjoy immensely.

This episode was so good, and these comments have has gotten me itching to do a campaign. I think Kenneth has been name checked in Elden Ring. Sort of... A side quest character goes by the name Kenneth Haight. Could be a coincidence, but it was written by George RR Martin and directed by Hidetaka Miyazaki, who have both spoken about their love of TTRPGs.

This was great and would love more looks at horror RPGs

Tomas Rawlings

I'm new to commenting here (hi, hi), and this episode was really eye-opening for me. I'm running D&D right now and would LOVE to incorporate more elements of storytelling and story structure into the game. Any recommendations on resources for incorporating story structure into TTRPGs? I'm sure this is obvious to everyone; I'm just a newbie.

Just wanna say, I would be *fascinated* by a companion TTRPG for the podcast. The mechanics questions would be interesting enough, but the fact that a lot of the old tales you've covered are presumably public domain also raises some fun worldbuilding possibilities. Like a pulpy League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Just with less sexual assault, and hopefully with less Golliwog cameos.

Mandy Reznor (She_It)

My introduction to role playing games was Vampire when I was in the Navy. Your story about fighting another PC rung with me because it reminded me of an instance where my Nosfetatu was in a mix chronicles game and fought another PC because I wanted to spare a Baali for whatever reason and our characters cried about it afterwards.

I don't know about "art form." I guess any form of expression can be one and I will gain nothing by trying to argue with Ken Hite, but I think of it more as a "craft." I've been using plain old D&amp;D to tell stories for, well, a long time. It never occurred to me to do otherwise. Established settings and modules never seemed all that necessary; the rulebooks gave you everything you needed to make the rest up on your own, so that's what we did. And with D&amp;D functionally the lingua franca of the hobby, its not hard to find people to play with. While world-building and adventure design are fun intellectual pursuits in and of themselves, the game part of the equation is where all the fun really happens. You get four or five people together to hash out a plot and see what happens when dice add a further layer of randomness to the proceedings. Players zig when the DM expects them to zag. When you absolutely positively need a big success you will roll a critical failure. You can still have your epic adventure but its going to be more like Richard Lester's <i>Three Musketeers</i> than <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i> and that's a good thing. Because the gamemaster has to be a quick thinker who can adapt to players plans and the players have to be able to rebound from screwing everything up royally, and hell that may even be what the story becomes about. There really is nothing like it. Maybe improv theater, but you never get XP for winning one of those games.

The podcast reaches new Hites. Great Stuff.

Steve

I enjoy the systems that have you develop your characters with the rest of the players at the beginning. Our group played Beyond the Wall, and you create friendships and rivalries with the other players as you create the group, as well as external motivations and histories. We created ideas about the characters, the world, and our motivations that helped when it came to playing the game. I think it also really helped give story ideas to the GM.

Great talk! Oh man… I’m old as hell and I have to say I *love* listening to rpg recordings. It keeps me going when I don’t have time to rpg myself. And it lets me get a peek at RPGs I haven’t had the chance to read or try. I haven’t listened to more than an episode of Critical Role tho, mostly because I’d much rather listen to recordings of Call of Cthulhu or weird story games and OSR systems.

Jason Thompson

Absolutely. Nothing deflates an rpg player faster than the (often obvious) deus ex machina of the game master saving a precious scenario or NPC. Let the players win however they do, and turn that anti-climax into the sinister approach of a new threat!

Great episode! I could listen to various sub-topics regarding ttrpg as a creative art form all day, and Ken always has great insights. A part of the discussion that particularly resonated with me was the excitement in participating in such a young form of storytelling, as well as finding those things that it can uniquely do (rather than shackling it to more mainstream storytelling forms). I’ve played and written for ttrpgs (including Vampire: The Masquerade) for years, and the one of the things I love about it is this ongoing sense of discovery. What can we do with this larval storytelling form? What shapes can me mutate it into? One lesson I've learned: EMBRACE THE ANTICLIMAX. Traditional media has an expectation of buildup and climactic action. Games play out a little differently. I can think of two examples to illustrate. EXAMPLE 1: I played in a game of DC Superheroes. My party faced off against a swarm of goons. Through clever use of powers, we neutralized the threat before a proper fight could happen. Our surprised GM said, "That was quicker than I expected... I guess more goons barge into the room." The GM was trying to give us the best possible story. Going by cinematic reasoning, he thought we needed a big battle sequence before finding the main villain. But he not only fudged things, he TOLD US. It made our clever ploy meaningless. It made the story seem more like carnival ride, taking us to the same story beats no matter what we did. It extended a combat that we were, frankly, already bored with. What happens during a combat is rarely as interesting as how it ends. EXAMPLE 2: The very opposite. I played in a unique D&amp;D game where all the players characters were demons/devils de-powered and exiled to the material plane to work our villainous machinations. The DM ran a pure sandbox game. She did foreshadow and build up a major enemy, the holy paladin Sir Reginald. We were terrified of him, so we took to subterfuge. Long story short -- through a series of daring deceptions and amazing rolls, we tricked Sir Reginald down to an underground lake. Before he realized who we were, we pushed him into the water (another miraculous roll). Sir Reginald, in his heavy armor, sank to the bottom, his last words being, "Bubble-bubble-bubble!" The DM looked stunned. But to her credit, she held up the paladin's character sheet and said, "Argh! I worked so long on him... but you got him." She was a servant of the dice, and we loved it. We got to be clever. We subverted cinematic expectations, and that was a thrill. We had absolute agency. We still talk about this game session, years later, certainly more than if we had fought a protracted battle with the paladin. Even in traditional media, you can find strategic anticlimaxes. The best example I can think of is Raiders of the Lost Arc. The swordsman flourishes with his scimitar. You know a big fight scene is coming and... Indiana just shoots him with a pistol. What a delicious subversion of expectation! It's also a character revealing moment for Indiana. Now imagine that was a tabletop game. Imagine if the GM said, "Wait! There should be a fight scene here. Uh... your gun jams, I guess. Roll for initiative." Certainly there is value in modeling some of our game storytelling off of traditional media. But one of the thrills of the hobby is taking those story elements and then doing all of those things we yell for the characters in the book/screen to do. Want to say, "Nope!" and burn down the creepy house instead of going down into the vampire den basement? You can! Want to side step the traditional gothic drama of a tragic love triangle and instead form a sexy dracula/ghost/werewolf power throuple? More power to you! Embrace the Anticlimax. Hug that flatulent little demon close.

There's such a wonderful world of TTRPGs out there beyond the maze and monster variety. I've had the privilege of running many one-shot games for a local charity organization, so I got used to crafting more hook-y concepts for rules-lite systems. For those I'd have more set plot beats, but you always go where the players lead you. A few years back I hacked FATE Core to include rules for players getting points back by singing to create a "jukebox musical" and pitched it as "The Spice Girl, but on Dune." None of the players who signed up had read the novel but EVERYONE had a favorite Spice Girl, and it was one of the most awesome experiences of my GMing life. "Okay, so the Harkonnen drove us from the city, that wasn't great. We're...just gonna regroup." "Awesome. Smash cut to five years later." I went to the bathroom to let them have a few minutes to decide how they were going to get back into the city. They decided to launch a military invasion, using a comeback tour as cover. I came back and could hear them bellowing, "Do You Hear the People Sing?" from Les Mis. There's just something electric about "I had a stupid idea, and five people got VERY excited about it."

I cannot recommend enough spending a little time with the work of C. Thi Nguyen on games and play. He approaches the subjects quite seriously from a philosophical perspective. I think you'll find some guidance on how to best design the intentional challenges and opportunities to take on different mindsets.

Consider having the players create a few characters all at once. This is their character pool and they can decide which characters are active in which part of the Masks adventure. Each character records their activities and passes those recordings (notes, photos, what-have-you) to the other groups through regular postal drops. Most games encourage players to focus in on one character in depth. This can be a lot of fun, of course, but leads to attachment problems in a campaign like Masks. Starting out with a team and fully understanding that members might be incapacitated or killed puts people in the right frame of mind. Another advantage of this sort of thing is that you can run the different sections of Masks all at once in game time. The villains do not have much time to coordinate or react because it is happening on all fronts. The Raid on Innsmouth campaign is an excellent example of this sort of thing in action.

You boys goin to that then there necronomicon this year?

Erik Gordon

I once ran a game (stole the idea from somewhere on Reddit years ago) that was D&amp;D conceptually but everybody was a rich aristocratic-adventurer type (lots of love for it, minimal experience) who's sole role was to delve into dungeons looking not for gold, but for decorations to put in their home so they could stand above the rest by having trend, otherworldly sometimes, art. So the gameplay loops were largely the same "Go to dungeon, kill things, get treasure" but the motivation was completely different, as were the tropes that normally surround characters (no more sullen rangers, charming bards, dumb/violent barbarians who all secretly want to be Minsc). It didn't run long enough to really come up, but my idea for death was that you could simply slot yet another rich guy in who wants to do the same thing and now there is another seat at the table, much like in any given poker-scene in a Western.

As somebody who is running Masks of Nyarlathotep for my friends (all of whom are either brand new, or nearly brand new to Call of Cthulhu) this was a pretty great episode to listen to. Masks, as noted, has a notorious kill-count, but I've never really been fond out that for my style for the reasons mentioned. How engaged will my players get with the broader globe-trotting story after the tenth thie we have to ham-handedly sneak in a new character when one of theirs dies? I did the same thing in Curse of Strahd, which most of this group finished running before we started in with Masks. Everybody survived, because in the end most stuff was trimmed down to be about the story (less combat more narrative). In both cases, if somebody 'would' die, I try to take something away from them instead. Like okay, bad call man, so now you have curse, are half-insane, lost a companion, whatever. Of course, somehow, that makes me feel like I'm playing it "wrong", which I know doesn't really matter (there is no RPG police) but I'm sure if I shared this story at an RPG convention or something I'd look like the care bears version of a GM. Last note, I really love the emergent storytelling of these kinds of games. I change up quite a lot with the NPC characters, and some of the larger themes, and then really lean in to the elements that my players pick up on. Leaving out details for spoilers (though if you are actively playing, or about to, you may want to stop reading just in case), but as an example, one common issue in Masks is how big of a threat the mythos and cultists really are after you start to lock down their plan. If you keep the stakes high then it sort of seems like you are accomplishing nothing, but if you limit them, along with having investigators gather tons of evidence, it sort of seems like at some point you can just turn it over to the military. I got around this by having the remaining big-name villains alter their plans as things progress. So, for example, now instead of worrying about yet another summoning-zone under the desert, H has repurposed the ancient-tech to create a machine that will let him rip-open space/time so he can skip past this whole "serving an eldritch god" thing and just be the eldritch god himself. Maybe it's not a good plan 'for him', but then he's insane, and it sucks for humanity either way. Similarly, a throwaway character who is almost there as a cameo, and a minor-villain from an early section of the game, have risen to be campaign-climax level villains because my players really latched onto them as 'hating' them, and I wasn't about to just spend that hate having them get iced, or walk off screen saying "Hi there, hope you enjoyed this Shadows of Yog Sothoth reference!" That's that emergent story that I really like. Thus ends a post so long there is no way anybody will read it. ...Or is it...?

A COMPANION ROLE-PLAYING GAME FOR THE SHOW?!!? Sign me up now, this is a great idea. The times you guys have pointed out the common threads have been so influential in my approach to Call of Cthulhu, D&amp;D, WFRP, etc. games. Will absolutely support your KS whenever you're ready