Storytelling Basics in an Actual Play World

 

Blame Rowan Zeoli, but all this talk of “intention” and “back work” has me thinking a lot about the way the “games as content” model that occupies much of the actual play scene requires a different approach to storytelling. While the “games as pedagogy” model prevalent among reviewers and how-to guides relies on mechanics and meta-discussion, “games as content” rely on character and story. As our medium professionalizes and creators expand their skills and ambitions, it’s worthwhile to take a step back and examine what “character” and “story” mean for our body of work.

We’ll dive into some thoughts a few from paragraphs now, but not before some important caveats.

First, this advice applies to a particular actual play style. Queen’s Court Games aims to produce character-first, narrative-driven stories in a variety of systems and genres. We’re quick to throw the rules aside when the story is at stake and do our best to keep the dice away from the drama. Tables where the crunch is the point or mechanics take center stage may find much of what follows anathema to their cause.

Second, this advice applies to a particular actual play schedule. To quote a friend, “Aaron is system-polyamorous and a bit of a slut.” That means heaps of one-shots and mini-campaigns. Generating that kind of content relies upon a different set of skills and priorities than producing a long-running series. Certain thoughts will apply equally to both versions of actual play, but others will be entirely useless for folks on Episode 97 of their sprawling Pathfinder adventure.

Third, this advice is imperfect. None of us are unimpeachable god-arbiters of role-playing or anointed justiciars of story craft. These tenets have worked well for me when developing actual-play content; you may be traveling a very different but equally valid road to excellence. Also, anyone who regularly consumes our content will recognize plenty of occasions where I fail to follow my own advice. Certainty is the enemy of progress. Among other things, creative growth requires introspection.

Also, strangely, spoiler warnings for Toy Story, Curse of Strahd, and Final Destination.

STORYTELLING 101
Regardless of system, the typical campaign pitch begins with “You’re a group of X from Y, on a quest to Z.” From there, it’s off to the races with character sheets and questions about which splat books and homebrew are allowed. A few weeks later, scheduling permitting, you’re off to kill (or date) the Big Bad. The campaign takes the form of a carnival funhouse ride: players take their seats, progress through a series of encounters, and exit (several months later) amused but otherwise unchanged.

For most tables, that’s enough. The game experience can be carried by the triumph of a lucky critical or the agony of an ill-timed fumble. Players swoon as their character sheets fill with magical items and new abilities. At some point, someone orders pizza. Actual play can invite the audience to enjoy some part of those thrills, but we recognize intuitively that it must do more. None of us are advertising our channels with taglines like, “Our characters level up!” or “Watch us find magical swords!” or “Sometimes, we roll really well!”

More likely, your marketing involves some variation of “watch us tell a story.” And if that’s the language we’re going to use, we should start by defining the key elements of “a story,” and working to incorporate those elements into every campaign and scenario. So, what are they? Google will tell you there are as many answers to this question as there are people trying to sell Introduction to Screenwriting workshops. In my own work, I like to keep the list short and in a specific order: theme, setting, conflict, character, and plot.

With this vocabulary in hand, we can re-write the initial campaign pitch: “You are a group of characters from setting, on a plot,” and just like that we’ve uncovered a problem. Role-playing games have trained us to focus on people, places, and events without regard for any deeper narrative meaning – theme – and actively discourage players from interrogating that meaning through differing viewpoints – conflict. That makes for bad storytelling. And in a world where we’re branding ourselves as storytellers, it also makes for bad actual play.

IT CAME TO ME IN A THEME ONE NIGHT
Take a moment to think about your favorite system. What are its themes? Note, this is distinct from what the game is “about.” Delta Green is about a conspiracy of federal agents defending humanity by hurling themselves at the unknown, but its themes are uncertainty, morality, and knowledge vs. ignorance. Vaesen is about investigating and resolving conflicts with folkloric creatures in Mythic Scandinavia, but its themes are industrialization and tradition vs. modernity.

Now do the same thing, but about your current campaign. What are its themes? The All Night Society is about six Kindred neonates conscripted into Prince Jackson’s war for the future and soul of Chicago, but its themes are ambition, loyalty, and change vs. tradition. Downfall is about four strangers following the mystery of a missing student into a labyrinth of sexual excess, but its themes are passion, the pursuit of divinity, and the line between safe kink and dangerous obsession.

Without clear themes, actual play has nothing to explore beyond the next room of the dungeon, and characters have nothing to talk about save for what was in the room. There’s nothing wrong with that. Some of the most popular examples of games-as-content can be described this way, and the market has clearly declared they have value. But for shows not involving people who are already famous or produced in-house by a major publisher? We have to work a little harder. The "games-as-content" audience wants characters they can wrap their hearts around, and stories they can spin into fan-fiction.

Plot is born when characters are in conflict – so what are the characters conflicted about? What fundamental beliefs explain their differences in opinion? The road toward narrative is paved with easy shortcuts – your character has bones, the lich wants those bones for its undead army – but surely there’s more to the story than a debate over osteo-autonomy?

Decide what that “more” is. Let it fill up your game. And because actual play is collaborative, discuss it in advance with your players so they can help. Before anyone, anywhere says word one about which fantasy continent the story unfolds on, which Big Bad is threatening that continent, or which class their would-be hero has trained in, zero in on the universal human quandaries that will form the beating heart of your game.

OKAY GEEZ I PICKED A THEME, NOW WHERE DO I PUT IT?
We start with theme because it informs setting. In role-playing games, setting is primarily a function of system. Cyberpunk lives and dies in Night City, Blue Planet stalks the mysterious depths of Poseidon 2199, and The One Ring is tied inexorably to J.R.R. Tolkien’s backyard. None of these worlds are monoliths, but each generally lends itself to a particular kind of story. Placing your story in the correct setting is the first step in tuning the audience’s sense of immersion, as your choice of time, place, and social environment guides the viewer towards the story’s themes before you’ve written a single word about the characters or plot.

You could run a zany dating simulator in the decrepit and ghost-infested mansions of Call of Cthulhu or launch your transhumanist science fiction adventure from a grimy Duskvol tavern in Blades in the Dark, but you’ll very quickly run into thematic and mechanical dissonance. If that’s the point, excellent! The juxtaposition of two misaligned things sets you up for a superb spoof or comedy. But if the intent is to generate something serious, you’re better off picking the right tool for the job. There’s a reason most d20 hacks feel awful to play, and why many of us roll our eyes every time someone tries to force a genre into Dungeons and Dragons.

The choice of setting is also important for characters. Whoever your players bring to the table, their personalities and backstories will be informed by the historical period, geographical location, cultural context, and physical environment they’ve been stewing in. Their motivations are only believable insofar as they align with the expectations you've established with your world, and the audience can tell when that connective tissue is missing or underdeveloped. They might not be able to articulate it in the language of craft, but free-floating characters in an ill-fitting world are the fertile soil from which words like "flat," "inconsistent," and "one-dimensional" grow.

I’M PICKING A FIGHT WITH YOUR WORLD RIGHT NOW
Conflict is the big, beefy engine that sends your story speeding down the highways of your audience's imagination. Without obstacles to overcome, stakes to raise, or tension to resolve, the characters can only plod along in meaningless circles -- the narrative equivalent of a permanent shopping episode. As the characters charge forward, something needs to push back, be it a fierce villain, an unforgiving environment, or their own bruised and battered hearts.

What’s important for our discussion is that conflict must be in conversation with the story's theme and a setting. When conflict is detached from either element, the story becomes muddled or farcical. Moby Dick doesn’t make sense if Ahab’s obsession was with the ceaseless march of technology. Jane Eyre reads slightly different if, instead of Moor House, the titular character was pondering Mr. Rochester at the Battle of Verdun. Likewise, the conflict must be enabled and amplified by the characters. Hamlet is a much shorter play if our Danish prince suffers from a lack of ambition, and the world would be short one legendary monologue if he's simply not prone to existential introspection.

Who or what is your Big Bad, and how do they represent the narrative core of your game? What about this world can explain how they arrived on the path of villainhood? How have their plans been shaped by the world they intend to conquer with an undead army? Strahd von Zarovich is defined by his betrayal and fall from grace, which tangles nicely with the campaign's themes of corruption and decay. Vecna is a dead wizard with artifacts for body parts. Which one has inspired more Tumblr posts?

And why limit the emotional sparring to the evil end boss? Good themes, by their nature, invite a panoply of perspectives. It cannot be the case that your characters approach issues of emotional sophistication as a monolith -- we know they disagree about something, so let us see what it is. Infuse that camping scene with the gentle thrum of discord. What happens when your characters start subtweeting one another? Or the paladin slaps the ranger with the fantasy equivalent of a callout post? It's only a matter of time before tempers flare or walls break down, an event made all the better if it happens in the middle of some other impending crisis.

Thoughtful integration of conflict with setting and themes highlights and amplifies the core message of our storytelling, stacking layers of meaning atop one another to maximize their emotional weight. Or, if nothing else, it stops us from sounding very silly when our main character receives a second marriage proposal amidst the muddy trenches of the Great War.

FINALLY, THE PART WHERE WE TALK ABOUT CHARACTERS
The nature of role-playing games encourages us to think of characters in terms of dice pools, skill ratings, and once-per-session abilities. This is a crucial part of the activity, but characters are more than their ability to seduce the barmaid or cast fireball. Characters are vessels for storytelling, responsible for pushing the narrative and reinforcing its themes with the choices they make and fail to make. Despite this, most character sheets reduce all non-dice-generating details to physical descriptors or personality quirks, or, in the worst examples, the broad category of “backstory.”

This is profoundly unhelpful. What does a character having blonde hair tell us about the obligations of family? How does owning a cat or being born in Seattle help us understand betrayal? When we limit our discussion of a character to surface-level trivia, we cannot be surprised when that character feels trivial. The common instinct is to fill this space instead with a spicy trope -- a lost lover, a traumatic childhood, a dark family secret -- but this is only doing half of your homework.

All the narrative bulk is for nothing if it doesn't explain something about the character, which in turn interacts with the theme, setting, or conflict. By itself, "My character was betrayed by their first true love" is a factoid. It only takes on meaning when placed in conversation with something else. Perhaps you're playing Curse of Strahd and their common suffering makes the character more sympathetic to our fan-favorite fang-haver, leading to a conversation among PCs that explores the game's theme of betrayal. Maybe you're playing Court of Blades, and this early trauma leaves your anti-beau skeptical of love in a setting defined by flashy, overt romance and swooning paramours. Or maybe you're playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians, and as you poise to strike the final blow, the villain is revealed to be your lover who actually survived (gasp! Also, conflict!). The ties can be subtle or grand, stated or subtext, but they need to be something.

 There's more to say on the topic, and I expect it'll take the form of a full-sized essay devoted entirely to the subject of narrative-first character building at a later date. For now, let’s try a simple exercise. Choose a character from an upcoming game or from a favorite piece of media, and try to answer the following questions:

1. What does this character want?
2. Why do they want it?
3. What is standing in their way?
4. What happens if they can’t get it?
5. Why do they want it now?

Consider two examples. First, Woody from Toy Story.

1. Woody wants to retain his status as the Andy’s most popular and most loved toy.
2. He derives the core of his identity from his relationship with Andy.
3. Buzz, a new, sexy spaceman toy with a retractable helmet and laser gauntlets.
4. Woody fears being thrown away, like other “unloved” toys.
5. Andy spends more and more time with Buzz. He needs to regain his place before it’s too late.

Second, Carter from Final Destination.

1. Carter wants to not die and would also like if his friends didn’t die.
2. Being alive is preferable to being dead.
3. Literally, Death.
4. He will die.
5. His friends keep dying.

It's a brutish and unfair comparison, but the example drives a clear point home. Woody has strong internalized beliefs that resonate with the movie’s narrative core and place him in conflict with other characters. The audience can extrapolate from his values, and accurately predict how he might act outside the context of the film. Together, these make both the character and the film more memorable. Carter exists on a single, unsophisticated axis and could trade places with almost any other character in the film. In fact, he is, because you’re probably thinking of Devon Sawa’s character Alex right now. Carter is the jock who is crushed by a neon sign in the film’s closing moments. When your next campaign is over, how would you prefer your character be remembered? Which level of storytelling would you prefer your game be compared to?

UNTIL ROWAN SAYS A NEW INSIGHTFUL THING, BYE FOR NOW
I understand this is the part where "plot" should appear, but plot emerges easily enough when theme, setting, conflict, character are well in hand. Generating dramatic events has never been an area where our community lacks for enthusiasm or ability. To the extent "plot" includes things like story structure or pacing, those thoughts are best served by their own discussion. Thus we arrive at the end.

None of the information presented here is especially revelatory -- as I stated in the beginning, any introductory writing text will tell you all of this and more. It is precisely because the concepts are so simple that I feel the need to call attention to them. The creator's quest for audience and accolades can introduce all manner of flashy complications to a production. Bigger costumes! Bigger art! Bigger editing! Bigger names! All of these things are valuable and do contribute to success, but consider: before we get carried away making our stories prettier, let's first ensure we're making them on purpose.

Thanks as always for reading. I'm looking forward to your thoughts.