Still, we as a game masters sometimes spend a lot of time preparing NPCs, stories and combat encounters. For us sometimes the top goal is to see our stories come to life but players will still want to have fun.
How do you balance the fun part and the serious part so the adventure would be completed and to tap into that something extra, beyond just having fun? Is it a good story all you need? Or do you have your own approach to it? Do you ban drinking or telling jokes?
I doubt that any attempt to ban drinking or jokes would work very well with my group. I'm not currently GMing and my current group is fairly avowed to casual play (too many grown men with real life making participation haphazard.) I presume we're mostly addressing D&D and its traditional rpg kin/descendants. It used to be that I would suggest all sorts of changes to the XP system (that's where D&D does its rewarding and I don't care what
anybody says about in-character rewards like titles and the like.)
Also, as I've gotten older, I have begun to question the wisdom of D&D (or any traditional rpg) being a good medium for "serious" storytelling. On the other hand, D&D has the strange property of slowly but surely getting the players more entangled with big plots as their characters develop over time. But it
is slow. Campaign starts in D&D are historically noted for their awkwardness as it needs to be established exactly how and why these often wildly-diverse characters would even know each other, let alone be working towards a common goal. Some new games have mechanisms for providing some of that up-front, but they are not universally loved.
However.
In a broader sense, I think much depends on your motivation for having an involved story be a big part of your game. So I'll go through some possible motivations and how I think they relate to the game.
1) You like coming up with interesting and complicated stories and want to share them with your friends.
You're doing it wrong. Honestly, nowadays a blog or something where you could just write the stories would be much less frustrating. IME, being a good/great GM is about setting up compelling challenges for the players and letting
them finish the story. That's a lot more limiting to story authorship than it at first sounds. Alternatively, if you don't want to be an author (a whole new workload), there are cooperative storytelling games that let you crank out stories much faster than traditional rpgs. (Of course, you need to find a few like-minded people to play with, in that case.)
2) After putting all that work into developing compelling challenges for the players, you hate to see them disposed of so quickly.
Ah, the workload of the GM. The solution here is to attack the problem directly. There's other threads for reducing that workload, some of the advice is very good. Of course, the effectiveness varies from edition to edition. My best advice here is to use, develop, or purchase tools to help make prep faster/easier. I have, for example, run a dungeon that was nothing but a stack of geomorphs, a stack of random encounters, and one big "finale" encounter to be pulled out an hour before the session ends. Making up a new finale each week is not that big of a deal. However, that conflicts with....
3) You want to give your game more gravitas and make it "serious" with recurring villains and themes.
This one is a controversial one, because I think system really matters in this regard. D&D often sounds like it wants to make recurring villains and long arcs possible, but the game at a very fundamental level is about turning adversaries into looted corpses. It will fight you at every turn. Many other traditional rpgs follow suit. There's also the problem that serious stories grind up against traditionally "sim" mechanics which don't yield just because its the "climax". I think the solution here is to adopt some mechanics (if not the system) from some of the indie/new-school games to bend the game in the direction you want. Which ones and how they would affect the game...well that's probably worth a whole thread on its own. It will also almost certainly involve "metagame" mechanics, to which some people object. But! Don't be afraid to experiment! There's really nothing that weds a particular campaign to a specific mechanic. If you start of using FATE-like aspects, but they aren't working really well, replace them with something from another game.
However, even within the confines of traditional rpgs, there are things you can do to add a little gravitas. These techniques
do sometimes limit your options plotwise. You might need to do some houseruling to pull them off, as some (particularly divination) effects can basically be read as "dodge plot". You could:
- Get out of the traditional dungeon entirely.
- Limit exposition so that the characters need to be cautious about killing everything at first sight; "Save one for questioning!", "Wait, you don't know where we have to take this ring to destroy it?" Don't have a Gandalf to explain everything. Trickle out the clues that something bigger is afoot.
- Lower the monster/person distance. That is, if orcs are citizens, you've just committed murder. (More severely, limit or eliminate near-human always-evil monsters...see The Black Company books. They're darker because their aren't any non-human baddies.)
- Eliminate "pure evil" or "team evil" and inherent alignments entirely. Drama happens in the gray areas.
- It may seem counter-intuitive, but don't have a great big over-arching plot. Things like "We have to get the Ring to Mordor to destroy it and save the world" create a sort of plot-immunity that is surprisingly antithetical to players actually getting involved. Instead, rely on wisdom like "University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small."
- Make death real. Eliminating Raise Dead and Resurrection from the spell list has a profound impact on the game.
- In the same vein, have the bad guys offer surrender more easily, work towards avoiding the "its them or us" combat of D&D. (FATE has the Concession wherein the GM can offer to end a conflict scene with certain narrative results: "We can end this and say all the orcs are dead, but you had to use that scroll." "Let's say you escape the Imperial pursuers, but you're trapped in an asteroid belt with your Hyperdrive Malfunctioning." The players can, of course, negotiate. Note that its the GM, not the baddies, who do the negotiating for a mechanics-level concession.)
- Choose a game or houserules to eliminate the "PCs are special/heroes" vibe. That is, make the guardsmen a significant thing. (Heck, make the PCs guardsmen a la Discworld.)
- Houserule traditional XP away. Make all advancement dependent on goal-achievement or plot participation. I once met a 3e DM who made leveling up all dependent on availability of training opportunities. So when the PCs were in a wilderness area, they could level up in Ranger or Druid, etc. I don't see why that couldn't be adapted to encourage story.
- Include jerk NPCs who are (strictly speaking) not of "evil" races (or whatever) but whom are direct competitors with the PCs for fame and fortune. For that matter, any sort of "moral quandry" you can throw at the PCs will help. I once had a party go through a dungeon finding nothing but looted fresh corpses and lousy treasure only to encounter another party of stalwart adventurers exiting the dragon's chamber carting buckets of loot. Hilarity ensued, as well as jealousy-fueled plot for months. My current DM did a similar thing in a previous campaign.
- Illusion/Deception focused NPCs, especially those not interested in confronting the PCs at all, can make for long-hated rivalries.
Basically, anything to remove that "special exemption" from the rules of behavior that PCs seem to have. Anything that causes or provokes a conflict with their image of themselves as the Big Damn Heroes will work to drive plot entanglements. Of course, some players might balk at that kind of thing. Its also something of a social risk, you've got to kinda pick on the things that draw some people to the table. So don't push too hard. Lay some of these things out (either explicitly or slyly in play), and see what the players "bite" on. At the very least, they often make for more memorable games.
I hope that helps.
