Compelling Storytelling

Celebrim said:

I would say that some of the hardest parts of achieving this in an RPG is that the players have to be skillful as well. They are responsible for so much of that stuff, and if their input is missing or inept or unworthy, it doesn't matter what you do with the villains, setting, and chorus of the story. In fact, the meta-story of the RPG, whether we are talking about Knights of the Dinner Table, or The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising, it's this conflict between the DM's desire to tell a great literary story and the player's ineptness or lack of interest in that as a goal or even perception that the DM's goal is orthogonal to their own is often the driver of conflict in the story.

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I agree on the weight of a/the player's impact. I won't necessarily consider "skillful" to be a nessecity, but I know what you mean. Being a good enough roleplayer to be able to invest (maybe even emotionally) in your character and his/her environment and fellow PCs. It usually suffices to have that "latent talent" hidden within a player if he/she somehow ends up in a story he/she particularly likes.

For an example, I've had that one player some years ago who was utterly prone to doing seemingly nonsensical actions, changed characters like clothes and didn't seem to really care about his surroundings (PCs were okay, but he was reeeeally testing his limits when it came to his DM-PC interaction). Then one day I tried DMing for the first time and said player was suddenly playing one of the deepest and most thought-out PCs who even fell in love with an NPC (who turned out to be a goddess without powers who was suffering from amnesia) and went to the end of the world to help her. I was more than pleasatly ssurprised to see our previous chaos-monger so utterly focused and invested in the campaign.

Celebrim said:

I would say that some of the hardest parts of achieving this in an RPG is that the players have to be skillful as well. They are responsible for so much of that stuff, and if their input is missing or inept or unworthy, it doesn't matter what you do with the villains, setting, and chorus of the story. In fact, the meta-story of the RPG, whether we are talking about Knights of the Dinner Table, or The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising, it's this conflict between the DM's desire to tell a great literary story and the player's ineptness or lack of interest in that as a goal or even perception that the DM's goal is orthogonal to their own is often the driver of conflict in the story.

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This!

I think there was ... is a small problem with certain player types. They show up and expect the DM to have done everything! Which if that works for you and your group, awesome. But I, as a DM, am constantly trying to get feed back from players. What's your goal in life? What do you do when you're not adventuring? What's your favorite color?! Any little bit of information you can give me is something that I can try and weave into the campaign. To take a series of encounters and try to make them more meaningful.

As a DM or Player which would you rather have:

A) "As the king, I do hereby giveth thee a quest to go out into yonder wood and slay the brigands that live there."

or

B) You hear reports of banditry in the area and the local constabulary is unable to locate the thieves. The town guard has put out a call for help and is offering a reward for anyone that can eliminate this menace. You learn that the bandits always leave a strange mark on their dead victims. After patrolling the roads you come across an unfortunate carriage. The footman and guards are dead, each marked with this strange symbol. A symbol that looks very familiar to the ranger. In fact, you're pretty sure that it's the same symbol that the men that stole your sister were wearing on their tunics....

When I am a player, I often worry that I'm annoying or bugging the DM. I frequently talk to them about what's happening in the campaign, how my character reacts and what I see him doing in the future. And it's not that I want to be the center of attention, in fact I can be shy at times, but I know that as a DM I crave that feedback so much.

EDIT:
[MENTION=6816692]Lylandra[/MENTION] do you know what changed between campaigns? Was it a difference in styles? Did someone smack him upside the head? I was in a campaign recently where we had a chaos monger similar to yours. Every time the DM tried to meet that player half way he rejected whatever storyline she proposed. "Hey, this looks like it might have some info on your missing brother." "Nah, that's okay. I go drinking and gambling instead."

Grogg of the North said:

When I am a player, I often worry that I'm annoying or bugging the DM. I frequently talk to them about what's happening in the campaign, how my character reacts and what I see him doing in the future. And it's not that I want to be the center of attention, in fact I can be shy at times, but I know that as a DM I crave that feedback so much.

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Grogg, I can definitely see myself in your description. I want to make sure that my DM has all the necessary information about my character's interior (thoughts, motives, emotions, plans, attitude towards NPCs/PCs) so he can plan ahead and won't be surprised by my character's reactions. I'm regularly mailing him feedback about my character and the campaign because I know that he doesn't always get what she's about by just being played at the table. And yes, I also do worry that I'm annoying or overloading him, but I know that this would be the kind of info that I'd need as a DM.

EDIT:
[MENTION=6816692]Lylandra[/MENTION] do you know what changed between campaigns? Was it a difference in styles? Did someone smack him upside the head? I was in a campaign recently where we had a chaos monger similar to yours. Every time the DM tried to meet that player half way he rejected whatever storyline she proposed. "Hey, this looks like it might have some info on your missing brother." "Nah, that's okay. I go drinking and gambling instead."

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In my case I guess it was a matter of respect, or rather the lack of respect towards our previous DM who had been a bit lazy and unprepared back then and had a tendency to let "misbehaviour" have little consequences. He changed that much later, but I guess it was too late. When I started with my campaign, he had no idea of what to expect. I asked everyone about their character's background and asked them to be all from roughly the same rural area. After a small, generic goblin chase, I did some weird dimensional travel alternate reality stuff with them (I *was* really unexperienced and wanted to toy with a "world of ruin" concept where the players had to figure out what went wrong and basically save two worlds on the long term despite being only "regular town folk").

So, I don't know whether my "chaos player" and yours are really comparable. But putting the character through some hardships and forcing him to take a stance certainly helped.

I am mostly interested in the experience of deeply personal fiction. When I am a player if you place me in a situation where the imperative is to hunt for a GM's pre-planned story or I am constantly forced into situations where I am a fish out of water with no real relationships, contacts, or resources I tend to lose interest in the game very rapidly. However if I am given the agency to pursue personal goals or shared group goals and can make meaningful decisions that impact the fiction I become deeply interested in the events of play. Traditional sandbox play, dungeon crawling, or Apocalypse World style gaming all get my engines revving. Adventure Paths, mysteries, and investigations tend to put me to sleep. I want to have a say in what we are doing. These are also the sorts of games I most enjoy running.

Given the interactive medium I think focusing play on the decisions players make for their characters and its impact on their relationships, outlook, and standing within the fiction make for the most compelling narratives. I know some people show up to be fed a story, but I am not one of those types. I also have very little interest in carrying the game on my back as a GM.

So, what I'm getting is, in an interactive story, such as tabletop RPGs, relationships are important, but stakes are equally as important. A player must have a stake in the story.

RobShanti said:

So, what I'm getting is, in an interactive story, such as tabletop RPGs, relationships are important, but stakes are equally as important. A player must have a stake in the story.

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I really like what [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] said about "skillful players" – that's very insightful because it has to do with a shift in thinking away from expecting the DM to be the primary entertainer / decision-maker to thinking about play as collaborative.

We've all seen the classic party of orphaned heroes who wander for no particular reason.

That's the perfect example of an unskillful player who hasn't exerted their imagination to create meaningful relationships between their character and other characters, and hasn't created a reason why they care about the campaign or adventure at hand.

It's astoundingly common. I see new players do it and I see old players do it. I see men do it and I see women do it. I see young players do it and older players do it.

I used to think it was a reaction of players to killer DMs taking out their PCs' families or something, but now I think it has much more to do with group psychology.

Grogg of the North said:

This is one of those questions that seems so easy but is incredibly deceptive. If I knew the magic formula for an awesome story/campaign I'd be writing them for a living and then going to bed on a giant pile of money. Like a dragon.
. . .
So, in a round about way, I would have to say that for a good story not only do you need relationships between characters and NPCs but your character needs depth. They need to accomplish something personal.

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Touche. First, the magic formula, Grogg 'o' North, is in probably 50% of books on writing fiction. It's super-formulaic, which is why every Hollywood movie (blockbusters, anyway) feels like the exact same movie. Making money off it means having connections...

...like the relationships that characters need. However, to diverge from the relationships train, I'd like to suggest that viewers/players get immersed in the story when they personally identify with the main character. This takes an interesting turn in a TRPG, when they ARE the main character. So if a player is playing someone else, he needs to be in touch with his backstory. If a player is playing herself, then the story needs to contain elements that interest her personally.

Campbell said:

I am mostly interested in the experience of deeply personal fiction. When I am a player if you place me in a situation where the imperative is to hunt for a GM's pre-planned story or I am constantly forced into situations where I am a fish out of water with no real relationships, contacts, or resources I tend to lose interest in the game very rapidly. However if I am given the agency to pursue personal goals or shared group goals and can make meaningful decisions that impact the fiction I become deeply interested in the events of play. Traditional sandbox play, dungeon crawling, or Apocalypse World style gaming all get my engines revving. Adventure Paths, mysteries, and investigations tend to put me to sleep. I want to have a say in what we are doing. These are also the sorts of games I most enjoy running.

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I generally feel the same, but my genres of interest differ a lot. I have roghly the same points which make me lose interest in a campaign. Playing a character that feels nonconnected or interchangeable, having your decisions have no or only little impact on the world/story or your "feeling like a fish out of water" - playing a character who doesn't really fit into a given setting without being told by the GM during character creation. I also lose interest when I cannot connect to my own character, but in this case, changing characters can help.

However, I tend to feel disconnected and "lost" in heavy sandboxes. When everything the story is about has to be created by the player without too much of an underlying, "bigger" story or threat, I feel overwhelmed and the setting starts feeling "muddy". Also, pre-existing player knowledge about a setting is way more important in sandboxes. If you don't know what could be interesting, you won't really contribute to the story (not that I don't inhale every bit of information, but I know players who don't want to read pages of encyclopedias before session 0). Dungeons also feel way too limited for my personal style as they *tend* to be all "us vs them" in a violent style. There can be great player interaction in dungeons, but the environment's responses are lacking in breadth.

I do love adventure pathes when they are well written and not designed to be simple railroads which cannot be changed or impacted by the character's decisions of backgrounds. Because I then know that I'll have that "big, underlying storyline" which is not depending on the GMs ability to keep track of everything and planning ahead multiple of sessions. Because some of the better ones are planned in advance from beginning to end, you can find heavy foreshadowing, recurring characters and consistent NPC characterization which are good points for keeping me interested. And a good GM will know how to let your characters and their decisions have impact on the world. Modern APs try to offer multiple ways to get from A to B, including switching sides in the middle of the AP or killing that annoying NPC who was supposed to recur much later, so the railroady-ness has certainly decreased.
Mysteries and investigations can be great if they don't lose themselves in minute details where you have to play for multiple hours just to ge a small clue AND if the mystery itself is meaningful. And what I really like is bold, epic action, both noncombat and combat wise. But that's just me

Quickleaf said:

I really like what [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] said about "skillful players" – that's very insightful because it has to do with a shift in thinking away from expecting the DM to be the primary entertainer / decision-maker to thinking about play as collaborative.

We've all seen the classic party of orphaned heroes who wander for no particular reason.

That's the perfect example of an unskillful player who hasn't exerted their imagination to create meaningful relationships between their character and other characters, and hasn't created a reason why they care about the campaign or adventure at hand.

It's astoundingly common. I see new players do it and I see old players do it. I see men do it and I see women do it. I see young players do it and older players do it.

I used to think it was a reaction of players to killer DMs taking out their PCs' families or something, but now I think it has much more to do with group psychology.

Click to expand...

Playing a "wandering orphan" is just the easiest, most lazy way to have a reason for adventuring. Same as "I just want to make money". For me this is a sign of having a lack of personal investment into the campaign. The other "unskillful" (if you want to use that term) player one sees regularly is the one who constantly tries to put *his* newest, flashy idea into a campaign and doesn't really care about whether or not that character would actually fit in or makes sense. Like... playing a stereotypical Menzoberranzan drow who has suffered from the "evil matriarchy" in Eberron. Or wanting to play a psion who's been persecuted by the officials in a world where psionics simply don't exist.