Tell Your Own D*mn Stories - Futurismic Blog and Adventure Design

[Hussar]

An interesting blog post from Futurismic on the use of plot and video games.

Later on, he relates it to tabletop games as well:

The human urge to weave events into a narrative shape is something that has always underpinned the table-top roleplaying hobby. From the earliest days of Dungeons and Dragons, RPGs were little more than combat systems allowing your character to navigate his or her way through a series of tactical challenges. However, even though early D&D published adventures were frequently little more than floor-plans and combat stats, great human stories would emerge organically from play: perhaps two players would fall into a degree of rivalry and this rivalry would result in their characters betraying each other; perhaps a player might have his character snap at someone in the local tavern, resulting in the character being stabbed and the entire session drifting off into an extended side-bar in which the characters wage war on the local community [You evidently played D&D with far more interesting people than I did, J. - Ed.].

Indeed, this tendency of tabletop RPG sessions to spiral off away from the story the GM had planned to tell is what provides many RPG-related comics – such as Jolly Blackburn’s Knights of the Dinner Table, John Kovalic’s Dork Tower and Mehdi Sammi’s Les Irrecuperables – with their principle thematic drives.

It's an interesting point. I'm not sure I 100% agree to be honest. That if we create adventures that lack plotting, the players will automatically fill in the gaps. IME, that does sometimes happen, but, more frequently what happened back in the day was the game devolved down to nothing more than tactical combat encounters - without any guidance from the DM or the adventure, the players slipped into pure hack and slash.

Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, but a pure diet of raw carnage tends to be a bit stale after a while. I, for one, would like more.

OTOH, I do agree that you can go way too far. The whole "railroading" meme stems from DM's and adventures that go too far and start dictating plot to the players to the point where the players feel too restricted and too detached from the game.

There's a fine line in there somewhere, IMO, between Pac-Man and Final Fantasy.

 

[Beginning of the End]

I think GMs have killed more interesting stories than they've ever created by imposing their pre-determined predilections.

Sometimes those predilections are "let's get to the next tactical challenge ASAP" and sometimes those predilections are "let's make sure the players do what I planned for them to do". But the end result is the same: Dozens of potentially great stories killed at the moment of their birth.

 

[IronWolf]

I think players are great at filling in gaps as a game unfolds. The question is more of how does the GM handle this? Do they catch these things the players fill in or do they charge onwards to get to the next point the GM has in mind? Or if something is mentioned by a player during a session, how frequently and how willing is the GM to expand on that later or between sessions to play off some of these ideas the players fill in.

I know in the current campaign I have a mindmap going of all the little things the player's might have mentioned and ends up as a loose end that can come back around later in the campaign. It can be tough keeping track of all of them and working them in though.

 

[Hussar]

I think GMs have killed more interesting stories than they've ever created by imposing their pre-determined predilections.

Sometimes those predilections are "let's get to the next tactical challenge ASAP" and sometimes those predilections are "let's make sure the players do what I planned for them to do". But the end result is the same: Dozens of potentially great stories killed at the moment of their birth.

There is the flipside to this however. The game that goes nowhere. You play the campaign for six months, take stock and realize that in the last six months, despite playing regularly every week, nothing has really happened. At least, nothing that seems to have any real importance. You fought some stuff, gained some loot, went up a level or two, but, other than grinding xp, to borrow a computer game term, nothing's happened in the campaign.

Why?

Because the GM has no idea what direction the game should go. He's plopped the game down and either expects the players to drive, or, even worse, thinks that wandering aimlessly while he shows off his spiffy homebrew world is the height of gaming.

I've seen both ends of the stick pretty much equally. The aimless, pointless game that sputters to an eventual, sad, pitiful end. And the lockstep railroad that the Gm is trying to force on the players.

IMO, there is a place for both a happy medium.

Games like Pac-Man, were tons of fun, but, y'know what? After a few hours of endlessly repeating the same thing over and over again, I'd never play it again. Tetris is great for a ten minute time waster, but, it's never memorable. In order to have impact on the players, you need at least a little bit of a plot. Something for the players to buy into.

 

[Thasmodious]

I don't know, I pretty much agree with the author. The issue, for me, is player buy in. I don't know what will truly pique their interest, but I know the game is better when something does, so I prefer a lot less plotting and lot more fluidity in my games. Throw some things at them, let them go looking for trouble, keep the world populated with things, have a timeline for significant events and see where it all takes us, driven by the PCs.

 

[Mark Chance]

There is the flipside to this however. The game that goes nowhere. You play the campaign for six months, take stock and realize that in the last six months, despite playing regularly every week, nothing has really happened. At least, nothing that seems to have any real importance. You fought some stuff, gained some loot, went up a level or two, but, other than grinding xp, to borrow a computer game term, nothing's happened in the campaign.

Why?

Counter questions: So? Why does something really have to happen? If everyone had fun fighting some stuff, gaining some loot, and going up a level or two, why isn't that good enough?

 

[Beginning of the End]

There is the flipside to this however. The game that goes nowhere. You play the campaign for six months, take stock and realize that in the last six months, despite playing regularly every week, nothing has really happened. At least, nothing that seems to have any real importance. You fought some stuff, gained some loot, went up a level or two, but, other than grinding xp, to borrow a computer game term, nothing's happened in the campaign.

(1) IME, my players are not mentally deficient. When I put them in a permissive environment that let's them do whatever they want, they will generally do things that they enjoy doing. All I have to do is respond to that.

The only times I've run into problems with this approach is when I'm inheriting a player that's been conditioned by bad DMing into spending all of their time trying to figure out what the DM wants them to do: Since I didn't actually have any preference about what they should do, their attempts to glean a null data set from non-existent clues was essentially feeding on random static. But after a couple of bad experiences, I've discovered that just sitting these poor, broken players down and explaining how things work in my campaign generally fixes the problem.

(2) IME, "interesting" things or events of "real importance" don't actually require plotting. In fact, quite the opposite. Plotting is a less efficient and more difficult method of achieving those goals.

 

[Hussar]

Counter questions: So? Why does something really have to happen? If everyone had fun fighting some stuff, gaining some loot, and going up a level or two, why isn't that good enough?

As much as I love beer and pretzel gaming, it does get a bit stale after the years.

Beginning of the End - IME, what happens when you give a very permissive environment is you get a group that never gels together and you wind up having five or six concurrent campaigns going on with everyone trying to do their own thing.

OTOH, I have had it work well too.

I honestly think that a bit of DM guidance is a good thing. Not heavy handed, but, at least a general guiding hand that has a nice high altitude view of what's going on and can mold the action in more coherent ways.

The danger, of course, is going to far.