How Do You Create Story?

[WayneLigon]

I try to create a campaign that interests both myself and the players.

I have a general outline that includes:

1. The major themes I want to work with. These are things like 'type of campaign' (are they treasure hunters, are they oppossing an organization or person, are they mercenaries, are they in service to a religion -- things like that), and the emotional themes I want (these follow naturally off the campaign type - a campaign where all the PC's are in service to a religion, for instance, would have more alignment-based plot points than, say, a mercenaries game).

2. The backgrounds of the characters. Everyone gets a basic campaign guide to start with that details the world and also the 'campaign type'; it tells them what does and does not normally 'fit' in the world, though they can certainly make a case for something they really want. I then look at these backgrounds and lift the salient points for later involvement. Character B served in the militia? At some point that will become important. Either an adventure will require that they know something about the militia, or they meet someone he used to serve with and thus that person can provide them with some information or some service.

There are often directed adventures in the beginning: a trader asks you to safeguard a package, or a local noble announces that there is a reward for every bandit head brought to him, or someone steals your sisters necklace and he was last seen heading towards those old ruins your parents told you not to bother.

From these, I get an idea of how the PC's interact with each other and the world. I find out what they want and then think of ways that those wants can be used to create plots. As time goes on, the campaign flow becomes more and more 'organic' I suppose you would say. If you were to drop in to see a session seven or ten weeks down the road, we'd have to stop and give you the backstory of how and why these people are in this situation and this place. By that time, everything should be flowing naturally from what went before it. They willl have made friends and enemies by this point, and those people continue to touch on the PC's lives in a natural fashion.

I sometimes say that I don't run D&D, I run a midieval soap opera. Everything should run like a soap opera: things that you did before come back to you sometime down the road. The PC's go places and do things because of what they want or what they need to achieve. I'm just making sure everything turns out fun fo everyone, that pacing stays brisk when it needs to be brisk and slows when it needs to slow, provide world details and play NPC's, set challenges to be overcome or not, and in general be a stage manager for the stars: the PC's.

 

[Rel]

Thanks Rel, this helps me to understand why I tend to prefer gaming with people who have no special love of most fantasy literature but have that love of Tolkien that I identify with.

I feel compelled to point out that, as has often been mentioned on these very forums, what makes for a good novel (including, perhaps especially, LotR) and what makes for a good game are not the same thing at all. Novels are going to vary widely and there will be exceptions to any examples I draw from them. But I feel that I can make a fairly solid generalization about gaming that the PC's are expected to gain powers and possessions through the course of the campaign. The time honored manner in which this is accomplished is to Kill Things (yielding XP and therefore new and more expansive powers) and Take Their Stuff (yielding wealth and magic items).

Let's posit a 1st level party and make no assumptions about their alignments or morality. They arrive in town and hear of two possible ideas of what their PC's might engage in as a first adventure. The first is that little Jenny has fallen down a well and is trapped. The other is that there are Goblins inhabiting the old siver mines.

Now from a purely mechanical standpoint, this is a no brainer. You go Kill the Goblins (getting XP in the process) and Take Their Stuff (getting material wealth). Helping little Jenny gives no XP (in the traditional model that rewards taking big risks and offing monsters) and she's unlikely to have much in the way of phat loot.

Now of course characters with any real sense of morality at all are going to go help the little girl out of the well before they go off and slay Goblins. But that's the difference I'm trying to underscore. It's not necessarily that one mindset is more modern than the other. It's that one is more heroic than the other. I mean, consider which sounds better on your tombstone:

Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he saved the kingdom and brought peace to the land.

Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he got rich and powerful and nailed a lot of supermodels.

Could it be that your preference is not precisely for non-modern style stories but more for players who like their PC's to be heroic? If so, do you recognize that as a constraint upon the players (I'm not trying to imply that that's a bad thing, particularly if the players enjoy playing heroic characters)?

One general understanding that I have with my players (all of whom are very close friends) is that I'm open to them playing non-Good or even occasionally Evil characters. I've made it pretty clear that I don't want to delve into stuff that is too dark (like sacrificing innocent children for fun or profit) and they've never pushed that boundary. But several of them DO like to play very mercenary PC's at times (like now) and I'm fine with that. I recognize that it can be just as cathartic to depart reality to play an amoral, "what's in it for me?" type of character as playing a paragon of virtue. Both are likely to be departures from our own outlook on life in the real world. All I really care about is that the game is fun for everybody.

I'm not equating a mandate for a heroic style game to railroading. But it is a constraint upon the kinds of characters the players can play and, depending on the pool of players, might limit some of your options.

It might also place (slightly) more onus on the GM to come up with reasons for a party to follow a certain plotline. The mercenary party will go after the Goblins in the silver mines simply because they're there. The heroic party might question how this is for the common good. But this probably works in the reverse pretty often too. If you say, "Bandits made off with the princess!" then the heroic party will ask, "Which way did they go!?" while the mercenary party will say, "Yeah. And...?" But once they ask, "What's the reward?" then you've got them.

 

[Rel]

I sometimes say that I don't run D&D, I run a midieval soap opera. Everything should run like a soap opera: things that you did before come back to you sometime down the road. The PC's go places and do things because of what they want or what they need to achieve.

And dead characters come back to life for the flimsiest of reasons.

 

[Hjorimir]

Well, since plot and story are almost synonymous, I think you better explain that a little better.

The plot is just the theme of the campaign. What is happening in the world that will get the PCs involved. Is there a dragon terrorizing the lands? As the DM I will plan events that happen around the world (and not all of them will involve the PCs directly). But that is where it stops for me.

The story follows the PCs and their actions. I don't really know what they're going to do or where they're going to go. Trust me, they've surprise me on a regular basis. I am about as anti-railroading as you can get. Sometimes this backfires on me as the PCs flounder not really being sure what they want to pursuit at a given time.

I don't know if that works for you, but I tried to clear it up.

 

[Afrodyte]

The mentioning of proactive vs. reactive characters raises something that I should have stated in a previous post. For those of you who deliberately do things to help create story, what are you major influences for narrative structure and characterization?

In my case, it is drama. The narrative works of stage and screen are one of my primary sources for understanding story. It's not often a deliberate choice. It's simply how things unfold. When developing a character, I spend a large amount of time on their deeds (which is a function of their desires, just not always the most obvious ones), motives, and conflicts. I generally make characters who have done things rather than have had things happen to them. I do mean this literally. It's one of the reasons I prefer The Silmarillion as opposed to LotR. It's also likely that this is why I'm not a fan of a lot of epic stories. They forget the personal aspects of the characters involved, the parts which interest me most.

 

[GMSkarka]

Long post, but here goes:

About 10 years ago, I tried experimenting with something that I ended up calling Intuitive Continuity (a term which I then described in my RPG, UnderWorld, released in 2000, and which has since been adopted by the theorists over at The Forge as part of their ramblings).

The Forge defines Intuitive Continuity as:"in which the GM uses the players' interests and actions during initial play to construct the crises and actual content of later play.

Which is all well and good....but I invented the damned thing, and MY definition of it is as follows: The development of your own Story Arcs with little or no prior planning. The planting of plot elements throughout the campaign that, in retrospect, will appear to make a unified whole...and yet began as mere improvisation on the part of the GM.

My first experiment in Intuitive Continuity was a campaign that I ran using Precedence Publishing's Immortal RPG back in the mid 90s. The entire campaign was based upon notes that I had written in a hotel room on a business trip--a single sheet of legal paper. Over the next few months, I dropped in plot elements as they occurred to me...Immortal is a BIG game, with little to "tie it down", and so I just decided to wing it, rather than spend time detailing things that the PCs might ignore or never encounter.

As I did this game-mastering improvisation, I noticed that the players, who weren't aware of the fact that I was improvising, reacted to everything I dropped out of the air as if it was of critical importance to the plot. Rather than telling them that I had no plot in mind, I started to react to their reactions, if you will...and after a couple of months of this, a plot began to develop naturally.

When it ended, it was the most "literary" campaign I have ever run (and general consensus is that it was the best GMing job I've ever done...and I've yet to top it)...a complete epic story arc, with a beginning, a rising action, a mid-point, a climax and a denouement, with thematic elements, and foreshadowing, and reflections of Campbell's "hero's journey"...and all of it was unplanned. It just fell together, from bits of improv and spinning new events based on the players actions and reactions.

This can be done in any RPG. The trick is to remember that nothing is "set in stone" until such point as you reveal it to the players. If one of your PCs "figures out" that NPC "X" is the Big Bad Villain, but you had intended it to be NPC "Y", there's nothing saying that you can't change it to "X" if you think that the idea is more interesting.

You just need to master the art of improvisation.

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure—the adage that a role-playing group is similar to a band of musicians, each playing their own part, and creating a collective work. I’ve noticed that the similarity gets even more specific. A gaming group operates in almost identical fashion to a group of jazz musicians. Lacking any pre-defined structure or script, the individual players rely on impromptu combinations of their individual riffs, which combine to create a complex new composition on the fly.

So, I started to apply the lessons of improvisational jazz to my role-playing.

The first lesson: By careful combination of well-prepared riffs, one can improvise, and if it’s pulled off well, the audience will never quite be able to tell what was rehearsed and what was thought up on the spot.

Apply this to the gaming table. Nothing is established until you commit to it. Until you divulge the information to the players, it is mutable…ever-changing. If this is done correctly, your players won’t know the difference. It will all seem as if it had been planned by you from the beginning, part of a grand tapestry that you wove for their entertainment…when in reality, they did most of the work, and you merely reacted to them.

As such, I tend to keep a number of “riffs” in my game-mastering repertoire: plot elements that can be dropped in on a moments notice.

Here is the first of my improvisational methods: I don’t come up with ideas for campaigns. I come up with ideas for the beginning of a campaign. That’s it. After that, I let the direction of the campaign be created by the characters. Let’s face it—the average playing group has something like 4 players and a GM. It is simple numerical fact that the players have, in the average case, 4 times the imaginative power of the game master. There are simply more of them than there are of you…why should you do all the work?

They come up with character concepts…why not sit back and have them create the direction of the campaign as well?

What I have done in past campaigns is to create the opening, and then sit back and observe what the players do with it. I then react to what they’ve done, and we’re off and running.

The key here is to make sure that you take copious notes during play, rather than before. Make sure you keep a record of everything that has been solidly established (so you don’t violate those in-house “rules” later on), and quickly jot down any possibilities that occur to you as play progresses. Remember that the possibilities only become fact after you’ve presented them as such. You’ll find that as play progresses, some possibilities will naturally grow more likely, as other options are eliminated through player actions. At that point, you can change a possibility to a fact by presenting it during play—or you can completely come up with something else, completely out of left field, that puts an entirely new interpretation on even the previously established facts.


How do you handle things like NPC write-ups? Have some published adventures or supplements standing by, and simply lift the stats from there. Since you won’t know in advance who will turn out to be important, just use this method as a stop-gap measure initially—if the NPC turns out to be more important later on, go ahead and write them up as a unique character, using the initial “lifted” stats as a starting point. Again—unless you let on, your players will never know that the recurring villain who has plagued their every step started out in your notes as “the guy they meet on the docks”, whose stats were lifted from a published module.

I keep a bunch of NPC write-ups ready to go, to be plugged in where needed. It’s one of the riffs that I use—like a 4-bar break-down from a jazz pianist, that he slips into the end of an improvised phrase to lend it some weight.

The point here is that your players are more than capable of dragging any carefully prepared story that you have off to hell and gone. Almost every “how to GM” article or section in a rulebook that I’ve read has contained the “be prepared to have your adventure completely screwed up” admonition.

So, if they’re going to do it anyway, why not roll with it? It only takes a couple of things on your part: the ability to think on your feet, and the ability to keep a straight face when they assume that you’d planned it that way all along.

 

[Rel]

The mentioning of proactive vs. reactive characters raises something that I should have stated in a previous post. For those of you who deliberately do things to help create story, what are you major influences for narrative structure and characterization?

In my case, it is drama. The narrative works of stage and screen are one of my primary sources for understanding story. It's not often a deliberate choice. It's simply how things unfold. When developing a character, I spend a large amount of time on their deeds (which is a function of their desires, just not always the most obvious ones), motives, and conflicts. I generally make characters who have done things rather than have had things happen to them. I do mean this literally. It's one of the reasons I prefer The Silmarillion as opposed to LotR. It's also likely that this is why I'm not a fan of a lot of epic stories. They forget the personal aspects of the characters involved, the parts which interest me most.

I think I get what you're saying. It's sort of like the difference between somebody caught in an earthquake in Mexico City vs. somebody climbing Mt. Everest. Both are in extraordinary situations but the second person is in an extraordinary situation of their choosing that only the brave dare try. The first person may act heroically but is doing so in a situation not of their choosing and surrounded by other mundane individuals who are similarly struggling. The Mt. Everest climber is engaged in a more personal struggle.

 

[fusangite]

Shameless Cross-Post

I just posted this for an argument I'm having in the "whose property are the PCs" thread and realized that it would go well here:

If I create a world based on certain principles and a player unilaterally creates a piece of it that violates those principles, then the central plot, theme, etc. of the world can easily fall apart. Because I don't tell my PCs what the big universe-building equation behind my world is, we have to work a little differently. The player has to ask "If I wanted to play someone from over there, what would they be like?" Now, plenty of things about "over there" are up for grabs but some portion of them has been predefined because they inhere in the structure of the world itself.

Let's say you had a bunch of ancient Hellenistic players gaming in a particular world and you were working on character background with them for a campaign set in this world. "Well my character is from some Brahmin-like culture," one might say, "but he's a Platonist (or Stoic or Pythagorean or whatever) and worships Poseidon." Because of the way people in the Classical world understood the world, they assumed that philosophy inhered and gods inhered in the very structure of the world and that no matter where you went, there would be Pythagoreans and temples to Poseidon everywhere. You can see that there is a basic conflict between two worldviews about what is local and particular and what is universal and entailed by the structure of the world itself. In this case, the inherent structure of the world you have built (this one) says that culture, philosophy and gods are local and particular and cannot be deduced from non-local data. Conversely, your player might say, "Well, my character will be very surprised by how travel works around here given that where he's from, water usually flows up hill and the sea is often burning." Here, he believes that the properties of water can vary at the local level based on regional particularities, whereas you know that the properties of water are universal in your world.

Every world has a structure that implies that certain things can vary locally and individually and certain things are universal. Many people who play RPGs seem to like putting new things in the the "local and individual" column but rarely take anything out of that column and slot it into the "universal" category. I find the most vibrant and interesting worlds are ones that switch a few (not too many) between the two columns.

 

[fusangite]

I feel compelled to point out that, as has often been mentioned on these very forums, what makes for a good novel (including, perhaps especially, LotR) and what makes for a good game are not the same thing at all.

I could not agree more. I was merely pointing out that LOTR was written by a medievalist who was interested in embodying different medieval things in his story than those things many amateur students of history who write fantasy choose to embody in theirs.

But I feel that I can make a fairly solid generalization about gaming that the PC's are expected to gain powers and possessions through the course of the campaign.

I'll accept your idea about power but not possessions. In many of my campaigns, the characters keep losing friends, money and equipment the whole time. Admittedly these are rarely D&D campaigns; D&D's rule system, in fact, assumes escalating material "net worth" over the course of play.

Now of course characters with any real sense of morality at all are going to go help the little girl out of the well before they go off and slay Goblins. But that's the difference I'm trying to underscore. It's not necessarily that one mindset is more modern than the other. It's that one is more heroic than the other.

I don't think it's just psychologically-based nostalgia that causes us, erroneously, to credit people in the past with greater heroism. Althought it does not appear to be true that people in the past were not heroic, they appear to have produced a literature that was ashamed of different things than our literature is today.

My interest in pre-modern people is not so much about exploring the "real" world in which they lived but rather the phenomenological world they inhabited. I am interested borrowing from how they saw themselves and their world.

Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he saved the kingdom and brought peace to the land.

Through arduous adventures and great risk to himself, he got rich and powerful and nailed a lot of supermodels.

You're dichotemizing something here to get around it. In our culture, if someone did both, we would have an equal or higher opinion of them than if they only did the former. In many other cultures, the latter would detract from the former because, although we retain older criteria for heroism, we have nonetheless successfully added our own. Similarly, in our culture, if the person died poor and celibate, 20 years after bringing peace to the kingdom, while it might not detract from our belief in their heroism and might add a tragic note of pathos, in some other cultures, this additional piece of information would magnify our sense of the person's heroism.

Could it be that your preference is not precisely for non-modern style stories but more for players who like their PC's to be heroic?

While not identical to the point I'm making, it certainly overlaps considerably. Both, related things, are part of my preferences as a GM.

If so, do you recognize that as a constraint upon the players

Oh yeah. But that is, in a certain way, what being a GM is. That's what we do. We constrain player imagination in order to focus it into a shared space.

One general understanding that I have with my players (all of whom are very close friends) is that I'm open to them playing non-Good or even occasionally Evil characters.

Well, I'm not sure if you're using D&D definitions of these terms; I find them pretty useless. But, regardless of what kind of person a character starts as (and people often start with stupid, narcissistic or morally tribal characters), I do try to build systems that generate stories in which the characters become better people not worse.

But several of them DO like to play very mercenary PC's at times (like now) and I'm fine with that.

Same here. However, when I build a society that is congratulatory about this kind of behaviour, it is not a "good" one.

I'm not equating a mandate for a heroic style game to railroading. But it is a constraint upon the kinds of characters the players can play and, depending on the pool of players, might limit some of your options.

Well, given how many options my style of GMing opens that other GMs close by virtue of their own preferences or, just as often, simple unawareness, I'm just fine with that.

 

[Psion]

I feel compelled to point out that, as has often been mentioned on these very forums, what makes for a good novel (including, perhaps especially, LotR) and what makes for a good game are not the same thing at all.

I'm proud to have been a drum-beater on this point, if it has helped this realization spread.