Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories

[Celebrim]

If not hooks to reel them in, there probably need to be at least some ropes within grasp that the players can pull on to see where they go.

You ought to avoid creating a rowboat world. There has to be sign posts that say "Adventure here". There always has to be something to do no matter what road the PC's travel in, though the risk in a sparce sandbox is that you'll unconsciously rely on illusionism so much that you'll actually be building a railroad while everyone pretends the PC's are making choices.

There is a real difficult decision that you need to make at the beginning of the campaign. It isn't a right or wrong decision, but it will shape the campaign. If you want to have a big grand story from the get-go, that's fine but in my experience, it interferes with players driving the story. There is a bit of a conundrum here that there is no solution to. If you want a cinematic story driven experience, you need to begin with a Bang. That is, you need to begin with something exciting and engaging that sets up the situation. You don't begin with small options like "You can go kill rats in the basement" or "You can go kill the kobold raiders" or "You can search for a lost family necklace".

The problem becomes if you do begin with a bang that the players are driven by events and not their characters or the implied themes of their backstory. And opportunities to explore those things are limited, because "Saving the world" (however big the world is) is always a pressing point that overrides consideration whatever story the players could engage in. Investigate the disappearance of my mother, or go save the world? Figure out the secret of my heritage, or go save the world? And by "Save the world" I don't mean that literally necessarily, but I do mean that there is some big obviously important thing that needs to be done.

But if you have a sandbox and you focus on small episodic adventures, then you are strongly risking that you never get a big story out of the campaign because the players don't ever engage with anything deeply.

Which one you make probably should depend on just how much energy players put into backstory and how much they signal that they want to drive the story forward.

Many game concepts have PCs take on jobs or other tasks for rewards, but it always feels to me that these rarely ever sound actually exciting.

I mean, because they are not. Compare with what well designed RPGs like 'Skyrim' and 'Mass Effect' do with these big establishing scenes. Bangs are so much better than hooks. Hook design is fine, but it's creates so much more emotional impact when you that distant glimpse of a Reaper or have the PC's escaping their own execution because a dragon attacked. It's just the trade off there is the PC's are probably going to emotionally invest in the story you are offering.

I think that's kind of the goal I am after. Players having every option to just walk away from a situation and keep their PCs safe, but still rather wanting to do that thing that might cost them dearly. Which is why I feel it is very important that the players pick for themselves what they want to get invested in. If it is part of the premise of the campaign that the PCs will be heroes for a specific cause, then the players know that walking away is not actually a real option that they could go with and continue the campaign.

You can walk away from "We're rat catchers in the sewers." It's much harder to walk away from, "The Dark Lord is conquering the world." But then again, what story do you really want to be plunged into? And if the Dark Lord isn't conquering the world, what are you going to do that is equivalently exciting? You can dangle "The Dark Lord is conquering the world" as a hook sometime after killing rats in the sewers, but then one the players bite you're basically into a campaign that started with a "bang" without the bang. There are real dangers in slow boil campaigns where you are waiting around for the players to decide what the story is. And maybe the biggest danger is that you have six players who can't agree on what to do and are suffering from choice paralysis, spending 3 hours discussing what they could do without ever doing anything.

 

[Umbran]

Wow, so, basically it is your world, your story, and your characters. I honestly think you should simply give up the pretense and write fantasy novels.

No, it is not. You are significantly mis-reading that post.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Here is my take, once again restated: player driven campaigns are driven by skilled players. Whether those develop into strong stories depends largely on skill of the players to personify characters and give them strong dialogue and motivations, and to make strong character driven choices within the setting.

While I wouldn't deny that player skill will impact the outcome of player-driven play, I don't think it's the only thing that matters. Any game is created by three things: the players, the GM, and the rules. So yes, the players will have an impact, but so will the GM and the rules.

The GM has to support the idea that the game will be player-driven. The rules have to support that kind of play, as well. The more effort that the GM and the rules make for the game to be player-driven, the less it will be solely on the players.

I think it's rather odd to talk about what you can do as a GM to create player driven campaigns and strong player driven stories in those campaigns. Really, what can you do beside let players create their own choices and just respond to that? A GM can't make a player create a good story. A GM can't make a player RP well. A GM can't make a player create interesting choices that will lead to interesting circumstances. We're supposedly talking about respecting a player's agency but we're doing it from the perspective of the GM making all the choice.

The GM can involve the players in determining what the game will be about. The GM can ask questions of the players, and then build on the answers. The GM can refrain from crafting an entire world and pre-existing stories for the characters to explore and instead can help craft a setting that serves the PCs' stories.

I think a better approach would be to focus on what players can do to drive a campaign and create strong stories. The topic really IMO should be, "What can I do as a player to tell better stronger stories?" And I think if the thread took that approach honestly, it would reveal how weird the original post actually is. Like, can you imagine writing an adventure to be purchased by and consumed by potential players? And like how would that actually empower players? What would a player's story look like and how could you communicate it, and if you did wouldn't it cease to be the player's story? And would the player really want to know their own story? How can the player be the secret keeper?

The original post is not weird at all. It's asking a legitimate question. But everything you're saying relies so much on a traditional GM-player paradigm that it seems you can't even imagine that there are legitimate answers to the question.

Think about it this way. My PC's are bounty hunters working for the bounty hunter guild. Like, I could run the game by presenting the players with 10 or 20 choices of what bounties they wanted to go after. But even if I did that, I'd still have to invent the scenario. Currently they have been hired by an Imperial Prefect to investigate the disappearance of colonists on a frontier world. Now do the players want to know at the start why the colonists are disappearing? And remember, "We are bounty hunters" was a player driven tagline. The current scenario is running at like 22,000 words of notes plus maps, and most of that is documenting what happened before the PC's arrived and so therefore, what history exists for them to uncover so that they can make real choices based on their own investigation.

I think relying that much on backstory... that there's 22,000 words of things that have already been decided... is a mistake for player-driven play. That is the GM committing strongly to a lot before play even begins.

I would also ask that if the players have indicated they want to be bounty hunters, why not present them with some bounties to hunt? Why are they investigating missing colonists?

I would think you'd take the player request to be bounty hunters and then combine that with some other player requests. These requests would hopefully be based on their characters in some way. This is where rules come in... some games have players declare traits or instincts or bonds that the GM would then use in play to make the events of play suit the characters.

I don't have a clue what they are going to do, but I do have to document very carefully what is there because the resulting story has to be internally consistent. You got 10 different disappearances and crime scenes and impacted families and communities that need time investment to describe. And, minor spoiler, there is actually an important element of the timing of the crimes that required a lot of work from me to get the outline of the past right. All that world building is necessary if I'm actually going to create a sandbox that also generates the big linked dramatic story that the original poster wants.

All that work is not necessary. That's a choice you made. And that's perfectly fine if that's what you like and if your players are into it. But the OP is asking for other ways to play... and they do exist.

The underlying problem is that it's not that fun if the same person who introduces a problem is responsible for solving it. I mean that's the problem with a railroad - the GM both introduces the problem and sets the solution. But the reverse doesn't work either. You can't have the player both introduce the problem and its solution because then there is no drama.

The players don't have to introduce the specific problem, and certainly don't need to know the solution ahead of time. The players need input on the elements of the game. I'll offer a few examples of games I've played or run recently that were very player-driven.

Blades in the Dark- the players have a lot of say about what will come up in play. This happens in lots of ways. Their selection of playbooks and playbook abilities are cues to the GM to include related elements in play. The group actively creates a Crew with its own playbook, so that will have a huge impact on play. A game featuring Smugglers will be different from one featuring Assassins will be different from one featuring a Cult. Each Crew also has abilities and contacts and friends and enemies that will influence play. The GM will make a note of all of that stuff, and will then use it as material to bring up in play. He's not going to ignore their choice of Smugglers and the fact that they're enemies with the Red Sashes gang and instead have them looking into ghostly possessions of the city's elite. All the decisions the players make when they create their characters and crew should shape the game.

Spire: The City Must Fall- Spire assumes the players are members of a secret Drow revolutionary group devoted to resisting High Elf rule of the city. Beyond that basic premise, there are a lot of ways the players will influence play. Each Character Class has associations with factions within the city that will impact play, and Class abilities that should also play a significant role. The factions linked to the classes are often also connected with a specific district of the city. Each district has a specific feel to it, each lends itself to certain types of stories. When I ran this game, I asked the players what kinds of stories they might like, and then we chose the district based on that, and they then selected classes. When they make characters, they also create Bonds with both other PCs, and also with NPCs. The ways Bonds with PCs work is to establish the connections between the characters, but does so in an interesting way... each player gets to declare a truth about someone else's PC. You get a strong sense of the shared history there, and any GM will know to include this stuff in play. The players also choose Bonds with NPCs. These are relationships that can help the PC, but which also may put the NPC at risk.... it's all rife with potential for drama and excitement.

Stonetop- The players all make characters who live in the eponymous village. Stonetop itself serves as the binding element of the game. Everything the characters do will be in service of the town in some way. Similar to the other games, the players will contribute significantly to the creation of the town and its inhabitants. They'll craft the existing relationships they have with NPCs. Each will also select an Instinct, which is a huge indication of what is important to their character, and which the GM should be considering at all times in play. Part of character creation, which is always done as a group, is to take turns asking a series of questions. Each playbook has its own list of questions. The players answer these questions, which will largely determine the events of play. The GM should pay close attention during this step, and should offer advice or suggestions when needed, but otherwise leave the players to it. These questions are designed to create initial threats or situations for the characters to deal with. The players are actively involved in determining these elements. They're not determining the entirety of things, nor pre-determining a solution... but they are actively involved in choosing these elements.

Each of these games has a default setting, and a book that goes along with it, but none of them require the GM to write 22,000 words of anything. For my Blades game, my prep consisted of setting the opening Score to get the ball rolling, and then offering a couple of options for their second score, and then after that, I would just use what came up in play to further the events and offer new scores. For Spire, aside from printing some stat blocks (which are minimal), my prep consisted of a one page mind-map that showed the significant NPCs and factions of the district of Red Row. That was it... one page of prep. For Stonetop, I made notes during character creation, noting the Instincts of each character and their relationships to NPCs, and then I crafted an initial situation that built upon their choices and would challenge their Instincts.

In each of these games, I could ignore all that player input and come up with a 40 page backstory that will determine what play would be about, and we could likely still play and enjoy the game. Each could (largely) be played in a very traditional manner. But I'd be ignoring the intentions of the games and their processes. This is how the rules and the GM contribute significantly to a game being player-driven.

 

[niklinna]

Our Blades in the Dark crew started out as Assassins. We went on to do only a couple of assassination scores (although plenty of straight-up killing) as events unfolded and players made their desires known in the new contexts. I was a little annoyed, as I'd wanted to do a different type of crew to begin with and went with the majority during crew creation, but really your crew & character types as "defined" by the playbook are at best suggestions. If you hold on lightly, things can go wherever. (This is not to say everybody has an easy time holding on lightly, or letting go of strongly-held desires, and we've had a little of that come up in our campaign, too.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Our Blades in the Dark crew started out as Assassins. We went on to do only a couple of assassination scores (although plenty of straight-up killing) as events unfolded and players made their desires known in the new contexts. I was a little annoyed, as I'd wanted to do a different type of crew to begin with and went with the majority during crew creation, but really your crew & character types as "defined" by the playbook are at best suggestions. If you hold on lightly, things can go wherever. (This is not to say everybody has an easy time holding on lightly, or letting go of strongly-held desires, and we've had a little of that come up in our campaign, too.)

Yeah, that's another indication about how the game allows players to drive things.... you can start off as Assassins, and then go in a new direction if that's what the fiction demands, or if that's what the players want. My point was not about locking things in so much as whatever choice is made and whenever it's made, the GM and players should be considering that whenever they come up with a score.

 

[Yora]

I think what's important is not so much that the players have a talent or developed skills at crafting engaging stories, but investment into the setting and its conflicts. When playing a game, the players are not (or at least should not be) attempting to create a series of events that will make compelling retellings. Instead the goal is to create excitement and engagement in the moment as things unfold. If it turns out to be a "you would have to be there to get it" story in which nothing of consequence happened and no progress was made, that's fine. If tension and engagement are high as the events are happening, that is all the success that matters.

Tension, and in many cases immersion, comes when the stakes are high. And stakes become stakes when the players are invested into what happens to the people involved. We can assume that players are always invested in their own PCs (though that's not even a given), but if that's their only investment then they have reasonable motivation to keep their characters out of harm. Which means not being proactive and remaining reactive by continuing to escape from risk. Getting invested in the fate of people and places to the point that avoidable risk to the PCs become a worthy trade is what I believe is the key to get players to proactively go on the offense against the people they perceive as antagonists.

How to get them invested is the big puzzle to solve.

 

[niklinna]

How to get them invested is the big puzzle to solve.

I might suggest that a very good way to get them invested it to let them invest themselves. Give them room for it, give them the opportunity to state what matters to them—yes that means authoring part of the world—and then honor those stated desires by putting what matters ahead of them, but not making it trivial to get or enact!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Another element of the rules that can really shape play is how the game chooses to reward play. The experience or character advancement system can have a huge impact here.

We can look at the various editions of D&D and how XP works, and what behaviors it rewards. XP For gold gives an incentive to obtain treasure, XP for kills gives an incentive for fighting, XP by milestone gives an incentive to achieve certain story-based goals. Each of these things very likely impacts the way players engage with the game.

But there are games that offer advancement in different ways.

Spire, for example, awards character advancement for effecting change in the city. A minor change results in a minor advance, a change at the district level awards a medium advance, and a change at the city level awards a major advance. This incentivizes the players to try and change the setting... to tear things down, or to build things back up. The manner of the change is up to them.

The Heart rpg, by the same guys who made Spire, has a different method. It allows players to select the options for thier advances. It calls these "Beats", and each character has a list of Beats broken up into three tiers. These can be based on mechanics (for example, take Minor Fortune Fallout) or can be more narrative (Coerce an important or beloved NPC into undertaking a task they don’t want to do). Each character has a list of about 30 to 35 Beats, and they select two every session to be their Active Beats. The book explains that the GM should explicitly work to include these elements in play... that there is no need to be coy about it. The players are literally telling you what they're interested in seeing, so why not use it?

Then you can look at Powered by the Apocalypse games and similar games like Forged in the Dark... they have end of session questions that are asked, and for each yes the player answers, they get an XP. These questions are usually focused on what's relevant to the character. If you displayed your Instinct, or if you addressed an issue with subtlety or manipulation, if your opinion of a PC or NPC changed during play, did you learn about the world.... all these kinds of questions which promote the activities we want to see... the players engaging with the game world and its inhabitants in ways that matter to play.

Just some more examples of how mechanics can help promote player-driven play. And these mechanics rely on the GM to help bring them up in play. On recognizing what the players are interested in, and then crafting play around those things.

 

[TwoSix]

Wow, so, basically it is your world, your story, and your characters. I honestly think you should simply give up the pretense and write fantasy novels.

And how ironic that you post this here in a thread on "Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories."

That seems like a very uncharitable reading of @Celebrim's post.

I think the point here is that a game needs a unified motive, a driving force. There might be various plot threads focused on individual characters, but they need to weave together as a coherent whole.
The PCs can't be strangers with no connection, and yet also have the freedom to each drive their own individual narrative simultaneously. Maybe that works if you only have 1-2 PCs, but certainly not well for bigger groups. The ability to keep a coherent motive driven by PC motivation only becomes more tenuous as group size increases. When you have a game with 5-6 PCs, a certain amount of GM steering of the overall plot becomes almost an inevitability.

 

[Celebrim]

While I wouldn't deny that player skill will impact the outcome of player-driven play, I don't think it's the only thing that matters. Any game is created by three things: the players, the GM, and the rules. So yes, the players will have an impact, but so will the GM and the rules.

Agreed. Although I would say here the rules are probably the least influential part of this.

The GM can involve the players in determining what the game will be about. The GM can ask questions of the players, and then build on the answers.

These things don't really have anything to do with the rules, and they can occur in lot of ways. For me a lot of this occurs in asking the players about backstories, which is a time that just about game or any style of play you can allow players to inject things into the setting without it being much of a risk. So you can allow players to inject NPCs, families, factions, deities, cults, whatever into your game and have personalized fronts and allies that will play a role in the future story. And you don't need rules for that. But what that to me does is something the opposite of 'no myth'. This is an opportunity to collaborate on the world's myth.

That opportunity doesn't completely go away after the story starts, but it does get more limited after the game starts because you have to avoid inserts that would be retcons or which would be too important to the story or which would imply PC knowledge that would be problematic. But it's often OK to allow some injection of player world building at later points.

The GM can refrain from crafting an entire world and pre-existing stories for the characters to explore and instead can help craft a setting that serves the PCs' stories.

I don't see how there is much difference between the two. Sooner or later you need enough of the world for the story to take place in, and that implies preexisting stories. And much of those stories both logically and by story necessity can't be stories the PC took part in, because otherwise there would be no mystery and no exploration. But whether or not the player has chosen to work with you to insert backstory into the setting, the world is still there for the PC's stories. And this needs to be true whether or not the player has the slightest idea at the start of what they wanted to accomplish. Because most of the time, they don't. And even if they did, they have no more ability than the GM (and indeed much less) to predict and shape how the story goes because well, randomness will happen and discoveries will be made and mistakes will be made and no plan survives contact with the unknown.

The original post is not weird at all. It's asking a legitimate question. But everything you're saying relies so much on a traditional GM-player paradigm that it seems you can't even imagine that there are legitimate answers to the question.

Oh dear. No, the post is asking questions about how things are done without seeming to understand that things are done that way for the simple reason that there isn't an alternative. I don't think you have any idea just how many systems I have read the rules for. You'd be much better off assuming that I am aware of the alternatives to fortune mechanics or having a GM or whatever.

I think relying that much on backstory... that there's 22,000 words of things that have already been decided... is a mistake for player-driven play. That is the GM committing strongly to a lot before play even begins.

Yeah. So what is the fun of inventing the solution to your own puzzle? You say that I don't need to do those sorts of things, but you don't really produce alternatives.

I would also ask that if the players have indicated they want to be bounty hunters, why not present them with some bounties to hunt? Why are they investigating missing colonists?

Because at this point we're like 8 or 9 bounties into the campaign and I'm trying continually to avoid the routine that you'd have if you approached this entirely from a realistic perspective. Realistically, most bounties wouldn't be all that interesting. There wouldn't be a story. They wouldn't play out as great TV episodes. I'm continually throwing twists at the players. In this particular circumstance the Prefect has agreed to write out the Writ of Remandation and pay a bounty if the PC's will provide the criminal. So the PC's find themselves playing the unusual role of 'local sheriff' while otherwise doing the usual things that they would do to hunt down a bounty, only this time they don't have a puck and a face they are looking for. They still have their Imperial Peace Keeping License, and they are still doing all the same things they normally do, just this time they actually have magisterial authority - something that they've wanted at times in prior adventures but haven't had. In some senses, this is fulfilling a bit of a power trip/fantasy that the players previously had, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could just arrest people?"

Blades in the Dark- the players have a lot of say about what will come up in play. This happens in lots of ways. Their selection of playbooks and playbook abilities are cues to the GM to include related elements in play.

Fundamentally, that's not that strong. That's in total just about the same as my session zero where we discussed concepts for a new campaign and agreed that it would be Bounty Hunters. If the system was Blades, we'd still have a Crew of Bounty Hunters.

The group actively creates a Crew with its own playbook, so that will have a huge impact on play. A game featuring Smugglers will be different from one featuring Assassins will be different from one featuring a Cult.

Sure. And if the players had said we all want to be Jedi Survivors and made appropriate PC's then that would have had the same effect and I would have made a completely different campaign with completely different adventures.

Each Crew also has abilities and contacts and friends and enemies that will influence play. The GM will make a note of all of that stuff, and will then use it as material to bring up in play.

Again, that's not that strong. Yes, it encourages or even forces players to do that in way that most games don't, and yes, I only had one player in this campaign bother to make a backstory at all. But if players wanted to bring in contacts, friends, and enemies I would have totally been on board with that. I've done it for prior campaigns, so it's not even like these players didn't realize that was an option. It's just not a priority for this group.

He's not going to ignore their choice of Smugglers and the fact that they're enemies with the Red Sashes gang and instead have them looking into ghostly possessions of the city's elite.

I mean he could, but he's just not supposed to. But this is so weak, because it's not like if we were playing Dungeons and Dragons and the group decided to be smugglers and a player inserted backstory for a character that made them enemies of the Red Saches gang that I'd ignore that and wouldn't let it shape the campaign. Regardless of the system, the players can make their own fronts, collectively or individually before play. That's great, but then I'm still the one that has to bring that to life. Nothing has changed much between systems for me here. There are some changes Blades brings about, player driven flashbacks for example and concrete ways to describe the groups growing influence in the downtime minigames between heists, and yeah without writing in your own minigame tracking influence like that is hard in systems that don't explicitly support that minigame. You can fudge it without a minigame, but minigames do make that sort of thing more compelling.

I could keep going, but your examples to me don't really demonstrate to me a lot of change from what I'm already doing in games.

Each of these games has a default setting, and a book that goes along with it, but none of them require the GM to write 22,000 words of anything.

Yeah, and the result in my experience is always bland shallow games filled with incoherence and illusionism and ultimately for me a distinct feeling for me as a player that have no real power over anything because the GM feels impowered to metagame. And if the GM's metagaming, you got no agency and very little impact over the story.

I consider myself a pretty darn creative person. You can look back through old threads were people ask me for creative content and what I generate for them as evidence of that claim. There are probably people more creative than I am, but I've never met a single person creative enough to wing a story at any depth without extensive preparation. I know that claim offends people who say that they are doing that, but until they actually demonstrate it to me I'm just not going to believe it. And particularly in an RPG, where you are the GM inserting the fictional positioning and consequences into play at every turn, if you didn't actively limit your power by pre-establishing some truths that constrain what you can do, well I don't by that the players have any choices at all. It's all Schrodinger's Setting at that point, painted as serves the GM's ideas of what the story should be from moment to moment. If you don't have prep, literally nothing can happen except what you want to have happen.