Player-driven campaigns and developing strong stories

[Celebrim]

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.

At this point I'm confused, because that to me reads like a complete contradiction of how I read your original post. Do you or do you not want long running compelling literary fiction to be produced by your play? In your original post you wrote:

"The limitation of this approach is that even though it gives players full freedom and can create really fun and memorable scenes or sequences of scenes, these stories are generally short and not very much interlinked with each other, other than having happened to the same PCs. It does not tend to generate the grand stories of great struggles and intrigue that we commonly see in fantasy and sci-fi fiction."

That's a very different goal. If all you are trying to do is generate a loosely connected series of events that provided moment by moment excitement, but which do not make for a compelling retelling and which do not produce a transcript of play that is comparable to a good novel or a good movie or a good TV show, then that's a very low challenge. You've already described enough tools in the toolbox to create that sort of wandering encounter or randomly generated dungeon type game, where you are just happy to kill the monsters and take their stuff. And really, for me that sort of play though I was already starting to get bored of it by the time I was 18, and I can remember the session very well where the group I was a player in at the time just gave up on that sort of play and invested in the campaign where there was more going on than moment by moment action and had stories they felt were compelling.

At some point when you've gamed enough, you get to the point where you are no longer interested in stories "where you would have to be there to get it" and which no progress is made and nothing of consequence happens and the transcripts of play aren't memorable except for that moment someone rolled a critical or failed a saving throw or set off a trap or what not. Not that those things are bad, but I thought the whole point of this thread was how we get more engagement than that while having players drive the story instead of being as one person put it just an "audience" for the events.

 

[pointofyou]

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.

Honestly it is neither a mystery nor a recreational impossibility. If you want the story of the game to be about the PCs then you make the game about the PCs. You can choose one of the myriad games that purport to have that as their explicit intent or you can run a more-conventional game to be about the PCs. I've found the latter to work better for me but your choices and preferences are your own.

 

[S'mon]

I thought the whole point of this thread was how we get more engagement than that while having players drive the story instead of being as one person put it just an "audience" for the events.

I think the real trick is not to think in terms of story creation, whether pre written or in play. I create the elements of conflict, such as motivated NPCs with their own goals. This creates exciting events. Maybe stories are told afterwards, but nothing is pre written, and the players are actors in the world, not authors of the world. Don't think in terms of "compelling literary fiction", think in terms of "Who are they? What do they want? What will they do to get it?"

 

[hawkeyefan]

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

I don't think so. I think they have a profound impact on how a game works. I would argue that it is more important than player skill, which was your original point. I think player skill is the least important of the three. There are plenty examples of brand-new players who are totally engaged and play with inspiration and excitement, despite their lack of expertise.

Also, look at D&D as an example again. Highly detailed NPC and monster entries, specific spatial distances and effects for combat and spells... all these things promote a certain kind of play that require at least some prep, mostly in the forms of maps and statblocks.

What if D&D didn't have monster stats? What if the ranges and areas of effects of spells were more broadly categorized? That would effect how people play.

You seem to be of the opinion that the only way for the players to drive play is if they're highly skilled players. And while that may be one way to do it, there are others. Having the game itself help with that, and the GM, too, are huge parts of it.

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.

By rules, I meant the procedures of play just as much as I meant the actual mechanics. It's not so much about backstory as it is about what's to come. The players can have a lot of say on that, if the game is designed to bring their wants to the fore, and if the GM knows to pay attention and proceed with that in mind.

It can also be specifically the mechanics. The Spire game I mentioned took on the epic feel it did largely because of Fallout, and the impact it had on the characters, which then impacted play. One character in particular had a journey in the game that was like nothing I've ever experienced in any other game. It would not have happened without the rules working the way they do, the player being open to having his character changed in fundamental ways, and the GM being able to help with it.

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.

I don't think that setting is about pre-existing stories. The setting should be there for the player characters. Look at the original Star Wars... there's clearly a lot that has happened in the past. But all of it is there to propel Luke on his journey. That's the focus. If that was an RPG, we shouldn't be as concerned about solving all the little tidbits about the past. We should be focused on Luke's journey.

Don't make the focus of your game be about the players learning what's in your 22,000 word backstory (hell, even Lucas was making it up on the fly). Make it about finding out about their characters and what they care about and what they do about it.

As for inconsistencies... what do you think is more likely to result in them... my one page of backstory or your 40 pages?

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 don't care how many systems you've read the rules for. Your second sentence here renders the point moot. I cannot see how you will have read so many games and feel that there is no alternative to the approach you've described. There absolutely is, and I'd expect someone with a strong grasp of the wider RPG industry to know that.

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 didn't suggest that anyone should do that.

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?"

So look at the Mandalorian as an example. It started out with a bounty hunter. Then it became about something else as a result of what happened as the show unfolded. If we viewed this as an RPG, maybe the player said they wanted to play a cold-blooded mercenary, and so the GM decided to test just how cold-blooded they were by introducing a child for them to care for. And we'll make the child important in some way that the players will understand, even if the character doesn't. Then leave it up to the player if they turn the kid in or decide to protect him.

That decision can then help shape how things are going forward. The GM should let the player decide, and then proceed accordingly. If the player decided to save the kid, then we know they care about something. So then the question maybe becomes how much? Enough to risk their sense of self? Their heritage and legacy? And so on.

If the player decides to turn the kid over to the remnants of the Empire and collect their bounty, then the GM should accept that and not somehow steer things so that the kid shows back up and so on.

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.

It formalizes it as a process and makes it explicitly a part of character creation. My character's Friend and Rival are on my character sheet, just like my Action Ratings and my Gear. And they're meant to come up and to matter, though perhaps not as frequently.

You're dismissing multiple things as not being strong examples, but yet they're not meant to be applied in isolation. Combine these practices with a game that allows for them to happen and a GM who knows how to help with that, and collectively, they work quite well.

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.

Right, that's a good first step toward player driven play. I don't think it's all that can be done.

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.

So this reminds me of all the posts here and elsewhere lamenting how pointless the Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, and Traits are in D&D 5e. They're just there, without much connection to anything else, accept if the GM remembers to grant inspiration. They're tacked on.

But what if they were more integral to the game? What if the GM actively used the Bonds to help craft the setting? What if the game instructed the GM to actively find ways to test the characters Ideals? What if the Flaws couldn't be conveniently ignored?

Other games effectively incorporate these kinds of elements into the game such that play of any given game is ABOUT the characters, rather than being about something else and just featuring these characters.

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.

I mean, in my current D&D game that I'm playing in, we're doing the Temple of Elemental Evil. It's a perfectly fun game. I'm enjoying it. It's not player-directed at all. It can't be, really... it's about the threat of the Temple. It's not about Malacus the Eladrin Wizard. My character and any other PC could be swapped out and little would change about the game.

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.

What do you mean by GM metagaming here?

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.

I don't see how anyone can demonstrate it to you except perhaps if you actually played with them. Have you actually played or GMed any of the games I've mentioned, or similar ones? Would you be open to doing so?

It feels very much like you're starting with your conclusion, and then working from there.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

At least as long as there are reasons the group has to operate as, well, a group a majority of the time. That isn't perhaps the case in all games, but at least you exclude certain sorts of other game features if you insist on it being practical to run each character as a mostly independent entity.

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.

With relatively simple characters and resolution systems that are focused on situation resolution rather than task resolution it can be done. Its not my cuppa, but its a thing.

 

[Celebrim]

I think the real trick is not to think in terms of story creation, whether pre written or in play. I create the elements of conflict, such as motivated NPCs with their own goals. This creates exciting events. Maybe stories are told afterwards, but nothing is pre written, and the players are actors in the world, not authors of the world. Don't think in terms of "compelling literary fiction", think in terms of "Who are they? What do they want? What will they do to get it?"

I generally agree with your ideas, and it's the creation of compelling NPC's, their resources, their plans, and so forth that takes up a good deal of my preparation. But I tend to think answering the questions, "Who are they? What do they want? What will they do to get it?", is how you get compelling literary fiction and is not something contradictory to it.

 

[S'mon]

I generally agree with your ideas, and it's the creation of compelling NPC's, their resources, their plans, and so forth that takes up a good deal of my preparation. But I tend to think answering the questions, "Who are they? What do they want? What will they do to get it?", is how you get compelling literary fiction and is not something contradictory to it.

Yes this approach will often create good stories in hindsight. It's the thinking in terms of literary creation pre-game that is harmful, I think.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't think so. I think they have a profound impact on how a game works.

Celebrim's Second Law of RPGs states, "How you prepare to play a game and how you think about a game has a bigger influence on the game than the rules." I'm rather fond of that observation, and I find it holds.

Also, look at D&D as an example again. Highly detailed NPC and monster entries, specific spatial distances and effects for combat and spells... all these things promote a certain kind of play that require at least some prep, mostly in the forms of maps and statblocks.

What if D&D didn't have monster stats? What if the ranges and areas of effects of spells were more broadly categorized? That would effect how people play.

Would it? I think you get things backwards. Detailed monster stats and spell effects are the product of how people played D&D and not the result of it. People made the maps before they made the other things. They needed the other things because they had maps.

Besides, those are the easy parts of prep. Most of the work doesn't go into those things for most of the things I do in most systems.

By rules, I meant the procedures of play just as much as I meant the actual mechanics.

Procedures of play is what isn't written down in the rules. It's things that vary from whether or not you count the roll if the dice falls off the table, to whether or not the DM draws maps, to whether or not PC's write out 4 page backstories, to whether you RP in 1st person or 3rd person, to what filters does the group apply to determine what a valid proposition is and how skill rolls are called at the table. It's a thing very different than the rules and which most tables are not even consciously aware of. Most games don't actually change play by changing the rules, but by changing how people think about playing.

I don't think that setting is about pre-existing stories. The setting should be there for the player characters. Look at the original Star Wars... there's clearly a lot that has happened in the past. But all of it is there to propel Luke on his journey. That's the focus. If that was an RPG, we shouldn't be as concerned about solving all the little tidbits about the past. We should be focused on Luke's journey.

The two aren't separatable. There isn't this either/or distinction you are trying to make. Imagine Star Wars as a campaign. Do you think it matter's if Luke's player knows that Darth Vader is his father from the beginning? Which do you think is more exciting from the player's perspective, setting up all his own story beats or discovering them as he explores the setting? I think it's better if the player just signals his orphan status as an opportunity to explore fairy tale themes, and then let's the GM come up with his past generally with the consent of the player - "On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you want me to mess with you?", sort of thing. And I really hope that the player said 10 out 10, because making Leia a secret sister is so Greek Tragedy, "Yikes!".

Don't make the focus of your game be about the players learning what's in your 22,000 word backstory (hell, even Lucas was making it up on the fly). Make it about finding out about their characters and what they care about and what they do about it.

Again, the two aren't separable. The setting backstory isn't the opposite of player empowerment. What the characters do about whatever is always what an RPG is about. But, finding out what their characters are and what they care about is an aesthetic of play that 80% of gamers do not give a flip about. Most players have no interest in roleplaying out their feelings in melodramatic scenes and are already pretty sure what they care about and aren't interested in particularly in RPing out moral or ethical angst, or deciding what relationship that they are going to have with other characters (PC's or NPC's). Most players do not want that as a focus of play. But regardless of what system you are playing, all players have access to that sort of RP if that's what they want. If your aesthetic enjoyment is exploration of character, and you are in a group - like say Critical Roles group - where you have quality improv actors that can do those scenes, well go for it. But you as a GM aren't really in control of that. You aren't the person animating the characters. You don't get to create Raistlin and give him personality and drive and put him into those scenes. That's on the player.

As for inconsistencies... what do you think is more likely to result in them... my one page of backstory or your 40 pages?

Your improv when you one page no longer covers the questions you need to answer and you have to answer things on the fly.

I don't care how many systems you've read the rules for. Your second sentence here renders the point moot. I cannot see how you will have read so many games and feel that there is no alternative to the approach you've described. There absolutely is, and I'd expect someone with a strong grasp of the wider RPG industry to know that.

I'm not even going to derail the response by dignifying that. But if you'd back up and look at some of my specific objections rather than assuming I don't know things, you might have more interesting things to say. The fact you immediate go on to say, "I didn't suggest that anyone should do that.", just tells me you are too busy playing "gotcha" to even follow along.

So look at the Mandalorian as an example. It started out with a bounty hunter. Then it became about something else as a result of what happened as the show unfolded. If we viewed this as an RPG, maybe the player said they wanted to play a cold-blooded mercenary, and so the GM decided to test just how cold-blooded they were by introducing a child for them to care for. And we'll make the child important in some way that the players will understand, even if the character doesn't. Then leave it up to the player if they turn the kid in or decide to protect him.

So? What's your point? You think that's not trad RP? You think that's not the result of trad preparation? You think that's not the result of GM driven storytelling?

In fact, that's hardcore GM driven storytelling. I have a player that would get furious over me pulling that stunt early in a campaign because it works entirely against the session zero preparation. This is something we joke about a lot in the current campaign - "The Mandalorian" is a show about a bounty hunter that doesn't actually follow the character until the end of his bounty hunting career. It never actually bothers to try to explore the premise, and instead becomes a quest-based fantasy right off the bat. If I pulled the stunt of promising a Bounty Hunting game after table agreement that that is what we wanted to do, and then in the first adventure put the characters in a moral dilemma where they either had to give up bounty hunting and go rogue or else be complete SOBs, I'd have several very unhappy players. They'd get over it. They'd go along with me screwing the campaign over like that. But it wouldn't make them very happy. I think I know what my players are trying to achieve better than you do.

If the player decides to turn the kid over to the remnants of the Empire and collect their bounty, then the GM should accept that and not somehow steer things so that the kid shows back up and so on.

There is no disagreement here over that though. It's not a point of debate or something that separates your position from tradition RPing.

My character's Friend and Rival are on my character sheet, just like my Action Ratings and my Gear. And they're meant to come up and to matter, though perhaps not as frequently.

Backstory is character sheet. And you can put Reads Latin or History on your character sheet, but it's up to the GM usually to figure out how to make that relevant.

Right, that's a good first step toward player driven play. I don't think it's all that can be done.

Sure. But I find your argument increasingly incoherent.

What if the GM actively used the Bonds to help craft the setting?

Then you'd have strongly GM driven play, or at the least, it would be at least as strongly GM driven as my play is.

Other games effectively incorporate these kinds of elements into the game such that play of any given game is ABOUT the characters, rather than being about something else and just featuring these characters.

This is such an arbitrary distinction. As for Temple of Elemental Evil, I'm not particularly fond of the adventure as written, as it's a pretty simplistic dungeon crawl. There is a thread around here somewhere where I talk about changes I'd make to the adventure that would allow it to achieve it's aesthetic of play, but also provide for the sort of complex literary scenarios that would allow for more RPing.

What do you mean by GM metagaming here?

Whenever a GM is called to invent something mid-play, there is always the conscious or unconscious temptation to invent what the GM thinks would be good for the game. For example, if the game has a big combat encounter, and the PC's are doing well, the GM experiences the temptation to say invent some reinforcements or some new challenge in the middle of the combat to make it exciting because the combat was supposed to be dramatic. Games the strongly encourage the GM to invent things on the fly tend to strongly become dependent on Illusionism, where the game the players think they are playing isn't the game they are actually playing. As an example of Illusionism, imagine if the BBEG had no hit points but was always defeated on the seventh round of combat. It's Illusionism if the GM keeps asking for damage inflicted and marking it down as if that was relevant to the game actually being played. There is a whole theory of how to be a good GM that depends heavily on perpetrating those sorts of deceptions on the players.

 

[Celebrim]

Yes this approach will often create good stories in hindsight. It's the thinking in terms of literary creation pre-game that is harmful, I think.

I disagree. I don't think you are expressing yourself particularly well. My guess is that what you are trying to say is that as a GM I shouldn't have the forestory plotted out in great detail and be committed to particular scenes, conversations, or twists actually happening and having the dramatic impact I desired or intended. And I definitely shouldn't do this to the extent that I ignore player freedom and agency. If that's what you are trying to express, then I agree. If you think that setting up a story is somehow bad, then I just disagree.

 

[pemerton]

I think the point here is that a game needs a unified motive, a driving force.

Why can't it be done by committee?

With the GM as the "chair", whose job it is to weave various elements together.

I mean, isn't this why Vincent Baker, in Apocalypse World, calls the GM the Master of Ceremonies? And why Christopher Kubasik, in his Interactive Toolkit, calls the GM the Fifth Business?