What first in your TTRPGing - Story, Game or Character?

[damiller]

As a GM I start with the game. If I dont' like the rules (and by extension the setting those rules come with) it'll never get to my table.

Then I come up with a Story (or focus, also called a campaign).

After that I'll pitch it to potential players asking them if they want to play this Game system with this Story Focus.

Once I get some players who buy into the Game system and Story focus, they create Characters. (That fit into that Story Focus and Game rules.)

When play starts the stream reverses itself, and its characters, story, game. Wherein the characters actions create a story, in part, by using the rules of the game.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah, I just think that's largely design failure, not a feature of the form.

I don't. I think they are different media, and they have different strengths. It is not a "failure" to be different. This is a feature, not a bug.

 

[pointofyou]

I think it depends in the game and the goals and expectations for it.

So, I’m currently playing in two games. In one, I’d say character is not very important at all. It mostly amounts to choices of class options to help the team, a bit of flavor while portraying the character, and perhaps a sliver of motivation in certain instances. The game is very much story first. We’re playing D&D and going through the classic module Temple of Elemental Evil.

My other game is probably more about character in that if we changed the characters, the events of play would go differently. The story that emerges from play is the story of our characters specifically. They cannot be swapped out for others and have the game go the same. This game is Stonetop.

What makes these two games different is largely the rules and processes of play. Those rules highlight story or character in both active and passive ways.

That seems right. The biggest difference I see is that the story for your D&D game is already written and and the process of play is just filling in some details whereas the story for your Stonetop game is emerging from play. Changing characters isn't much going to change the story of The Temple of Elemental Evil. Changing the characters in Stonetop is going to change the bonds and the playbooks and at least some of the moves available at the table which will change how the people at the table interact with what has come before so there are opportunities for the story to go in different directions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

"First" is a hard question, because at least two of those are pretty definitional about what makes an RPG to me; if I can't properly represent and operate a character, its not an RPG to me, and if the game part isn't engaging it probably isn't either. Story is distinctly third there (though that shouldn't be interpreted as my saying it doesn't matter).

 

[Voadam]

As a DM I go Game, Story, Character.

I run D&D and not other things so that is the first thing and just an assumed baseline. I also conceptually try to focus on the games being fun.

I generally run modules, and often Adventure Paths, but in a fairly sandbox way. So I have an arching story that characters can dynamically interact with in different ways. I spend a lot of time thinking about the setting and adventure plot and the characters so that what is likely to happen all hangs together and makes sense as a story.

Character. I work hard to riff with the players on their things and what they get into in a fairly sandboxy way and to tune things to the individual group, but structurally I'd have to say this is 3rd.

 

[pemerton]

I read something once that there are five elements/factors that come together to create an RPGing experience:

*setting
*situation
*character
*colour/flavour
*system (= mechanics and other methods for working out what happens next)​

For me, colour is important, in that there are some genres/flavours that even in a well-designed game don't really appeal to me (eg that's the vibe I get from Blades in the Dark).

System is very important to me - I enjoy a variety of approaches, but there are some I don't particularly care for, especially those that lean heavily on GM pre-authorship or relatively unconstrained GM decision-making.

Character and situation are both important to me, but I can play different games that prioritise them differently. Eg Agon puts situation first - the islands the characters come to as they travel home on their Odyssey-like journey. My approach to 4e D&D was mostly situation-first too.

Whereas Burning Wheel tends to be character first. And my Torchbearer game started out as situation first but feels like it might be drifting to character first.

I've played MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy both situation first and character first. It's interesting that I think it allows for both (not at the same time, obviously).

For me, setting - as that extends beyond colour and situation - tends to come last. My most setting-intensive RPGing was around 30 years ago, and even then I think character and situation were higher priorities for our group.

In the context of this thread I'm not entirely sure what's meant by story - but if we mean resolving situations and having the characters revealed in play that's quite important to me (so eg I think I might find it hard to get into @hawkeyefan's Temple of Elemental Evil Game, which has little revelation of character and I suspect doesn't have the sort of intensity of situation that tends to appeal to me). I'm not really into pre-authored story (like APs or a pre-sequenced "adventure").

 

[Yora]

With these options, clearly Game.

A well designed systems has structures and procedures by which simply following the gameplay loop organically creates story. Character is something that forms along the way as the players develop patterns in how they react to things encountered in the gameplay in the context of the unfolding story.

 

[Pedantic]

I don't. I think they are different media, and they have different strengths. It is not a "failure" to be different. This is a feature, not a bug.

That's precisely the thing I find so frustrating! This is not (to my mind) the important difference, and treating it as a principle mostly leads to bad design. Like, not in some abstract Platonic ideal of design kind of way, in a "the math doesn't always produce expected results" kind of way. That attitude leads to stuff like the 5e designers surprising themselves on a livestream with the deadliness of ghoul paralysis.

TTRPGs are different, but not in a way that makes the last 20 years of iteration on board game design irrelevant, and insisting they are mostly just serves to make them worse.

 

[Lanefan]

The answer to the OP question is hugely different for me depending on whether I'm answering as DM or a player.

As DM: system --> setting --> story (at the vague-idea level) --> characters.
As player: character --> setting --> system --> (story, which only emerges as play goes on).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In another thread, @Snarf Zagyg was talking about the game Everway, and had the quote that it was a game "which placed story first, before game or character". [Edit: As Snarf Notes below, these are Shannon Appelcline's words.]

This made me wonder about classifying games based on which is first: story, game, or character. And also how 5e varies between them based on DM and Player desire.

And then I thought about my own playing... and then what the definition of these would be for me, or for anyone else.

I don't know yet. But @payn suggested making a thread, and so here it is.

I think I like character first... And I want the character to get a story, but it doesn't need to be the one I came into the game burbling around in the background of my head. So I want the game to help decide that. I need to think over B/X/1e, 2e, 3.5, 5e, 13A, VtM 2e, Gamma World 1e, Fate, and some others (none of the not-so-new anymore new fangled kind really) to see if I want to amend that or which systems played better and worse with my preferences.

I think there are (at least) 2 ways character can be addressed. One option is what I would call display; the game gives you descriptors to use, and in play the game is designed to produce fiction in keeping with that. A strong character lifts heavy stuff, or at least can. Another option is discovery; the player, generally, asserts certain hypothesis about the character, like 'brave' and then plays to see where that goes, if it's true or not.

Most games do some display, some also do discovery, the two are not opposed