This weekend a friend of mine who plays in a game I’m not in was telling me a tale of woe and how she was getting rather frustrated with her fellow players. My friend wanted to frame a scene that would develop the ongoing narrative — bang, here’s the information we need to move forward with the story. Her counterpart across the table, however, didn’t want to “skip” to that scene without delving through all of the fictional details that the characters would have gone through, regardless of the narrative impact provided by those details and the sifting between them — otherwise, they were just cutting out large parts of the story.

In my design group last night, one of our members discussed his goals for the game he’s designing. He wants the system to develop epic plotlines and encourage intricate characterization, both over the course of multiple game sessions, with a heavy emphasis on living the character and experiencing what it was like to be the character in these exciting situations and how those situations affected, challenged, and grew the character. And what word did he use to describe all of what he wanted? Story.

Ask a hundred gamers what it is that they really like about their game, and eighty-seven of them will tell you it’s the story* — but what one gamer means by “story” will bear little resemblence to what another gamer means when they use the exact same word. Not coincidentally, a lot of RPG books purport to provide “story” — and can you blame them, considering that 87% of the market wants “story?” But because when it comes to RPGs, where books are only written by gamers with delusions of grandeur, what that guy means when he says “story” is almost guaranteed to be something completely different than what you expect when you play the “story” game that he made. Conversely, when you, gamer-cum-game-designer, make your game and slap “story” on the cover copy or put it in the title of the game itself, you are doing the exact same thing — building a nice venus fly trap to lure customers in thinking that you’re offering what they want because you’re using some nice-sounding words. What you are not doing is actually communicating what you are offering. That is a bad, bad idea.

A Fun Take-Home Exercise!

In response to our community’s little problem with the word “story” I am proposing an exercise: excise the word “story” from your vocabulary. Not permanently, mind. Do it for a week. Try it out; take it for a spin. Try and rewrite your Introduction To My Keen Story Game without using the word “story” anywhere. See where it takes you and, if you don’t like where you end up, go back to using the word.

The first thing that you’ll get out of excising “story” is that you will put into words what you actually mean when you normally use the word. When you can’t say, “players tell a story” you have to get specific. You say “players relate their character’s actions to fictional events described by the game master” or “players each add details to an imaginary world” or “players take turns narrating what happens next.” All three of those might normally be construed as “story” but are in fact completely different things. While they may all, in the end, produce something that someone might recognize as a story, they are different processes that happen to create similar things.

Now that you’ve got a better handle at what you’re doing, it becomes easier to write precise, step-by-step instructions for your procedures of play. If the game is about reacting to the GM’s events, then you can make procedures for reacting to events. If the game is about adding details to a communal world, you can make procedures for adding those details. Rules for reacting will look fundamentally different than the rules for adding details. Assuming you can write clearly, players will have an exacting list of things that they can and should be doing in pursuit of a goal that they hold in common, not wandering around in the fictional world trying to find something interesting, getting lost in the cloud of idiosyncratic details in their heads, or fighting over what ’should’ happen, all in the hope that they’ll eventually arrive at “story”.

But most importantly, most King-Kong-sized screaming-madman-in-your-face importantly, you can stop presenting the game you’ve designed as having something to do with “story.” You can present the game as this other thing, this specific, precise thing like “collaborating to create a fictional world in motion” or “rising to an imaginary challenge” or “developing an intriguing character and sharing it with your friends” and then — this is the important part — and then actually give that to the people who respond with interest. You can say “I will give you X” and then give them X. How much cooler is that than saying “I will give you the awesome” and then giving them something that you think is awesome and maybe they will, too, but probably not?

A Step Further

Now, I don’t know if I’m alone on this or not, but generally speaking, I like roleplaying games of every stripe. I like me the juicy moral crises and tough choices, I like building up a shared world, I like cleaving to a world presented in teevee or fiction. I like gritty tactical combat, I like deep characterization, I like quick and fast play using characters as little more than pawns. There really is very little out there that I can’t sit down and play and enjoy myself doing. The one thing that I really need out of any play experience, however, is knowing what I’m doing so that I can appreciate it. I sit down at a Dogs game with a different mindset than I sit down at a Capes game, much like I have a different mindset when playing Monopoly, Scrabble, or Jenga.

What I’m getting at here is that, most likely, I’d really dig on whatever it is that you call “story”. I could probably hear your “this creates stories!” schpiel, sit down at your game, and eventually enjoy myself. That ‘eventually’ is the kicker, though. Sometimes it takes a long, long time for me to figure out what it is that I’m supposed to be enjoying — “Oh, this is all about pushing my character into tough choices” or “Oh, this is all about fiddling with technobabbly space drives and stuff” or “Oh, I’m supposed to maliciously leave my character open to getting hurt in new and interesting ways.” The real question, though, is how long that ‘eventually’ takes. It can be half a session, it can be three sessions. If it takes too long, I may lose interest before I get to the good parts. But if the game is designed and presented with a clear, precise goal, that ‘eventually’ can be cut down to ten minutes, and I can sit down and have fun right now.

The best praise that I have for any game is that it says what it does and it does what it says. Dogs in the Vineyard says you’re God’s Watchdogs and hands you gameplay about judgment and making things right. Capes asks “Power is fun, but do you deserve it?” and then makes you prove that you’re worth the power. The thing of it is, using the word “story” to describe gameplay makes all of that collapse into a heap. It does not communicate anything, and consequently, players have little expectations or more likely incorrect expectations — which makes it difficult-to-impossible to fulfill those expectations.

So ditch “story”. Get rid of it for a week or so. See what the world looks like without that tint to your glasses. I’m betting that things will take on a much sharper focus, things will be clearer, and most importantly, you will be better able to talk about those things in sharper, clearer terms.

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* The other thirteen will tell you that they “love the setting” (5), “like the feel of the crazy dice shapes” (3), tell you what Creative Agenda they “are” (3), or tell you how Forge theory is stupid and never actually answer the question (2). Needless to say, all of these numbers are illustrative bullshit.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 12:53 pm and is filed under Gaming Culture, Publishing, RPG Theory. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.