My Storytelling Guide Companion: My Storytelling Guides, #2

By Aron Christensen and Erica Lindquist

My players asked me how I ran my games and what made them work, so I wrote a book. Then they asked for specific examples and ideas, so I wrote another one.

This companion to My Guide to RPG Storytelling goes deeper into creating in-game crises, with lists of example scenarios and twists. The second half covers using voices, mannerisms, and archetypes to create NPCs, including some of the most memorable NPCs from my own games and what made them work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loose Leaf Stories
• Release date: Oct 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781643190044

Aron Christensen

Erica and Aron are the science fiction and fantasy authors of the Reforged Trilogy, In the House of Five Dragons and the recently completed Dead Beat occult detective serial. Their short fiction has appeared in eFiction and Abomination magazine. They also write paranormal adventure erotica under the porn names of Natalie and Eric Severine. Aron and Erica live together in Sacramento, California, but miss the dark pines and deep snow of the mountains. Their education included medicine, biology, psychology, criminal justice, anthropology, art, martial arts and journalism before they finally fell in love with writing fiction. Now they can’t quite remember why they bothered with all of that other stuff.

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Part 1: About Crises

What is a crisis in the context of a role-playing game? Well, when it’s time for combat, all of the players roll initiative, then the player characters and their opponents start rolling attacks and defenses. A combat scene that lasts a minute and a half of in-game time may take an hour to play out.

But a life-saving surgery or disarming a bomb usually comes down to a single roll or two. It’s all over in ten seconds, even though in-game, that kind of exciting heroic action could take hours. Why should field surgery, computer hacking, mountain climbing or card sharping be any less exciting than combat in a role-playing game? That’s exactly what crisis scenes are for.

I worked on creating non-combat crises for my games and now when my friends watch a movie and someone falls off a rooftop or crashes their car, they joke that the movie characters just failed one of their crisis checks. I like to think of crises as skill challenges with a shot of adrenalin. Instead of resolving picking a lock with a single roll, a crisis makes it more exciting by doing it in the middle of a fire­fight, or a fire, or at least breaking down the steps into an ap­propriate variety of rolls. A crisis scene is a way to add some oomph to things the player characters (PCs) do outside of combat.

USING CRISES

So when do you use a crisis? If your characters are just picking the lock on a suburban front door, that probably doesn’t re­quire three or four rolls. Don’t worry about crises for simple actions or things that don’t affect the story. Kicking in the enemy’s door might be a single roll before a combat scene – or forget the roll and let it just be flavor. But picking the lock on a secured storage room door be­fore the patrolling guards can finish their circuit and discover the characters deserves more than a single die roll.

A crisis can be the focus of a scene all by itself, and many crises rightfully deserve to take center stage or even be the climax of an adventure. But they can also serve supporting roles in a scene. If your player group is on their way to a climactic confrontation with the main villain, you could make them fight through several com­bats before the big one.

But instead of fight after fight, why not replace a combat or two with a challenging climb up the slopes of the bad guy’s volcano lair or navigating a trap-filled maze? Not only can crises serve to amp up your players and raise the tension level, but successive combats get repetitive after a while and crises can keep your role-playing game dynamic.

Those crises also serve the same purpose as combat. Take that daunting climb up the slope of a volcano. The characters must cling to scorching stone that might crumble under their fingers, threaten to spill them hundreds of feet, and have to avoid raining embers or leap across a river of lava. The cost of failing these rolls? Hit point damage, usually. And you know the players will be expending their resources to gain whatever bonuses they can to avoid dying in a fire, so the net result is the same as having put them through a combat: they take some damage, they blow some of their resources and use up some powers.

But what do you think they will remember when the campaign is over? Fighting ten identical orcs in a cave before taking down the necro­mancer? Or that time Jeff almost melted his face off in lava as they scaled the necromancer’s huge volcano? Crises shouldn’t re­place all combats, but they can soften the PCs up to make the next fight scene more challenging. They change up the pace of game, too, and make for some great memories.

While crisis scenes can serve the same function as combats, they offer as much or more role-playing opportunity for your player group. When a player has to make quick decisions, they’re forced to step out of their head and into their character’s. And succeed or fail, when the crisis is over, they have to live with the consequences. Did they resuscitate the prince after he was poisoned and he’s now in­debted to the character? Or did they fail, leaving the character to deal with the grief and enmity of the royal family?

How many fight scenes give you that kind of opportunity for role-playing? Not many, but that’s what we’ve got crises for.

Doomed to failure or guaranteed success

In a standard RPG dice roll, Jeff succeeds the athletics skill check and makes the climb up that volcano or else fails and falls on his face. But what if your story requires Jeff to make that climb and he fails the roll? Does the story just come to a halt? Does Jeff have to make the same roll over and over until he finally succeeds?

I weave character arcs into my stories and encourage players to invest in their characters. I hate to see that stopped short by a bad die roll or two, to say nothing of losing a whole player party and not getting to Story­tell the epic confrontation that I had planned for so long. So in crises, I often create failures other than failure.

What does that mean? Well, Jeff fails his climbing roll. Does he fall to his gruesome death? Probably not. If Jeff dies, he’ll never live to find out that the necromancer is his father and I’m really looking forward to the look on his face. So instead, Jeff jumps from one jagged outcropping of stone to the next, but on that failed roll, he succeeds the jump only by grabbing onto a scalding hot rock and burning his hand. Jeff fails the roll, but lands the jump and takes some damage. The story can move on and now it’s time for some daddy issues.

When building toward the climax of the chapter or the whole story, I’m more likely to escalate the consequences of failure in a crisis. Maybe Jeff falls on his failed athletics rolls, but I’ll probably give him a chance to catch himself on a ledge further down, taking some damage and maybe resulting in an extra roll to climb back up. Or another character might try to grab Jeff as he falls. If his friends biff it, not only does Jeff still fall, but their failed roll might en­danger or damage them, as well.

But if the whole party aces their rolls, they reach the top of the mountain and feel badass for not taking any damage at all, even if they had to burn some resources to pull it off.

If everyone rolls terribly, they still reach the top of the mountain and feel badass because they survived to stand battered but trium­phant at the summit. In order for the story to progress, I need the players to reach the top. So the crisis doesn’t determine whether or not they make the climb, but what shape they are in when they reach the top.

So when can characters truly fail a crisis? When I don’t need them to succeed in order to further the story. Let’s say my group has crossed those mountains at last. Now they’ve rented some rooms in the town on the other side and are resting up when a thief makes off with a sack of their supplies. I make them run across rooftops, jump between buildings, and narrowly cross a rickety bridge as they chase the thief down.

Now, this is nearly the same crisis as if the characters were chasing down an antagonist with vital, plot-relevant information. But since the stakes are only a bag of rations and a few canteens, I can let the player characters fail. Jeff and the others jump the gap between two buildings, but the bridge crumbles away from the rotting old masonry. The characters fail their roll and fall. The thief gets away, but the story can move on. Better luck next time.

SOLO & GROUP CRISES

In most role-playing games, you have a group of players and they do the majority of scenes together. Role-playing is a group activity, a team sport. Sometimes crises are going to involve the whole group by nature: the party is crossing a bridge when the villain sets it on fire behind them. The player characters run from the flames, cling to blackening spars as the bridge burns through and collapses, then climb up the other side together. But crises are a great way to highlight a single character’s special skills for a few minutes, too, and make them feel cool without sidelining the rest of the group for long periods.

So if the group crises are obvious, when should a crisis focus on just one character? When they have a special skill set. I encourage my players to create reasonably specialized characters just for this reason.

Let’s say one of my players has rolled up a sailor. You can damn well bet that at least once – probably more like every chapter or two, if I can