Loaded Dice 5: My Storytelling Guides, #8

By Aron Christensen and Erica Lindquist

Hello and welcome back to our fifth volume of Loaded Dice! How did we get to five of these things? Thank you to everyone who reads our blog and these collections of our favorite articles.

 

By now, you know the deal. Loaded Dice 5 has the all usual sections on Storytelling, plotting and pacing your RPG, non-player characters (NPCs), juggling game rules and mechanics, and advice for players about creating characters and then playing them in a team sport like role-playing games. So let's play!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loose Leaf Stories
• Release date: Mar 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781643190778

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.

Book preview

PART ONE

ABOUT STORYTELLING

HOW TO TELL WHAT’S STRANGE IN AN RPG WORLD

– BY ARON –

The party enters the city of Phylota, which you’ve painstakingly crafted and filled up pages of notes about. You dive into narrating the busy city streets, exotic shops, and the wondrous people, aliens and strange species that the characters have never seen before. The air is full of mysterious new languages and the scents of… food? Is that food, or some kind of savory perfume? Who knows, but Phylota is a bright new and exotic location to learn about and explore!

…And your players just shrug and ask where to find the nearest bar. Why aren’t they gasping at all the new sights that you spent so long working on or reacting to the strange denizens?

When we play an RPG, we dive into a fictional world and one that’s often already very fantastical. Some near-future sci-fi or urban fantasy might be pretty close to the real world that we (have to) live in, but role-playing campaigns just as often involve zipping between planets on a spaceship, or stepping through a magical portal into another plane of existence. Buying potions from a bipedal bear is just another Tuesday.

What is normal or strange in the world of an RPG is up in the air and can’t be taken for granted. By establishing exactly what’s normal, you leave yourself room to create something strange and unusual.

WHAT IS NORMAL, ANYWAY?

Normal is anything you want the players to take for granted in the game world: the species and people of a setting, places and things that they know, and customs that they are familiar with. In an urban fantasy game, it’s fair to assume that there are cars and cell phones – but in a fantasy setting, are there steam-powered wagons or magical trains? Does everyone have a Sending Stone in their pocket that they check when they should be concentrating on riding their griffon? In those games that take place on an Earth not too different from our own, there’s going to be plenty of safe assumptions, but fantasy or science fiction games will have assumptions as well. We’ve all read or watched Lord of the Rings too many times to avoid it.

The door of the tavern bangs open and an orc eclipses the light from the street outside! In Middle Earth, this is a very bad thing and probably means that there’s going to be bloodshed. But in Eberron, orcs are an ancient race with a civilization that predates just about any of humanity’s kingdoms. They are devoted to protecting the land from the horrors sealed away in the twisted labyrinth of Khyber, so their arrival at the tavern probably just means they want a drink.

Between RPG settings, there are a lot of those kinds of differences and your players’ experience will shape those expectations. A Tolkein buff who doesn’t know Eberron will probably grab their sword when they see an orc, while someone who grew up playing Eberron will react differently – even if they’re both wrong about orcs in the setting you’re running. Most of their assumptions are unconscious, so players generally don’t even know they have them. (Hey, neither do Storytellers.)

SO HOW DO I SHOW WHAT’S NORMAL?

Start with a table talk and set expectations. If you’re inspired by popular retro television or streaming show and are running a game in the 80s, it’s worth reminding your players that there are no cell phones – a lot of the series would be very different if the kids just had phones in their pockets – and the internet isn’t really available. If you’re running a fantasy game in which dragons are simply a part of the society instead of remote and dangerous beings, then tell everyone that dragons have settled amongst the mortal races of this world. It’ll save them some freak-outs down the road when one flies overhead.

A dossier on the game world and the things in it can be helpful, but putting one together can be a major endeavor, and not every Storyteller has time to create that kind of documentation. And not every player will have the time or inclination to read a bunch of notes. So beyond your table talk, the Storyteller is most often the one who gets to show what’s normal as you narrate and play NPCs.

Maybe an NPC directs the party to go find a sage who has the in­formation they need for their quest and says, Don’t go to Grahlk the red dragon. He’s a jerk. But the green dragon Melenach should have copies of the scrolls you need. The NPC is casual in their statement, which indicates to the players that the existence of dragons isn’t abnormal. They’re told to avoid a dragon – but not because he’s a dragon, just because he’s an asshole. You might describe a dragon walking down the street and then arguing with someone who steps on their tail. The fact that the person who stepped on their tail hasn’t been reduced to a pile of cinders and argues that the dragon was wagging it too much tells the players that dragons and mortals live on more equal footing here.

Maybe the world doesn’t even have dragons – not that anyone knows about, at least. Then if you tell them one is swooping over the party, most likely they’ll react based on their out-of-game experience and knowledge. It’s ingrained, it’s often unconscious, and because that’s what they expect. Even if you drove the point in the table talk that there aren’t dragons in this setting, then you’re still fighting all of their expectations.

So describe this new detail like it’s strange. "You see something you’ve never witnessed before. It’s large and scaled, like a lizard grown to frightening proportions. And it’s winged, impossibly soaring despite its bulk. It lands on the hilltop and arches a long neck to peer down at you and when it opens its mouth it speaks. Not growling or snarling, but words in your own language!" Now the players know that they’re facing a dragon, but also that this is highly unusual. Cue brown pants time.

And there’s always straight up telling your players what’s normal and what’s not. A Storyteller can just say your character would know that… and then fill in whatever they need to be aware of. Everyone in the tavern is knocking on their chairs and tables before they sit and when the players all stare, you can let them know that their hometown has a history of mimic problems. Their neighbors are testing to make sure that their chair won’t eat them while they have an ale. Or you can call out this behavior as strange. Your character has never seen anything like this before. Maybe there’s something in that ale…?

You can also show whether or not something is strange in your campaign by modeling that behavior with NPCs. If that orc barges into the tavern, does the bartender grab the axe off the mantle or do patrons dive for cover? Or does the piano player not even miss a note and the whole bar shouts Norm! when the orc appears? How other people react to your game world will tell the players a lot about it.

I’M A PLAYER. HOW DO I FIGURE OUT IF THIS IS NORMAL?

Maybe you missed the table talk or you’ve played so many RPGs that you’re not sure what this one is supposed to be like, and what you’re carrying over from some other game. If you’re not sure, you can ask how the rest of the world is reacting. When a dragon soars over the town, ask what the other people on the street are doing. If the Storyteller says they run in terror, you have one answer. If they act like they’re getting on the bus, then you have a very different answer – and get on quickly, you don’t want to get stuck with a tail seat!

If the party’s out in the wilderness with nary an NPC in sight to clue off of, then you can just ask the Storyteller point-blank if the ogre that’s just walked out of the bushes is normal along this road.

Role-playing is about diving into a fantasy world! There’s going to be differences and everyone at the table – Storyteller and player alike – will add their own touches to help flesh out the setting. Establishing what is normal and adding strangeness are part of both world-building and collaboratively exploring the setting. Put that stuff out for the group to consider and ask questions so that you can dive into something new, free of assumptions.

NO BUT

– BY ARON –

Yes And is the first and most important rule of improv acting – and role-playing games are 90% improv. The Storyteller might have a plot planned, but they have to be ready to react and respond to what the players do in that story. And the players themselves are constantly reacting to the story, NPCs, and each other. Shutting the players down is a recipe for making players unhappy – especially if it’s an ongoing issue, so saying yes and playing off of everyone’s con­tributions is a vital skill for both Storytellers and players.

But there’s another half to Yes And – No But. It’s a rule of improv and writing both, and something worth any Storyteller’s time to cultivate. Storytellers can’t allow the players to do everything that they want. To quote the movie Tombstone, We got to have some law. The reason that player characters have stats and character sheets is to de­fine what they can and can’t do, so we’ve all agreed already that there are boundaries. It’s not unreasonable for the Storyteller to put some limits on things.

Obviously, we still don’t want to make a habit of shutting players down. It’s become an entire trope in online gaming to tell them you can certainly try. It’s a way of saying that players can attempt anything that they want, but can’t expect to actually pull off every single idea. There’s a chance to succeed, at a high difficulty; but hey, head’s up, those chances are slim.

Why is No But so important, though, when Yes And is the most common advice? Because the players’ ability to act within the game world is important, but so is acknowledging the limitations of the world and game. Storytellers have to balance giving the players freedom and agency, keeping a story arc on track and… basically making sense of the game and plot.

I’m Costorytelling a game with my friend and we planned a story arc in which the party gets embroiled in some deadly legal trouble. We have a courtroom drama scene all set up, with witnesses, drama, and a bunch of other awesome stuff. It’s a nice break from all of the dungeon-crawling and monster-fighting, plus we get to be in a real Law & Order-style crisis scene! One of our characters even has an official rank, and she was going to be named as our council so that she could call wit­nesses and question them, object to things; the whole shebang.

But as soon as our legally-challenged character got arrested, he asked for a lawyer and our Storyteller Yes And-ed the shit out of that. Yes, there’s a lawyer! He came up with a name, described how the man looked and acted, spoke in character. Yes, the lawyer would help us build a case and then present it in court… While all of the player characters sit on the sidelines and watch.

After the game session, he talked to me as Costoryteller for help, because he had painted himself into a corner. His Yes And lawyer now gets to call and question witnesses, object to things, and do all of the things that we had planned for the player characters. And because the lawyer, the prosecution, the judge, and most of the witnesses are all NPCs, he set himself up to spend an entire session talking to himself. By saying Yes And at the wrong time, he accidentally took all the agency out of the players’ hands.

Here’s where No But comes in. Can we have a lawyer? the player asks. The Storyteller answers, No, but… as an official of the city, another player character has the rank to represent you in court! It moves the agency back into the players hands and basically the party still gets a lawyer; but one of the player characters gets to fill that role now.

The thing that Storytellers need to remember is that Yes And is for everyone at the table – the players are supposed to Yes And the Storyteller, too! The Storyteller gives them constraints, throws challenges at them (like the absence of lawyers), and lets them react and play off it. It’s not the Storyteller’s job to always be the one reacting, and being on your back foot constantly like that is exhausting. If nothing else, lob the ball into the players’ court for a while so that you can catch your breath. And remember that the players want to react to your plot and world! That’s the whole point of being the player. They need challenges and barriers so they have to get creative.

Yes And and No But are the