Loaded Dice 6: My Storytelling Guides, #9

By Aron Christensen and Erica Lindquist

After six years of writing for The RPGuide, we've talked a lot about running and playing role-playing games. Thank you for reading all this time!

 

This is a collection of our best and favorite articles from year six of RPGuide posts. It includes sections on Storytelling, plotting and pacing your RPG, non-player characters (NPCs), game rules and mechanics, and advice for players to create characters and then play them in a team sport like RPGs.

 

Whether you're new to role-playing games or have been gaming for years, come learn from our mistakes and take advantage of our experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Loose Leaf Stories
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781643190792

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

NO ONE FIX

We talk a lot about our gaming and the issues that we’ve seen, about how we fix them or get around them. But there are so many different things that have come across our blog. And it’s important to remember that no one answer will fix everything in a role-playing game.

Every single table is different. Each Storyteller and player is different, so take any advice with a grain of salt. Maybe some of it will be useful, maybe some of it will just get your mind moving toward your own solution and awesome next game session. Make your game the game you want to enjoy.

But, if I could boil it all down into any one piece of advice, it would be this – communicate. That’s how you find the fix for your specific table and make the tweaks to enhance your group’s gaming.

PART ONE

ABOUT STORYTELLING

ROLE-PLAYING MAKES US ALL CHILDREN

– BY ARON –

I know most of us are adults, many middle-aged, but this goes for older and younger. I’ve never been at or seen a table where it doesn’t happen. When we play TTRPGs, we all turn into absolute children. Fart jokes, infantile snickering at accidental double entendres, and generally being rambunctious little kids.

Why? Why does a man in his forties with a decidedly grown-up job and an over-full basket of adult worries turn into a giggling child once he breaks out the dice? (The man in question is Aron, and it’s adorable.)

Aron and I have talked about this at length, and all we can figure is that it’s inherent to the nature of the game. We’re all just playing pretend. With rules and dice and maps, sure, but it’s still playing pretend.

Remember when we used to play pretend? When we were kids. We pretended to be superheroes and brave knights, aliens and mon­sters, kings and queens. Playing pretend is a kid thing – in all the best ways possible. So we all become kids when we play, and get to recapture some of that shine of childhood.

So if your table is getting just too wild and silly and rambunctious, go ahead and talk to them about focusing up so you can all game together. But remember that it’s a good sign when they’re being little kids. It means that you’ve given them that beautiful piece of childhood, and it’s a gift.

NO-WIN SCENARIOS

– BY ARON –

For half an RPG campaign, the players’ party has been battling a jerk trying to summon a terrible demon into the game world. In the mid-campaign climax, they assault the ritual in which the cultists are trying to open the portal. Dun-dun-dun!

But the critical words here are half the campaign, mid-campaign… There’s a whole second half of this game to go, in which the PCs fight against the demon and its army. But that doesn’t happen if they stop the mid-campaign ritual! This ritual needs to happen, the portal needs to open, and there’s nothing the players or their characters can do to stop it.

Well, that sucks.

I’m a story-first Storyteller (obviously), but putting the players in that kind of no-win scenario is… not ideal, to say the least. Deus ex machina, the stick-end of the carrot and stick, or the Storyteller Hammer are all names we use to talk about enforcing the story – but they can be really heavy handed.

Any time that you make the players feel like they have no choices, or that nothing they do can impact events, the entire point of RPGs is lost. What makes role-playing games unique among other stories is that the players get to influence events.

ADDING WINS TO A NO-WIN SCENARIO

If the story needs a certain plot beat to happen, how do you avoid the Storyteller Hammer? How do you ensure that this thing happens without railroading the players or taking away their agency? There’s a couple of methods that my table uses – and doubtlessly more that we haven’t thought of yet.

Use the carrot! What carrot, you might ask. The carrot is enticement, instead of punishment. Use the carrot to make the players want to go where you need them to. In my example, perhaps according to the lore they have uncovered, the characters learn that if the demon fully manifests, they can kill it permanently. In that case, they might allow the summoning to go forward in order to cleanse the cosmos of this evil. Which maybe comes back every hundred or thousand years, so they get the idea this is the only permanent win. I’m a big fan of the carrot, and I know my players well enough to use it effectively.

And then there’s the Xanatos Gambit. Check out the link, or even better, watch the Disney series Gargoyles – it’s awesome. The concept behind this gambit is that the villain has a plot, which the heroes thwart. But the villain actually wanted to lose that fight, accomplished some secondary goal while the player characters were busy thwarting them, or brilliantly pivot their failure into success. The PCs win and then the villain gets to say Joke’s on you, I’m into that. What this accomplishes for your story is giving you the ability to give your players the opportunity to win while also making sure the villain moves the plot forward.

You can flip it, too. If the Xanatos Gambit or the carrot isn’t doing the job or you need to use another tool, then maybe the villain succeeds in accomplishing their main goal – but make sure there are secondary goals that the characters do get to thwart. That way even in defeat, they get to tuck some wins under their belt. I like to say that PCs should win (almost) every battle, but lose the war.

Thwarting is important to players and their characters.

I’ll take an example from a shape-shifter game that I ran a few years back. The villain’s plot was to hijack several holy sites and use their power to summon a god-demon into the world. Each holy site was either under attack, being eroded by spiritual corruption, or something that suborned their power for this ritual. The PCs were sent to each place to aid the people there, cleansing the taint or acting as the calvary for embattled defenders or whatever.

At the climax of the game when the ritual was under way, the evil rite master was safe behind an impenetrable shield. No chance of stopping the ritual. But as the cultist called on the power of each holy place, she found that her grip on the power had been broken. She shouted out sites that were supposed to be hers, but now read like an awards show of the characters’ accomplishments. In the end, she only had one holy site under her control, and when she summoned the god-demon, he wasn’t so much a god as a kaiju that the player characters got to fight – and defeat!

To my knowledge, none of the players felt disempowered, railroaded, or ineffective. They got to feel how their actions affected the game and made victory possible.

These victories need to be tangible and they need to affect the game plot. If your PCs win battles against common bandits in random encounters, those are technically wins, but they don’t let the players influence the story. If they’re not influencing the story, then they don’t really have agency.

ADDING LOSSES TO WINNING SCENARIOS

But story stakes are important. You don’t want the player characters’ victories to make the villain seem powerless. Remember, the PCs should win every battle, but lose the war – right up until the end. Perhaps the villain is seeking an artifact needed to summon the demon, but the characters destroy or steal it or otherwise remove it from the equation. What’s a villain to do?

Give a speech. I tried to do this the easy way, to usher in a new, glorious age… But you made me do this the hard way! The villain then proceeds to summon the demon by doing something awful. Maybe it costs their own life, or that of their favorite lieutenant. The Big Bag still gets to do their thing, but the player characters feel like they made it so much harder on them – and that they can defeat the Big Bad.

CONSEQUENCES

The characters’ actions should have consequences, good and bad. If they steal everything that’s not nailed down, they might find themselves with a bounty on their heads and probably aren’t making a lot of NPC friends. Consequence! But their positive actions, their wins, should have consequences, too. They thwart the villain’s plans, so it changes the course of the story. Maybe the cultists now have to sacrifice themselves to open the portal.

These consequences need to be palpable, on screen and visible to the players. If the characters get themselves some wins but the ritual isn’t affected then… Well, what did they accomplish? Oh, something happened behind the scenes, or far away. Maybe the villain got mad and threw their coffee, but the players don’t get to see or enjoy them.

They’re left thinking that their wins changed nothing. Writers say that if it’s not on the page, it doesn’t exist. On the internet, it’s pics or it didn’t happen. It all amounts to the same thing: if the players and/ or the characters don’t know the effects that they’ve had, then it may as well not have happened at all.

AGENCY

The players need to have agency. If they can’t affect events, then that’s closer to reading a book or watching a movie; things just happen and even if they shout at the screen about the killer that’s right behind the character, it doesn’t change anything. Role-playing games are all about the ability to interact and change things! Their decisions and actions should impact and inform the plot.

If you need to make something specific happen, then use the carrot to get the players invested in the outcome that you want. Let the villain be defeated, but then give the Big Bad a secret victory on the side. (Maybe narrated in a cutscene.) Or let