The Blog of Roon

Well, phew. That’ll do for now. As long as the NCSU people don’t use IE5.

So now I can talk about stories. Stories are lovely things. Collective stories, when they work, are lovelier still.

Making them work is not easy. I don’t think it’s coincidence that most of the better fluff—in a literary, this-story-hangs-together sense—that have come out of my games have come from smaller games, or from side-avenues the main game never explored. It’s just downright hard to pull a story together when six or eight people are dragging it in different directions.

How to do it, then? Awareness, I suppose. Building a character who is incomplete, unfinished, to begin with, someone who has someplace to go and a better self to grow into. Ensuring that that character leans on the others to cover what she lacks, and allows herself in turn to be leaned on. Seeing the shape of the larger story, and helping that shape emerge.

Because the GM controls the world and many of the events in it, the GM is often thought to be uniquely responsible for the story-ness of a campaign. This is, of course, an overstatement. The GM can ruin a story, to be sure, dropping threads or keeping a campaign relentlessly episodic. Players can ruin it too, though, and all too often they do so by advancing their own character at the expense of everyone and everything else. The story that comes from an RPG must be collective, or it will not be a story at all.

The resulting stories don’t usually have the nice, neat structures that lit-critters love. They’re more like Arabian Nights confections, tall towers of untruth with weird spiral staircases within and without, resting on shaky foundations. They are, however, no less enjoyable for that.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 5th, 2003 at 6:28 pm and is filed under Gaming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.