Apathy Games

The Myth of Collaboritive Storytelling

Written by Jeff Carlsen on 2010/01/19 – 00:00 -

You’ve heard it before. Roleplaying is storytelling with friends. As both a writer and a Game Master, I can tell you that that is a lie.

Storytelling, as is apparent in the structure of the word, is about the telling. It requires an audience, and the entire focus of the craft is on pleasing the audience. In fact, self indulgence on the part of the author can ruin a story.

But roleplaying is entirely about self indulgence. That’s because the target of the story is the people playing. So by that logic, Roleplaying is collaborative story-living.

Collaboritive Storyliving

Knowing that the goal of roleplaying differs from that of storytelling is key to finding what works and what doesn’t. The rules change.

The first rule that changes is that outcomes are rarely pre-determined. In a novel of a movie, despite the tension of a scene, you can be relatively confident that the protagonist is not going to die, or that the antagonist will only go down as part of the climax. In roleplaying, nothing is certain. The players are going to try to accomplish their goals, and sometimes will completely break any pre-built story structure. And sometimes, no matter how well things are planned, characters will die. In fact, uncertainty is key to the game.

And it has to be this way. Because the players are deriving their enjoyment from the moment, not from the overall story.

Think back on some of your favorite campaigns. It’s not the story you think about, but the greatest moments. Good roleplaying, funny jokes, incredibly unlikely rolls. Or perhaps the moment your character got incinerated by a dragon.

Elements of Structure

This doesn’t mean that a game isn’t made better by a sense of cohesiveness in story. Some of the same elements still come into play. Primarily, motivation and conflict. Just as these are the driving forces of any story, they are the driving forces of roleplaying.

Other factors include theme and tone. All of these, used effectively, create verisimilitude, a very large word that essentially says that the world is brought to life and feels real, which is the penultimate goal of roleplaying (the ultimate goal is to have fun, but that’s both a vague and obvious point).

The goal of this article is not to explain how to use these things. Volumes could be written on the subject (and have been). Instead, the point is to firmly establish your goals when you start studying elements of storytelling to improve your game. There’s value to be found, if you keep in mind that it’s all about the living, not the telling.

Tags: jeff carlsen, story telling, storyliving
Categories: Game Masters |
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