How to Keep your Campaign Personal

Written by Tyson J. Hayes on 2010/02/19 – 00:00 -

We can offer you all the tools in the world, but are they worth it if the game isn’t engaging? How do you make sure that your game has a personal touch and speaks to all of your players?

Don’t Plan Ahead

Focus instead on the here and now. What are the important tasks that need to be accomplished in a given session in order to drive the story forward? Now that you have that what would be the most fun way to get there? Come up with a couple of loose ideas and leave it there. Your players will chose what interests them and you’ll come up with the details from there.

Focus on the Players

If you allow them your players will always tell a more interesting story then you ever will. Paul related to me that one of his players, during play testing for our game, came up with far more interesting ideas for how things we done then we ever did. So we changed the game. By focusing on the players and allowing them to participate in the story-living we created a better campaign.

Tell Interesting Stories

While a bit of a duh it is important to make sure that all of your players are engaged. If you are focused on them and letting them the story as well this should be simple. If they need prodding check their character background, likely they’ll have a plethora of stories that can be pulled and extrapolated on. Another approach is having your players write some in-character fiction. Pull some of the characters they came up with and flesh them out as NPCs. This will keep everything nicely tied into the story as well as keeping it personal to the player.

What have you done to keep your campaigns more personal and relevant?


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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.


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