Role-playing games are not stories.

This is a position with which many game masters and game designers disagree. This misunderstanding by designers and game masters is why most published adventures suck.

It is why most published campaigns, adventures and supplement books fail at being game supplements.

Games have elements which are similar to stories. Both have heros, villains, settings and conflict but the difference is that at the moment the game is happening, it is a game.

The telling of the events after the game is over is the story.

One of my favorite memoirs about the Vietnam War is We Were Soldiers Once… and Young by Joe Galloway. 

It describes the events of two battles in the Ia Drang Valley in 1965. When the battles were happening they were battles. Joe Galloway came home and wrote a book about what happened in those battles. That book was the story of what happened during those battles.

If Colonel Hal Moore was writing a novel about a battle, he might think, “This is the second act turn. I’ve hit the obligatory “all is lost” story beat and now I need to come up with something heroic to get these boys out of trouble and come to the climax.”

In reality, he was the commanding officer of an Army unit in a deadly situation. What he thought was probably more like, “We just got our asses handed to us on Bravo Company’s section of the line. There are way more NVA here than intelligence thought. I better concentrate my forces on that creek bed, call for air support, and hope the artillery can keep putting fire on the hill or we’re all going to die. Where the fuck are the medevac and ammo supply choppers?”

Role-playing games are more like fighting a battle than telling a story.

If a game master decides that the outcome of an encounter has to have a certain outcome even though the players make choices that would make it go a different way then they are telling “their story.”

If the game master simply decides, what resources the bad guys have, what the bad guys are doing to thwart the desires and intents of the players and the players can decide what to do about it. That’s a game.

There’s no concern for creating a “satisfying narrative”, which usually isn’t what happens when you are actively trying to create one. The game is about creating a situation and deciding what the characters do about it.

Paradoxically , when you just let the game be a game, the “story” that you tell after the fact is often much better.

When you are sitting at the table rolling dice, that’s a game.  When you are telling your friend who missed the last session what happened,  then you are telling the story of the game.