In industries that buy stories, 99% of the submissions are rejected. Sometimes the stories are good but don’t fit the buyer. Most of the time, the story is the problem.
In the film business, the first person to read a script is a “reader.” Readers evaluate scripts and write a coverage report. Maybe 1 in 100 screenplays are recommended by a reader. Of those, maybe 1 in 10 ever gets made. These are screenplays submitted by professional screenwriters through agents, not hopeful newcomers.
Even professionals turn out junk. Considering the number of filters that the typical script has to go through, you’d think everything put out by a major studio would be genius, but it’s not.
Studios spend millions of dollars making films that are garbage. Veteran writers spend months or years getting the script just right. A string of readers, development executives, directors, producers read that script and decide it’s good enough to risk a huge pile of cash. Actors read the screenplay and decide its worth their time and reputation to appear in the film.
Hundreds of professional storytellers working together to make a $100,000,000 pile of dooky.
What does this have to do with role-playing games?
If you think the game is about “your story”, then you are in trouble.
Why? Because “your story” is probably shit.
Creating good stories is hard. Good stories require a lot of time and effort.
Storytellers bleed for years to learn how to create great stories.
If you haven’t spent the time working on the craft of story-creating, you are likely to create a story that a fanzine editor wouldn’t read for more than two paragraphs before tossing it in the bin.
If you love stories and want to be good at writing them then get writing. The act of creation by itself is worth the time and effort. You probably aren’t going to be any good at it at first and you’ll get better with experience.
But that doesn’t mean people playing in your games want to experience years of bad to mediocre gaming because you have a story to tell and decide the RPG table is where you are going to unleash it on the world.
I have good news.
Role-playing games aren’t stories. They are games.
The events that happen during play are events. Taken together after the game is over, those events can be conveyed as stories. Good stories, sometimes.
Trying to create a specific, scripted story through play rarely creates a good story and often wrecks what it means to play a game. The good news is that you don’t have to create a story to run a good game.
Create a situation with adversaries and obstacles the players need to overcome. Give the adversaries some resources, minions, advantages, weaknesses, personality flaws. Scribble out a few maps. That’s it.
That’s also not to say that RPGs don’t contain stories. Story-creating and storytelling are part of RPGs. It’s just not the part many role-playing game advice givers think it is. The game master’s story creation duties are largely found before and after the play session.
Story is used in tabletop RPGs as context or backstory which players can discover or use to make decisions during play. It is helpful, and often necessary, to make up a story about what happened before the PC’s arrive on the scene.
Sometimes, you don’t need to make up a story. You can create a whole adventure with a random generator. It may not be a great adventure but it will probably be serviceable. The crazy thing is that the players will perceive some pattern in the randomness and concoct a theory (a story) about the cause and effect of the adventure.
People invent stories to make meaning out of random events all the time. That’s how we get cargo cults and financial bubbles.
Stories have all kinds of complicated problems that can take months or years to work out. Theme, dialogue, scene sequences, five act structures, reversals and on and on.
When you play a tabletop role-playing game; treat it like a game and you might get a decent story.
If you try to make the game about “your” story, what you are likely to get is a bad game and a bad story.
Grumpy Wizard 
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I just discovered your blog, and I’m enjoying it!
I don’t exactly disagree with this, but I think it creates a strange message. Sure, most people are going to write bad stories, but most people are ALSO going to write bad games.
Being bad at something isn’t a good enough reason by itself not to do it.
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Hi Tyler! Thanks for reading my blog. I appreciate it and I appreciate that you took the time to comment.
I completely agree that being bad at something isn’t a good enough reason not to do it. The only way you go progress from Shit to Suck is to practice the thing you are bad at. I have some more to say about that in one of my recent essays that I wrote for email list subscribers. If you’d like to read it you can get access by signing up for my newsletter. Link in the sidebar. The specific essay is called _Talent, Skill, and Success_.
Where I disagree is your assertion that most people are also going to write bad games. Specifically, bad campaigns and adventures. Adventures and campaigns are MUCH easier to create than a story. The game, that is the mechanics and the settings (implied or built in depending on the game) provide the structure of the adventure scenario and campaign.
The game master needs to provide 1) A Goal 2) An Obstacle 3) Interesting Decisions for the Players to Make. Then respond to the players decisions based on the characteristics of the NPCs, Monsters and the setting. And that is it. Super simple really. It does require a lot effort and time but it isn’t nearly as complicated and difficult as writing a story. Game designers and adventure scenario publishers like to make it seem harder than it is.
What I am getting at is… If a game master tries to write a story rather than treating the game like a game; They will almost always get a bad adventure scenario/campaign and a bad story. Even experienced game masters will create a bad adventures/campaigns this way.
If instead, they treat the game as a game, Then they are exponentially more likely to create a good (even if only satisfactory) game experience that produces stories that emerge from the experience of play. It is a weird paradox but good play produces good stories and good play is much easier to achieve than a good story if that is what you set out to produce in the beginning.
Thanks again for reading. I’m glad you enjoy it and I hope you get some useful ideas.
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Well, it’s nice to have a discussion, and I appreciate that we just might not see eye to eye on this. It’s good food for thought. I’m going to give one more stab at explaining my perspective.
We agree on the process of creating a good game: build an adventure or level or map or situation for players to play a game in. Stories are for reading or listening to!
However, I don’t think people are naturally better at creating game levels than creating stories. We learn to craft stories from a young age, and it’s an integral part of our social interactions and some of our academics. While we do craft game adventures as we develop, it’s much less of a focus, and there is often little guidance.
This is why people default to trying to create stories! It’s so much more natural. GM’s struggle to create non-story adventures and seek tons of help to find a way to make it easier. This is true in lots of games, not just rpg’s. You can see an overwhelming amount of badly designed levels for the video games that enable design and sharing within the game.
My point is just that the reason stories are bad for adventure design is not because of a certain writing skill level. They’re bad because they aren’t functional, even when they are excellent!
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I agree completely with your last sentence.
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