Jeff Jones invited me to appear on his RPG Rambling podcast a few weeks back. He noticed I was posting on social media about a local writing conference and he had questions.

Here is the link to the podcast episode.

Jeff was wondering what lessons I had learned from creative writing classes and conferences that applied to tabletop role-playing games. We went off on some interesting tangents and I don’t know that I ever truly answered the question. I revisit the main question in this post.

Understanding story convinced me that stories and games are not the same thing.

Once I started looking into how skilled storytellers think about and work on stories ; I saw clearly that games and storytelling are very different things in practice. The technique of storytelling is hidden behind a curtain like the mechanisms of a magicians trick. We only see the lovely assistant sawn in half.

Since the output between story and game feels almost indistinguishable, we don’t realize they are different.

A lot of gamemastering advice givers come at story from the point of view of a story’s audience. From that perspective, games and stories seem to be the same thing. Role-playing games often feel the same way a good book or a good movie feels. Our brains are using the same meat to process both games and stories. That’s not how screenwriters, novelists, and other creators of story (skilled one’s anyway) experience stories or build them.

Stories and role-playing games have very similar structures and produce similar emotional effects but they are not the same thing nor are they constructed the same way.

Professional storytellers are doing something different. Here is a short video illuminating one way in which creating a story and creating an adventure are very different in practice.

Is this what you do when you play through an encounter?

Great game masters tell stories but only to create context and describe outcomes.

The storytelling skills that are most relevant to game mastering are those applied to telling stories to the players, not telling the story of the player characters.

The game master creates the story of what happens before the player characters get involved. Once the crucial moment occurs, players making choices in the role of their characters, then you are playing the game. If the game master imposes outcomes regardless of player character choices and the results of the game’s mechanisms, then they are abandoning game play for storytelling. This turns the game into a story.

Player choices having consequential outcomes are what makes the game a game.

The rules, the players, the dice decide what happens and the GM only intrudes into the outcome when rulings on player actions are necessary to fill rule gaps.

The results produced by the game mechanisms are communicated to the players using narrative which makes the game seem like a story. The game master applies the rules and then tells the players what happens in story form but it wasn’t a story that created those outcomes. The game did.

Hence, a game master is a storyteller but there are moments when storytelling is appropriate, and moments when it is not. Knowing when to tell a story is perhaps more important than knowing how to tell a story.

Storytelling skills can enhance the gameplay experience if they are applied at the right time.

Techniques from storytellers that are useful for game masters.

Many story skills are useful for game masters. Though I don’t always call it out, several of my blog posts are about using techniques I learned from storytelling classes and books.

Here are some blog posts where I share some of these skills.

• How to describe a scene by showing and not telling.
• How to build NPCs that elicit an emotional responses from players.
• How to deliver exposition without boring the players.
• Characters reveal themselves through word and action.
• Inserting themes into your campaign.
• A technique I learned from a screenwriter to avoid cliches
• The Dramatic Question and game mechanics
• Fixing A Game Using The Dramatic Question

Some storytelling resources.

Story Grid was created by Shawn Coyne, a fiction editor who worked at a Big 5 publisher for 30 years. He gives a great overview of the structure of stories.

Shawn has a book I refer back to from time to time. The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know If you only read one book on storytelling and have no interest in writing novels or screenplays, I recommend Shawn’s book. It will give you tools to assess stories and your adventures.

The Film Courage YouTube channel interviews people in the film and TV biz. I find that screenwriters are able to communicate story concepts better than most writing teachers.

Wizardry & Wild Romance by Michael Moorcock. More literary theory than storytelling but still useful for any game master who runs OSR games.

How to Write Science Fiction & Fantasy by Orson Scott Card

Here’s a bonus exercise.

Here’s an opportunity for audience participation.

Screen and TV writer Glen Gers breaks stories into 6 essential questions.

Based on what Glen has to say, Do you think that my statement that an adventure is not a story holds any water?

If I’m wrong, tell me why.