Emotion in role-playing games is a topic I mention in passing from time to time. It is one of the most important topics for game masters to understand and learn. Yet, almost nobody talks about why or how to produce emotions outside of horror games like Call of Cthulu, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Role-Playing.

Role-playing games are unique for their capacity to evoke a wide range of emotions, profoundly influencing players’ decisions. This emotional aspect makes role-playing games memorable and engaging. The most successful game designers focus heavily on triggering these emotional responses.

This post will be a beginning place for an exploration of this concept and why it is a priority in my own design and game mastering.

We play because of feelings

When I write a recommendation for a game product, a book, a film, an album; it is because I get the feeling I want from the experience. With the scholarly material there is more reason and rationality involved. For everything else, it’s about how the work makes me feel.

Even when I praise a game book for it’s information organization its because the organization of the stat block stays out of the way of the feeling that the NPCs or monsters generate when I’m playing them at the table.

We choose which games we play based on feelings. We like to rationalize about this mechanism is elegant, or bounded accuracy this, and diegetic integration that. When it comes down to it, we play certain games and like certain adventure scenarios because we feel good about the experience.

Enjoyment is a feeling.

We play because we get some desirable emotional result from playing that game. Whether you are playing purely for fun or you are playing a Nordic LARP that has the express purpose of creating emotional discomfort to explore a difficult social issue; you are playing because you want whatever feeling the game produces.

Thought experiment. You have two choices of games that you can play.

You have to pick based only on the cover.

You could play this.

Or, you could play this.

Which one do you want to play?

Is there a feeling involved in that answer?

Emotion drives choice

One of the most successful sessions I ran at Gamehole Con was an introduction to Hogwater, the bottom up sandbox campaign seed I’ve been taking too long to complete. I ran the session as if it were the first session of a campaign. I described the town as the players entered it, gave them hooks to adventures and they picked what they wanted to do.

It was more fun than I anticipated and I got a lot of good feedback from the players.

There are several factions in Hogwater. The largest faction are the peasants. They are the weakest faction and have the the least to offer player characters in terms of experience points. They have very little money. They have no magic. Acting in the interests of the peasants creates enmity with other factions who do have money, and magic.

The party met the local reeve who told them about problems the town was facing. He sent them to meet the local lord’s steward who also offered them work. There were gold and experience point incentives in the hooks. Bounties for killing monsters, a large reward for capturing or killing a bandit leader, a reward for recovering money stolen by a runaway servant.

The party set those hooks aside and opted to track an ogre who had stolen some sheep. The reeve had mentioned it but really wanted the party to go see about the runaway servant. Something about a farmer who had the best pigs around was involved.

When the adventurers returned to town with the head of the dead ogre, the peasants threw a party. The villagers roasted meat, shared their ale, and touted the characters as heroes of the people. I played it up. The smiles and laughter around the table told me I had the players hooked.

The next mini-adventure they chose was to investigate the disappearance of a peasant. His widow had become mute and mentally disturbed from witnessing the death of her husband. She had nothing to offer them. No gold. No magic. She was homeless and living on the charity of the villagers. She couldn’t even talk.

The other peasants in town told the characters her sad story and the party acted on it.

Why?

It wasn’t the rational maximization of utility which sparked that choice.

It wasn’t experience points and it wasn’t gold pieces.

It felt good to do good.

The other hooks had substantial financial incentives attached. Bounties for the capture of a bandit. A hefty reward for returning a runaway servant who stole money from the lord of the demesne.

The players weren’t calculating whether they had enough XP to level up or if they had enough money to buy plate armor when they decided to help the poor peasant woman.

They did it for a different reason. They felt better about taking on that adventure over the other ones.

The players cared because they had, however contrived it might seem, a feeling about the peasant NPCs and the situation they faced. This was despite the fact that those people don’t exist and neither did the player characters.

We succeeded in creating a moment that felt like they were real, even if was just momentary.

RPGs compared to boardgames

The ability of RPGs to evoke a broad array emotions is one characteristic that makes them different from other forms of tabletop gaming.

One way you can tell if something had a deep emotional impact on you is if you can remember details about the event. Long term memory formation is partly driven by the emotional impact an event has on a person.

I’ve played the board game Discworld Ankh Morpork at least 100 times. It’s an amusing and enjoyable game. My family likes it very much. I can’t provide you with a narrative of any one time we’ve played it. I have a general notion of certain playthroughs because they were noteworthy for their rarity.

Contrast that with my experience of RPGs. I could talk for days about different events, adventures and characters from 20 years ago. So could the other people playing those games. They were memorable because they hit us in our gut. Right in the emotional center.

Conclusion

Role-playing games are special.

They are special in ways that solving a puzzle, finding the mathematically optimal strategy, or defeating a difficult opponent with a higher rating can never be.

Role-playing games are special because they tap into the deepest places of our psyche. They invoke the feelings that only come from the emotional center of what it means to be a person.

We play these games because they reliably produce feelings which very few experiences produce.

The best game designers and game masters are aware of this and train themselves to create games and scenarios for games that are most likely to invoke those emotions.