The falsehood that role-playing games are stories endures like an ancient wyrm atop its hoard.
The Grumpy Wizard abides in his striving against this mendacity.
I hypothesize that one of the reasons the “storytelling” myth persists is that both RPGs and stories produce powerful emotions.
Stories and games can feel the same but they have a crucial difference.
It’s a kind of magic…
Magicians do not alter reality with supernatural powers.
The art of magic is to make the experience of a trick feel like real magic when what they are doing is taking advantage of blind spots in human senses, attention, and cognition. To our brains, it doesn’t matter.
Unless you know how the trick works, it is indistinguishable from a supernatural ability.
We perceive it to be real magic even though it is just a trick.
Harrison’s astonishment feeds the idea that Blaine is doing something more.
“Watching the game” is an illusion.
We say, “I’m watching the football match,” but we aren’t. We are watching a moving image of the match projected on a screen. There are no tiny two dimensional players running across a pitch in your living room. There are no spectators screaming. There are no venders selling beer.
Unless you are in the stadium, you are not watching the game. It feels like you watching the game but you are not.
You are watching a broadcast of the game. Light arranged to reproduce the images captured by a camera hits your eyes. Your brain interprets those signals as “the game”, but that is not the game itself.
You feel the elation that comes when your team scores. You cheer! You jump to your feet!
That emotion feeds the illusion that you are “watching the game.”
Stories are illusions.
Filmmakers want you feel like you’ve been transported into the world of the film. The best films make you momentarily forget that you are sitting in a theater watching a movie.
A filmmaker produces realistic depictions coupled to masterful storytelling creating an illusion of being in the action.
Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opens with a scene of the Normandy D-Day landing.
We see Captain Miller leading his men up the beach. The explosions, the blood, and the confusion are visceral. The intensity of the experience makes the story feel real.
That scene felt so real that some of the men who fought on D-Day couldn’t watch more than a few minutes. It triggered the same terror they felt as they struggled up the beach on June 6, 1944. Many of them asked Spielberg how he knew what it was like to be there.
Role playing games can feel like stories
The game master narrates what happens in the game.
A voice actor narrates what happens in a story.
My experience of each narration is functionally the same. Soundwaves hit my ear. My brain interprets those sounds as meaningful. The interpreted meaning of those words may produce an involuntary response.
A gasp, tears, laughter, sadness, anger, excitement.
The narration might feel the same but the substance of that narration is differently created.
Events in a story happen because the storyteller decides what happens.
Events in a game happen because the rules and game master resolve the decisions of players in a dynamic model of a fictional world.
If I’m telling a story, my next choice must match the story I’m trying to tell even if it departs from the action I believe the NPC would likely take or the outcome that is most probable.
If I am running a game, I chose an NPC response I think that character would chose, even if the probable outcome will produce an “unsatisfying narrative.”
That is what makes stories and role-playing games different.
They may feel the same but they are not the same.
Games can have the same emotional power as stories
This is the crux of my thesis for game masters who believe that games are best when they are stories.
You want to give your players an amazing experience and you are certain the way to do that is to create a story for the players to act out.
If the game goes against your story then you ignore the game and stick with the story.
The result is, in 999 out of 1000 cases, a mediocre story and limited emotional impact.
You can do better if you accept the answers that the game produces.
Games with uncertain outcomes produce more intense emotional experiences than interactive stories with a predetermined plot.
I create interesting situations, apply the rules, let the system and the dice decide the outcome. Over the course of a long campaign, this produces meaning and emotion. I accept the outcomes the game produces.
I accept that characters might do evil deeds, that characters can die in minor skirmishes, the party might fail to achieve their objective, or a string of bad dice rolls can result in total party annihilation.
Those outcomes increase the emotional intensity of the game. That is what I’m after.
It is easier to produce amazing emotional experiences with a game than it is to create an amazing experience by telling the player character’s story.
I know a lot of gamers say they’ve had great “games” that were a story camouflaged as a game.
I’m not one of them. Not one railroady interactive narrative I’ve ever played in has been nearly as exciting as an open, dynamic, living world game. Not even close.
My most memorable games have always been when the players decided where they were going, what they were doing and accepted the outcomes, even when they failed.
I’ve never seen players more engaged and on the edge of their seats than when they know that their next decision could cause the death of a character that they’ve played for more than 100 sessions.
Why impose “my story” when, “our game play” proves far superior?
Game mastering is easier than storytelling.
I can hear the objections now.
My players don’t engage…
My players don’t like it when a character dies from a random encounter.
The campaign is over if there’s a TPK…
Most of that is dealt with when you work from first principles coupled with skilled game mastering and skilled adventure design. Those skills are much easier to acquire than a lot of people think or want you to think.
Roleplaying games can reliably produce emotionally compelling experiences that your game group will talk about for years to come, but only if you give up the idea that the player characters are there to play a part in “your story”
Storytelling and narrative skills are part of game mastering. Creating campaign worlds, developing NPCs, designing unique adventure locations, and the backgrounds of factions is where I apply those skills.
These tools combined with running the game like a game create moments of uncertainty and tension.
They create emotion.
Grumpy Wizard 
I find this tension really interesting. There is a lot to unpack.
At its most simple – you are 100% correct. There are role playing games (RPG) and there are collaborative storytelling games (CSG) and they are *different games*. Very different. In a CSG all the players take turns to create the world and the narrative. In a RPG players take on a role and act and react as they would in various situations.
The purpose of a CSG is creativity. The purpose of a RPG is immersion. Both good, depending on what you like, both very different.
I think where it gets confusing is the role of GM – the GMs role is much more similar to a player in a CSG than a player in a RPG. This can lead GMs to think that they are “collaborative storytellers”, when really they are not. You cannot be a collaborative anything if you are the only one playing that game. But it does highlight that the GM and the players are *playing different games*.
That is from the GM side (where I think a lot of the “thinking about the hobby” talk comes from). From the player side there is another element – that of character destiny (or “story”). This is messy because I think this can be quite confronting.
Let’s see this scenario – a GM puts together an adventure with a group of bandits menacing a town, and the town sends out a call for heroes (the PCs) for assistance. When this game plays out, what are we going to see? Is it;
1. The story of a bunch of heroes who try to resist a bandit clan or
2. The story of the heroes that overcame the bandit clan
I use “story” here purely in the sense that a story is how we as people talk about events after the event (and also to kind of highlight that we use that word a lot in English and it can mean a lot of different things).
Option 1 is the classic “play to see what happens”. The players are going up against a scenario. Anything could happen. They could very well die. They could also very well end up marrying the bandits and living happily ever after. No one knows what the story is until it ends.
Option 2…. this is the messy bit. In this one everyone knows the end. The players defeat the bad guys. There can be no deaths. Railroads will be needed. And… the GM has to do gymnastics in order to make sure that this happens. You get the picture.
I think players say they want option 1 but unknowingly want option 2. I know I did. I wanted to be a hero. I didn’t want to find out what happened. I wanted to play out the story of the guy who *did the thing*. It was only much later that I realised what that meant – I wanted the safety of knowing that my decisions would be the right ones. That I would triumph in the end. I wanted to be the hero without any risk. I wanted plot armor.
Yeah it’s embarrassing, but in my defense, that’s movies yeah? That’s books. The protagonist is the one that does the thing. That’s stories.
And this brings us back to you being correct again – RPGs are not stories because stories have already happened. RPGs are happening now. The story is what the players tell themselves afterwards.
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I played some CSGs with the darling designers of that scene when I lived in MA. They had one day conventions and game days at a local coffee shop. What was remarkable about that experience was that the games rarely ever delivered a “satisfying narrative” or the emotional punch that I’ve felt playing more “trad” RPGs. Even when played with people who designed them and the hobbyists who exclusively played that kind of game; it always felt like a gamified version of the writing exercises my craft of fiction instructors had us do in my Lit Fic classes. Intellectually interesting, sometimes creative but rarely satisfying or cathartic on an emotional level. It may be those games just aren’t for me and they got more out of them than I did.
I agree, in many, maybe most contemporary players want to be the heroes without the bother of going through the trouble of earning the status of hero. Lew Pulsipher made some videos about this several years ago stating that this has become part of the culture. He’s observed a lot of gamers want their characters to be immune to the consequences of bad choices and to always be able to do whatever the player thinks they should be able to do, even when it’s a nonsense idea.
I think that is what 5E was trying to do by making it so hard to kill a PC and the common DM advice of not killing characters but do something “imaginative” like capturing them and letting them escape, fudging dice, reducing monster HP etc.
5E creates the illusion that your character “could” die. Played RAW with a string of encounters designed to be winnable so as to make sure the heroic outcome is what actually occurs, very unlikely. Especially if your DM is the telling “my epic story” type. The designers could have made rule in the game that says, “Your character can’t die because they are heros. Sidekicks, innocent bystanders, and all other NPCs can die but not your character unless you give your DM your consent to kill your character for dramatically appropriate scenes.” If WotC removed the possibility of character death out of the game entirely, it would shatter the illusion of “adventure”.
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Yeah CSGs don’t do it for me either. I mean they’re fine, I just don’t find the stories that they tell anywhere near as interesting or compelling as a RPG.
I wonder if computer games are the culprit for the changing player expectation here? When you play a CRPG you are not playing to find out what happens. You already know what happens – you beat the bad guy. The ending is pre-determined. And you cannot die in most computer games either. Death just means ‘try again’ (reload last save).
A lot of adventure design seems to follow the computer game model too (“play through this narrative with your characters as the heroes”). I imagine that doesn’t help.
And there is the way that almost all characters in popular live-plays seem to have +5 full plate plot armor. That is something I realised recently and it is really hard to un-see (tho, to be honest, 5e is sooo easy that any character that makes it to level 3 effectively has plot armor).
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I have similar thoughts about CRPGs. There are some that are harder CRPGs with a story built in like Darkest Dungeon but they are rare. Also rare are straight simulation with no story at all such as Dwarf Fortress
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Thanks for writing this! I totally agree that emotional storytelling is a powerful tool in RPGs.
Having said that, I have played in a lot of games where it hardly comes into play, and to some extent, I think it has to do with player – game master expectations around what the goal of the game is. Many players see RPGs as either “paper video games” and/ or logic puzzles/ escape rooms.
But the game is almost always better and more memorable when there is some real emotional value being expressed.
I feel like a lot of energy comes from how much the game master cares about their NPC’s and villains. If the GM/DM is mostly using them interchangeably and only to move the plot along, the players them start to see them as interchangeable and therefore disposable and forgettable. Whereas, when the GM takes the time to imbue them with an inner life of their own, players often pick up on that energy.
Similarly, don’t underestimate that good players will often develop hero characters with strong emotional cores. I feel like a careful and thoughtful GM should pick up on that and work in sync with those kind of players. If the GM doesn’t, you kind of lose if after a while.
Over the years, I have created some very carefully designed characters with strong codes of ethics (of one type or another) but sometimes, I’ll just give up because either the other players are really into gold and xp, and I don’t want to spend twenty minutes being a pain-in-the-ass, or it’s clear that the GM has no other possible storyline available, and me staying true to my characters’ core will just set up a battle of wills between my playing style and the GM’s predetermined story arc.
Thanks again for your thought-provoking post! So much to consider.
Armand ( in Boston)
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Hi Armand,
Thanks for reading and commenting.
I am going for emotional “game play” NOT “emotional storytelling.” Those are different things.
What I do is use the skills of emotional storytelling (evocative description, complex NPCs with contradictory motivations etc) and combine them with the purely mechanical aspects of the game. I create interesting problems with an emotional core BUT the problems are resolved by applying the rules, the dice mechanisms, and game master rulings. It’s a method that gets the best parts of storytelling and combines them with the best parts of gaming without compromising the rules and mechanisms of the system for purpose of a predetermined narrative.
I don’t run plots. I don’t create an interactive story for the players to go through. There is no predetermined story arc in campaigns.
There are NPCs actively seeking to achieve goals that cause problems in the setting and for player characters BUT I have no idea how that’s going to end up and I have no attachment to whether PCs become heros, anti-heros, or villains. That’s up to them. I do not pre-plan or have expectations around any of that.
If you’d like to learn more about how I do this, click the “game mastering advice” in the topic cloud in the sidebar or do a search. I include a lot of links between posts where I explain specific ideas in more detail. I also recommend my monthly newsletter, there is also a link in the sidebar.
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Hi Travis- Thanks for your thoughtful reply. In looking over my comment above, I see that it looks a bit snarky; please accept my apology for that. I have been having some frustration recently finding a tabletop RPG that I really connect with, and I think it’s coming across in my personal comment(s). I am looking forward to reading more of your stuff!
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No worries. I didn’t detect any snark. I wanted to make sure I had communicated my major thesis clearly.
One way I’ve found useful to evaluate an RPG is to ask “What is the dramatic question? Does this game answer it in a way I find satisfying?”
Once I saw that it made figuring out what games I like and why a much easier task. Here is a link to an essay I wrote about that problem.
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