When you’re having trouble writing a thing, there’s this trick you can use to get started. It’s called free writing. You open up a fresh document or get out a blank sheet of paper and you just start writing. Whatever crosses your mind, you write it. And you keep writing until you hit the time limit or word limit you set or until you’ve hit the starting point of the thing you actually want to write. And then you delete the document or throw away the paper and you start writing the real thing.

And I’ve just realized that that’s what my Long, Rambling Introductions™ actually are. They’re the free writing I do to get started. I just don’t start a new document. Probably because I’m so egomaniacal that I think even my scrap paper is worthy of your praise and attention.

How is it possible that I’ve only just realized that when I’ve been doing this s$&% for ten years? Well, it’s possible because I’m not actually a writer. Or a game designer. Or a gaming expert of any kind. I’m a f$&%ing accountant. Everything I know about running games and making games and writing comes from actually just doing that s$&% for however many decades I’ve been doing it now. I’ve never been formally educated. I’m just making this s$&% up as I go.

Though it IS kind of funny that we consider people experts if they paid tens of thousands of dollars to spend four or six or eight years listening to some nonpracticing academic prattle about theory. But the people who just go out and spend years doing something until they get good at it? We call them amateurs. But I digress.

There’s a gaming-related subject I’ve been avoiding for a long time now. But recently, I stupidly promised someone I’d actually deal with it. That was three months ago. The reason I’d been avoiding the topic is that I had no idea how to actually analyze and explain the subject. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a subject I know. It’s something I do. And do well. At least, my players have been telling me for years that I do it well. But I had no idea how I was doing it or how I learned how to do it. So I certainly couldn’t explain it to anyone else.

The point is that, while I do go out of my way to educate myself about all sorts of different things, I’m not an academic. I just run games. And tinker with them. And, lately, make my own. The thing I seem to have going for me is that I’m very analytical and I’m very good at explaining things once I understand them. And writing this blog forces me to analyze and explain things that I’ve never tried to analyze or explain before. When I started this ten years ago, I couldn’t identify the two core skills that every GM has to master. I couldn’t explain the three fundamental qualities that make an RPG work. I was just running games and writing about that.

That’s why my ideas are constantly changing. When I said ‘scene’ in my last article, that word meant something different to me than it did a year ago when I wrote my book or three years ago when I first failed to write a series about building adventures. And that’s why I can suddenly discover new things or answer questions I couldn’t answer before.

And that is why I am finally ready to talk about how to run a game that the players actually care about.

Emo Gaming

Tabletop role-playing games are one-part game and one-part interactive storytelling experience. That’s why we put both ‘role-playing’ and ‘game’ in the name. And, honestly, that precise balance isn’t important. It ain’t even true. This isn’t a trick question about matter-antimatter intermix ratios on the Starfleet entrance exam.

In the past, I’ve talked about what makes the game part fun to play and why people play games. But I haven’t talked much about what makes a story engaging and why people want to experience them. That’s because I’ve never been sure I had a good answer. But one of my Patreon supporters asked me about it in my community Discord server. And stupidly, I said I’d be glad to answer. I’d just have to think about it.

At least it only took me seven-and-a-half weeks and not seven-and-a-half million years. Though I really did think deeply about it.

So, I’m ready to explain how to make a game that people care about. Or, more specifically, how to make players care about the people and places and things in the game world. But I can’t explain it all in one article. There’s a lot of different directions to come at this question from because there’s a lot of different ways people can care about fictional worlds and characters and events. In this article, I’m going to look at the idea of ‘caring about game things’ in the general sense. And because I know it sucks to get an introductory article and then have to wait for a meat article, I’ll be back in two or three days with a follow-up. Not two or three weeks.

First, let’s replace the word ‘care’ with the phrase ’emotional investment.’ As in, “how do you get your players emotionally invested in the people and places and things in your game world?” How do you get them to have emotional responses to the things that happen in your game? How do you get them to hate a villain? Or love an NPC? Or care about which faction triumphs in the power struggle? Or decry the rebels or cheer for the empire?

Consider the Harry Potter universe. Some people really loved Harry. They cared about him the way people normally care about real human beings that actually exist. Or at least the way they care about family pets. And because of that, they wanted to see everything work out for the best for Harry. They were sad on Harry’s behalf when Hedwig died. They were furious when Harry was unjustly punished and tormented by Dolores Umbridge. And when Harry lived happily ever after and got married to, I don’t know, Ron or whoever, they were happy for him.

Other people didn’t really care so much about Harry, but they really hated Professor Snape. Or Lord Voldemort. Or Dolores Umbridge. When Snape was driven from Hogwarts, they cheered for his humiliation. When Umbridge was carried off into the woods to have unspeakable things done to her by massive horse creatures, they were gleeful. And when Voldemort finally died for reals, they felt the triumph almost as if they’d cast that final alomomola spell themselves.

And then there’s the people who didn’t really connect with the characters at all. They were more engaged with the deeper subtext. They felt chills when they considered that most of the conflicts in the Harry Potter series grew out of people becoming consumed by the pursuit of the “greater good” and realized how well-meaning people – and well-meaning governments – can subjugate and enslave others in the name of protecting them. Or elevating them. Or they felt disgusted at the depiction of a society in which certain sentient creatures were placed beneath others. A society that didn’t recognize the equal moral worth inherent in every creature that could think for itself. Or they just felt the comfort that comes from seeing a world in which good will always triumph over evil and where cosmic karmic will be meted out in the end because, in this life in our real world, the universe is not always so just.

All of those are examples of emotional investment. And emotional investment is a big umbrella. It covers a lot of different things. That’s why I’m going to need to explain it from several different angles. But let’s start by figuring out why emotional investment is worth building. Because it does take a lot of skill, practice, patience, and effort. And those things suck. So it better be worth it.

Emotional Blackmail

What good is emotional investment? Obviously, you can play games – even RPGs – without it. It’s totally optional. So what does it add to the game? If it adds anything at all?

When you’re emotionally invested in a thing, your own personal feelings are wrapped up in how that thing plays out. You’ll have an emotional reaction. And this isn’t the same as getting emotionally invested in winning because you’re competitive. Whenever we play a game, some amount of our happiness hinges on our victory. That’s human. And that is a kind of investment. But that’s not emotional investment.

When you’re emotionally invested, you have an emotional response to the fictional things in the story that’s similar to the response you’d have if they were real. If they were real events that happened to real people. Or to you. As I said above, when Harry Potter is forced to maim himself during detention with Dolores Umbridge, you might feel anger at the injustice and cruelty of it all. It’s kind of silly because it’s just words on paper. Those things never happened. And it’s a story about wizards in some magical fantasy land. There’s no wizards in real life. No England. But still, you feel the emotions you’d feel if there were.

Now, there’s differences. Mostly differences of degree. Most rational adults recognize that cruel injustices visited on fictional characters in a book are not worthy of the same anger as cruel injustices visited on real people in real life. But this is also an era where a 30-year-old man-child on YouTube can openly weep tears of joy on seeing Girl Skywalker in the trailer for Space Action Fantasy Film IX: Another S$&%ty Rehash directed by Hack Hackington. The last – and only – time I wept tears of joy was when I was in high school and the cat I’d had for almost a decade returned home days after it fled from a car accident and we’d presumed he was dead.

That aside, emotional investment is about becoming so involved in the events and characters in a story that the supramarginal gyrus buried in your brain gets tricked into forgetting that it’s all pretend and you end up projecting yourself or the people you love onto those characters and events and feeling emotions as a result.

Why yes, I did spend some time actually researching this s$&%. Thanks for noticing.

It should be obvious that that sort of neurobiological chicanery can have a positive impact on the role-playing experience. An RPG is all about seeing yourself as a fictional character in a fictional world and making the choices they’d make in the situations they find themselves in. If you can actually feel the emotions they’d feel, that helps you see yourself in the role. And it makes the experience more authentic. Especially because your brain temporarily thinks the emotions are real. That raises the stakes. It makes it feel like there’s more riding on your choices than whether a piece of paper with a stat block on it gets thrown out and replaced with a new one. And increased stakes means increased agency. That said, when you f$&% up, there’s an emotional weight to it that creates a sense of responsibility. That can suck. But everything worth having comes with a cost. And that cost is responsibility. So don’t shy away from it.

But there’s another benefit too. Emotional investment leads to you making more human choices.

One of the problems with RPGs is that it’s really hard not to take the big-picture, strategic view from 30,000 feet. It’s easy to make correct choices based on cold, calculated logic. Strategically and morally. It’s easy to say a few hundred lives are an okay cost to pay to defeat a villain who might threaten thousands when you don’t have to explain it to the sobbing mother of one of those few hundred as your rip her child from her arms to power the magic ritual. It’s easy to decide not to help your dying ally for three rounds because you know the rules and the odds. But it’s a lot harder to leave someone you care about screaming in agony as their life’s blood pools around them to go fight the ogre that your two allies already have locked up and will probably defeat in two rounds anyway. You f$&%ing monster.

Human beings are emotional creatures. Emotions and social interactions govern far more of lives than logic, math, science, and probability do. But RPGs are played at an emotional distance. Anything you can do as a GM to get the players to feel some human f$&%ing emotions over what happens in your game will improve the role-playing experience.

Let me give you a solid example from my own game. Early in the campaign, the players met this abused, scared kid who was running from his wizarding professor. And the players came to like him. Especially the warlock. And it’s important to know that this warlock has a psychic backdoor in his own brain that connects directly to a Cthulhu snake monster that feeds off fear and nightmares.

Recently, the party ended up in my version of the Realm of the Dead. And when you go there, you’re tormented by shades and spirits who take forms based on your negative emotions and your fears and your regrets and your guilt. So the warlock found himself face-to-face with this kid. He knew it was an illusionary manifestation of some repressed mental issue. The party knew how this s$&% worked at that point. The player could have easily chosen just to walk away from the shade. And no, I didn’t pull any bulls$&% like “you have to roll a Wisdom saving throw or else your character is tortured and has disadvantage for an hour”. Well, there was a saving throw. But it came after.

He could have walked away. That was the logical, win-the-game thing to do. But it wasn’t the human thing to do. And because he felt an attachment to this kid and was worried about what kind of unresolved issue there might be, he let it talk. And what it said was horrible.

It told him that ever since he – the warlock – had explained about the nightmare snake, the kid hadn’t been able to forget about it. He’d had nightmares about it. He felt like it was always there in his head. Watching. And feeding. And growing more powerful. The kid couldn’t sleep. He was living in terror. And the player hadn’t really considered the idea that the psychic nightmare snake that lived in his head and fed off human terror might be contagious. That he could pass it along just by sharing the idea.

It didn’t matter whether the illusion was right. It didn’t matter if it was true. It was a horrible possibility to entertain. Especially considering that he’d infected a kid who’d already been tortured and had known nothing but pain and fear his whole life.

In that moment, the player was able to feel like he was something monstrous. That just by choosing a specific class and a set of spells, he’d made himself a danger to everyone around him. To everyone he’d ever cared about. And that he was being used to empower something unspeakably evil in ways he didn’t even know. In short, he felt like a warlock. He’d chosen power thinking he knew the price, but it turned out to cost more than he intended to pay.

Don’t even ask about what the poor cleric encountered. Suffice to say the party ain’t going back to Mictlan anytime soon.

If the player hadn’t cared about the NPC, the scene would have had no weight. And he’d never have chosen to engage with it. It would have just been some mechanical resolution involving Wisdom saving throws and psychic damage. And if the player hadn’t cared about the NPC, he never would have gotten to feel like a real, terrible, Faustian warlock.

Emotional investment adds weight to the player’s choices. It aligns the players with their characters. And it makes the players more likely to make human choices, not logical ones. Every choice is a little harder. Every victory is more victorious. And ever failure stings a lot more. And the players become very invested in what happens next.

And it’s a whole other way to make players cry. Which is just f$&%ing fun.

But there are downsides.

You Can Lead a Player to a Sympathetic NPC…

Believe it or not, not every player wants to feel like a warlock. They don’t want to feel like a vile abomination just because they wanted to be all about the eldritch blast. And while I feel that maybe you shouldn’t be a warlock if you don’t want to be a warlock, I do get their point.

Emotional investment isn’t something everyone is into. Remember that the people sitting at your table have chosen to play a fantasy-action-adventure-strategy-role-playing-board-game. They didn’t choose to spend their time reading a book like Little Women or watching a movie like Little F$&%ing Women. There’s lots of reasons to play an RPG. And most don’t involve sobbing over poor Emma Watson’s plight in Reconstruction Era America. It’s just stuff like the chance to win tough battles against powerful dragons. Or to painstakingly map out some unexplored fantasy Terra Incognita. Or to justifiably murder a bunch of brutal, savage, primitive, evil orcs and take their stuff.

So, first, remember that emotional investment isn’t for everyone. And it doesn’t work for every game.

Second, remember that emotions tend to make people emotional. That’s why we call them that. While emotional engagement does draw us deeper into the fictional world, it also makes that fictional world more stressful. Emotions burn a lot of mental energy. Improperly managed, emotions can just exhaust the f$&% out of people. I remember when I played Final Fantasy X. I like the game. It was pretty good. But it also never f$&%ing lightened up. Every revelation and twist and turn just made everything worse. Your father was an abusive d$&%. And also he’s the world-ending abomination now. The priestess can only kill him temporarily though. He always comes back. And everything keeps getting destroyed. Oh, and the priestess has to die to do it. So does the person she likes the most. And all her pets. Oh, and your mentor is a ghost and he’ll cease to exist at any moment. And you’re just a dream and don’t exist and when the game is over, so are you. It’s like, “holy f$&%, can we vary the tone a little here because this is getting seriously depressing.”

Oh, there’s some minor spoilers for Final Fantasy X in the previous paragraph so you might want to retroactively skip it.

Some people aren’t going to get emotionally invested because they stupidly showed up wanting to explore some dungeons and fight some dragons. And some people might get into the emotion at first, but then get worn out if things are heavier than they expected or stay too heavy for too long. I’ve had players quit my games in the past because of this. It’s not an academic danger. They didn’t want the emotional weight. Or they thought they did until they got it.

But there’s other risks too. Once you flip on someone’s emotional switch, you might get a lot more emotion than you were expecting. Because some people can’t control their emotions. And some people have emotions about things that are way stronger than most because of the experiences in their life. An no amount of bulls$&% consent form f$&%ery will ever cover it all. Don’t even get me started on that asinine crap. But then, its an idea from an era where 30-year-old man-children weep openly over fictional characters being so awesome while also having boobs.

Some people can’t handle emotions. And some people can handle emotions but they have experiences that make some of their emotions really powerful. And some people are just really passionate about the things they believe in. Passionate enough to get mad at you if they think you’re handling something wrong. Or if they think you might disagree with them even slightly. And this isn’t just to do with controversial topics. This is everything. You never know what someone else is hiding in their head and what’s going to cause the dam to burst.

If your players are emotionally mature and they can control their emotions, these things aren’t necessarily landmines. When something happens, you can talk about it like mature adults and come to some understanding. You can agree to avoid certain topics. But not everyone is emotionally mature. Some people assume the worst of everyone. Some people will accept no apology. Some people cannot actually deal with other human beings. Some people are still kindergartners.

That’s what you have to understand about emotional investment. You can’t force it. Some people don’t want it. Some people think they want it until they don’t anymore. And sometimes, it’s like petting a cat: it’s totally fine until suddenly, for no reason you can fathom, it isn’t anymore and you end up a bloody mess.

Subjects Gonna Subjective

Assuming you’re prepared for the worst and you want to put some feeling in your game, the next thing you have to cope with is the fact that emotional engagement is different for everyone. Everyone engages with different things at different levels for different reasons. Some people are open to caring about any fictional character at any time. Some people need time for the character to become real to them, but then they get super attached. Some people cannot give an emotional f$&% about a stat block no matter what personality you give it. But those same people might care deeply about values and virtues and themes and causes and they might relish the opportunity to play with them in the Land of Make-Believe. Some people don’t give a crap about any of that, but if you give them a villain to hate, they will stop at nothing to take him down.

Point is every player cares differently about different things and at different levels. So, as a GM, you have to work at getting your players emotionally invested from a lot of different angles at once. Eventually, you’ll get to know your players and you’ll be able to engage specific players in specific ways. But when you start out – or when you write an adventure for publication – you have to throw a lot of spaghetti at the wall and wait for it to stick.

And, by the way, note that you can’t really get people emotionally invested in your game as a whole. That’s not how emotional investment works. Instead, you get people emotionally invested in specific elements of your game. In people, places, things, events, and ideas. If that wasn’t clear before, I’m making it clear now. People don’t care about stories except insofar as they care about the things in those stories.

Which brings me around to the only general advice I can give about building emotional investment. Everything else I have to say will be highly specific and will need to wait for future articles in this series.

Giving People Many Chances to Care

Since you can’t actually MAKE people care and since you can’t know what specific things people will care about, building emotional investment in your game is a complicated, multistep process. First, you have to understand what things most people are most likely to care about. What qualities make certain things likable or hateable or otherwise emotionable to most people. What qualities make people most likely to emotionally engage with things.

Second, you have to liberally sprinkle your game with lots of things that have those qualities. Third, you have to watch your players and take note the moment they show signs of getting emotionally invested in something. Fourth, you have to cultivate and reinforce that emotional investment. Only then can you say you have a player that’s emotionally invested in something. And then you can start to f$&% with them.

This will probably sound obvious, but the key is to get good at building things that people are likely to care about and then filling your world with those things. You can’t make people care about anything. You can only fill your world with things they want to care about and trust them to do the rest. Oh, and you have to get real good at bringing those things to life.

It’s hard, but it’s not THAT hard. Once you start doing it, it’s easy to do it all the time. Just like you eventually learn that every monster needs hit points and a Strength score, you learn that every NPC needs certain traits and qualities that make them emotionable. And yes, I am going to make that a word, thank you.

In a few days, I’m going to talk about those traits. Specifically. The first thing I’m going to teach you is what makes an NPC likable. And I’m starting there because most people are more likely to care about people than they are to care about any other element of your game. People care about people.

Not counting me, of course.