I just keep f$&%ing this s$&% up, don’t I?

See, all this crap about campaign plotting started out simple in my head. First, there was this idea about how to outline a campaign as a list of stops on a road trip and how to expand each leg of the trip into its own trip. I thought it was a fun, easy to grok way to handle campaign plotting and I just wanted to share it.

Then, I fell down that kishotenketsu rabbit hole. The one we’re not supposed to talk about anymore. But that was supposed to be simple too. I just stumbled over this idea for four-part plot structures that video game designers had adapted in different ways and thought I could adapt it too. And, frankly, it seemed like a great follow-up to that article on plotting. Didn’t work out so well, did it? F$&% no.

So, I figured I’d fix the problem with an interquel. You know, fill in the missing pieces and try to backfill the stuff about plot structure. And that helped, but I’ve still got a lot of people scratching their f$&%ing heads. It’s like I loaded you all in a bus to take you on a fun little trip. But there’s no seatbelts and I left the doors open and there’s a bomb on the bus so I can’t slow down and I keep changing lanes to get around slow-a$& losers and every time I do, I send passengers hurtling from the bus and bouncing down the highway. And then, when I try to circle back to pick them up, I don’t stop the bus. I just sort of plow into them and hope I’ll bounce them into one of the doors if I hit them just right.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a motorcycle gang chasing me screaming about how I’m doing it all the stupid way and how some guy named Alexander told them you should never plan a plot, just a situation, and how I’m ruining GMing for everyone. S&$% like that.

So, I figured it was time for soul searching. Yes, I do have a soul. It’s just a tiny one. And I’ve decided to just stop the bus. I figure, with any sort of luck, the bomb will take out the motorcycle gang when it goes off. Meanwhile, I can start walking slowly along the highway and picking up the bodies I’ve left behind.

What I’m saying is I’m starting fresh. The problem was that I went into all this s$&% about plotting and planning without a plot or a plan. I just did what seemed like a good idea. I made s$&% up as I went along. And it just didn’t work. I never made it clear what I was actually talking about and why I was talking about it. And, in the meanwhile, I assumed a lot of the s$&% that it’s taken me a long time of study, research, and practice to understand would be totally intuitive to everyone else. Problem is, as intuitive as this s$&% might be—and it really isn’t—intuition ain’t the same as understanding. And before you can apply something, you’ve got to understand it.

I’m starting a new series. From scratch. A series about narrative theory for GMs. Again, I ain’t going to take down anything I’ve already written. And I’m going to do my damndest not to rehash too much of what I’ve already said. But, if there’s anything about the last two or three articles on story theory you haven’t understood, don’t worry. None of that s$&%’s a prerequisite. This is a fresh start.

So You Want to Build a Compelling Narrative…

Like I explained in the Long, Rambling Introduction™, I’m starting a fresh new series right here and now. A series that’ll teach you all the crap you didn’t learn in college because you were busy getting a useful degree. All the crap the dude who makes your lattes learned in his literature and film theory courses. All the crap I learned while I was getting a useful degree at the same time because I’m f$&%ing nuts. But that’s another story.

Except… I’m also not going to teach you all that crap.

See? I’m pretty damned ambitious. And I have a decent amount of self-respect. And I don’t actually make lattes for a living. While I did pay attention to all that crap in high school and college because I found it interesting, and while I did keep studying it all outside of academia because I enjoyed it, I know most of you are sane. That you’ve got no interest in this crap unless there’s a way to make some practical use of it.

Besides, that’s what you—my patrons—pay me for. You don’t pay me to ramble uselessly about whatever I find fun. You pay me to provide you useful, practical information that’ll help you run less worse games.

I’m talking about narrative theory here. The theory of how good stories get put together. How they’re told. And why the good ones are good. But, the thing is, there’s a hell of a lot of difference between a screenplay and a novel. Sure, there’s a bunch of basic stuff common to both, but there’s also a lot of unique details that change the rules from one medium to the next. And it turns out that role-playing game narratives are different from the ones in movies. Or books. Or even video games. For a lot of reasons.

Point is, I ain’t going to spend a lot of time teaching you how narratives in movies and books and video games work. I want to translate narrative theory into RPGs. Develop a narrative toolset specific to building and running tabletop role-playing games. Seems crazy, right? Well, I’m pretty sure I’ve already done it. Because I’ve been making compelling RPG narratives for lots of years. And I’ve been writing about it in different ways for lots of years too. That’s why you’re here. So, this is just about putting the pieces together in a single lexicon. A pile of ideas to help GMs like you build games around compelling narratives.

And that goal—help GMs build and run games around compelling narratives—is very carefully crafted and filled with important nuance and s$&%. Before you can understand anything else, you’ve got to understand what that goal means and why it’s a good goal.

The Misunderstood Yin and Yang of Fluff and Crunch

To understand what I’m getting at—and why you should give any kind of f$&% about it—you’ve got to understand the dual nature of role-playing games. Really understand it. And that’s something a lot of gamers think they understand. And don’t.

Over the many long years that RPGs have been a thing, we gamers have always recognized there’s two parts to the whole RPG thing. We write fluff and design crunch. We talk about having a story-focus or a game-focus. We recognize there’s rules and flavor text. WotC hires designers and developers. There’s the role-playing part and the game part.

Now, lots of people talk about those distinct parts of RPGs in lots of ways. People talk about their preferences for one or the other. People highlight which of the two they think is the one that makes RPGs unique. Or special. Or great. People even put forward theories—stupid, wrong theories I’ve been disproving for years—that you can’t make games for both gamists and narrativists to enjoy together. All that s$&% focuses on the distinction. On the separation. On the differences between the two elements.

And that stupid, useless crap is a waste of time if you want to be a good GM.

It’s not important that RPGs have narrative parts and gamey parts. What’s important is what happens when those two things get blended together. Because they’re blended together. They’re not sitting next to each other on a plate, like steak and potatoes. They’re mixed together like ice cream and milk in a milkshake. Eating a bowl of ice cream and drinking a glass of milk is nothing like drinking a milkshake.

Now, I ain’t saying you can’t have an RPG system or campaign or adventure that’s more story than game. Or more game than story. Of f$&%ing course you can. But what makes an RPG an RPG is that it’s a unique blend of the two elements. Where each ingredient complements the other. Enhances the other. Each ingredient makes the other work better.

On the one hand, you’ve got a game. Games give people the chance to test themselves against obstacles and challenges. To earn a victory or grow from a defeat. They fill this deep human need for competition—against anything, not just against each other—and for achievement and accomplishment. Players operate within the game’s constraints, using tools the game provides and their own skills, to accomplish a goal. Players win or lose by their own efforts. And, as they keep playing, players hone their skills.

On the other hand, you’ve got a narrative. Narratives give people a chance to experience emotions and connections. To feel empathy. Compelling narratives resonate with people emotionally. They create a sense of connection between the author and the reader. And between the reader and the character.

Neurologically speaking, games and stories—narratives—make our brains secrete certain chemicals associated with different mental states. Games make our brains squirt out dopamine, which is associated with accomplishment and helps our brains think, plan, strategize, and focus. Stories get our brain spraying oxytocin, which is associated with belonging and helps our brains form social bonds and relationships. Our brains crave games and stories for different reasons, but when you put them both together…

But forget all that s$&%. I ain’t teaching biology class here. The point is games and stories aren’t opposing forces. They are like yin and yang. You know, that Chinese symbol that looks like two tadpoles mating. See, the yin and the yang represent opposing forces—order and chaos, light and dark, masculine and feminine, sun and moon, lots of s$&%—but they represent complementary forces. Each force contains a bit of the other’s potential. That’s why each tadpole has an eye in the other’s color. More importantly, though, life doesn’t exist in one tadpole or the other. Life’s the line between them.

I know this s$&%’s getting really philosophical here, but role-playing games are the sinuous line between the yin and yang of story and game. And the more you can get the two forces to work together, to complement each other, the better your RPG experience.

You can have a pure story, right? That’s a novel. A compelling narrative that’s completely passive. You sit there and experience it. You might identify with the characters, you might have an emotional resonance, but the story’s distinct from you.

You can have a pure game, too, right? Like chess. A set of mechanical rules that define a challenge and the ways to overcome that challenge. Totally active, but also totally devoid of emotional resonance or connection. Because it’s just about moving pieces around the right way to win.

In RPGs, the story and the game work together. The story—the characters, the settings, all that narrative crap—they provide stakes and motives that a game like chess will never have. Provide for emotional connections beyond a simple desire to win. The game—the rules, the strategies, the choices, the depth—make the stories personal. And make the outcomes personal. They let the players control the outcome and experience the characters’ victories as their own.

No other game or narrative experience comes close to this s$&%. Choose your own adventure books, gamebooks, video games, board games? They all merge narrative and gameplay, sure, but none so purely as an open-ended RPG. That’s why video games keep striving for more open-endedness and more choice. And why board games keep adding more permanence and continuity. When a video game strives to “make choices matter”? When a board game comes out with a Legacy version or includes campaign options? They’re trying to pull off what RPGs already do. They’re moving closer to that line between the tadpoles.

But RPGs are uniquely able to pull this s$&% off because they’re constantly being written and rewritten by a creative human brain responding to the player-protagonists in real-time. The story emerges from the gameplay experience and the gameplay experience evolves in response to the story.

And that—by the way—is why the efforts to remove the creative human brain overseeing the experience—the unholy grail of GM-less play—will always end up with something that sucks compared to the real thing. Look, you can find ways to let the GM also play or to let the players share the burden of overseeing the game so no one person’s responsible for running the game, but you can’t remove the creative human brain from the equation without diminishing the RPG experience in the process. Sorry. Except I’m not.

Master of Two Realms

As the GM, you have to walk the line between yin and yang. You’ve got to master the art of storytelling and the art of game design. Well, maybe not master, but you need a basic f$&%ing proficiency with both arts. You might be better at one than the other—most people are—but you can’t ignore one discipline completely. Nor treat one discipline as subservient to the other. There can’t be one greater force and one lesser force. And that’s true even if you’re not making your own games.

See, we gamers often draw distinctions between system design and world creation and adventure writing and game running. We sure like to separate things into different categories, don’t we? So, we tell ourselves that if we’re using someone else’s rules and running someone else’s adventure, we don’t need to know too much about game design. And if we’re using someone else’s setting and adventure, we don’t need to know much about the narrative art.

Problem is, though, that the thing that makes RPGs work—the thing that lets them sit on the line between game and story—is the fact that the game’s constantly being redesigned and the story’s constantly being rewritten. Every choice you make as a GM is a game design choice or a storytelling choice. Or both. When you introduce an NPC, it’s on you to communicate their desires and motivations and personality by interacting with the players. Nothing written in the module can make that s$&% actually happen at the table. And whenever you evaluate a die roll or adjudicate an action, you’re making a call about how the game should play out. Even if the decision’s just to follow the game’s rules as written. When the game tells you it’s time to roll for a random encounter, actually making the roll and throwing what comes up in your players’ faces is a game design decision. If you follow those instructions at the wrong time and put your players in a death spiral they can’t recover from, well, sorry bucko, but that was your s$&%y design choice. Blame the system creators all you want, but you still end up with the busted game.

All that crap in the books about how you—the GM—can override the game’s rules whenever you want to? That’s not just giving you permission, it’s giving you responsibility. It’s the game’s designers saying, “look, this s$&%’s an open-ended, evolving game and you need to be ready to redesign it at a moment’s notice.”

GM’s shoulder a heavy burden. Luckily, we can stand on the shoulders of giants.

Postmodernists Need Not Apply

Game design and storytelling are both disciplines. Skills. Arts. Trades. Whatever f$&%ing word you want to use. And they’re really old disciplines. The art of storytelling goes back at least 30,000 years. Actual structured game design goes back around 5,000 years. And play as a survival training tool goes back to who the f$&% knows when. Even animals do that s$&%. Collectively, we’ve gotten really good at writing stories and designing games. The disciplines have grown and evolved. They’ve been tested time and time again. While some aspects vary from culture to culture and some change with the zeitgeist of the day, many aspects are universal. As in shared among all humans on Earth. Every culture on Earth, for example, has a few enduring examples of the quest narrative. Beowulf, The Odyssey, The Ramayana, The Tales of Prince Yamato, The Sundiata, Star F$&%ing Wars, and so on, and et cetera, ad infinitum and beyond. That’s why Joey Campbell called it the Monomyth. The one story to rule them all.

Now, I’m not saying that’s the only right way to tell a story. I’m just making a point that there’s rules to storytelling. Good, solid rules that work so well, every culture on Earth has stumbled on them and the stories have endured for thousands of years. Same thing with game design. There’s rules to that too. And if you learn the rules and apply them properly, you can design good games and tell good stories. Moreover, if you learn the rules, you can break them consciously and carefully for impact and stylistic flourish. Ignoring the rules, though? Pretending they don’t exist? That’s stupid. You’re stupid. And you’re making a hell of a lot of work for yourself. Instead of using the vast array of stuff that’s guaranteed to work 99 times out of ten, you’re throwing it away and trying to invent everything from scratch. And you’re as likely to end up with crap as you are to end up with genius. More likely, actually.

Tens of thousands of years of experience and practice have gone into this s$&%. We haven’t found every possible thing that works, sure, but we’ve tested a lot more things throughout our history than you’ll be able to try in your meager little lifetime. We’ve found a lot of things that are very likely to work and we’ve forgotten more s$&% that doesn’t work than you could possibly come up with. Use that experience and practice. Make life easy for yourself.

And I’m not just talking to all you Rian Johnsons and Spike Jonzes out there. All the deconstructionists striving to subvert expectations. I’m also talking to the GMs who reject tropes, cliches, archetypes, stereotypes, and s$%& like that. Especially the GMs who reject that s$&% without understanding it in the first place. I start almost every fantasy campaign I run in an inn or tavern. Not accidentally, but consciously. I purposely start every game I run with a cliché. Not to subvert it. Not to deconstruct it. Not because I’m lazy. Even though I am. I do it because I get it. I understand why the trope exists. And why it’s a near-perfect way to start the sorts of narratives that usually come up in fantasy adventure role-playing games.

To master a discipline, you’ve got to respect it. You’ve got to respect the art and you’ve got to respect the artists who came before you. It’s okay to believe you can do better than them. Hell, every generation should do it better than the generation before. But that’s just because every generation starts with a little more of a head start. One given by the generation before. It’s in you to reach higher than everyone before you because you’re standing on their shoulders. You’re not smarter. You’re not better. Probably. I mean, you might be. It does happen. I’m smarter and better. Maybe you are too.

Meanwhile, I’m talking to others too. Beyond the deconstructors and the post-modernists and the hipsters too good for tropes and cliches and the self-proclaimed free-verse geniuses, I’m also talking to the improvisationalists who reject structure and planning as unnecessary, harmful, or impossible.

Leaving the Narrative Up to Chance

There’s a hell of a lot of GMs on the net who’ll tell you that this narrative theory stuff—especially when it comes to plotting and structure—is useless or wrong-headed or just f$&%ing impossible to use in role-playing games. The wrong-headers claim the game’s supposed to be open-ended and reactionary. The GM’s supposed to create situations and then get the hell out of the player’s way. The GM’s just there to react to anything and everything the players do. Thus, anything you do as a GM to plan in advance or structure the narrative is just stealing the players’ agency and destroying the game’s depth. Meanwhile, the uselessers and the impossiblers claim that, because you—the GM or adventure writer—have no idea what the player-protagonists will do and because they can do anything, there’s no way to impose any sort of narrative structure on the game. You can’t make things happen when they’re supposed to and you can’t make the right things happen, so why bother trying?

Those arguments both ignore two things. First, they ignore the fact that the GM doesn’t just react, he reacts with purpose. At least he should. You should. You can’t control the player-protagonists’ choices, but there’s always an infinity of possible outcomes that follow logically and fairly from those choices. And you choose which outcomes actually come out. You have agency too. You have a lot of agency. Sometimes, steering a game’s as easy as pulling a switch on a train track. Sometimes, it’s like trying to keep a sailboat full of kittens on course during a typhoon. But there’s never a time when you can’t steer the game at all.

Second, they ignore the fact that the story—the narrative—is an emergent thing. Your game’s going to have a narrative when it’s done. Like it or not. And people are going to interpret it based on how they think stories work. Players won’t experience the game as it was. They’ll experience it based on their warped perception of it. Humans warp everything to fit narrative structures. Hell, your memories aren’t even verbatim transcripts and video recordings of actual events. They’re the stories you tell yourself about the things you think happened to you.

Once your game’s done, it’s going to have had a plot. It’s going to have followed a single sequence of events. There’s going to have been a climax. People—even you—will remember that s$&%. You can either use what power you have to steer the game toward the best narrative possible. One that does the things that thirty millenniums of storytelling have taught us make for good stories. Or you can hope and pray that the emergent narrative is accidentally a good one. It’s your call.

See, when a GM like me—a smart GM who knows his S$&%—talks about plotting a game, he’s not telling you to plan every moment in detail. He’s not telling you to write down everything before the game starts. To know what’s going to happen before the players show up. You can improvise whatever you want. As much as you want. Do you have any f$&%ing idea how much s$&% I invent on the fly for my own games? Somewhere between 75 and 99 f$&%ing percent of my written notes get put to paper after the session’s over. When I’m pulling s&$% out of my a$&, I use this narrative theory stuff to decide which s$&% to throw at my players, which s$%& to save for later, and which s$&% to flush.

You can sketch a painting in advance or you can throw paint on a canvas and see what happens. Either way, though, you’ve got to understand color and composition and perspective and how to use all the different brushes. You can design the spice rack on paper first or you can cobble it together from scrap wood, but you’re still going to use hammers and saws to make the damned thing.

Remember, this narrative theory s$&% isn’t a formula for a good story, it’s just a framework. You can’t just plug the right numbers into the equation and get Lord of the Rings. Especially when it comes to a role-playing game. In RPGs, you need a very loose, very malleable framework. Because you—the game designer-storyteller—only have so much control over the narrative. And because the narrative evolves through play and emerges from play. That’s why understanding traditional narrative theory will only get you so far. And why I want to focus on how to apply this s$&% to RPGs, even if I have to twist and bend and break some of it to make it work.

Oh, Right, I’m Introducing a Thing

Look, I know this has gotten really ranty and passionate. It’s worthy of one of my bulls$%& articles. And it doesn’t really lay out any sort of groundwork at all. It barely describes the series it’s supposed to be introducing. But, given the confusion I’ve sown with the last few articles, I want to make sure we’re all coming at this with the same perspective. I want you to understand why you should care about this s$&%. Even if you don’t think you should. Especially if you don’t think you should.

Over the next few months, I’m going to follow this introduction with a series of articles describing the different fundamental elements of narrative theory and showing you how to apply them when you’re writing and running role-playing game adventures. We’ll look more at plot and plot structure as planning tools for campaigns and adventures, we’ll discuss the ins and outs of conflict, and we’ll figure out what makes for good settings and good characters. I’m going to have to tweak some of this s$&% from what you might have learned in creative writing and I’m going to scale back on the background and theory a bit. But that’s because I’m not trying to teach you how to be that insufferable prick that analyzes every movie to death and can’t figure out why no one invites you to the theater with them anymore. I’m just trying to teach you to run a good game.

Or rather, how to tell a good story that the players can play.