It?s Not Your Story

[ArekExcelsior]

I love this article, but I think there's something missing. Story arcs can be good things. But they have to be done without a loss of agency. How do you balance those?

Imagine a world without the players temporarily. (This is, after all, almost the definition of agency: How you change things from what would have happened had you not been there). Now, the story arc is that world. The intrigues, the wars, the villains' plans. That can all be written in advance, because that's what is going to transpire without player intervention.

THEN the players show up. Now they can do whatever they want to screw with that. The evil summoner needs to collect twelve artifacts to bring the demon god to Earth? Too bad, since the party unwittingly lucked out into finding one of the artifacts because the Bard managed to get a clue from the townsfolk, the Rogue managed to avoid powerful encounters, and was smart enough to deal with the security measure that normally only the summoner would have prevented.

Now let's say your plan was to have the summoner pull a Xanatos Gambit. He'd get them to collect the twelve artifacts and give them to him. But maybe he never asks about the artifact they got already, because he assumes someone else must have taken it. And when the players figure out what they have, what do they do? Etc.

This combines the best of both worlds. Your villains can have speeches, your players can have their planned awesome moments, you can have an entertaining storyline, but it's still emergent.

Now, my experiences may differ, but the vast majority of the time, players WILL follow the railroad. If they come to town and four different factions offer them different quests, they will PROBABLY take one of the four quests, happy to have the choice, and not decide to be a fifth faction, or pull a Yojimbo and pit them against each other, or just leave town and hunt boar. So your pre-planned set of events will likely proceed.

But not always, and oftentimes the changes are CENTRAL. In one campaign I ran, the villain of one arc was the President of the United Earth Government, and she had corrupted and taken over a supersoldier group that behaved like a hivemind. I had thought that these would be expendable mooks, just more people the PCs would slay.

Instead, one player character felt sorry for the soldiers. He let himself be taken into the hivemind!

That led to great drama. The character inside the hivemind rallied the minds of the controlled soldiers and got them to break free. As he did so, his allies had to fight their own teammate and deal with his decision. And when the soldiers were freed, they were able to turn around and strike their victimizer, giving the team a decisive victory.

The whole feel of an arc changed. Running with it was one of the best decisions I had ever made.

In particular, I think of the GM as a chessmaster. The PCs are playing the game: This is not a solitaire game. But the GM is making counter-moves to the PCs. However, the GM is not doing so to obstruct them, or to help them. Rather, he is moving his pieces in response to the PCs actions, within the character of the pieces. Most of the board won't change since the PCs haven't done anything. But some will change from their original trajectory, and then that will have ripple effects.

For example: It's railroading to have your villain's original plan succeed no matter what the players do. But a villain that just lets the players beat him without any alteration is a boring adversary. Instead, when the players stop his plan A, he moves to a plan B. That gives them consequences but preserves story.

This sort of structure also makes it hard to keep the party together, unless they are designed to be very cohesive from the beginning. If one person decides to leave and go somewhere else, you have to split your time, which massively slows things down. If you have three or more groups of PCs wandering around independently, you might as well just split the game into 3 separate campaigns. I know there are plenty of people who like gaming with just one player and the GM, but for me the whole fun of gaming is the cooperation and collective action, the interesting things that happen when a group of people interact. I played in a web-like campaign last year, and early in the game there was a bit of a split between some of the characters, and from that point forward we were never all in the same place at the same time. It slowed the game to a snails pace and I really didn't have a very good time--every time we began to approach a dramatic moment, someone would pull out and the story would just sort of fizzle for a little while.

Okay, but here's the problem: The same thing SHOULD happen in a railroaded game, it just DOESN'T because the GM forces people with starkly disparate motivations, either IC or OOC, to stick together. Players should talk before the campaign and have a shared idea of motivations, goals, etc. and make sure their players can get along. Otherwise, you have to choose between railroading out the conflict, violating good roleplaying, or let the players roleplay, and then screw your story and likely end the campaign.

 

[RafaelLVX]

I both like the article, enjoyed reading it, will use some advice of it in the future, and disagree with many basic assumptions.

I certainly loved the simplicity of the story web concept allied with its potential for quick preparation and quick expansion of the web as needed. I'll definitely try that in my next campaign.

Now, while I see from the 3-4 articles I read you always justify your methods on well-based premises, I tend to find you overly biased towards ways to minimize the problem of lack of meaning of choice/agency by players. You're quick to point out how GMs shouldn't direct the story, fudge rolls, lead players toward choices, obfuscate characters with his view, railroading, asuring players have fun, etc. I can agree to all of this, based on your articles, everything you write about these issues seem fair to me. Your hatred towards directing stories makes me uneasy though.

You seem to hint you like hexcrawling (the map, the random encounters, it's on the article). I tend to think most hexcrawling is bland in comparison to well directed stories, because it adds randomness where it's needed and where it's not neeeded, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt, because you wrote you have a list of great encounters and beautiful locations made before game, that can be used always and anywhere. Just so you know where I come from, as a GM, I'd never roll a random encounter table, no matter how cool it is, instead I'd pick up the encounter from the list that I feel makes the best addition to the campaign in that particular situation, if not plan to use that ahead of time. Why do you think players prefer a random GM's roll, no matter how cool, instead of a tailored choice?

Directed stories can be great, and they are meant to be grand. And I don't even think I need to break your rules to have great grand directed stories. I could estabilish a story web like you suggested with several directed stories intertwined, and they'd take to multiple locations and endings. Each directed story can be multilayered to provide adequate level of choice and agency.

In the end, in your article, you do come up with how I try to do my directed stories when I get the chance. Players can take the route to Arneson because I want them too, but if they don't, it'd be great if there're cool consequences like you suggested, and it can be planned ahead of time, why not?