Telling a Story

Sorry for the delay in writing... things have been busy.

I've had a chance to play some more games lately, including my long running Ptolus game and a playtest of How We Came To Live Here, by Brennan Taylor. I'm not going to review that game right now, because we didn't finish the game and I still don't have a handle on the rules.

However, all my gameplay has gotten me to thinking about the nature of story-telling in RPGs. If you ask anyone about roleplaying games, they'll probably tell you that it's a form of story-telling, which is true, or it's a game of miniatures combat, which is true some of the time. But what does it mean to tell a story?

Very few games will teach you how to tell stories. It's something that you're just supposed to know how to do, either from years of exposure to books, movies, and TV, or just through the instinctive way that man has told stories since we sat around those ancient campfires. There is an art and a science to telling stories, though, and not all game mechanics are equally suited to tell those stories.

Perhaps the most famous book on storytelling is Joseph Campbell's "Hero With a Thousand Faces" where he deconstructs myth into its basic components. I've been guilty of using that book as a gaming resource. In the early days, I followed it a little too slavishly, treating each step on the Hero's Journey as a box I had to check off before moving on.

Many gaming systems don't concern themselves with the story. The mechanics are there to handle conflict, and the story gives the conflicts a framework. That and the general assumption that an antagonist (the villain of the piece) is at work and will be faces by the heroes at the end of the adventure is all that they're concerned about. They give you a means to create the villain and his minions and to determine who wins the fight. That's it.

This is fine for a certain rudimentary type of story. It tends to be very linear, however. D&D even makes a virtue of granting the illusion of choice where there really isn't one. You're in a dungeon, you can go left or right. That's a choice, right? But if the bad guy is never leaving his personal sanctum, which is to the left, all going right did was delay the final confrontation a bit, and maybe force your players to use up some resources they would have needed to face the villain.

Really, is a dungeon crawl a story? In most cases, it is merely a string of encounters, one after another. You can, and I've seen it, set up dungeons where every creature in the rulebooks is present, just hanging out in rooms waiting for the heroes to show up. That can be fun, but it's not a story.

What I would like to see is some sort of mechanic that makes where you are in the progress of the story have a concrete effect on the heroes. Maybe things are easy for them in the beginning, but everything becomes harder as they get closer to the climax. Or maybe things cycle, growing progressively harder until the heroes fail and must go back and lick their wounds.

One of the best story mechanics I've seen is probably forgotten by most people, and it has to do with the old game I'm resurrecting for my group: TORG.

In TORG, one of the other realities that invades Earth is Orrorsh, a reality of Horror. The goal of the realm of Orrorsh is to create fear, so they built game mechanics to simulate the way horror movies and stories work.

Here how TORG's "Power of Fear" works: First, the player characters are assigned a Perseverence Difficulty Number that is based on how powerful the main monster is in the adventure. Perseverance is a measure of PC confidence and resolve when dealing with the creature they are hunting. The PCs have a number of perseverence points, starting with 8. (TORG's central mechanic is to roll a d20, and then consult the result of that die roll to the bonus chart, which give them a bonus number or a penalty that they will apply, in this case, to their Perseverence Total).

In the game, the party will have to roll against their peseverence when ever they encounter a monster, see occult magic at work, and whenever something really terrible happens to the party or they encounter something horrible (and often grisly.) If the total of their Perseverence Points and the bonus from their die roll equals or exceeds the Perserverence Difficulty Number, great! If they fail, however, the monster gets a number of extra powers and can inflict severe setbacks on the party.

The party can gain Perseverence Points from a number of situations:

• They discover information about the creature they are pursuing.
• When they win a skirmish against the forces of Orrorsh.
• When they encounter people in need of help.
• When something so horrible happens that they strengthen their commitment to kill the monster.

They can lose Perseverence Points from:

• Suffer a loss at the hands of the forces of Orrorsh.
• Witness a horrible sight committed by a monster, or see a companion die.
• Witness a violent and grisly sight caused by the power of the occult.

There is some overlap there, but that's intentional. First they see something horrible and lose Perseverence. If they survive and think about the incident, they regain that lost Perseverence and then the same amount again, to show their newfound resolve.

The mechanic of Perseverence even encourages the party to split up, as each smaller group can gain Perseverence, and the points are all added together when they rejoin.

So, you can see how some game mechanics can create a story. I'd like to see more stuff like that.