One session into a campaign of Hero’s Banner, which my gaming pal Hans introduced me to and which I’m knowing GM’ing for a small group. It’s a neat game, hot from the fires of the now-defunct Forge community, and I encourage you to check it out. It’s all about tragic heroism in a faux-medieval settings, full of passions and self-destructive melodrama. Good stuff.
But starting a campaign in it made me reflect on one of my least favorite parts of campaign play: the beginning. The start. Episode One. Why? Because roleplaying games fundamentally differ from practically every other kind of medium in what beginning-relevant information is conveyed and how it is conveyed. More traditional linear forms of narrative media have a whole library of methods and devices for this kind of stuff; the opening crawl, the in medias res, the exposition dump, and many far more refined but less codified methods. When watching a film or reading a book, there’s a certain assumption that what the audience needs some kind of narrative hand-holding to be properly introduced to the story and characters. More often than not, powerful opening draw their power from clever interaction with both audience knowledge and audience ignorance. At no point in a story is it more important to balance the audience’s expectations with what’s delivered.
Thus, we get establishing shots. We get the first moments where characters set precedent for our future expectation of their behavior. All that good “show, don’t tell” stuff creative writing instructors make a (justified) fuss about. Beginnings get a lot of attention from storytellers, audiences and analysts alike because of the simple fact that they matter.
Yet one of roleplaying’s idiosyncrasies is exactly its interactive nature, and the fact that we don’t actually have an identifiable audience who are consuming the story. What even is the “story”? I think beginnings clearly illustrate that as far as roleplaying games are concerned, the “story” is merely the fiction as it unfolds at the table in strict narrative terms. If that were the case, where do the pages of character background, the worldbuilding notes, the collaborations that occur before dice are even rolled fit in? They don’t really, is the issue here. A lot of exchange of information takes place before the proper narrative begins to unfold. And a lot of it is exactly the kind of stuff we’d see worked into opening crawls, exciting action openings, or any other of the previously-mentioned devices. In roleplaying, they are redundant. Everyone at the table already knows what such sequences would convey.
What we want to get to in roleplaying is how player decisions, GM (if there is one) decisions, and the system drive play. Many of the traditional building blocks of edited storytelling fall flat. Their assumptions don’t hold true at the gaming table. So obviously the game’s “beginning” should dive into some exciting moment that facilitates, well, roleplaying. That’s what we’ve all shown up for.
The inaugural session of a campaign can, obviously, be exciting and engaging. It better be, in fact! But younger me’s frustration was in how my roleplaying games seemed to lack that punch, that narrative finesse, that exciting feeling of being drawn into a new world. When looking at the story (taking the story here to be mean “in-fiction as it occurs due to play”), beginnings looked stale and stilted, even outright undramatic. And for good reason – all the important stuff a book or film needs to establish has already been made clear to all relevant parties involved! I felt my campaign openings were weak because I didn’t realize this distinction before far too late in my gaming career. It killed my enthusiasm for a few games back in the day. Because when looking at it, from the lens of conventional narrative wisdom, most rolepaying game campaign beginnings do appear to suck. And suck bad! They are arbitrary, random, often borderline nonsensical, confusing and convoluted. Or at least, they appear so.
Because roleplaying doesn’t actually use the same vocabulary of narrative content and devices. In so many ways, it’s its own thing, and that thing is an amorphous interaction that blurs the line between author, audience and participant. If its beginnings appear awful by the criteria of other media, so be it. Let your beginnings “suck” as much as they need to. The campaign will most likely still be awesome.
Augury Ignored 