Since the very beginning of TTRPGs there’s really only been one question that matters – at least to me. One point of difficulty, one point of tension: how do we build narrative in a game, especially one where we can do anything?

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes the answer is “we don’t”. We don’t want to and we’re not expecting to. But clearly that ship has sailed for a lot of people. It’s certainly not how D&D markets itself. Another answer is “exegesis”, as in we let random shit happen and build a story in our heads later that makes it make more sense as a logical progression and with narrative payoff. This is often done during the game as well – “You crushed your perception check? Well I guess this random goblin DOES know the way to the mines, because that makes it more satisfying”. As humans, we kind of do this instinctively, to everything in our lives so it’s natural for us to do it to games, even when they are completely random.

Another answer we’ve had is “eh, whatever, I don’t run pregenerated scenarios”. That I have always felt is not a good answer. Neither is “I do run them, but I completely change them.” People buy these products, especially now (Strahd was huge!) and I used to only be able to run games I had adventures for (and it’s still really the only thing I find interesting as a GM). Often there is a self-fulfilling prophecy at work here: people say they don’t want these product because they are always bad, so they don’t buy them, so the products have no incentive to get better. Yet when they are good, in the past, people flock to them – The Enemy Within, Murder on the Orient Express, Fly to Heaven, these things are legends. Or they were, I think that ship has perhaps also sailed. The rise of the indie scene and the absolute conquest of D&D has meant there’s less and less money in the centre for mainstream products that aren’t D&D, so there’s no “experimental” campaigns any more. Indie designers, so far, have decided not to care much about this idea, or approach it in a different way. Which is interesting, too.

(The indie/old school revived scene has also sort of kicked off “West Marches” as a term, but I’ll come back to that.)

Another answer that I don’t think is useful is “play zero prep games” or “learn to run with zero prep”. One big reason this isn’t useful is it is usually delivered with a degree of smugness as if as soon as the GM learns this One Weird Trick they will stop living in the stone age and, scales falling from their eyes, discover they never needed to prep at all. There are a few problems with this beyond tone. One is that a lot of “zero prep” things aren’t entirely zero-prep, because they kind of expect some prep to be effectively zero (for example, reading the game/source material, or reading and learning how to do the zero prep in the first place). Another is that it only works for certain games, certain play styles and certain GM styles.

And as I say I think that’s actually the question that matters – what do we want in an unfolding narrative and how do we get it, and how do we use both a human moderator to get it and a pre-written story to get it? I actually think computer games are way ahead of TTRPGs when it comes to that latter element, because not having a human moderator they actually set out to solve this problem. In some cases, sure, the computer players have just learned to go along with the fact that the story will be clunky, or with railroading (the cutscenes don’t change no matter what you did in the play scenes, or you just go from story check point to story checkpoint) but in many cases there have been incredible leaps in storytelling both in terms of nudging into narrative and exegesis narrative. I’m not up to date in this field at all but in my own experience the Monkey Island games for example, were full of puzzles that didn’t block exploration and gave a sense of telling a great story, and the way that Gone Home used a few locked doors to make the story happen in a strong sequence of reveals while still using puzzles to make it feel like a game was extraordinary.

But are we applying this new learning to writing TTRPG written adventures? Not really, I fear, because of all the above. Some might say we shouldn’t because of all the above or because we have that human brain to do it for us. But that latter one ignores the question of HOW our brains do it. Because in the end we do it a lot like the computer games do it, which is to say we have two basic concepts of story construction (leaving aside purely random or mechanical outcomes that are recontextualized post-facto):

• Area based, which is to say that if players go to a certain location in space in the world, the GM/adventure/prep has decided/decides what is there and what the players find out
• Consequence based, which is to say the adventure is structured as a series of if/then logic gates. These gates can be incredibly complex, but in essence they are “if the PCs do this kind of thing, this kind of thing happens”.

In most cases, we tend to use both at once, I think. If players don’t go to a place for a long time, something might happen because of that, or if they go there instead of somewhere else, that’s a consequence choice.

I am avoiding the terms “railroad” and “sandbox” here because I find people actually disagree on what they mean. Some consider the classic D&D dungeon crawl a railroad, because the players can’t really leave. They have to progress through rooms, and find the big bad. On the other hand, others would call that sandbox because they can go to any room they want, in any order, no matter what. And in that case, a railroad feel stronger to those players, it feels like no choice at all. And I think we should avoid jargon as much as we can because people use the same words to mean different things all the time, or to attach bad or good feelings to them that aren’t part of it.

Definition drift and terms being altered or misunderstood is something that happens in every field but it seems very strong in TTRPGs. I think this is because we don’t have the kind of language base we need to talk about this, and as a result language always seems to swiftly become a form of attack. What you described on this forum or blog is bad, evil, wrong roleplaying/GMing, or what system X wrote is revolutionary brand new roleplaying. See above about how we treat zero prep like it is this great salvation – and how that makes us feel judged and devalued, too. And this vagueness I think is why people feel uncomfortable with the idea of actual plays and paid GMs – we haven’t actually worked out what good GMing really IS, so it feels rude to say mine or yours isn’t worth watching or worth paying for…

Speaking of definition drift, because I’ve been talking about this online for …. (thinks in head) thirty years, I invented some of the popular terms for it. I invented Pixelbitching, which was a word for when there’s one specific thing a GM wants you to do, but to preserve a sense of player agency, there are no massive context clues which thing that might be. Don’t look for the secret door in room 12? You’ll leave the dungeon thinking there was nothing there. That might be fine in a very “sandboxy” campaign, but it can be devastating to enjoyment if you want some sort of sense of where the GM might have put some things to interact with or if it is used to penalize you for “playing wrong”. I’ve played far too many convention scenarios where at the end the GM has gone “oh you know how you felt like you had no direction? that’s because you didn’t talk to NPC X” or “the reason the monster killed you all at the end is because you didn’t talk to NPC X who had all the clues”.

To counter this, I always said that I tended to figure out what I want the players to know (and indeed, sometimes the cool things that I think they might do) and put them wherever the players go or with whomever they might talk to. This was then labelled Illusionism, and has become to be now very taboo, with a lot of extra things attached to it. And it also has problems: if the plot is everywhere the PCs go, then the players can just go “we talk to the first person we meet”. That sounds unreasonable and it is, but a close equivalent is “I roll Gather Information to see who to talk to – because my character would know.” It is a golden rule that you should not expect your players to be as smart or as charismatic as their characters…but it is also a golden rule that “I roll my Smarts to figure out how to solve this adventure” is no fun.

To me what I conclude from this, overall, is that RPGs are actually a kind of agreed upon pretence. The players agree to pretend as if they are not in a story, and are acting only for their characters survival and viewing everything as if it is natural and real to them, but will of course do no such thing when they see opportunities for great plot hooks and dramatic things to do. Meanwhile the GM pretends that everything the players do is a free choice and they are merely reacting as the universe might, while doing no such thing when they see opportunities for great plot hooks and dramatic scenes to build. The exceptions are prompt games like The Score or games that are specifically about creating narrative elements like Hillfolk or Smallville, although even then we enter the stance of “now I’m playing my character who doesn’t know that we just had a Dramatic Conflict, and doesn’t know they live in a soap opera”. And let’s be clear, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with this. We’ve all seen horrible writing where the characters are too genre savvy or they seem saved entirely by plot armor; we’ve also all seen films where we know that the hero will win but we understand he cannot act as if knows that, and our feeling of suspense is not undercut by our knowledge that it will all turn out alright. The lie is built into fiction, so there’s no problem with it being built into RPGs.

But even if we all agree on this, we still have a question of “how do we decide what happens”. My friend is of an improv school and one time a player had an idea and I could see how he completely rejigged a scene so the player idea would be super useful. As he explained, in improv they are taught to follow what others say. But I’ve seen other GMs go “look no I already said he was too far away, that idea won’t work,” or “you don’t have that skill” or “you’ll need to roll really well”. It’s not “wrong” or “blocking” to give weight to established in world-truths, or to make it feel hard for the players. I’ve had a player once blame me for their character dying because I knew their character was at the back of the line and I had skaven attack with poison, and I honestly had just chosen how skaven do things and let the dice decide – it was nothing personal. Meanwhile I’ve also run games where to me, the players had zero choice about really anything. My notes were: players arrive at the hospital, they encounter weird stuff, they get clues XYZ, the patient tries to kill himself, they stop him, they convince the ghost to leave”. And it all happened just like I said, around all the dramatic events I listed. The players at the end said they felt like they had more agency and control than in most adventures they played, and they had all the choices in the world.

One of my rules of RPG Theory is that often the actual play events visible to the outsider are identical regardless of what theory or style of play or GMing you’re using. In practice, that is, even the players at the table cannot tell how the GM is making their decisions. Nor can the GM tell of the players. Thus a GM railroading a dungeon crawl and some virtuoso improv god building a wide open sandbox might actually appear identical to everyone involved. That said, the players and GMs still have to make decisions internally. And that is going to involve either a if/then thought or a what’s over there thought. It’s also going to involve (as so many theorists have come to conclude) what kind of thing matters more: a really cool dramatic/narrative structure, the power of an experience being curated for the players and the needs of the players right now, the story the GM wants to tell, the truth of what the PCs can do and what the rules say about that, the truth of the dice rolls, the truth of the world and the coherence of the setting. And there’s how much we want to control for those values, so that the ones we want come through and the others don’t. And how hard we hit those things.

I actually have a lot of trouble with this because I just like people so much (and fear conflict so much) I don’t want to hurt them. So eventually my GMing became worthless because I was like “Of course you can kill the dragon and be king – you’re awesome! Don’t even roll!” or I collapsed into the opposite and started blocking and pixelbitching. And so I keep asking questions and trying to get into what people really think. And it starts by I think stepping away from railroad and sandbox because nobody really actually knows what you mean. They have too much emotion tied to them and too little definition. Let’s try instead to go “what are the goals here” (eg to feel like we are heroes of a story) and how much are we pretending those aren’t the goals in order to achieve the other goals (eg pretending we’re not the heroes of the story, as all fictional characters must)? So far I’ve found GMs have an enormous difficulty trying to actually explain these things out loud. They just “know”. And I think we also kind of just know when it’s done poorly.

But if we can find actual words, without prejudgement and without vanishing up our own asses, or trying to force everything into categories, maybe we can go from that to figuring out good ways to put those things into prewritten scenarios, and make those interesting as hell. Even if we admit that in executing them, it is also important to have a human brain, who can adjust when things don’t work perfectly. That’s why every escape room has a radio or a telephone: because everyone who knows anything about games knows that you can’t just set things up and expect every game to work for every group to produce the perfect outcome of fun every single time. But admitting that a human brain is needed doesn’t stop escape room design from being a fine art, and the same goes for scenario design.

I mean I’ve only been saying that for 30 years….this time, Rocky, for sure.