Story Elements in Tabletop Roleplaying Games

This post is a series of excerpts from my book, Elusive Legends: Building Story in Tabletop Roleplaying Games

When I think about the tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) I’ve played over the past 35 years, what I remember are the stories. I remember revealing that the villain behind the slave trade was the friendly and curious barkeep that the players had trusted. I remember when my ranger was asked to follow the trail of a werewolf, only to discover that he was tracking himself. I remember when a friend’s timid Call of Cthulhu character suddenly grabbed an ancient stone and dove into a pit, sacrificing himself to save the rest of us from approaching shoggoths.

But these story elements happened only by chance, or through creative efforts of improvisation and imagination by a single player. As a gamemaster (GM), I’ve found it challenging to build story in my campaigns. Many newer RPGs reward storytelling elements like playing in character and pursuing character goals, but even these systems can’t automatically generate a great story. The rules only go so far. What we need is a set of guidelines for how to create story.

If only someone had already written such a book.
   
Anyone who's even dabbled in writing fiction knows that hundreds of these books exist. But how do we apply the wisdom of fiction writing instructors to roleplaying games? That’s what this article is about. We'll examine a few story elements studied by beginning fiction writers and then suggests how they can be introduced into your roleplaying games.

High Concept

Make sure your players know what the story is about.

The high concept of a story, sometimes called the premise, is a short statement of the key conceit of the story. What makes this story different from every other story? This is the hook writers use to attract readers and establish mood. Cloned Dinosaurs Escape on an Island is a high concept, as is A Widow Protects her Farm During the Civil War. Depending on the genre, the high concept may be the core around which the story is built, or the external scaffolding that supports it. In The Breakout Novelist, Donald Maas has this to say about high concept, which he calls premise:
   

In short, a premise is any single image, moment, feeling, or belief that has enough power and personal meaning for the author to set her story on fire, and propel it like a rocket for hundreds of pages.   

 
In RPGs, your high concept is the tagline you use to get your players interested. Even if there are portions of your campaign that you want to keep secret, you should still come up with a high concept to describe the game. It will act as inspiration and help establish a consistent mood. Your players will have different expectations if they’re playing Small-time Bootleggers in the 1920s, as opposed to Explorers of Undead-infested Elven Ruins.

Inciting Incident

Make it clear when normal life ends and the story begins.

The inciting incident is what changes the main character’s world and sets the story in motion. In Star Wars, it’s when Luke sees the message from Princess Leia. In The Hunger Games, it's the drawing of Prim’s name in the lottery. If the inciting incident doesn’t happen, the main character’s normal life proceeds unchanged. There is no story. For that reason, inciting incidents should occur very early – some say on the first page of a novel or story. But often, especially in genre fiction, readers need more time to understand normal life before they can appreciate the significance of the change the inciting incident brings about.

The inciting incident in tabletop RPGs is the event that draws the players into the adventure. It’s what keeps them from settling down to a normal, safe life. In heroic fantasy, it’s the first sign of evil and monsters. In an investigation game, it’s being assigned to the case or stumbling upon the first clue. In our conquistador campaign, it was when the ships dropped us off on the west coast of South America and sailed back to Panama City. It should be obvious to each player that their character’s time of leading a normal life has come to an end. The adventure has begun.

It can be difficult to come up with a single incident that motivates all of the players to get involved. You don’t want the inciting incident to split the party into two factions that are at odds. The solution is to have a clear understanding of the characters’ common goals. If they don’t have any common goals, they don’t really have a party.

Sympathetic Protagonist

The player characters are always the protagonists.

Readers keep reading because they want to know what happens next, and usually it’s because they care about the character to whom things are happening – the protagonist. This might be a sympathetic attachment to the main character based on identification, pity or admiration. It could be intense interest in the protagonist’s unique situation, which is often the case with an otherwise unsympathetic antihero. Either way, the reader should sense inner strength in the protagonist – the potential to overcome obstacles and reach their goal.
 
Making readers care is an art, but much of it comes down to whether the author really cares about her characters. The more the author knows about a character, good or bad, the more she will love them, and that will come across on the page. In the stories we tell in roleplaying games, the protagonists are always the player characters. For some adventures, one character is the protagonist and the rest are supporting cast. The same concept applies here; the more the players know about their characters, the more they will care about what happens to them.

Sometimes it may seem like the players aren’t the protagonists. Perhaps they sign on to help someone else with a goal – the young farm girl whose father has disappeared in the woods, the starship captain who has to smuggle secret cargo onto a secure planet, or the tribal chief trying to survive the challenges of rivals. Even if this is the case, understand that the players are still the protagonists. Even if they’re helping someone else achieve a goal, the story should always be about them. Your job is to create situations to help players love their characters, so put them in scenes where they are challenged, where they can be the heroes. If a player doesn't like his character, he’ll lose interest and stop playing, just like a reader stops reading. If he loves his character, he’ll find story everywhere.

Stakes

Stakes must be high, so the players can’t turn back.

An author creates story by showing us how a protagonist we care about deals with a problem, but that’s not always enough to keep the reader’s attention. The stakes must be high enough. What if the protagonist doesn’t fix the problem or achieve their goal? What happens? If the consequences aren’t significant, then we don’t feel tension – even though we care about the character, we don’t really care whether they succeed. Stakes don’t have to be earth-shattering, or even significant to every reader, but they must be very important to the protagonist. If we care about the character, then we care about what matters to them. In Plot & Structure, James Scott Bell explains stakes as:
   

Something that is a threat to the Lead character from the outside. Alost always this is in the form of another person trying to do the Lead harm - physically, emotionally, or professionally.

Usually the stakes are negative, like death, the loss of a loved one, or the destruction of the world. Sometimes stakes are positive, like gaining true love. Salespeople often claim that people are only motivated by two things: hope of gain, and fear of loss. I don’t usually listen to salespeople, but that’s pretty good.

Stakes can be external, dealing with physical consequences to the main character or their world, or they can be internal, putting the status quo of their psyche at risk. Sometimes stories have both – an external threat that forces the character to deal with an internal struggle. Stakes give everything else in the story significance. Without them, the reader just won’t care. I had a writing instructor who illustrated this point with a story. He convinced his mother to watch Terminator 2 with him, and when it was all over, he asked what she thought. “It was alright,” she said, “but not much happened.” All that action, but nothing happened. She didn’t appreciate the stakes because she hadn’t connected with the protagonist.

One of the biggest issues in many RPGs is that stakes are not high enough. Stakes keep your players from deciding to give up and send their characters off to do something else. If you don’t understand what the players and their characters want, you’ll have a hard time coming up with an adventure with stakes that will keep them motivated. The best stakes in RPGs are those that threaten the player characters directly. If the party is connected enough, you may only have to threaten one of them in order to create high stakes for them all. If the stakes only involve an NPC, even if it’s a friend or relative, they won’t be as strong.

Stakes are what happens if the players take no action or turn back. If a party is risking their lives by entering a dangerous cave to recover a fabled treasure, the stakes are just the treasure – they could turn back at any time, and that’s all they’d lose. But if one of the characters has been cursed to die in three days unless the treasure is returned to the sorcerer prince, then death becomes the stakes.

They Fixed Dungeons and Dragons

My friends and I have been playing D&D since 1978. It was a totally new experience at the time, breaking away from Avalon Hill wargames with hex maps and cardboard counters into a world where we could try to do anything, imagine anything. The world of RPGs expanded in the early ‘80s to include horror, superheroes, and international espionage. All in the theater of the mind. It could only get better.

            Somewhere along the line, I think we made a mistake. We bought little metal miniatures, painted them, and placed them on a square grid. The setting was still exciting, and we still felt the draw of character advancement and newfound abilites and magic items, but sometimes it felt like we were playing the old wargames again, counting out movement spaces and measuring for ranged attacks. We weren’t the heroes anymore – those little metal figures were.

            D&D version 3.0, released in 2000, and 3.5 a few years later, were very successful because they felt cleaner, more precise. They were also energized by the release of the d20 Open Gaming License, which allowed any 3rd party publisher to produce support materials for D&D without any licensing requirements. The OGL sparked a renaissance in the RPG industry and dragged in a whole new generation of gamers. But these releases also institutionalized the use of miniatures and square grids. It was built right into the rules. The roleplaying game became a board game whenever the players got into combat. The rules required it.

            Don’t misunderstand me. I loved D&D 3.5.  I wrote for Dungeon Magazine during the 3.5 era and was part of an esoteric priesthood that could calculate proper challenge ratings for encounters and correctly generate all the modifiers for a new monster stat block. But it did feel like we had lost something.

            In 2008, Wizards of the Coast released the core books for the 4th edition of D&D. The regression back to a tabletop combat game had taken 30 years, but it had come full circle. Gone were any monster abilities that didn’t apply to combat. Skills and character abilities were all focused on fighting using miniatures on a square grid. All roleplaying aspects of the game had been removed, leaving only a tabletop combat game (albeit a good one). We tried 4th edition briefly, but it just made me sad. I missed D&D. We found some refuge in Pathfinder, a very well-produced lifeboat for everyone who wanted to stay with the 3.5 system. But I still preferred games where we could “go off the grid.”

            My first exposure to D&D 5th edition was at Gen Con 2013. Some friends were playing it in organized sessions and said they liked it. I really got interested when I heard that none of the organized event Dungeon Masters had used square grid maps or miniatures. Everything happened through dialog, with maybe a few hand drawn maps thrown in to set the stage. I picked up the Players Handbook and found myself reading a cleaned up version of the old school D&D rules, but including many of the best parts of the editions that had come between. No mention of squares, or precise line of sight, or drawings of how a cone-shaped spell maps onto a square grid. I bought the Monster Manual and found that my favorite creatures once again had their non-combat backgrounds and abilities. D&D had been fixed. Congrats to lead designers Mike Mearls and Jeremey Crawford for giving us back one of our favorite RPGs.

            Now I have to get back to preparing an adventure. I have a 5e group starting up tomorrow. Good thing I don’t have to dig out all the right miniatures and pre-draw a bunch of maps. I’ll spend that time concentrating on the story.