Collaborative Storytelling Expanded

Collaborative storytelling is the essence of what makes D&D and every other RPG unique among games and other pastimes. But beyond the baseline sense that campaigns create narrative shaped by the details laid down by the GM and then reshaped by the choices of the players and the actions of the characters, RPGs offer plenty of opportunity for more advanced approaches to shared storytelling. 

One of the coolest of those approaches comes from having players come up with some of the details of the campaign, whether as one-off reveals or as details connected to their character’s backstory. Details and hooks for nonplayer characters, events, locations, and more can all be worked into the campaign by the players this way, creating an optimally dynamic story framework that takes some of the pressure to be continually creative off of the GM. 

However, this process of having the players contribute story can be hard to navigate sometimes. This is particularly true for groups used to the traditional setup wherein the players focus only on directing their characters through a world of events, locations, and creatures that are the province of GM. So for groups who want to engage in richer storytelling, here are a few tips.

Talk It Over

As is true for almost everything in the game, the first step to trying something new is to talk about it. Setting up the idea that players are encouraged to bring their worldbuilding A-game to the table is an excellent topic for your game’s session 0, or for whatever email and messaging about the upcoming campaign precedes your session 0. Whether you’re a GM wanting to make the other players a more active force in the story of the game, or whether you’re a player pitching the GM on the idea of a more collaborative campaign, talk about your goals and expectations. Do your best to get all the players on board with this approach, but be respectful if players who are happiest just focusing on the moment-by-moment story of their own character prefer to let others sketch out the larger world.

Especially if many of the players are new to the game, or if experienced players are taking on a broader role in creating narrative for the first time, talk about how the players’ input in the campaign story should play out at the table. It’s easy to start with the GM calling for the players’ input, focusing on relatively easy campaign details, and encouraging any or all players to work together on those easy details as a means of getting everyone used to the process. “Spending a bit of time in town, it’s pretty easy to learn which tavern offers the best chance to find a somewhat shady broker of information. So what’s that tavern called and what’s it like there? Tell me about it.”

Shared Secrets

As a player looking to pitch in on shared story, your character’s backstory can be a great starting point, letting you shape details in the campaign that feel personal to you. So don’t skimp on sketching out that backstory before and during the campaign. Digging up story nuggets from your backstory helps the GM with that all-important goal of making the campaign feel meaningful to the players by connecting it to their characters. And what better way to do that than by having the players create those connections? An NPC your character knows or has heard of, a location you visited or whose secrets you know, a legend you recall from childhood, a rumor you overheard that offers a hint of what peril the party is about to face — all of it is great grist for the shared story mill.

Timing is Everything

Especially if this style of play is new for a group, think about the best approach and timing to having all the players feed lore into the game. As talked about above, having the GM prompt the other players for information can be good starting point, asking for details when an NPC is met, when the party enters a new village, when a mysterious note is found whose contents the GM hasn’t prepared, and so forth. 

Then at some point, you’ll find that the prompting is no longer necessary. As things start to get more dynamic, the decision of when players should introduce story elements will flow naturally from the way the campaign story unfolds during play. The points at which lore is revealed in the story don’t change with a more collaborative approach. They simply shift their focus away from the GM as the center of all revelations.

The way the game naturally unfolds places most moments of revelation into roleplaying and exploration scenes. But don’t overlook the potential of having players introduce new story elements in combat. This works especially well when experienced players know details about a monster (defenses, weaknesses, tactics, and so forth) that their inexperienced characters don’t. At any point during the fight, a player might suggest that their character recalls having heard some important bit of monster lore that can lend them an edge in the battle. But players shouldn’t try to push this into “cheat code” territory by having their character suddenly remember that the lich lord they’re fighting can be momentarily incapacitated by vigorous tickling.

Trading in Trust

As part of establishing the goal of shared storytelling in session 0, the GM and the other players should talk about the need for trust as they shape narrative together. All good GMs avoid “gotcha” moments involving unbeatable monsters in combat, or traps that have no chance to be detected or avoided while exploring, knowing that such things can violate the other players’ sense of trust. Likewise, all good players know to avoid unwanted character conflict or the tired trope of “But stealing and selling the paladin’s holy avenger is totally what my character would do!” So all players should treat the sharing of story in the same way.

As a player, look to contribute backstory details that potentially enrich the campaign for all the players and characters, not just for you. As a GM, embrace and absorb the lore handed to you by the players. Never reject outright a player’s story detail unless that detail feels seriously at odds with the overall campaign narrative — and even then, talk to the player about your reservations and see if you can come up with a compromise that works. 

“Yes, and dragons!”

One thing that can make some GMs wary of a collaborative approach to game story is the idea that giving players more involvement in sketching out the shape of the campaign will make it more difficult to surprise the players. So as a GM, you want to always look for ways that you can take a story detail provided by the players and give it a subtle twist, turning it into something that holds an element of surprise for both of you.

When discussing theatrical improvisation, people often talk about the importance of saying “Yes, and…”. This is the idea that an improv actor builds on what the other actors are developing around them by acknowledging and embracing those developments, then adding to them. You always want to work with what the other performers give you, rather than rejecting their contribution. For GMs who need to be able to work with the other players’ story building suggestions in real time, this means working to not get flustered if a player’s suggestion seems like it might take things in the wrong direction.

For example, when the party is looking for a wealthy thief willing to buy a hot magical relic currently being searched for by the city guard, having a player offer up that their character just happens to know such a person can seem too easy. If you’re the GM in that scenario, it might appear that the player is trying to just work around the challenges that the game needs in order to be fun. But rather than rejecting the player’s suggestion out of hand, think about what happens if you say, “Cool. But what was the event that put you both on bad terms the last time you met?” Working with a player’s suggestion, then taking it in a new direction, complicates the narrative to make it interesting again. So instead of the initial challenge of finding a buyer for the relic, the party now has a new challenge — convincing a prospective buyer to help someone they might be holding a grudge toward.

No-Hassle Summoning

For a spellcaster to summon monsters from the magical aether to the real world is one of the most iconic moves in a fantasy RPG. The essential idea of calling forth creatures from nothingness to do your bidding is always a cool move — especially in combat, where unexpected allies can easily tip the balance of a fight.

But because those unexpected allies each need to take full turns in combat, handling summoned creatures can quickly become one of the most frustrating aspects of a game, for everyone at the table. For the GM, each extra foe added to a fight increases the complexity of running that fight. And for the other players, all the extra actions, tactical decisions, and dice rolling that comes from madditional combatants can turn the fastest-paced fight into a slog of waiting endlessly for one’s turn.

So if summoning creatures has ever been a hassle at your table, the following options might help make the process easier.

Agree That Casters Shouldn’t Use Summoning Spells

This is definitely the nuclear option for dealing with summoning being a problem, but it’s not an entirely unreasonable approach. If you’re a GM (especially a relatively new GM still finding your way), feel free to say to the players: “Summoning spells absolutely wreck me, please don’t cast them.” If you’re a player who’s noticed that summoning spells are causing the GM grief and slowing the game down, you can just have your character cast something else. All RPGs are a continuum of choices, and making choices that make the game fun for everyone is always a good idea.

Share the Responsibility

Rather than automatically assuming that the player of the caster or the GM should handle all the tactics and die rolling for summoned creatures, get other players to help share that load. For a single summoned creature, ask the player with the most straightforward character — or the player with a demonstrated ability to get through their turn quickly even with a more complex character — to make the summoned creature’s die rolls and track their hit points. Especially if the player of the summoning spellcaster has a more complex range of choices to make while casting other spells in subsequent turns, they can focus on giving the summoned creature general directives, then leave the fiddly bits to someone else.

In the event of multiple summoned creatures, it can be great fun to have all the players take on a summoned creature or two like short-term secondary characters or companions. The player of the caster might continue to make tactical choices for summoned creatures in such circumstances, or that could be given over to other players as well, creating the strongest sense of summoned creatures as intelligent, independent combatants.

Simplify Combat

Use whatever tricks you can to make the presence of additional creatures in combat flow as smoothly as possible. Even if your game doesn’t normally use average damage for monsters, do that for summoned creatures. If you know that summoned creatures are badly outclassed in a combat encounter, rather than wasting time on missed attack rolls, let those creatures use the Help action rather than attacking on their own. Or at lower levels, when a single summoned creature can likely hold their own with the party, let the player of the weakest combatant use the Help action to give the summoned creature advantage on attacks, with that player running the summoned creature as above.

Plan Ahead

Sometimes the problem with summoning spells is less about how much they slow down a combat session, and more about how much they grind the session to a halt before combat even starts. Players using spells that summon distinct creatures (as opposed to generic “summoned monster” stat blocks) should think about what sorts of creatures their character is likely to summon, then have those creatures’ stat blocks ready to go — bookmarked in a monster tome, printed out for table use, saved on a tablet, and so forth.

If you’re playing a summoning caster, have two or three options prepared — one creature you like for scouting and recon, one creature built for combat, one creature for mischief and skullduggery. Even if those creatures turn out to not be ideal for a particular scenario, run with them anyway, rather than run the risk of derailing a session by having to quickly through a book of creatures looking for the perfect option.

GMs can likewise have a few easy-to-run creature stat blocks on hand — and are within their rights to ask players to use those stat blocks if they haven’t come prepared.

Learning to Live with Speak With Dead

 A lot of GMs actively hate the speak with dead spell for making it impossible to run a cool murder-mystery campaign in D&D. But in my experience, the reason many GMs feel that way is that they’ve let themselves be convinced by forceful players that the text of speak with dead says words to the effect of: 

“You grant the semblance of life and intelligence to a corpse of your choice within range, allowing it to answer any question relating to its death with perfect accuracy, including the name, description, mailing address, and shoe size of their murderer.” 

Except, of course, the spell doesn’t say that. And within the scope of what the spell doesn’t say, there’s lot of room to make sure speak with dead doesn’t mess with your ability to get your detective story on.

First, always remember that a person (dead or alive) can’t name what they can’t see. Magical disguise is a potent hedge against identification by the living or the dead. But so is a simple mask, a hood pulled down in an area of dim light, or a scarf quickly tied beneath the eyes. Creatures intent on evil deeds typically understand the importance of not being seen — and further understand that in a magical milieu, a victim is always a potential observer even after their demise.

Even when the victim is aware of who’s responsible for shuffling them off this mortal coil, remember that speak with dead allows a caster to question a corpse’s animating spirit — not to access the full consciousness of the person who died. Villains will thus understand how easy it is to confuse that spirit with false information. As a victim breathes their last, imagine a killer they don’t know leaning over them and saying clearly, “My name is John Smith! Remember that John Smith did this to you!” In the hands of a canny villain and a deft DM, speak with dead can be a perfect vehicle not just for deflecting suspicion from the real killer, but for framing someone else for a crime they didn’t commit.

Always remember that characters living in a fantasy world filled with magic are aware of that magic, even if they’ve never seen or experienced it themselves. So NPCs and villains being aware of speak with dead and what it does can keep the effect of the spell in mind if they find themselves involved in a lethal altercation. An easy analogy in our own world is taking fingerprints as crime-scene evidence — a practice for which most people have no idea how it actually works, but which we’re all generally aware of. Anyone who’s seen a police procedural has seen criminals and other ne’er-do-wells wiping fingerprints off surfaces before the investigators arrive. And in the same way, a villain in a fantasy campaign is going to understand the risks involved in a dead character telling the story of how they met their end, and will do what’s necessary to work around that.

The Fine Art of Forgetting

Here’s a bit of advice for people like me who are really, really good at forgetting things while they’re running an RPG.

Consider the following scenario. The characters are doing X, and you made a note at some point that Y should happen. But then in the rewarding chaos of running a combat encounter, you forget the exact details of how Y works, so you run it wrong. There are lots of different scenarios that this encounter algebra can cover. Y can be the fine details of what an illusion can or can’t do, or misremembering a creature’s resistance to a damage type as immunity, or forgetting that an effect should have ended after just 1 round. It’s a complicated game, and forgetting things is easy.

First off, understand that it’s simple enough to just say to the players, “Sorry, I messed that up. Let’s just assume that Y happened in a different way than what we played out.” Everyone makes mistakes from time to time. Your players understand that. Especially if you’re playing with people you know well, no one’s going to get uptight or hold a grudge over you slipping up. (If they do get uptight or hold a grudge, you might be playing with the wrong people, but that’s another topic.)

Alternatively, though, it’s often possible — and remarkably easy — to roll with your mistakes and figure out ways to cover for them after the fact. 

Here’s an example near and dear to me. Every time I run troglodytes in combat (and I sincerely mean: every single time, for the last 40-odd years), I forget to ask for saving throws for their stench at the start of the fight. Every time. And usually when this happens, one of the players points this out in round 2 or 3, and I just say, “Oh, right. Let’s assume you saved earlier and we’ll start rolling now.”

But you can also embrace that mistake whole-heartedly, by saying words to the effect of: “Yeah, that’s unusual. These troglodytes aren’t exuding their normal stench, and you have no idea why.” 

Then at some point after the combat, you get to figure out why. Depending on the timing, you might have the entire length of the break between your game sessions to think of something.

Maybe these troglodytes are suffering some magical malady that’s weakening their tribe, putting the characters in a position to do them a favor by discovering the source of the malady and ending it. Maybe they’ve all become cultists of the god of hygiene. Who knows? 

Well, you know. Because you can pivot off of that innocuous error to make your the game’s narrative line up with the error any way you like.

Always remember how much of what’s fun in an RPG comes about because of randomness. Players and characters doing things that no one could possibly have predicted. And in the same way, the act of GMs making mistakes — the simple process of forgetting details in the way all GMs do from time to time — can create the same kind of fun by taking the session or the campaign as a whole in a different direction.

 

What’s the Story?

If you haven't seen it already, there's a new update on the CORE20RPG design and development blog: Skills and Story. And thinking about story in relation to skills — and specifically, thinking about how to describe the new setup for handling skill success in CORE20 — put me mind of the following.

• • •

When I talk about story in RPGs, and about story in D&D in particular, there’s often a response (usually measured; sometimes not) of: “But D&D isn’t a story game.” And that’s entirely true; but also not at all true, in the way of all conundrums that are less about fact and more about how we define the things we’re trying to factually assess.

For folks who define story games as games with specific mechanics for telling story, it’s absolutely true that D&D isn’t a story game. It doesn’t have those mechanics. No version of D&D has ever really worked on that level. But for folks (like me) who define story games as games in which a story can be unfolded and told, D&D has been a story game since its inception.

How do I know? I was there. I was there three thousand years ago, when Isildur took… Sorry, I mean I was there in the 1980s (which only sometimes seems like three thousand years ago), playing AD&D without so much as a standard mechanic for using skills unless you were playing a thief. And with those completely non-storytelling rules, I created stories with my friends that still resonate in my heart and mind to this day.

Were they good stories? Not always. But the characters we  created and the narratives we shaped never failed to hit all the touchstones for what story can and should be made of. Goals and desires. Conflict and tension. Secrets and revelation. Villainous monologues. Dramatically revealed character backstory. All that good stuff. 

For better or for worse, D&D is a game that lets people tell stories. And I like to think that the strength of the kinds of stories it tells — the kinds of allegorical tales that fantasy excels at — are a big part of the game’s enduring success. Much more so than mechanics, because there are many other games whose mechanics are much more elegant than D&D’s nearly-five-decades-old rebuilt war-game engine. 

Story ties to mechanics, to be sure. The randomness of combat and skill challenges can help create the uncertainty that defines the dramatic tension of an encounter or a scene, with the overall up-and-down movement of that tension tracking the shape of story as it unfolds. But even though the mechanics of D&D in its earliest forms ignored story completely, story became an unavoidable byproduct of the game nonetheless. And for me, that speaks to story as being the single most important part of the game’s ongoing legacy.

Three Pieces of Advice

I’ve been gaming since 1980, and I’ve been working on D&D since 2004, and I’m happy to tell people that I don’t feel like I have any more insight into what makes the game work than anyone else. Because more so than any other creative form, what makes roleplaying games work happens in the moment, forged where the creative energies of a bunch of people crash together to tell a story that couldn’t ever exist in any other way.

In general, I’m not ever about giving advice. I can talk to you about things that work for me in the game, and things that have entered the lexicon of D&D’s design and philosophical foundations. I can and do talk about things that I’ve seen work for other people, because learning what works for other people always invariably teaches me something about my own approach to the game. And I like talking about the evolution the game has made in multiple areas, edition by edition, that make it better at certain things than it was before. 

When it comes to regular advice, though, I try to avoid talking about things that other people have already talked about, unless I’ve got some specific insight or a fresh angle on it. Lots of D&D advice is pretty straightforward. And that’s totally cool. D&D and other RPGs rely on a constant stream of new players coming into their space, and every question that an experienced player has been collecting answers to for years is a question that a brand-new player somewhere is asking for the first time. 

In my experience, though, there are certain less obvious pieces of gaming advice that don’t get talked about as often as they should. So for this initial entry in Missives From Mooncastle, I thought I would talk about three of those things.

Watch, Listen, Engage 

Playing a roleplaying game is like no other kind of creativity or entertainment. An RPG is a storytelling machine, taking in the raw materials of narrative choices and dramatic possibilities that the GM and players create, and churning out amazing stories in emotionally resonant, finished form. But the fuel of that engine is you, the player — meaning your energy is the most important part of keeping the RPG engine running.

Watch the game before you, taking in all aspects of the narrative as it unfolds. Listen to what the other players are doing, especially when it’s not your turn. And engage in the story as strongly as you can while it develops. It’s easy sometimes for all of us to just want to focus on our own characters, especially when we’re roleplaying those characters well. But RPGs like D&D aren’t generally designed to spool the story thread of a single character. They weave story from multiple threads, and watching all those threads as they move, not just your own, puts you in the best position to help shape the pattern they create.

Failing for the Right Reasons

All RPGs are built around the idea of characters attempting actions, and resolving those actions as failure, success, or some relative degree of partial success in between. In the game, as in life, it’s much more fun to succeed than to fail. In real life, being in a position of never failing at anything would be pretty sweet, all things considered. But in the game, never failing can get boring pretty quickly, because without the risk of failure, the achievement of success can start to feel flat with nothing to judge it against.

One of the key aspects of D&D and games like it is the idea that failure shouldn’t be a static endpoint. A failed check should never mean that the adventure stops, just as a failed attack roll doesn’t mean a fight is unwinnable. All good GMs understand that when the characters fail, that just translates into an opportunity to succeed in a different way the next time. If an attempt to sneak in through the sally port of a castle fails, it gives you and the other characters a chance to think about other ways to make the same approach. A series of misses when attacking a heavily armored foe are an opportunity to think tactically about how to compromise that foes’ defenses with magic, by knocking them prone, or what have you.

This isn’t something a GM figures out automatically, of course. Like every part of running a game, understanding how to keep the game moving forward through failure takes time and practice. And one of the best ways for a GM to practice this is with the help of you and the other players as you focus on moving past failure with new ideas. Because every time you make a suggestion for a different approach to solving the problem at hand, you remind the GM that every problem can be solved in different ways — including ways the GM might not actually have thought about until you brought them up.

Empathy as Endgame

Empathy, as everyone knows, is the ability to mentally and emotionally put ourselves into someone else’s place in order to get a sense of how the world (or some specific aspect of it) looks and feels to them. By doing so, we gain understanding as we compare how the world looks and feels to others and how it looks and feels to us. Empathy is one of the core components of being human. Some (including me) might call it the most important component.

The concept of empathy is extremely important in fiction writing. It’s the foundation of our ability as readers to mentally and emotionally inhabit the characters we read in books or watch in movies, shows, and streams. And given that, it probably won’t surprise anyone when I say that empathy is one of the core foundations on which RPGs are built. When we create a character to portray in the game, we are putting ourselves emotionally and intellectually into that character’s place. We want to experience the world as they experience it — which becomes an even more exciting prospect the more different that world is than the world of our own lives.

As an added bonus, being cognizant of how empathy drives us while we’re within the game can make it easier to think about empathy in the space around the game. We can empathize with our fellow players, thinking about how the experience of playing the game feels to them, and how that experience might be different than our own. For experienced players, empathy helps make it clear when a newer player might need assistance that we can offer. As new players, empathy can help us remember that experienced players once had the same questions we have, as a means of making it easier to ask those questions without feeling self-conscious.

Understanding our own capacity for empathy is also the best way to recognize when certain players come up short in that department. The experienced players who make fun of newbies who ask questions. The players who insist that their experience of playing the game is the only legitimate one, as they make it clear they have no interest in the experience of anyone else. Those are players you want to avoid in your games, and engaging in empathy yourself lets you experience the game from those players’ point of view — and by doing so, makes it clear that the way they play the game isn’t worth your time.

Welcome!

This is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, the online home of the email newsletter of Insane Angel Studios and Scott Fitzgerald Gray.

Scott Who?

Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive good) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games — all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. His work in gaming covers three editions of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG, including working as an editor on the fifth edition Monster Manual, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, Starter Set, and Essentials Kit. 

All told, Scott has written or edited upwards of two hundred books, adventures, and articles for Wizards of the Coast, including writing Dead in Thay in the Tales from the Yawning Portal anthology and being managing editor and co-creative director for the Acquisitions Incorporated book from Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade. He’s written or edited for MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Schwalb Entertainment, Sly Flourish, Gamehole Publishing, Green Ronin, Frog God Games, and others, as well as for Dragon, Dungeon, Dragon+, and Arcadia magazines. He also creates and publishes under his own Insane Angel Studios imprint, including the recent monstrous-advice-and-tools tome Forge of Foes, created with Mike Shea and Teos Abadía, and the CORE20 RPG — a new classless, freeform-character approach to story-focused d20 fantasy.

Scott shares his life in the Western Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a number of animal and spirit companions. More info on him and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found on BlueSky, Mastodon dice.camp, and Twitter (all @scottfgray), and by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.

What to Expect

The Missives From Mooncastle newsletter covers a broad range of random ideas revolving around Scott’s love of D&D and fantasy gaming. Sometimes this means digging into game mechanics. Other times, it means talking about things we can learn from the older editions of the game that are all but unknown to most new players. Sometimes it’s about making up random adventure or encounter generators, new magic items, or mysterious dungeon maps. And a lot of the time, it’s just a lot of thinking about the unique nature of fantasy RPGs as a medium for shared storytelling.

The blog is updated with new newsletter material on the newsletter’s irregular schedule. But if you’d prefer to get Missives From Mooncastle delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe!

The Old Lore

If you glance at the Blog Archive sidebar to the right of the page, you’ll note that even though this is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, there are a bunch of older entries. These are a selection of RPG-themed entries from Scott’s no-longer-extant personal blog, more details of which can be found here.