Storytelling in Tabletop Games
This was a panel at #Nerdcon 2016. Transcribed here in 2023.
Darrin Ross, Jonathan Ying (moderator), Katrina Ostrander, John Darnielle, Michael Underwood? Karren Maulin
Ostrander is a dev on the star wars roleplaying line.
John introduces himself as Gary Gygax
Someone behind me: "You shouldn't try to kill your players, but you shouldn't stop them from killing themselves"
What was your first gaming experience and how was it?
Katrina: Play by post, sailor moon. Didn't try d&d until college because it was too nerdy
John: heard about d&d in the early 80s in high school. They had a d&d club. His friend played and his parents from Alabama (lived in SOCAL) found out and burned their books
John lost his first game by attacking a ghost and he died and put it down for 25 years
Michael: got into 2nd ed and his classmates had collectable cards, and all he remembers is he played a barbarian Al Khadeen.
Michael: I love that you don't have to follow the rules as long as everyone is having fun
Karren: I've never played tabletop games, I'm an artist on some game. I play Catan and Risk and I take it too seriously. But I'm a noob.
Darrin:
"I'm old enough I remember when dirt came out. I kickstarted that."
"We used to play games like don't get eaten by a tiger"
"I was raised b the church so I legitimately believed that if you played it a demon WOULD COME INTO YOUR HOUE"
But there was a resurgence and people realized that it was okay, but I'm still really bad at roleplaying games.
Jonathan: I didn't know what D&d was, I just saw this giant hardbound book in a game store that had a giant eyeball on it and I bought it and it was filled with stats and I knew all this stuff about wyverns and stuff and then years later my friend was like "you know there's a game around that?"
(I had a similar experience, as did Chris Perkins)
Rules mattering
Johnathan: you said the rules don't matter but we all played pretend as a kid and had that friend who said "I hit you with my laser but they say no you didn't' and how do you compete with that? But now we have dice
And he goes on about how theres games like gurps that have hard rules about how to catch dysnetary and there's baron munchausen or fate on the other end with no rules and where do you stand on that spectrum
Darrin: I play imperial assault. Rules heavy games can be so specific where if you get it wrong everything goes to hell (like jedi force pushing everything) and that nuance can be fun once you figure it out, but there are games like super fight where people make up rules that are better than mine
Karren: Still a noob. We need rules light. Ease me in.
Michael: I wasn't always dune buggy first (anecdote about ignoring rules for coolness and dune buggy earlier) before that I wanted mechanics to emulate the tone. I want one more layer of rules than I expect to need so if we have a layer of rules we can play and then until we disagree we can fall back on the granular rules. So medium-soft crunch. If I'm in post apocalyptic I want it to be a grittier game
John: talks about fate and admiring zealots--I play simple games with 0 or 1 d6. I have 120 gamescience dice. But I can't hold that many rules in my head I'm an English major but I admire that person who can and im attracted to that. If I roll 6 dice you're going to give me a minute while I figure out how much that is. I like him
Katrina: super crunchy like exalted 3rd edition or pathfinder has an abundance of rules where the numbers on your character sheet overwhelms everything, you're just concerned about the best combination of rules. I don't want to get into a 20 minute grappling check. But I'm not all the way to the other side, like fate or the diceless story games. I want something in the middle where I can represent my character with some mechanics that I can customize, but the rules should be a vehicle to get the story out.
I like system that have interposal conflicts modelled very well (she like baron Munchausen style of passing tokens back, but she wants a little more crunch with skill checks)
John talks about a system (Night Witches?) where you are female Soviet plane pilots that are decoy fighters for the bombers and you're GOING to get hurt and when I play this game I learn I want to hurt them so I learn them better but my instinct is to protect them I want everyone to come out okay, but I ….better if not everyone comes out okay but NO ONE wants to die but people in my group are ready to die and I think that's interesting because I want to protect the people in my stories. And you don't want to take real damage but it make the story richer, etc.
What can we learn from gaming?
Katrina: I go back and forth between gaming and creative writing.
She talks about the 3 act structure again and how she makes a scene checklist to ensure she includes the details she wants to include and I adapt those to the games so that I account for success or failure.
But last year I was doing NaNoWriMo and my GM instincts kick in and I screw things up for my characters like oh you fail to sneak past the gaurs and before I was a DM I didn't think about the possibility of being more random and putting failure in my protagonists.
Darrin talks about how themes matter in superfight and between different games. Characters and themes cross over and …the world is a cold and terrible place but I want to make people feel something.
John: It's hard to write characters you know nothing about when you you roleplay you can have a safe space to experiment from.
Michael: but I'm the opposite when I fail as a writer its private and not in front of people
Darrin Ross: I'm not creative. whenever I play d&d I play a sorcerer named mark. He has no last name and sounds exactly like me and all I do is fireball
Jonathan: games are collaborative, you have to remember the events and social contracts. Do you have ground rules for player deaths or whatnot, or having a LE pally w/ a chaotic evil warlock?
Gives a contrived example about PVP and then ends with hypothetically (everyone laughs, the example was very specific)
Katrina: I railroad my characters w/ ground rules: you are going to create a party that likes each other and is willing to work together and… but as the GM it's my responsibility to make sure people aren't set up to fail or clash and I have to confront people when they are making game unfun for other people at the table and I can be selective about the people I game with so if I don't get along with someone or they bring baggage ill kick that out of the group. I understand not everyone has this luxury, but check online.
At the time, I wrote that I disagree with 60% of this. Now, I mostly agree with it.
Katrina: I like legend of 5 rings because you're going to be an honorable character w/ duty to a lord instead of a raging murder hobo parading around the country. Use roll20
Darrin: I'm the opposite.
Michael: I play with people I know and strangers but this was 10 years ago but the group aesthetic was unspoken, there was no explicit style of play. He name-drops Diaspora.
I've not had it be explicit. The biggest story of when i failed as a gm and I had a dark star wars game where Luke joins Vader etc. and half my players wanted to be Jedi and bring hope and half wanted to explore the dark and I couldn't bring them together and they weren't compatible.
Note from 2016: Mmm, I think he could have fought this, by talking with players.
Karren, how's the social contract when playing with a family?
Karren: I've never played a game like a cooperative game. We play Mario Kart and it's trash talking and wizards school is cooperative but I helped with the feel and the world and the inside jokes but I don't know the mechanics but I'm looking forward to playing my first cooperative game.
Question Jenga
Rapid fire, people wrote questions on Jenga bricks.
How would you make a game around an RTS and how would you make an RTS and how would you make a game around supreme commander?
2016 note: What the hell is this question?
Darrin: I love RTS, I love Factorio. I would just make senseless…a 3d Factorio
Just ranting about how much life you wasted on Factorio
Senseless stupid things are satisfying from a top-down scale.
I would go deeper and file stupid budget supports and making lunch for your kids and like the sims but managing an army of sad people just miserable game of mundane things
Karren: I have carpal tunnel so my hands shake
Darrin: get a running start
Loving games personally vs prof detachment for sake of craft how do you balance?
Karren: only done art on wizards and by the end I was hating hank green and trying to keep up with him but one meeting we were making characters but allowing level up from underclassmen to upperclassmen but I had to draw another version of all of them and we wanted a diverse cast but 12 isn't enough to be diverse
(Jenga tower falls as Michael pulls, 3 pulls in)
What game has the best story for you?
Michael: I adored a game of Dogs in the Vineyard which is a focused RPG where you play a holy arbiter teenager in a wild west that didn't exist with a fake religion hormonal teenager to send them around to be arbiters to strangers and the game encourages you to create screwed up characters and I was reasonable and a player was the zealot who wanted to get us killed and it was the best campaign I was ever in because everything escalates.
2016 note (before I was aware of Dogs): It's all escalation and it sounds.. interesting.
(The tower is rebuilt)
How can overpowered characters be kept fun and interesting?
We don't have op everyone is flawed but the games we play don't allow you to become invincible.
There are people who like d&d some don’t because you end up invincible.
To keep one interesting you have to find flaws, focus ont hat, take some power away, give yourself a disadvantage
You can introduce an element of introspection.
That's a conflict you'd have in real life
What do you do after you find the holy grail?
Your quest is over, what are you then?
You're a sad person with no goal
Look hard at your character, if he has too much power, he should have feelings about that
It's not just about points, it's about the things that have the points
Jonathan: there are good stories starring superman, there are situations you can't overpower.
Kristen: if you want to watch me play Jenga later, I'm playing Dread later
Jonathan: did we just scribble all over the Dread Jenga?
Kristen: how do you control narrative in….
I think if you want to remain control you don't let them roll
But that's not fun
I see where you're coming from
But you might be better writing
Because your players need agency
You can keep that behind the scenes and regardless of success or failure they go to the next scene
But you need to have consequences in the next scene
2016: (I agree with this about 80%). Now I agree 99%
The fun in a game comes from agency that they have.
2016: (agree). Still agree now
You need to be careful how much control you take
They need to be able to go in a different direction
That's why I'm playing a game and not writing fiction
2016: Good answer
Jonathan pulls
How do you handle outsiders, people who insist on not collaborating ?
Generally I've seen this handled form a design standpoint if you need to be cooperative, make it so players have limited actions
(quaterbacking where one person can dictate all the actions and everyone else is sitting around)
XCOM does this well (the board game) limited information, limited time.
Pandemic with antagonist
Jon introducing randomness mitigates this.
What's the most challenging story you've told in a game?
Darrin: it hasn't come out yet, I can't talk about it.
John: I played a norse myths game, sagas of the icelanders
And a character was so thoroughly [inaudible (the word might have been cuckolded?)] was a bad vibe and the dice were against us and the story was against us and it wasn't fun and everyone wanted out and I had to say this is too dark
Which is hard for me, if you know my stuff, but this was too much it was a house where no one's needs got met which is where I want to LEAVE by playing gams.
I didn't know what to do about this.
Karren pulls---
Really?
That's not how physics work
No go for it
Do it!
Anything is possible attack the ghost!
She pulls it, tremendous applause
What would make monopoly fun?
Lots of clapping
Karren: There should be a Nerdfigheria monopoly, that would be fun
Michael: (better answer) what if one person was a socialist.
Is it ever necessary to railroad a character?
Michael: it depends. If you set your play agenda ahead of time, if your game is about X and a player wants to go to a pub and get drunk but everyone else wanted to do X, then you either directly call them in "We're here to do this" or I'll do a scene with them that builds their plot towards their agenda and then try to bring them in (and that's the way to do it) or if your players trust you you can say hey I spent a ton of time on this it's gonna be great trust me.
Is there a key to balancing giving hints with player actions
John:
Talks about numenon how hard the mechanics is and how there's just a location and a battle mechanic with the dominoes and the dm has to run ONE WAY and you're an insect at the beginning of the game and you have no knowledge of who you are but you feel like you were once someone else and what is this game it sounds great
The players were astronauts in the previous life, and they found out and wanted to find their spaceship and rebuild it and I didn't expect that, they're dead, but they searched so I had to give it to them and… I prefer stories where the players and characters work together to tell a story 2016: (agree)
Katrina pulls do you think it's a good idea to split the party?
Are you the game master because boy is that fun
You can do it but yo have to do it carefully. Engage the other players so they aren't checking twitter while everyone else has their adventure, does it make sense to have separate sessions
2016: (agree, I usually switch a lot)
She suggests having one party be NPCs in the other.
Don't disenfranchise half your players
2016: That's good advice, I agree 100%
Final Q: (not a great question)
Do any of you play d&d and how was your first time as a DM
Jonathan: I made all the classic mistakes
Darrin: did you SUMMON A REAL DEMON?