It’s very easy to fall into the trap of designing encounters, adventures, or full campaigns as if they are going to be read like a story. It makes sense: the majority of advice Role-Playing Game (RPG) manuals give with respect to how to be a Game Master (GM) focus on storytelling. Potential GMs may find themselves thinking back to stories of adventure that they’ve read and trying to capture the same feelings that those produced. The problem with this advice is that, while recalling stories helps to capture certain elements of a game, it falls short of being able to translate existing stories into a playable RPG.
For example, you might want to build out characters from your favorite series of books, but you’ll soon find them feeling hollow, because game frameworks all too often only give you the tools to paint a face on a stat block. Encounters based on existing fiction also often lack the emotion and dimension of the original subject matter, because 1) the GM only gets to control one side of the story, and 2) often the feelings generated by the fiction are based on the build up of tension and conflict leading up to that particular encounter, which rarely matches what your Player Characters (PCs) choose to do. And you shouldn’t try to control your players. They should feel free to make their own decisions.
Even more importantly, books are edited. Whatever doesn’t progress storylines or characters is removed or reworked. You typically won’t have that level of control in your games (and again, you shouldn’t try to control your players — much of the fun of RPGs is that lack of control). So, if you can’t rely on exposition to make something important enough to keep in your table’s stories, what can you do? You prep encounters where everything has some motivation you can leverage — based on your players’ actions and dice rolls — to tie what they do to where they are, and how the world impacts them as a result. This doesn’t just apply to the characters in an encounter; potentially anything in the RPG can have motivations.
But first, let’s take a step back and talk about mechanisms that help with motivations. Games Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA) typically have players roll 2d6 plus a modifier when they want to do something. A roll of 10+ automatically succeeds, and a roll of 6 or less fails (which often rewards the player with experience points). But the meat of the game happens on a middling success of 7–9; the character gets what they want, but at some cost or alongside some impact that they may not have been expecting.
Something like this PbtA game mechanic can very easily be brought into other RPGs that use dice rolls to determine success. Just consider a small range around the target number to be a middling success (say, +/-2 for a d20 check). This constant dynamic of PCs getting what they want but with unintended consequences works wonders for creating a world that players are invested in.
For example, let’s say my players want to go to a rare book seller (a Non-Player Character, or NPC) to look for some information about the quest that they’re on. Rumor has it, she has a map at her shop that will give the characters a better chance of finding what they’re looking for. Typically, you could toss some stats on the proprietor, make a cost sheet of things she sells outside of the normal gear list, consider how difficult it would be to talk her down in price, etc. But that’s really dull. The proprietor would become nothing more than a proxy for a gear list — just a speed bump in the game’s momentum.
Instead, consider this: the proprietor has her own motivations. Maybe this one hates her wares. They were left to her when her husband died, but his will stipulated she would have no claim to his modest fortune until all of his rare books found good homes. The husband cursed the books, and they’ll know if they’ve been mistreated. Her motivation is spite.
Let’s go even farther, and say that even the store has motivations. This bookstore isn’t interested in the owner’s spite or the late owner’s desire to see all of the rare books sold. The bookstore’s agency in the world is derived by its contents, and it is difficult for the shop to give anything up. Its motivation is to covet. Keep in mind: giving something narrative agency isn’t the same thing as giving it sentience. The bookstore, for all intents and purposes, is a regular bookstore. But because we’re creating a story together with our players, and the PCs exist in this space, the spaces they exist in must have agency to impact the story. In my example, the players’ goal for the scene is for the PCs to get the information they need. The proprietor is more than willing to sell the PCs anything they’d like — at a discount, even. If the players roll middling successes, you as the GM can tap into the NPC’s motivation, and PCs can be ‘gifted’ additional items from the store, only to find out that the items are cursed after they’ve taken ownership. Or perhaps on a failed roll, you decide that the proprietor has already been impacted by the curse by giving away the document the PCs are looking for to someone who was unworthy of it.
Alternatively, you can tap into the store’s motivation, allowing a different way for obstacles to be presented. PCs middling successes here might reveal that there’s a sign above the register stating ‘maps are only to be exchanged for items of equal or greater interest, no purchasing permitted’; you could even have the PCs receive the map they want, only to realize an important item in their packs has gone missing, and somehow it ended up on the bookstore’s shelf.
And that whole scenario was just using the motivations of the immediate scene to influence rolls. Motivations from things larger in scale (guilds, the city as a whole, the weather, etc.) can also impact play in non-mechanical ways. The point here is to fill your world with interesting things, then let your players muck about with it. You don’t have to know where any of it is going to end up, but by creating these opportunities based on how your players interact with the world, you’ll end up with the same kind of emotional investment that novels and movies can create. But instead of telling your players a story, you are all working together to collaboratively create the story.
Brendan Quinn is the President of Tri-City Area Gaming, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that promotes critical thinking skills with community-building events and supports game-based educational and charitable activities.
Tri-City Area Gaming uses tabletop gaming as a framework for social interaction, education, and community building. They host nearly 100 events a year in order to bring folks together in a way that’s safe, friendly, and inclusive.
Check out Tri-City Area Gaming’s events and follow them on social media: tcag.carrd.co
