As activities go, role-playing games are surprisingly hit-and-miss for me. It’s not surprising that there is a fairly high proportion of failures but rather that we so eagerly tolerate it, which suggests to me that there is something outside the game that keeps it worthwhile, and/or there is a different kind of fun in failure. I will bet on “and”.

I am a problem solver. That doesn’t mean that I solve problems, but rather that I enjoy trying to solve problems. If someone tells me what’s bugging them, I will try to construct a plan to solve it. This pisses a lot of people off. Within the context of gaming, though, it means that when a game goes badly I get to analyze it and try to figure out why it broke and then how I might fix it and if that happens at the table, then the evening can be a stunning success for me even if the game failed.

But I want to talk about success. There’s a lot of talk about “story” moving around the role-playing-game-meme-o-sphere and I think it has a lot of merit, though the word “story” is dangerously overloaded. Here’s what I buy, because the idea that fiction maps directly onto gaming strikes me as completely broken, but I don’t think a lot of people make the claim anymore anyway. I’ll also add that there are huge swaths of the gaming community who want to talk about how railroading sucks and so when anyone uses the word story, they use that as a launching point to talk about railroading.

There are things that writers do when writing fiction that works (as opposed to “good” fiction, which is orthogonal) that can probably be ported to gaming. I’m not a trained fiction writer so I don’t necessarily know what these are. But I know what kinds of things work for me in a book that also work for me in a game, so maybe I can get by without the correct terminology. Here goes.

Characters. One of the things that makes a stellar evening’s play for me is having an awesome conversation about something entirely in-setting from the perspective of an interesting character in the game. If I could only have one trick up my sleeve it would be this: make sure there is one character who is passionate about something and that the players will be in a position to talk to. The sharper among you will notice that there are some more tricks embedded in that trick.

Passion. In order to engage the players, someone has to be passionate about something. This is hard. You can’t expect your players to do it — even if they have a dozen aspects, three beliefs, and a handful of statements explicitly declared as passions, there is a disjunct between what the character is passionate about and what the player is passionate about. So there are a couple of ways to manipulate yourself and others to get some passion.

You can bring it. Seriously, you’re the ref, you’re reading this, you care. So bring some passion to the table. Tie it to a character (or two — anyone passionate about something is usually intense about it because they are opposed, so now you have another passionate character automagically) and now that character has something to talk about. And if that conversation goes well you can at least credibly enlist cynical mercenary players and at best sell them on the character’s vision (or its opposition!) and create motivation. Even if you get only one good argumentative in-character scene, it paid off. The evening will be memorable.

As a player (and this is the second ref trick: tell your players this bit) you can get passion without fabricating it by making your character care about something you do. I know, the thespians will balk at the idea of playing a character that’s like you (I play to be someone else!) but let’s face it, you don’t get to cleave off heads in pursuit of your passion, so even if this character shares your deeply-held convictions, she is different from you: she’s going to do something serious about it. And, if the ref is on the ball, she’s going to be challenged on it.

Imagery. At some point you are going to be describing stuff. You will want to get at least one setting-establishing image into play every session. Something awesome that the players can see in their heads. Some people use props, some use prose, some use pictures from the interwebs, some use combinations of these. It doesn’t really matter how you get there, but if you can plant an image in the heads of the players, and if that image is part of what compels you to ref in the first place, then you stand a chance of creating a shared atmosphere that will be memorable.

I use “memorable” a lot because I don’t think fun is all that important. Everything we can say we “liked” is defined by our memory of it — no action exists anywhere but in the instant and as a memory, and memories are all stories. How you will recall an evening’s play is the story you will tell about what happened. That’s why memorable is more important than fun. Fun smells of frivolity and frivolity is not a necessary component of a successful game. What’s important is that you relish the story you will tell about it (even to yourself — maybe especially to yourself as many of us have learned hard lessons about picking up girls by re-telling the exploits of Smegnar, our Fighter-Thief) and the priority for establishing a future story is memory. Memory is necessary for a successful sessions. I cannot recall any successful but forgotten sessions. I don’t need to remember detail for it to have been successful and detail will fade over time, but I do need to smile and look up a bit and think, yeah, I had a swell time when Tirian found the sword at the bottom of the cavern lake, littered with the skeletons of ancient elfish kings.

I will be remembering the people, their passions, and the imagery of those moments.

–BMurray