On Role-Playing Game Storytelling, Game-Mastering, and the Fire That Makes Them the Same Thing
There are essentially two genres of game-mastering. There are many more than two, obviously, but all of them can be clumped onto one side or the other of a divide that tends to arise philosophically. This divide matters because knowing which side you’re standing on — and which side your players have elected to stand on — changes everything about how the game actually plays.
So you want to be a storyteller.
The divide is storyteller versus game director.
Each borrows a little from the other, but the fact that it has more of itself is what makes it itself. So what’s the difference?
The Game Director
The game director has to know the rules. First and foremost, they are selling a certain kind of competence, and that competence has to do with the understanding and proper adjudication of the rules. This is why “referee” is sometimes the term that stands in for that role. They’re going to set up a scenario — very often one somebody else wrote, which is completely fine — draw players into it, and execute it. The players are going to do what they’re going to do, and the game director is going to rough it.
There are systems that lend themselves to this. You could write a whole essay (and many have) on the way that a system’s rules and emphases turn and influence the kind of stories that arise out of it. All of us in this hobby are standing in the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons, and D&D can be executed on either side of the divide — which is probably what makes it as classic as it is. You can run a very rules-heavy, tactical, turn-based game where positioning and team strategy are what you spend most of the time discussing. You can do a pure simulation, military tactics via miniatures scenario. That’s why so many of those games involve digital miniatures and models and elaborate terrain and, frankly, in the immortal words of Dennis Leary, “lead to carpentry.” There is a time and place for all that, and I’m not talking down to fans of Warhammer, here. But that’s not my hobby, and I find inhabiting other people’s IP stifling, to put it mildly. I like a simple rule system, a world in motion, and I can take it from there. My friends and I, we have our own stories to tell, and they are much more interesting. It doesn’t sell game modules, but it’s the truth.
I’m talking about something else.
The Storyteller
Contrast that with something like Vampire: The Masquerade, or the Hunter games, or Call of Cthulhu — games that depend very heavily on what they literally call the Storyteller system. These lean on the ability of the person running the game — in this case called the storyteller, not the Dungeon Master — to manage a story, not a rulebook.
Too much rigid storytelling, as opposed to refereeing, and you get games that feel on a track. Open worlds that are not actually open. Choices that are illusory and feel illusory. The game starts to feel claustrophobic, like you’re just reading out somebody else’s script. That’s bad.
Too much of the other side — too much refereeing, too much game directing — and it starts to feel rudderless. A little chaotic. Overly tactical. Hack and slash. The accumulation of loot, with no thematic meaning or coherent narrative point. A lot of meaninglessness, frankly, which for certain age levels of gamers is completely okay.
I have the profoundly unpopular opinion that past a certain point you should probably be done with that, just as a matter of advancing your craft. Some of it is always fun. Some players are always going to like it. And very good players — advanced players — can take that and balance it and imbue their own meaning by the weight of their choices. If you ever get the opportunity to play with actors or performers, they’ll know how to do a lot of this intrinsically. They’ll guide the story towards meaning, even at the short-term cost of a choice that might benefit their character. They might jump into the flame and kill their character if it provides the right kind of narrative tension or dramatic climax. That’s good.
It’s my opinion that refereeing and storytelling are different skills. Both can and should grow into each other, and you have to find the balance that suits you and your group’s style. And you have to find the group that suits you. Not everybody is for everybody.
You Have Permission
I’m moved to write this because somehow I’ve ended up in a series of online groups where young gamers are getting ready to set up their games, and they lack something. Confidence. They think they are going to mess it up, they think they aren’t ready. I think you are aligning yourself with an ancient and powerful tradition. And I don’t want you to overthink it! But I don’t want you to miss it, either. So I’m moved to set them up for success, and keep the sacred fire going.
Storytellers. Let’s get moving.
The Beowulf Lineage
Neal Stephenson tells a story about two types of writers.
There is the Dante writer — the kind of person creating crafted art that moves the form forward. This is the product that comes out of the lab. Out of patronage and investment and the time and space to sit down and push the form to its next iteration, in a way that can absorb loss and learning and produce something truly new.
And then there is the Beowulf writer — the Homeric kind — which comes to us from the tradition of the hearth. Somebody has shown up. They have a job to do. They have to do it now. That job is to entertain. They have to be able to read the room. There’s a bit of performance to it. But they are singing for their supper. They do not have time to be experimental unless they’re supremely confident. They don’t have the space to be precious about what they think should work. They get the audience they get, and that audience better walk away happy, or they don’t eat.
When I talk about storytelling in games, I see something that comes to us in a very direct bloodline from the Beowulf lineage. You are providing an entertainment. It is to your discredit and your own peril that you overdo it and give the players the feeling of being on a track. It has to feel natural. It has to feel important, laden with stakes. You might think it’s cheesy to lean on cliffhangers and action sequences — too fucking bad. This is about giving the people what they want.
Now I’m going to contradict myself, because I feel like there’s a legion of TV writers nodding along and understanding only too well the tension I’m about to describe.
There is an asterisk, here and it is: But what the fuck does the audience know?
Because this isn’t your first time doing it either. Once you get a sense of audiences, you get the ability to supersede the needs of your audience in the now. This is a very fine needle to thread, but sometimes they’re not going to like it. That doesn’t mean you overcorrect. It means you follow your instincts. Sometimes they like it later. Sometimes they never like it. Sometimes they come to understand it. Sometimes they never do.
But you have to have confidence in what you’re offering, because what you’re doing is connecting to a sort of Promethean fire. It’s not to be fully understood by you, and it’s sure as fuck not to be understood by them. They’re further from it than you are. They’ll know if it’s working — that much they can tell you. But your instincts on this matter are the ones that count. Everything that comes after is a critic.
Aside: If it’s not clear, I think the internet-comments-to-TV-output pipeline is one of the worst things to happen since, well, ever. You want to make a fan group to bring back Firefly or whatever? Great. You want to tell the writers how to do their job? Fuck off and write your own show. I mean that sincerely, literally–your answer should be a better show. These are the people who thought Andor was too complex, which should be disqualifying. If you cook steak at a steak restaurant, send them packing when they ask for a hamburger. You knew what this restaurant was.
Some of you are thinking: this is an awfully full-throated defense of the role of what is, after all, the Storyteller in a game. And you would be right. But what I hope I’m doing here is providing some tools and rationales for why your confidence as a storyteller must be protected, and how to do it. This is important, beyond just entertaining your friends over an evening.And if you find yourself overly receptive to the audience of the moment, what you’re doing is called ‘fan service.’ Fans like predictable. Fans like genre. Fans like all the shit they’ve seen enough times. Those are tools you use, but they’re not what you’re actually doing. They’re more of a clue left behind by your passing, a signature you don’t even know you’re leaving. Being conscious of it is the kiss of death. You just do what you do. And that is: keep it moving.
The Craft
Confidence
The first and most valuable trait a storyteller has to have is a certain kind of confidence.
You need to be able to manage the session — what a teacher would call ‘classroom management.’ You’ve got a bunch of people arguing, discussing, whatever. You recognize that the rules exist to facilitate the story. They don’t exist for themselves. You really shouldn’t ever refer to the rules at all if it slows down the narrative. Delta Green is an example of a game that understands this intrinsically — part of their rules is that you don’t use the rules unless there’s no other way. Blades in the Dark is another. A lot is left to the ability of the troupe to self-manage, and this is ideal.
You are not the boss, in the way the conductor is not the boss of the orchestra. You’re assembling a collaboration. This is a tandem story between all the people at the table, to the extent they want to involve themselves. You arrive confidently. You present. You direct. You nudge. You control the pace. If things aren’t happening, a good storyteller makes things happen. A bad storyteller leaves it to the players to figure out. They’re not going to figure it out. If they could have, they already would have. Give a respectful amount of space — certainly for things like puzzles — but don’t make them bored of themselves. Give them something to react to.
Scene-Chaining
Your management should feel like it’s behind a curtain. You don’t force players to do things. You present them with choices that interest them, and the choices will interest them if they align — or conspicuously fail to align — with the things they want. Carrots and sticks.
The single fluttering needle on the dashboard readout, the one they’ll probably never be aware of (and when they are aware of it, it’s never a good sign for you) is the answer to the question: where is the why?
You have to be aware of that question–and its answer–all the time. Entering every scene and coming out of every scene, there should be a reason they’re there. Something they want to achieve, or an obstacle they need to overcome. When they leave, they enter the next scene with a reason for being there. You? You’re just chaining reasons together. Sometimes the reason is they’re escaping the last scene. But it has to feel like they know how to get out of the night. They’ll know when the next scene is over, intrinsically, if you’ve correctly chained those two things together. When things seem to be listless or dragging, check the dial on the why. Often it will be unclear or obscured, and needs a narrative restatement.
Imagination and the Loop
There is something both overstated and understated about the role of imagination in this.
If you have a good imagination, it’s going to come through in your confidence. You’re going to believe your ideas. You’re just going to want to see them happen. You’re going to want to call them into life.
If you’re not particularly imaginative, that’s going to show up in your confidence too. It’s a self-fulfilling loop. You’ll put forth fewer and less interesting ideas. It’s going to be more cliché. You’re going to be reaching for stuff and not finding anything good.
Confidence allows your eyes to roll back and go white while you reach into the collective unconscious and pull something out. You’re going to be fine with it. You’re going to put it in front of them, and they’re going to look at you like: “you’re really selling me this?” And you’re going to say yes. And they’re going to have to react to that. Chain enough of those moments together and they start to get a flavor. They start to understand it. They start to roll with it.
Don’t try to manage this. This is part of the ineffable.
Stop Asking the Internet
I bring this up because one of the things I see constantly — in Facebook groups, in Reddit, in chats — is young gamers asking these rule-based questions, and it’s so fucking boring. If I have one of these and it’s fighting one of those, who wins? I don’t know, man, it’s your game. Who wins? These are not fixed quantities. The rules are guidelines. They’re there to untangle disagreements, but the disagreement has to happen first. Sometimes this character wins. Under different circumstances, that character wins. Done.
I had a teacher in martial arts who had a great line. He had a student caught underneath him, and the student said, “Well, I might as well give up, you have the advantage.” And the teacher said, “Yes, but only God knows for sure.”
In the game, you control that. It is not interesting to compare stats or to dwell on other people’s ideas. I submit to you that storytellers should have ready answers to questions like these in their heads. But unless you’re really stuck, you get to make it up. Don’t go to the internet looking for answers. Ask yourself: what would be the interesting thing that happened? Then let the dice decide if they did, and if not, why not. The dice decide, you give meaning to why the decision was interesting.
Preparation
Period: preparation makes you better.
Even if you think you’re really, really good off the cuff — and I bet if you think that you are you probably are, because I’m fucking great off the cuff— I got news for you. You’re even better with a little bit of preparation.
Being good off the cuff means that if you find yourself unarmed and unprepared, you have skills to rely on. That’s great. But if you want something to be good, take the time to think it up ahead of time and play around with it for a few days.
What happens is you start to accumulate stories. Scenes jostling around in the back of your head, brushing up against each other. Any one of them ready to get pulled out at any moment. Every one that does gets pulled out in a way you didn’t foresee, reshaped into something altogether new for a circumstance that wasn’t what you had planned. Most of the time it’s worse than what you imagined. On those few rare times that it’s better, it’s truly magic.
Once you have enough of those banked, you get better at coming up with new ones, and you have a library of maneuvers that becomes almost infinite. I say almost because you’ll start to see your own patterns emerging, and your players will too — your tricks, the way your mind operates, your frame of reference. But that library will always be ready.
It’s like the best rappers. They’ve already put together a toolkit of words that rhyme. They’ve already put together sentences, phrases, whole raps they never used. And one day, in a so-called freestyle situation, they pick it up and make it look like they just thought of it. Nobody saw the thinking that went into it. They’ve made that rhyme a hundred times, a hundred different ways, and here, now, it looks unforced, natural. That’ll be you.
All of this leads to one place: your ability to answer the question — and then what happened?
Well. Let me tell you.
Endings
You’re never surprised by arriving at the end. To the contrary, you usually see it coming for a while. You know some things that should probably happen. This is when thinking about it ahead of time pays a certain kind of dividend, because nothing brings the meaning home quite like an end. So you want to end strong.
The ending reveals the theme. They wanted this thing. They either got it or they didn’t. Were they right to want it? Were they wrong? Did they do the right thing? Did they change — not necessarily for the better or the worse, but in a way that makes sense? And if it makes sense, what meaning does that leave on the table?
If it doesn’t make sense, unfortunately, it won’t indicate any meaning at all.
Don’t be afraid of dramatic endings. Let me give you two examples — one that worked and one that didn’t.
The Watchmen Ending (Don’t Do This)
I ran a game where the players caught the villain at the end but were unable to stop him. He’d already unleashed his plan. I was using it to set up the next mission with a certain amount of velocity, but it was so deflationary. The game was over. They were willing to be good sports about it and try the next thing, but — it didn’t work. They’d been led to believe their choices would make a difference, and then told, explicitly, without negotiation, that they didn’t. That’s the how-to manual for how not to do this.
The Bar Shooting (Do This — If You’ve Done the Work)
Now here’s a contrasting example you’d think would go badly.
A personal rule I try to follow — and I think it’s especially good when playing with younger people — is never kill the characters. They should not open a door and find somebody with a gun who shoots them dead. Not by surprise. There should be clues along the way that they’re heading toward something that overmatches them, or that the walls are closing in. They should die only by bringing to bear the consequences of decisions that they made.
But there are exceptions. In one of the games I’m running, there’s a mechanic — a meter called Danger that rises over the course of play. I use it as a stand-in for what is called ‘Heat’ in the crime genre: how much the cops are onto them, how much the press is watching, how much the wrong kind of attention they’ve attracted. It’s a meter that stands in for consequences they’ve already set in motion. And we agreed up front: once the heat meter hits five out of five, yes, it is entirely possible that you will open a door with enemies on the other side, and they will shoot you.
So. The players had made it through the entire scenario. They were alive. Laughing and drinking and toasting their success at a neighborhood bar. Two of them went outside to take a piss.
Out came the dice. Out came the roll.
Boom, boom. Headshot, headshot. Their bodies fell into the outdoor trash bags in front of the apartment buildings by the bar.
I was comfortable doing this for a few reasons. One, we’d laid out the rules. Two, this was an advanced game where every player runs multiple characters — they have backups, and backups of their backups, because the understanding is that some of them are going to die. Three, I put them in a hospital afterward with the possibility of recovery, and in fact in future sessions both made full recoveries, which became a big part of their backstory going forward, as was the meaning created by that passage of recovery time.
I would have thought it’d get a bad reaction, like the Watchmen thing. Quite the contrary — it put everyone on notice. It reinvigorated the game. They realized: oh, no, there is real danger out here. It woke everyone up. One of those characters went on to get killed again, and was brought back via fair game mechanics into the same hospital. He could have been dead a couple of stories ago. Now the player was really invested. The character started accumulating scars and history that actually meant something.
If you asked those players to survey the moments they remember, they would all remember that one.
Hints and Signals
Always give them choices. Always give them hints. Hints are a big part of genre — messages, motifs, signals and signatures. Horror uses these constantly. The first warning is a crow in the road. The second is an owl on the window sill. The third is the killer in the house.
It has to build.
Feed Your Head
A word on sources.
Storytellers are writers who move too fast to write their shit down. If they could slow down, they probably would. There’s something of a tragedy here — capitalism doesn’t really have a way anymore for somebody like that to turn this into a paying skill. This game system is very close to a lot of very old forms, but you can’t really find those forms in use anymore. You don’t go anywhere to see somebody tell a story, certainly not an interactive one, because it’s a different skill set to be able to riff with other people in the formation of your story, like a cast (with and appropriate nod to Critical Role and the like.)
A lot of arts are close, but none are quite it. It’s its own thing. Sometimes the best art is for the smallest audiences. C’est la vie.
Take in good material. Try to stay away from crap. You ever hear that saying — shoot for the moon, you miss, you hit the stars? If you’re going to tell a vampire story, find the best. Read Bram Stoker. Read Anne Rice. See Near Dark. Watch Interview with the Vampire, the TV series. Take the best examples. You can see Twilight and you will understand everything it has to say about the teen vampire genre. The world does not need another one. It needs you to have read that already and be on to the next thing.
You can only come up with something new when you have an awareness of all the old stuff and how to improve on it. Dali and Miles Davis have something to say here: learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.
Read outside the genre. If you plan to do horror, read historical fiction. Read romance. Then twist those things. Whatever genre you want to do will be calling to you no matter what you fill your head with. It will just be that what you fill your head with gets inflected by the story your soul is aching to tell — not the other way around.
I had a teacher once who said: you have to read the classics because you have to know what made them classic. But, he continued, if you spend your time only reading the classics, there is no reason I can see for me to give a damn what you have to say now.
Fantasy Gets a Bad Rap (But Earns It)
I’m going to pick on fantasy because I think it gets a bad rap — but also because it seems to be in constant need of reinvention, and to its great and enduring credit, people successfully keep reinventing it. The work of George R.R. Martin is aware of but not in conversation with the work of J.R.R. Tolkien. But there is no Martin without Tolkien. Likewise, I’m not sure you get Joe Abercrombie without Martin, or without Andrzej Sapkowski. These are real standouts, but they have a lot of also-rans. And it is possible to spend too much time in that section of the library, filling your head with more of the same. And sooner or later I can make the same injunction: I see no reason why I should give a shit what you have to say, now.
It is not interesting to read about dwarves and how they like money and are short and always act a certain way. It is not interesting to read about elves and how they’re pretty and have pointed ears and are essentially super-Europeans representing all that’s good. That’s fucking boring. And not only is it boring — a lot of those elements have done real nasty work poisoning our narrative culture over the years.
If that’s the kind of thing you’re into, find your way to the edge of the pool and climb out. Move to horror — horror is always doing something new and interesting. Find your way to popular, or literary fiction. It’s actually never been a better time to be a reader. It just feels like the opposite. It’s a supply problem: fewer readers than ever, more books of more types than those readers could possibly need.
Know Your Weaknesses, Lean Into Your Strengths
Find out what your weak points are. What kind of scenes are you really good at? I’m a huge believer in finding the things you’re good at and leaning into them twice over. But I’m also a big fan of finding out what you’re bad at and getting passable. You need all the weapons. You might not be a sword fighter, but sooner or later you’re going to find yourself in a sword fight. Don’t have no clue what you’re doing. Be passable. Be serviceable.
The Game Within the Game
One last thing on rules and mechanics, because it matters more than people think.
Pick the right game for the game you want to play. Pick the right rules for the story you want to tell. I really like the Storyteller system. I find vampires themselves the most boring thing imaginable — an incredibly well-searched room. But the rule system brings a lot of interesting stuff with it: the humanity meter, the willpower meter, skill checks on courage and self-control and conscience, which change depending on your character’s affiliation. Other games cover all that off with something called an ‘alignment,’ which is incredibly boring — it’s a commitment to how you’ll play the character, and if you don’t follow it, what happens? Nothing.
The Storyteller system is about change. People change, and there are consequences for those changes. Your humanity can go down, and there are consequences for that. The stories I tell are about that process — characters starting one way and becoming another. Usually they start good and become worse. Sometimes they start worse and become good. But they always undergo change. That’s what’s interesting to me.
It is not interesting to me if they can kill a dragon. It is incredibly interesting to me if they’re willing to kill a dragon — the last of its species — so they can harvest a specific magical artifact from its bile duct that they need for a reason that’s maybe important and maybe not so important. That is an interesting choice. And a game is a series of interesting choices.
Even the mechanical decisions matter. The Storyteller system recommends that fight scenes not go longer than three rounds — they believe it gets boring, and I agree. If you’re rolling dice pools of eight, that’s could quickly become sixty-something dice rolls in three rounds. That’s not fast. Compare that to a system like D&D or Palladium, where the same fight could be over in twenty-five seconds with the right players and some quick math.
If you know all this when you sit down to build — or modify — a rule system, what comes out of it will be different from just the story you’re telling. The mechanics have a huge vote on how play is expressed. That’s an incredibly obvious thing to say, and it’s also an incredibly underappreciated one. Whether investigation and research feel like slow, careful work with dark tomes and uncanny presences, or whether it’s a quick percentile roll and on to the next thing — those produce two very different kinds of narrative.
Back to Delta Green: their system for managing insanity — alongside trauma, addiction, and the personal relationships that keep you sane — is absolutely brilliant. It infuses tension into areas that other games don’t even address. Can you imagine something like that in D&D? The slow accumulation of trauma from killing? It would make the game unplayable. But in Delta Green, it makes the game.
Trust Yourself
You want to know if you’re good at this? You have to be a talker, or willing to become one. It’s not a prerequisite for entry, but I can tell you — after you’ve done this for a while, you will have no problems talking to people.
You have to have confidence in your ideas. But more importantly, you have to have enough ideas for that confidence to be believable to you. The confidence follows the ideas, not the other way around. You have to want to say something, because you have things to say. Usually it’s a plot you’ve been germinating, and you really want to try it out.
And it’s going to work. All you need to think about is keeping the narrative flowing and getting them out of ditches. That doesn’t mean solving their problems — it means keeping things moving. If you’ve been thinking about it long enough that you know where it begins, how things kick off, what the middle mostly looks like, and what the end probably ought to look like — you’ve got it. Go ahead and get started.
This is a hobby you can have for the rest of your life with the right people, and it’s a great way to meet a certain kind of people. Trust yourself. Trust your friends. Tell the story you want to tell about the world you want to see, or anyway can envision. Come to one of my games and you’ll see — God forbid it’s the world any of us live to see — but I have a vision of what it looks like, and that’s what I’m trying to share.
I’ll leave you with this, because all of the advice I’m giving here — while aimed at Storytellers and game-masters — is really just how the orchestration of drama works. It’s translatable to verbal storytelling. To written storytelling. To directing. These are narrative rules that cross media.
And all of it comes down to your ability to answer one question, which will get stronger and stronger and more powerful with practice:
And then what happened?
Well. Let me tell you.