T w e n t y S i d e d

So much of learning to run games is about building confidence in your own abilities. My primary goal is to make you assertive, relaxed, and comfortable when sitting behind the screen and your players feel the same way sitting in front of it. Nine times out of ten, a game like Dungeons and Dragons is a good place to start building that feeling. This article is to help you figure out if you’re one of those nine or if there might be greener pastures.

There’s something unusual, risky, even a little perverse in skipping traditional games and going straight to storytelling-heavy games; almost nobody starts out that way. You’re supposed to join a D&D group, play for a year or two, then somebody doesn’t show up–the GM brings out some crusty old paperback joke game he picked up at a convention in 1998 because it had an anime babe on the cover, and with a shared look of dread and suspicion you all agree to play–a lot of six-sided dice are rolled and “wacky” charts are consulted–you have a decent time and everyone agrees, in spite of themselves, that this was a good change of pace–later you hear somebody’s running another one-shot game, and remembering the decent time you had with the last one you show up to find they’re running something Google-translated from a Norwegian subreddit whose title translates to “Hope is Not Always Lost in the Valley of the Giants” that uses “Hope” and “Hopelessness” as its only two stats and is designed to be played for exactly forty-eight minutes at a stretch, ending according to the rules with the death of every single player character–you play it, you have another surprisingly good time, and you think to yourself that if you can enjoy this you should probably be playing more of these things.

I think part of the reason people follow this trajectory is that storytelling games, which are usually abstract and experimental and meant to be self-contained sessions, are forbidding–neither intrinsically appealing nor easy to get into. Like foreign art films or hoppy beers, they’re poor ambassadors because they’re usually directed toward acquired palates and have to be experienced very actively. But for the right kind of person, they might inspire a lot more interest and eagerness as a first exposure than The Avengers or a St. Pauli Girl would.

So instead of offering a blanket recommendation or non-recommendation, let me break down what story games are and why they’re difficult.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rutskarn’s GMinars CH6: Storytelling Games, Part 1”

Rutskarn is a writer, author, wordsmith, text producer, article deviser, prose architect, and accredited language-talker. If you enjoy his contributions to this site you could always back his Patreon.