Part 2 of ? In the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
I used to work as a tour guide. The guy who owned the company was a Marine and an aspiring novelist. He had some amazing stories, as many thoughtful military folks do. On a multi-day through-hike gig, he was explaining how he was going to write his next story: “The hero is gonna be like me but, you know, way cooler and more competent.” Literally everyone on the trip, from the other guides to the guests, all shook our heads. Gritted teeth and everything.
Nah, brah. That’s not storytelling. That’s…something else. Charitably, I think he was just ignorant about why we’re drawn to narratives.
Everyone knows this, right? At least I had assumed everyone knew. This aspiring novelist friend just didn’t. Going forward (this was about 15 years ago) I no longer make that assumption, particularly among gamers. Especially among gamers whose play training has taught them to prioritize winning, even if that was never their play goal.
Part 1 of the series was an essay for GMs/facilitators/MCs to think about narrative tension: how to find, apply, build and resolve it. So I’m going to talk to players next about how to cultivate a storytelling mindset on their side of the game.
But First: Games Are Not Stories, Stories Are Not Games
Here’s a big one I want to get out of the way, something I should have covered in in part 1. There are some important differences between conventional storytelling, and cultivating the mindset of storytelling to enrich or direct roleplaying.
The big one, for me, is that stories are written by authors, who have a whole range of tools at their disposal that we (conventionally) don’t at a table. The most important tool in my mind is that stories – short stories, novels, screenplays, theatrical work – are written from start to finish, revised, and delivered complete to an uninvolved audience. An audience has a very different relationship with the work, right?
By contrast, players have a very different relationship to gameplay than an audience does to a story. Not quite author, not quite audience, kind of both. There’s uncertainty in the outcomes, and alchemy in how this particular table of players’ inputs will combine.
Okay. That’s out of the way.
Characterization Is About Transformation
Okay, so you’re a player and you want to cultivate a storytelling mindset. I would propose this means thinking about characters as being in perpetual transformation. Characterization is about transformation. That’s my assertion and I’m sticking to it.
I’ve seen advice over the years to come up with a catchphrase or mannerism but that seem like the bare minimum, a quick coat of paint over your character’s stats and abilities. It’s garbage advice that has nothing to do with storytelling.
The reason I want to talk first about stories ≠ games ≠ stories is that authored stories have a beginning and an end. They end eventually, at which point a character’s transformation is over. But since games ≠ stories, we need to think about transformation a little differently. We need to build in ways to make transformation durable. Hell, we need to make transformation perpetual if we go with the default RPG assumption that campaigns proceed “forever.”
(NB: “Play forever” is a terrible assumption and I would argue the reason players treat a character as a tactical asset: this is my playing piece, and it gets more effective over time as the challenge escalates. And it speaks in a funny voice.)
But what about comics and sitcoms? Yup, definitely, there are genres and forms where characters essentially remain unchanged. Everything they do is an expression of essentially unchanging character rules: Wolverine is a cynical smartass with a heart of gold, Seinfeld and Newman are frenemies bound by fate. I would contend that their characterizations are still about transformation! But only within the scope of an episode. Their transformations are temporary, and we return to the familiar starting positions at the end. That’s fine, and I would propose that intentionally leaning into that is a fine approach. It is, in fact, probably the default “how to roleplay” approach when all you have or want is mannerisms.
Still with me? Storytelling mindset characterization in an RPG means having the capacity for ongoing transformation, ideally (but not necessarily) arriving at a clear finale.
Internal vs External Characterization
Here are a couple ideas to think through:
- Internal characterization is about the attitudes, beliefs, goals and emotions of the character. Everything inside their skull.
- External characterization is about how the character acts on those internal elements to change their world.
Internal characterization is super interesting to me because there’s a necessarily blurry zone between the invented headspace of a character and the actual headspace of the player. Where’s the line? Is there one? Do you wind up your character and then let them toddle off on their own, playing in as principled way as possible? Are you ever really capable of being hands-off? Is every character really just a funhouse projection of the player?
I don’t have answers for these questions and I suspect it’s different for everyone. Some folks are more able to hold multiple conflicting ideas in their minds, or being dispassionate observers, or strong advocates.
External characterization is where the rubber meets the road. Your character believes in something just plain wrong (by design, so they can transform their beliefs), so what happens when they act on it? What about pursuing their goals, or bringing their values into conflict? How will they change the world, and how is the world changing them? (A topic for another day!)
This is all pure storytelling mindset play and flies in the face of tactical play, so make darned sure the other players understand where you’re coming from.
A Few Techniques
Now that you’re sold on the power and purpose of storytelling-mindset character play, how do you do it? Here are a few approaches.
A Litany of Flaws
If you’re trying to characterize with a storytelling mindset, start by thinking about the ways in which the character is flawed. If you’re looking to bolster the character’s strengths, you’re coming at it from a winning mindset. A storytelling mindset can, I think, be described as playing to lose. But in the losing, the character is transformed and their flaws are transformed. Maybe not cured! But transformed flaws will certainly look different.
First off, think through their internal flaws. Make sure however you’ve built your character’s internal landscape, it’s capable of transformation through play:
- Let them believe things that are wrong, like, factually incorrect.
- Put them in conflict with other characters’ values.
- Embed your character in their world: how do they feel about current events? What goals do they have relative to how their world impacts them?
Next, think about the flawed ways characters can act in service to their internal flaws. Incorrect beliefs, conflicting values and setting-grounded characteristics will probably prompt you to play your character in a way that might look irrational, so make sure the players at the table understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. If everyone’s on board with a storytelling mindset, “it’s what my character would do” shouldn’t be a problem.
Answer Questions
One of my favorite characterization tricks comes from GMful games like Montsegur 1244 and Inheritance. In those games, the player is directed to work toward answering several questions about the character’s underlying motives and values. You don’t just, you know, answer them though. You spend time exploring the questions, by showing rather than telling.
For example, in Montsegur 1244, the lord of the castle, Raimond, has three questions that direct his play: “Do you regret offering Montsegur as home for the Cathars?” and “Why is your left leg stiff?” (intended to bring his history into play) and “Who of your beloved ones is most dear to you?” (so you’re forced to think about how you relate to your family, and choose a favorite).
In Inheritance, the priestess Gefjon has beliefs and goals (because it’s a distant relative to Burning Wheel): “My daughter will marry whom I choose” (to force action against another character), “I laugh at any fool who defies the Norns/Odin” (because someone else in the setting is gonna do that) and “I will punish the kinslayer” (putting her at odds with the patriarch of the scenario). Different approach, more goal-oriented, but still results in her transformation through play.
You can do this in a plain old tabletop rpg as well. After character creation and situation/setting setup, most games (at least informally) have the players introduce their characters, right? I mean, that’s at least good practice. During that step, ask the other players what questions they have about how your character thinks, what they believe in, or what their goals might be. Don’t answer those things right away! Write them down, and come back to them through your play. Write them down not only to remember, but to solidify and commit to answering them.
In those example games, the questions are carefully designed to generate maximum friction. That won’t happen at your table but it’s still a good exercise.
If you’ve got a good sense of your game’s narrative arcs, or if your facilitator has identified that you’re ending or starting an arc, revisit your questions. Maybe you’ve answered them to your satisfaction? This is an internal thing that ideally you’ll express at the table (either through verbalized internal monologue or through your character’s actions).
Purpose-Built Games
Some games are built with character transformation already baked into gameplay.
Burning Wheel is still, to my mind, best in class for transformative play. The interaction of Beliefs, Instincts and Traits (BITs) is incentivized with an elaborate currency: for being influenced by the BIT, or when BITs come into conflict, or when a BIT is resolved. The table regularly votes to give one another Traits (not always flattering ones!) based on how they’ve been played. Those Traits evolve into better, more mechanically toothsome benefits. And the GM is tasked specifically with challenging the characters’ Beliefs, which is a terrific, organic way to accrete a situation around the characters.
Tenra Bansho Zero has an economic incentive for players to address and resolve Fates throughout a session. Fates are a lot like Beliefs, but in TBZ the goal is to churn through them fast fast fast. The vibe is melodramatic and occasionally chaotic, much like anime.
Legacy and other games that derive from it are tuned to show off character transformation. The game is played both at a very high level to show the passage of time, and up close and personal to highlight moments of the characters’ lives. But they advance by taking on new “roles,” and after they’ve taken four of them it’s time to move on. So there’s both a structure and an incentive to come at the character in terms of transformation.
Keys-based games like The Shadow of Yesterday, Lady Blackbird or Cartel offer a direct advancement incentive for playing toward the “Key” (basically a lengthy pre-created Belief), or a one-time larger incentive to refute/cash in the Key and choose something else.
Other games come with clear end-points, allowing the player to charge hard toward a particular transformation with a satisfying ending.
Apocalypse World was the first game I ran into that offered “retire in peace” as an advancement. It’s a direct refutation of the “play forever”/”play until the PC is killed” mold, and is surprisingly powerful in the hands of players who want to complete an arc for their character.
Burning Empires has all the same good transformative stuff as Burning Wheel, plus a couple options for a clear endgame: either at the end of one of the three phases, or after playing all three. The game will end, and however the character ended up is how they ended up. You can play that intentionally or just step back and watch what happens when you’re principled about playing toward your character’s BITs.
And still others are actively bad for this kind of transformative character play.
Band of Blades I found hard to play with transformation in mind. The bulk of play is about getting through the campaign, and you explicitly don’t play the same characters from session to session. Each mission in the campaign is tuned with one or two playbooks in mind, and you’re as likely as not to be playing a recruit rather than your own character. Probably if you slowed down play and didn’t try to push a mission every session, there may be more time to explore character transformation.
I find the overall mechanical vibe of Forged in the Dark games – the mission/downtime split, the emphasis on competency as the main advancement goal – to be not-conducive to characterization, much less transformative characterization, but I think that’s on me. The Stress mechanic of many of these games, in which your character is permanently damaged when they’ve gained too much of it, is transformative but also uniformly negative and itself immune to further transformation. Your character’s “reckless” or “unstable” or whatever becomes a mannerism, a shtick.
In Circle of Hands, the players create a shared pool of characters and are prohibited from playing the same character twice. Formally it’s an interesting exercise in seeing what different “writers” do with the same character, but since there’s not much to go on other than directly observed play, we found it hard to create any sense of continuity from player to player. The internal tensions weren’t conveyed between plays.
Read The Table
Last thought: not all games work well with players trying to bring a storytelling mindset to their play. A game focused on tactics and overcoming obstacles is probably not improved by players working on their characters’ transformative journeys. I mean, maybe it can be! But that’s a table-culture thing. I would definitely not push an internal transformative journey at a table that didn’t agree to it.
As with all storytelling mindset play, you can’t pre-play the outcome. That’s the main space between writing a story and playing a game. Playing to find out introduces risk and uncertainty, to both external and internal narratives. Lean into that uncertainty and let your characters surprise and dismay you.
Part 3 of the series will be about how players decide what to care about. Because caring about things is central to cultivating a storytelling mindset.
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I find your blog to be excellent!. I enjoyed this post enough to comment, and not just because it is a topic that matters to me as a player. I am particularly interested in how the terms we use, such as story, affect how we think about the experience we are trying to describe, label, and share. For instance, ‘a storytelling mindset’ occupies an interesting space between actually and not actually storytelling, so your choice of words made me smile in appreciation. It is so good, that it makes me wonder why you did not step more completely away from the notion of storytelling – being willing to jettison the whole family of story-related terms (because stories ≠ games ≠ stories). This whole post is about character transformation (including the transformations which are not lasting) and somehow I bet there is a more communicative term for how to arrive at a stance or mindset that draws on that more than the notion that as players our authorship is more than a by-product of what we sat down to do~
As an aside, in regard to Circle of Hands, I am not sure if this was a result of a typographical incident when you wrote that section or something else, but the game’s rule on playing characters is not that you cannot play one twice, but rather that you cannot play one twice in a row. You can alternate between two of the characters in the pool as each Venture is played, or you could cycle in some way through all of them. Over long-form play, the nature of the character is revealed across all of the Ventures in which it appears – not just from one player. We can discover what the character is like overall as well as presenting what the character is like in this moment.
Part 3 of ? in the Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series
The hardest thing I ever ask of a player is to decide what they’re going to care about.
Some games tell you what to care about, right? You’re dungeon delvers, so you’re supposed to care about the treasure. Advancement is a strongly implied goal as well. But there are also games that don’t tell you what to care about. Why is deciding what to care about such a challenging lift?
We’re playing Shattered City, a PbtA game derived from Legacy that doesn’t specifically tell players what to care about, so I can’t stop thinking about this subject. It’s a game design challenge but it’s also a creative, social and emotional challenge for the players. Burning Wheel covered this ground, and workshopping Beliefs and Instincts is a notoriously difficult process. In Legacy games, which feature big shifts in time and an explicit split between big-picture events and small-picture character vignettes, there are no specific economies driving choices other than the ones you choose, I think it’s even harder.
And what does “interesting” even mean? Is it interesting to the player, to the GM, to the other players? To your blog readers? To your Twitch audience?
How does this continue to be so hard?
Such a mystery. Or you could help the players figure it out for themselves.
Where To Look
Sometimes, system provides the player benchmarks and validation. You want to advance, so do the things that earn you advancement. You will grind out food, rest and light, so do things to maximize them.
Other times, the game’s premise provides an answer: you’re a secret society of monster hunters, you crew a tramp freighter, you’re a criminal gang. The shared goals in these games are of course entirely embedded in the game’s fiction: monster hunters hunt monsters, tramp freighters take jobs, criminal gangs claw their way into being bigger and badder. Shared goals are great! But those are all extrinsic goals. They’re not the character’s goals.
Meanwhile, we’ve provided players almost no training at all in developing their own intrinsic goals. Decades of shitty GMing have provided plenty of negative reinforcement though, mostly by ignoring what players tell us. It’s too hard to integrate their backstory. I forgot that NPC you took an interest in. Our session time is so consumed by the job/mission/dungeon that there’s no time left for the characters. You can’t wander off the rails.
I’ve talked on and off for a while about the concept of “holding environment.” To recap, it’s the premise of your game that gives the characters reasons to spend time together, particularly in scenes. And those premises can be all over the place: for emotional support reasons (personal relationships in a closed environment, like the settlements of Sagas of the Icelanders), for tactical reasons (party builds in D&D), for professional reasons (a ship crew like in Scum and Villainy), even for meta-play reasons like “because we all agreed to show up on Saturday afternoons for five hours.” But those are all related to the larger social dynamic of all the players at the table.
I suppose it’s not unreasonable that a player might pick any of these things as their intrinsic goal: what I want to do is support someone else’s effort. But I don’t think that’s sustainable or scalable. What happens when the whole party exists to support…the whole party? Or crew or whatever. At some point, if you’re playing a game where the emergent fiction is the goal, someone needs to care about something.
The secret is that not caring protects you from being hurt. Not to get all armchair therapist here, but identifying what players fear will hurt them is most of the exercise.
Why Should You Care?
Deciding what in the fiction to care about makes some assumptions. The big assumption is that “the fiction” matters, changes, and is part of your overall enjoyment of the medium. And different RPGs care about “the fiction” in very different, incompatible ways. A dungeon delving game puts a lot more emphasis on the tactical fiction than, say, a ships-crew game that emphasizes the fiction around tramp freighter logistics. Or a feels-heavy game that emphasizes emotional context way above tactics or logistics. Or a political maneuvering game that emphasizes social context.
Some games are written in a relatively fiction-agnostic way. Personally I think that’s usually not intentional: the designer(s) just didn’t think about what aspect of “the fiction” they wanted their game to address or facilitate most clearly. But that incoherence can be intentional. You can get a lot of good play even while the players don’t settle into a gestalt.
Because I can’t stop thinking about this topic, I’m starting to think “give me easy things to care about” is something I desperately want and need in a game. “Don’t punish me for the things I end up caring about” is a close second.
Okay I totally lied. Let’s get all armchair therapist!
Get Out Of Your Own Way
I think the difficulty comes down to fear.
Fear of being judged for having a bad idea. Easy and shitty to be judgy about other players’ contributions: it’s dumb or hackneyed or predictable.
Fear of tripping over the GM’s authority or credibility, their prep or plans.
Fear or uncertainty around fitting your idea into established fiction, or external canon (the Star Wars problem, if you haven’t bought into making a canon-rich setting your own).
Uncertainty about how your authority interfaces with other players’, including the GM. What happens if I want to care about something that contradicts what someone else wants to care about? Will the system let me fight that out, or do I need to talk it out? Is that going to be okay or weird or what?
A general lack of player credibility, that the table won’t buy your idea but they might buy the same idea if it came from a higher-credibility player. (How do you build credibility? Glad you asked.)
Not wanting to rock the boat if the table’s goals don’t match yours. Everyone else is there to beat a dungeon, but while you’re exploring your thief’s morality, that’s interfering with your thief’s tactical efficiency. That’s not what the other players signed up for. I’ve done this, and had it happen, and it sucks.
But what if I choose wrong?!
Okay, So How Do I Choose?
Sometimes it takes time to settle into the game’s table vibe and established fiction. It’s hard to decide what to care about when nobody else has decided what they care about (including the GM!). Someone has to go in the water first and prove it’s warm, or at least swimmable. That’s usually one of the unspoken responsibilities of facilitation: clearly signaling where it’s safe to put your attention.
You feel that stutter-step tempo during scene framing in GMless games. This can be a tough exercise, particularly if you’ve never done it before and especially if you’ve never GMed or facilitated before. If you’re doing a scene with another player, you both fumble around until you settle on a premise for the scene you can agree to and find interesting. I’m not sure how you speed up that process other than through practice and saying “yes” a whole lot when the other side offers a scene up.
But that’s just related to making the game proceed, and doesn’t have anything to do with deciding what to care about inside your own head. I’m thinking about how I go about settling on a vibe or characterization or whatever, in these set-your-own-scene games. It’s so hard because I’m asking myself what I can care about for the next four hours. And sure enough, I still face all the fears I list above: does this fit with everyone else’s investment? Will I be judged favorably for it? Is it “clever” (ugh)? Does my characterization fit with the premise or setting or genre?
I’ve been playing these kinds of games for a decade and I’ve never really dialed it in. But I’ve also mostly GMed conventionally structured RPGs for four decades, which has given me plenty of training in being comfortable asserting anything.
Okay, finally the useful part.
Subjects To Care About
Again, I’m assuming you’re playing a game where the fiction matters, where players need to pick something to care about otherwise the game won’t go. The set of games that requires this is quite small. Similarly, the set of games that actively reject or ignore this is also quite small. The vast majority of games, either tabletop or larp, work best when the players settle on some set of things. And the table, ideally, supports your choices.
Goals: Personally I think this is a pretty shallow take on “the fiction,” but sure. Let’s assume your character is consumed with the burning desire to do well at their…thing, their job, whatever it is. This is an easy fallback to competency-porn type play: characters who are good at their job, enjoy being good at their job, and look great doing it. There’s no need to justify your character’s goal, just pick something, anything (but please, please pick something in the fiction, not “I want to unlock this ability”). Goals are a terrific jumping-off point to decide that you care about what may have led to this goal.
Logistics: This is, to my mind, a logical extension of investing in goal-oriented fiction. Now you’re caring about how to get the rest of the players as deep into the dungeon as they can get, or fly their ship as far and as safely as possible, all the support stuff that happens in a game. I mean, it’s a thing and you could pick it to care about. Folks who love to be supportive frequently fixate on a game’s logistical concerns (and are frequently frustrated when games simply don’t have them, eg no tracking ship fuel or maintenance schedules, don’t really care about food, rest and healing times, and so on).
Emotions: What does my character feel about things? Are those feelings a rational product of their setting and situation? I talk about this bit a lot in the previous Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset. In short: your character’s emotional state can be literally anything, rational or not. Your goal is to be true to it, explore it, see where their hopes and fears and desires take them.
Relationships: How does your character fit into their larger social context? What friends, families, rivals and enemies are around them? This means choosing to care about your character’s relationships and treating them as real, rather than as (merely) useful or obstacles. This is often ultimately goal-driven, but it doesn’t have to be.
Setting: Tricky one! I feel like choosing to care about “the setting” is some alchemy of social concerns, taking an interest in big sweeping events, and fidelity to genre expectations.
Fidelity: Does the game feel like the genre you’re modeling? How do my decisions advance that feeling? This level of caring feels really meta to me, like, it’s more concerned with “correct” authorship than with interesting or provocative authorship. But genre is a good way to ensure everyone’s on the same page, right? If we’re hunting vampires, it’s practical and useful to invest in your depiction of vampire hunting: describing badass mission prep, complaining about being too old for this shit, relating stories about how vampires ate your family.
Yeah don’t do this.
Just Pick Something. Anything. Many Anythings, Even
The reason this is in my Cultivating a Storytelling Mindset series is that choosing what to care about ultimately means engaging in proactive play. Invested play. Thinking more about what you want your play experience to be and taking measures to ensure you get it. It’s a refutation of play where you simply react to what the GM throws at you in the most tactically efficient way possible. That’s a whole category of play – arguably the biggest! – but it’s not storytelling-mindset play.
And like I go into in some depth in the previous piece, stories are not games and games are not stories. Just because you’ve picked something to care about, that doesn’t mean you should expect your wishes to go unchallenged. In fact it’s now on the GM to specifically push you on the things you care about. And those challenges might not feel like how you imagined things going down. If you want your wishes to be all that matters, write a story. On the other hand, if you’ve picked something (anything! Many things!) and the GM, other players, and evolving events don’t take that into account, that’s worth talking about.
(Which is the next-hardest thing for players to do!)
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