A Story

Let's talk about story in RPGs right fast. I hit on this a few weeks ago and I want to follow up.

In that blog I talked about how forgiving I am about story. Seriously, I really am. For example, as the basis of an RPG, I am fine with the following:

Setting: Near a town, there is a cave that has monsters in it.

Characters: There are towns people, monsters, and an evil sorcerer. You play adventurers.

Exposition: You play adventurers, you guys kill monsters. The towns people like it when you kill monsters. The evil sorcerer does not like it when you kill monsters (but screw him, he sucks).

Sequence: You leave the town, you go to the cave, you kill monsters, then you fight the evil sorcerer, you come back to the town, everyone likes you, the end.

Conflict: The towns people want you to kill monsters, the evil sorcerer does not. You like the towns people, you do not like the evil sorcerer.

Climax: You fight the evil sorcerer.

Resolution: Everyone likes you, the end.

huzzah

With any group of people worth playing with, I promise, that right there is several hours of fun. My group would turn that into several sessions of awesome. My group on a bad day would force-feed awesome into that. The worst group I every played with, using the worst system ever, would have fun with that.

I could write out another example of some high-fantasy, fancy pants, story that was all deep and filled with rich and deep stuff. I'm not going to. The thought of doing that is boring to me and I bet anything you would be bored before you finished reading it. I'm not saying you shouldn't develop rich and deep characters/setting/sequence...I'm saying you don't have to and most of the time it won't be appreciated.

This is especially true in the first few sessions or so. If something more develops (there is a catacomb under the town filled with undead that the towns people want you to kill but the evil necromancer doesn't want you to kill), fine, good, go do that thing. But in the beginning, working out a long-term plot or meta-plot is almost always wasted time and energy. At worst it causes more problems than it is worth.

My point is, in RPGs, you need to play to the strengths of the genre and keep it simple.