War Stories

I've been having ideas left and right for stuff that I want to write about, and spilling out words onto the page, but in the tangle of offshoots and cul de sacs that follow, the bolder ideas have been getting lost in the murk. If you want to hear me ramble on at length about something very few people will really care about, you can read my doctoral thesis when it's done. So I've cut about 75% of this post (no really), to focus on what I want to talk about.

What I want to talk about is war stories. You see, ttrpgs are all about stories - no duh. But there are two types of stories (at least in trad gaming) as I see it. I call these "narratives" and "war stories".

A narrative is what you get when a GM sits down ahead of time and thinks up what action the coming session is going to contain. It consists of set-pieces, and connections between them. There are a few reasons people do their game prep in terms of narratives. One is ease: You generally have to do less prep up front, and require less on-the-spot improvisational thinking at the table, than if you take the alternative (on which, see below). Another reason is attachment: GMs like to think up cool scenes, NPCs etc., and narrative planning allows you to write those things into the upcoming session, preventing them going to waste. And, to be sure, there are other reasons.

The thing about narratives is that they are created by the GM, away from the table. The players enact them through their characters, but they don't create them - even where their characters do, in terms of the fiction. This can actually create a dissonance between what the fiction says is happening and what the players know to be happening in game terms, for instance, where the characters have a limited amount of time to stop the ritual, but the players know that they'll arrive in the nick of time no matter how long they take, because that's what the plot demands (say it with me: Ludonarrative-f*ing-dissonance).

This leads to a discussion I refuse to get bogged down in here regarding everyone's favourite bad boy game design concept: Railroading. As I've said before, merely having a narrative isn't railroading. That assessment belies the multifarious varieties in which railroading can manifest - each more perfidious than the last. No, railroading refers to the many means by which the GM enforces a narrative. And that shows us a problem with narrative, straight off the bat: The more tightly-plotted your narrative, the more elbow grease you have to exert to keep the players from straying from the path. The more delicate machinery you have, the more you have to work to field flying spanners. And the more you do that, the more you telegraph to your players (and they do pick up on this) that their actions don't matter. And what's more, you'll be doing that a heck of a lot. Having run this sort of game, I think most of my time and energy at the table was spent trying to figure out how to keep the players on the straight and narrow, and reroute them, quantum ogre-style, when they strayed.

The dirty secret is that creating an enjoyable game session or campaign is so much easier than prepping a compelling story and guiding your players carefully through it. It's easier because all it requires is creating a goal for the players (or letting them pick their own, although that isn't necessary), a situation with some texture that they can explore and potentially leverage, and then handing over the reigns to the players at the table. The point of a ttrpg, the thing that no other game or medium can truly provide, is to allow the players to choose their own approach to achieving their goal. But the secret is that that's really easy to do! Even a fairly by-the-numbers, tropey scenario will, if you hand over control to the players to get things done as they see fit, result in an enjoyable evening of gaming, where players get to enjoy scheming and strategizing and exploring the consequences of their actions, and getting to know their characters in the process.

What actually sparked the idea for this post in the first place was rewatching a video clip from the documentary Secrets of Blackmoor, which looks at the early development of the concept of roleplaying in Dave Arneson's Blakmoor campaign setting. I have issues with the film generally, mainly because it doesn't turn out to be much like the trailer makes it out. What gives me literal chills from the clips in that trailer (and did in the film too, I'll admit) is the war stories. Seriously, go watch it. It's full of people telling stories of experiences they had in the game that they still remember forty or fifty years later, with these huge grins on their faces. It's that point where Bob Meyer tells us about the people who put their characters on the line to heroically hold the door against a group of Balrogs, knowing that it would basically be suicide. It's the choices people made over the destinies of their own characters, and the consequences those choices had, and how those events formed memories that are still cherished.

"You don't know, man - you weren't there..."

Think for a moment of a few stories you remember from gaming. Imagine meeting in the pub after the end of a campaign. What would your war stories be? Genuinely, have a think for a moment. My bet (and my result when doing this thought exercise) is that they'd be, mostly if not entirely, stories of unexpected things the players did, that had consequences that nobody could have foreseen. That time the rogue tried to escape the jaws of a mimic by setting it on fire while still inside it. That time a player slapped a stamp of mind control on the target of the heist, and they helped you carry out the loot and waved the party off as they left. That time the characters activated the doomsday device because the GM left the key too close to the ignition. If those seem quite specific, it's because they've all happened in games I've been playing or GMing in (and yes, the doomsday thing really was unplanned, and yes, I've learned my lesson re players and the "square peg, square hole" mindset). I can talk with those groups about any of that stuff, and they'll still remember it years later because they did it - it wasn't a story their characters went through, it was a story that was their doing.

Here's a difficult pill for GMs to swallow. I know because I've grappled with it myself. By and large, the monsters, npcs, stories and set-pieces we put together as GMs don't get immortalised in war stories. Where they do, it's largely because the players managed to subvert them, thus putting their own mark on them, turning them into something that they themselves had a hand in creating. Player-characters simply being present for the event doesn't count. For a story to stick in the mind of the party, they have to feel like they brought it about, like it wouldn't exist but for them - like if there was anyone else sitting at the table, playing any other characters, the thing wouldn't have happened.

The idea I want to put forward with this post is that what gets immortalised in war stories tells you what really matters to the players, what they actually come to the table for. And that stings a bit as a GM, because it means all the monsters, villains, deep and sympathetic npcs, fantastical locations etc. that we create aren't really what matters to the game, in a sense, because they won't be remembered in their own right. Trust me, I've come up with a lot, and even I can barely remember most of them. What I do remember are things like that time the party pantsed that odious minor npc villain in front of his entourage of cronies, even though I struggle even to recall the villain's name or backstory (side note and further illustration: I can much more easily recall the party's crude and demeaning pun on the villain's name that became their nickname for him - if that doesn't prove the point, I don't know what does).

No-one sits around retelling the story of that time that scripted thing happened, or when the GM's set-piece played out exactly as planned. It's not that the content created by the GM doesn't matter at all, it's that it doesn't matter simply as something to be experienced - it matters, and will be remembered, to the extent that it drives the sort of creative play that will be remembered. It's a jumping off point for letting the players create their own memories, not an end in itself; it matters to the extent that it is fuel for creating war stories.

And the thing is, narrative or plot as created by the GM is pretty much antithetical to that. Plot is the only type of content you can prep that actually impedes the creation of war stories, rather than setting them up to unfold as players inject their creativity. It is possible to have war stories emerge out of plot, but as I've mentioned, they're usually the result of subverting it rather than building on it. Because when you're conscious that your decisions are being undermined or vitiated in the name of a predetermined destiny, the only time you know you're in control is when you disrupt destiny's plans.

I decided a few months ago, when I decided to start gathering everything together for my present campaign, that I wasn't interested in that sort of game anymore. I don't want to tell people a story, I want to be there to experience what happens with them. Then, afterwards, we'll retell those events as old stories, not like skalds recalling an epic saga, but like friends recalling shared experiences. Because the point of ttrpgs isn't to create an epic that you can sit back and appreciate on its own merits, like Homer composing the Iliad, it's to be there when the events happen. A narrative is a story even before it hits the table, but war stories are only stories to people who weren't there to experience them - to those who were, they're memories.