There are so many ways you can trip up a player.
One way is when they are left unable to understand how to progress the plot in a direction they want. It can happen in a lot of ways, but a common one I hear a lot is when a GM sticks to the idea that there’s only one way to solve the problem they’ve placed in front of the players.
In this scenario, the players are left trying to guess the one thing they are ‘supposed to do’ in order to clear the bar set by the GM. In my early days of playing RPGs, this type of GM frustrated me. For young me, it turned an RPG into a game of ‘guess the thing I’m thinking’ rather than a shared storytelling experience. I hated it. I resolved to never be that type of GM.
So for years, when I have tried to plan an adventure, I’ve made sure that I created more of a narrative smorgasbord than a set list of plot. Players have five different avenues to pursue and could invent their own through the cast and events that I have planned: a conversation or action by the players could reveal a plot or change everything. The idea is just to set them loose in a world, provide villainy, and do a combination of not planning anything too hard while also keeping my vast conspiracy ideas hidden until they find them.
So when my players said the other day that they had too many options and couldn’t work out what the true path forward was, I got confused and then realised: I’ve kind of overdone it. I’ve provided so many factions and characters it becomes hard to work out what is useful. They’re unable to progress, not because they’re guessing what I want, but instead, they’re unable to define what is actually important to accomplishing their goals.
The end result is the same: the players are stuck. It made me wonder about a few things.
Game vs Storytelling Mentality: Who’s responsible for outcomes?
There’s definitely a thought process that the player is the person who should be creating outcomes. The joy of the game comes from thinking up clever tactics off the top of your head, surprising everyone, doing something unexpected or turning over a piece of information that changes everything by talking to the right people. The GM’s job is to provide all the pieces but let the player put them together. You’re not in the business of providing solutions for the players.
But I’d say: we’re definitely in the business of providing tools for the players to solve problems with. In D&D, one of the GM’s jobs is to hand out magic items, right? This is to give the players more resources to solve the problems presented to them. It’s one of the reasons that as a D&D game goes up levels, we have to expand threats – because players have so many ways to bypass them, sometimes parts of the game vanish.
But those tools could also be allies. Or information. In a Vampire game, the right NPC on the side or juicy secret can provide a whole new avenue of attack. So we need to be providing that ammunition at the same speed we would dish out magic items in a D&D game, right? We need to be showing them the potential ‘off-ramps’ that allow them to slide or cut their way out of the problem they face.
If we are playing a game, the first thought process is clear – there’s a skill to this game, and it’s in problem-solving. Being good at this game involves actually getting better at those things. But if we’re telling a story, then our responsibility is to instead keep handing each other the tools to make the story not get jammed – the skill is instead in keeping the forward momentum with the narrative elements up. And I think it’s this tension that underscores quite a lot of RPG discourse. People look at a newer game like Daggerheart and think ‘it’s too narrative’ or ‘this is a lot of bookkeeping for a storytelling game’. But what we need to be doing in that scenario is examining our own bias on this spectrum of ‘game/story’ expectations in the hobby space.
I’m aware that this isn’t a new revelation, but I think applying it to how we equip our players with clear choices is important. While I’m not going to hand players an answer, if they’re making progress towards a solution that makes sense in the fiction, it’s not my job to restrict it. They should be able to achieve the things they want. I won’t dictate how they do something, but I will narrate the outcomes of their actions. If I am constantly narrating that even clever players and good dice rolls achieve nothing, then am I really dictating outcomes or just describing the lack of them?
The Vague Space
There’s a version of planning any RPG that is meticulous, where you have pre-prepared for lots of things that could happen. Even in this version of events, you have this vague hole in the planning of any story, situated around the players, because they could do anything. And I think a lot of having clear outcomes is about how big you let this vague space be. In a game with a bigger vague space, the agency of the players is much higher, but then the chances they’ll connect with the parts you actually planned are much less. When I was running PBTA games, I’d often only have the vaguest of plans going into a game because the system was likely to hand so much narrative control to the players; sessions would often finish nowhere near where I expected.
While this gave the game a sense of widescreen and ‘we are going places’ type strangeness with a dynamic level of storytelling I have never before, or since, reached, often the games would end with players tired and emotionally spent. They were caught in a roll of endless possibility, unable to tell which way was up. I think if pushed several years to remember any detail of any of those games, some players would struggle. They were so in the moment that it never went into long-term memory. The vague space so large that they just flailed until their problem was solved, rather than coming up with a plan.
Was this a failing of me or the system? I don’t know to this day. But looking back, I think it’s to do with not restricting the ‘vague space’ at least a little bit. The link between information, action and outcome needs to be clear and followable for a coherent experience. Sometimes, while you are planning, it’s ok to have sections where you go “and then the players do pretty much anything constructive, and the plot progresses to part three if it makes sense” without making it too clear for yourself. But you have to be clear for yourself what part three looks like and what “constructive” looks like. Imagine it like islands of narrative sense floating in the sea of player action, waiting for you to build a bridge to them.
The point is that you have to provide the tools for bridge-building for the players and show them that if they build a bridge, it will connect to that island. Even if you just give them a glimpse of the island in the distance through the fog. Don’t leave them at the end of a misty bridge to nowhere.
Give them a clear road to the end. Like this article, they need to reach an end eventually. I hope the vague space I left in it was enough that this feels like a conclusion.
Creative Commons credit: Dungeon Entrance by mhmithu, By the Light! by Jakub Jagoda and Portal to the Depths of Space by ErikShoemaker.
