My Plot Doesn’t Matter

Preface: There is no ‘right’ way to do role playing games. There is no ‘best’ way to play. There is no ‘bad’ good fun. If its fun for you, it works for you. Having said that, here’s some thoughts on the best, right way to play to have the most good fun.

Preface the Second: In this article, I pull on some real experiences I’ve had at the gaming table. Some of them very recent. Some of them with my current Shadowrun group. Some of what I have to say is critical, both of myself and of folks at my table. Please know I still love you all and I’m honored by all of you, present and past groups. The reason I’m writing this is to encourage you to expect the sort of quality game I so desperately want to provide. I want to create art at the table. This is part of how I envision that.

Those points aside, this is how its done:

One of the struggles I have as a GM is overcoming the years of abuse players have suffered from other so-called GMs. You know the type… the folks who GM because they like being in control. Because they want to tell a story to a passive audience, but don’t have the focus or talent to write a novel. Or maybe its insecurity or even laziness… its harder and takes time to develop a setting and scenarios where player’s characters have agency. These are the sorts of GMs that will cheat at rolling dice to make the story unfold the way they imagine is ‘best’, limit the choices of players to fit into their ‘grand vision’ and slap down any player that dares meander too far from the rails they clumsily laid for their story to slog or whip along at whatever pace they’ve decided is appropriate.

Apparently, I need a bone hat with horns. And I need luxurious facial hair.

To be fair, as much derision as I have for this type of GMing, some folks are good enough at it that I can sometimes overlook the lack of agency… or I can just create my own agency and let them get frustrated when I take things off the rails as a player. I suspect this is one of the reasons the games I play in tend to end after only a few sessions. I know I’m rough on GMs and I’m not sure I want to change that. I’m a demanding player.

I digress.

My primary focus in GMing is to encourage the players’ creativity by facilitating the stories of their characters. I can’t put enough emphasis on this. The games I run are about the players’ stories. They’re about the younger brother of a famous adventurer trying to make his own mark in the world. The street urchin struggling with the knowledge that he is a construct built to assassinate an immortal villain trying to destroy the multiverse. A vampire who grapples with the fact that he made his own sister into a ghoul to save her life, but her will has deteriorated so much by his tainted blood that she unnaturally worships him. A hermit who must learn to work with others to defeat the evil queen, a deposed nobleman who’s brothers sacrificed themselves before his very eyes so he could live, a street urchin that was secretly the scion of a wicked royal family who has to raise armies to fight against her own mad son. These are the stories I had the honor to be a part of helping come to fruition.

The worlds I spend hours and hours on are just a setting I provide for these stories to occur in. The time I spend on adventures and missions and developing NPCs is spent to create a framework around which the players can weave their characters’ stories. All the statistics and numbers on paper (virtual or otherwise) are there to help create that story, to take it in directions neither the player nor myself might have expected. That’s why I spend so much time on building the setting and the NPCs in it… because I don’t necessarily know where the players are going to take things and I have to present a world built on some degree of verisimilitude to be prepared for that. All of that is in service to the players at my table.

Unfortunately, a lot of players have been gaslit by poor GMs over years and decades to believe that their stories don’t matter or, at most, should be subordinate to my “grand scheme.” That the purpose of a role playing game is to go hear the GMs story/plot and maybe get to participate in varying degrees and to hear the conclusion of the story the GM is telling (some games even go so far as to call us “Storytellers”). This inexorably leads to that bane of all role playing games: metagaming. This is where the player makes choices for their character that are meant to facilitate a perception of the game or the Game Master, rather than progress the story of the character. Metagaming is, at its heart, cheating. On rare occasions in RPGs, metagaming is necessary, but that rare necessity too often gets used as an excuse to metagame throughout.

This manifests in a few different ways. I’ll list a few here, but I won’t claim this to be even remotely a comprehensive list:

1. Waiting for Plot: Rather than have their character act with the available information they have, the player decides not to ‘interfere’ in what’s going on and lets events in the game proceed without engaging their agency. They believe the GM is going to make Things happen, so they’re waiting for the Things.
   
   Example: While exploring the ancient underground ruins that were sealed off for centuries, the adventuring party comes across a group of six animated skeletons. They do not attack. One skeleton leaves. The party waits. And waits. And waits… and then the skeletons’ boss/creator finally shows up and obliterates the party because this is Earthdawn and Horrors are not meant to be fought (shortest campaign I ever ran).
2. Not Rocking the Boat: Rather than react to other players’ characters in a way that makes sense for their character, the player chooses instead to go along with the majority or not have their character speak up in a situation they otherwise would. Player character conflict is some of the richest, most interesting parts of the game, but so many players have been taught its poor gaming or, worse, outright wrong to have a character disagree with the group.
   
   Example: The party’s elf adopts a goblin shaman after a particularly good series of rolls and RP lead the goblin to convert into worshipping him instead of the rat corpse on a stick he used to worship. The elf carries his new worshipper around in his backback, where he periodically sticks his head out of and orders the party members to bow down to the elf, particularly when they’re being uppity to him. The party’s dwarf shrugs it off and doesn’t react, despite his family being wiped out by goblinoids and the party goes from bland adventure to adventure never dealing with or even really recognizing what the elf has done (this is the opposite of what happened in this game… the players took agency and a rather big fight erupted… not every character survived that night).
3. Not providing feedback: When a GM sets the PC’s stories as primary to a game, they’re likely going to ask for feedback, either formally or informally. Ignoring that or, worse, depreciating the value of that feedback undermines the GM’s ability to facilitate your character’s story. Even if your GM doesn’t ask for downtime actions or journals or holds out-of-character post mortems, offer up some feedback when you have it! Drop them a Private Message, give them a call, whatever it takes… let the GM know how they’re doing by you, what you enjoyed and what you didn’t. And, if things aren’t going the way you want them to, talk to them!
   
   Example: Your gaming group hangs out after the game for an hour or so talking about what happened, theorizing out of character and discussing where they want things to go. You, however, always pack up and leave as soon as the in-character part ends. You later wonder why everyone else has story leads to follow and develop while you do not.
4. Overmathing: This is related to Min/Maxing a character (which isn’t necessarily a Bad Thing)… Overmathing is more about focusing overmuch on a character’s statistics and not enough on the roleplay of the character. If your character’s high strength is just about extra damage in combat, you’re really, really missing out on the story elements of that stat… how do physically strong people tend to interact with the world? How does it impact their relationships or how they perceive others? How does it affect their social groups (yes, physically strong people often form their own cliques based on their pursuit of strength). This also applies to skills or lack thereof… for example, your character doesn’t have any points in Swimming, chances are they’re a little afraid of water, even if they don’t have a Phobia disadvantage on paper.
   
   Example: This happens most obviously with charismatic characters… “I want the guard to go away.” Clatter. “I rolled a 20.” Wait for the GM to describe the guard going away. Yawn.
5. Undermathing: Conversely, your characters’ story is told partially through the success or failure of your stats and how they roll. Undermathing is where you either don’t build a character that fits the story you’re trying to tell or you ignore how the dice roll in the development of your character’s story. For example, you create a character that claims to love Opera, but doesn’t have a Knowledge or Hobby skill allocated to reflect that. Or maybe he was raised on the streets, but doesn’t have any abilities that reflect the harshness of that reality (like Unarmed combat to reflect _some_ experience with getting into fist fights). The main problem here is that you’ve spent so much energy building a character that you think will be useful to the GM’s plot that you’ve forgotten to design a character worth telling a story about.
   
   Example: The party is deep in the forest fleeing from the forces of Big Evil Daddy. Your elven ranger spent the first two hundred years of his life living in the elven glades. You didn’t allocate a single point to your game’s version of Survival (Forest). You look to the GM, explaining your background and hoping that’s enough reason to justify a default roll of some sort… it isn’t. A wild boar kills you and the forest feasts on your corpse.
6. Not doing your research: I could plumb this one for a whole series of articles, but the basic idea here is that you create a character, maybe under direction of the GM, and then don’t bother learning anything else about the rules, setting or world you’re playing in. You rely on the GM for all of this information because, in the end, what information they tell you is what’s important to their plot, right? This has far-ranging implications well beyond just reading a rule book… if your character is a magician, you should know the magic system, including the fluff, perhaps even better than the GM. If your character is charismatic, do some real-world research on how charismatic people win friends and influence enemies. If you have some ranks in Knowledge (Yakuza), do some research on how the Yakuza operates in the real world. You don’t have to do a doctoral dissertation, but become the subject-matter expert in your group of gamers. Even if you don’t get to use much of this research, you’re a better person for having learned something new, so win-win!
   
   Example: “A woman’s proper place is being subservient to a man, that’s the way its always been and always will be,” says your Drow rogue raised in the Underdark.
7. Forcing a round peg into a square hole: Sometimes, the character you came up with just doesn’t work in the collective story that’s being told. Instead of doing what the character would do, you decide to muzzle it and carry on, struggling to fit, maybe getting bored or frustrated or just kinda zoning out, your character becoming something of a cardboard cut-out. You’re so afraid of disappointing the GM’s story, you play a character you come to hate and let yourself become trapped. Worse, you keep it quiet until the game is over, revealing how you’ve been feeling only afterwards (if you’re reading this and wondering: yes, I’m thinking about you.. and yes, I still love playing with you… so stop doing this).
   
   Example: I am Chiroptera Guy. I am the evening. My parents were murdered by Joseph Brisk in a back alley and I still remember my mother’s pearls scattering across the greasy puddles as she died in front of me. I joined a hero group with Sally Brighteyes, the Lovebears (Lovebear Stare!) and the Velveteen Rabbit. I’m constantly frustrated by the other characters’ attempts to talk Gargle-Mel out of capturing the blue forest gnomes, but I go along with it because the GM has plans for me and made it my character’s destiny that I help them. I’m bored, I’m frustrated and my character often comes across as an ass because I’m constantly berating them for not dealing out some vigilante justice from time to time. I’m miserable, but I’m doing what I think my GM wants me to do because that’s what players do.
8. Making yourself submissive to the GM: This is kind of catch-all category and really sums up a lot of what’s above. GMs, as a whole, tend to be fairly dominant personalities. You have to be, to believe you have the talent and ability to create setting, engineer scenarios and help provide entertainment for your closest and craziest friends or complete strangers! And the Bad GMs, they expect you to be submissive to them, their goals and their plot. Me? I expect to be challenged by my players. Throw a wrench into the works! Do the unexpected! Think and act! Keep me on my toes and push me past the point that I’d planned for. I don’t need you to dominate me, but neither do I want to dominate you (at least not at the gaming table…) Challenge me!
   
   Example: I think the GM wants us to walk into the room filled with statues that look exactly like us… even though its an obvious trap and we can accomplish our goals without going in, I walk right in anyways.

That last one is the big one, I think. When I run a game, I always look like I have a plan. Most times, I do. Often I do not. But always, always, always, that plan is not what’s important. Players try to guess what I want them to do because they think that’s how they’ll succeed… it isn’t. One of the worst things you can do in games I’m GMing is trying to guess what I want you to do with your character because, in all honesty, I don’t know. Its not that I don’t care… its because I DO care that I don’t try to come up with my own conception of what I think you should do or how to do things.

I admittedly take this to extremes when doing scenario design.

A lot of published scenarios, particularly in recent decades, have explicit expectations of what players will do in a sequential order. This is the railroad… its easy to write and publish, because it doesn’t require much thought or explanation. The players will take a quest from A, go fight B, then steal C, combine it with D and finally confront the E in his throne room and, dice willing, win the day (some games even get rid of the dice altogether and winning the day is a foregone conclusion). As long as you do things in the right order, the scenario chugs along the rails like the train it was designed to be. Indeed, the players might not even be all that necessary to a scenario like this… you can just sit and read through the story and tell everyone how it ends!

Obviously, this isn’t how I design scenarios. Even in episodic games, like the Shadowrun campaign I’m currently running, I don’t think in terms of how the PCs will succeed. So its more like A wants to hire the PCs to defeat E. E is carrying out their nefarious plans, which involve sending out minion B to find and defeat opposition, while protecting C and finding D for themselves so it can’t be combined with C. If the PCs refuse A’s offer, things proceed apace without them. Maybe E succeeds in their nefariousism, maybe they don’t. If the PCs accept the offer, they have to figure out for themselves how they’re going to stop the nefariousness. They’re going to have to figure out how to conduct a heist on a busy highway deep in a gang’s territory or how to protect a mysterious businessman without letting on that they’re protecting him or rally a kingdom against its Queen who’s turned corrupt out of desperation in trying to figure out how to save the world.

Or… not. PCs circumventing parts of the scenario or deciding not to do it altogether are perfectly acceptable courses of action. The game might end. That’s okay, let it conclude. The game might take a different course… that’s fine too… with the right mix of creative people, its still going to be a lot of fun. Maybe that traditional ‘heroic journey’ campaign I’d planned for suddenly becomes a Pirate’s Game when the PCs decide to keep the enchanted ship for themselves! I’ve had to end sessions early because players came up with a way to completely circumvent a plot element (recently, in fact!). Some players have genuinely apologized to me for ‘messing up my plans’. I couldn’t figure out how to tell them I was thrilled and excited by what they’d done. I was so happy and here they were, apologizing for it.

Because the point of tabletop roleplaying games is to play a role in a story. Your story. The collective story of the players at the table. The story of the rich kid and his bodyguard. The story of the shapeshifting twins with a destiny. The story of the outcast finding a place to belong. And, somewhere down the list, the plot I’ve come up with to facilitate that story. But if your story doesn’t mesh with that plot, find another plot. Or create another character. That’s the beauty of the sandbox.

I know others have denied you agency. I know some games have told you you can’t have agency where there’s dice. I know some GMs have belittled you for trying to tell your own story. Hell, some of you have BEEN those GMs, so you expect to be submissive when playing in the games of other GMs.

I’m here to say you can expect more. Demand more. Demand it of me!

I am, truly, here to serve.

So let’s tell your story. Together.