“The players are not your audience — you are theirs.”
Me, just now.
I mean, what are we doing here? Friends gathering together, huddled over a table, some statistics and sheets, a fairly large amount of dice and go on to spend hours, well, just talking. But what are we doing here really? Usually, when trying to explain what RPGs are to people unfamiliar with them, I say vague things like: “It’s like a board game, but there’s no board” or “Remember those old choose-your-own-adventure books…?” or “It’s also like improvisational theatre”, etc.
When trying to explain what my job as a Gamemaster is, the terms become even vaguer: “I’m like a movie director” or “It’s like in a computer game, only I’m the computer.” Not one of these terms comes close to explaining what table-top roleplaying games or gamemasters really are. After all, no one can be told what the Matrix is. Or can they?
Two of my top RPG gurus, Mike Shea, author of my game-mastering bible “Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master” and Johnn Four, whose Roleplaying Tips mailing list I’ve been subscribed to for decades, joined forces in a video giving priceless high-level advice on how to structure an adventure, using the 5-Room-Dungeon template:
The template discussed in the video above allows you to structure your adventure, or when done even more proficiently, structure your actual roleplaying session in real-time, in an attempt to build a better Story. This ingenious template is modeled after the “The Hero’s Journey” model (also known as the “Monomyth”) by the famous narratologist Joseph Cambell, from his book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces“. This pivotal book was the result of years of studying a huge amount of stories, from all parts of the world, from all parts of history. Cambell noticed an obvious repeating pattern throughout these stories, even within cultures that had no contact with others what-so-ever. He came to the only possible conclusion — Aliens!
Ok, no. Not aliens… His conclusion was rather that the human species has a certain pattern in which we experience reality — and that is The Story.
It doesn’t matter what the experience is, it could be a vacation, a dream or a visit to the dentist, the pattern in which we tell and re-tell the experience to ourselves and others — is the Story. Some scholars, such as Yuval Noah Harari, go even further to say that our natural ability to tell stories is what differentiated and elevated our species to its top-of-the-food-chain status.
In many screen-writing books there is a version of Cambell’s Monomyth in some form or another, but the following video has the simplest and most inspirational explanations I’ve seen. I know that a lot of new writers constantly try to fight such “dictated” patterns and reinvent the wheel. Not only is that impossible — there is simply no need. If we distort the pattern, our audience will have difficulty understanding us. Plus, how will you know if you’re reinventing the wheel, if you don’t know what the wheel is?!
To summarize the Hero’s Journey model in even simpler terms:
- The Hero lives their life peacefully in their own world.
- But, suddenly, they must have/do something important.
- Then the hero leaves their familiar world to go do/get that something.
- But they encounter resistance along the way.
- Then they manage to find what they were after!
- But they lose something precious to them as a result.
- Then they learn something crucial about themselves and the world they live in.
- But, now, they have to go back home and deal with the reason they went on the quest in the first place.
The End.
Notice the “Then/But” that must follow each other, otherwise it’s just boring monotonous babbling (think phone calls from your mother). This is what Mike Shea refers to as the oscillating scene flow, or the tension and release cycle, where a positive encounter must be followed by a negative encounter, and so on. This idea of course also appears in many screen-writing books, such as “Story” by Robert Mckee.
It’s no surprise that this template might seem very familiar to you. With this model’s archetypes such as The Guardian, The Mentor, The Helper and so on… Hey, wait a minute! Are these all RPG classes?! The Fighter, The Mage, The Cleric… sure they are! This is of course by no accident. Gary Gygax was quoted explaining how “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” was one of his main motivations for Dungeons & Dragons, and how he returned to it many times for inspiration.
And what is the point of a story, through its cycles of tensions and releases, leading the Hero to their destiny, if not to elicit emotion? When you finish a good movie, book, or TV episode, you have this life-affirming feeling of fulfilment, growth and excitement. Aristotle, in his book Poetics, already made up a word for this feeling 3000+ years ago: Catharsis. No, this is not a name of a fantasy Elven city — This is the feeling you get after listening to a song you love… These are the goose bumps you get after scrutinizing an unusual modern-art painting and suddenly getting it… This is the rush you feel after a really good RPG session!
I rarely see this mentioned in RPG books, maybe buried somewhere between the many rules, fluff and tables, so here’s my point: Roleplaying games are an art form. And like many art forms, it adopts methods and techniques from other media: It uses story and character building concepts from screen-writing; It borrows acting skills from the theatre; It employs plastic art for inspirational illustrations, maps, miniatures, etc.
Playing a Gamemaster borrows from even more artistic professions, such as stand-up comedy. One of the best game-mastering advice I heard was from Jerry Seinfeld, when he was asked: “What do you do on stage while the audience is laughing and clapping?” — He answered: “You stay in the bit!”
This advice immensely helped me control the flow of the sessions themselves. When paying close attention to the players and their enjoyment of the game, I can extend in real-time encounters that are more fun, or quickly cut through encounters that are obviously more boring.
Finally, roleplaying games borrow from arts such as film-making, in the sense that it’s a collaborative creation process. Rarely is any movie made by a single person, same as role-playing sessions — with the Gamemaster sharing some duties with a movie director. RPGs may have many things in common with other art forms, but it’s still its own thing.
When considering RPGs as an art form, all of its many separate ingredients make complete sense: The world-setting and rules are there to create a consistent framework for the characters and story to take place in. The dice are there to create the tension of an uncertain future. Some role playing systems, like Genesys RPG, take this even a step further with an inherent “Then/But” mechanic built into its Narrative DiceTM system. By default, each roll of the dice in Genesys generates a success or failure result, as well as an additional Threat or Advantage your character might have gained. The oscillation driving the tension of the story is ever present.
Further roleplaying games’ elements, like the characters’ mechanical progression, the artistic décor, the antagonists, the genre, the tone, and more, all are there to help create the oscillating flow of encounters, the drama, the story, ultimately leading to the yearned for Catharsis.
But who is the audience of this art form? Who is there to absorb the show and experience this Catharsis? You are. This goes for every player sitting at the table. Even more so for the GM, as they are clearly not the protagonist of the story.
Next time you sit down to play and start to argue over a game rule, think about it this way: Is the rule crucial to the tension and drama that is worth looking up through 5 books right now? Or is it a tedious rule that will just slow down that game and is completely inconsequential to the story? When realizing you are all there to create together, the priorities should be obvious. And I promise you — if you feel anything at the end of a session, if you experience this Catharsis, the other players will too. It is our nature.
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