Collaborative Storytelling Styles

Here’s a strong opinion of mine. I’ll die on a hill defending this opinion as well. Here goes.

The main point of role playing games is to get a group together to tell stories in a collaborative and fun manner while using a set of rules to guide the storytelling though its paces.

Let’s break that down a bit.

Group: More than one person. The more the merrier (to an extent). If you don’t have a group (meaning you’re alone), then write a novel or a short story or playing a solo journaling game or play a computer game or do a puzzle. If you have at least one other person, it’s now possible to do something collaborative.

Tell stories: The point of RPGs, in my view, is to get together and tell a story. The GM has some say. The players, through their characters, have some say. The group as a whole has a collaborative and supportive say in where the story goes. The dice and game mechanics get involved as well, to be honest.

Collaborative: This is where the improvisational style of acting phrases “yes, and” and “no, but” come into play. You want to support other peoples’ ideas at the the table and expand upon them. However, if an idea is a little too far “out there,” you can invoke a “no” but don’t make it a full stop. Toss in “but” to the “no” to redirect the idea that just won’t fit into the overall story flow.

Fun: This is subjective. This is hard to pin down. Some people (looking at Chris) don’t like the use of the word because of the difficulty to pin it down. For me, if each member of the group is having a good time, engaged, smiling, laughing, or enjoying themselves the vast majority of the time, then they’re having fun. Fun comes in too many flavors to define them all here. Each person is different. Each person’s fun will overlap in different manners with the fun of others at the table in different ways.

Rules: One of the default modes of RPGs to have rules. Even the diceless games out there have rules. Some games are very lightweight when it comes to the rules. Others are very heavy in the set of rules. It’s a spectrum, not an on/off switch. These rules exist to set boundaries and provide guidelines on the stories being told using those mechanics.

Now that I’ve dropped a statement and supporting statements, let’s delve into the different styles of storytelling. This is largely focused on collaborative storytelling within the environment of a role playing game, not writing a novel or other length of story.

A last note here, so I don’t have to repeat myself in each section. Each of these sections provide the extreme opposite ends of a slider. Games do not have to be “epic or personal.” They can be somewhere in-between, and most games will be somewhere along that spectrum. Please don’t take my following categorizations as either/or, but bumpers to keep you on course as you consider what kind of story you’re group is collaborating on.

Epic Stakes vs. Personal Stakes

What are the PCs trying to stop, start, prevent, cause, or interact with?

If the results of their actions will impact people they’ve never heard of, seen, or can directly interact with, then the story is getting more epic in scope. This can be stopping an invading army or alien force. This could be curing a disease plaguing a star system and is threatening to spread to other star systems. My friends and I had to stop the sudden rise of an undead army during a campaign once. That was a hoot, and was very epic. Any story with widespread impacts (for good or ill), are generally epic in nature.

Personal stakes in stories are immediately felt by not only the PCs, but the NPCs and immediate surroundings the PCs interact with. If an NPC that it tightly related (not always by blood relation) to a PC needs help or rescuing or avenging or help performing a task, these are personal stakes. If an adventure or story arc ties directly to a personal goal of a PC, these are personal stakes. If the surrounding area where the PCs are based or stationed or originate from is impacted by their actions, then the stakes are generally personal.

Another set of phrasing (which I now firmly reject thanks to a conversation with Senda) is “large stakes” and “small stakes.” If a story is told well, all stakes are “large” to the people involved. This is why I now go with the phrasings of epic and personal for the stakes involved in a story. Thanks to Senda for providing her insight into this shift in my thinking and approach at determining stakes.

Open vs. Linear

Open stories can lead almost anywhere at the PCs’ whims and decisions and/or the results of the die rolls. These can be referred to as “sandbox campaigns,” but that usually implies lots of wilderness exploration and trying to find points of interest while exploring or traveling to a destination. Open storytelling does not have to be a sandbox or a random series of events the GM is not prepared for. Open stories can be a series of decisions the GM presents to the PCs during the course of the storytelling to allow the story to veer left, right, up, down, or sideways.

Linear stories are more structured and are highly appropriate for one-shots, convention games, shorter story arcs, and more focused storytelling. Straightforward stories can (and should) involve limited choices by the PCs to allow them agency on how to approach a problem or to choose which problem to tackle first. If the GM ignores (or forces) PC choices to keep the adventure “linear,” then the GM has fallen into the trap of running a “railroad” instead. PC agency should be alive and well at all times, but it can be presented in a manner to limit when/where/how PCs take their actions to keep the story within certain bounds.

Improvisational vs. Planned

Setting aside learning the rules and world and mechanics and character abilities and all that, there are two approaches in this section: improvisational and planned storytelling.

Improvisational storytelling requires the GM to think on their feet in a rapid manner because there is no “plan of action” or “proscribed text” to follow along with. Instead of (mostly) knowing what comes next or what is hidden behind the locked door, the GM interacts with the PC choices on the fly  and makes up what the world does next in response to the PC actions. This sounds intimidating, but with some practice, improv GMs can flourish in the right setting. If the players are open to brief pauses in the game to allow the GM time to give a thoughtful response to a major PC decision, then the GM can get more comfortable (and faster) with this style of play.

The other end of the spectrum is to run planned adventures or story arcs. These can be pre-published or homegrown adventures that are written before the PCs start interacting with the storytelling. This can provide a foundation upon which to build stories, but it might give  some GMs brain lock when (not if)  the players decide to take their characters in an unexpected direction. The classic advice (slightly reworded) from Phil is to have pre-written adventures provide problems for the PCs to overcome, but never to suggest a solution. This frees the GM from anticipating solutions and then being surprise. Surprise always sets people back on their mental heels and can cause issues with running the game.

Complex vs. Simple

How deep is the story? How wide is the story? How many concurrent threads are running within the story? These are the complexity factors.

For deep stories, there is a commitment it a single ideal, goal, or objective of the story. This can be stopping a single bad guy. This can be thwarting the goals of a single overlord. This can be stopping a single army or invasion or disease. It  can also be as personal as shutting down the HOA that’s stealing the neighborhood  water supplies to sell  to the evil water bottling empire.

For wide stories, these can be more difficult. In my case, I’m using “wide” to describe stories that have a more broad  impact or antagonist or single evil corporation or some such. In this case, there are multiple opponents at the same time for the PCs (and GM) to juggle. This can come in the form of faction wars. These faction wars involve allies, enemies, direct antagonists, and neutral parties. Each addition of a faction adds a layer of complexity to the story.

Lastly, how many story lines or threads do  you want  to  run concurrently? I recommend having no more than three active threads. This means if you have six players, you’ll most like have at least six threads. It’s okay to have an arc “back burner” 3-4 threads to keep things sane for you. If players merge their personal threads together either at the beginning of the campaign or through telling stories during adventuring, then that can help reduce workload on you as the GM. A side note: Just because a player’s character has a plot thread on the back burner, this doesn’t mean you get to  ignore the player, their character, or their ideas. You never know when the perfecting timing will hit to shuffle that player’s story line to the front of the story being told.

Conclusion

I hope these delineations have been helpful. Obviously, there are probably more categories and spectrums to consider when it comes to storytelling, but these are the more important ones in my mind. I could have (maybe) come up with another 3-4 categories to talk about, but that would have made this (already too long) article super long.

Thanks for sticking with me. If you have your own categories for me to consider, feel free to ping me (comments below or on social media) with ideas. I might make a follow-up article if enough ideas trickle in.