Making it feel real

It can be easy to focus so much on the players that you neglect other parts of an RPG. If the players move through the plot and the world around them doesn’t respond, then it all begins to feel like so many cardboard cutouts, even if the story is theoretically excellent.

When something happens in the game world, that world can’t just sit there not reacting. If there’s no reaction, the story happens in a weird vacuum and the players start to suffocate. So if an army is building up somewhere, people need to notice and comment on all those mercenaries heading out west, or the townsfolk should talk about how much iron is being bought up by the guy who’s girding for war. Other nations need to get nervous and start fortifying their borders.

If the players have a shoot­out in the street, the police should re­spond — eventually — and that night’s local news should have a story about violence in the city. Even if the threat is supposed to be a secret, when it does spill out into the rest of the world, the world must react.

Some plots are supposed to be hidden from the general public. A secretive cult planning a doomsday ceremony isn’t going to ad­vertise their plans to the city living above their heads, but the chase scene or raging fight that occurred between the characters and the antagonists should get some attention. When the bad guys’ plans get big enough that the rest of the world can notice, it should notice.

Don’t leave your RPG world empty. Make it react.

In one game, our characters faced a local extremist group that was gearing up for war and to unleash a catastrophe on the world. But no one else seemed to notice the thousands of soldiers mus­tering and the siege weapons under construction in the forest. When our characters went to the authorities with warnings about the army, no one reacted. Only on the very last day of game did those authorities enter the story on our side. Until then, we felt like it was just us and the antagonist. It was like the rest of the world was in a coma.

Of course, you can’t give your players a free army just because they run to the authorities and point out the bad guy. But if they do point out the bad guy, the authorities have to do or say something. Maybe make it clear the police or government have been corrupted, or that they’re decadent and don’t take the threat seriously.

But that’s not the same as doing nothing. They’re reacting, but they don’t have to react exactly the way the players ask them to. You don’t want the authorities and back­ground characters to defeat the antagonist and do the players’ job for them, of course. NPCs should only intervene or help when it’s dramatically appropriate.

I ran another game with a similar sort of threat — a powerful army conquering the world one nation at a time. The antagonists fought back as small-scale rebels at first, freeing villages and small towns. As the victories began to mount, the villain increased security and committed more troops to their cause.

After the protagonists won a major battle, the villain changed his tactics. When the protagonists gained a nomadic tribe as an ally, the villains slandered those nomads and painted them as thieves and vagabonds to turn the common people against them. Even though many of these things happened far away and were only con­veyed by reaction or rumor, the antagonists responded to the PCs’ every move and countered with one of their own.

The easiest way to make the world feel alive is just to have the people talk about what’s going on. Especially about things that the PCs do. Players love it when people talk about them. Stroke their egos a little and they’ll have a blast.

The content of this post originally appeared in My Guide to RPG Storytelling.