Player buy-in: Storytelling edition
We’ve written before about the concept of buy-in: Storytellers and players alike treating a character according to their concept. Respect the physical power of the barbarian, the charisma of the bard, and the intelligence of the wizard — even if the dice aren’t. When the Storyteller and other players treat your character like they are the upright badass paladin you made them to be, it’s a lot easier and a lot more fun to play them.
So now let’s talk about the Storytelling version of all this. Storytellers can — and should — buy into their player character concepts. But the players need to buy into the campaign’s story and world, too. You need them to invest, and there are a lot of ways to do that. Build up the in-game world for your players, help them make their characters to best get involved in your story, make them shine far brighter than the NPCs, layer your scenes for impact, let them delve into your plot and don’t worry if they guess the reveal. I could go on, but we’ve spent years dissecting how to craft an RPG campaign that will capture your players’ imaginations. We give a lot of advice about what to do.
This time, let’s talk about what not to do. I’ve read a lot of horror stories, and lived plenty of my own — not to mention everything that Aron’s seen in three decades of gaming. When you’ve poured time and love into creating your campaign, it can be really frustrating when your players aren’t paying attention, or laugh at the dramatic reveals. It can make a Storyteller desperate to draw them in.
I struggled with this when I first started Storytelling. In order to make my players care about the stakes of my game, I cranked them up to eleven. My game worlds were so full of pain, torture, rape and death that even George R.R. Martin would have sat up and taken note. If my player characters failed to rescue an non-player character fast enough, I would describe absolutely awful things happening to the NPC. Even random in-world people that they met had tragic backstories as I indirectly begged the players to care about what happened to them.
It didn’t work, of course. All I did was make myself and my players uncomfortable. Most of our group are serious gamers, but they’re generally looking for fun, heroic stories — not torture porn with dice. I don’t think I actually lost any players during that phase, but it was close. I drove Aron nuts as he tried to be heroic and help the people of my RPG worlds, only to meet an unbreakable wall of agony as I continued to abuse my NPCs.
No one had much fun, and I quickly picked up a reputation for being the melodramatic Storyteller. All I accomplished was frustrating myself and my players, and the awful consequences of any action in my campaign made it harder for players to invest, not easier.
I’ve reined in the doom and gloom a lot since those days. The impulse is still there, the feeling that I need to endlessly increase the stakes to keep my players invested in the outcome of a scene or to get an emotional reaction. But my players are good, I trust them, and I have better ways now to get them invested than pain and melodrama.
Aron struggled with investment at times, too, especially when the time came for characters to be frightened. After all, the characters are in danger, not the player. Their creations are just dice-puppets that don’t actually feel discomfort or pain, so it’s all too easy for players not to engage or invest in the scene. Captivity or torture scenes, in particular, suffer from this.
A quick aside: RPG scenes that involve capture, imprisonment, and torment can be painful or triggering for some players. Game is supposed to be fun, not traumatic. So if your campaign involves these kinds of scenarios, discuss it ahead of time with your group and give them a chance to either tell you to bring on the heavy stuff, or that it’s not something they would enjoy. Then they can either skip that campaign, or the Storyteller can work up an alternative scene.
Inevitably, Aron’s NPCs would capture his player party, who then ceaselessly mocked their captors with your momma jokes. It wasn’t scary, and it wasn’t dramatic. Rather than talk to his players or find ways to get them to invest, he just came down on them harder to get them to take it seriously. More prison time, beatings that dealt more damage, and so on.
It never helped. It just made his players resentful, and lash out more childishly at NPCs — or the Storyteller himself. Only after years of work did he finally concede that fear is not something we can often make players feel. Nervous, yes, and worried for their character or an NPC. But that’s about it.
And that is fine. Role-playing is a game. It should never provoke actual fear or pain. Trying to force your players into negative emotions isn’t good for you or for them.
One of the most common responses that I see discussed online to players who don’t engage is to punish their characters. Someone wasn’t paying enough attention during combat? Then the Big Bad smites them with a single hit and the Storyteller says it’s their own fault for not being engaged. Maybe they should have been watching the map a little closer, sure, but being punitive with your players will rarely get you anywhere.
This isn’t something that either Aron or I have ever engaged in, but it’s worth talking about. Some Storytellers have antagonistic relationships with their players, each trying to bend the rules to beat the other. If that’s your preferred dynamic, no problem… But this blog probably won’t be of much use to you. Our entire style is based on the assumption that players and the Storyteller are working together to create a narrative.
So if you’re supposed to be on the same team, punishing a lack of engagement from your players doesn’t help anyone. Your players are there to have fun and to engage with your story. If they’re not doing that, bringing down the hammer won’t help. Maybe they’ve got some real-world distractions — schoolwork, sick family, that kind of thing — or maybe the story just isn’t gripping them. Or maybe your Storytelling style just doesn’t mesh with their player preferences. Either way, that’s a conversation you should have, not something to be punished. If you two can work it out, then you can avoid any lingering resentment. If not, then at least player and Storyteller can part amicably, not shouting at each other over bruised feelings.
RPGs are games of pretend, and it doesn’t work unless everyone is prepared to invest in a shared fantasy. But if it’s not working out for some reason, don’t jump straight into punishing your players or NPCs. Talk to your group and figure it out together.
