The carrot & the stick

Role-playing is a collaborative effort, and the choices that players make determine a great deal of the tone and direction of your game. But as Story­teller, you’re trying to tell a story and you need to keep the players focused on coming up with solutions to the challenges and problems of that story. If your plot is about stopping a tyrannical regime, you need to keep your players on task stopping the tyrant. You should let them be creative in how they do so, but don’t let them lose sight of the goal.

You’ve got two basic ways to do it: the carrot and the stick. The stick is often called the Story­teller Hammer because it’s a brute force tool. You know the stick: “A bajillion bad guys surround you. They are heavily armed and hold your pet bunny hostage. If you try to fight, they will slaughter you without breaking a sweat! Guess you better surrender, hmm?”

If something doesn’t fit into the plot, you can use the Story­teller Hammer to smash it back into place. If you want your players to make a certain decision, you bash them in that direction. A little more subtly, you can just raise it and the simple threat of its use can get players to conform or get things back on track. Sometimes, you can use the hammer without anyone knowing — like faking a roll to make sure that it succeeds or fails as required by your story.

But for the most part, the Story­teller Hammer is an obvious and heavy-handed tool that can break your players’ immersion. It makes them feel resentful, condescended to, or like they don’t have any freedom of choice in your game. Sometimes you have to use the stick. It can be a vital and necessary tool, but it should be used sparingly and only as a last resort.

In general, the carrot is a much better tool. It’s subtle and easier to use without your players realizing what you’re up to. The carrot works by making the players want to do what you need them to. It’s not even very hard. Find out what your players want out of game, know what their characters want in game, and then dangle that in the direction you want them to go… Or just make it look like it’s dangling out there.

“To the south lies the Desert of Death, famous for its blistering hot winds and plagues of groin-rot. To the north is the Forest of Ease, famous for the emperor’s astonishingly poorly-guarded treasure room and armory. Which way do you want to go?”

Which way do you think they’re going to go? If you can manage a little more subtlety than that, you can get your players to willingly go exactly where the story needs them to.

Far tastier than a stick.

If my characters need to break into a fortress and I really want to run the sewer infiltration, then all I have to do is stack the deck a little. When they case the fortress, I let them notice that the guards stay away from the smelly sewer drains. I might also mention that the sewer tunnel leads right under the chamber they seek. And the sewer is old, with updated security measures only present in newer parts of the fortress.

Sure, I could use the stick and tell them that the guards search everyone coming in the main gate and there’s no point in disguise, or that the guards patrol the walls and gates in huge numbers making frontal assault or entry by stealth impossible. But rather than hemming them in with negatives, I high­light the positives of the choice I want them to make and most of the time, they do just that. And if they don’t… Well, it’s a good thing I outlined the other approaches in my notes.

And just because you make an option look good, it doesn’t mean it has to be good. Once the players get into that sewer, I can decide that the commander seeded the water with carnivorous fish because the guards couldn’t stand the smell long enough to keep an eye on it. She also blocked the tunnel that leads directly inside, forcing the characters to take a detour across the fortress and into some challenges I’ve placed along the way. You can’t always offer the carrot and then yank it away, but you don’t have to give your players their carrot every time, either.

Be very clear about your carrots. Don’t be obvious and tell your players, “Look at my carrot! Come and get it!”

But do make sure that the carrot is good motivation and don’t dangle attractive things in front of your characters that you don’t actually want them to pursue.

In one game I played, the Story­teller hinted that we needed to talk to a spirit. We weren’t given a reason why, or told what questions we needed to ask, and the spirit was famous for being treacherous and deadly. So why talk to it? We might have gone anyway and just muddled through, hoping the spirit would clarify things for us. But at the same time, the Story­teller dangled another carrot: the bad guys were camped in a nearby forest and building devastating weapons of war. We knew those guys and we hated them. The threat of their forces seemed far more urgent.

So we decided to go sabotage the antagonist’s plans. Apparently, we were really supposed to see the spirit, and the encamped bad guys were simply a detail thrown out to keep the villain’s presence active. Well, that backfired pretty badly. The Story­teller had no plan for us to fight the antagonists that session, and the scene that en­sued was a little forced and unfocused. It didn’t add anything to the story and pulled us off course for several sessions.

Some time later, we found out the spirit had certain information we were looking for and we raced off to talk to it like we were supposed to in the first place. We just needed clear motivation, and no distractions.

So, if you dangle a carrot that the players aren’t interested in, they won’t chase after it. Make sure that the players are motivated to pursue the plot. In the game I talked about before, the plot revolved around a threat to the spirit world, but most of the spirits we met were petty and cruel. The bad guys wanted to destroy them all and we kind of agreed. Not an ideal situation for the Story­teller… The spirits were supposed to be victims, but they were lashing out and causing more damage than the antagonists, who professed to be saving the world.

The antagonists were jerks too, but for a good chunk of the game, we helped the spirits only because we knew that we were supposed to. On a few occasions, they pissed us off so badly that we really wanted to help the bad guys.

Toward the end, the Story­teller finally gave us some back­ground on the villains and revealed that their plans against the spirits were selfish and destructive, that they weren’t trying to save the world at all. The spirits were just their excuse for taking power.

Once the villains were pitched as real villains, we happily kicked their asses up and down the map. The Story­teller also made the spirits more sympathetic so we actually wanted to help them. When we had good carrots that made us want to stop the villains and save the spirits, everyone was a lot happier.

Except the antagonists.

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