Why I call myself a “Storyteller”
The person who creates and runs a role-playing game gets all sorts of titles. Dungeon Master, Game Master, Referee, Narrator… And, one of my favorites, Holmeister.
But the one I identify with and which I use in my books about role-playing is Storyteller.
I want to be more than just the guy who sprinkles monsters around a dungeon like deadly cake toppings. Game Master sounds all tied up in rules. I don’t want to just Referee my players or Narrate a scene to them, and Holmeister is something we probably don’t even want to get into.
(…But if you want to get into it, it’s the Storyteller of a HOL game. HOL stands for Human-Occupied Landfill, and to say the game is gross barely scratches the surface. Go check it out if messed-up games are your thing.)
I want to tell a story, just like when Erica and I write novels. I’m here to create a story just like my friends and I see in movies. But gaming isn’t handing players a script, or beating round pegs into square holes with a Storytelling hammer. It’s just finding a mood and infusing my game with it, using recurring themes so that it saturates the story and resonates with my players. It’s about making them feel like the heroes of a story, about making them laugh and cry.
And when I make my players cry, I don’t mean just torturing their characters or screwing them over with the rules until they cry tears of frustration. No, I mean getting them so emotionally invested in my game that they truly care about what happens to the characters in it — their characters and non-player characters alike. We’ve all cried during movies, or when our favorite character dies in a book, so why can’t we do that in an RPG? Why can’t that kind of story move us the same way?
That’s my goal. That’s why I run role-playing games. And why I call myself a Storyteller.
And if you want to know a secret, I think of my players as Storytellers, too. Oh, I’m definitely the one who comes up with the plot and portrays the NPCs, but role-playing is collaborative and my players each have scenes and themes to contribute to the story. I try to weave them all together, so that the end result is so much more than the pile of notes and outlines and stats that I came up with. But the end result I’m looking to create together, isn’t a handful of high-level characters, it’s a story we can enjoy just as much as any book or movie.
