Story Wednesdays: My First Story Focused DM

Welcome to Story Wednesdays, where I share stories from my past that are fun, helpful, or inspirational. Or sometimes I just want to reminisce, at which point... stay on the boat, folks, because we are navigating a river of the damned, and if you get off, who knows what might happen to you.

By the time I entered college, I'd been playing Dungeons and Dragons for six years. I knew the D&D 3.5 Player's Handbook like the back of my hand. I could site rules and pages from memory. I knew (because me and my friend had stayed up one night until four in the morning checking through every book that had been published) that there were rules to regrow a limb, but there weren't any rules to lose one in the first place. Of course, it could happen for story reasons, but it seemed to us that if there were actual mechanics to grow an arm back, there should be mechanics to have it cut off in the first place.

That friend and I played D&D every day after high school for almost three years. There were other games with larger groups that happened on a weekly, or bi weekly, or monthly basis. But I could always count on my game with Marcus. It was always there.

The thing about it though, was that neither of us had played much outside of our small group. I longed for a group that wanted to take the game seriously, to pick up the rp and treat it as important as the rules, and that just wasn't the group I was playing with.

Then I got to college, and one Game Master made everything change.

I stumbled on the group three weeks into my first semester. I was eating in the cafeteria, and I overheard this group at another table talking about Tiamat, Raistlin, and Tanis. They were talking about Dragonlance, and if they were talking about that, it was almost a guarantee that they played D&D. I was thrilled. I hadn't met any other gamers yet. I had just gone from playing every single weekday to not playing at all.

I was having gaming withdrawal.

So I almost threw myself at this group and begged to be in their game. And they smiled, told me that their friend Geo was running a Final Fantasy game, and that they still needed a white mage for heals.

So I made a character in this crazy system and jumped in.

I was flabbergasted. Geo described things in such detail. Characters talked to each other in character. There was story. And not just a backdrop of story for shenanigans to take place in. No, there was serious story that felt like it had actual stakes. 

It was like nothing I had ever seen before. This is what roleplaying was supposed to be like. This is what I'd been searching for ever since I started trying to design my own table top games before I knew that table top games were a thing.

I played two other games with Geo. And by the end of the third game I had become a bit less enthusiastic. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was the fact that I was still running games at least two times a week, and was maturing as a GM myself. But by the end of that third game I was realizing something that has changed the way I think about games.

Geo's games had story. But it wasn't our story. It was his story.

Oh, we had some room to play in it. But in the end we were always going to go from point a to point b to point c. There was never going to be anything that would steer the game in a completely different direction. And that wasn't because our characters didn't have influence in the world, but rather that in the end they had no influence on the story.

We might die and create new characters. But if a boss was supposed to get away - he was always going to get away.

And as I realized that, my awe faded. I still liked playing in his games, but I could see the cracks that all of us have as Dungeon Masters. Because no one is perfect, and styles aren't always the same.

But his style influenced my style. A decade or two later, PbTA games would form my feelings into a single phrase: play to see what happens. 

I love that phrase. As a Dungeon Master I no longer prepare stories. I prepare settings. I prepare groups and organizations and cities and dungeons. I come up with story hooks to give my players something to do. But I don't come up with a specific end plot. Instead I let the players take control.

Because I don't want to sit at the table to tell my story. I want to sit at the table and enable the players to tell their own.