The Bonds Forged in Imagination:
Why Our RPG Group Lasted Years
Contents
What Held Us Together
The Game Master’s Craft
Beyond the Dice: Mind Over Matter
Theatre of the Mind vs. The Board Game
Crafting Situations: Location and Motivation
Conan & Kobolds
What Held Us Together
What caused the group to stay together for years is that through the game we came to know each other as people. It developed into human friendship with bonds existing outside of the game. Mostly, we had a lot of fun. We came to respect how each other operate as people. This was enabled by the device of Character Alignment role-played in problem-solving. From the Players enjoyment of character acting.
The Game Master’s Craft
The clever GamesMaster presented situations where Players had to use their intelligence and their emotional intelligence to navigate. As time went on, the GM cultivated the adventures to enhance this. That’s a big part of why he is a good GameMaster. His technique was to not railroad Players through pre-existing adventures, along pre-ordained paths to a predictable outcome. He used cross-referencing to doublecheck their decision-making, to train the Players in critical thinking skills. Primarily to do with the task at hand within the context of the game world. How it affected the other Characters and how that affected the dynamic of the Players wanting to return to the session. That’s what built the community. It was not only about the story but as an exploration of strategies based on how individuals would react in whatever circumstances and how those reactions affected the people around them.
Beyond the Dice: Mind Over Matter
The dice rolls became less relevant. Although it added drama and tension necessary when dealing with the element of luck. Sometimes it would be months before dice would need to be rolled at all. The role-play game sessions were handled through decision-making and character acting. Dice were replaced by the GM’s decision and the Players accepted to go along with it. That the most probable realistic outcome of any given situation is the most probable realistic outcome of any given situation. There is a cohesion as to what that would be, which everybody agreed with. In this way we came to share an understanding of reality is and how it works, what normality is.
Debates did hold up the flow of story, sometimes most of a game session would be a philosophical debate about the consequences of one nuanced way of thinking over another, rather than any actual In Character gaming. This was part of the play. It was better than simply rolling a dice to see what the outcome is.
To that extent, you could flip a coin for a 50-50 odds. The chance of a hundred-sided dice might seem like it’s not 50-50 odds, it might seem like a one percent chance of getting any number. We explored through doing sessions where there was a lot of dice rolling to experiment between different models of probability. Different schools of thought. One suggestion is there is a 50-50 chance the dice will come up with any number, the same as if you’d flip a coin. It does not matter how many other numbers are on the dice, if you look at it that way. Because they're all in the same box, the numbers which did not come up trumps, the non-realities. We began to understand that how we were looking at it had an impact on the results of the dice rolls.
We started to explore and observe the flow of Lady Luck by measuring the winning or losing streaks of fortune which players were on. We began to explore ways we could alter that. Observing how it can be changed largely through self-belief but it’s also through other people believing in you. We discovered that when members of the group, the players, wanted a certain outcome for one players dice role, they could help affect the manifestation of it.
The GamesMaster wove this into the story itself. It is a lucid awareness between the Players and it is the exploration being told through the story that the Characters are living in the world of our imagination. The group began to realise there’s a lot more to what’s happening when invoking imagination and measuring it through dice rolls, than simple dungeon crawling.
Of course, we also all love a simple dungeon crawl, so we do that too.
Theatre of the Mind vs. The Board Game
Recognising there are two forms of role-playing game; The Board Game and the Theatre of the Mind. One has very restrictive rules, limited options per turn, and relies on dice. The other is the opposite. Instead of game system rules creating a mechanic of limited choices, what we call roll-playing, the game of role-playing is where the restrictions are your imagination and behaving In Character to tell the story cohesively.
We began to realise the same understandings of Mind Over Matter physics we’ve been exploring with dice rolls, applied also to the tunnels we were making with our minds in manifesting experiences. The group began to report back that these decisions made in the games in how to think in a certain way were shaping their lives and that it was opening doors to events which then happened in their real lives. Stuff would come into the group’s lives related to the story in the game as well as using the story in the game to explore the stuff going on in our lives through the fiction of the fantasy world version of real events and people. Situations.
Crafting Situations: Location and Motivation
The GameMaster observed this and recognised his domain is that of Situations. The players domain is not of how they deal with the situations.
What makes the situation? There are two parts to it. There is the Location where it happens and how that location may or may not be relevant to and affect the situation.
For example, take a classic love story. Let’s say Romeo and Juliet. Versions of that story have been told throughout human history. It does not have to happen in a Renaissance city, it could happen in a bandit forest or the Samurai or Cimmerian Empire or ancient Greek islands or on space stations. The location adds dramatic flavour to the story. It’s very much a character on its own right.
Empty cities with no people have no impact in the same way. They can be explored by adventurers who happen upon them, perhaps having followed a map through wastelands to the ancient city. Living cities are very different matter. What makes a living city is people.
This is the second factor along with locations. In terms of storytelling it is more important. Is the People. Not only having people who happen to exist. What makes a situation, what makes a story, what makes a person, is their Motivation.
Location and Motivation.
The beggar simply wants enough coin to buy food so that he does not have to steal food and have his hand cut off by the guard as lawful punishment for stealing, like what happened to his friend last week. The biggest motivation is hunger. The thieves motivation is hunger. The bottom line is, every human is motivated by hunger eventually and regularly. It’s a massively important motivation that we can all understand. A lawful good character will give a chaotic evil character food out of sympathy because they are lawful good. The chaotic evil character will more likely kill the lawful good character and steal his food. When you have both of those in the same playing group, the food becomes more important not only symbolically but as a plot device to motivate the personalities involved.
Even when motivation is the same, people’s behaviour changes the story and its outcome. How they go about attaining their desire. This is why chaos/law and good/evil is an important part of the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. It’s probably more important than the numbers for the Statistics, especially if you’re ignoring that because you know, you don’t need to roll a dice if you already know the most probable outcome of that situation.
Conan & Kobolds
While there is a chance a Kobold will fluke through fighting Conan and actually kill him, the probability is so small that it’s not the story we’re telling here today. We’re telling the story of Conan wading through packs of Kobolds get to retrieve a dangerous item from them before they do something idiotic with it. Even a pack of Kobolds is not much of a fight for Conan. To dice-roll and number-crunch through the scenario of Conan fighting Kobolds to retrieve a primitive atomic bomb which they’ve 'borrowed' from an absent NPC mage, comedy value, is fun. It can take an hours to perform or can be done in a moment if the focus of the story is more importantly on getting the bomb back to the Mages warehouse before he realises it has gone, jumps to a paranoid conclusion and starts blowing up the wrong people with the rest of his nuclear arsenal. What makes a good story involves a weight and measure system which goes beyond dice rolling and trusting it to fate.
So whether 3D6 lands on the black side of the coin or the white side of the coin is 50-50 in some situations. Can the Barbarian fend off a pack of Kobolds without much effort at all worth rolling a whole load of dice for? Yes. Should we therefore dedicate two hours of our lives to doing that mission? Well perhaps, if you enjoy seeing Kobolds flying through the air and being squashed underfoot.