Every GM and every player has a different purpose for playing TRPGs. Some look for opportunities to roleplay personal growth, others look for the feeling of capability that comes with success, and still others look to simply spend time with their friends. Crucially, though, all of these types of players have something in common: they are pursuing their own definitions of fun. This is the most important thing in gaming: that your players have fun.
Fun is a difficult thing to define. It's different for everybody, and it is more an art than a science. If it were possible to make everyone happy with one effort, then we would only need one strong one-shot or campaign to satisfy all players. But there are different factors in determining what is fun, and they grow more complicated than just one single issue allows us to understand. I aim to define these factors so that you can institute them in your game more easily. These factors are agency, novelty, and creativity--let's see how they each function in bringing your players fun.
But first, the importance of fun. Let's think about what TRPGs would be without fun. Games involve a great deal of statistical understanding to grasp the rules of the game. They require a large commitment of time. They require you to work closely with other people to accomplish joint goals. They sound a lot like work, really--it takes real effort to achieve success in a TRPG. Without fun, the game is simply work, which is very few players' opinion of an enjoyable game. Further, games generally exist to create opportunities for fun; the work the player does to become proficient in the game is rewarded when they are able to have fun. So your game simply must provide opportunities for fun--it's why your players gathered in the first place.
So how do you respect the formula for fun? The first step is in learning how to monitor whether your players are having fun. Laughter is a great indication; players who are obviously having a good time in this way are in the clear. But engagement looks different from different players. Generally, if your players are taking something seriously--the story, roleplaying, combat--they're engaged. You can notice players taking things seriously when they take care to describe their reaction to something. And players are sure to be having fun when they communicate out-of-game about in-game goals. I recently had a player contact me to ask whether they were taking too much of the game's focus; they didn't want to be stealing the show. This is an engaged player; they're invested in having fun and in respecting the fun of other players.
If your players aren't engaged, it's time to use the tools for bringing fun. The first factor is agency. Your players should feel that they have the ability to make meaningful choices. This is hard to overstate. We as humans want and even need the ability to make choices when we're having fun. You can ensure that your players sense their agency by creating situations where their choices have consequences. Your overall story should accomplish this, but you can begin to portray this effect with smaller narrative moments. I like to start my games by providing a simple scenario with consequential choices. I might have a poor person ask for help with something trivial; the players then get to portray themselves either helping or not helping this person, and I bring that NPC back in a later session to reveal how the player character choices changed that person's situation. (If they helped, the person comes back to repay the party; if the party did not help, they have come back with a hired goon to antagonize the party.) In order to give the players real agency, you'll need to be willing to improvise--you cannot anticipate all player actions, so be ready to turn their actions into farther-reaching moments for your players.
Agency is especially important for a roleplaying campaign. The ability to make choices is central to defining a character for who they are, and if you don't let player characters act as themselves, you will be curtailing the fun of those players. In general, your philosophy as a GM should be this: if the player character could reasonably do what their player directs them to do, they are capable of accomplishing it. Use the outcomes of dice rolls to determine degrees of success, but err on the side of the player. If they can imagine doing something and it's not strictly impossible, what can it hurt to grant them agency? Players will remember inspired actions by other players far more than the details of your story, so lean into it. Grant your players the right to act according to their values, and your game will prosper.
The next factor of fun is novelty. Your players should have something new to discover with each adventure. That doesn't mean that every detail must be unique to your campaign, but it has been illustrated by neuroscientists that novelty is a vital aspect of brain health. We are drawn toward what is new to us naturally, and that applies to your game as well. Novelty means that your game includes new ideas and information for your players to interact with. Mostly, this is an indication that your party might benefit from mixing things up from time to time, but within the area that your players will have fun (it's no use using a roleplaying campaign to shake up things for committed combat experts if it won't appeal to them). Instead, focusing your efforts for novelty on the way you express your story.
To have a novel story, the best bet is to combine several ideas you like into a new format. Let's say you're into science fiction, and you want to tell a story about sci-fi that will be new to your players. But there's a lot of sci-fi out there--how are you going to have a unique idea? You don't have to! All you need is some ingredients from things you like. I'm a big fan of Samuel R. Delany's novel Nova, which depicts a ragtag crew trying to harvest energy from an exploding sun. I also really enjoy time travel movies, like Primer and Triangle. And although I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, I do like the game Knights of the Old Republic, with its sprawling quests and myriad settings. I can combine all of these ingredients into a new story by borrowing some ideas from each thing. So now my story is about a ragtag crew (the party) off to harness the magical energy of a heavenly body, in a race against someone who has access to time travel; in order to outrace the time traveler, the party must gather resources from the sites already visited by the time traveler, and each stop on the way creates problems for the party to deal with. This story doesn't really look anything like any of its component parts, and it's unique enough that your players will get their novelty fix. You can also always design your campaign from player suggestions, but either way, your attempt at novelty will be appreciated by the players.
The last factor to consider when addressing fun is creativity. Creativity is the most elusive thing to address because it is not something you can do for your players; you must allow them to do it for themselves. Allowing your players to be creative means that you provide them the opportunities to be engaged in a thoughtful way. Creativity is open to all TRPG players. Combat experts devise unique ways to exploit the game's rules to come out ahead. Story-invested players find interesting ways to guide the narrative. Roleplayers use their creativity to express their characters and inhabit the world. Strictly speaking, all you need to do to allow creativity is leave room for players to engage. But more to the point, you should inspire creativity amongst your players. This is like the difference between loading the dishwasher and running the dishwasher; it's one thing to do your part, but another to set someone else up to succeed.
When you want to inspire creativity, it's important that your players understand that they can be creative. My preferred method is to reward creativity. When my players come up with an outside-the-box plan for solving a problem (like starting a business in order to solve a murder), I definitely do not set limits on how they can solve the problem. I recognize their creativity and allow them a fair shot at success. In the case of the linked example, I allowed my players to relatively quickly and efficiently build a business and become involved in the social circle they were eyeing because their idea took creativity. It's important to note a certain distinction here: there are bad player ideas and good player ideas. A bad player idea ignores facts about the setting or plays on the fact that it's a game. Anything else is a good idea. Roll the dice if you must, but I generally recommend honoring the creativity of players.
A quick example to make this point. I recently played in a session where the party's goal was to obtain a magical artifact from an ogre in a heavily fortified compound. We as the party looked over maps, considered options, and made plans. Our method was a little bonkers: we would arrive and declare ourselves traveling sheep masseurs (the ogres had a flock of sheep) and jewelry polishers. We used the spell "Grease" to free the sheep, distracting most of the ogres. We poisoned the ale keg the ogres drank out of. We started a massive distraction fire. In the end, we made it out unscathed, and our DM was flummoxed. Though he is relatively new to DMing, he understood that player fun relies on the agency to make choices (wild as they were), the novelty of a one-shot none of us were familiar with, and the room for creativity to develop our wild plans. It was a bizarre strategy, but our DM knew we were engaged and rewarded us for our efforts. This is how you create fun for your players: you use the tools and encourage them to play as they want to.
So that's it. It's really so simple. The end goal of every TRPG is fun, and creating that fun is easily doable with the right attitude. Just keep your players' in mind first and foremost, and you'll never fail to provide your players with fun. Coming soon: how to design a campaign setting, rules for my custom magic system, and my expanded list of familiars for every class. Until next time, happy gaming!
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