What Works When Telling a Grand Story (and What Doesn't)

Many GMs have designs for big, sweeping stories rich in detail for their players. But as any experienced GM knows, players are unpredictable, and they can make it difficult to tell your story exactly as you imagined it. So what can work well when you're telling your grand story? What will the players almost certainly do to challenge it? Read on to gather some insight on how to design your story with player actions in mind. 

In a previous post, I spent some time addressing a campaign I ran when I was making my first serious run at GMing a big story. In a nutshell, I had my characters completing assassination contracts on members of the royals, both officials and royalty. My plan was fairly grand: they would complete 20 contracts, eventually having killed the royal family (and thereby setting the city into anarchy), only to discover that the princess of the royal family had been behind all the contracts. Her own death would cement the new future for the city in line with her anarchist ideals. It was a big plan--too ambitious, in the end, as 20 contracts would have been entirely too much, but I was still an intermediate GM at best. And of course it didn't work. 

The players completed one and a half assassinations and turned on the questgiver, who they discovered was the princess. And then all hell broke loose. The party split into anarchists trying to bring down the kingdom and loyal guards who strove to defend the king and his family. In the end, the campaign resolved with a giant battle that killed hundreds and sicced a dragon on the city; the princess and her lover (a player character who was a devious bard) disappeared with the city in ruins, and the loyal player characters were left to rebuild the city. This is to say that less than 10% of the story I wrote was completed by the players before they abandoned my vision of the quest. Let this story serve as a reminder: you cannot guarantee that your players will follow your story, no matter how grand it may be. 

So what can you do to ensure your players are likelier to follow your plans? There are generally two ways to do this: creating smaller units of story at a time and allowing for time spent on non-story pursuits. These are not mutually exclusive strategies; I recommend you employ both in your games. Before getting into how to employ them, let's consider how these pieces of advice could have saved my campaign idea before trouble struck. 

In a way, I had broken up my grand story into smaller pieces--each individual assassination contract. But the important mistake I made was that each unit of the story was basically the same: investigate a royal servant and kill them. I had plans to make each assassination different, but for the players, "kill these 20 people" is essentially the same quest 20 times in a row. This is bad design. Stories can get old, and I would have been better served by chapters of the story that felt different in obvious ways. So my players were faced with a practically endless list of assassinations to attend to with only heaps of gold to motivate them, and that is rarely enough for roleplayers. In a sense, this campaign was doomed from the start.

The only reason that things worked out is that I leaned heavily on the other important strategy: allowing for time spent on things besides the story. I had done this in small ways leading up to the party split by allowing the players to do whatever they wanted, which in the end allowed them to sense that they didn't have to complete the assassinations. I'm sure some GMs would say that by allowing the players to freedom to ignore the story, I dug my own grave. But I cannot overstate how empowered my players were by having the choice to break the story. I have rarely seen players more engaged. My poor writing was saved by my strong improvisation. And if you have both strong improvisation and a carefully-written campaign, you're ready for anything. 

I have learned my lesson. When I began to write the mystery campaign, I wrote my adventure differently. Rather than relying on an overall arc to inform the moments between, I broke up my arc into smaller pieces--importantly, pieces which each felt different. Session one was about finding a description of the murderer. Session two was about learning what the murderer was doing in the first place. Session three involved following up with someone who had threatened the person the murderer had targeted. These mini-stories each revolve around related but distinct ideas, and ultimately, the players feel like they are searching a wide-spanning web with treacherous secrets hidden in it. This is what I want--I want my mystery to feel complicated and far-reaching so that the stakes are high and the difficulty curve is powerful. Building a campaign with detailed chapters allows you to keep your goals in perspective; you don't need to guide your players to the solution in one elegant step when you can focus on individual smaller chapters of story each session instead. 

But as readers of the mystery campaign know, a careful outline is not enough to keep up with the players' interests. Over the last five sessions, the players have spent more time playing musical performances and building a business than pursuing the murderer (all in the name of infiltrating the circle of high rollers in town, who seem to be involved in the case). Here's the cold, hard truth: there is no amount of imagining possible paths the players will take to anticipate their actions. Truly, there is no way your mind will ever grasp the collective decisions of the players. So once you've written your ideal version of events, be ready to improvise. Let the players guide the action and keep up as best you can. It's the only real way to grant agency to your players and tell your story at the same time. Remember that if it really were all about your story, you could simply write a novel for your "players" to read--it's really about their choices. So be ready to improvise and to drop hints, clues, and events for your players to return them to the story when they're done with their agendas. 

So let's take a grand story idea and break down how to make it work, wary of the pitfalls of designing a campaign. Borrowing from my list of campaign ideas, let's go with a story idea I had years ago and have never run: a gnomish leader strives to take over each section of the gnomish capital. Like my assassination contract idea, this campaign concept can be a problem because it calls for the players to commit to a course of action over fifteen concerted actions to take over the other sections of the capital. The odds of us getting our players to commit to this is pretty low. And given player roleplaying, only the most evil and strategic characters would be able to commit to this. But we can fix it by keeping in mind our two keys: smaller chapters of story and room to improvise. 

The first step is in breaking this story down to its component parts. We're striving to create story beats which are distinct and interesting, so it can't simply be fifteen big battles (unless we have a committed combat-heavy campaign to back it up). So, like the mystery campaign, I'll break this down to ten story beats, or ten chapters we can use to track the story. 

1. The gnomish rebel leader approaches the party. They describe the flaws in the gnomish political system--how leaders are chosen by popularity rather than merit and how social programs don't do enough for the poor. They want the party to work with them to unite gnomes under a common banner, which will mean undermining the other gnomish sections of the capital. The leader might promise a stake in gnomish politics, a grand reward, or simply the satisfaction of having done something meaningful--whatever will motivate your players. 
2. The first strike against the neighboring capital section: the gnomish rebel leader sends the party into a neighboring part of the city to overwhelm the corrupt guards who work there. The party is responsible for preventing the guards from harming gnomish citizens, whether by combat, diplomacy, or another tactic (notice the room for improvisation). Once the guards are undermined, the rebel leader rewards the party with a small contingent of gnomish troops for their next mission. 
3. With their contingent of troops, the party is responsible for stopping a shipment of weapons from arriving in a rival section of the capital. The shipment is heavily guarded and can be stopped either outside of town or in the capital section it is bound for; this encounter should be challenging. With the weapon shipment recaptured, the party is free to outfit themselves and their troops. 
4. Three sections of the capital have taken note of the rebel leader's actions and are banding together to stand against them. The leaders of these capital sections must be intimidated out of their stance, says the rebel leader. They direct the party to directly target these three leaders and force them to abandon their stance. Once two leaders are targeted, all three fall in line. 
5. The gnomish rebel leader feels they need more support from other cities, and they direct the party to approach a powerful aristocrat from a nearby town. The party must use their charm and reason to convince the aristocrat to provide funds and political clout to the rebel leader's cause. The aristocrat is reluctant to help but will help the rebel leader if the party will complete a favor: retrieve a magical amulet that belonged to their parents. 
6. With the power of the aristocrat and outfitted troops, the party must now launch an assault on a prison in a neighboring capital section to free jailed dissidents who side with the rebel leader, who wants to use their fervor in their cause. Freeing them from the prison involves besting/surpassing guards, breaking into the cells, and communicating the rebel leader's intentions. The dissidents are largely anarchists who hate the heavily structured gnomish way of life. 
7. Now with the dissidents behind them, the rebel leader wants to make a statement to gather more public support. The party must guard the rebel leader through a short parade, during their speech, and return them to their home. During the guarding process, guards from a rival section of the capital arrive and attempt to arrest the rebel leader. The party must prevent the public statement from being derailed in order to satisfy the rebel leader. 
8. The public statement drums up public support for the rebel leader, who calls for a march on the home of a rival capital section's leader. At the leader's home, there are a contingent of guards prepared to defend the manor. The party must defeat the guards (via any strategy chosen by the players, including combat, charisma, and magic) and confront the rival leader. The rebel leader wants the rival to resign their post as leader; they are willing to only under extreme duress. 
9. Eight sections of the capital raise troops to contest the progress of the rebel leader. They congregate in the center of the city, ready for an attack. The rebel leader has plans to mobilize their troops and surround the forces at the center of the city. They give strategic command to the party, telling them to kill or capture any guard who stands against the rebel forces. The battle should be dramatic, as this is the penultimate chapter of the story. 
10. In this final chapter, the forces of the capital have been defeated and the rebel leader wants to strike at the leaders with a crushing blow. They call a governmental meeting and assert that they will be the new supreme leader of the capital, which meets heavy resistance from the remaining leaders. The rebel leader calls on the party to help them convince the other leaders to resign--this should be a tactical discussion in which the party uses whatever powers they have to convince the leaders to resign. It takes a lot of coaxing, but the party should eventually be able to convince the leaders they have no choice but to capitulate. You as GM now have the choice to portray the rebel leader as the force of social good they presented themselves as or a cruel despot who lied to gain power. 

Notice that each chapter takes the direction of the story and pushes it in a slightly new direction; each chapter is a challenge that involves new thinking to solve. They are different enough chapters to keep the players from getting bored. They are achievable story units--as a GM, you are likely to be able to get your party to commit to a single action that moves the story forward. So this grand story which depicts the overthrow of one of the largest cities in the known world is pretty playable. 

And of course, the players will complicate things. An average group of players is likely to have misgivings about forcing the gnomish capital to bend to one person's will, and that may create resistance to your story. But the big, important thing to note here is that this outline of each chapter is not set in stone. If the players complete the first four chapters but balk at working with the aristocrat, or they lose the taste for combat before the end of the campaign, you still used your notes for what they were good for--getting the story set up this far. After that point, you'll have to reorient and improvise around the party's new intentions, but is your story any less grand? Doesn't a story about heroes who begin to serve an evil force but change their hearts midway through have all the grandiosity of the story your players want to tell? You don't need to follow your notes to a "t" to tell a grand story--your players will do a lot of the work if you provide the foundation for them. 

Nevertheless, there are some pitfalls you can avoid if you're mindful from the beginning. As I mention above, asking players to perform similar actions over and over causes issues. People get bored and look to find fun elsewhere, so don't write a story that requires players to do things repetitively (like I once did). Be wary of moral choices--your players will make moral choices, but each player will have a different moral compass. Since interesting stories usually involve moral choices, you're bound to put your players in that position eventually, but every time you place a moral issue in the story, you're creating the opportunity for your players to leave your story's confines. That's not a bad thing--you want your players to take ownership of the story--but you should be aware when writing your story that such moments are usually the site of derailments and try to anticipate when you'll stick to your notes and when you'll have to improvise. 

Other things to watch out for: moments that require a specific action, extended GM narration, and anything that involves an assumption. Moments that require a specific action are almost always narrative failures. It may seem fun and challenging to present a puzzle with only one solution, like using a specific spell to counter an effect, but if your players can't come up with that answer in the same way you did (and they probably won't), they're screwed. Which means by extension that you're screwed too. Always try to imagine a few possible solutions to a problem and be open to still more so long as they make sense. Extended narration is also something I advise against. As I say above, you're not writing a novel; you're creating the foundation for the players to tell their stories. If you as GM are speaking for more than a minute without pause, you're probably running afoul of some story issues. You want to give the players prompts to react, not place the story on rails for a time. If you have a big, important effect you need to narrate that the players must spectate for, make it grand, but be quick. Every word you say is silently prompting your players to react, and giving them too much will overwhelm them. And finally, assumptions: they really do make an ass out of everyone involved. Don't leave room for assumptions in your story unless you want to be ambiguous. In the above example, it's appropriate to be ambiguous about the rebel leader's true intentions. But you wouldn't want the link between two chapters to be an assumption. Even in my mystery campaign, where being in the dark is part of the fun and the story, I have mechanisms in place to keep the connective tissue between story moments clear. When you read your notes for your campaign, or even a one-shot, ask yourself how explicit the link between chapters is; anything that requires a leap in reasoning should be rewritten to be obvious. Save yourself from repairing your game later by staying ahead of problems before they arise. 

In the end, there is no reason you can't tell a grand story with a TRPG. In fact, when we consider the role of the players as authors in your story, it's a little difficult to not tell a grand story. But you must adjust to thinking about a story's grandiosity in terms of how your story meets the players'. Ultimately, I believe that it is more important that your story allow for grandiosity than be grand. Still, get writing, and swing for the fences, because by breaking it down into chapters and allowing yourself to improvise, you will always be able to tell a grand story for your players and give them the tools to tell it with you. 

That's all for now. Coming soon: courtesy rules for running a game, my variant god rules, and how to deal with characters starting businesses in-game. Until next time, happy gaming!

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