An Argument for Convenient Storytelling

Almost a year ago, I wrote down an idea for an article: an argument for convenient storytelling. I knew I had something in mind, but it hadn't developed yet. For unrelated reasons (because I started full-time work as a teacher), I became too busy to continue posting regularly. Now, on summer break, I've returned and reconsidered that idea, and fortunately, I have new insight on it. 

The reason for this insight is related to the reason I had to stop writing: because of school. As part of my school's final week, the students pick between fun activities offered by teachers. Samples from this year included a variety of hikes, a murder mystery package, and a buffet of video games. I offered a D&D event: five days of adventures with characters we would create together, plus a set of roleplaying dice for every student to take home thanks to a small budget. I was excited to see how it would go, especially given one wrinkle of the event. 

I would need to take care of 30 students simultaneously. You can already see the issue--no one could satisfyingly run a campaign for 30 people at once. Combat alone would be a colossal mess. So I devised a solution: I would DM for a group of 10 students (a more manageable if still wild number of players) for 5 minutes, then advance to the next group of 10 for 5 minutes, then spend a last 5 minutes with the third 10 before repeating the cycle. 

For the players, this was not a terrible bargain. A lot of time at the table is planning and talking and joking, so some down time was okay. This allowed me to expect the players to have plans in mind when I was with them so that they could maximize their time. And only having 10 minutes between bursts of play meant either a quick break or just time at the table with friends getting ready to play. It was a good solution, except for one thing. 

I would need to be improvising three narratives simultaneously and trying to keep 30 different player characters in mind at once. To say it was a mental feat is an understatement; my brain was taxed for 5 days. We would play for 4 hours a day, so for 4 hours a day I was juggling multiple campaigns, all while my players had the advantage of being overprepared in response. It was a challenge.

 But it came out okay! After the players voted, I had a group of 6th and 7th graders playing a classic dungeon crawl seeking a powerful magical artifact which allowed the holder unlimited spells of any level; a group of 6th and 7th graders trying to solve a murder mystery at a dinner party they were attending; and a group of 9th graders handling a similar but distinct dungeon seeking the same artifact. Each story came out well, especially given my obstacles. 

My measurement of that success is in how the stories ebbed and flowed as a conversation between myself and the players, just as I have always said it should be. With the middle school dungeon, their decision to start at 1st level meant combat was hairy, so I compensated by fudging a lot of rolls to make combat exciting but manageable. With the murder mystery, the players would "need" to find a specific solution if the outline I'd made in preparation were to be followed, so I made a lot of their first guesses right and changed my plans. With the high school dungeon, they cleared their way to the artifact much more quickly than the middle schoolers, so I had to improvise a whole new extension to the story that stemmed from their getting the magical artifact on the beginning of day 4 (with 40% of the story time still to fill); that extension was largely seeing what they wanted to do and giving mild resistance to it. The common theme here is convenient storytelling. I made these players' lives considerably easier than I might have. Why?

You may be pointing out some details that complicate this. I was playing with children--of course the storytelling will be convenient at times because that's what the audience needs. Or perhaps you'd say that the convenient storytelling was just a way of escaping my own poor design for the mini-campaigns. You could make these arguments, but I feel as though something bigger is at play here. Yes, children need different stories than adults, and yes, I always knew I would adjust my outline, but consider this:

There are 211,568 possible games of tic-tac-toe. 9 squares, 2 players, almost no rules. 211,568 possibilities. There is an abstract book of poetry called Hundred Million Billion Poems by Raymond Queneau; it is 10 sonnets printed on paper that is cut into strips, and rearranging the strips creates poems. 10 poems of 14 lines can create 100 quadrillion unique poems. These numbers are possible to calculate because they are closed systems that have finite possibilities. We literally cannot calculate the different ways that a group of players may try to solve an abstract puzzle which is only described to them with words (without a visual or the possibility of tactile feedback). I can bet, though, that there are more than 100 quadrillion possible ways that a group of players might respond to any given clue.

And so, when I ask a group of players--of any age--to evaluate an idea of a situation that only exists so far as I can explain it and make a meaningful guess as to how to proceed, I am forced to make a choice. Either I can insist that they get it exactly right or else face the consequences, or I can allow good ideas to work too. And let's be honest, here: the DM is not the only person at the table entitled to creative thinking and good writing. I often feel that my players come up with better solutions and perceptions of situations than I was able to do in anticipation of their playing. It's simply D&D's nature that the product of a session is a collaboration, so why not extend that to your players?

I want to return to the examples of my D&D event and describe ways that a convenient story was more satisying than a carefully prepared one. The middle school dungeon: these boys were bloodthirsty maniacs. I put literally one puzzle in front of them before they fought the boss, and they stewed for several turns before really committing to trying to solve it. (There was a lot of talk of destroying the locked door instead of unlocking it via the puzzle.) I didn't relent on requiring them to solve a puzzle, but as soon as they offered a good idea that could conceivably solve it, I accepted the answer. This allowed them to feel as though they had really beaten the puzzle, and it allowed them to get back to their lives as murder hoboes more quickly.

The murder mystery group was lost in the decisions they had to make. I gave them control of the investigation but had to have the murdered man's right hand woman step in to make suggestions when they ran into trouble. But more importantly, I had planned from the start that the culprit was actually a ghost haunting the estate and not another guest. But my players were hell-bent on accusing the gnomish circus ringleader Pango, no matter what he had to say in his defense. So I mentioned a chill in the air and a glowing orb and the sound of moaning in the attic, leading them to investigate and find several clues pointing towards the ghost. From one perspective, I gave the crucial info about the ghost's existence away; from another, I allowed my players to feel as though they had cracked the case themselves by limiting my hint to a very slight suggestion rather than saying, "You hear a ghost upstairs." The self-satisfied looks on my players' faces told me that they appreciated their convenient storytelling.

The high school dungeon was convenient storytelling of another type altogether. My high school boys had, quite frankly, utterly destroyed every encounter I threw at them. They used the spell Shatter on the artifact--the Crown of Krantor--and I judged that it broke into three identical crowns when the spell worked, allowing each member of the party to wear their own. Keep in mind that this artifact's effect is unlimited spells of any level. Multiple wishes were cast, and things began to get out of hand. I could tell that the players wanted a real challenge. I was completely improvising at this point because getting the crown was the last thing I had written. So I had a worthy mage challenge them to a duel using glyphs. Now, I had taught several of these boys, so I knew what they really wanted. In the duel, I fudged a roll so that the mage banished them back to the dungeon without the crowns. Their delighted cries told me that convenient storytelling--your spell didn't stop him, you lose--was precisely what they needed.

In the end, I am not arguing that every story should be easily resolved on the first try. But time constraints are a real issue in tabletop games. Being mentally exhausted is a factor, as is imagination exhaustion, as is player distraction. The thing that makes players flock to roleplaying games is the feeling of agency that the games give them, which comes from being able to reliably do the things we set out to do. Narrative obstacles are good, but not every battle needs to be hard-won. Sometimes, it's not worth making what could have been a moment into a long lull in the game. Sometimes, you just have to make things a little easier.

That's all for this time. Coming soon: how to write a murder mystery party one-shot, a profile on politics in my homebrew setting, and a guide for creating 5E characters quickly and easily. Until next time, happy gaming!

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