This is broadly true of all tabletop games, but let's use D&D as a simple example. In D&D, characters get alignments. If even one out of a whole party of adventurers has "chaotic" in their alignment, you will be likely to have to deal with some really surprising behavior. If multiple characters are chaotic, this effect compounds. And even if you have a party of all lawful characters, that doesn't mean that the players won't make an occasional choice that isn't pretty chaotic. In other ttrpgs, though we don't always quantify alignment, the same principle is true: players and their characters are going to make some unpredictable choices, and we need to be able to deal with that as GMs.
Keeping stories open-ended is an easy solution to this. You can't derail a plan that doesn't exist, and your players won't be able to throw off your plans if you don't have plans. Already, I'm sure that some readers are alarmed at me casually mentioning not having plans. What I mean is less radical than that. I do prepare for sessions, but I don't write out any events. I only develop characters.
What I mean by this is pretty simple, actually. At the beginning of a campaign and as we play, I generate NPCs. I work hard to develop realistic personalities, motivations, and relationships for these NPCs. Then, when the player's actions affect these NPCs, I know from their personalities how they would react and behave. This takes very little time or effort because I have worked to know these characters well enough to know how they think and feel. I can then easily improvise how those NPCs behave and carry on a scene with the players.
This is not to say that the NPCs are just along for the ride. They have big agendas and take meaningful actions like the player characters do. In my most recent campaign, Of Gods and Dragons, the main NPCs were gods and dragons, all at least level 30, and their impact on the world was huge, for good and for bad. But I never sat down and decided "the red dragon accomplishes this goal while the god of the elves fails to accomplish this other goal." I might decide that "the red dragon tries to accomplish this goal while the god of the elves tries to accomplish this other goal," but I let the players decide the actual fate of things. That gives them agency, which most all players enjoy (if not all players), and it also makes the story about them. But that's not my focus here. Today, my focus is on why this method is important. And to do that, I want to tell a few stories about chaotic players and the games they played in.
When I first started DMing, I was a college freshman with more ambition than skill. I also lacked a fundamental understanding of how the collaborative nature of tabletop games worked, and so I was guilty of a fair amount of railroading. I remember one of the games I was running had a player who was intensely curious about everything I described. He would interrogate every NPC and pore over every vaguely noteworthy object in the world. I should have taken this as a compliment--my player was fascinated by my world and wanted to connect to it. But I foolishly grew impatient and summoned up a mean little gnomish wizard NPC to threaten the group with death if they didn't get going on a questline soon. I cringe to think of it now, and I wish I could apologize to that player for my stupidity.
What I didn't see at the time was that my player was deviating only mildly from what I expected. I wanted him to follow the plot I was laying down, and he was, but I wanted it done efficiently. It was a very rookie mistake to make. This may not sound very chaotic, and it honestly wasn't; his other actions tended towards chaos, like randomly deciding to seek the god of death as a level 1 character. But either way, I saw something that deviated from what I expected, and I punished it. This is the opposite of how it should be done, and I'm ashamed to have messed it up so badly.
Shortly thereafter, I ran a campaign I describe here often. I had a long list of assassination contracts drawn up with the big twist at the end to be that one of the last contracts was the questgiver, and the final contracts would eliminate the royal family of the city. My players began to chafe under the questgiver's violent goals, and they turned against her about 10% of the way through the campaign. Instead, the party split upon finding the twist, and the game turned into a civil war in which the guard organization they were a part of either defended the royals or turned against them.
By this point, I had learned not to railroad, but I also hadn't learned to anticipate player actions very well. So when the party split, I was totally confounded about how to proceed. I ended up just refereeing the civil war, which resolved in a tense battle between the party members and their allies. But the shock to my system was all I needed: I realized I couldn't assume much of anything about the players, and I resolved to spend the rest of my tabletop career writing more open-ended adventures that allowed my players to actually have freedom of choice.
I will acknowledge that this isn't a "more freedom equals better experience" situation. For a while after the civil war campaign, I was a little too far the other direction. I ran campaigns designed in part by my players where I never guided my players away from anything they seemed interested in for a few years, one set in a lush and varied forest and another in a Wild West setting. I look back on both campaigns with general satisfaction but some disappointment. In the forest campaign, I was running four main quests at the same time--one for each player. In the Wild West setting, I was running a very loose antics campaign for my silliest friends. In both campaigns, I let my players wander to their hearts' content, but I never thought to keep the pace going as the DM. I learned from that mistake moving forward.
Most recently, as mentioned above, I ran the Of Gods and Dragons campaign. I consider this campaign the high point of my work as a GM. I credit much of that success to finding just the right group of players and to finally getting the balance right as far as open-ended writing. The truth is, I've been GMing since I was eighteen; I'm thirty-six now, and that means half my life has been spent doing this. Whenever I have written events that occur, the result has been disappointing. My players and I always seem to feel that something has been lost, perhaps their agency, perhaps some of the fun, perhaps both. If I give only a world to explore, things are aimless. But if I script characters to populate the world and let the players fill in the events with their actions, things seem to go exceedingly well.
So I suppose in the end that by an open-ended story, I don't just mean that some details are not filled in, but also that the players must be given the ability to fill in what the GM does not. And most players enjoy filling those details in, so the opportunity to do so is very important. I think that if there is a true challenge that defined my experience in growing as a GM, it's been finding the right balance of how much to ask the players to contribute. At first, I didn't see the importance of it. Then, I underestimated it. Then, I overestimated it. It was only with the striking the balance that things felt truly right.
How do you strike the balance to create open-ended stories that suit your style? I suggest trying the character-driven model I described above--having detailed characters' intentions be the driving force that meets your player characters, not events that were decided in advance--and seeing what works and doesn't. It will take some practice and calibration to get just right. But there's also a chance that that method just doesn't suit your personal style, in which case you should think about the following:
- What can you do to offer part of a story--a beginning--to your players?
- How can you influence the world aside from directly controlling the world around the players? Can you use characters or worldbuilding to influence the players?
- What can you do, without deciding anything for the players, to advance a story?
Thinking about these things will get you going in the right direction. Remember: the ultimate goal is to give your players a good time, and that can mean learning to do things in a new way. I like to remind myself that there are several players at the table who will benefit from and enjoy playing an open-ended game, and rising to that challenge serves more than my own enjoyment. Besides, the satisfaction I have after managing to do something difficult that benefits my players (my friends) is greater than what I would experience if I just lazily manipulated events to tell my own story instead of my players'.
So in the end, an open-ended story is something that benefits your players immensely. I would argue that an underwhelming story idea that is open-ended enough to really let the players tell a part of the story themselves is usually a bigger hit than a beautiful tale narrated to players who aren't really doing much. It's all about finding the way you can provide the open-ended story that fits your style. And I believe that since keeping the players' experiences in mind in this way can be very simple, any GM can do it if they work at it.
I'll say from my own experiences as a player, when I'm given the ability to have real control of my character and be a part of the story we're telling as a group, that's when I'm having the best time. I've tried to reflect on that as a GM--how could I give my favorite experiences as a player to my own players? That's really the heart of what send me on the journey I described above, and I hope your own journey serves you well too.
That's all for now. Coming soon: a pirate D&D one-shot, a guide to the planes, and imagining the future of tabletop games. Until next time, happy gaming!
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