It's not Jackanory

The T-Shirted Historian is right. Roleplaying is interesting when it allows events to take their own shape. If it's just going to be a story told to you by a GM then why bother even rolling the dice? There are other media that do that kind of storytelling better.

Professor Barker used to say there were no NPCs on Tekumel. Most narrative systems lean right other in the other direction, privileging player-characters to the extent of having them the only ones to roll for actions. In that kind of game, the PCs are intended to be the stars of their own show and the NPCs merely extras. 

We've talked about this before and everyone will (quite rightly) make their own choice. And most players now do seem to favour the tell-us-a-story form of roleplaying; I can't even find a group these days that's interested in my and the Historian's preferred style. (Told you I'm Biffen, not Milvain.)

But it goes beyond roleplaying styles. Consider the ambush scene in a movie. The first bullet misses one of the characters (probably just after he's made some comedic quip) and our heroes all dive for cover. That's The A-Team or a tongue-in-cheek knockabout action flick starring The Rock. If the bullet hits then we're watching a grittier movie entirely. Carpenter or Scorsese or Boorman, maybe, if the character survives. If he's maimed or killed then we could be watching something really uncompromising.

What about if the player-characters' enemy makes the roll, sets up an effective ambush, and then scores a nasty hit on one of the PCs? Well, too bad. They knew they were walking into danger, right? A character could get shot at any point during any firefight, so why should the opening salvo be any different? 

The point is that the story isn't what the GM decided it should be before the game starts. The story is what actually falls out when those intentions meet dice rolls and player choices. The death of Joe Lynch, a long-running character in our Iron Men campaign, came about because of a really bad roll during what should have been a routine skirmish against a small group of petty brigands. It was pure dumb luck -- and led to one of the most memorable games in that campaign. If the GM had come up with a get-out-of-Sheol-free card, in the moment we might all have been relieved (especially Tim Savin, who played Joe) but we'd have been cheated out of something great.

However, it's crucial that players have been given the choice to opt in to a disinterested game universe. When I am playing I insist on dice rolls that affect me being out in the open so that the GM can’t fudge it and let me survive a bad roll. However, when I'm running the game I probably wouldn’t let an opening shot from a sniper kill a player. So really it’s a case of personally wanting no favours or second chances, yet I will give them to players if I think the roll is too unfair. Any player who says they want the dice roll out in the open earns my respect; the rest can keep their plot armour.

You get the same kind of choices in prose fiction. Some people lap up cosy murders. (No other appalling crime is ever cosy; just murder.) Others prefer the darker writers, like Ian Rankin or Georges Simenon, who are less likely to hold a nannying protective hand over their characters. Or you might turn to In Cold Blood or You Could Do Something Amazing with Your Life (You Are Raoul Moat) if you appreciate that real life (or unsentimental roleplaying) throws up far more interesting and varied stories than authored fiction ever can.

As the author Joyce Carol Oates puts it:

“My belief is that art should not be comforting. For comfort we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Recommended reading

• Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon
• The Snow was Dirty (different translation)
• In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
• The Devil's Lieutenant by Maria Fagyas
• The Glass Pearls by Emeric Pressburger

Oh, and as Columbo used to say: just one more thing. Whenever I write a post like this, someone will pop up and complain that I'm being dogmatic, and that they like escapist roleplaying with a GM who's out to tell them a story they'll like. Well, I already said that everyone will and should make their own choice. Blog posts are opinion pieces, not diktats. If you want your roleplaying games to be the equivalent of mass entertainment then perhaps you'll opt for the cosy option. If you think of roleplaying as an art form, you might demand more of it. Your call. (And yes, all that should go without saying, but I've been doing this blog for over a decade now and I've learned that some people just can't manage to parse a half-dozen paragraphs.)