On Storytelling in Games

Joshua Buergel, the designer of The Fox in the Forest and Hocus, wrote a piece for Space-Biff! on storytelling in board games, mostly discussing the limitations on games where player agency is limited in order to tell the story the designer intended. Decent read that wouldn’t be hurt by being several times longer.

spacebiff.com/2019/04/08/joshua-buergel-...ytelling/#more-13542

This is a super interesting discussion and a good article. He is, of course, wrong both when it comes to board games and RPGs. Or rather, I think he looks at what stories can and should be the wrong way. The thing is, stories don't have to be about what happens, but can instead be about how the things that happen do it - and games are pretty good at that.

I have two examples - and sorry for tooting my own horn here, but sometimes the best examples are those you know the best.

In Denmark we have a pretty long and strong tradition for one off RPG games. The best of them are written for a yearly convention called Fastaval and people are literally coming from across the globe to be part of it. Usually these games are written by an author/designer with a very clear vision of what kind of story they want to tell. And while some of them can be very open, a lot of them narrows down exactly what parts of the narrative the players can change and how they can do it. For instance I co-authored a game last year that contained and entire season of a re-imagining of Buffy called Joan: The Vampire Slayer. We had pretty much the entire plot lined up - we knew what was going to happen, more or less, during the five hours of play. But that left a lot of room for the players to focus on the how. They could conentrate on arcing their characters, develop romances and group intriques and so on. No, they didn't have total autonomy, but they did where we wanted them to. And because they didn't have to worry about the what, they could focus their energy on other things.

I believe board games can do the same thing. Right now I'm peddling a zombie game called The Living to publishers, and the idea is precisely to give the players not an emerging story, but an arcing story that they will both experience and help shape. And that is precisely because I want the game to be centered on how the players choose to survive the apocalypse. And I can make those choices harder and more difficult by not letting too much of the "what" be up to the players. But of course such a game should also create emerging stories as you play so that it's not just a choose your own adventure book. I believe it does, but we'll see if publishers agree. So far it hasn't been an easy sale to publishers.

I think I’m in your boat, Mads. I think there is a point for storytelling in games that lies between total free form, emergent play and “this designer probably should have just written a novel.”

The game that came to mind for me was the Arkham Horror LCG. On the one hand your campaign ultimately will only reach one of two or three possible pre-written ends and scenario five will always follow four, but if you ask two different play groups about their campaigns, you will get two wildly different answers. Did they run rough shod over every byakhee and mi-go that dared stand against them or just scrape through on broken fingernails? Did they lose their jazz man to the asylum only to replace him with the psychologist who heard truth in his ramblings on the King in Yellow?

Great topic. I have done a lot of role-playing over the years, and I also value boardgames that tell stories. There is definitely a vast middle ground between wide-open sandbox role-playing and railroad games where players can't break free from the GM's intended storyline. And I firmly disagree with Buergel's suggestion that an adventure with a strong story is necessarily an inferior adventure. For example, some game systems (Amber Diceless, for example) rely heavily on the GM's ability to improvise, while other games (like D&D 3.5) require detailed prep that works best in the context of a more structured story.

But perhaps there is less of a meaningful distinction in terms of storytelling in a boardgame. You can still have games where the only storytelling emerges as a side effect of gameplay, where the players can easily imagine the semblance of a story based on fairly random occurrences, like in Arkham Horror 2nd edition. Or you can play a game like Mansions of Madness 1st edition where every game is a tightly-focused scenario.

Interesting article, thanks for sharing it!

I liked this line here:

The second problem is that because the focus in these sorts of games is on the narrative, many of them opt for very simple game mechanisms. There aren’t any mechanisms in them that are going to be interesting on their own, divorced from the story, and your fun won’t be rescued by a compelling competitive environment.

You could call that issue the "Mice & Mystics Problem." That game relied heavily on its story for its appeal. The story was poorly-written, trite, bog-standard fantasy, but even that wasn't a dealbreaker. The far bigger problem was that the underlying game kinda sucked. It was boring and repetitive. Combat was a monotonous slog. Every scenario played out pretty much exactly like the one before, with maybe one new feature or obstacle represented on the board. My son and I played through the first 3 scenarios, and could never muster the enthusiasm to play again. I finally sold it off, and good riddance.

Conversely, Near and Far is a story-driven game that I've played a ton, and my son and I both love it. The story parts come through "quests" where you read a paragraph, and have to pick one of two skill checks. The stories are delightfully weird, with bird-people and ancient robots and other strange denizens of this word. But I certainly don't feel like I'm reading a really compelling novel. Board games shouldn't even try to mimic the experience of reading a novel, because they're poorly suited for it. What Near and Far does right is provide a fun game, with lots of interesting choices to make. The story parts simply add to that experience.