Story Creation Engines: A perspective for table top RPG design

‘Role-Playing-Games’ can be defined as an engine composed of rules that encompasses interactions of game, experience, and story. The rules, (mechanics; that take an input and deliver an output; and directives; instructions for how and when to use them) can be further classified into two categories: Meta-; things or references to things outside the fictional narrative. And mesa-; things or references to things within the fiction narrative.   

Meta-mechanics allow interaction with the story from outside the narrative. They are mechanics that reference things being done to the game, story, or experience by the players or an arbitrary constraint, not the characters or the fiction. For example, FATE points or 1/session limits.

Meta-directives direct the actions of the players. Most commonly, they indicate which players are responsible for setting terms, or difficulties, or scenes. Meta-directives can limit meta gaming by saying things like 'players should not read any further'. It's possible that implicit social contracts falls under this heading, but most games do not include social contract directives. To sit down and perform an activity together, it’s reasonable to assume the players are going to conduct themselves in a manner appropriate to play. The social contract exists in a space outside and above anything any given RPG book says about it.

Mesa-mechanics give the simulation degrees of consistency. They reference, define, and track fictional things, or take a narrative input and deliver a narrative output. Mesa-mechanics include how many shots you have left, your chances of success when using a randomizer, or any if/then statements about the world. Mesa-mechanics often have a one-to-one relationship with something in the fiction of the world.

Mesa-directives tell the players when and how to apply the rules to the story. What fictional event demands or triggers a dice roll? How do you interpret a success or failure?  

Combined, these elements create an engine that takes the input of the players’ decisions and returns results which provide a particular experience to the players and prompt the creation of story of the players’ exploits. From the simplest dungeon exploration to the most complex political games. From extremely heavy games with complex mechanics to simple narrative games that have less than a page of rules. From all the dice to diceless. From this perspective, the relevant consistency is the production of the game, the story, and the experience; three separate but interlocking elements. These elements each can each be broken into their meta- variants that reference things outside the emergent creation, and mesa- variants that reference things within the emergent story. 

The mesa-experience is the experience of the characters, and the meta-experience is the player experience. For example, It's fine to include suffering as part of the character experience, but you generally want to avoid inflicting it on your players.

The mesa-story is the story in the fiction of the game world, and the meta-story is the story of the players as the play it. When we talk about that time Derek rolled a 1 five times in a row, that's meta-story. When the GM is on the last page of the adventure and accidentally reads the wrong boxed text, that's a meta-story.

The mesa-game refers to the interactions between all the rules and the mesa-story. The mesa-game, like plumbing, is something you only notice when it stops working. If a game's mechanics produce a result no-one can convincingly narrate, or any rules put the game in a fail-state, then the mesa-game has broken down.

The meta-game refers to the interactions between the players and the mesa-story. The meta-game breaks down when a player makes a decision not based on the mesa-story, but based on the meta-story. For example, when a player thinks something like 'We're getting near the end of this dungeon, because the GM is on the last page, I'll start expending my resources'. that's often referred to as 'meta-gaming' but, more accurately, it’s a disjunction in the meta-game.

So, I want to propose a framework where we recognize and analyze Role Playing Games as Story Creation Engines, abbreviated: SCEs. 

This is not a challenge to the title ‘RPG’. Framing RPGs as ‘game’ makes them much easier to understand in many contexts. There is strong utility in thinking about them from the perspective of game in many cases during the design process. They often contain many sub-games. When determining feel of mechanics and dynamics, the probabilities that undergird any randomness, or determining how to allow for optimal strategies. All places where analysis through the lens of game is necessary. 

But there is a downside to thinking about or explaining them as game. It’s possible to give the impression to new players that RPGs contain so many rules that they’re less like a game and more like software you have to run in your head. The SCE perspective can help ease players into the activity by framing it as a different kind of mental activity. Not one in which the point is to track and apply rules fairly, but one in which the creation of narrative is central.  

I believe there is equal utility in thinking about RPGs from the SCE perspective. This is meant to be an outline of a perspective that is a useful tool in the process of design and development of nearly any game.  

And to be clear, I’m not outlining anything new. This is a fairly simple shift in perspective that most designers and players already do without having a name for it. The purpose here is to name the perspective and help define and articulate its utility as a method that anyone can use to make their product better.  

The central utility of the perspective is to aid in integrating the mechanics and fiction with a smaller gap between the two. Ideally, if you were to look at any given game, the goal would be to have everyone maximally voluntarily engaged at any given moment. In this ideal, all modes of fun are catered to satisfactorily. No one would be able to detect a difference between the player that showed up to game the system and the one who showed up to delve deep into their story. The two modes of fun should have identical valence, both to the story and the system. 

If we are to take the perspective other than one where the medium is viewed as a game, we first must agree on the definition of game. The broadest possible definition of a game is: a voluntary activity constrained by rules. This covers RPGs, solitaire, golf, and the stock market. It excludes TV or movies or reading because of their passive nature. Under this definition, games are necessarily generative. When you engage in a game, you create new states of the universe in an extremely local area. Sometimes that’s even limited to one other person’s mind. The simplest is, perhaps, Peek-a-boo. We learn how to play long before we are able to articulate rules, indicating the foundational nature of games in our consciousness. 

But to help with design, it’s not sufficient to define a thing broadly. The particulars matter. But as this medium develops, the specificity of terms should be considered with respect to their functionality rather than ability to categorize strictly.   

Divergence from the broad definition comes from game theory. Game theory assumes that the simplest possible game must still have players, strategies and differential outcomes. Under this rubric, Peek-a-boo is dropped. There is no differential outcome of Peek-a-boo. The product is an experience of surprise and delight. It goes until one party gets sick of it, at which point it ceases to be voluntary for all parties. 

I think that the same is true of SCEs. There is a product, but from this perspective, the overall goal is not a differential outcome. The goal is to have an experience of telling a story, not to win, lose, or draw. This does not exclude the possibility of wins, losses, or draws occurring as part of the story, games still occur as part of and encompassed by the mesa-narrative. But, from this perspective, game elements are ways to resolve or track part of the story, not it’s main driver.

Once we conceptualize the mechanics as dials and levers of story, we have another useful device for interrogating their utility. How does it alter the story? Is the mechanic truly at a crossroads of decision? Does it track something that we want the players to care about? Does it exist for aesthetic reasons to evoke a particular emotional experience? How does it mesh with the story that the game is incentivizing the players to tell? 

Thinking about mechanics from a story creation perspective can help mechanize story elements and provide strong incentive for both the ‘roll player’ and the ‘role player’ to engage with the story using mechanical elements. Creating convergence by consciously attaching mechanical incentives to things that we, as designers, wish for the players to care about.  

Whenever I hear people complain about their players ‘going off the rails’, the solutions often sound like trying to design bigger sticks to whack the players back onto the rails, when the problem is that the design offers no carrot. From the perspective of an SCE, this arises from bad assumptions of character motivation. 

In many games, motivation is imposed from the top-down for the core loop to work. But player motivation is often disjointed from stated character motivation. When the point of the game is to win and advance, the player’s motivation is to win and advance, but the character’s motivations within the narrative may be different. If the character has no incentive to follow the player’s wishes and vice-versa, then the action and the play will feel inauthentic on some level; like a character in a movie defying established motivations to advance a bad plot. Many games make meta-rewards, like level-ups or experience, contingent upon the actions it needs the players to want to take, but don’t necessarily inform the players that they should restrict their character’s motivations to categories that produce behavior that advance the game. For example, most published products from D&D do not function if the characters practice non-violence; characters in D&D are practically required to be vagrant killers of sentient life for hire, but to look at any of its marketing material, that requirement is rarely mentioned.        

Many players, especially new players who come from a background of video games, typically understand all the game elements already. But without the strictures that video games necessarily have on their story, it’s often hard to conceptualize a goal outside of ‘beating the level.’ 

It’s perfectly fine to structure an RPG around defeating the challenges of successively deeper dungeons. But it’s irresponsible, from the perspective of the SCE, to not incentivize delving ever deeper as part of the character’s motivations. As designers, we want the players engaged as often as possible. But when there’s a lot of attention paid to complex mechanical interactions sometimes it’s easy to forget the simple principle of putting the cheese where you want the mouse to go. 

There is discontent and disengagement that arises from placing incentives on meta-motives in an RPG rather than mesa-motives. In my experience, this often manifests as behavioral discordance at the table. 

The ‘power-gamer’ is a term for a player, often used pejoratively, that has left behind any pretense that they are participating in a story. They are simply make the most mechanically optimal move at any given juncture. If RPGs were truly games, this behavior would not be anomalous or cause for concern. No one thinks to accuse Chess players of failing to live up to the motivations of the king when he castles away from the queen. But when powergamers are accused of ignoring their character’s established motive for mechanical gain, the accusers are highlighting a disconnect between a character’s motives and their actions. 

These incentives also give rise to the ‘actor’ who minimizes their engagement with the game elements, because the game isn’t incentivizing anything they care about. Namely, the character or the story. When game mechanics provide outcomes or track things that can’t be squared with what they imagine, they disengage. These people are often accused of ‘playing the wrong game’, but I think more often than not it’s the result of dissonance in the design between the story a game purports to tell and the story that its mechanics incentivize. 

The dissonance that misplaced incentives create between mechanics and story is more readily apparent from the from the perspective of an SCE. The mechanics can be interrogated by asking: How much does this really matter to the outcome of the story? This can detect gaps in the rules, and make extraneous or unnecessarily complex rules stand out. 

The SCE perspective can also highlight relative utility of mechanics from game to game. Depending on the intended story, certain mechanics and dynamics may not have the same utility. What works perfectly in one game may be terrible in another. A detailed encumbrance system found in something like Torchbearer would feel very out of place in something like Blades in the Dark. From a game-based lens there would be no issue; a more granular encumbrance system could improve the game by asking the players to make interesting choices about what they take with them. It’s even in keeping with the theme of being desperate but daring rogues. But from a story based lens, this shifts the kind of story the game facilitates; Torchbearer and BitD aim to tell very kinds of stories. Even though the mechanic could easily be ported to Blades in the Dark, it would skew it towards telling stories about how the loot got out of the heist, not how the heist went wrong.

As the example illustrates, what story is told often comes down to what is detailed and what is not. What is not detailed, by definition, does not come up in the story. But when something is detailed, the level of granularity relative to the rest of the game prompts the players level of engagement with that specific fiction. In other words, players tend to ignore light mechanics and engage with significant ones.   

In order to do this, only one thing must be established. The kind of story we want to facilitate. Once this is established, mechanics and dynamics can be compared based on where they place the focus of the players. Enumerating or tracking a thing makes it significant in the minds of the players, whether it ultimately contributes to the story or not. Knowing this, we can ask players to only track things of significance to the story. 

Where we place incentives and reward as designers matters perhaps more than anything else. The incentive in the game is the replacement for the incentive in the real or fictional world. They are the character’s motivations from the story perspective. In other words, whatever we motivate the players to do is how the characters will generally behave. Often it’s assumed that characters will advance because of accomplishing certain things, but when we specify these kinds of things more specifically the story has the opportunity to be more focused. Or perhaps even better, when we let the players choose what motivates their character, they discover a way to engage with exactly the kind of story that they’re interested in.