I've been listening to Matt Colville for a long time. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-YZvLUXcR8&list=PLlUk42GiU2guNzWBzxn7hs8MaV7ELLCP_) In case you aren't interested in skipping over to YouTube, he has a great series on running Dungeons & Dragons games (and tabletop RPGs in general). He's got about 30 (40?) years of experience running games and it's a subject he's obviously enthusiastic about. It's a joy to watch.
Matt talks about how to scale monsters to match your player characters(PCs). How to coordinate conflicts between players. The central conflict of a setting. The merits of reviled things (4th edition) and the flaws of beloved things (3.5 edition). Those topics each have their time in the sun, but they also bleed over into one another to create a tapestry of Matt Colville's Philosophy of Running a tabletop RPG.
In that tapestry, there's a deep conflict. One thing Matt talks about is how the dice are the dice. Players' characters take their chances in a dangerous world: and if a trap would deal more damage than their hit points, or a non-player character would execute them, or if a card from the Deck of Many things would randomly make a player's character unplayable, then that character--and their years of experience and adventuring--would be gone. There are real stakes to the events which happen, and to some extent they are "natural" to the world that he, as the Dungeon Master, is creating.
The other thing is fudging dice rolls and drama. He regularly covers how bad guys can choose to affect less vulnerable characters in combat and how the events of the world occur in ways that are dramatic and centered around the characters. Players are playing to have fun, not to get a Sopranos cut to black ending because of an enemy who kills them with no foreshadowing via a completely unknown mechanism.
Both are good, but they are in conflict. It's a razor's edge for any Storyteller (Dungeon Master, whatever you want to call it). Players want rules with real chances of failure to feel like they've accomplished something, but they also want to have fun. For some people, the feeling of accomplishment is synonymous with fun. I believe most of us see ourselves as being that type of person.
I'm not sure you can have it both ways. You can't overcome the indifferent clockwork of a universe that runs on dramatic narrative conventions. If you fail at the drama, it's because you were railroaded. If you succeed despite the drama that's ludonarrative dissonance.
It's no surprise that gaming has these terms to hand--railroading and ludonarrative dissonance--because they represent conflicts which come from the tension of smushing consequential game decisions into traditional, satisfying narrative structure and saying "now kiss."
Neither one of those things is bad--not even railroading. Players can pull the old improv standard of "yes and" to a good railroading and have fun with it just as easily as they can get disgruntled. The same applies a character who is bad at lying rolling a "20" to deceive the Prince of Lies. Lots of characters would have fun with that, but some wouldn't.
Y'know, your mileage may vary. Talk with your group before playing. Ensure your play group understands what each person wants outta the yadda yadda yaddah.
I'm not sure if it's possible.
Obviously, everyone can sit down at a table and have fun with their friends. You can play Cards Against Humanity or gin rummy or...I dunno, Crack Cocaine Chess and have fun with your friends (as long as your friends can keep it together when the cops come around).
Is there any real story if nothing matters? Copy that previous sentence and replace "story" with "accomplishment." Fictional events can affect us and make us feel very real emotions. The illusion of overcoming a problem, like solving a puzzle, can be satisfying.
On the crust of slow-bake planet, between the vacuum and the magma, in the stellar film upon which we live like the universe's black mold, human feelings are the only things that matter, the only things that are real, I mean, after you get over the food, shelter, and water stuff.
The delusion of story and accomplishment are real, yeah.
I talk this as it relates to video games, too. I'm sorry, but
there's no accomplishment in defeating a video game. There's not
anything remarkable about getting video game achievements. You're supposed to
win. That's how video games work. Even if there's a bell curve of
people who can master a video game and people who can't, huddling under
the proficient arc of that curve means diddly squat.
You were supposed
to win and all you mastered along the way was...reflexes? memorizing a level? a moveset? reading a
wiki? following an instruction like a dolphin who can sort shapes?
Whoopty fuckin' doo.
This is a bit of a self-roast. If you follow me on twitter, I've
been humblebragging on my fell-off-the-wagon Stellaris run for a few
weeks under the thin veneer of poking fun at the game. It's just a
distraction to learn and interact with the rules of a completely false,
contrived world.
D&D is that same kind of masturbatory exercise with some token challenge and a few consequences waved around like a drunk with empty gun. Even if the consequences are real, they aren't. If your character dies and their belongings are scattered towards the winds, it doesn't matter; you'll get up tomorrow and go to work.
Or maybe your DM is creating a world with consistent, discernible rules which you master and then they'll give you a few extra virtual shekels for your dolphin-like obedience.
The truth isn't that you need to balance story or challenge; it's that you can't really have either one. Not with conventional tabletop RPGs. Not without some delusion.
And that's fine. Delusion is, debateably, essential to how we live. Refusing to consider existential dooms and living as though they aren't present helps to focus on the present as it is instead, of considering the many things that might wipe this algae out.
I've been leaning hard into FATE these past few years, because the story is the challenge. What you overcome is the blank page in front of you and your own reticence to accept other peoples' ideas.
Ideally. I haven't overcome shit while playing FATE and as I'm writing this I realize I've always been a bit too comfortable blaming other player's lack of enthusiasm.
For someone who felt I needed to define "dungeon master" a few paragraphs back, I'm comfortable blowing past was FATE is. FATE is a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons and Dragons, but whereas D&D game mechanics include status effects, ranges, spell components, and the linear probabilities afforded by a single 20-sided die, FATE's mechanics are about drawing broad characters, using drama as a currency, and creative a story collectively.
I've also thought about picking up Microscope. Another tabletop RPG--which isn't a game, so 'Another tabletop RP'--where players agree upon the theme of, ground rules of, and events which will bookend an era in a world's history. They then take turns adding periods, events, and scenes in the era of that world. The game is the creation of the world itself, with players roleplaying historical characters during specific scenes.
For the past few years, I've told people "I haven't been in the right headspace" for roleplaying. I wasn't before I started saying it, but then I didn't realize why I wasn't having fun with it anymore. I don't feel like throwing on the skinsuit of an elven ranger and listening to Important NPC from a generic fantasy world talk about Task to Retrieve/Discover/Destroy the Notable Item/Person for STAKES and then accomplishing that Task via overgrown tabletop wargaming mechanics and negotiating reality with the DM. Worse, it's actively aggravating.
You might say, "VanVelding, you have depression." Obviously, reader-slash-listener-slash-watcher. Obviously.
That tension isn't a gamebreaker for most players. Players show up and appreciate a little bit of story, a little bit of gameplay, and a little bit of...what I can only see as trolling the world out of genuine curiosity. Even when they love it, in a lot of ways the DM's world is set in opposition to the player. The combination of our world's DNA and the need for basic conflict makes no part of that world come into sharper focus than when it's set against them.
No one asks the color of the tickertape when they're throwing the heroes a parade.
It's the Storyteller who is shouldering most of that tension. They create not just the story (usually) and the game challenges, but they're also engaged in worldbuilding that's satisfying for every Storyteller I know. And if they're doing it in Dungeons and Dragons, it's all built on the caprice of a 20-sided die.
Have I bitched about that before in this essay? Probably, but it's a flawed system and one that 5th edition's advantage/disadvantage system really improved.
The Storyteller is often saddled with the additional burden of keep up the delusion--pretense?--of events being relevant. Now, that might be baked into "making a story that's good" and "making gameplay events which are good," but it's more than that.
There are plenty of stories which are just fine without pretense. NBC's Community snarked its way through six seasons kind of aware it was a TV show and subverting TV show tropes. Garth Marenghi's Dark Place is sublimely self-aware.
There are games which are satisfied with saying, "this is a game." The Stanley Paradox.
But for players who are playing characters, you're telling their story, and you can't schlep it out or turn to the camera and wink when they're doing things they enjoy. The point of playing a cool character in D&D is to play a cool character. DMs don't say, "You reduced the dragon to 0 HP. You've won Dungeons and Dragons," then shake everyone's hand and end the campaign by reading the credits of the adventure module.
So the Storyteller keeps the story, pretense of relevance, worldbuilding, and game part of the game going. It's a lot and it's a lot to put on the shoulders of one person. So while we're doing that Session 0 talk to your group set expectations rigamarole word salad, maybe consider not playing D&D?
Do your friends want to spend time together while killing dudes and comparing builds? Path of Exile is free and fairly fun.
Do you want to explore an interesting world that your DM friend has created? Just fukkin' ask them about it.
Do you want to collaborate to make an interesting story? Microscope is fine, but so is just chillin' out and making a world.
Or maybe you all want to work together to build a world with some ground rules and play through some challenges. Maybe play D&D, but instead of showing up once a week and dropping 2 quarters into your DM so they amuse you for a couple of hours, you can heckin' talk to them and start picking up some of the storytelling. Maybe offer to run or co-run a few sessions. Pitch in on worldbuilding so you're familiar with it.
If you're trying to wrap a story around a game, there's always going to be tension there, but unlike the tension from Matt Colville's Politics 101 primer, you don't want that tension to boil over and snap into a big, cool, fictional war. You want to acknowledge it and build around it to ease it. The best way to do that is to share it.
