Building a TTRPG Campaign
Two years ago I was brand new to being a Dungeon Master/Game Master (I will stick with the acronym GM) and I barely knew the Pathfinder 2 Role playing game system. Today I've learned a bunch about the rules and how I like to play, but I'm still far from perfect and often make mistakes. Much of my time and energy these past two years was spent creating a story and characters for my players to interact with. Coming up with methods to track the events, story beats, situational notes, and details was also a difficult hurdle. And trying to enrich my own GM style and experience to put on the best performance possible for my players. This article will be my experiences as a first time GM, including some of the key struggles I had to overcome and the design decisions I made along the way to best structure the game for my players. I will include some of the story beats themselves where appropriate, but I want to keep things high level and abstracted away from any specific story.
A little background, I wasn’t brand new to the world of TTRPGs when I first set out to be a GM. I had previously played in two other groups, both times as a player. So when a friend approached me asking if I want to play a table top RPG with him, I was definitely interested. He wanted me to be the GM for this new group. I was definitely intimidated and felt unsure of how things would go, but the only way to improve is practice and I felt comfortable with this group of players to make as many mistakes as it took to get better. After making a group chat and getting everyone excited I set out to learn the rules.
Learning the rules of a TTRPG
I told everyone I wanted to play Pathfinder Second Edition, but I didn’t even know the rules! At the time this was the newest iteration of the Pathfinder game system and I was eager to try it out. So I told everyone that the first time we would meet would be in one month and at that time they should have a solid idea for a character. I had no idea what the setting would be, how the characters would meet or already know each other, or any of the details that typically come with this kind of game. I felt pretty lost for the first week of this prep month.
One thing was clear though, I had to start learning how to play Pathfinder 2e. For me the easiest way to learn something is to read about it, and lucky for me the Pathfinder Core Rulebook is basically a textbook with instructions on how to play. Over the next month I read and re-read specific chapters from the core rule book. Most of the player creation and spell chapters I skipped over, I didn’t need to know tenth level spells for day one. I had to know how combat and social encounters worked, what each stat and ability meant. I focused on the bits that mattered most for me and for making sure the first session would run smoothly. If the first session went smoothly, then there would be a second session and I would have more time to learn new rules. I recommend for anyone trying to get into a new TTRPG system to just read the relevant chapters when starting out. It should teach you all you need to know about the game. Spending extra time listening to podcasts or watching videos online about how to GM is helpful, but will always be less direct than reading the core rule book.
As a part of learning the rules I also wanted to learn what it meant to be a GM. The more I played and learned, a couple of questions came to mind. I would continually seek answers or change my existing answers to these questions in an effort to always be improving and growing as a GM.
1. What was my role in the group?
2. What is the most fun part of the game for me? For my players?
3. What are some good skills to have as a story teller? What techniques can I use to best tell my story specifically?
I quickly learned the answer to #1: I am both a participant in the game, and the judge or arbiter of the world. I act as both the laws of nature and all the inhabitants of the world all at the same time. At face value that answer scared me and I didn’t think I would be able to stick with this for very long because of how overwhelming it would be, but the more I read the rulebook and the more I researched other GM’s techniques I was steadily gaining confidence and feeling less overwhelmed by the prospect of GM-ing.
Another task before the first session was to actually create a story for the Player Characters to explore and enjoy. I wanted to keep the scope small because I was still new. I could always run a second campaign or even expand the scope of this current one. I also wanted to have sessions start and end in the same place. Similar to a Hub and Spoke system, like Monster Hunter (one of my favorite video games) where players accepted jobs from some central town or area that they would have to return to complete it and get a reward. And killing two birds with one stone I decided to make all the player soldiers in the army, new recruits, who would be given increasingly dangerous missions but always had to come back to the base afterwards. It only took a single session for this idea to fall apart, but I didn’t know that yet.
I had also asked my wife to help me come up with story points and characters. She enjoyed the creative process so much she ended up helping me every step of the way. She was my behind the scenes co-GM.
The date of our first session rolls around and everyone is very excited, including myself. Some of the people at the table have never played before and are eager to get their feet wet. Others have been a part of other groups but none that played Pathfinder 2e and were eager to learn about a new rule system. I sat at the head of the table with a small journal I had jotted down some key notes. The major story beats I wanted the players to hit, the major characters they would meet, and of course their first real assignment. I also prepped a decent amount of history to this world including old wars with heroes and villains who changed the nations' borders to where they lie today. After opening up with some setup and some verbal set dressing, they players were able to chat with people and do what they wanted.
I think now is the best time to tell you that this the story I had mind was fairly linear. I would gently push the players with plot hooks towards the desired end goal but they would have a lot of freedom in their choices. However It was anything but a typical sandbox. My preparations reflected this type of linearity. I anticipated having to improvise dialog and some scene transitions, but the amount of improvisation I actually had to do was staggering.
Right from the start the players did not do what I had anticipated. At first they kind of sat around without much of a goal, so I had to have an Non Player Character (NPC) come by and prompt them to leave the room and go looking for some other people. When they eventually made it to the first major story beat, where they get their first mission, they asked SO MANY QUESTIONS! I was not prepared! My only choice was to start making stuff up hoping that I didn't dig myself into a narrative hole, or say something that I regretted. They ended up only getting to about half of the content I had prepared because they had so many questions and did some many other things I hadn’t expected. When we wrapped up for the evening I asked for some feed back and everyone had positive things to say. Some even shared predictions about where things were headed, or concerns that their characters would have about their first mission and the state of the world. My personal feelings had me thinking it didn't go we well because I was improvising so much, and there was no way that was the best story I could have created. After one session I felt like I was letting my players down and sending them on a wild goose chase! But they enjoyed it, so I guess it was a good session after all.
This is where I learned a crucial lesson about campaign building and Game Mastering overall: what ever story beats you’ve planned the players will find a way around your intentions, subvert your puzzles, or otherwise completely break what you had prepared. I decided to change my preparation style. Instead of trying to anticipate what the players are going to say, do, or ask, I will create characters in my story that act based on stimuli. They should be thought of as people with emotions and act in patterns, so why not write them as such. After doing some research about how professional writers create characters, I came up with my personal go-to checklist for quickly creating a character in 3 questions.
1. What motivates this person?
2. What is this person afraid of?
3. What is one hobby of this person?
This is my personal check list and if I can answer these questions on the fly, it helps me create and act as made up characters. I’m no longer planning out conversations by who says what. Instead I'm planning social encounters where certain participants are present and what each of their motivations and interests are. If each character knows what they want to achieve with any given conversation (and what they don’t want) then these fictional characters (and by proxy me as the GM) can quickly react to the players and contribute to conversations in a more meaningful, dynamic way. This type of thinking touches on another lesson that I learned later, but I’ll talk about it later in this post.
The world my players were going to explore wasn’t fully fleshed out by session one, so I had some more work to do if I wanted to incorporate this new planning style. I needed to understand the general attitude of multiple groups of people towards each other, towards opposing nations, and even towards gods. The world had a polytheistic society, many popular TTRPGs adopt this feature as it ties into some of the character classes. This really wasn’t too difficult for me. I took inspiration from Earth's history and current geopolitical relations. Some countries are allies, some have long rivalries with no fighting, others are openly in conflict. We have organizations at all levels, global, national, regional, etc. and they all have various effectiveness. The world I was creating, and the preferred setting of Pathfinder 2e, is a high fantasy medieval one. So the idea of global organizations doesn’t make sense, nor does cities as we know them today. So looking back into history: how did countries conquer each other? What technologies helped them win? What were monarchies like? What were tribalistic societies like? These were all things that I wanted to consider and understand before attempting to create more plot or story. After doing research I found that I implicitly knew how people would react in certain situations, it made planning future sessions and the remainder of the plot easier.
Keeping to the strategy of small scope, I wanted complex relationships but only a few key parties. So I went with three major nations on an island. And I kept the story beats limited to two of the three nations. This definitely helped me hone in on creative story bits instead of trying to balance many different characters, goals, and plot points.
After only one session I was already finding it difficult to keep everything organized in my head and in my notebook. I needed to adopt a better strategy to tracking all this information. After some trial and error with multiple tools I landed on using a blank notebook, about 200 pages, with thick paper that can handle erasing well. I left about 15 pages at the start of the book for some details and notes to myself as well as a table of contents. This table of contents was invaluable! Whenever I wrote down anything, I recorded the page number and a brief description or header about that topic in the table of contents. This made going back and looking up older information so much easier. I would also write inline page numbers when referencing something from a different section of the book. This paid dividends when a character from an earlier session made a surprise appearance in a later session. I was able to take some new notes and link the two sections of my notebook so I could easily jump back and forth between the old and new notes.
This notebook acted as the final place for ideas, which means if I wasn’t 100% confident about a specific character or story beat I wouldn’t write it down in the book. I would brainstorm in other ways; writing it out in a different scratch notebook or typing it on my computer. I had multiple ideas that I had to flesh out a lot more before I felt comfortable including them in this final notebook. But I am glad that I did, because now each page of that book contains some great content that is clearly labeled. There are minimal cross outs or course corrections. But going back to my first lesson when the players always break everything, of course there were times where I had to bob and weave to make sure the story could continue on in a natural way. But that was why I made sure to get paper that could withstand heavy editing, I knew things would inevitably need to be revised.
After using this note keeping system for two years there are a few things I would improve. But the original idea flexible and worked well overall.
1. The table of contents should take up less room.
2. I would leave room for maps
3. have some kind of small folder attached to the book that can store loose papers or index cards.
I will definitely be sticking with this note keeping system for all future games I GM.
The first mission I gave my players turned out to take a very long time and what I expected to take 2-3 sessions, ended up taking about 10 sessions. So my narrow scope was slowly growing as the sessions tallied up. By the time the players got back to the base to actually complete the mission I was much more confident in the rules and in my ability to improvise in a way that kept things on track and interesting. After the 10 or so sessions the confidence I had can't be understated. I was still new, but I felt much more comfortable at the head of the table and handling all the minor details that would come up during a normal session. My players were feeling more motivated and confident in their characters and play styles. Keep in mind they were also new to the Pathfinder 2e system and had to learn new rules just as much as I did.
After each session I would discuss with my wife about what the players did and where they wanted to go next. I would give her the abridged version of each session so she could help design the next one. My wife thought up numerous places to explore and people to meet. We had such a fund time creating the situations and characters that when we went out on dates, we would spend most of the time discussing plot hooks and interesting locations to add into this world. She even made a guest appearance and acted as one the characters she created. The world we were building was now fully shared and we were regularly talking about it almost every day.
By this time I had asked my players multiple times for feedback. Things I did that they liked or didn’t like. All of them all had only positive things to say, and I was feeling proud of myself, but I knew there were still things that needed improving whether they pointed them out or not. This is one of the most challenging parts of being a GM, accurate and constructive self critique. One of the things that I thought I was doing a poor job of was managing combat and remembering all the rules. I would frequently ask “how does that work again?” or say “hmm, I need to look that up quickly” and I thought I was doing a terrible job not being familiar enough with what I considered the basics. But I received positive feedback about this exact topic, how I did a good job telling people how rules worked and handling combat. It made me re-evaluate what aspects of being a GM I need to improve. If my players will only tell me what they think I’m doing well, but not what I’m doing wrong then I have to read between the lines and extrapolate what I can improve on. I recommend that all GM’s give them selves one thing they should actively work on at the start of each session. Then at the end of the session ask them selves, and the players, for one thing they could have done better.
I had also designed many monster encounters to help level up the players. They easily overcame all of them, even the boss fight that I thought would force them to surrender. It would seem my combat encounter design needed some work. I wasn’t challenging the party enough. The major threats weren’t true threats. There was no sense of danger in anything they were doing. The next adventure they would go on would be more dangerous and would introduce new enemy types. Time to crank up the difficulty, and actually attempt to kill these players. Make threats that are scary enough to make the players stop and ask “can we actually kill that?” I had no intention of actually killing the Player Characters, but I did want to make them scared that their lives were in danger and the world around them was threatening.
I also needed to start giving more equipment and loot to my players. I wasn’t intentionally being stingy, but by the end of this story arc there were some of them who hadn’t received any cool upgrades. Going into the next part of the story I wanted to make sure to reward everyone more. Put them in situations where they could purchase items they like or where they discover novel items and equipment. This changed both my combat and social encounter design philosophy. I moved away from a narrative focus and towards a material or reward focus. Dangle some reward in front of the players when they head out on a mission. Even create multiple rewards and missions respectively and allow the party to choose what they wanted to pursue.
I also found a different answer to one of the questions I asked myself earlier. What was my role in the group? My role is a prompt generator. I’m not writing the story I’m just creating conflict and prompting the players to take action however they see fit. The players are writing the story, they are the main characters and their decisions are the only ones that matter. My job was to challenge them along the way and give life to the world that they were exploring.
What is the most fun part of the game for me and for my players? I found the answer to this organically, but it came alongside the realization that my role in the group is being a prompt generator. The most fun for me is to come up with story points that are interesting and engaging. And the players enjoyment came from unintentionally (or intentionally) messing with my plans and doing crazy things in a fantasy world. Everyone gathered around each session because they wanted to be with friends and be goofy by making up outlandish characters and scenarios.
What are some good skills to have as a story teller? What can I do to tell my story specifically? After completing the first arc I hadn’t found the answer I expected. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t telling a story, at least not directly. I was enabling the true story tellers to pave their own path in this fictional world via their characters. If I wanted to tell about how the group took down an evil necromancer, I would have to prompt them with an evil necromancer and see if the players were able to kill her. Maybe they would befriend her and agree not to interfere with each other’s plans, or try to convert her to join their side, or possibly join her side and become evil. They had agency in this world and I was just prompting them with a situation. It just so happened that all the prompts resulted in the story of the 6 heroes who helped heal the land.
Now that I had a couple of sessions under my belt and I was more confident in my abilities to adjudicate unknown situations and create interesting dialog on the fly, I wanted to give my players total agency. I gave them the ability to say no to any of my plot hooks. Some of the hooks were just too enticing and they wanted to see them through to the end. Some they misinterpreted and ended up killing innocent civilians (they still regret that). The idea that they were able to move forward on their own volition and at their own speed made everything run much smoother. They knew when something went wrong it was their fault. If they decided to walk into a trap or do something that gets them arrested it was their own fault. I think this key detail is what makes TTRPGs so much fun. When players have full control and agency, they are able to have the kind of adventure they want to have. The GM facilitates this experience.
For the remainder of this campaign, I tried to follow all my own advice as much as possible and I believe it led to the most enjoyable game possible. The players talk about it fondly and remember little details that I had completely forgotten about. It took all eight of us to make this campaign happen and we had a fantastic time writing this story together.
1. What was my role in the group?
2. What is the most fun part of the game for me? For my players?
3. What are some good skills to have as a story teller? What techniques can I use to best tell my story specifically?
I quickly learned the answer to #1: I am both a participant in the game, and the judge or arbiter of the world. I act as both the laws of nature and all the inhabitants of the world all at the same time. At face value that answer scared me and I didn’t think I would be able to stick with this for very long because of how overwhelming it would be, but the more I read the rulebook and the more I researched other GM’s techniques I was steadily gaining confidence and feeling less overwhelmed by the prospect of GM-ing.
Another task before the first session was to actually create a story for the Player Characters to explore and enjoy. I wanted to keep the scope small because I was still new. I could always run a second campaign or even expand the scope of this current one. I also wanted to have sessions start and end in the same place. Similar to a Hub and Spoke system, like Monster Hunter (one of my favorite video games) where players accepted jobs from some central town or area that they would have to return to complete it and get a reward. And killing two birds with one stone I decided to make all the player soldiers in the army, new recruits, who would be given increasingly dangerous missions but always had to come back to the base afterwards. It only took a single session for this idea to fall apart, but I didn’t know that yet.
I had also asked my wife to help me come up with story points and characters. She enjoyed the creative process so much she ended up helping me every step of the way. She was my behind the scenes co-GM.
Session 1: “I didn’t plan for that”
The date of our first session rolls around and everyone is very excited, including myself. Some of the people at the table have never played before and are eager to get their feet wet. Others have been a part of other groups but none that played Pathfinder 2e and were eager to learn about a new rule system. I sat at the head of the table with a small journal I had jotted down some key notes. The major story beats I wanted the players to hit, the major characters they would meet, and of course their first real assignment. I also prepped a decent amount of history to this world including old wars with heroes and villains who changed the nations' borders to where they lie today. After opening up with some setup and some verbal set dressing, they players were able to chat with people and do what they wanted.
I think now is the best time to tell you that this the story I had mind was fairly linear. I would gently push the players with plot hooks towards the desired end goal but they would have a lot of freedom in their choices. However It was anything but a typical sandbox. My preparations reflected this type of linearity. I anticipated having to improvise dialog and some scene transitions, but the amount of improvisation I actually had to do was staggering.
Right from the start the players did not do what I had anticipated. At first they kind of sat around without much of a goal, so I had to have an Non Player Character (NPC) come by and prompt them to leave the room and go looking for some other people. When they eventually made it to the first major story beat, where they get their first mission, they asked SO MANY QUESTIONS! I was not prepared! My only choice was to start making stuff up hoping that I didn't dig myself into a narrative hole, or say something that I regretted. They ended up only getting to about half of the content I had prepared because they had so many questions and did some many other things I hadn’t expected. When we wrapped up for the evening I asked for some feed back and everyone had positive things to say. Some even shared predictions about where things were headed, or concerns that their characters would have about their first mission and the state of the world. My personal feelings had me thinking it didn't go we well because I was improvising so much, and there was no way that was the best story I could have created. After one session I felt like I was letting my players down and sending them on a wild goose chase! But they enjoyed it, so I guess it was a good session after all.
This is where I learned a crucial lesson about campaign building and Game Mastering overall: what ever story beats you’ve planned the players will find a way around your intentions, subvert your puzzles, or otherwise completely break what you had prepared. I decided to change my preparation style. Instead of trying to anticipate what the players are going to say, do, or ask, I will create characters in my story that act based on stimuli. They should be thought of as people with emotions and act in patterns, so why not write them as such. After doing some research about how professional writers create characters, I came up with my personal go-to checklist for quickly creating a character in 3 questions.
1. What motivates this person?
2. What is this person afraid of?
3. What is one hobby of this person?
This is my personal check list and if I can answer these questions on the fly, it helps me create and act as made up characters. I’m no longer planning out conversations by who says what. Instead I'm planning social encounters where certain participants are present and what each of their motivations and interests are. If each character knows what they want to achieve with any given conversation (and what they don’t want) then these fictional characters (and by proxy me as the GM) can quickly react to the players and contribute to conversations in a more meaningful, dynamic way. This type of thinking touches on another lesson that I learned later, but I’ll talk about it later in this post.
Creating the world
The world my players were going to explore wasn’t fully fleshed out by session one, so I had some more work to do if I wanted to incorporate this new planning style. I needed to understand the general attitude of multiple groups of people towards each other, towards opposing nations, and even towards gods. The world had a polytheistic society, many popular TTRPGs adopt this feature as it ties into some of the character classes. This really wasn’t too difficult for me. I took inspiration from Earth's history and current geopolitical relations. Some countries are allies, some have long rivalries with no fighting, others are openly in conflict. We have organizations at all levels, global, national, regional, etc. and they all have various effectiveness. The world I was creating, and the preferred setting of Pathfinder 2e, is a high fantasy medieval one. So the idea of global organizations doesn’t make sense, nor does cities as we know them today. So looking back into history: how did countries conquer each other? What technologies helped them win? What were monarchies like? What were tribalistic societies like? These were all things that I wanted to consider and understand before attempting to create more plot or story. After doing research I found that I implicitly knew how people would react in certain situations, it made planning future sessions and the remainder of the plot easier.
Keeping to the strategy of small scope, I wanted complex relationships but only a few key parties. So I went with three major nations on an island. And I kept the story beats limited to two of the three nations. This definitely helped me hone in on creative story bits instead of trying to balance many different characters, goals, and plot points.
Keeping track of everything
After only one session I was already finding it difficult to keep everything organized in my head and in my notebook. I needed to adopt a better strategy to tracking all this information. After some trial and error with multiple tools I landed on using a blank notebook, about 200 pages, with thick paper that can handle erasing well. I left about 15 pages at the start of the book for some details and notes to myself as well as a table of contents. This table of contents was invaluable! Whenever I wrote down anything, I recorded the page number and a brief description or header about that topic in the table of contents. This made going back and looking up older information so much easier. I would also write inline page numbers when referencing something from a different section of the book. This paid dividends when a character from an earlier session made a surprise appearance in a later session. I was able to take some new notes and link the two sections of my notebook so I could easily jump back and forth between the old and new notes.
This notebook acted as the final place for ideas, which means if I wasn’t 100% confident about a specific character or story beat I wouldn’t write it down in the book. I would brainstorm in other ways; writing it out in a different scratch notebook or typing it on my computer. I had multiple ideas that I had to flesh out a lot more before I felt comfortable including them in this final notebook. But I am glad that I did, because now each page of that book contains some great content that is clearly labeled. There are minimal cross outs or course corrections. But going back to my first lesson when the players always break everything, of course there were times where I had to bob and weave to make sure the story could continue on in a natural way. But that was why I made sure to get paper that could withstand heavy editing, I knew things would inevitably need to be revised.
After using this note keeping system for two years there are a few things I would improve. But the original idea flexible and worked well overall.
1. The table of contents should take up less room.
2. I would leave room for maps
3. have some kind of small folder attached to the book that can store loose papers or index cards.
I will definitely be sticking with this note keeping system for all future games I GM.
Completing the first story arc
The first mission I gave my players turned out to take a very long time and what I expected to take 2-3 sessions, ended up taking about 10 sessions. So my narrow scope was slowly growing as the sessions tallied up. By the time the players got back to the base to actually complete the mission I was much more confident in the rules and in my ability to improvise in a way that kept things on track and interesting. After the 10 or so sessions the confidence I had can't be understated. I was still new, but I felt much more comfortable at the head of the table and handling all the minor details that would come up during a normal session. My players were feeling more motivated and confident in their characters and play styles. Keep in mind they were also new to the Pathfinder 2e system and had to learn new rules just as much as I did.
After each session I would discuss with my wife about what the players did and where they wanted to go next. I would give her the abridged version of each session so she could help design the next one. My wife thought up numerous places to explore and people to meet. We had such a fund time creating the situations and characters that when we went out on dates, we would spend most of the time discussing plot hooks and interesting locations to add into this world. She even made a guest appearance and acted as one the characters she created. The world we were building was now fully shared and we were regularly talking about it almost every day.
By this time I had asked my players multiple times for feedback. Things I did that they liked or didn’t like. All of them all had only positive things to say, and I was feeling proud of myself, but I knew there were still things that needed improving whether they pointed them out or not. This is one of the most challenging parts of being a GM, accurate and constructive self critique. One of the things that I thought I was doing a poor job of was managing combat and remembering all the rules. I would frequently ask “how does that work again?” or say “hmm, I need to look that up quickly” and I thought I was doing a terrible job not being familiar enough with what I considered the basics. But I received positive feedback about this exact topic, how I did a good job telling people how rules worked and handling combat. It made me re-evaluate what aspects of being a GM I need to improve. If my players will only tell me what they think I’m doing well, but not what I’m doing wrong then I have to read between the lines and extrapolate what I can improve on. I recommend that all GM’s give them selves one thing they should actively work on at the start of each session. Then at the end of the session ask them selves, and the players, for one thing they could have done better.
I had also designed many monster encounters to help level up the players. They easily overcame all of them, even the boss fight that I thought would force them to surrender. It would seem my combat encounter design needed some work. I wasn’t challenging the party enough. The major threats weren’t true threats. There was no sense of danger in anything they were doing. The next adventure they would go on would be more dangerous and would introduce new enemy types. Time to crank up the difficulty, and actually attempt to kill these players. Make threats that are scary enough to make the players stop and ask “can we actually kill that?” I had no intention of actually killing the Player Characters, but I did want to make them scared that their lives were in danger and the world around them was threatening.
I also needed to start giving more equipment and loot to my players. I wasn’t intentionally being stingy, but by the end of this story arc there were some of them who hadn’t received any cool upgrades. Going into the next part of the story I wanted to make sure to reward everyone more. Put them in situations where they could purchase items they like or where they discover novel items and equipment. This changed both my combat and social encounter design philosophy. I moved away from a narrative focus and towards a material or reward focus. Dangle some reward in front of the players when they head out on a mission. Even create multiple rewards and missions respectively and allow the party to choose what they wanted to pursue.
I also found a different answer to one of the questions I asked myself earlier. What was my role in the group? My role is a prompt generator. I’m not writing the story I’m just creating conflict and prompting the players to take action however they see fit. The players are writing the story, they are the main characters and their decisions are the only ones that matter. My job was to challenge them along the way and give life to the world that they were exploring.
What is the most fun part of the game for me and for my players? I found the answer to this organically, but it came alongside the realization that my role in the group is being a prompt generator. The most fun for me is to come up with story points that are interesting and engaging. And the players enjoyment came from unintentionally (or intentionally) messing with my plans and doing crazy things in a fantasy world. Everyone gathered around each session because they wanted to be with friends and be goofy by making up outlandish characters and scenarios.
What are some good skills to have as a story teller? What can I do to tell my story specifically? After completing the first arc I hadn’t found the answer I expected. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t telling a story, at least not directly. I was enabling the true story tellers to pave their own path in this fictional world via their characters. If I wanted to tell about how the group took down an evil necromancer, I would have to prompt them with an evil necromancer and see if the players were able to kill her. Maybe they would befriend her and agree not to interfere with each other’s plans, or try to convert her to join their side, or possibly join her side and become evil. They had agency in this world and I was just prompting them with a situation. It just so happened that all the prompts resulted in the story of the 6 heroes who helped heal the land.
Giving players agency
Now that I had a couple of sessions under my belt and I was more confident in my abilities to adjudicate unknown situations and create interesting dialog on the fly, I wanted to give my players total agency. I gave them the ability to say no to any of my plot hooks. Some of the hooks were just too enticing and they wanted to see them through to the end. Some they misinterpreted and ended up killing innocent civilians (they still regret that). The idea that they were able to move forward on their own volition and at their own speed made everything run much smoother. They knew when something went wrong it was their fault. If they decided to walk into a trap or do something that gets them arrested it was their own fault. I think this key detail is what makes TTRPGs so much fun. When players have full control and agency, they are able to have the kind of adventure they want to have. The GM facilitates this experience.
For the remainder of this campaign, I tried to follow all my own advice as much as possible and I believe it led to the most enjoyable game possible. The players talk about it fondly and remember little details that I had completely forgotten about. It took all eight of us to make this campaign happen and we had a fantastic time writing this story together.
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