The Holy Trinity of RPGs

When you boil down any RPG to its fundamental components you come up with three things. You can ditch the dice, battlemaps, settings, pencils, books, minis, food, drinks, and, hell, even the table can go the way of the dodo provided you’ve got Characters (a.k.a. players, or sometimes the GM), a GM (a.k.a. DM, Storyteller, or Referee), and a Story (a.k.a. Plot, or Adventure).

Nobody knows this better than me. As I’ve parroted over and over again, I started RPGing from a “No dice; No rules; No prisoners;” mentality. Systems come and systems go, but no matter what the ruleset the Characters, GM and Story are always there. (This is even true for RPG videogames—with the AI taking over the role of GM.)

Let’s break it down, shall we?

CHARACTERS
Much like a novel, all RPGs have characters. Typically there are two familiar types: the PCs and the NPCs. Pick an RPG you’ve played in. Let’s pull an It’s a Wonderful Life and pretend for a moment that the characters didn’t exist. Start with the NPCs. Scrub them all away. The game just got a little blander, didn’t it? The setting is starting to lose some of its flavor. Still, you’ve got the PCs! They can run around and chop up Generic-Monsters all day long! Now scrub them too. They’re characters—that big ol’ “C,” remember?—and the more important ones for that matter.

Suddenly you’re left with the barren desert town of a world filled with nothing except, perhaps, the Generic-Monsters who may just die off of sheer boredom. It would basically be as if God had made the world and then said “You know what? Fuck it.” when it came time to make the fauna. It’s a pretty sandbox, but if there’s no one to play in it, does it really exist?

Point proven, methinks. Moving on—


GM

So, remember when you were a kid and you were playing “cops and robbers” or “knights and dragons” or “heroes and monsters” or some variation thereof and you nailed that one little twerp and said “Got you! You’re dead!” and he said “Nu uh! I dodge it!” and you said “Well you can’t!” and he said “Yes I can!” and you went back and forth for hours until somebody’s mother told you to play something else or you were getting a time out? This problem could have been much more easily solved with your friendly, neighborhood GM.

(Okay, arguably, the random mom could be considered the GM, but she’s not a very good one if she tells you to stop playing the game.)

Yes, a proper set of rules or dice could have settled whether that asshole dodged or not, but if you have a GM, and everyone accepts that when the GM makes a final ruling “That’s that,” it would have been solved without 200 pages (or more) of reading and $5 (again—or more) in polyhedral plastic.

As I’ve heard many times “The GM is God.” That’s not strictly true. The GM is MORE than God. (S)He is organizer, referee, task manager, architect, improvisational actor, and, most importantly, the person who gets the game going in the first place. Without someone plucking up the courage to put themselves in the GM spotlight, there’s isn’t a game. The GM has the hardest job of all people involved in the game—namely deciding how much control to retain for themselves (and risk being that obnoxious “I AM GOD!” GM with the railroad tracks all firmly in place) and how much to relinquish to the players (and how much outrageous crap you’ll let those tricksey little bastards get away with). Personally, I’m in favor of retaining as little power as possible while still getting the “final call/if I make a ruling, you do not argue with it” ability.

As to the vitality of the GM—have you ever played a game where there wasn’t one? And how long, exactly, does a game last when the GM loses interest?

Yeah, exactly.

Now that we’ve covered those pesky “human elements” I bring you to our more ethereal friend—


STORY

Now, imagine you’ve got some Characters and a GM and you’re all sitting around a table. You’ll do scant more than drum your fingers against the wood if you’ve all forgotten to generate some sort of Story. What makes the game interesting? The answers to these questions:

What makes each character unique?

What are the characters’ goals?

What is in opposition to them achieving said goals?

What terrible things will happen if they don’t achieve said goals?

See that? That’s a Story Outline. Without Story you’ve got no reason to be playing an RPG. You might as well crack out your basic, plotless, board game. Now don’t get me wrong, some board games have plots and some board games are hilarious and fun for the lack thereof, but we’re talking fundamental RPG needs here. And that means story.

The interesting thing about Story is while it dictates Character action and is usually brought into existence by the GM, in a proper RPG it doesn’t always STAY that way. The Characters can rewrite a story faster than you can say “Scooby Doo, where are you?” Then the GM has to immediately “write” new story, to which the Characters then react.

A proper Story morphs, changes, and ultimately grows through the influence of the GM and the Characters.

And that, my friends, is what we call A Game.


Even if you only do it once and hate every minute of it, try casting aside the material trappings of your typical RPG for a free-form game. Maybe it’ll never be your cup of tea, but it might give you an interesting new perspective on gaming—and the power of The Holy Trinity of RPGs.


The above is posted at Geeks in Love and Long Island Role Players