What are the tools a player has to shape, add to, and mold the experience of everyone at the table during a tabletop RPG session? What are some pitfalls you’d warn a player against using to try to command the table?
Overall the Player fits into the Storytelling structure of Tabletop RPGs with the Designer and the Game Master in a manner most downstream: where the Game Master is their direct upline and the Designer above the GM.
I see the distinct roles of player and GM to be distinct but non-hierarchical, and the role of the designer to only have power in so much as the table holds their idea of the designer to be. Frankly, there is no traditional role-playing game without players AND a referee, both are needed, and both feel different, albeit sometimes overlapping roles. But either way, the “story” - a thing that only occurs post-game, is entirely dependent on both roles.
The role of the designer can be looked at in a number of ways, but when playing a role-playing game, its easy to see that they can be completely disregarded, so they aren’t really necessary to the process and are of an optional role.
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In terms of tools for players operating outside of the traditional role of the player, that’s kind of what the whole Forge-era of proto-story games were about, and then later the full fledged style, before a lot of design kind of returned to traditional, but “modernized,” methods, ala PbtA and all of that.
I’m way more invested in trad rpgs, despite there being nothing wrong with the above, but examples of trad games taking such influences include stuff like Beyond the Wall, which mechanizes setting and rumor creation at the start, but typically returns to a traditional model afterwards
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Is the story not what is being built at the table through play? What do you mean it only occurs after the game?
I see the distinct roles of player and GM to be distinct but non-hierarchical
I agree it’s not a hierarchy, but it is a flow of information. Starts with the designer, flows to the GM, flows to the players. Is this not how traditional RPGs are run?
its easy to see that they can be completely disregarded
An RPG doesn’t need a designer (see FKR) nor does it need a GM (see Belonging Outside Belonging games amongst others) but you do need at least one player for an RPG to happen.
edit: thanks for reading my blog! looking forward to the conversation
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A potential infinite stories are being built during play, which are only realized through play. Story being the recounting or retelling of events of the game through the lens of the teller, which would be anyone. This is a subtle thing with ttrpgs is the fact that we have a non-symmetrical imagined space in the head of everyone involved (except the designer, which again is why they don’t really matter). A story of the game can be looked at as a kind reification of the perspective of the teller.
Why does it start with the designer? Information doesn’t flow as a stream in a tabletop role-playing game, its bi-directional, flowing from referee to player to referee to other players, so on and so forth.
FKR games can definitely have designers - that will be the referee and potentially the players but that’s an aside and somewhat irrelevant to my point (games, as in defined rules texts aren’t FKR or not, campaigns/sessions are). My point is that if I pick up any rules text - I can play it in such a way that is entirely counter to any designer’s “intentions” and still fulfill any goals my table may have.
I should mention wrt GMless play - I almost exclusively talk about traditional role-playing games as that’s my primary interest. I think everyone should play every kind of game, but we can easily start to throw any discussion for a loop if we start including things like storygames, lyric games, solo games, etc. At least from my perspective. Which isn’t to dissuade others from talking about them, but at least for what I see relevant to the discussion a GM is absolutely necessary (when discussing the role of GM contrasting with Player).
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So I think the tl;dr of my answer to the question of “who tells the story in a tabletop rpg” is that - its whoever is telling the story of past sessions, no matter the role (this can also include roles such as audience in terms of actual play).
If we’re asking who has more contribution to the transcript of the game - I don’t think there is necessarily one that contributes more than potentially any other. More in terms of importance, rather than imaginary volume.
And if we’re talking about tools used to drive the particular content of a transcript - I feel nothing beats talking about it as humans. No amount of mechanics will ever out-weigh the ability to sit down and say “hey I was think we could focus more on…” or “I really liked this, can we do more of that maybe with this kind of twist?”
The way that I generally think of it is that, during play (in many but not all games) what we are doing is generating fiction. Fictional characters, places, actions, etc…are not themselves a story, they’re just the raw material that we use to construct stories.
Now, RPGs themselves are pretty weird, narratively and editorially speaking: even in the most detached, mechanical-procedural kind of play, people are probably making decisions about what kind of fiction to generate based on some level of narrative expectation, the idea that something they do is/will be part of a story, so arguably one is always already “telling a story” when they do that. But at the same time, when you actually recount what happened during a session (i.e. when you “tell a story” of what happened), you probably don’t recount every single action taken by the players either: every sword swing, for example, or incidental skill checks that resulted in nothing happening (missing a secret door, for example). To me, at least, it’s weird to say that those actions constitute “telling a story” in and of themselves: we can’t know for certain that everything we do in play is going to be “part of the story” until we have all that fiction gathered together and can start separating out the wheat from the chaff.
Just my .02, though; like I said, roleplaying is a very complicated activity (to analyze/describe, I mean) and a lot of the language that we used to talk about it is ambiguous and/or was developed for talking about functionally different kinds of media.
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