Table Top RPGs as a Medium of Storytelling
I started writing the moment I was able to hold a pencil. Mind you, I was not writing any known human language—just mindless scribbles in my mom’s spare notebooks. But if you asked, I could tell you exactly what they said. The story wasn’t stored in the page. It was stored in my mind.
Since then I’ve written novels, short stories, screenplays, and scripts. But nothing invokes that early sense of childlike imagination quite like Table Top RPGs. So much of the true narrative of role playing games is stored in the mind of the Game Master and their players. The moment it is spoken, it vanishes. Remnants are left behind in players’ notes and in the GM’s planning, but unless the sessions are video recorded, they are preserved only in the memory of their tiny audience—a group of nerds clustered around a table.
In novels, the story is written down. In movies, the story is filmed. Even in video games, where the narrative is not necessarily set in stone, the story can be played over and over again until the player experiences every version.
In Table Top RPGs, no matter how much the Game Master prepares for a session, they cannot possibly predict how the story will play out. A player could kill an important character. The party could fail at a crucial juncture where they were made to succeed. One of the player characters could be killed before their arc has a chance to culminate.
When I’ve run games, some of the most dramatic moments are the ones I did not plan. They were not written down ahead of time. The dialogue was not drafted or revised. The emotional reactions were genuine and spontaneous. It is an electrifying way to tell stories, and when you’re performing for an audience of 4 to 6 people, it becomes one of the most intimate forms of storytelling in the world. It has the same energy as kids playing on a playground except with more rules. And math. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of math.
The point of Table Top RPGs is not to TELL a narrative but to give Game Master and players the TOOLS to tell a narrative. Rules to add a basic structure, world building to provide set pieces, creatures to become obstacles. From this toy box, Game Masters select what ideas they like the best and use them to craft a story their players will love.
Video game writers have the difficult job of creating multiple story paths through their game in effort to give players agency. But video games cannot allow ANY choice to made both because of hardware/software restrictions, budget constraints, and general human limitations (writers should be able to sleep). In Table Top RPGs however? The imagination has no budget or constraints. A clever enough GM can ‘yes, and’ almost any choice, even ones that completely change their original story.
Thus, any Table Top RPG is there to provide support for the GM—so that when their players inevitably veer off course, they have the tools and confidence to build a new path for them.
