Andrew Stanton is the superstar creator of WALL-E, John Carter, Finding Nemo, A Bug’s Life, Toy Story, and many more. In 2012 he gave the above TED talk collecting all the lessons he’s learned about storytelling.

A good story, says Stanton, makes a promise. That promise might be as simple as, “Once upon a time…,” but the crucial thing is that the audience believes that this will be a story worth hearing. The promise, therefore, invites the audience to engage with the story. It’s like a foot in the door. It’s incredibly important because, without that initial engagement (and the trust that comes with it), the storyteller has nothing to build on or with.

The nature of the promise also means that “stories are inevitable if they’re good, but they’re not predictable.” A statement which, I think, can be interpreted in many ways: That we may know where a story is going, but not the path which is taken. Or that we may know the direction of Fate, but not necessarily the specific form it will take. Or that when we look back at the story, it seems as if everything is perfectly aligned and could have gone no other way than it did, but we could not have foreseen it.

In other words, the story must faithfully keep its promise, but it should still surprise and delight the audience.

(For more on how you can achieve this effect in an RPG, check out Random GM Tip: Three Point Plotting.)

The promise also creates a window of opportunity for the storyteller, and they have to capitalize on that by making the audience care about the story.

There are many ways a storyteller can do this — character, theme, craft, etc. — but one particular lesson he talked about leapt out to me as a Game Master:

THE UNIFYING THEORY OF 2+2

The absolute best way to get the audience to care about the story is to get them involved with the story; to get them actively thinking about the story. And the best way to do that is to make them work for the story.

In other words, don’t show your audience FOUR. Show them 2 + 2 and make them do the math.

Note that 2 + 2 isn’t difficult. The point isn’t necessarily to challenge the audience. (Although it can be: There’s a reason why the mystery genre is popular. A properly placed insoluble problem can actually be even more effective, which his why everyone remembers the end of Inception.)

The point is that even the simplest act of connecting the dots engages the audience. It makes them, on a primal level, a part of the story. They are thinking about the story and they have opinions about it. Once you’re part of something, you care about it. As Stanton says, “A well-organized absence of information pulls us in.” We have a desperate need to complete an unfinished sentence.

Take Citizen Kane, for example. (Spoilers ahoy!) Imagine how much less effective would that movie be if, at the end of the movie, Orson Welles had Joseph Cotton’s character say, “Rosebud was his childhood sled. Despite the poverty and the hardship of his youth, he must have always missed the simple, uncomplicated joys of his youth and the unconditional love of his mother.” The beauty of Citizen Kane as a movie is, in fact, the immense artistry Welles employs so that, rather than spoonfeeding that moral to the audience, he has prepared the audience so that all the nuance and emotional complexity of that idea becomes as simple as 2+2 when he shows them the image of the sled.

(I’ll note that this can actually create paradoxes in storytelling, where sometimes the more effort you spend explicitly and plainly explaining something to the audience can actually result in the audience understanding it less, because the lack of engagement causes them to mentally skim past it.)

And it’s a “unifying theory” because it can apply to almost everything in a film: Characters, plot points, exposition, etc.

The trick, of course, is that the audience wants to work for their meal, but they usually don’t want to know that they’re doing that. So it’s also the storyteller’s job to hide the audience’s work from the audience.

To use our Citizen Kane example again, when you see the sled at the end of the movie, you don’t consciously think, “Oh! A tricky problem! Let me think this through!” Ideally, the storyteller has set you up so that you simply see 2+2 and reflexively think, “Four.”

(Again, there are exceptions, like the central conundrum of most mystery stories.)

IN YOUR GAME

Stanton, of course, is talking about animation and filmmaking, and we know that we can’t just take the same storytelling techniques that we see on screen and use them in our RPG games. RPGs are a different medium; one in which the players have an unprecedented freedom and for which plots should not be prepped.

But the Unifying Theory of 2+2 still works!

All you need to do is give your players the equation and then left them take the final step.

In fact, the interactivity of a roleplaying game can actually enhance the technique because the players can actively investigate. In a film, the audience has to passively receive the equation, but in an RPG, the players can go looking for the twos. Or maybe they have the twos, and they need to experiment to figure out the correct mathematical operator.

(I think I’ve broken the metaphor.)

Matryoshka techniques like matryoshka searches and matryoshka hexes are built around this idea that “completing the equation” will mean taking action as a character, and that doing so can give the player both ownership and control over the answer we find.

For other techniques you can use to help make your players care about your campaign, check out Random GM Tips: Getting Your Players to Care.

For the first couple decades after D&D, virtually all roleplaying games looked fundamentally similar: There was a GM who controlled the game world, there were players who each controlled a single character (or occasionally a small stable of characters which all “belonged” to them), and actions were resolved using diced mechanics.

Starting in the early ’90s, however, we started to see some creative experimentation with the form. And in the last decade this experimentation has exploded: GM-less game. Diceless games. Players taking control of the game world beyond their characters. (And so forth.) But as this experimentation began carrying games farther and farther from the “traditional” model of a roleplaying game, there began to be some recognition that these games needed to be distinguished from their progenitors: On the one hand, lots of people found that these new games didn’t scratch the same itch that roleplaying games did and some responded vituperatively to them as a result. On the other hand, even those enthusiastic about the new games began searching for a new term to describe their mechanics — “story game”, “interactive drama”, “mutual storytelling”, and the like.

In some cases, this “search for a label” has been about raising a fence so that people can tack up crude “KEEP OUT” signs. I don’t find that particularly useful. But as an aficionado of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, I also understand the power of proper definitions: They allow us to focus our discussion and achieve a better understanding of the topic. But by giving us a firm foundation, they also set us free to experiment fully within the form.

For example, people got tired of referring to “games that are a lot like Dungeons & Dragons“, so they coined the term “roleplaying game” and it suddenly became a lot easier to talk about them (and also market them). It also allowed RPGs to become conceptually distinct from “wargames”, which not only eliminated quite a bit of confusion (as people were able to separate “good practices from wargames” from “good practices for roleplaying games”), but also allowed the creators of RPGs to explore a lot of new options.

Before we begin looking at how games like Shock: Social Science Fiction, Dread, Wushu, and Microscope are different from roleplaying games, however, I think we first need to perfect our understanding of what a roleplaying game is and how it’s distinguished from other types of games.

WHAT IS A ROLEPLAYING GAME?

Roleplaying games are defined by mechanics which are associated with the game world.

Let me break that down: Roleplaying games are self-evidently about playing a role. Playing a role is about making choices as if you were the character. Therefore, in order for a game to be a roleplaying game (and not just a game where you happen to play a role), the mechanics of the game have to be about making and resolving choices as if you were the character. If the mechanics of the game require you to make choices which aren’t associated to the choices made by the character, then the mechanics of the game aren’t about roleplaying and it’s not a roleplaying game.

To look at it from the opposite side, I’m going to make a provocative statement: When you are using dissociated mechanics you are not roleplaying. Which is not to say that you can’t roleplay while playing a game featuring dissociated mechanics, but simply to say that in the moment when you are using those mechanics you are not roleplaying.

I say this is a provocative statement because I’m sure it’s going to provoke strong responses. But, frankly, it just looks like common sense to me: If you are manipulating mechanics which are dissociated from your character — which have no meaning to your character — then you are not engaged in the process of playing a role. In that moment, you are doing something else. (It’s practically tautological.) You may be multi-tasking or rapidly switching back-and-forth between roleplaying and not-roleplaying. You may even be using the output from the dissociated mechanics to inform your roleplaying. But when you’re actually engaged in the task of using those dissociated mechanics you are not playing a role; you are not roleplaying.

I think this distinction is important because, in my opinion, it lies at the heart of what defines a roleplaying game: What’s the difference between the boardgame Arkham Horror and the roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu? In Arkham Horror, after all, each player takes on the role of a specific character; those characters are defined mechanically; the characters have detailed backgrounds; and plenty of people have played sessions of Arkham Horror where people have talked extensively in character.

I pick Arkham Horror for this example because it exists right on the cusp between being an RPG and a not-RPG. So when people start roleplaying during the game (which they indisputably do when they start talking in character), it raises the provocative question: Does it become a roleplaying game in that moment?

On the other hand, I’ve had the same sort of moment happen while playing Monopoly. For example, there was a game where somebody said, “I’m buying Boardwalk because I’m a shoe. And I like walking.” Goofy? Sure. Bizarre? Sure. Roleplaying? Yup.

Let me try to make the distinction clear: When we say “roleplaying game”, do we just mean “a game where roleplaying can happen”? If so, then I think the term “roleplaying game” becomes so ridiculously broad that it loses all meaning. (Since it includes everything from Monopoly to Super Mario Brothers.)

Rather, I think the term “roleplaying game” only becomes meaningful when there is a direct connection between the game and the roleplaying. When roleplaying is the game.

It’s very tempting to see all of this in a purely negative light: As if to say, “Dissociated mechanics get in the way of roleplaying and associated mechanics don’t.” But it’s actually more meaningful than that: The act of using an associated mechanic is the act of playing a role.

As I wrote in the original essay on dissociated mechanics, all game mechanics are — to varying degrees — abstracted and metagamed. For example, the destructive power of a fireball is defined by the number of d6’s you roll for damage; and the number of d6’s you roll is determined by the caster level of the wizard casting the spell. If you asked a character about d6’s of damage or caster levels, they’d have no idea what you were talking about (that’s the abstraction and the metagaming). But they could tell you what a fireball was and they could tell you that casters of greater skill can create more intense flames during the casting of the spell (that’s the association).

So a fireball has a direct association to the game world. Which means that when, for example, you make a decision to cast a fireball spell you are making a decision as if you were your character — in making the mechanical decision you are required to roleplay (because that mechanical decision is directly associated to your character’s decision). You may not do it well. You’re not going to win a Tony Award for it. But in using the mechanics of a roleplaying game, you are inherently playing a role.

WHAT IS A STORYTELLING GAME?

So roleplaying games are defined by associated mechanics — mechanics which are associated with the game world, and thus require you to make decisions as if you were your character (because your decisions are associated with your character’s decisions).

Storytelling games (STGs), on the other hand, are defined by narrative control mechanics: The mechanics of the game are either about determining who controls a particular chunk of the narrative or they’re actually about determining the outcome of a particular narrative chunk.

Storytelling games may be built around players having characters that they’re proponents of, but the mechanical focus of the game is not on the choices made as if they were those characters. Instead, the mechanical focus is on controlling the narrative.

Wushu offers a pretty clear-cut example of this. The game basically has one mechanic: By describing a scene or action, you earn dice. If your dice pool generates more successes than everyone else’s dice pools, you control the narrative conclusion of the round.

Everyone in Wushu is playing a character. That character is the favored vehicle which they can use to deliver their descriptions, and that character’s traits will even influence what types of descriptions are mechanically superior for them to use. But the mechanics of the game are completely dissociated from the act of roleplaying the character. Vivid and interesting characters are certainly encouraged, but the act of making choices as if you were the character — the act of actually roleplaying — has absolutely nothing to do with the rules whatsoever.

That’s why Wushu is a storytelling game, not a roleplaying game.

More controversially, consider Dread. The gameplay here looks a lot like a roleplaying game: All the players are playing individual characters. There’s a GM controlling/presenting the game world. When players have their characters attempt actions, there’s even a resolution mechanic: Pull a Jenga block. If the tower doesn’t collapse, the action succeeds. If the tower does collapse, the character is eliminated from the story.

But I’d argue that Dread isn’t a roleplaying game: The mechanic may be triggered by characters taking action, but the actual mechanic isn’t associated with the game world. The mechanic is entirely about controlling the pace of the narrative and participation in the narrative.

I’d even argue that Dread wouldn’t be a roleplaying game if you introduced a character sheet with hard-coded skills that determined how many blocks you pull depending on the action being attempted and the character’s relevant skill. Why? Because the resolution mechanic is still dissociated and it’s still focused on narrative control and pacing. The mechanical decisions being made by the players (i.e., which block to pull and how to pull it) aren’t associated to decisions being made by their character. The fact that the characters have different characteristics in terms of their ability to be used to control that narrative is as significant as the differences between a rook and a bishop in a game of Chess.

GETTING FUZZY

Another way to look at this is to strip everything back to freeform roleplaying: Just people sitting around, pretending to be characters. This isn’t a roleplaying game because there’s no game — it’s just roleplaying.

Now add mechanics: If the mechanics are designed in such a way that the mechanical choices you’re making are directly associated with the choices your character is making, then it’s probably a roleplaying game. If the mechanics are designed in such a way that the mechanical choices you’re making are about controlling or influencing the narrative, then it’s probably a storytelling game.

But this gets fuzzy for two reasons.

First, few games are actually that rigid in their focus. For example, if I add an action point mechanic to a roleplaying game it doesn’t suddenly cease to be a roleplaying game just because there are now some mechanical choices being made by players that aren’t associated to character decisions. When playing a roleplaying game, most of us have agendas beyond simply “playing a role”. (Telling a good story, for example. Or emulating a particular genre trope. Or exploring a fantasy world.) And dissociated mechanics have been put to all sorts of good use in accomplishing those goals.

Second, characters actually are narrative elements. This means that you can see a lot of narrative control mechanics which either act through, are influenced by, or act upon characters who may also be strongly associated with or exclusively associated with a particular player.

When you combine these two factors, you end up with a third: Because characters are narrative elements, players who prefer storytelling games tend to have a much higher tolerance for roleplaying mechanics in their storytelling games. Why? Because roleplaying mechanics allow you to control characters; characters are narrative elements; and, therefore, roleplaying mechanics can be enjoyed as just a very specific variety of narrative control.

On the other hand, people who are primarily interested in roleplaying games because they want to roleplay a character tend to have a much lower tolerance for narrative control mechanics in their roleplaying games. Why? Because when you’re using dissociated mechanics you’re not roleplaying. At best, dissociated mechanics are a distraction from what the roleplayer wants. At worst, the dissociated mechanics can actually interfere and disrupt what the roleplayer wants (when, for example, the dissociated mechanics begin affecting the behavior or actions of their character).

This is why many aficionados of storytelling games don’t understand why other people don’t consider their games roleplaying games. Because even traditional roleplaying games at least partially satisfy their interests in narrative control, they don’t see the dividing line.

Explaining this is made even more difficult because the dividing line is, in fact, fuzzy in multiple dimensions. Plus there’s plenty of historical confusion going the other way. (For example, the “Storyteller System” is, in fact, just a roleplaying game with no narrative control mechanics whatsoever.)

It should also be noted that while the distinction between RPGs and STGs is fairly clear-cut for players, it can be quite a bit fuzzier on the other side of the GM’s screen. (GMs are responsible for a lot more than just roleplaying a single character, which means that their decisions — both mechanical and non-mechanical — were never strictly focused on roleplaying in the first place.)

Personally, I enjoy both sorts of games: Chocolate (roleplaying), vanilla (storytelling), and swirled mixtures of both. But, with that being said, there are times when I just want some nice chocolate ice cream; and when I do, I generally find that dissociated mechanics screw up my fun.

2020 ADDENDUM: TABLETOP NARRATIVE GAMES

If we can move beyond arguing that vanilla ice cream is actually chocolate ice cream, we have the opportunity to step back and recognize that these are both different types of ice cream. I propose that both roleplaying games and storytelling games are tabletop narrative games.

Now, here’s the cool thing: Recognizing that these are different things within a broader paradigm will make it easier for us to explore that paradigm. Much like having a different word for different colors makes it easier to distinguish those colors, clearly seeing the distinctions between associated mechanics and narrative control mechanics will not only make it easier for us to develop better games of those types, it will also likely make it easier for us to discover completely new types of games.

Compare this to video games, for example. Grand Theft Auto started as a maze-chase game. When they iterated on that design, nobody launched a holy war insisting that this was the One True Way of making maze-chase games. They said, “Oh. Hey. Look at this cool new type of game.” Instead of spending twenty years arguing that Grand Theft Auto 3 was a maze-chase game just like Pac-Man (and how dare you suggest otherwise?!), they identified the new form as an open-world game and spent twenty years making lots and lots of open-world games (that were in no way still trying to be Pac-Man).

Video games and board games do this all the time. And we have better and more varied video games and board games as a result. Wouldn’t it be great if tabletop narrative games could reap the same benefits?

A couple weeks back, when I was chatting with Baron de Ropp for Dungeon Masterpiece, we had a fun little idea for a unique (and slightly kooky) way to think about roleplaying characters, particularly if you’re a GM who needs to roleplay a bunch of different characters in every session.

Before we can dive into that, though, I want to have a quick word with the people reading this who are looking for the One True Way™ of roleplaying games, because that’s an attitude that can create a lot of cognitive dissonance here on the Alexandrian, where my philosophy is much more about finding the Right Tool For the Job™. There are lots of different techniques you can use while playing a character, prepping a scenario, or running a game, and I’m far more interested in adding new tools to my toolbox and learning new ways to use the tools I already have than I am in trying to raise one of those techniques onto a pedestal.

Nevertheless, I still see people trying to use node-based scenario design for everything and getting frustrated when it doesn’t work. Or getting confused when I talk about how to structure a linear campaign, because I’m “supposed” to be the Oracle of Sandboxes. Or deeply angry with me because I know that Once Upon a Time and Eclipse Phase can’t be played in the same way.

The reason I say all this is that I’m really hoping you can approach this article as a fun little way to think about roleplaying. I think there’s some cool stuff to discover thinking about roleplaying this way, but I really doubt that’ll happen if we get stuck trying to think of it as the One True Way™ of roleplaying our characters.

SPELL COMPONENT ROLEPLAYING

The Universal NPC Roleplaying Template is a tool for efficiently describing significant NPCs in your campaign, organizing the information in a consistent format that (a) makes it easy to pick up and quickly start playing the NPC, while (b) making sure you don’t miss any details that are essential for the current scenario.

One section of this template is literally “Roleplaying.” I recommend including two or three bullet points here, each describing a distinctive trait of the character that you can use to bring them to life. The idea is that each trait provides a “hook” that you can very easily reach out and grab, giving you a quick grip on the character.

For maximum effectiveness, I further recommend that each trait be significantly different from the NPC’s other trait. A distinctive physical mannerism, for example, is great, but three different mannerisms may be more difficult to use or they might turn into a bit of a muddle compared to, for example, having both a physical mannerism and a unique accent.

This isn’t a hard-and-fast rule, of course. But it’s a useful guideline.

But how can we know if two traits are sufficiently different? And is there anything that could help us brainstorm different roleplaying traits?

Well… An accent would be a verbal trait. A nervous twitch, on the other hand, would be a physical one. Or, instead of “physical,” we could say somatic.”

… can we classify roleplaying traits as if they were D&D spell components?

Of course we can.

VERBAL COMPONENTS

When we talk about roleplaying, we often default to the verbal components. Since we’re all sitting around a table (or in a group call) talking to each other, this makes a lot of sense.

Furthermore, a lot of attention — probably too much attention — is given to accents and other “funny voices.” Obviously, though, if you can affect a wide range of distinct vocal personalities, use those as appropriate.

You don’t need to be able to do full-blown voices or accents, though, to vocally distinguish characters. You can often create a very distinct and memorable voice for an NPC by just focusing on a single vocal character, such as:

• Pitch (a voice deeper or higher than you normally speak)
• Speed (slower or faster than your normal speech)
• Volume (e.g., always speaking in a raspy whisper)
• Vocal tic (e.g., rolling your R’s, a lisp, or stutter)

A distinctive pattern of speech can also be useful. A classic example of this Yoda is. Alternatively, you might have a character who:

• Almost always responds to a question with another question.
• Yells when they’re lying.
• Says, “Don’t you think?” whenever they finish speaking.

This can bleed over into having an actual catchphrase or unique turn of speech. For example, I played a pulp detective named Jack Hammer who liked to refer to his punches as jackhammers — e.g., “Have a taste of my jackhammers!” On another occasion, I had an elf noble who said, “Let the wizard speak!” so often that it became a running joke in the campaign.

Alternatively, you can boil this down to a single, distinctive favorite word. Pick something exotic or esoteric — perhaps even something from a foreign language (e.g., a Russian who always says “Nyet”) — and then find every opportunity you can to drop into the character’s dialogue. Distinctive epithets are great for this. For example, if I say, “By Crom!” you likely instantly know who I’m talking about.

SOMATIC COMPONENTS

Even though we’re just sitting around the table talking, there’s still a wide range of physicality you can use to embody a character.

The most basic somatic component is a physical gesture:

• Stroke your chin
• Pull on your earlobe
• Tap you nose
• Wink
• Tug your braid
• Drum your fingers on the table
• Scratch your elbow

The possibilities are almost endless! And take note that the gesture doesn’t have to be large or gaudy. Subtle gestures, in fact, can be even more useful because they can often be repeated more frequently without becoming tiring.

Another option is a physical tic, which is similar to a gesture, but is usually involuntary.

Posture can also be a powerful option. Think about how you’re sitting in your chair, where you hold your hands, and the inclination of your head.

I really like having a distinct somatic component for each NPC, because it not only provides a clear signal to the players for who’s talking; it’s also a great way for you to jump into character: Just hunch your shoulder like Rodrigo or give Roberta’s sly wink and you’ll instantly slip into the role.

If you’re struggling to come up with a somatic component for a character, think about each part of the body – head, face, neck, torso, shoulders, arms, legs, etc.: How could you use it? Move it? Touch it?

MATERIAL COMPONENTS

Material components probably the last thing most tabletop gamers think about when roleplaying, but they can pack a big punch when you can figure out how to use them. For example, when running Trail of Cthulhu games set in the ‘30s, I’ll often buy a pack of candy cigarettes. Invoking the ubiquity of smoking really brings the time period to life, and cigarettes offer a huge range of characterization — from femme fatales gracefully asking for a light to gambling addicts with nicotine-stained fingers to a nervous witness who can’t keep the cancer-stick steady in their hands.

You probably don’t want to haul around a huge chest full of objects and need to go digging through it every time a new NPC pops up, of course, but small, handheld props can provide a great touchstone for a special character: The henchmen who rolls a coin across his knuckles. The nervous damsel in distress clutching her rosary.

Keep in mind that you don’t need the perfect prop: Proxies are perfectly acceptable, whether it’s a modern quarter standing in for a fantasy gold piece or a convention lanyard serving as an ersatz rosary.

Similarly, when improvising characters, be aware of the props and proxies and you’re already carrying: Got a wedding ring? Great! The witness can be nervously spinning theirs. Wanna smoke? Light up a pencil. The archvillain should be peering at the PCs through a ruby? Pick up a d20 and pretend!

The other major category of material component is costumes. These probably need to be used with even more caution than props, and I’m certainly not suggesting you do full-fledge quick-changes at the gaming table. But one or two items you can quickly affect can have a large impact. (I once carried an eyepatch around a convention and roughly half my PCs that weekend used it for impact.)

Even better, don’t forget that you can use the clothes you’re already wearing for effect: The Picard maneuver doesn’t require you to be wearing a Starfleet uniform. Taking off your glasses and slowly polishing them can be a wonderful character affectation, as can be loosening your own tie, tugging at your collar, or snapping the band of your watch.

As a final note, if you’re comfortable doing it, mime can be a great way of invoking material components even if you don’t have any to hand: You can smoke with out a cigarette, tighten a tie you’re not actually wearing, or even gesture with a sword made out of air.

Because, after all, when it comes to roleplaying, the only true limit is your imagination.

The Harmon Story Circle is a character-focused storytelling formula created by Dan Harmon, who’s also the creator or co-creator of TV shows like Community and Rick & Morty:

It’s a very effective structure for episodic storytelling, because it makes the events of each episode meaningful, easily incrementing character growth and changes to the status quo, which creates a constant forward momentum throughout, for example, a season of television.

It’s also a very common story structure to see played out at the table during a roleplaying game (with one notable exception, which we’ll get to in a moment), because these beats emerge naturally from the “scenario hook + adventure site” concepts that we commonly use. For example, consider a stereotypical dungeon scenario:

• The PCs are in the local village. (A place of safety / comfort / familiarity.)
• A hooded stranger hires them to retrieve an item from a nearby dungeon. (They now have a desire to complete the job.)
• They enter an unfamiliar situation (i.e., the dungeon).
• They adapt to the dungeon, learning its geography and figuring out how to overcome its challenges.
• They retrieve the item they were sent to find.
• They return to the familiar situation (i.e., the village).
• They have earned XP and perhaps gained new magical items, being changed as a result of their journey.

The PCs begin in their home base, a scenario hook prompts them with a desire, the adventure site (whether dungeon, raid, or the like) provides a challenging situation, and the mechanical rewards of your system of choice level the character up (literally or metaphorically), changing them over time. Repeat.

Similarly, consider a typical run in Shadowrun, Technoir, or Cyberpunk Red: Relaxing between jobs gives a safe status quo, but then the PCs are hired to breach a megacorp’s servers and retrieve sensitive data. The heist takes them into an unfamiliar situation where they have to learn and adapt (i.e., plan the job). Once they’ve retrieved the data, they get paid and go back to lurking in the seedy bar or digital hacker enclave or private island where they got the job in the first place.

It’s a satisfying loop that can be effectively run in perpetuity.

But you may have noticed that we skipped a step:

PAY A HEAVY PRICE.

In too many RPG scenarios, the PCs just kind of skim over the surface of the scenario: It’s a thing they’re doing, but not really a thing that’s affecting them. This partly indicates a lack of investment – the PCs don’t have any skin the game! – but it’s also a lack of consequences: Whether they succeed or fail, the effect of the scenario is ephemeral. Within a couple sessions you could imagine having skipped the scenario entirely and nothing in the campaign would be different.

This is made worse because, in practice, success is predetermined: The possibility of the PCs not killing the raiders or retrieving the data-package is a completely alien idea to many GMs, and considered anathema by wide swaths of modern scenario design.

One reason for this is that RPG mechanics and scenarios often frame everything as life-or-death stakes: Failure isn’t paying a heavy price; it’s everybody dying and the end of the campaign. Since that’s not a desirable outcome for many groups, the GM has little choice but to ensure the PCs succeed.

Even when death isn’t on the line, GMs can also fall into the trap of framing binary outcomes: You either kill all the raiders or you don’t. You either steal the data-packet or you don’t. Paying a heavy price, on the other hand, usually means some form of non-binary, either in the primary objective or in ancillary consequences. For example:

• You steal the data-packet, but get identified by the megacorp. Now there’s a huge bounty on your heads.
• You hunt down the raiders, but not before they start killing hostages.
• You can stop the Red Hand from claiming the Sword of Fatherfall by taking it from its resting place, but only if one of you is willing to take up the sword and suffer its curse.

Next time you’re designing a scenario, think about the stakes: Is success defined as restoring an unaltered status quo? Is the only possible failure state a TPK? See if you can break out of simple binaries and add the complexity you need for the scenario to have meaningful fallout.

You can root these possible outcomes in meaningful choices made by the players – e.g., which faction do they give the Ruby to? – but it becomes even more powerful when a complex and nuanced scenario gives the opportunity for the players to invent their own meaningful choices! Either way, these choices are significant because they’re how the characters take ownership of the price they pay: You could have used the cure to save your beloved sister, but instead you gave it to the Alchemist’s Guild so that they could synthesize it and save hundreds or thousands of lives.

(Or vice versa.)

These are the crucibles through which PCs change and grow over time, becoming deeper and richer characters as the campaign plays out.

Tip: Another thing to think about is using scenario hooks that matter to the PCs. Due to the influence of published adventures, there’s a tendency for scenario goals to be externalized: The PCs have to do something because someone else wants them to do it. If the PCs are instead pursuing a goal because THEY want it to happen, it’s a lot easier to have meaningful outcomes that matter to them. See GM Don’t List #12: Mail Carrier Scenario Hooks.

SYSTEMIC RESPONSE

Some RPGs also address this gap systemically.

For example, what set Call of Cthulhu apart from the competition when it premiered in 1981 and why has it gained such a reputation for powerful roleplaying?

In part, it’s because the Sanity system hard codes a heavy price into the standard gameplay loop: It’s basically impossible for a PC to engage with a Call of Cthulhu scenario and come away unscathed.

Technoir achieves a similar effect through its locked adjectives: A character can recover from a fleeting or sticky adjective, but an adjective that becomes locked – whether it’s physical injury, mental trauma, or a shift in belief or personality – signifies a permanent change in the character.

Another great example is Blades in the Dark, which weaves a complex web of Stress, Trauma, Heat, and Vice and then bakes those costs/consequences into every die roll.

CHALLENGE TO THE PLAYERS

Regardless of scenario or system, understanding the heavy price of the Harmon Story Circle can also be both a challenge and an opportunity for you as a player. It is not, after all, the GM’s responsibility to roleplay your character for you. Quite the opposite, in fact. So you can make the conscious choice not to skim past an adventure.

If your GM is pitching you big, juicy stakes, of course, that’s fantastic: Take what they’re offering you and run with it. But even when the GM or scenario isn’t framing up these opportunities, you can still proactively think about how a scenario is affecting your character:

• Is there anything that might cause them to change their values or goals?
• Is their desire for something so strong that it might make them sacrifice something or compromise their own values? What impact will that have on them in the long run?
• Why is the group’s current agenda important to your character?
• If it’s not important, can you look for a moment when it becomes important to them? (Don’t be afraid to go big for the, “Well now it’s personal!” moment.)
• Or, if it’s already important to them, is there a moment where the character questions that?

And so forth.

If you’re looking for inspiration, think about your favorite characters from films or books: How and why and when are Frodo or Paul Atreides or George Bailey or Commander Adama or Rick Blaine or Ilsa Lund or Laura Roslin or Elizabeth Bennet transformed by their stories?

Alice is Missing is a stunningly beautiful storytelling game that delivers an utterly unique and unforgettable experience. I’ve played it twice, with different groups, and each game was profound. Every player was deeply affected, and several texted the group the next morning to say that they’d dreamed about the events of the game.

The premise of Alice is Missing is in the title: A high school student named Alice has gone missing, and the players will take on the roles of her friends as they try to figure out what happened while dealing with the emotional trauma of her disappearance.

The central conceit of the game is this: You don’t talk. Instead, all of your interactions — all of your roleplaying — takes place via text messaging.

HOW IT WORKS

You can play with three to five players and you’ll start by each selecting one of the five broad, archetypal characters provided. These are quickly fleshed out with Drives, which provide Motives (a key personality trait) and two Relationships, which you’ll assign to two different player characters. It’s a fairly quick process that creates a remarkably broad dynamic of play while keeping the structure of play focused.

Now the Facilitator will start a group text message with all participants by sending a text with their character name in it. All the other players reply by sending their character name, at which point everyone should create a contact for that number (if they don’t have one already) and change its name to the character’s name.

At this point play begins: The Facilitator will open an Alice is Missing video which provides both a soundtrack and a 90-minute timer. From this point forward, no one speaks: The Facilitator will send a message initiating the game, and then everyone will spend the next hour and a half texting.

The core mechanic of the game revolves around Clue cards. These are synced to the timer — so, for example, there’s an 80 minute clue card, a 70 minute clue card, and so forth. There are three different cards for each time interval, and these can be freely intermixed, resulting in thousands of potential game states.

Each Clue card contains a prompt for the player who draws it:

• Reveal a Suspect card. This person shows up at your door acting suspicious. What weird question about Alice do they keep asking you?
• Reveal a Location card. You dig up some weird or unexpected history about this location. What do you learn about this place that would make it the perfect spot to hide?

The player creates the answer to this question and introduces it into the group chat, pushing the narrative of the game forward.

As you can see from these examples, the game also includes Suspect cards and Location cards. These help shape the mystery of Alice’s disappearance, and a number of clever mechanics are used to make sure that the narrative in the back half of the game evolves logically and naturally from the foundation laid down in the first half of the game, even as it’s ultimately being guided by the player’s creativity.

Finally, the game provides a deck of Searching cards which are more flexible: Whenever a PC decides to go somewhere without being prompted by a Clue card, they should draw a card from the Searching deck to reveal what they discover there. (Examples include “a drop of blood in the fresh snow” and “a loaded firearm.”)

SOME GRIT IN THE GEARS

Overall, Alice is Missing does an excellent job of walking a new player through the rules. The rulebook is actually split into two parts: The first is an in-depth explanation of the rules, and the second is a Facilitator’s Guide which walks the Facilitator (most likely the game’s owner) through the exact steps they should take to explain the rules to the other players (including short scripts they should read at every step).

This is crucial to the game’s success, because if everyone at the table isn’t completely onboard with the rules, the central conceit of silent gameplay won’t work and the game will fall apart. Spenser Starke, the designer, deserves major kudos not just for a great game, but for making sure the presentation of the game was everything it needed to be.

With that being said, there are a few places where grit gets into the gears, and I’m going to point them out so that when you play Alice is Missing you can hopefully benefit from my experience and avoid them.

First, the game comes in a lovely box that suggests completeness. Unfortunately, the box is missing components. There are no character sheets, for example, and there’s also supposed to be a stack of missing person posters that isn’t in the box. These are all easily downloadable from the publisher’s website (at least for now), but these aren’t just optional supplements: The rulebook will tell you to, for example, select a missing person poster, and you won’t be able to. (So make sure you track these down ahead of time and print them out.)

Speaking of the character sheets, they’re too small. For example:

In the half-inch by three-inch space between “Charlie Barnes” and “Dakota Travis,”you’re supposed to write down their physical description, favorite class, home life, etc. plus the answer to their Background question plus more… You can’t do it. The character sheet should have been designed as a full-page sheet and probably also double-sided to work properly.

After everyone picks their characters, they’re encouraged to specify their character’s pronouns. This is great in principle, but Alice is Missing completely flubs the execution by constantly referring to the characters by predetermined pronouns (and even baking this into the mechanics). Points for trying, but beaucoup negative points for failing. (A close edit of the rulebook to remove predetermined pronouns and, most especially, removing gendered identities from the character roles would be the minimum required to fix this. Ideally, I’d also want all the character names to be gender neutral.)

On a similar note, every character has a Secret. These are listed on the character cards, and so when the Facilitator is instructed to lay the character cards out in front of the players and have them select which characters they want to play, all of the players are going to read every single character’s Secret. The Facilitator’s script then almost immediately says, “Do not share your Secret — it should come out in play.”

This is not actually a problem: The players are not their characters, and what the rulebook means is that the answer to your Secret prompt question should not be included in your character introduction, but instead revealed during play. But every single group I’ve played this with has immediately gone, “Wait. Did we screw up? I read the Secrets!” It’s a very minor thing, but it’s a consistent irritation and it’s probably worth thinking about how you want to tweak that particular point of presentation to sidestep it.

My final critique of Alice is Missing is more significant: The rulebook sets things up so that the Facilitator is always playing the character of Charlie Barnes.

I can understand why they’ve done this. (It allows them to script specific examples into the scripts in the Facilitator’s Guide.) But it makes for a really bad experience if you’re the one who owns the game and is, therefore, always the Facilitator introducing new players to it. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to fix this and let the Facilitator play any of the characters. (But it will require some edits to the guide and its procedures.)

WHAT MAKES IT BRILLIANT

I took the time to highlight all these little minor bits of grit in the gears of Alice is Missing because you’ll want to know about them when you play the game.

And you will want to play this game.

Because it’s brilliant.

The mechanics are elegant, easily grasped, and expertly tuned by Starke to effortlessly guide almost any group to a powerful story which is nevertheless unique every time. It’s a true exemplar of storytelling game design.

The novelty of the experience certainly helps to make it memorable, but the true brilliance of Alice is Missing is more than that. It’s a game that effortlessly immerses you in your character: The experience of play — focused through your text messaging app — is seamlessly identical to the character’s own experience.

You know how the world can sometimes sort of drop away when you get focused on your phone? Starke leverages that fugue state — everything else drops away, and the only thing you’re truly experiencing is the world of the text messages. A world where you’re not talking to your friends; you’re talking to Charlie and Dakota and Julia. (This is why it’s so important to change your contact names before playing.)

In addition, the text-based medium automatically leads the player to create the game world through a creative closure which is nigh-indistinguishable from the closure you perform every day in the real world. When Julia, for example, texts you to say, “There’s someone outside my window!” you immediately imagine that scene in exactly the same way you would if one of your actual friends texted that to you.

The power of that in a roleplaying experience really can’t be underestimated.

Either of these two things — the near-flawless mechanical design or the novel genius of the text-based roleplaying — would make the game worth checking out.

The two together?

Alice is Missing is one of the best storytelling games ever made.

Grade: A+

Designer: Spenser Starke

Publisher: Hunters Entertainment / Renegade Game Studios
Cost: $21.99
Page Count: 48
Card Count: 72