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.
You always make me think, Sir… And for that I am appreciative.