Narrative Toolbox 1: Storygaming

I have been running monthly narrative Age of Sigmar events for the past 3 years (just by counting the battleplans in my campaign books, I have planned and run at least 30 Game Day events).  This is the first part of a narrative toolbox for other NEOs to draw from to hopefully learn from my experiences and further build the technology of narrative event design.

Storygaming

For about 5 years I was part of a roleplay gaming group that played exclusively indie games of the story-centric variety (Apocalypse World, Dread, Psi Run, Kingdoms, and so forth).  I learned a lot about storytelling through gaming from that experience, and have tried to port that over to my Age of Sigmar events to a certain degree.

The first thing I learned is that the mechanics of the game are what the story is going to be about.  If there are a bunch of game mechanics to engage at the dread obelisk, but nothing special to do at the sigmarite orrery, then the story will be about the obelisk.  Dark Heresy purports to be about engaging with the 40k universe grimdark aesthetic, but if you read through the rules it has pages and pages of skills and talents with very specific niche combat (or sometimes out of combat) effects.  You won't find mechanics that reward you for creating a grimdark aesthetic, or that create a grimdark aesthetic (except maybe those damage tables, ouch!).  Whatever is taking up the players' mental space will be the story of the game.

In my first season of AoS Game Day, I had a table with 6 different mission objectives on it and the players randomly selected one of the 6 objectives.  I had adapted this mechanic from a Warhammer World battleplan designed for school leagues.  After a while, I realized that players were only occasionally engaging mechanics that told the story of the event, so I adjusted and came up with a different system.  I created battleplans with two different locations built into them, and the victory conditions depended upon the location you were battling over.  So perhaps at Furyford you have to control the river, but at Dreadchapel you are battling over blessed sarcophagi.

Use the battleplan and associated special rules to incentivize participating in the story.  Buff the types of units you want to see and award Victory Points for narrative behavior.  Also, make sure to remove incentives that lead to non-narrative behavior.  I ran an event recently that had a theme of Diplomacy.  I had a victory condition that allowed Heroes that were engaged with an enemy Hero to, instead of attacking, parley to earn victory points.  It resulted in one battle that devolved into several heroes milling about in the center of the battlefield talking.  The players were no longer playing Warhammer really, but they were definitely engaging the narrative.  Because that was the main thrust of the story it was goofy fun and very memorable.  If it had happened too often, or had not been the story, it would have been quite the debacle.

So, when deciding whether or not you want to include elements like Realmscape features, secondary objectives, narrative bonuses, etc., ask yourself whether they tell your story, or if they are just chaff that will distract.

I want to keep these posts short because I don't like walls of text, but I'll be back!