RPG Gamemasters Fill Yourselves with Stories

Okay, this is the woo-woo section where I tell you to be a better person.

Just hang with me for a bit.

I think it is critical for any gamemaster or dungeon master to understand story. To understand how stories work and how they are told.

But I don’t want to go overboard.

I don’t want to put more work on a GM because my theory of no-prep GMing is all about taking work off of the gamemaster, not adding more.

However, the more stories that you are familiar with the easier it becomes for you to tell a story.

If you are a gamemaster and you find yourself drawn to tabletop role-playing games you most likely love stories, so this should not be a problem.

What I’m saying to do is:

• Read as many books and stories as you can
• Watch as many TV shows and movies as you can

There are some very important benefits that come from reading stories and watching TV shows and movies.

This should be a fun assignment.

The Best Storytellers Read Everything

Gamemasters are, at bottom, storytellers.

One does not simply just become a good storyteller. Learning how to tell stories takes practice and effort. Fortunately, learning requires consuming and experiencing stories.

The best storytellers of the ones who have consumed myriads of stories.

You’ll notice that famous novelists, screenwriters, and movie directors have read tremendous amounts of stories as well as have screened enormous amounts of films.

As they are reading or listening or watching they are learning story structure and it then allows them to create their own original stories.

Stories are the materials that they work with so they need to have as many of those materials at their disposal as possible. And the only way to do that is to experience them through reading or watching.

Great writers have always been great readers.

And great storytellers have heard countless stories. So there is nothing new with this technique, in fact, it is millennia old.

Some examples of great storytellers reading everything would be Ken Hite and Robin D. Laws. They are professional role-playing game designers behind Trail of Cthulhu and Hillfolk among many others.

If you listen to their podcast, Ken and Robin Talk about Stuff, you will see how much they read and how many films they watch.

In the screenwriting world, Ted Elliott and Terry Russo of Aladdin and Pirates of the Caribbean fame also consume tons of stories.

On their website, Wordplayer Russo mentions reading all of Robert Heinlein’s, Theodore Sturgeon’s, and Alan Moore’s published works just for starters.

In the novelist’s realm, Michael Crichton was famous for being incredibly well-read and quoting rare books during interviews.

The novelist and essayist C.S. Lewis read every extant English work from the 16th century. Yes, seriously he did.

Film directors Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese will screen every film from a director or time period they are studying.

Without this catalog of story in their memories, storytellers are limited to what they have experienced.

If the last book you read was in high school or the last movie you watched was Weekend at Bernie’s, then you are going to have trouble running a good RPG session.

As GMs, we do not need to (or cannot) read or watch as much as the creators mentioned above, my point is that in order to tell good stories you need to have experienced many of them.

A Catalog of Situations for Your RPG Sessions

If you fill yourself with stories, you will have a catalog of ideas and situations you can pull from at a moment’s notice.

If you read a lot of books. If you watch a lot of movies. If you watch a lot of TV shows. If you listen to radio dramas or audiobooks.

You gain a kind of catalog of situations and story points in your mind and in your imagination and you can pull from it and flow right into running an RPG.

For example, I remember watching a movie about a group of adventurers protecting a dragon egg.

Well, now I have the situation of protecting a dragon egg in my memory and I can take that situation and throw it into one of my games.

If I had never watched that movie, I may have never thought about protecting a dragon egg as an adventure hook.

I read a book where there was a secret tunnel at the bottom of the lake. I now have that situation and I can use that in one of my campaigns.

I’ve read a number of books where an advancing army landed their ships on the shore. They left their ships lightly guarded and went exploring. An enemy was able to sneak up behind, dispatch the few guards, and burn the ships.

Now that I have this situation, I can present the players with it may be right at the beginning of a session or a campaign.

I could simply say your enemy’s ships are now beached and they are lightly guarded. The main force is heading to your city and you’re leading a scouting team. The ships are right in front of you, what do you do?

I’ve just created a session and more likely I just created a campaign.

The more stories you experience the more you will have inside of your imagination that you can then pull up on a moment’s notice and be ready to go.

If your players or the world that you’ve created present an opportunity you will have it right there at your fingertips. However, you need to be consuming stories and whatever form you can to have enough situations.

Story Structure is Helpful for GM’s

Consuming stories also teach you about story structure. Structure makes stories more satisfying.

Story structure basics:

• Beginning – Stories usually begin with some status quo
• Inciting incident – This breaks the status quo
• Raising action – The number of events increases as does the tension
• Complications – The heroes face more and new problems
• Raise the stakes – Consequences of action or inaction increase: The heroes are in jeopardy of losing their pay, now they are in jeopardy of losing their lives, now the nearby town is in jeopardy of being destroyed, now the world is in danger
• Climax – The main problem of the story is resolved: The heroes defeat the villain
• Resolution – The action decreases and a new status quo emerges

The more stories you read the more you learn about how to begin a story and how to inject complications during it.

Plus you learn how you can make things look very bleak for your players and how you can pull the action to a climax. Then how you can let the tension go down into a resolution or denouement.

This is important because it can add a layer to your gamemastering without much prep work.

Just from having read many stories, you will know how to tell one more effectively.

If you’ve been playing sessions for a while you know almost automatically when you need to inject a few complications.

Or after a huge battle climactic boss fight of some kind, you will know to allow the players a resolution phase so they can talk about what they accomplished.

This structure creates an emotionally satisfying experience and it’s an extra layer on top of exploring a dungeon or trying to steal the keys from the jailer so you can rescue the dog that has the secret message hidden in its collar.

Branch Out and Explore Stories

In your reading and you’re watching you need to build a breadth of different stories.

Watching the Marvel movies is fine, but also expand yourself a little bit and watch the films of Akira Kurosawa.

Reading new fantasy authors is very helpful, so reading Patrick Rothfuss is a fantastic way to prepare to run a gaming session.

However, reading the so-called “boy books” of Robert Heinlein or the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard is also fantastic preparation.

Delving into the renowned “Appendix N” of D&D is also excellent preparation. Also, see my collected list of all the D&D suggested reading.

Expanding the sources from where to get your stories is eye-opening and gives you more tools in your storytelling toolbox.

Listen to Books

I know what you are thinking, how can I do all of this? I thought this was a post about not preparing for games!

I do not want to give you more work you already have a ton on your plate.

Everyone has family obligations, work obligations, school obligations, and even more than that.

However, there are ways to overcome the problem of consuming more stories.

First, I’ll assume watching movies and TV shows isn’t too much of a problem.

Everybody loves movies. Everybody loves TV shows. You’re probably doing okay in that area with Netflix and Amazon Prime not to mention YouTube or Hulu.

The problem can be reading more books.

Now there are people who read voraciously and can consume a 200,000-word novel in a matter of days.

That is amazing and I am not one of those people. Many of us read slowly.

There are other ways we can still make sure that we read books

In this day and age, you can listen to books. There is almost no excuse for not being able to find audiobooks and the time to listen to them.

Even if you cannot afford or do not want some type of audiobook service, all you have to do is go to YouTube.

Type in whatever kind of audiobook you want sci-fi, fantasy, or whatever genre you would like. You can probably find some very interesting and very good audiobooks.

Also, there is a website called LibriVox which has free recordings of works that are in the public domain. The readers can be hit-or-miss since most are not professional voice talent but you can find some great works there.

Also, there are some wonderful storytelling podcasts put on by professional actors. Podcasts about myths and legends can be helpful as well since you will be learning some of the oldest stories in the world.

A few mythology podcasts:

• Myths and Legends
• Our Fake History
• Mythology
• Mythunderstood

Online reading apps, like TTSReader and Natual Readers, while they sound like a computer, you can put any text in them and they will read it. Some are better than others but that is always an option.

I listened to Stars Without Number just by using the “Read Aloud” function in a normal PDF reader.

Of course, do not forget your local library.

In many cases you can check out nearly any audiobook you can imagine from the library. If you happen to live in an area with a good library, take advantage of it.

So there really is no excuse not to try at least to listen to books.

Again this is always with the aim of consuming these stories so that you are more familiar with how to tell a story yourself.

Each book you read gives you more options as a storyteller and will help you be prepared to run an RPG on the fly.

The Classics are Free!

If you are budget conscious and you’re worried about the expense of buying books or buying an audiobook service or paying for Netflix or paying for Amazon Prime there are other options.

The main one is that classic literature is completely free because the copyright is run out and they are now those works that are in the public domain.

When searching YouTube or looking on LibriVox there are some amazing classic works of fiction and nonfiction that are available for free that you can listen to.

So think about this, if you’re running the Eberron setting in Dungeons & Dragons. You could look for novels that kind of go along with the science fiction steampunk flavor of that world.

You could listen to several Jules Verne novels and they will help you think of situations and complications and scenarios that would go quite well with the Eberron setting.

Recordings of Vern’s novels are readily available and in the public domain so they can be listened to free and legally.

You listen to a couple of classic Jules Verne novels and then you run your RPG campaign.

If your gaming group falls apart or the campaign can never get off the ground for some reason the only thing you’ve done is listen to a few novels that are considered classic world literature.

There is no downside.

Redeem the Time

Who has time for this? I hear you shout. Well, there are always ways we can redeem the time.

• Do you have a commute to work or school? If so, stop listening to morning radio, and listen to audiobooks.
• Do have a job where you can listen to music? If so, stop listening to music and listen to an audiobook.
• Do you have to spend time cutting the lawn? If so, listen to an audiobook.

Truth be told we have the time, we just need to put some thought into how to better use it.

Bonus: This Helps You be a Better RPG Player as Well

Having this catalog of story in your imagination also helps you be a better gamemaster but it also helps you be a better role-player.

It allows you to anticipate situations that the Gamemaster is presenting to you and gives you more options on how to deal with those problems because you’ve seen them in stories before.

• Your character has been thrown into a cell by the town guard. You can ask yourself, how would Captain Kirk escape?
• The dungeon floor just fell away revealing a pit. How would Indiana Jones get across?
• You just gained control of a powerful but dangerous magic item. What would Master Samwise do?

Coming Up

More GMing tips are coming soon. Never miss a post and get free dungeon maps.