The Five Elements of a Good Roleplaying Game


My hope is that by reading this blog, aspiring game masters, dungeon masters, storytellers or whatever their preferred titles may be, will find inspiration and good practices for their unique, creative craft. Hell, even players might find it useful. If you've never seen a game being played, or never participated yourself, this blog is probably pretty useless for you, as I'll skip some of the very basics and go straight to the juicy stuff. This blog also contains some foul language and bad grammar. But this is the internet, so I trust that you are prepared.

Q: What makes a roleplaying game enjoyable?
A: While there are as many answers as there are players, here is a dissection of mine. I call it "The five elements of a good game".


The First Element: Immersion

“If you watch young children play, you will notice that they create games, characters, situations, whole worlds in which they immerse themselves with intense concentration.”  -Greenberg

When it comes to roleplaying one's character, there are a few key archetypes of players: Some gamers enjoy diving into the heads of their characters, while others prefer a 'third person' approach, while others still wish to simply create an avatar of themselves in an alien world with rules differing from our reality. Myself, I'm a third person type of a guy. I just enjoy populating a world with things that I like.

Immersion is a sort of a difficult state to describe, but I'll try. When you are immersed, you can imagine the game world, let your mind paint it with detail, and soon, you'll feel as if you were transported right to the middle of the action. Well, to the same extent as you feel when reading a book or watching a movie.
Immersion and concentration walk hand-in-hand; I often have problems knowing where one ends and the other begins.

The opposite of immersion is the state where you don't give a fuck about what's happening, and you are just texting your friend or playing games on your DS. 

Personally, I've found that players with a LARP background (Live Action RolePlaying, where you dress up and all that jazz)  often stress this element, immersion, over the others. While I do agree it is important, for me it is just one stripe of colour in the spectrum of the rainbow.

No homo.

Anyway, moving on..

The Second Element: Growth and Challenge

“Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.”  -Heinlein

Everyone loves EXP and LOOT.
If you don't speak nerd, that's experience points and the stuff you grab from dead enemies. 

As with immersion and concentration, Growth and Challenge are closely related concepts. Without a challenge, there is no need for growth. 

A knight, defeated in combat by his rival has to become stronger to reverse the tables. This is good for a story, because the knight has both motivation and room for growth.
The knight who never loses or faces any difficulty is not going to be motivated to grow at all. This is a stagnant state, and thus, bad for a story. A story is all about movement. Things need to happen, things need to escalate. Otherwise, it's a crappy story.

My observation is that a many Dungeons & Dragons players emphasize the element of growth and challenge over all the other elements. Regardless of the opinions of my fellow D&D enthusiasts, I think this is yet another colour in the spectrum, nothing more, but certainly nothing less.


The Third Element: Consequence

“Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas?.”  -Probably some other guy than that one dude from Jurassic Park.

Lets say, for fun's sake, you decide to plunge your weapon into the heart of a king that is known for his cruelty and tyranny, right in the middle of a session of his court. In a world where every deed has a consequence, this is a very badass move. The king's guard will probably now chop off your head, but if you somehow manage to succeed, the waves of change will ripple through the entire kingdom. And if you fail and get cut down, the evil king might decide to take his wrath out on your poor peasant friends...

Every deed, big or small, should have a consequence. Especially if things go wrong! Consequence is the spark that brings the game world to life, makes the static become animate. Without consequences, there are no risks, and without risks, there is no excitement.


The Fourth Element: Consistency

“There's a certain consistency to who I am and what I do, and I think people have finally said: 'Well, you know, I kinda get her now.' I've actually had people say that to me.”  -Hillary Clinton

A roleplaying game forms a story arc. And a good story has to be consistent.
If a bunch of tribals are first declared to be immune to magic, and the next day they are cooked into crisp by a magical fireball, the story's consistency has suffered. This is also known as a 'plot hole'. 

Why is consistency important?
Because without consistency, nothing the game master describes is worth memorizing or noting, because it might randomly change on the GM's whim.

If the game master can just pull things out of his ass without any regard to the estabilished facts and previous events in the game world and story, the game will feel flimsy and fake. The players will feel cheated.

But if consistency is carried out well, if the world acts in a logical, realistic fashion, the players will 'get' the world. They'll start to understand how it works. They just might memorize details and patterns and use them in clever, entertaining ways. The story will practically write itself at that point.

The Fifth Element: Control

“I have a very strict gun control policy: If there's a gun around, I want to be in control of it.”  -Clint Eastwood

While the GM has power to control anything he wants, a player usually just gets one character. Through that one character, his options and actions are usually severely limited. There are limits placed by the character's abilities, and limits placed by the characters morals, personality, social standing etc. 
The GM works with the players, together, to create a story. And if a player only gets one character, the character better be important and powerful enough so that the player can have an impact on the way things unfold. Powerful enough to carve his own path.
Nobody wants to be railroaded through an amusement park ride. A game is a unique medium, because in a game, the players can interact with the world. And if the players have zero control, it might as well not be a game at all.