The troll behind the door

Back in the day I did a lot of role-playing games, Champions, D&D, that sort of thing, both as a player and a gamemaster. In addition to being a geeky pursuit, it is also IMHO, another form of narrative. It’s influenced my writing a fair bit, and probably assisted in my ability to choreograph action sequences. But there’s one thing that’s come out of my gamemastering experience that has general applicability to story construction, any story, and a recent project has gotten me thinking about it.

Now, when you’re gamemastering a bunch of players through a scenario of your construction you have three main narrative problems to deal with. First, the characters run by the players should be central to the story. Second, you need to lead them through whatever plot you’ve come up with as gamemaster. Third, the players don’t ever do what you want them to do. Murphy’s law: if you’ve set up an elaborate dungeon for them to meet the Troll King, and you set the troll behind door #1, they’ll go through door #2. Only one door? They’ll dig through a wall, or go back around and go to the closest inn to get drunk. A common refrain when I was GMing Champions campaigns back in school was, “Look, it’s plot coming, run!”

Note, this is not very different than dealing with characters on the page. If you’re dealing with realistically motivated characters, the basic human reaction is “PLOT? RUN!” Plot means trouble, danger, complication or, at the very least, inconvenience; things a rational person avoids. Even someone whose nature is to run into danger— a cop, a soldier, a firefighter— is not going to willingly do the author’s task of getting themselves in the worst possible position for drama’s sake. Those that do so end up driving what is commonly called the “idiot plot.”

What to do? Well, I have some old advice from a better gamemaster than I, Peter Wells who said in short, “whatever door they decide to open, that’s where you put the troll.” They open door #2, they find a troll. They dig through a wall, they find a troll. They go back to the inn and the Troll King is doing karaoke and buying rounds. The trick is, allow the characters completly free choice, but since you control the rest of the universe, you make sure those choices lead to the consequences you want to happen.