Uneasy Lies the Head, and Telling RPG Stories Wrong

Uneasy Lies the Head is a GM-less RPG focused on telling the story of a tumultuous royal court as a disastrous portent threatens to destroy everything the court holds dear. Perhaps the throne has cracked, perhaps the revolution has finally reached the gates, perhaps the sun has exploded. Whatever the cause, the players — as members of the court — must enact their schemes to reshape the world to their liking.

Each player chooses one of six playbooks to represent their character. They could be the Master of Spies, the Head of the Church, the Performer of Propaganda, or even the Monarch themself. They make their plans, plot their schemes, work their projects, and try to bring their goals to fruition.

What follows is a story of turmoil and struggle between ruling factions. How does the game end? It depends. Perhaps the players all manage to work together and weather the terrible strife that follows. Maybe they fall to infighting and the kingdom collapses. Maybe some of them die. From Game of Thrones to The Death of Stalin, political thrillers and cloak-and-dagger plots are everywhere. It seems reasonable to think you could tell such a story through an RPG, no?

One problem with talking about “telling stories” in RPGs is that there is more than just one kind of story.

I once played in a game where a dark and mysterious Foozle set about bringing an otherworldy apocalypse to the land. Through mystical intervention we saw images of her backstory, the dark moments that led her to seeing the world as flawed and in need of purging. After we thwarted her plans, she was grabbed by demonic claws that pulled her through an abyssal portal. Only one of our party had the time to act.

They watched calmly as the Foozle was dragged to the depths and the crack sealed shut.

We’ve been told stories like this: a tragedy of sorrows and pain that drive someone to dark designs. Her backstory made sense; we could sympathize with her, if we chose to. I did, though my character was perhaps less so inclined.

But there was another character in our party who most certainly sympathized, and had they been given the chance to act, their tightly-held personal and moral codes would have sent them grabbing for the Foozle’s outstretched hand, pulling her free from damnation. And we’ve been told that story too.

My party-member decided which story we were telling. The rest of the party didn’t get to choose.

Is that wrong? Or “bad”? Or is it simply the nature of the beast?

Let’s look again at Uneasy Lies the Head. The game’s ludo-narrative certainly encourages a specific kind of story; it asks players to write out secret goals for the player on their left to follow, but there is nothing that specifies what kind of goal it has to be. It is easy to imagine a game where all the characters vie for power, glibly stabbing each other in the back and giggling at their shared misfortunes amid showers of blood. At the same time, there is nothing to prevent everyone’s goals from being mutually achievable, with everyone working together to overcome a shared crisis.

But is that what the game wants? Uneasy Lies the Head establishes the difficulty target of rolls through voting, which suggests an actively combative game. Whether or not your character can act in a given round is decided by pulling tokens out of a bag, which is disempowering. Ludo-narratively the game is about political conflict, not cooperation amidst a crisis.

But a story about collaboration in the face of a world that demands conflict? We’ve seen that story too.

One could say RPGs are not about telling “traditional” stories, because traditional stories require editing, revision, planning, and structure. Or perhaps we can say that these things improve stories, and so these techniques being absent in RPG game-narrative makes RPGs a poor method for creating a polished narrative like LeGuin or Heinlein.

Let’s be honest with ourselves…any RPG that is transcribed “as it happens” would take some major editing to make it palatable as a coherent narrative. We’d need to cut out all the scenes of discussion that go nowhere, the side quests that serve no strong connection to the greater narrative, running back and forth to get clues or items they didn’t get the first time, and all the anachronistic references to Star Wars or Monty Python.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: All RPGs are Hacks. If your group wants to play a comedic cosmic-horror game, you’re not playing Call of Cthulhu “wrong.” You might have more fun or at least an easier time if you used a system like Triangle Agency or Lovecraftesque, but there’s nothing more or less inherently “correct” about using ruleset differently than its creators may have intended.

Can we say the same thing about a story? We certainly have stories about characters who don’t fit into their story’s purported genre. Spoofs and satires are filled with singular pranksters among seas of straight-folk. The prevalence of “twist” movies suggests there is a place for dead-pan horrors to turn into comedies, and Cerebus Syndrome is not uncommon either.

So perhaps, thanks to its improvisational core, we can’t say that you can tell a story “wrong” in an RPG, unless you have a plan for what story you want to tell and how to tell it. If you do, then telling the story “wrong” is akin to playing the game “wrong;” breaking the agreed upon rules, whether system- or narrative-based.

That said, perhaps what we mean when we think of “telling a story wrong in RPGs” is better framed as “not sharing the same story goals as your fellow players.” If you want a comedic story, playing alongside people who want a serious drama is a game that is destined for unhappiness.

But then again, isn’t that closer to “playing the game wrong” instead of “telling the story wrong?” Or are they the same thing?

So I guess we can sum up the last few posts about narrative in RPGs as: it’s complicated. Far too complicated to sum up in a short post, at any rate.

I suppose we should see if we can finally answer the question I asked a while ago: If the medium is the message, what message do RPGs send?

Well, there’s one more tradition of RPGs that I’d like to address: what happens after the game.

Whether a brilliant book, a captivating TV show, or a one-in-a-million die-roll, when a story excites us, we want to share it. The cliche is “the nerd who won’t shut up about their character,” but I reject that framing. It does us a disservice.

RPGs are at once a story-telling and story-writing medium: with player agency being such a significant part of the meta-narrative and improvisational storytelling the core of game-narrative, RPGs are about creating stories from a collection of disparate sources. GM judgments, established world-building, random dice-rolls, prepared ideas, player intervention, genre expectation, narrative structure…all these factors interact with each other, forcing players to bounce of a thousand different rules and expectations of varying (and sometimes uncertain) importance, all in the attempt to make something worthy of telling someone else about.

Even in more combative RPGs, the message of the medium is about working, creating, and being together. The message is one of failed efforts, mutual successes, and above all; collaboration. All these pieces of RPGs work together to create and tell a story in the same way that the players work together to fell a dragon.

Well… most of the time.

There is a school of thought that the GM isn’t or shouldn’t be an active participant in the creation of the game-narrative, but a passive referee calling balls and strikes, referencing rules, and ensuring that the players remain in bounds of the established setting. But, if the player’s agency is paramount to RPGs, does that mean the GM has no agency at all?

There is another school of thought that thinks the story is primarily the GM’s responsibility, with carefully planned sets and characters for the players to play against. This is perhaps obviously the domain of one-shots and short campaigns, but it’s also the primary ethos behind almost every pre-built module you’ve ever played. There is nothing inherently wrong with creating pre-built characters and handing them to your players, or establishing a specific and well-crafted setting for the players to play in, so it must also be okay to establish a plot-line for your players to follow.

Right?

Next time we’ll talk about what happens when a GM goes down that railroad.