Storium Theory: The Player Characters are the Stars

For today's post, I'd like to talk less about technique than about philosophy--a guiding principle, I suppose, that I try to use for my games and that I hope to see others use as well. This is a principle that applies to Storium games, but also to virtually every other role-playing game you might GM--so though this is a Storium Theory article, I hope it's useful for those of you GMing in some other system as well.

Here is is: The player characters are the stars.

Okay, we all say. I can feel heads nodding there. It seems pretty obvious, doesn't it? But it's actually pretty easy to lose sight of this.

Here's what it means, in practice: if this were a TV show, or a movie, the player characters would be the main characters, the ones that get listed in the opening credits, or whose actors get top billing. If this were a comic book, the player characters would be ones with their names--or their team name, at least--on the cover, and featured in the little blurb on the inside that documents the concept. If this were a novel, the player characters would be the ones featured in the back-of-the-book or cover flap summary, and perhaps their names would be the ones used for a clever or not-so-clever pun in the title.

In much shorter terms: The player characters are the focus, and should almost always remain the focus.

I think we've all probably been there: We've designed a non-player character ally for the players, given him cool powers, and really put a lot of work into his background. We want the players to like him and keep him around, so we get to play him more--kind of like our own player character, so we get to pal around with the group.

There's nothing inherently wrong with that, to be honest. Cool and interesting allies are a great thing to introduce into a game.

Except when they take the focus off the player characters.

I find the trick is to think of ally NPCs like side characters in a TV show--the ones that aren't on camera as much, or don't show up every episode. Or, think of them as the characters in a hero's solo comic that aren't the title character.

They can help, but they shouldn't dominate.

It can be a difficult balance to find, depending on the system in question. In some RPG systems, dice rule quite heavily, and you don't always seem to have a choice as to whether the NPC slays the dragon.

You do, though. It's just that your choice comes earlier than you expect.

It isn't a question of whether the NPC should beat the dragon. It's a question of whether the NPC should fight the dragon. Generally, the answer is "no." Unless, of course, you're having him fight the dragon first so he can lose and the heroes can avenge him.

But he's a cool hero, and a dragonslayer! Shouldn't he...

No.

No, he shouldn't.

Because he's not the main character.

The purpose of a skilled supporting character in a story is, generally, one of two things:

1. To assist the main character(s) by providing knowledge or resources that they will need to address a situation.
2. To emphasize just how dangerous or complex a situation is by failing at something he's known to be skilled in resolving.

(Note that #2 doesn't mean he has to die, necessarily--and in fact I'd try to avoid that in general, unless it really strikes a chord in the story.)

When the drama is at its peak, the chips are down, and the story has reached a critical moment, the story should almost always focus on the main characters--the player characters.

With Storium, incidentally, you can sometimes go a little further with this. Because the system isn't using much of anything random, you can have allies actually on scene to help out a little more freely than in a tabletop RPG without fearing that they'll take the spotlight. It's all in how you craft the challenges, then. You just have to make sure that your narration and the challenge results all keep the focus on the player characters, and emphasize that the ally should help out, but not resolve things himself. It's definitely easier to do if you don't have the ally fight the dragon at all, but in Storium, you can have him fight the dragon and know that he's not going to get a kill with a lucky roll.

Also, a quick note: I use a lot of battle imagery in this and other posts, because it springs to mind first, but these notes apply to non-combat situations as well. Your ally shouldn't convince the duke, forge the treaty, gain access to the building, find the secret file, smooth things over with your ex, or whatever critical situation you can come up with.

Now, I want to bring up one other slight note here: this doesn't mean that the player characters have to be the most powerful characters. It doesn't mean they have to be stronger than their allies. It's certainly easier to achieve this focus if they are, but that isn't the only way. You can have the player characters as a bunch of streetwise non-magical kids allied with the greatest wizard in all of history, who can wipe out cities when he sneezes, and still focus the story on the players.

Additionally, there definitely are situations where you can have the player characters saved by an ally or have an ally resolve a situation...early in a game. If your story is about the main characters going from zeroes to heroes, having a powerful ally show up early on, help them out in major ways, resolve a situation or two (or be featured in the challenge results specifically, in Storium), and then disappear for a while until the heroes are stronger can be a great way to set the mood and emphasize that the characters are weaker starting out. Then, when the ally shows up again, he can be the one that needs help, or that can't take down the threat, leaving the main characters to pick up where he left off. That can really show how much the characters grew in might and skill over the course of the story.

The point to remember is that when things come to a critical point, the actions of the player characters are what makes the difference.

Let me pull in a couple examples here, to see if I can make my point:

• I played in one (quite excellent) game that had an ending that felt a bit underwhelming--because the main characters didn't end up actually fighting the main villain directly. Rather, the main villain--a advanced cyberpunk robot--took control over some construction robots and the heroes fought those, while their ally, another advanced robot, took on the villain. This would've worked great if we'd beat the construction bots and then the villain and our ally came crashing through the window, still fighting, with our ally in need of our help to win. Instead, what happened was that we beat the construction bots and our ally beat the villain. It just felt underwhelming, like we didn't actually get the story's proper final conflict. It's otherwise a terrific game, but it feels like the main characters don't really take the final, critical actions.
• In my own An End in Fire, I knew this was going to be a major possibility. I'd brought in an ally character who was a powerful runic mage, demonstrated in the history revealed over the course of the story as able to do pretty much anything given the proper prep time. The main characters, meanwhile, were just a bunch of human thieves--good at their craft, but nowhere near the same power scale. But they had to be the focus at critical points. I don't think I got it one hundred percent, but I worked on it.
• The mage was initially met only briefly, implied to have been helping the characters out in subtle ways to that point.
• When they met again, the mage needed their help badly, having been caught off guard, captured, and poisoned magically to weaken him.
• Still weakened, the mage became their ally, but needed them to do his preparatory work for any big spells he'd use. He simply didn't have the strength to move around much, especially not going out into the world to retrieve things he'd need to use.
• When the game came down to a conflict between the thieves and three other mages, I made sure the actual plan for taking them down came from the thieves--the actual player characters--and the mage just expressed his agreement or provided information if needed.
• For the final conflict, the players either engineered or directly caused the defeat of each of the three evil mages.
• For one, they set up a situation where two of the evil mages ended up fighting, and kept supporting one side or the other in the battle by subtle means until one took out the other.
• For the next, they gathered the materials necessary for their ally to craft a spell to distract him and take him out. (I feel like I probably should've had even more player character involvement here, but they did strongly engineer the situation.)
• For the final one, their ally mage got ambushed and was being choked, unable to fight. He managed to weaken his attacker just a bit, but the entire fight from that point was all the main characters.

Again, I think I could've probably gone even stronger with the player character focus for An End in Fire, but I think it still demonstrates a decent idea of how to handle having a really powerful ally but still keep a much weaker group of heroes as the stars. By putting limitations on the ally's power, showing that he needed help from the heroes to accomplish things, and finally having him unable to confront the final and most dangerous foe, I made sure that the ones who resolved the story were clearly the player characters, not their ally.

Overall, it's just something to remember when you're crafting the situations for your game: you can have ally characters in there, but don't let them steal the focus from the players.