As the narrator of a ttrpg game you should 100% collude with your players to help set up awesome moments at the table. I’m not the first person to say this, but I’ve had great success in taking player feedback for cool moments to set up and then deploy them at the table. While not the easiest technique or method in the tool-box, I highly recommend it as a way to step up your GMing skills.
What do I mean by “collusion”? D&D and other TTRPGs are improv, doesn’t it sully the experience to “plan” things ahead of time, like “scripting”? Isn’t that cheating? What is cheating in a TTRPG, anyway?
By Collusion I Mean Collaboration
Collusion is not the best word for what I hope to describe in this article, but it’s certainly the most attention grabbing. A better one might be “collaborate” or “coordinate” but something about the connotation of scheming makes the idea much more appealing to me.
So, in terms of defining how I think of the hobby, let’s start with one core assumption:
Tabletop roleplaying games are a collaborative medium.
This is easy to forget in high adventure games, and I see it in places all across the internet where people ask “how can I get my players to engage with my story” or “how can I write a campaign to do X or Y”. These folks are mired in one kind of discourse - high adventure fantasy ala LotR, Conan, etc - where it’s the responsibility of the narrator to come up with the bulk of the content and the players to experience it.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, but it is wrong to think of this as being the only way to engage with this hobby. The players are there not just to play a game and have an experience, but most likely they’re there to tell a story as well. The story of their character, how they interface with the world and the story, and ideally how they grow and change over the course of the story.
Another way to frame this idea is that old school fantasy games - Dungeons & Dragons but also DCC, Old School Essentials, other OSR games, etc - require the GM to drive the story. The GM is required to drive what world the game takes place in, having highly developed opinions on elves and dwarves, for example, and what sort of villainy or antagonism challenges the characters. In the scope of writing and advice on running old school fantasy, this play style (or running style?) is so dominant that it is assumed to be the only way to do it, a story-driving GM and players passively experiencing said story.
Lots of games also exist outside this play style!
Games like Errant (from last week’s article~) go whole hog encouraging players to invent their own takes on class abilities, working with the narrator to implement them. Games like Oops, All Draculas! and Cantrip have the players decide what the setting looks like (a vampire’s lair versus a magical school for young girls, but the process is the same). They collaborate with each other and the narrator on how they interact with the space, what problems arise from the presence of competing interests, and the experience is better for it.
This would be a ttrpg driven by the players; not in totality if there’s still a GM or narrator, but to varying degrees on a kind of spectrum. Is the GM driving what happens in game or between sessions, or is it the Players?
This is also different from how much prep work a GM needs to do before a session, or how much they’ll be relying on improvisation. Prep and improve form another spectrum of how much work needs to happen between sessions to facilitate suspension of disbelief, or to make things interesting, and also rely on different creative strengths. Prep work is much more the writer’s game (or worldbuilding/lore creators game) while improvisation can much more the actor’s game.
Now, to describe that relationship visually…
This is chart is courtesy of Thomas Manuel of The Indie RPG Newsletter, which you should definitely check out (we all stand on the shoulders of quantum giants, after all).
Prepped and Improvised are the more straightforward of the four: The more prepped a game is, the more the GM creates the world before the session begins. The more improvised a game is, the more the GM leaves to improvisation at the table.
GM-Driven and Player-Driven is a bit more nuanced, so I’ll let Thomas explain:
“In almost all playstyles, the GM kicks off the first session with a clear premise for the players. It is one of the sacred duties of the GM - “Help Us Start Playing”. In a GM-driven game, the GM is constantly “starting” things like they did in the first session. The players mostly “finish” things and look to the GM to start the next thing. This could be encounters, plot arcs, locations, quests, etc. In a GM-driven game, the GM isn't usually building on the player’s actions from the previous session. In a player-driven game, the players start things. The GM reacts to what they’ve instigated. Before every session, the GM is asking, “So my players did this last session, what consequences should that attract? What would my NPCs or factions be doing in response?”
This terminology here is eye-opening, and encapsulates a more technical understanding of what I’m trying to describe. “Classic old school fantasy” certainly falls in the sharp corner of GM-Driven+Prepared, but there are other quadrants that any ttrpg is capable of facilitating, with some being more intentional than others.
Old school fantasy is so entrenched on this GM-Driven end of the spectrum, that temporarily handing over control and working to set up a dramatic moment beforehand feels like a huge leap of faith, when there are so many other games that go even further. Cantrip, Oops, All Draculas! and Errant are all at different points along the Player-Driven+Prepped quadrant of this chart, each giving different amounts of support for this collaborative back-and-forth that I want to talk through and encourage as a useful tool in your toolbox.
All (sic. probably most) games can facilitate games that are in any of the four quadrants, which of course is a spectrum of varying degrees of each.
It all depends on play style, what works for the facilitator and for the play group, and what gives you the most amount of juice to play games and tell stories.
The first step to telling new stories is imagining that other kinds of stories are possible.
With that in mind, the GM taking a player aside and trying to collaborate on a dramatic moment is a great technique to striving towards this more collaborative form of playing TTRPGs, a kind of halfway point between GM-Driven and Player-Driven gameplay.
Every time I’ve taken a player aside to say “Hey, here’s some secret information only you’re privvy to, how cool would it be if X happened?” the player has been excited to be let behind the scenes, like they’re a conspirator responsible for even greater fun or drama in the game we meet up to play.
For clarity, here’s an attempt at creating a procedure for this:
PROCEDURE
Communicate
Take the player aside and pitch the dramatic moment that you’d like to see happen at the table. Don’t be afraid to use a media example from a movie or television, if you’re trying to communicate a specific theme or mood.
Trust
“Trust the people, and they become trustworthy” is one of my favorite quotes by adrienne marie brown.
This process requires you to pull back the veil of suspension-of-disebelief, but TTRPGs are ultimately a game. Revealing a few details from behind the scenes will not ruin their fun, or yours, and will likely improve it.
Setup
What needs to happen at the table for this dramatic moment to happen? How can the player take on the role of a participant in the drama, so that it results in overall greater drama? Figure it out, and let the player act out their role!
The trick is to plan something ahead of time, but by relying on a trusted player making it feel far less forced or “railroady”.
This might be “setup” over the course of 1 session of a TTRPG, but it could theoretically be over many sessions to get from Setup to Deploy.
Deploy
Play the game! Put the stuff you talked about in private in the game in front of everybody, let the dominoes fall, trusting the player to act out what you talked about.
Now let me give you an example.
Red Sky at Morning | Chain of Acheron
Spoilers for the first episode of MCDM’s The Chain of Acheron.
This is the best example I’ve seen of this kind of dramatic collusion (and it’s also the moment that ultimately set me on this path of thinking).
The Chain are a mercenary company in Matt Colville’s campaign setting, inspired heartily by Glen Cooke’s The Black Company. A player in this game, Lars, plays The Captain of this mercenary company as they accept a contract that would go on to destroy them: their target knows they’re coming, they are betrayed, and a demon lord is dropped onto them by the greatest, evilest villain in the world.
Red is picked up by said demon lord, bitten in half, and The Chain must flee the city to avoid total decimation.
An incredibly dramatic moment: this executes Matt’s vision of the company being set back and having to flee from impossible odds, it allows the other officers of this mercenary company to have their moment…(my favorite being Judge). Then, the second in command is handed the card that describes the powers of being commander, told “Congratulations, you’ve just received a field promotion!”
It was also pre-planned! Or, rather, colluded upon between Matt and Lars (the player of Red). They agreed together beforehand to deploy a temporary leader of the company, Lars playing essentially a “dummy character”, playing through a dramatized death before promoting his “real character” from the ranks of minion to a fully fledged PC.
And it was awesome.
Red’s death would go on to be a central axis of The Chain’s developing story, the power vacuum that the Commander’s absence left resulting in so much good juicy drama and role-play.
Collaborative moments like this take some extra time and effort, but they are a really effective tool for ensuring dramatic beats happen and setting up even greater stories. It’s way more fun to remember “hey you remember when Lars got picked up and bitten in half? And we had to sail into The Sea of Stars to escape?” than to be told through exposition that the last commander died, The Chain had to flee and that’s why our adventuring party is here.
So, to bring us back to the terminology of our chart earlier: the GM of The Chain - while running a very trad Prepped+GM-Driven game- talked with their player beforehand, effectively giving us a cinematic that the player was in on.
What if we went even further than a cinematic, dipping more firmly into the realm of Prepped+Player-Driven?
That was how I tried to start my most recent game. January 2023. A long running campaign had just wrapped up, and I was looking for inspiration to start our next game with the same players. Krist - my comrade in The Steel Guild - was the only player and friend familiar with MCDM and The Chain. I asked him if he wanted to try and “pull a Red” and he was enthusiastic to try.
I think it went really well, but I think my Minotaur friend can explain it best:
Narrative Interlude
The bartender took the broadsheet and smoothed it out on the bar.
“Shit.”
Even if you’ve never heard of him, Cook knows everybody. You ever hear someone say “I know a guy, who knows a guy”? If you’re in Talzur the odds are it’s either Cook himself or just a degree or two separated from the guy.
He was so well connected, that when he looked over the obituary section he saw the face of someone he might’ve even considered a friend. Cook couldn’t help but read it aloud, hoping it would ring false in his ears: “Captain Ziri, leader of The Greencoat city watch in Traveler’s Gate, murdered last night in a vacant lot. God damn it,”
There was only one patron at the bar this time of day, a curious old man swaddled in brown-cloth robes. At the bartender’s exclamation, he grabbed the paper. Bits of it were already wet from the countertop, but most of it was legible.
“You alright, my friend? It seems a terrible day for the obituaries. Very full.”
The bartender turned back, having steeled himself.
“Just a damn shame, is all.”
“Who was this guy?” The man asked, handing back the broadsheet.
“You never heard of Ziri? Captain Lid?”
The man frowned. “Is that the guy that charged a line of Greencoats with a trash can lid?”
Cook snapped his fingers. “The very same! Worked the public sanitation beat for years, real working class guy. After the riot and The Drow Wars he turned to public safety. Joined the ranks of the people he fought, hoping to make a difference.”
The man sighed. “Oh man, I’m sorry. Were you close?”
“We shared info from time to time…”
They paused for a moment, the gravity of the moment weighing on Cook’s shoulders.
“With hardship comes ease?” The man said, raising his glass.
“With hardship, comes ease.” Cook replied, picking up an empty tumbler to clink with the patron.
Patrons came and went to his bar, but Cook couldn’t stop thinking about The Captain. Cook made it his business to collect information and rumors, and Ziri had been one of the most influential people in Midtown. Especially impressive, the bartender and secret-power broker thought, since he never intended to be at the center of so much power. He just was. And now, through a night’s worth of iced shakers, Cook Mackenzie kept thinking of how many relationships would have to change in his absence.
A lot of work, sorting out the new web. And perhaps, some opportunity…
Pulling a Red
We collaborated back and forth, deciding that Krist’s “dummy character” would be the captain of the city guard taking mercenaries down into a basement to kill some rats. His unspoken motivation was that he suspected that a local villain would be there at the time, but couldn’t pull the time and attention of other guards without concrete evidence.
So, he’d buy the service of some ratcatchers and find out for himself…
Krist created Captain Ziri, the heroic martyr described in Cook McKenzie’s tale. After we created the framework for this event - and months in real life passing before we could actually sit down at the table and play Session 1 - Krist kept developing the relationships the dummy PC would have with the surrounding area.
What started as just my attempt to set up a cool moment to kick off our next campaign became the death of a vital, well-connected person whose death was felt by the entire local area. The drama of the opening led to a session centered on attending his funeral, meeting many local celebrities and power players, themselves brought into realms of influence and connection by Captain Ziri’s death at the hands of the villain.
There’s a plot hook: we watched a man murdered by a Villain, now we feel a connection to hunting him down and bringing him to justice. Yet it’s more than a hook, it’s a stone dropped in a pond sending out continual ripples. Krist’s actual PC was introduced at the funeral in session #2, a magic-slinging gutterpunk named Idris who essentially was one of The Captain’s allies in the underbelly of the local area. Every time Idris speaks - because of the introduction and it’s the same player - there’s a reminder of his sudden and violent end, and what goal ultimately lies in the path of the group. The defeat of the villain and everything he holds dear!
Krist had developed such a nuanced, well-connected view of this man’s life that it was easy to develop new NPC relationships to his sudden absence. The Captain was genuinely seen as a hero by the people of the local area, with a backstory that touched to many of the areas of interest I’d provided in my original lore document. A child of industry workers, who was denied citizenship due to bureaucratic violence, still winning entry into the city watch through dedication and the merit of his leadership skills.
Player-driven storytelling, and as the GM all I have to do is follow up on it! The ripples are even more important than the original stone’s throw, as Captain Ziri’s death became a central tension for all the events of my original plot to follow around. Antagonistic gangs are interested in foreclosing properties, which is most likely to harm the people Ziri dedicated his life to saving. The gang of ratlings hide and scheme in the infrastructure of public transit, the same industry that killed Ziri’s mother in The Drow Wars.
(Unimportant to our article, but Talzur uses purple worms for public transit, so a dark-elf guild of worm-wranglers are a central part of the city’s urban infrastructure. I could do a whole article on worms tbh).
This is one way to add more Player-Driven storytelling to your old school fantasy. This example has a lot of context and bite to it, which came from the very complex issues I wanted to talk about through TTRPGs, Krist’s willingness to drive the story forward with a backstory document I threw together, and our trust in each other. Collaboration really worked for us in this case.
It was also a fair bit of work! Now that I’ve written through my example, I don’t believe it needs to be this complex all the time. Communicate, Trust, Setup and Deploy can be the steps to help a player secretly play out a session or two as a villain, try and influence what kind of enemies are chasing the player down, or a variety of other scenarios that don’t even exist yet because multiple minds need to meet for the final story to emerge.
In Conclusion
What I’m trying to say, through theory-crafting and providing examples, is that collaborating with the people around the table can provide a far more interesting and dynamic experience if you’ve always run games in the tradition of old school fantasy, which I now think falls under the sharpest example of this GM-Driven+Prepped quadrant.
Player Collusion is a technique I’m excited to share, hoping it goes into your storytelling toolbox, and might even open the door to a lot of other ttrpgs with more robust frameworks for having the players drive the story. Think about the kinds of playstyles you like, or other ones we wish we could be better at, and through practice or setup make them a reality.
It also might not be right for every table. Communication is key here, both for executing the technique as well as finding out if it will land effectively with your group.
I hope you enjoyed this first foray into Tales from The Dripping Tap. Lengthier articles like this come as my own foray into “campaign diaries”, extrapolating useful GM-ing and game design tips from my ongoing game rather than purely relating the story. Please let me know if this has inspired you to collaborate and collude, if you think the terminology can be changed or expanded, and anything else you might observe.
And above all, keep being creative!