Yes, yes, we all know I’m crazy about player stories in games. They increase engagement, virality, and other social gaming buzzwords I’m not going to bother listing here. But I’ve been thinking about tabletop RPGs this week and how, even more than video games, they are all about player stories.
After an RPG session, what do you have? Achievements on your account? A high score on a leaderboard? A sackful of virtual coins to spend on virtual gear? Nope. You can’t even go back and play it again. All you have is your story. And even if you played through a pre-gen module, it’s still a unique, personal story that only you and the others at the table can tell.
It was these stories that got me in RPGs in the first place. As a kid in grade school and middle school, I had a friend who was big into D&D and Marvel Superheroes. He’d come to school with these amazing tales of his adventures: how he fought a dragon, or beat up a bad guy by throwing a car into his face. Awesome! It was these stories that made me want to play.
Today, countless RPG players are doing the same thing on hundreds of blogs and message boards across the Internet. Sometimes it’s a brief anecdote. Sometimes, it’s a full “actual play” record of a game. And now with services such as Obsidian Portal, it’s easier than ever to share full accounts of whole campaigns and browse the stories of other players. I’ve spent hours reading through other peoples’ game write-ups, and you know what? For almost every one of them… I wanted to play that game.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stories are powerful selling tools. Let’s use these tools to sell the games we love.
