The Storyteller Technique

Even games have a voice. When you sit down and read a tabletop RPG, the game itself speaks to you. The choice you make around narration heavily informs how people learn and play the game. Dungeons & Dragons has an anthropological voice, picking at pieces of the world the way a colonizer might dissect a foreign country. Apocalypse World is famously vulgar and harsh, partially designed to help players jolt out of their traditional headspace. From the clinical examination of Triangle Agency to the meandering prose of Wanderhome, the voice of a game brings a lot to how people read it and what they learn. Emerging game designers often struggle with writing rules and creating engaging texts. If you want people to actually read your game, you want to ensure your game has a voice of its own, and if the game is given space to explain itself in its own words, the text can take on a new life. Let’s go over some advice on how to create and stick to a narrative voice for your text, and how you can apply that to your tabletop RPG projects. <h1>The Storyteller Technique</h1> One of the first pieces of advice I give for anyone when I’ve been brought on to consult on a project is to imagine the game as an artifact of the world which itself creates. A game in a cyberpunk future might be an illegally-downloaded .exe file or a corporate memo passed down from on high. A fantasy game might be found within a wizard’s spellbook, the prayer-chants of a barbarian, or the research notes of an inventor. Imagining the relationship the game-text would have with the world it depicts will inform every aspect of the project, from art and layout to writing and design. <a href="https://possumcreek.medium.com/the-storyteller-technique-f7355573f5d9">Learn More</a>