Intro
Alright, I’m finally pulling this one down from the shelf and blowing off the dust. I had the full outline for the piece completed and just… never wrote it.
This is a direct appendix to The Three Layers of Storytelling, which will be required reading for this piece to make sense.
What I’ll be covering in this piece are the more nuanced and complex ways you can utilise that ‘Third Layer’ (which, for context, is Context).
Let’s get stuck in.
A Quick Recap
I’ll summarise the last piece in briefest terms just so that what I mean when I say ‘Context’ is fresh in your mind.
The GM sets the scene, which I call ‘The Circumstances’, the players then choose which actions to take in light of the situation presented, which I call ‘The Events’.
After that, the GM takes the outcome of those Events and puts them back into frame within the wider story. Puts them in context, if you will. Hence, ‘The Context’.
We use our control over the Context as GMs to help give a sense of consequence and meaningful outcome to the party’s actions. We can use it to compliment the party’s actions, or to subvert them.
But we can do much more with Context than just that…
Using Context
There’s actually a lot of ways we can use the Context of a party’s actions more subtly. We can use it to maintain a cohesive tone, we can use it to create a kind of freshness by seeking more interesting contextualisations of actions, and we can use it to create narrative turning points.
There are more, but these are the main ones.
Maintaining Cohesive Tone
If you want your campaign overall to be serious and gritty then the party having a silly Pink Panther-esque heist is going to spoil that tone a little. Good news though, you control the Context! You can recontextualise their actions to reinforce the seriousness of the campaign.
By sticking to a consistent Context for any given series of Events we can very easily create a cohesive tone that stretches across your whole campaign. This isn’t necessarily us undercutting our players’ attempts at a bit of light-hearted fun, it’s just us returning everyone to the status-quo so that we can continue forward. It grounds everyone so that we can carry on with the serious tone we’re aiming to maintain.
Once your players know to expect this Context they’ll very quickly start playing toward it and will work with you on maintaining that overall tone.
This can likewise be done with more light-hearted games. If everything is meant to be silly, absurd, and generally of little consequence then we can continuously contextualise the party’s actions as comedic to maintain that overall tone.
Creating Narrative Freshness
Sometimes we want to mix things up a bit! If the party is in a bit of a pattern of riding into town, slaying the nearby problem-dragon, and being lauded as heroes thereafter, we may want to shake things up. Altering the Context is a great way to do this!
Maybe the 3rd time they go dragonslaying at the request of the local lord it is revealed afterward that the dragon was harmless and protecting a nest of eggs. The lord on the other hand was an evil power-hungry wizard in disguise who steals the eggs for his own nefarious purposes. We give the same kind of Events a different Context and suddenly the game has a new dimension added.
As always, we can do the inverse too. If a party’s actions are constantly being contextualised as not quite turning out the way they’d hoped then we can have things work out perfectly once in a while. Sometimes there’s no catch! This does two things. First, it delivers a kind of relief to players who are used to their actions always having some unforeseen consequence. Second, it fuels suspicion as to why there was no catch, which you can utilise to propel them into the next beat in the story.
Creating Narrative Turning Points
When you suddenly change the way you contextualise character actions, you can actually use it to introduce a wider change in the narrative. Let’s take the dragonslaying example from before. Up until now the party have been heroic heroes, acting heroically. They come in and do the straightforward and obvious ‘good thing’, and are thusly rewarded. Suddenly their actions are contextualised differently when the lord of town #3 reveals his evil plan. This is a major narrative turning point as the party’s aim now shifts entirely toward undoing their mistake and taking down the evil wizard.
This doesn’t necessarily mean the overall tone has to shift. Maybe the next arc of the campaign involves them leading a resistance to liberate the areas that have come under the evil wizard’s control. This is still heroic in nature but will contain very different gameplay in a very different narrative structure than what we were doing before.
More Complex Context
So far we’ve used the very limited framework of contextualising the player’s actions as a Tragedy or a Comedy (in the very classic Greek sense). These are of course not the only ways we can contextualise player actions. Here are some other useful Contexts:
Heroic
Keying directly off what I was talking about in the above section, one can use Context to make the party’s actions Heroic, even if their intention was not to be heroic.
If they come into town to slay an evil dragon and, after succeeding, are lauded as heroes then that’s all well and good. If they come to town intending to steal the eggs of a mother dragon and end up killing her in the process, then return to town where they’re unexpectedly hailed as heroes because the dragon was killing livestock (to feed her soon-to-be-hatched brood, no less) then we create something much more interesting! The party intended to be selfish, now they’re being thanked and rewarded. Maybe this will inspire them to change their ways to be more heroic on purpose in future…
Meaningless
Where Comedic Context undercuts a serious party’s actions to create a sense of amusing bathos, Meaningless Context is the ultimate bathos. It is a total rejection of however grandiose or meaningful the Events felt.
This is a particularly potent Context for creating narrative shifts and even tonal shifts in your campaigns.
Let’s say the players have just spent the last few sessions crawling through dungeons to assemble the relics that will thwart an evil cult’s plans. This was some real classic heroic hack-n-slash, the party went from success to success. There were some dicey moments along the way but they made it through and are poised to stop the Evil Plan just in the nick of time.
They confront the cult leader and activate the relics. The cult leader laughs, snaps his fingers, and the relics crumble to dust. “You think those ancient knick-knacks could stop me!?” he taunts as he ascends to godhood and begins spreading his unholy corruption across the land.
All that work meant nothing.
What we’ve done now is shown our players that if they want to play in the Big Kids Game, if they want to be in the god-killing business, things are going to be much harder than just trawling through ancient tombs for crumbling trinkets.
Taking down the big-bad will not be classic heroic hack-n-slash, it will be something much more complex.
The campaign’s story now enters its next phase…
Subversive
This is one we all instinctively know. The easiest way I can explain it to you is with a phrase I’m sure you’re familiar with:
“The friends we made along the way.”
Subversive Context entirely removes the idea of needing to frame the characters’ actions in terms of their outcomes. Instead it frames them within the meaning of the actions themselves and what value those actions had to the characters.
An alternative example of this is a campaign about a band of thieves seeking to undertake bigger and bigger heists to acquire riches, slaying all manner of dangerous creatures in the process. First it’s a hag coven, then it’s a djinn, then it’s a dragon, finally it’s a lich. In order to set up these increasingly high-stakes heists they seek out experts on dangerous beasts, where they then get wrapped up in a conspiracy by the universities of the land to suppress information on how to kill dragons, further yet discovering that the deans suppressing this information are all secretly liches. For all intents and purposes the party seem to be getting swept up into a much broader story. They still make sure to complete those heists though…
By the end of the campaign the party has toppled this cabal of liches, unwound the conspiracy within academia, and overall made the world a better, safer place. The party themselves though? They’re in their manor houses basking in all the cool riches they’ve acquired, totally uncaring for the impact they’ve had on the world. They set out to steal some stuff and by god have they succeeded.
Multiple Contexts
An even more nuanced application of this whole concept is to have the party’s actions have multiple Contexts. Maybe they’re still lauded as heroes for confronting the evil cult leader despite the plan’s failure (and rightly so!). They weren’t to know the relics wouldn’t work. Their actions were Meaningless, and the narrative turns about that outcome as a result, but also their actions were Heroic in a way and they are rewarded thusly. They’re sought out by a secret society of do-gooders dedicated to taking down tyrants who’ll help them as they seek to work against the evil cult leader.
Or to go back to the heist example of the original piece, maybe the party pulls off the super serious Mission Impossible-style heist, and the Context is mostly Heroic but also the thing they were stealing turns out to be a much, ahem, saucier record of the mayor’s infidelity than they had bargained for. The mayor still gets run out of town, which is a very serious thing, but also the entire town is laughing at the now ex-mayor’s bizarre sexual predilections as the unearthed letters get posted on the town noticeboard. Lastly, the player’s actions become somewhat Tragic when the mayor’s affair partner – the miller’s widow and mother of three – is also run out of town to what is sure to be an unpleasant fate.
This is a great way to introduce general greyness into the tone of your campaign. If you’re interested in things like realism, immersion, and a general sense of simulation, then providing multiple Contexts to the players’ actions is a really great way to help achieve those things.
Outro
The Context of your players’ actions and choices within the game are a big part of how we control the overall direction of the campaign’s narrative. Using the right one at the right time adds so much to our games.
As always this is just a general framework that you’re welcome to ignore, but I think it’s one that really rewards paying close attention to and mastering the use of. If you’ve enjoyed this then feel free to support my work on Patreon! By doing so, you’re also helping support my GM advice podcast The One-Shot Show. If you like what I write hear then give it a listen I’m sure you’ll like it too!
Apothecary Press 