RPG Club, Telling Tales and Celebrating Fails
Collaborative Storytelling and Role Playing Games (RPG) Club is about making up and telling stories together, with the dice helping to keep the stakes high and the story continually evolving. This term, our storytellers have been surviving on the Mysterious Island.
Want to play?
You will need:
- Dice (the standard is a 20-sided die or ‘D20’, but you can use any and adapt the numbers accordingly).
- Your imagination.
The roles (and rolls)
- Pick a narrator (this is the person who will set the scene and determine the difficulty of the rolls).
- Have at least one player (you can have several though, either taking turns or working together).
Narrator: Tell your player(s) something to set the scene, such as: “You wake up on a beach on an island you don’t recognise. Nearby you can see a line of trees at the edge of the beach and a volcano in the distance, deep into the jungle. You don’t know where you are or how you got here. What do you want to do?”
Players: Decide what you want to try to do (climb a tree to get a better view, make a spear from a piece of wood, look for fish to eat etc) – it might work or it might not. The dice will decide!
Narrator: Decide how difficult the job is and think of a number that the player(s) will have to roll to succeed (you don’t need to tell them what it is though!): Find a stick? Nice and easy! Maybe 5? / Climb a palm tree? That’s maybe a 12…Unless they can think of a way to make it easier, like using a vine to wrap around it…So could be a 7? / Catch a fish with your bare hands? That’s a 15.
Player: Roll and find out if you managed it. Your narrator will tell you after you roll.
Narrator: Tell them what happens next. Did they succeed? Did they fail? How well or badly? If so, what happened? A 20 is always spectacularly successful and a 1 is always almost comedically bad and any anything in between is up to you. If they rolled a 20 trying to catch fish, did they accidentally hook a sunken crate filled with survival supplies? If they rolled a 1, did a bigger fish catch them instead?
Player: Did your plan succeed or fail (or somewhere in between). Do you have a new problem or a new opportunity? Work with the narrator to think of your next step and work out what happens next.
There’s no winning or losing, just a story to tell and the unpredictability of the dice-rolling puts the focus on problem-solving and communicating – and means that nobody knows where the story will go. Children have ended up sending smoke signals from a volcano to signal a passing ship, building luxurious bamboo mansions, befriending local wildlife or gathering improvised medical supplies to splint an injured leg after falling from a tree.
Where will your imagination take you?
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