Story Engines

I had an extremely fun but tiring four days doing Gencon Online.  Since I live in Indianapolis, I could have gone to Gencon in person, but COVID has kept me away.  I did get to host Kakita Onimaru (Trevor Cuba) for a few days, and got to attend the Dragon+ Clan dinner.  It was very wonderful to meet so many L5R players. 

Given that, a pretty short article this week. It's come up in other posts before and I realized I may never have explained it. That's the concept of Story Engines.

Simply put, a Story Engine is something within the structure of a game world that will generate conflicts or problems that the PCs will need to address.  Their addressing the problems they encounter is the source for the adventures that they go on. All decent games have a number of story engines.

Story engines can be structural, event-driven, or mechanical.

A structural story engine is built into the setting itself. It generally is beyond the ability of the PCs to affect or change, but its ongoing existence causes stories to occur.  An example in L5R is The Shadowlands and its ongoing, un-appeasable desire to infiltrate and destroy Rokugan.  The Shadowlands is part of the setting, and many adventures can be generated by people either going into the Shadowlands or the Shadowlands creeping into the Empire.  Structural story engines can also be much more subtle than that. Systematic oppression of the lower classes in L5R is a story engine:  It is unlikely that players will ever be able to end all treating people in the lower classes as less or non-human, but lords oppressing lower class people, and those peoples' response to such oppression is a story engine that can create many kinds of stories.

An event-driven story engine is built off of integrating a series of big, dramatic events that impact the setting, and then those impacts spawn of new stories related to the effects of the previous story.  Heroes of Rokugan, the 4E RPG group, does this masterfully.  In this type of story engine, you begin an adventure that will alter the end state of the world by the end in some fashion, then you can create a new adventure out of the consequences of that change.   This kind of story engine is the best for long term individual campaigns, but it is also the most restrictive. GMs creating stories built off of a pre-existing  event-driven storyline require a module or in-depth explanation of the previous circumstances to create the new event, and then must use a lot of imagination to come up with the consequences and follow them up.  It is great for campaigns, but the original circumstances need to be spelled out pretty specifically.   In L5R, something like the Scorpion Clan Coup might be an event-driven storyline, with other adventures coming out of the consequences of the coup.

A mechanical story engines  use pre-built mechanics within the game system or the world to generate launch points for adventures.  Examples of mechanical story engines can be Shadowlands Taint or severe injury in 5E.  For example, if a character receives a severe injury, such as the loss of use of a limb, due to the mechanical consequences of a roll, it can lead to an adventure around acquiring a prosthetic or curing the injury.  Minigames such as the Prosperity System found here can be used to generate adventures dealing with threat as it becomes built up.  Mechanical things like disadvantages can also lead to stories in a combination with structural story engines.

Anyway, I mostly wanted to get this concept of  a story engine out there this week.  How does this world spawn stories?  What mechanically encourages more stories, and what kind of stories do they encourage?  What structural areas of the world inspire more and more new stories without going outside the source?  Or are all your stories event driven, and how do you come up with the ideas.  All stories are, essentially, a source of ever new challenges for the player characters.  You want to make sure your table has good ones.

It's worth thinking of.