Whose job is it to bring the fun to the table?

An RPG is a game, but it is not one designed to have a winner and a loser. This idea doesn't get as much attention as it probably should. It is one of those ideas that when you think about it, it seems so obvious that you assume no one needs it stated for them. It's worth bringing up when talking about fun at the gaming table, because if the goal is not to win than what is the goal of this so called "game". I believe that the inevitable goal of any RPG session is to have fun telling a story with a group of people that also want to have fun telling a story.

I have been having some difficulty with one of my gaming groups lately that has caused me to spend a lot of time thinking about just exactly what's expected of who at the table. I get the sense that they are expecting something from me as the GM that I am not giving to them as players. At the same time, I have been feeling that I'm not getting what I need to be a good GM from my players. Fingers can be pointed endlessly about the root cause of the problem, but that doesn't bring anyone any closer to overcoming the issue. To that end it's important to address where the fun comes from in games.

Whose job is it to bring the fun to the table anyway?

The GM is often assumed to be the one that is bringing the fun to the table. The GM is usually the one that invited everybody over, ordered the pizza, and actually shelled out the ducats to buy that game that everyone hopes to enjoy. It stands to reason, a lot of people assume, that the GM would be thought to be the one to bring the fun to the table. That is not the case though. The whole point to any of these games is that they are meant to be a conversation. It's a conversation that leads to a story that is co-authored by everyone at the table.

Wait you mean players are responsible for the fun at the table?

Yes and no. The players shouldn't be responsible for ALL of the fun at the table, but then the GM should be expected to either. Players characters are the protagonists, aka the stars of the adventure. The GM does not control the player characters, so it is up to the players to act on behalf of the characters that they created.

The players are perhaps unwittingly accepting responsibility for exploring the world/setting/adventure when they agree to be the players. That responsibility can be taken as lightly or as heavily as the player wants, but the degree to which they accept this responsibility will usually determine the amount of fun that they have in the game.

So players need to know the adventure ahead of time so they can win, right?

Some players show up to the game hoping to be the audience and watch some awesome things happen that they can react to when prompted by the GM or other players. These types of players are the ones that often end up trying to win the game. They are the ones that assume that showing up and just reacting when prompted will be enough to get a dynamic and interesting story out of the night. In larger groups that is a legit way to approach gaming. You can count on the other players to carry the story through to the points where you get to roll dice. If you aren't going to get to sit back and wait to be prompted then you'll obviously need to know what's supposed to happen in order to make it happen the way it's supposed to.

The idea that there is a story or plot that needs to be followed for the adventure to be successful is a misunderstanding of what the adventure is in the first place. In almost every instance when something really memorable happened during a game it was me as a GM reacting to the player taking initiative to become involved in the story or just to push back against the world in order to make it work better for the fiction as they see it. This is when the player decides they are involved and want to leave their cushy seat at the side lines and join the adventure.

How does a player leave audience and join the game in progress?

This can be done by embracing the simple idea of character agency. This is basically making the character a real person. They have goals, motivations, and make decisions that affect the story. The motivations they have are all their own and they take an active role in pursuing them. Characters with agency move the plot along instead of getting moved along by the plot. The narrative/fiction is created by the words and actions of the characters. The story exists because the character was there to push through the entropy and make the story happen.

Think Walter White from Breaking Bad. The story reacts to Walter and he in turn changes his goals and desires for the outcomes of the narrative based on how the story reacts to him. Nothing in Walter's world is static and that's what makes his story compelling.

The flip side of that is characters without any agency. They are vapid and tend to be moved by the plot rather than affect the plot themselves. They are plot devices that could be interchanged with other characters or removed entirely without the story really being affected. They don't have any agency so they can't change the plot created by characters that do have agency. Without agency the characters are just pawns in the story controlled by the GM not players.

Think of Newman from Seinfeld. He was there as a site gag to give Jerry something to react to, but he never drove the story. His choices never drove the story. Even in episodes where he was featured it was all the other characters with agency deciding how they would react to his static being.

What's player agency got to do with the GM's adventure?

Player agency is everything in a GM's adventure. I have tried to impress this information upon certain players I have in my games. It has had varying degrees of unsuccess. A story without protagonists is boring and nearly impossible to write. Think of any story that had a memorable main character, now try to imagine what would happen in the story if the character didn't exist. If the story went on and happened without them and it was still an entertaining story, then you didn't pick a main character from the story.

This sounds an awful lot like a sandbox game. I don't like those. They are too loosely put together and I don't enjoy them.

This sort of reaction is one I get constantly from my players. When they say sandbox campaign, they are picturing them having to drive all of the story and come up with things to do, because there isn't any overall plot that needs to be followed. I assume they are afraid of this because they think that when I don't explicitly state that it is a sandbox game that I have the entire scenario planned out and everything is happening as I already wrote it. They are afraid that if they are given a wide open choice then they'll make the wrong one and not have any fun. I think that's an excuse to avoid anything other than showing up and rolling when prompted.

For me, when I am designing a sandbox campaign I find a map and then fill it with ideas. It's like making a sandbox and filling it with toys and shiny things and buried things. Stuff that a person inside the sandbox could look at and play with and enjoy. The entire idea behind a sandbox game is that the GM plans out many possibilities and gives the players the chance to go explore the ones they are interested in. If the players and their characters aren't interested in any of them, that is a whole other issue and raises the question why did the players agree to the campaign setting if none of it interests them. 

Conclusion

This all spawned from a specific adventure I run with a group. I was going to do a write up for that, but then it became this, so now I'll do a second write up for the adventure.

I've always tried to make my games designed around the players instead of my own ideas about what would be fun or interesting. It's incredibly frustrating to me to spend time on something specifically designed for player characters and then have them show an utter lack of interest in pursuing their previously stated ambitions, cause a week passed and they forgot they mentioned it. I get used to that and I'm okay with that, when my players are having fun. It's only when they start saying it isn't fun that I start even thinking about this stuff. 

The bottom line is you're responsible for your own fun at the RPG table. You can't expect the rest of the table to perform for you. You can't expect them to carry you like a lump through the entire adventure. You can expect to get more out of the game if you put more into it.