Don't use RPGs to fix other people's stories

 

 

One of my earliest roleplaying game campaigns is still a source of embarrassment for me. Back in those halcyon days of high school, I had finally convinced some friends to join a game, using a Mass Effect campaign to draw them in.

The first few sessions went well, though nothing particularly daring: saving a politically significant Salarian from pirates after he was trapped in his own vacation home and dealing with an uprising of renegade robots at a corporate testing ground.
 
Unfortunately, I got it in my head to try and fix Mass Effect 3’s famously contentious ending. Mercifully, most of the specifics are lost to time, though I remember some very poorly roleplayed video game companions showing up. I came up with a bizarrely spiritual plot involving all the “souls” of the allied synthetics killed in 3’s cataclysmic "Destroy" ending congregating in a mecha-like super Geth, to be later returned to their original states by a process I hadn’t actually figured out.
 
Not my finest moment as a game master, no matter how I cut it.
 
While the players at least claimed to enjoy it, even shortly afterwards I realized my error. I had shot down several of their

ideas to put the characters where I needed them to be. I let their story get hijacked by NPCs monologuing in my quest to fix Mass Effect 3’s problems, real or imagined.
 
Why do I bring up this tale of woe? As a warning, that no matter how tempting it might be, you should never use your RPG campaigns to fix someone else’s stories. We all have endings or installments were not happy with. And those always hurt the most when they come from a story we cared deeply about.
 
Just as an ending can elevate an otherwise average film, like The Mist (2007), it can also lay an otherwise strong piece of media low. Game of Thrones’ meteoric descent with a rushed, poorly conceived final season is the obvious example.
 
Many of these properties also have licensed RPGs or can easily fit into existing ones. It’s easy to see RPGs as a way to “set things right.” I know because that’s what I tried to do.  But it’s one thing to play in someone else’s setting and another thing entirely to play out someone else’s story.
 
Odds are many game masters will come up with something more coherent than my godhead super-Geth but there are some core issues beyond that.
 
For a start, not everyone might have hated that ending or that installment. I’ve even met people who were satisfied with the last season of Game of Thrones. In trying to “repair” the property, you’re shutting your game off from those who might otherwise make passionate, knowledgeable players.

Even then, odds are your table might have clashing ideas of how the story should have turned out. That’s true of any tale, including original RPG campaigns but if you set out explicitly to fix a story, a player left unhappy with the outcome both times around might feel particularly cheated.
 
But most importantly, you’re denying the table a chance to tell a story they can call their own. Rushing around trying to fix an existing story is going to require work that could be better spent coming up with something different. Even if you do manage to “fix” that bad ending and keep the table happy, I’m willing to bet that everyone would have been better off spending that effort elsewhere.
 
I’d recommend putting that energy and dissatisfaction towards crafting a narrative that doesn’t fall into the pit traps of the one you wanted to fix. Feel free to explore a flawed idea or faction from a new angle or discard it entirely, but focus on what you liked about that setting, not what bothers you about it.

Trust me, you’ll all be happier for it.