Story Feel

TTRPG mechanics have emotional undercurrents that we as designers can use to shape experiences.

Here's a trick I use these days to unblock myself when I struggle with game design: Rather than digging deeper into math, or throwing myself laterally into new expressions and innovations of procedure, I step away from the problem I am wrestling and I ask myself "What do I want players to feel while they are doing this?" The question is not "what do I expect them to feel in the outcome?"; I must root myself in how the process and performance of the mechanic evokes emotion. For the moment, I ignore the outcomes and the responses they draw forth.

I chase down the emotion players should feel. I catch it and am then rewarded with a vector and direction for my design. There are infinite ways to express combat, but once I know I am looking for players to experience terror in a combat, most of infinity clears and I am left with a more manageable list of options and approaches.

I first noticed this feeling when thinking about my own experiences playing and game-mastering over thirty years. When comparing two different systems in my mind, I noted how each could elicit small bits of emotion and various stages in the process of making a skill check, for example. One system generates excitement because it relies on the opportunities for a big swingy critical and/or a colossal failure while another feels more stable yet more powerful because it provided me as a player room to drastically alter the fiction of the game.

Once you open a door, it's difficult to close. I looked for and found those micro-emotional components to all the games I played or read. After some time, I gave it a name: story feel.

If you're familiar with the term game feel, story feel is definitely similar. While game feel describes the intangible yet tactile sensation of playing video games, I see story feel as the intangible emotional sensations of creating stories via play.

Game feel is a satisfying sensation when you shoot an enemy or hit the gas in your race car. Sounds, visuals, and controls contribute to that secondary physical sensation.

Story feel can use some physical components - a d20 feels different from 2d6, which feels different than rolling 60 d6s (I love you Tenra Bansho Zero!) - but the sensations are less about physicality and more about the emotional weight and transitions. If you've ever felt a sense of dread in making a roll to determine your character's fate or felt pure cathartic joy when you finally get a chance to roll to hit some bad guy you've been chasing forever, you are already familiar with story feel. 

I use large examples to make it clearer and easier to see, but the vast majority of the time it is subtle. Story feel often whispers, so you must lean in close to sense the emotion on the other side of a mechanic. I think we as designers like to talk about statistics and probability because it is quantifiable; it is easier to find, easier to measure. But the most important quality of all that math is the emotion it elicits in the people who play your games. What makes great TTRPGs great is how they support and contrast the emotional beats of a story with the emotional beats inherent in creating that story.

When I center story feel in my design, I always find my way.