Story Games
Story games are for people who love improvisation and freeform roleplay. We go on imaginary adventures in a lighthearted atmosphere with other friendly and creative people. Together we improvise stories from scratch, with no preparation. It is a combination of roleplaying, brainstorming, collaborative storytelling, and improv. If you feel like stretching your creative muscles - come join us on one of our adventures!
How to Play
Brainstorm
We use the Story Template to guide us through the game. First, we brainstorm to establish the important elements of our adventure: interesting premise, our goal, setting, characters, and challenges we may encounter.
Create Characters
Create the player characters, establish who they are, what abilities they have, their motivations and relationships.
Freeform Roleplay
Then we roleplay - improvise the scenes of our adventure, trying to tell a fun story, making things up as we go.
All players actively contribute to the story, introduce new ideas, fill in missing information, create interesting situations, help to advance the plot and take the adventure in new directions.
Freeform roleplay doesn't have many rules - there's nothing stopping us from doing anything we can imagine, but we trust each other to play fairly - avoid gamebreaking actions, do things that make sense in the story, and try to make it interesting and fun for other players.
Take a look at our guidelines to become a better player and get the most out of our games.
Tell a fun story
We win the game if we have created an interesting story that makes sense and resolves in an awesome and satisfying climax.
Playing Scenes
The Story Template contains a list of key plot points, we use them to guide our improv, strive to incorporate them into our story.
We can play up to three short (5-10 minutes) scenes per plot point, or one big one (no longer than 20 minutes).
Game Master
One player becomes a Game Master (GM) - the narrator of our story. GM describes the world around the players, plays the role of non-player characters, decides what challenge the players will face next, and narrates the consequences of their actions.
The Lead Player
After establishing a scene, the GM chooses a PC who will take the Lead on dealing with the challenge. The Lead can choose one or two other PCs who will actively participate in the scene. The players describe their approach to solving the challenge, the outcome is determined by rolling dice.
Players take turns GMing scenes
The player who took the Lead in the last scene will GM the next one.
Collaborative Storytelling
If the current GM has trouble figuring out what happens next, they can ask other players for suggestions, or tap out and let someone else continue the story. When necessary, we can pause between the scenes for a quick brainstorm and figure things out together.
Rolling Dice
After you describe your approach to solving a challenge, roll a 20-sided die to determine the outcome. If you roll above the target number (set by the GM) - you succeed. Otherwise you suffer a negative consequence, setback, or a complication.
The target number represents your likelihood of success, it depends on the difficulty of the task, situation you're in, and your approach to solving a challenge. GM sets lower target numbers for easier tasks and clever solutions, and higher numbers for difficult situations and risky actions. If you saw characters in a movie attempt something like this, would you expect it to work?
If your character is using an ability relevant to the task you’re attempting, you roll with advantage (roll two dice and take the best result). Type !roll in the chat for a regular roll, type !adv to roll with advantage.
Come play with us!
Come join our Discord server to find other people to play with.
Play Offline
To play offline, you need a print out the rules. You also need some 20-sided dice (ideally 2 per player, but 1 die for the group will do), and a print out of the blank-story-template to write down your ideas on.