Greetings, travelers! Welcome to Beyond the Audience where we provide tips and tricks for building an RPG show that is loved by both your players and the larger audience beyond your table.
This time, let’s focus on a narrative strategy that does wonders for both players and viewers: incorporating teams into your storytelling. What exactly does that mean?
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Making the Dream Work
In the fantasy genre, there’s a common trope: hero is a normal person. One day hero shows extraordinary abilities. Hero is then rescued by a wise figure. This figure introduces the hero to a powerful group for training.
With many variations, you’ve seen this sequence before. It serves many narrative functions, and for actual play purposes, incorporating a team or faction that your party belongs can delight your audience. Here are three specific benefits you can get from this: access to a home base, a way to incorporate more characters, and branding potential.
1. Home Base
People love having a home base. Time after time, players tell me stories about how exciting receiving a house, a boat, a fortress, a tavern, and so on, was for their RPG group. If you build a faction into the world of your game, you have a way to create a grounded location for your story. Whether your party works for a hero’s guild, a wizarding school, a police force, or some other organization with an established power base, that team requires a physical seat of power.
A home base is helpful because it’s an excellent place to return to between large narrative arcs. Both your players and your audience crave excitement and danger from your game, but high intensity all the time is exhausting for players and audience. They need lulls in the action, interludes to recharge their excitement for the next big thing. A home base is the perfect setting for these little breaks to occur.
People also need those shopping episodes! Jokes fly about shopping episodes in RPGs, but it’s with good reason. A home base is easy to populate with items and resources your characters logically need to advance in power. Shopping episodes engage your audience using some of the methods I discussed in the previous article.
The most important part of having a team home base, however, is giving your players (and your audience) a place to love. The world of your game is likely full of conflict, so an island of friendliness and order is vital to the morale of your consumers.
2. Expand the Cast
Having a place where “everybody knows your name” is hugely beneficial to the morale of your party, but it’s also a great way to introduce new characters.
If your characters are connected to an organization, you have a huge network of possible NPCs at your disposal. A team can be filled with memorable co-workers, quirky quest givers, adorable pets, and whatever else you can think of. Since you already have the forged connection of “being on the same team,” you don’t have to reinvent the relationship wheel with every introduction.
This ability to introduce new characters is also useful for a podcast or stream that features guest players. The freedom to introduce new characters with this network is gold for plot continuity.
3. Branding
My final point about the benefit of building a “team” into your world is probably the most important: branding. Creating a solid brand is important to the success of any product, including your show.
Once you have an organization in your game, you can create a logo to represent them, and that logo can represent your show in the real world.
My favorite example is the school houses of the Harry Potter franchise. It’s been decades since the first Harry Potter book was released, and people still identify themselves by which house they’ve “sorted” themselves into. People still buy specific scarves, patches, notebooks, and merch that declares their house “brand.” Why? Because we see ourselves in one of these groups. The groups feel personal and welcoming to those who identify with them.
You can capture that same feeling with your audience. There’s a power in displaying an enamel pin of a show logo you love. It communicates to others in the know and declares that you’re on the same “team.” This comradery is a key binding agent of successful fandoms.
Conclusion
Ultimately, building a team for characters to belong to in the fiction of your show can be a hugely beneficial tool. A high-profile example is the Acquisitions Incorporated franchise. The whole empire of Acquisitions Incorporated is based around belonging (or rather trying your best to belong) to a specific team.
Another phenomenal example to look to is Rivals of Waterdeep, a show that binds a group together because of their opposition to several established “teams.”
There are hundreds of examples in the genre, so get out there, check out those fellowships, factions, and families, and bring one to your game.
The campaign has ended, but the party isn’t over! There’s still time to SWASH THOSE BUCKLES!
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