8 Strategies for Planning & Running Narrative TTRPGs

Note: An earlier edit of this article previously appeared on my author website, www.shannonrampe.com. 

Each GM has their own distinctive approach to planning and running tabletop role-playing games. The more games I run and experience, the more I try to refine and define what appeals to me. There is no right answer, there’s only the answer that you and your players find fun.

Heading into 2025, I'm experimenting with new techniques and better trying to define my own style of GMing. Here are eight strategies I'll be leveraging to run games that are more narratively-focused without railroading my players. 

What Is a Narrative-Focused Game and Why Might You Want to Run One?

Apart from loving role-playing games, I love stories. It’s what brought me to writing fiction and to playing and running role-playing games. I have always loved the idea that the players and GM are forging a story together. To me, a narrative-focused game is a game in which the narrative matters.

As a GM planning an adventure or a campaign, we tend to think up an overarching story that the players will engage with. And players begin to expect a story to be fed to them that they can follow along with. There’s nothing inherently wrong in that approach (most published adventures follow this format), except that it runs the very serious risk of falling into the plot trap.

If you have constructed an overarching plot—a sequence of events that forge a pre-planned story—you risk taking something powerful away from the players: the ability to make meaningful decisions. At its most extreme, this can devolve to railroading: forcing the characters down a certain sequence of events in order for the plot to unfold the way in which you, the GM, planned it.

At the opposite end of the spectrum are games where there is little or no story at all. Where player decision is all that matters, and character motivation and decision-making is solely based on what the player thinks will be fun or interesting or challenging or make their character more powerful. This could be a classic dungeon crawl or a very tactical, combat-heavy game focused on number crunching.

These approaches to narrative can be seen in different styles or “cultures of play.” If you’re at all interested in this topic, I highly recommend you read this article as it has been very influential in shaping my thinking on this topic.  

For me the goal is to find a middle ground, where as the GM you have a hand in shaping the story, but the players’ characters and their decisions are what ultimately create what we traditionally think of as the “plot.” I want to run and play in games where the goal is to create a story at the table that is surprising for the GM and thrilling and fulfilling for the players.

That starts with the first strategy, almost a golden rule, which is to give players the ability to make meaningful decisions that impact the story.

Plan Situations, Not Plots

I love this classic bit of advice from Justin Alexander over on The Alexandrian blog. The idea is that a plot is a fixed structure that forces your players down a linear series of steps in order to solve a problem. A situation is a problem (or series of problems) without a scripted plan of how the characters will resolve it. A situation poses a question to the players: how are you going to deal with this mess?

It can be challenging to prep situations without planned solutions. You may think, “what if I’ve made it too hard? What if I’ve made a problem they can’t solve?” And in that, you may be tempted to come up with ways they can solve the problem.

That’s okay if you have some ideas – you can use those ideas as clues (see the next topic on Node-based scenarios).

The truth is that your players will come up with approaches to solving the problem—the situation—that you could never have dreamed of. They’re going to do that whether you prep a plot or not, so save yourself the headache. When you plan for a situation, you may develop locations, NPCs, villains, factions, events, and hooks that might be relevant for the PCs. What you don’t do is make a plan for how the PCs will deal with the situation.

Trusting your players to figure that out will lead to sessions that leave you feeling surprised at how things turned out and your players will see that their own decisions shaped how the events—the story—evolved.

The “plot” – that is, the sequence of events that made up the story – happens at the table during the session.

In a Dragon of Icespire Peak D&D campaign I ran, the players were hired to clear a mob of wererats out of an old mine. I used the mine location provided in the campaign book and fleshed out the few named NPCs with motivations and attitudes. I expected the PCs to treat it like a dungeon crawl, clearing out the wererats room by room using spells and weapons. Instead, the PCs began to negotiate with the wererats. The PCs’ employer pressed the PCs to drive out the beasts, and the PCs wound up in an argument with one another about how to deal with the situation. Several of the party members left the negotiation and found a back entrance into the caves, where they were captured by a group of wererats. This prompted the other wererats to attack, driving the negotiating PCs out of the caves. Still disputing amongst one another on how to resolve the situation, they ended up betraying their employer and creating a temporary alliance with the wererats, helping to find them a new home. 

I prepped a situation. What played out at the table was a series of events—a plot—that I could never have planned.

Node-Based Scenarios

Okay, here’s another one from The Alexandrian.

When designing a scenario using a “node-based” approach (also called a spiderweb approach), you create a series of nodes – these are often locations but can also be NPCs, events, or other elements – which contain clues that direct the characters towards other nodes. By planting sufficient numbers of these clues, you can ensure that the players will stumble across some even if they miss others.

Node-based scenarios are ideal for mysteries or investigations, and since they contain contingency clues, you don’t have to worry about the classic linear mystery problem of the players missing an essential clue that leaves them scratching their heads.

Using node-based planning is a way that allows you to plan an interconnected series of elements without forcing you to prep a plot. It’s a natural outgrowth of the prior bit of advice about prepping situations. In fact, node-based scenario design is a tool for organizing situations.

In my homebrewed Planescape campaign, I opened with a mystery in Sigil. I created a series of nodes containing clues that allowed them to stitch the story together. Some of these were NPCs who had information, some were locations where they found journals and other clues, and some were quests that needed to be completed in order to obtain information. The players missed the clues I placed for them at the start of the scenario, instead stumbling into a series of hazards and traps. But they soon encountered an NPC who helped them reach a different node and who was, herself, a node, since she had secrets as well. 

The way in which the players puzzled their way through this mystery and the relationships they developed with NPCs along the way created a more satisfying narrative than I could have planned had I scripted the order the of events.

A Sandbox Shaped by the PCs

Many tables enjoy sandbox play, where the GM establishes a setting, randomly determining events, NPCs, and locations through rolls on random tables as the PCs explore a map.

This places the onus of agency and decision-making on the players, which is great. But without narrative consequences, are such decisions meaningful? If the outcome of the players’ decisions is the results of one random set of die rolls versus another set, is that really a meaningful decision?

That’s an extreme version of an open sandbox. In fact, many things in a sandbox are fixed or at least have enough depth planned out for the players to make decisions that are less than totally random. And with some thoughtful planning and design, you can create a narrative-focused sandbox. Earthmote has some excellent advice for this on his YouTube channel. But the main tools involve creating factions and threats for the PCs to begin to engage with and care about. You still use random tables, but you customize those random tables to tie into factions, locations, and events that might be meaningful to the players and their characters.

As you learn more about what drives the characters (PC goals and backstories), you can refine and revise these tables and the agendas of the factions will evolve and change over time.

Factions Tied to the PCs

One of the most powerful tools for driving narrative without railroading by leveraging factions. A faction is an organization – a religion, a cult, a gang of bandits, a guild, an evil wizard and his army – with a goal. Creating factions that the PCs may want to ally with, who want to aid the PCs, or who the PCs oppose, or who oppose the PCs, is a way of making those factions relevant to your gaming table.

Dungeon World was the one of the first games to make faction play a central element of the story. Each faction has a “front,” an agenda they pursue which, if the PCs or other agents don’t stop them, will eventually come to fruition. Blades in the Dark and Mausritter have awesome faction systems as well. It's a great way to have your setting evolve over time and for the players to have a significant impact on the events of the world.

Finding or creating factions that the PCs are driven to engage with is critical to making them narratively meaningful. Let the PCs come to care about—or despise—a local town, then introduce a faction with plans to raze it. Will the party come to the town’s defense? Or choose to participate in the destruction?

Memorable, Recurring NPCs

NPCs are a way to show your world in motion, to frame events from someone else's point of view. For me, an NPC needs to have a few qualities to be memorable:

• They need one or two personality traits – something I can use to bring them to life at the table

• They an agenda – just like a faction – even if that agenda is just maintain the status quo

• They need an opinion about the PCs: do they admire adventures or loathe them? Do they see the PCs as an easy mark or heroes who can help? Their attitude can, and should, change over time.

• The PCs have to care about them.

I can’t force that last one, but I can increase its likelihood by creating NPCs connected to the PCs backstories, relationships, and factions. And sometimes, even random NPCs can become memorable.

By ensuring they have a couple of memorable qualities, they have some kind of agenda, and they have an opinion about the PCs, you go a long way towards increasing the changes that the PCs may come to care about them.

In my Dragon of Icespire Peak game, the party encountered Toblen Stonehill, proprietor of the Stonehill Inn, early in the campaign. I had decided that Toblen was manipulative and a flatterer, accustomed to conning the local miners out of their hard-earned coin. His agenda was that he wanted to get rich through seizing control of local mines. His attitude about the PCs? He saw them as ignorant outsiders and believed that with a little flattery and subtle suggestion, he could turn their violent aims towards seizing control of a local mine from some unsuspecting dwarves. This served doubly by connecting some narrative tissue to one of the adventures in the campaign. The PCs were immediately suspicious of Stonehill’s motives. They spent several sessions trying to thwart Stonehill, who became a minor villain simply because the party disliked him! His attitude towards the PCs changed – he began to see them as meddlers and set out finding ways to make their lives more difficult. 

By giving Toblen some personality, an agenda, and an attitude towards the PCs, I created a reason for the PCs to care about him and wound up with one of the most memorable NPCs of the entire campaign.

Leverage PC Goals & Backstories

Encourage your players to create characters that are tied into the factions of the world through their backstories, and who have their own goals and wants. If the PCs all have their own goals, they have done a lot of the work for you. Simply create obstacles, NPCs, factions, and locations tied to those goals and backstories and let your players go wild. The narrative emerges from what the players choose to go after and the factions trying to aid or thwart them.

You can make sure the achievement of those goals is challenging and narratively satisfying by pitting the goal against something that's valuable to the PC. For example, the PC has been trying to recover the lost artifact from the demon lord, but to do so, they have to sacrifice someone or something from their backstory. Or maybe a PC discovering what happened to their missing brother requires facing down some unpleasant truths about their family, causing them to question who they are.

Avoid pitting PCs goals against one another, though, without careful consideration and discussion between players. That’s a good way to create frustration, boredom, and/or disappointment in the game.

I recommend checking out Jonah and Tristan Fishel’s book “The Game Master’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying.” Ginny Di did a great video on this topic as well.

What's at Stake?

As an author, one of the ways I create compelling characters is by making sure the characters have goals and that those goals have stakes. Whatever the character wants or needs really, truly matters to the character. If they don't get it, bad things will happen to them. There are all sorts of ways to twist this – maybe the character believes something false or maybe achieving their goal will upset things worse than not achieving it – but the point is those stakes ensure that decisions made and actions pursued through the story are meaningful. 

If you want to ensure your scenes and encounters are narratively impactful, try to clarify what’s at stake. Maybe it is as simple as the characters’ safety – this can be a powerful motivator – but oftentimes you can tie something else into the scene. The party has to fight a bunch of monsters in a dungeon. Why? What happens if they don’t do it?

If you have connected the scenes in your game to the factions, NPCs, and character goals you and your players have established as narratively significant, that question should answer itself. If the answer is, nothing happens, then why are the PCs there?

On the other hand, not every scene needs to have crazy high stakes. Sometimes a scene of the PCs having a laugh together at the tavern or playing out a shopping session can be fun and relaxing. Sometimes exploring a random dungeon or chasing down a lead that goes nowhere can be an enjoyable aside. And sometimes, those unplanned and disconnected bits can provide the fodder for meaningful plot hooks you can deploy later.

What strategies do you use to draw your characters into your game and create meaningful stories and narratives? Do you have your own approaches? What challenges do you face? Let me know in the comments below.