Yesterday, our daughter S continued her Dark Sun Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game for Jung, J, and me. Yet again I was amazed at how effortlessly she spun her story. She created compelling characters with clear motivations and even deliberately presented us with a thorny moral dilemma. Jung, J, and I experienced some frustration, though, when we felt that as we discussed our options, S in turn made each of our proposed courses of action unattractive by altering her story in one way or another. We felt as if she was trying to force us in a particular direction and yet none of us could guess what direction that was. Among role-playing gamers this is referred to as “railroading.” The Game Master’s story is laid out like train tracks and the players’ story is like the train. The players can influence the story’s pace, but not its direction. This railroading reminded me of the post I wrote in mid-November:

[One mistake a Game Master can make] is to be so set on ensuring a particular outcome that no matter what the players do, the results remain the same. This quickly leads to a feeling of futility in the players and they lose the desire to play. There is no point to their making any decisions at the table if the Game Master has pre-scripted the entire game. The play disappears.

S’s largest growing edge with regard to being a Game Master is this: ensuring that the players feel that they have real agency in the game. She has a tendency to run the game a bit more like interactive theater, narrating large swaths of the story with minimal input from the players. I know that as S matures as a Game Master, she will learn how to co-create stories more with her players, allowing them to go “off the rails” and to contribute equally to the events in the game.

My experience as a player “on the rails” yesterday got me thinking about a similarity between role-playing games and real life.

When the players’ choices in a role-playing game are limited because they’re being guided too much by the Game Master, they don’t have the freedom to express and experience their characters fully. It is for the same reason that following conventional thought, doing what society expects and playing a pre-defined role can make our lives very small and we can sometimes feel like the life we are living isn’t very different from those around us. We lose a good portion of our individuality and our humanity. Living life inside the box without questioning the assumptions which were conditioned into us is the same as choosing to be “railroaded” into a life which is mostly narrated by others. We allow ourselves to sit back and give a bare minimum of input into the grand story of our lives.

For much of our lives, Jung and I thought that this was “just the way life is,” but now we have decided to test that largest of assumptions. We have made ourselves test subjects in the laboratory of the world in order to prove that living honestly, making conscious decisions and taking ownership of our own lives is a much richer and more joyful way to live. We believe that if we endeavor to have as much agency over our roles in life as we can and to express and experience our personal characters fully, not only will it make our own lives fuller, but it will make for a richer worldwide story for all.