Plot Types Part One

This is the first in a series of posts on the various basic plot types. For each plot type, I plan to describe the five acts that make up that story.

Game Masters have always desired to entertain their players by telling a story through the game, but innovations in roleplaying over the past twenty years have encouraged groups to intentionally structure their games in order to tell a good story. Scene framing and campaign-planning techniques enable groups to increase their enjoyment of the game by increasing the coherence of the story they are telling.

Fiction authors use certain planning tools that can be co-opted by roleplayers as campaign planning or scene framing techniques. The most important is the concept of the archetypical plot type.¹ Perhaps you’ve heard it said that there are only one or two stories out there, and that people keep retelling the same stories with different characters. This is a rather melodramatic simplification, but fiction authors do recognize that there are a handful of plot skeletons upon which many stories are fleshed out. I would encourage Game Masters or groups to plan the story of their roleplaying game based upon one of the following seven types of story. 

After choosing one of the following plot types, consider using each of its stages either as a separate gaming session, or as a separate scene in one longer gaming session. For example, if your group chose to model its campaign after the Monster Tale, perhaps your first gaming session, after making characters, would cover the stage “Anticipation & the Call.” Your next session would cover the “Dream” stage and so on. Your entire Monster Tale campaign would last roughly five sessions.

¹ This list is based upon Christopher Booker’s very helpful book The Seven Basic Plots.