Why Story Games Leave me Cold(er)

Storygames miss what matters most to me

In the acting workshop I spent much of an academic year in, I was taught two ways to become someone else.

One was the Stanislavski method: introspective, emotional, and grounded in truth. You don’t perform the characters. You live them. You imagine their world so vividly that their instincts feel like your own. I was good at it. It made sense to me. I could disappear into the role, not by controlling it, but by believing it. Honesty and instinct made you a good actor.

The other was mask work, drawn from Commedia dell’arte. When you are learning, you wear a literal mask. The mask method dictates your posture, your voice, your rhythm, where you look at. You even time transitions from an action to another. It’s formal, external, built on archetype and structure. I was hopeless at it. The moment I had to think about angles, rhythm, stage presence, I would disconnect from the character completely. Others thrived. Especially those who seemed more organizsd, more self-aware, more focused on how they appeared from the outside, less spontaneous.

The formalism that stifled me clearly liberated them.

That’s when I realised: there’s more than one way to become someone else towards others, but only one of them lets me feel like someone other than myself.

That same divide runs through roleplaying games vs storygames.

Why Roleplaying Games Matter (to me)

Roleplaying games are fun. But for me, they’ve always been more than that.

At their best, RPGs are a shared psychodrama: a space where you can step outside yourself, put on a mask, and see the world through someone else’s eyes. You don’t do it alone. You do it with others. Around the table, you create a world together, not to tell a story, but to live inside a different world, if only for a while.

You test values. You explore fear. You try on love or loyalty or rage. You inhabit them, you become someone who believes things you don’t, or who dares things you wouldn’t. And through that shared play, something extraordinary happens: you understand each other better. Not as players, but as characters moving through a world you’re discovering together.

That’s the power of RPGs. Not just the thrill of a great scene, but the empathy that emerges when a group of people believe together. When they leave the world they know, not to write fiction, but to co-exist in imagination.

That’s why I care about systems that support immersion, because only when the mechanics step back can that shared reality take hold. Only when I stop thinking about the story and start being in the fictional world, can the mask truly fit; and the people at the table aren’t just players, but companions in another life.

Story Over Self

Storygames are often machines for producing drama. Mechanics push players toward emotional beats, plot reversals, and character arcs. It’s a design that assumes and rewards a kind of narrative authorship: what would make this moment more interesting?

But that’s a different question than the one I want to ask: what would my character do?

In the systems I love the most, OSR sandboxes, Vaesen or Call of Cthulhu, I try to let the character’s instincts take over, even when it makes no narrative sense. If I’m playing a coward and danger appears, I don’t lean into the spotlight, I run. And the world adjusts, or it doesn’t. That tension between the character’s interior and the world’s indifference is what makes roleplaying feel real.

In many indie games and/or storygames, the mechanics reward you for doing what the story demands. You gain XP for revealing emotions, for “taking a powerful blow,” for engaging the scene in dramatic ways. But if your character just wants to avoid conflict or shrink away in silence, there’s no mechanical support. It’s not a failure of the system, it’s a deliberate orientation. But it pushes you toward performance, not presence.

Incarnation vs. Improvisation

There’s a reason psychodrama was therapeutic long before “TTRPG therapy” became fashionable. Not because it told good stories, but because it let people try on roles. Not to entertain, but to feel. It was a practice of becoming someone else, stepping into different fears, desires, regrets. And through that process, people discovered things they didn’t know about themselves.

That’s what roleplaying can be. When I run Vaesen for my kids and my friends, l want them to inhabit the characters. I try to do it in bits too, playing NPCs, but as a GM, I know how much the switching weakens immersion.

I prefer to just play. But I can GM, so I take it as an obligation. 

Immersion doesn’t come from crafting an arc. It comes from letting go. From being surprised by your own reactions. And that space, fragile, intuitive, communal, is where something healing can happen.

Storygame mechanics are rarely about that space. They want escalation, revelation, payoff. They constantly remind you that you’re shaping a narrative together. That’s fine for collaborative fiction. But in a shared psychodrama, the pressure to perform can break the spell.

I don’t want to write a better scene. I want to live a truer fiction.

The World Has to Push Back

In systems I trust, the world is real, not in the sense of lore, but in the sense of resistance. The GM is not a co-author, but a caretaker. They don’t build the world around us, they hold it together,  alive and (mostly) objective. The game’s world is not waiting for the players to invent it. It’s waiting to be encountered.

In many storygames, “play to find out what happens” often means build the world together as you go. That can be joyful and creative. But it also changes the nature of the experience. The world becomes pliable, cooperative, reactive. And something essential is lost: the feeling that you’re a person among others, trying to make sense of a world larger than you.

When the world pushes back, choices matter. When it yields to narrative rhythm, they may feel staged.

Hope Comes From the Inside Out

I believe RPGs offer hope. They let you be someone else, in the company of others, in a world that’s just real enough to matter. You grieve things you didn’t know you carried. You surprise yourself. You form bonds that feel more true than some in your everyday life.

But for that to happen, the game has to trust the players to find meaning through being, not building.

Many indie systems don’t do that. They ask me to shape, escalate, reveal. They ask me to make things interesting. And I know some people find that freeing. But for me, it breaks the delicate structure of immersion. I stop being the character. I start writing them.

And I already do a lot of writing. I want to live inside someone else’s skin in a fictional world; not alone, but as part of a group.