# RPG A DAY 2024: Sensational session tags: #thoughts #thoughts/RPGaDay/2024 ![[RPGaDAY2024-024x723.jpg]] We are not going to talk about a sensational session that I've had. Much like yesterday, [[RPG A DAY 2024 - Memorable moment of play|I said that nobody wants to hear about your cool character]]. Nobody really wants to hear about your sensational session. The reason it was sensational is because you were at the table, you were involved, and you had emotional investment. Odds are good, you can't set that up for any listener. *I'm* not going to try. Instead, I'm going to talk about things that go into *making* a sensational session for yourself. You want that experience for your own. You want that to be part of what you can talk about with the other people who were there at the table at the time, possibly for the rest of your life. That's a great thing. So what goes into making it possible? Firstly, you need to actually care about your character. Some games are better at cultivating caring about your character. What do you need to actually care about your character? You need to know what they want. You need to know why they can't have it. You need to know what they're going to do about that. If you don't have those three things, there's nothing to care about. It's true in fiction, and it's true in RPGs. All right, let's accept that you have a character that you care about. Now what? You need a situation which puts into conflict, not just that character against other characters, but that character against either the opposition to what they want or the opposition to what they care about. If there is no clear conflict, then there's no concern or interest about the situation. If there's no concern or interest in the situation, there is no sensational session. Now you have a character that you care about in a situation that makes the conflict clear and present. You need one last component to have a sensational session: the ability for your decisions to make a difference to the outcome. If you care about what happens to the character and the situation contains a conflict that connects the character to the things they care about, then you can make a decision that changes the character's relation to all of those things. If you can't make such a decision, none of it matters. In a sense, it's related to the idea of "failing forward" or "no matter what the outcome, something always happens." There has to be impact, even if the character fails. Your decisions have to end with something greater than treading water. If you succeed, something needs to happen in the fiction other than you tick a box that says you're closer to doing something. There needs to be repercussion. There needs to be consequence. If you fail, something needs to happen in the fiction other than your character being dead, which means that you aren't playing anymore. Or nothing happens and nothing changes. The negative counterpoint to those situations occurs when you are being railroaded through a set of experiences that you know are not as a result of any of your decisions. If you are the audience for the GM's story or the slave to random generation, neither one leads to a truly sensational session. Neither one leads to satisfaction. Your choices have to have an impact. Those choices need to have consequence in order to have heft. It is understanding and recognition of appreciation of those consequences that lead to a sensational session that you will want to talk about, that you will want to remember, that you will *want* to share. If you can manage to balance all of these elements at the same time as a sort of weird tripod of game experience, every session is going to be sensational. Your characters will have wants and needs they can't satisfy and motivations to do so. Your situations will have conflicts which come directly out of the wants and needs of characters fulfilling those motivations. The decisions that you make as to how those motivations play out will have consequences, and something will always happen. *Not every session is going to be sensational.* But that's no reason not to try. Every session has the *capability* of being sensational. If you set yourself up for success at the table, that's what you get to take away. See to it, fancy lad