The House of Nerdery and Curios

“Story” by Robert McKee is a foundational text on the principles of dramatic storytelling, widely respected and almost mandatory reading in screenwriting. It explores the structure of story arcs, character development, conflict, and the emotional logic of plot. Key is the emphasis on how every scene should turn on a value and how stories are ultimately about change. McKee breaks down the architecture of compelling narrative in a way that is both rigorous and deeply practical.

For game design, Story is invaluable because it offers tools for understanding why stories resonate and how to structure meaningful narrative beats, core skills for improvisation, prepping and designing mechanics that support narrative agency. McKee’s focus on conflict, choice, and transformation maps directly onto good TTRPG play, especially in story-driven or collaborative systems.

I very much enjoyed this interview with Robert McKee, where he reflects on his 40 year plus career teaching the craft of storytelling. Essentially, he takes an expansive view of story as a uniquely human technology that gives us the skills and tools for understanding the world and ourselves, making moral choices, navigating emotional complexity and perhaps enduring suffering.

Some key takeaways

• Story is conceived as a cognitive and emotional necessity. How else do we make sense of life’s chaos, interpret other people’s behavior, and navigate moral landscapes etc. This principle has deep implications for design – how can we reflect our story-telling as engaging in a powerful, structured form of meaning-making that mirrors how we process our real lives.
• McKee sees his work in uncovering the elements of story – which have been relatively consistent across history and culture. But, understanding the elements of story is not the same as mastering the craft of storytelling. Just as learning notes, scales and chords isn’t enough to write music, or the fundamentals of perspective, colour and thirds doesn’t make you an artist, knowing story structure, character, and theme doesn’t mean you can immediately write great stories. Storytelling is craft-like, with years of practice, failure, and refinement—not just knowledge of its building blocks.
• McKee critiques the idea of storytelling “rules.” Instead, he sees story as a living form shaped by tradition, context, and innovation. He cautions against eccentric writing that draws attention to itself (unless you’re a master), and instead promotes clarity, honesty, emotional impact, and meaningful form.
• Long-form television, he says, is now the cathedral of 21st-century storytelling, providing the scope, scale, dimensionality and time to fully explore character, contradiction, and change—what audiences crave most. TTRPGs, especially the kinds of long-term campaigns that it can generate, is a more analogous artform to this kind of media than say a movie or novel.
• Audiences (and players) are drawn to two things – revelation: discovering hidden truths about the world or characters and change: watching characters transform over time. These are the core drivers of narrative engagement. McKee notes that in long-form storytelling (like TV series or campaign-length games), characters must have multiple dimensions and evolve across time for the story to remain emotionally resonant.
• This can be achieved via nonlinear storytelling. He argues that good stories don’t need to be told chronologically—instead, the structure should follow the emotional logic of discovery, change, and contradiction. Story, he says, is not a journey (a word he describes as very Californian, which is outstanding), but the struggle toward meaning.
• Character dimension is defined as “consistent contradictions”—traits that reveal themselves differently in different contexts (loving in one relationship, cruel in another). This insight is crucial to developing believable, playable, memorable PCs and NPCs. How can mechanisms explore conflicting desires, past wounds, and inconsistent ideals. Can leading questions, drives, bonds, flashback mechanics be used to reveal contradictions over time?