by Graham Gentz
Play & Culture Lead
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Hello hello! And welcome to How Myth Works! A weekly column about game design, RPG facilitation, and how Mythworks does its Mythworks thing.
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With “The Goonies” sequel announced, we dip once again into the bottomless pit of nostalgic media. Here in the TTRPG world, we are no strangers to such things, as we can easily track our various “E.T”. to “Tales from the Loop” and others pipeline. As a piece of media, “The Goonies” from 1985 stands somewhat alone for people however. With its large cast of kids in a tale of adventure and danger and treasure, it’s not hard to see why.
So let’s take an RP lens to “The Goonies” and see what hidden secrets we too might be able to uncover for ourselves.
And spoilers ahead for the movie “The Goonies”.
1. Setting the Stakes as Part of the Setting
An easy stumbling block in beginning an RPG session is “what are we doing and why?” Sometimes this is referred to as “the Gameplay Loop.” Your game might have the coolest, raddest art, setting, and character options around. “But what are we doing? Why would we want to do it?”
In “The Goonies,” we get the stakes immediately in establishing the setting. A country club is buying up the foreclosed homes in our kids’ neighborhood to fuel its capitalistic expansion. This has everything you need baked in. It has the necessary looming threat AND the implication of how to solve it without being explicit.
So how does this apply specifically to RP?
Well, TTRPGs are special because they obliterate the line between audience and participant. As the audience for “The Goonies”, we are asked to care emotionally about the characters. Such is also a vital part of the RP experience (See discussions on “Bleed”). But now the players are also the participants in, and I would assert, creators of, that story.
Traditional GMed RP is like a tennis match. The GM begins with possession of the ball. Tossing it up is the Setting, the Stakes, the initial setup of your Ordinary World of the Hero’s Journey. It’s Square Zero. It’s where we find ourselves before the players begin to enact change.
As you serve the ball over to the players, that is the first ask to them of “...What do you do?”
If the stakes are an intrinsic part of the setting, then players will have less of a time drawing an immediate blank. It’s “What will I do?” rather than “What SHOULD I do?”
These initial stakes don’t need to be the sole motivator for the entirety of play. Ideally, they won’t be. The players will naturally create stakes, buy-in, and motivation as they go. It’s hard not to.
But you gotta start somewhere. And starting is often the hardest thing to do.
2. Consequences as a direct result of the players’ actions
A stronger and more resonant story is one where the chain of events are emotionally and causally linked. Which is to say, it’s not just “things happening” one after another in a sequence. The more effective way is that each event could not have happened at all until the event before it caused it to happen. And in turn, causes the next event to happen as a result.
At the Midpoint in The Goonies, a couple vital things have happened: our heroes find the secret entrance into the caves is locked behind them with the appearance of the villains. And one of the kids, Chunk, is captured by them.
I’m going to take a brief sidebar to say “Don’t Split the Party” is an outdated adage and nowhere near as black-and-white as all that. It comes from a Gygaxian era of antagonistic DMs and dungeon crawls who cackled with glee when the players “did something dumb” and fell victim to a missed, deadly trap or a Save Vs Death. Easier to happen when one player wanders off on their own, as well as the party missing their own strategic piece when the chips are down.
The other half of the complaint is that it essentially doubles the cognitive load for the GM. Again, not necessarily true. We have many, many TTRPG now that are not explicitly “party-based” where it is expected that every player character will more or less be in the same imagined physical space at the same time.
So our Midpoint. A lot has happened that all complicate the current action and are a direct result of the players’ actions. Using their pirate map, the Goonies discover the secret entrance. Chunk hides in the old refrigerator instead of following, and, as a result, is captured. Now our player characters can’t go back, and now must engage with the traps and treasures that await them. And Chunk’s player gets to have an initially harrowing experience being imprisoned with everyone’s favorite “Hey You Guys”ing Sloth. Let us also not forget that the “oh wait, that monster has thoughts and feelings like me” is a beat that always hits, especially when it is initiated by a player not interested in problem-solving with violence and facilitated with a willing GM.
Things didn’t just “happen.” And the hypothetical GM introduced consequences that weren’t arbitrary. Which, in addition to establishing a table culture of fairness, also results in a more emotional resonant and impactful game.
3. The Things That Really Matter
The surface level plotting of The Goonies is clearcut and easy to understand. The neighborhood is under threat. The kids need money. They search for treasure to solve it. The villains create obstacles in their path.
You need that chassis for the session to be placed in. But it’s not what makes the game special.
What are the experiences in RP that stick with you forever? What are the ones you remember so vividly, even with a sense of wonder that they happened at all?
Yes, the kids get to our climactic encounter of almost walking the plank, Chunk and Sloth have their heroic return, the villains even fall for the final boobytrap due to their greed where the players get the satisfaction of outwitting them.
But the moments that matter are the ones like this speech from Mouth. Or when Mikey recognizes the legendary One-Eyed Willy not as a pirate, but as a Goonie– a kindred spirit as an outcast seeking adventure.
So what are these moments in RP? Well, they’re offers. When I’m facilitating, I’m paying most attention to the players’ character concepts and the choices they’re making in-game. People don’t have to know precisely what kind of story they’re trying to tell to be telling a story at all. It is the natural result of how we work as human beings.
You could call this Setup and Payoff. You could call it “character moments” or revelations. I think of them as offers as your role in facilitating. A player doesn’t have to automatically accept a narrative truth about their character’s internal life. But if it feels good or true or interesting to them, they can take the idea and run with it.
It’s active listening, choosing your moments, and sharing agency at the table.
That’s what it’s all about.
