The Flexibility / Guidance Scale
Tabletop Narrators: If you’re going to be a certain amount of inflexible, you need to provide a proportionate amount of guidance. It's pretty much Barney Stinson's "Hot / Crazy Scale" but for gaming.
When it comes to Narrator flexibility there are a lot of opinions and judgments out there, but there aren’t many hard and fast rules that apply universally. The best approach I have found is “flexible enough to be collaborative but still respectful of your prep and overall story direction.” I don’t particularly love it when players treat the Narrator like an infinite content generator improvising a sandbox for them to play in however they please, nor do I love it when a Narrator treats their story like a museum that players can visit and behold but not really participate in. But those are extremes on the bell curve, most tables fall between them, and most of that in between space is negotiable even if it’s a question of fit and preference. It’s pretty subjective.
However, the way flexibility interacts with the need for guidance is wholly objective. The more the players need to adhere to the Narrator’s plans in order to make things happen or push plot forward, the clearer the Narrator needs to be about their expectations and the more skillful they have to be in communicating them. Otherwise the Narrator will end up doing a lot of prep that doesn’t really get interacted with, the players will feel like their efforts and roleplay aren’t making a difference, and ultimately both sides will probably walk away from the table feeling ignored and unappreciated.
Think about it like playing Battleship. Narrator flexibility is essentially the scope of what actions they consider significant or that would move the plot forward, and that’s the number of ships on the board. The player trying to do significant things that have impact on the story is them guessing spaces. You want the players to hit! The more players hit the more the Narrator’s ship layout is getting engaged with, and the more the players feel like they’re having an impact and succeeding. So if the Narrator has a bunch of ships out there the players will hit naturally just by doing what they think is appropriate. If there are only a couple of ships, though… the Narrator needs to give a hint about where they are so the players know where to focus their guesses, or the players will just keep missing and get frustrated not knowing what they could be doing better.
Put commentary about “hand holding” aside. That’s a toxic (albeit very prevalent) mindset. Tabletop is all about adequate communication, at every level. So remember the scale! Unless your idea of a good time is everyone sitting around the game table going “...okay… well, now what…” then you need to be keeping in mind how specific your plans are and how much direction your players will need as a result.
