You’ve all made your PCs. You’re all ready to dig into a big game. This time, you think, the game will be serious and deep, full of emotional complexity and resonance. And then someone makes a bunch of fart sounds, Boblin the Goblin is the only recurring non-player character and he’s obviously a joke, and your biggest emotional payoff is a PC’s binge-drinking celebration of their big gambling win.

You want a serious game full of big feels. You get a goofy game full of jokes and idiocy. The heartfelt depth and emotional bleed you came here for are nowhere in sight. Why? And how can you change that?

Good news! That’s normal. Don’t worry. Complex emotional stories can grow from that fertile mud. And, if you want your game to work differently or are feeling like you’re missing something, I have a few suggestions.

First, relax. RPGs are something people do for fun. They’re often a place for people to let out their silliest selves, to make the goofs and japes that they don’t get a chance to play with elsewhere in life. If you want emotional depth and seriousness, learn to look for that alongside the silliness. Embrace that juxtaposition, because telling everyone to be serious works about as well as ordering people not to think of pink elephants.

Second, you’re unlikely to get deep emotional content right away. You’ll almost always have a settling-in period at the start of a game—you might have several of them throughout the course of one campaign. Let everyone and their characters marinate. Give yourself a chance to learn who is at the table and in the game. Pay attention to what things people say their characters care about, and to what things their characters (and the players!) actually seem to care about. You can speed this up via collaboration and planning with your fellow players, or if you have a session zero where everyone really clicks… but some deep connections only show up when you’ve had a chance to play your characters for a bit.

If you’re not running the game, come up with just one or two big emotional hooks for your character—don’t worry about more right now. These hooks could be core beliefs about life, or morality, or faith, or they could be goals that your character feels deeply connected to, or something else entirely. Sometimes, it’s easier to start with a simple fact or goal and solve backwards for the emotional content. You get bonus points if you’re able to coordinate with the other players to connect around shared goals or themes—that gives your storyteller a clearer set of tools to work with. Then, test these hooks. If those big emotional hooks don’t feel right or don’t work for you, change them and experiment with something new. Throughout the whole process, talk with your fellow players about whatever you’re struggling with (to the extent that they want to discuss that with you).

Next, find ways to make your character invested in whatever is happening in the game. See my articles about being boring and making your character hungry and other motivations. You can repurpose those recommendations to make sure your character is invested in your game’s story. You can also choose specific characters to interact with, and make your own fun by playing with them in character. Doing that with your fellow players is great, and doing it with the storyteller’s NPCs gives your storyteller a chance to make those NPCs more meaningful in your game. Just remember that how you choose to interact matters too; if all your interactions are swapping fart jokes with Boblin the Goblin, you’re sending a message.

If you are running the game, look for those big emotional elements in your players’ PCs. Identify themes and hooks connecting multiple PCs—whether co-aligned or opposed—and incorporate those hooks into your story. If everyone in the party has strong feelings about Duke Eberhardt, include him in whatever plots are happening behind the scenes and then reveal his involvement! If some of your party members have fuzzy feels about the Nakatomi Corporation’s corporate mission, and the Nakatomi Corporation forced other party members into debt slavery, you know that Nakatomi Corp needs to show up in your story.

To this end, throw out a few names and groups during character creation (with very general descriptions attached) and encourage your players to strongly relate to those, for or against. If everyone in your party is opposed to a person, you’ve got a ready made villain or very complicated ally. If the party’s opinion is mixed, you know that introducing that group could create friction inside the party. Keep in mind that some players really want intra-party friction and drama, and some players hate that and just want a solid band of allies working together against outside threats. Find a balance that works for your group.

This also means that when you create NPCs, you should choose how they feel about these other big names that your party already cares about. Each NPC then becomes an opportunity for feelings of fellowship, betrayal, disagreement, or even deep conversations as players try to convince these NPCs to change their minds. Apocalypse World spoke about this with “PC-NPC-PC triangles,” from the perspective of making NPCs in relation to the PCs. It assumed that you had already established the PCs, and needed to create love (or hate) triangles to wedge the PCs apart with your NPCs. But if you create a number of NPCs first, they become a part of the world that the PCs can ally with (or oppose) from the beginning.

Honestly, I’ll probably write another post about this idea soon. It deserves exploration and concrete examples.

As the storyteller, you can also look for more abstract themes that are common to more than one PC and then create NPCs who interact with those themes. For example if there’s a noble in your party, explore nobility; there might be a corrupt noble who sees themselves as the PC’s equal and wishes to offer the PC opportunities for personal gain (maybe at another PC’s expense, maybe not). Or there might be an upstanding noble who desperately needs some inconvenient help from the PCs. Either way, you’re exploring what it means to be a noble in this world, and what the noble PC believes their place as a noble might be. And remember: if your players aren’t interested in the NPCs you’re offering, you can set aside whatever you’ve made for later and try again with something else.

Finally, for both players and storytellers, you can reassess! Are you looking for a different kind of fun, a different gaming experience than your fellow players? Maybe you’re looking for a game of Vampire, while they want an OSR dungeon crawl. Talk with them, and try to meet them where they are. If your fun is incompatible with theirs, find a new play group.