I love this quote from Vincent Baker : “The purpose of a game isn’t to balance, but to fall rapidly out of balance and accelerate into an end state. Even an exquisitely balanced game like Go, in play, is an unfolding catastrophe, an inevitable disaster for one side or the other. When I design, whenever I find two players, two characters, or a situation in balance, I look for the most aggressive and expedient way to unbalance them. It’s usually a simple thing to do: just make somebody’s decision binding.”
All good stories are collections of Jenga towers and inevitably they fall – they must fall. How you collectively make them fall and the cool shit that happens along the way is what we call a game. The role of the MC is to be ruthlessly pulling blocks.