Alais

Find the right type of players for a session of this game – it dramatically improves the enjoyment of it! By “right type”, I mean players that are willing and able to get into the roleplaying aspects of Tales. When you are the storyteller, involve other players, especially the ones that aren’t directly affected by the story. Encourage everyone to make sounds, voices for characters and even antics and movements while you tell the story! Try to remember events and characters involved in every story you tell, and use them again to link stories together, thereby forging a continous, epic tale, instead of random tidbits here and there. That disguised beggar you just met? He’s the same person you attacked and wounded last turn, AND he happens to be the father of the girl you wanted to woe. Now he’s out for revenge!

If everyone does this, there’s virtually no downtime and all the players become involved in every story!

When I play this game with my gaming group, we always set every character goal to 10 Destiny and 10 Story. It never made much sense for us to hide the goals from each other. In this way, everyone knows who is in the lead at all times, and there is more tension.