D&D 5E Is D&D a Story or a Game? Discuss.

[clearstream]

D&D is a game: we play characters, roll dice, try to win and not lose.
D&D is also a story: characters are travelling on an adventure in a fictional world, with dialogue and social interaction, plot hooks, etc.

In your opinion, is D&D more story or more game? What are the consequences of that?

Played according to RAW, it is a game. The way you can tell is to read a book, then read it again. Any words changed? Anything happen that didn't happen before? Then try playing through a D&D adventure twice. Of course there will be broad and perhaps important similarities, but there will be innumerable and perhaps equally important dissimilarities. Provided you have a good memory, with a book you can predict exactly what happens after the words "and then the hero swung his sword at the skeleton". It's the same every time. With a game, you can't make that prediction. You can make a good guess - "the 2nd level Fighter with +5 to hit swung his sword at the AC 13 skeleton" - chances are he hit. Sometimes he doesn't.

Another reflection on the distinction is to think about a game of Chess. Imagine we watch one, recording all the moves. After the game is completed, we have the unchanging story of the game. When black moves her bishop there, white always moves his rook there. Before the game is completed - while it is in play - we can't make such a prediction. We can make a good guess, if we know the players and the lines of play, but if we get those same two players to play another game, the moves are unlikely to be all the same.

In essence all stories are retrospectives, while games explore an unknowable future.

 

[Hriston]

D&D is a game. When you play it, it usually produces a story, but not always.

 

[Greg Benage]

Here are Mark Twain's rules of storytelling. My D&D games almost invariably violate each and every one of them. Especially #8.

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.
2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.
3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.
4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.
5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.
6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.
7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship's Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.
8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.
9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausibly set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.
10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.
11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

If your definition of "story" is the dictionary one, "an account of imaginary or real people and events told for entertainment," you can describe a D&D game as such by fudging the meaning of "account" and "told" a little bit. If by "story" or "storytelling" you mean some intentional art or craft guided by rules, traditions, conventions, etc., and with expected structures, objectives, and so on, then D&D games really don't qualify at all. That is, if you use the storyteller's understanding of story, then D&D games aren't.

 

[Yaarel]

D&D is a medium, like films or novels, to tell great stories.

 

[Caliburn101]

Really?

No discussion whatsoever is needed...

 

[hawkeyefan]

Water.

Is it hydrogen? Is it oxygen?

Discuss.

 

[Celebrim]

No, that one's a fact.

No, actually it wasn't.

But asking what cultural artifacts are "about" is always a subjective opinion. The author's intent may be interesting, but it's not definitive. If Shakespeare had written "This is a comedy" on the cover page of Hamlet that wouldn't make it so in the eyes of most people. If I say "Shakespeare is wrong; it's a tragedy", that's obviously my personal opinion. I don't need to add "in my opinion". And you, the reader, shouldn't need to have that spelled out for you.

That is itself an opinion. Different people can reasonable disagree over the above statements, and the truth of those statements is not established. It could be that you are right, and that the opinion you've presented is also actual fact, but given that it is something reasonable people have been arguing about for a long time you can't possibly claim any of the above statements are indisputable or that they are not merely interpretations. All you can do is try to persuade people you are correct, which merely stating that something is a fact does not do.

 

[Celebrim]

Here are Mark Twain's rules of storytelling. My D&D games almost invariably violate each and every one of them. Especially #8.

First, you've not established the Mark Twain is correct, or that his intent in writing the passage was not primarily to entertain. As a noted writer of satire, it could well be that the passage you quote is not intended to be taken as wholly reliable and might indeed even be farcical. Indeed, several of the statements in the 'rules' have notable characteristics associated with being jests or japes, which might render the meaning of the whole quite different than what you intend. And at best, all you've done here is make an Appeal to Authority, which is a logical fallacy.

But even if we assume Mark Twain's authority is reliable and definitive and the statements he makes are statements of fact, surely it is obvious that Mark Twain is not claiming that no stories exist which violate these rules. If the rules could not be violated, there would be no need to outline them. Rather it is obvious that Mark Twain is presenting rules which he believes one should not violate if one is to make a good story. So the obvious conclusion to draw from your point is that Mark Twain would not believe the stories you create are good ones, and we should not conclude that your games are not stories; we should just understand that they are not good stories.

I concur that most D&D games aren't good stories. That they aren't good stories doesn't make them any less stories. The only question I consider really interesting is whether D&D games should be good stories.

 

[Greg Benage]

Okay.

[ducks out]

 

[Celebrim]

Played according to RAW, it is a game. The way you can tell is to read a book, then read it again...In essence all stories are retrospectives, while games explore an unknowable future.

Are you claiming that there is no such thing as interactive fiction?

Or perhaps even more to the point, are you claiming that oral story telling is not story telling if the words are changed between retellings of the tale? If an oral story teller spontaneously improvises aspects of the tale that have never been told before, does it cease to be a story?

And when something is first written down by the author, surely it is still a story even if at that point it is not a retrospective because the author himself does not yet know all that he will write or even where the story might take them? Surely the author themselves cannot predict exactly what happens after the words, "and then the hero swung his sword at the skeleton" until he actually writes them and then ponders what will happen next.

In the same way, the game of an RPG is collaborative story generation engine. Repeated journeys through the engine will result in different experiences and different stories, but each journey and experience is its own story.