D&D General Defining Story

[Vaalingrade]

I don't recall anyone ever calling an anthology or unconnected vignettes a single story. That would seem to be why we have the term "anthology", rather than calling such a collection a novel.

They can be with a framing story. I just wasn't going to go down that rabbit hole in a quick internet post.

 

[Pedantic]

I've come to prefer characterizing the DM as a toymaker. The things they're making aren't necessarily obstacles (though they often are) and they aren't necessarily open-ended situations. They're toys, sets, stuff for the PCs to pick up and play with. I like the conception because you can fit both a complicated dungeon full of traps, or a town with an interesting economy built around magic well-water, or set of factions with competing political interests.

The ultimate point of all those things is to present them to the PCs for their players to enjoy. You can have "story" in the sense of a scripted series of events that make up one of those scenes, or you might have something that's more explicitly jungle-gym, open playset experience based, but the underlying aim is about the same.

 

[nevin]

I think there is still confusion about what a campaign is and what the story is. If I pull out LMoP and the players say they want to play and make characters and we sit down to suddenly one or two players want to turn around and go back to Neverwinter, then we have a problem. That was not the obstacles we agreed to put in front of the players. While being able to make character decisions is needed, there still needs to be some corral for how much.

If you are throwing obstacles at your players that make them turn around and go home I don't think there is a problem with the story. There might be a problem with the table's definition of fun vs the DM's definition of fun. I've seen a lot of DM's blow thier games up by trying to do the marvel thing and make the game all about saving everything. Some players don't want to save the world. They just want to be adventerurs, or save the city etc. Corralling the characters who've said no to what you want is simply railroading. Which if you've decided to only do dungeon crawls etc may be fine for your game. But for emergent storytelling it's kryptonite. No Choice means no buy in, less engagement and angry resentful players who act out and do things that make the game less fun all the way around.

 

[Umbran]

They can be with a framing story. I just wasn't going to go down that rabbit hole in a quick internet post.

If they are connected with a framing story, then they are, by definition, not "unconnected".

 

[Vaalingrade]

If they are connected with a framing story, then they are, by definition, not "unconnected".

Not really. Sometimes that's the point. Heck, framing stories for the longest time in the public eye were hasty things done after the fact, like the various shows that stitched together old Disney or WB theatrical shorts.

 

[Umbran]

Not really. Sometimes that's the point. Heck, framing stories for the longest time in the public eye were hasty things done after the fact, like the various shows that stitched together old Disney or WB theatrical shorts.

With respect, I disagree. The purpose of a framing story is to provide connection.

That said, I don't think our arguing over that will be valuable.

 

[overgeeked]

So, basically, any Adventure Path is bad for play?

Only if they involve railroading.

After all, every Adventure Path has a defined structure to it. You know you're going to do X and Y and Z. You might do them in different order, and you might skip some of it, but, at the end of the day, you're still going to be facing off with that NPC in that location.

Not necessarily. If the referee is being an honest collaborator and giving the players agency, there's no guarantee that anything in that adventure path will actually happen at the table except whatever the starting scene is. The referee does the prep and presents the opening scene to the players. The players then get to choose what they do next. Unless the players have the choice to opt out, they don't really have a choice. If you put the PCs at a crossroads and the $50 AP you bought is on the right, but the players go left...you as a referee have a choice to make. Honor the players' agency or deny it. You're not being an honest collaborator if you deny the players' agency. RPGs are collaborative storytelling. Railroading undermines that collaboration.

An example from my table. I generally don't run modules, but when I do they're DCC modules. I've run them from start to finish without railroading the players. I've also prepped a module and the players turned left when the module was to the right...so I simply ditched the module and followed the players. The players at the table are the game...what their characters do is the story. Not the module.

I'm not sure I would agree that one is better than the other. For one, a structured game can be really good. It can be much better paced than an emergent one (not that it will always be, I'm saying CAN) simply because everyone is rowing in the same direction. Yes, there's some rails there, but, since no one minds them being there, they aren't a problem.

A lot more people mind the rails than people seem to think. It's an incredibly contentious topic and always is.

This notion that sandbox, emergent play, is somehow superior is one that I find really hard to justify.

You're conflating two distinct things. Sandbox is one thing. Emergent story is another. Sandboxes involve emergent story, but emergent story also exists outside of sandbox play.

Imagine this. You prep a module and offer to run it. Your players agree and you run the thing. If the players follow the beats of the module without you putting your thumb on the scales, moving things around to match the players' choices, etc...that's still emergent story. Again, emergent story is shorthand for lack of railroading. You can run a module without railroading. And when you do, that's emergent play. It simply requires the players to follow the breadcrumbs the module provides...without the referee forcing things.

I mean, I probably could, some of the time. When you describe zigging instead of zagging, or a pushover boss fight, you're describing a series of events, not a story (well, not necessarily a good one).

Right. Thank you for saying the quiet part loud. That's part of the problem. People are quietly adding modifiers to how they define story. Good, long, epic, grandiose, etc. Nothing guarantees any story that comes out of RPG play will be a good, long, epic, grandiose, etc one. Forcing the players to jump through hoops also doesn't guarantee those in a story. People are quietly assuming it does and arguing from that position. But that's simply not the case.

To that end, I give myself two roles as a Dungeon Master.

The first role is a pregame role. It is a designer and storyteller role. I put the puzzle pieces into place to tell a good story and set the PCs up to play a key role. Once I put something into place, it is generally locked in and part of my world - changed only through the actions of the PCs.

The second role is an in-game role. It is a facilitator and adjudicator role. I only insert things into the game as required when the PCs do something unexpected. Beyond that, I am just trying to move forward the story as the players engage with what I created for them. I do not try to make something new up on the spot to make a better story - I let the PCs take the lead in determining how we unfold the tale. I will not, for example, realize the PCs saw an easy way around my traps and add another just to keep it from being too easy. Nor will I add monsters to an encounter to make it tougher. Nor will I improvise a puzzle for them to solve on a whim. They face what I have ready to go - and I only add stuff if they go where I am unprepared (and I try to be prepared).

What this results in is my storytelling driving the game outside sessions, and theirs driving the game during sessions. They make substantial impacts into where the story gores that always feels open to them, but that plays into the larger world.

It works for me.

That sounds really close to my ideal.

elements of storytelling that make for a compelling tale.

And that's the crux of the question. What makes for a compelling story? You can't have story without conflict, at least in the western view. I'm aware of Kishōtenketsu but we'll ignore that for now to save everyone the headache. You also need main characters and side characters. A setting. Etc. Okay, so then you also need something akin to story structure, raising tension, denouement, plot points, acts, scenes, action, reaction, try-fail cycles, etc. It's important to note that none of that requires the referee to predetermine the outcome of anything. You can have all that without the referee putting their thumb on the scale.

Robin Laws has done a lot of work translating story structure into game speak. His stuff is really incredible and well worth the read.

As we talked about up thread, even 6-word flash fiction is still a story. Length doesn't make it a story. Having the elements of a story make it a story. It's those quiet parts that aren't being said aloud that is causing trouble. Yes, a one-shot game is still a story. It might not be satisfying to some of the posters here because they wanted a sweeping, grandiose decades-long epic...but it's still a story.

But, and this is really, really important...RPGs are a unique collaborative storytelling medium. They're not like other storytelling mediums. RPGs are not video games, not novels, not short stories, not movies, not TV shows. Etc. In other mediums the audience is passive to varying degrees. In RPGs the players are active. And, importantly, the table as a whole is the audience. The players are not the audience; the referee is not the storyteller. The table as a whole is the audience; the table as a whole is the storyteller.

 

[Umbran]

If you put the PCs at a crossroads and the $50 AP you bought is on the right, but the players go left...you as a referee have a choice to make. Honor the players' agency or deny it. You're not being an honest collaborator if you deny the players' agency.

There are other options.

Like, having an honest discussion with the people at the table about what they all want, and making sure everyone is aligned, and then move forward with that alignment. I fyou did that at Session Zero, the issue of throwing out your $50 AP would not arise, because the players would be bought in beforehand.

Sheesh. People post about this as if human beings can't discuss like mature adults, or something.

 

[Distracted DM]

In the excellent DM's Advice thread, this particular bit of advice caught my eye:


Now, my initial reaction here is a big, heck no. Story, in my mind, is crucial in an RPG. But, stepping back a second, I wonder if there isn't a problem with how we each define what a story is.

To me, a story is simply character, setting and plot. That's why you can have 5 word stories, Drabbles (100 word stories) and various other very short fiction. To me, a story isn't a closed system. But, I think a lot of people define story in terms of a complete narrative. That you have a definite beginning, middle and ending and until you get to that last bit of punctuation, you don't actually have a story, but, once that final bit is in, it's locked in and THAT is the story.

Which, in my mind anyway, possibly explains why you see such different DMing advice. In another thread, we were talking about WotC's adventure paths and is an Adventure Anthology an actual campaign or not. Is it a campaign if you have a loose collection of episodes that are not really connected to each other, like Candlekeep Mysteries or Radiant Citadel? Is Dragon Queen a campaign because it has a definite beginning, middle and end point? Where does that leave things like Curse of Strahd, which is a pretty wide open sandbox until you get to the end and face Strahd. After all, if you complete Curse of Strahd, the final act of that campaign will be bearding Strahd in Castle Ravenloft, regardless of what order you do the rest of the module in. Is that more or less a story because it's open ended until the conclusion? Or, should we only strive for "emergent" stories?

I don't have any conclusions here. I'm just tossing this out to see what folks think.

Just a bit of semantics first, as I understand it a campaign is the entirety of the party playthrough. You can have multiple adventures in a campaign. You can play a sandbox who-done-it up to Red Hand of Doom, and then go off of what seeds were planted in RHoD to take you into the upper levels. That's a campaign, containing multiple adventures. If you start and end with Curse of Strahd, that's the campaign and the adventure.

As far as story, that's really down to the DM and the table. You can have a premade adventure/story and follow that- I do wonder how many tables DON'T expand on the adventure, and stick to the written material very closely.

Personally, I use premade adventures to create emergent story. I'm at my best when I'm in the flow improvising- that's usually when my best ideas come, that's when the best moments have occurred during games. Seeds get planted by those improvs, and over time they sprout or they don't. I basically put out hooks/opportunities during adventures and see what gets the players' interest- and from that I've had entire unplanned adventures. But I do like to have a premade module to lean on as an outline, in case I get lost or can't come up with anything or feel uninspired.

So for me and my tables, I guess it's both "planned" stories in the form of premade adventures, and the unplanned stories that sprout from the things that happen or are added throughout said adventure as we make it our own.

 

[I'm A Banana]

IDK, I think we're dealing with some pretty fuzzy terms, and the thing is more of a spectrum than a binary.

Even your most tightly planned campaign will have, if it is well designed, considerations for what happens if things go off the rails. Also, the plan for a homebrew game might not exist as anything more than "a general arc" + "specific plans for the next session or two." We don't plan the end of each scene or the exact words of each NPC, we shoot from the hip - the story still emerges through play.

On the other side, even an open sandbox will have hooks and elements that are more linear. Okay, go anywhere you want, but there's a lich over here and dragon over there, and once you decide to go for one of them, they have a dungeon and a boss fight, and both will still continue their nefarious activities until your group ends them ("The mind flayer died offscreen of a bad flu" isn't a satisfying end!).

I think D&D's design favors emergent stories, but only slightly, and imperfectly at that. Like, I think of the escalation die from 13th age as a very "story" mechanic - it wants a satisfying narrative of increasing danger. D&D doesn't have anything like that (and modern D&D has tighter fights anyway). D&D also possesses 13 different core classes, which points to something more emergent - you don't know what kind of party you're going to have before everyone generates their characters, and the characters aren't defined by wants and needs and connections, they're defined mostly by tools and attacks.

This doesn't mean that D&D doesn't work for story-focused games, because it can work very well, it's just not really what you're set up to do with the mechanics the game gives you.

There's a bit of a tension between the more deterministic nature of a heavily story-focused game and the more open-ended nature of something that favors a more emergent style that means that different players and different groups (and even different campaigns!) will prefer different places on the spectrum. I like emergent games, because part of what I want out of my play is surprise, and it's easier to get that from emergent-style mechanics (maybe the end of your story is this random ogre critting your ass) than it is from story-style mechanics (your story will end on your terms, where you become the hero you were always meant to be!). You can get surprise in the story, too (does event A happen or does event B happen?), but it's smaller-scale stuff.

Is it a campaign if you have a loose collection of episodes that are not really connected to each other, like Candlekeep Mysteries or Radiant Citadel? Is Dragon Queen a campaign because it has a definite beginning, middle and end point? Where does that leave things like Curse of Strahd, which is a pretty wide open sandbox until you get to the end and face Strahd. After all, if you complete Curse of Strahd, the final act of that campaign will be bearding Strahd in Castle Ravenloft, regardless of what order you do the rest of the module in. Is that more or less a story because it's open ended until the conclusion? Or, should we only strive for "emergent" stories?

I just finished running a group through all the episodes of Radiant Citadel, and it was absolutely a "campaign." Characters stayed consistent, and it became a sort of travelogue vibe of these adventurers exploring all these different lands. It had a beginning, middle, and end. It wasn't much of a constructed story (no villain, no arcs, no character conflicts), but maybe something more like an anthology of Sherlock Holmes mysteries. But it was a hell of a lot of fun, anyway.

I don't think we should only strive for emergent stories. I do think that if you want to run a very compelling narrative, you might not get what you want out of D&D, which is set up more for emergent stories. But if you're making a homebrew game, you should lean into what compels you and your group. My recent Theros game was VERY story-driven, very character-driven. And it was a blast. My Radiant Citadel game was more emergent. And it was a blast. Neither one is superior, at the end of the day.