It all started with Kurt Vonnegut, who outlined the shape of eight different story types in graphical form as part of a rejected thesis. Building on Vonnegut's works, researchers recently analyzed over a thousand stories to boil down the core narratives to just six. Applying these types of story arcs to role-playing games demonstrates how some games favor specific narratives.
View attachment 76854[h=3]The Six Narratives[/h]Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington submitted "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes":
The study references previous attempts to classify stories into distinct types. The study concluded there were just six story arcs:
Applying these arcs to role-playing games is illustrative of the underlying systems that shape how we tell our stories.
[h=3]Rags-to-Riches in D&D[/h]The study references Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and outlines categories defined therein that are complementary to the Dungeons & Dragons power arc, including overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, and voyage and return (comedy, tragedy, and rebirth are all also possible depending on the campaign). These elements are familiar to much of fantasy fiction and by proxy, D&D. But the arcs detailed in the study are much simpler, with the rags-to-riches storyline most prevalent. According to Jon Peterson in Playing at the World, the rags-to-riches storyline has its antecedent in Treasure Island:
This narrative arc was prominent in the adventures of Robert E. Howard's Conan, who went from a penniless barbarian to a warrior king. D&D emulates Conan's ascension:
D&D's modulation of gold and experience was originally interconnected so that collection of gold figured into the calculation of experience points:
D&D's level progression works on many levels to neatly stratify how characters advance, from the personal level of power to a dungeon's level to the amount of gold gathered. This isn't of course the only type of narrative told by role-playing games or even D&D, but the game's stratification encourages a rags-to-riches story arc, as we shall see.
[h=3]The Other Arcs[/h]Because D&D starts with characters "in rags" and then encourages them to advance in power and wealth, the other arcs that are complementary to D&D are those that begin with a fall. Vonnegut's "man-in-a-hole" story -- the main character gets into trouble and then gets out of it -- can easily be applied to first level characters. The other arc that applies is rise-fall-rise (AKA the Cinderella story arc), in which characters start out with things improving (first level), suffer a setback (death or level drain), and then overcome it.
More modern role-playing games reject level progression to tell broader story arcs. Characters who do not progress in power in a linear fashion do not necessarily follow the rags-to-riches storyline. That said, it should be noted that many role-playing games still allow the character to advance by gaining and spending points in some fashion, which means that while the rags-to-riches storyline isn't quite so prevalent it's still there. The difference is that the rules do not bias the system nearly as much as the linear advancement established by D&D.
What many RPGs don't do nearly as well is tell story arcs involving a fall, with one prominent exception.
[h=3]Taking a Fall[/h]A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence requires an inversion of the power arc inherent to D&D. Characters must lose something as the game progresses, with a slow, inevitable march towards oblivion. The study uses Romeo & Juliet as an example, but tabletop role-playing has its own version in Call of Cthulhu. Kenneth Hite explains:
In essence, the more a character plays, the worse he gets, until he suffers a combination of death, madness, or homelessness. This inversion of the traditional D&D power structure is what makes Call of Cthulhu excel at telling horror stories.
[h=3]The Other Exceptions[/h]Where D&D is biased towards a "rise" arc, Call of Cthulhu can be nothing but a "fall." As a result, certain types of stories are easier to craft with these games. It is, of course, possible for a "fall" arc in D&D in which the character gets progressively worse over time, but these tend to be either additional rules that attack the core attributes of the game (e.g., level drain, ability damage, permanent hit point loss) or the removal of treasure (e.g., curses, theft, death, taxes). Similarly, it's possible to run Call of Cthulhu as a "rise" power arc in which characters defeat Cthulhu -- this was precisely what happened in August Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu, in which a nuclear weapon is used to take out the eldritch abomination.
The beauty of analyzing a thing is knowing how it works. With the six literature story arcs as a template, game masters can determine which stories they want to tell by the games they choose to play.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
View attachment 76854[h=3]The Six Narratives[/h]Andrew J. Reagan, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M. Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds at the Computational Story Lab at the University of Vermont in Burlington submitted "The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes":
Advances in computing power, natural language processing, and digitization of text now make it possible to study our a culture's evolution through its texts using a "big data" lens. Our ability to communicate relies in part upon a shared emotional experience, with stories often following distinct emotional trajectories, forming patterns that are meaningful to us. Here, by classifying the emotional arcs for a filtered subset of 1,737 stories from Project Gutenberg's fiction collection, we find a set of six core trajectories which form the building blocks of complex narratives. We strengthen our findings by separately applying optimization, linear decomposition, supervised learning, and unsupervised learning. For each of these six core emotional arcs, we examine the closest characteristic stories in publication today and find that particular emotional arcs enjoy greater success, as measured by downloads.
The study references previous attempts to classify stories into distinct types. The study concluded there were just six story arcs:
A steady, ongoing rise in emotional valence, as in a rags-to-riches story such as Alice’s Adventures Underground by Lewis Carroll. A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence, as in a tragedy such as Romeo and Juliet. A fall then a rise, such as the man-in-a-hole story, discussed by Vonnegut. A rise then a fall, such as the Greek myth of Icarus. Rise-fall-rise, such as Cinderella. Fall-rise-fall, such as Oedipus.
Applying these arcs to role-playing games is illustrative of the underlying systems that shape how we tell our stories.
[h=3]Rags-to-Riches in D&D[/h]The study references Christopher Booker's The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories and outlines categories defined therein that are complementary to the Dungeons & Dragons power arc, including overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, and voyage and return (comedy, tragedy, and rebirth are all also possible depending on the campaign). These elements are familiar to much of fantasy fiction and by proxy, D&D. But the arcs detailed in the study are much simpler, with the rags-to-riches storyline most prevalent. According to Jon Peterson in Playing at the World, the rags-to-riches storyline has its antecedent in Treasure Island:
Treasure Island established the quest for riches as the most reliable subject of romances. It popularized the trope of a group of adventurers following a map to a buried treasure, and the familiar device of treasure chests. Indeed, the gold pieces coveted by the adventurers of Treasure Island and their adversaries, the mutinous pirates, are an important literary ancestor of all the lucre won by later wizards and warriors. It is perhaps no coincidence that when Jim Hawkins inspects the map of Treasure Island, its contours strike him as that of a “fat dragon standing up,” a fitting custodian for riches. The immediacy of the narrative in Treasure Island, the lack of pace-deadening summarization and digressions, the judicious use of suspense and a triumphant rags-to-riches storyline (as well as the reprieve of the charismatic villain, Long John Silver) informed many later works of popular fiction. Stevenson’s party of adventurers, with their diverse and complementary skill sets, also inspired future fellowships in adventure fiction: in Treasure Island one finds the marksman squire, the combat-honed doctor and the plucky lad (and faithful narrator) whose stealthiness enables him to uncover the plot of the mutineers and, at a critical moment, to wrest control of the schooner from the pirates.
This narrative arc was prominent in the adventures of Robert E. Howard's Conan, who went from a penniless barbarian to a warrior king. D&D emulates Conan's ascension:
Characters begin with little power, but through trials and perseverance, they become rich and powerful. From the original 30 to 180 gold carried by a starting character, one can expect to deal in sums of thousands of gold relatively quickly. A chart in the third booklet of Dungeons & Dragons suggests that in the first level of a dungeon, adventurers can expect to recover tens of gold after defeating the monsters in a given room; by the second level, hundreds of gold, by the fourth, a thousand or more gold pieces per encounter. Increases in wealth are only one axis in which the character improves; the character also gains levels of experience and superior equipment. The focus on personal enrichment is, however, one of the most addictive aspects of the game, and an element that helps maintain the game’s open-endedness, its lack of any concluding condition for victory. Like the acquisition of power, amassing wealth is an endless undertaking, one which keeps adventurers interminability exploring deeper and darker recesses of the underworld, slaying fouler creatures and lugging away heavier chests of treasure.
D&D's modulation of gold and experience was originally interconnected so that collection of gold figured into the calculation of experience points:
Ultimately, the accumulation of wealth in Dungeons & Dragons is tantamount to the growth of power, as it is in the real world. Money can buy transportation, superior armor and weapons, even magic items, castles, and perhaps most importantly, mercenaries, with greater expense improving both their quality and quantity. These commodities can forestall death, and bring ruin to enemies, just as well as gains in level. For that reason, wealth and level must remain correlated in order for the system to balance properly: gathering riches is a progression system, though an unstratisfied one. Starting characters cannot command vast fortunes, and an omnipotent wizard cannot languish in penury. Plausibility rules out either of those extremes: affluent weaklings would simply lose their fortunes to impoverished master sorcerers. The story of a successful adventurer is therefore a rags-to-riches story, like many a sword-and-sorcery story arc.
D&D's level progression works on many levels to neatly stratify how characters advance, from the personal level of power to a dungeon's level to the amount of gold gathered. This isn't of course the only type of narrative told by role-playing games or even D&D, but the game's stratification encourages a rags-to-riches story arc, as we shall see.
[h=3]The Other Arcs[/h]Because D&D starts with characters "in rags" and then encourages them to advance in power and wealth, the other arcs that are complementary to D&D are those that begin with a fall. Vonnegut's "man-in-a-hole" story -- the main character gets into trouble and then gets out of it -- can easily be applied to first level characters. The other arc that applies is rise-fall-rise (AKA the Cinderella story arc), in which characters start out with things improving (first level), suffer a setback (death or level drain), and then overcome it.
More modern role-playing games reject level progression to tell broader story arcs. Characters who do not progress in power in a linear fashion do not necessarily follow the rags-to-riches storyline. That said, it should be noted that many role-playing games still allow the character to advance by gaining and spending points in some fashion, which means that while the rags-to-riches storyline isn't quite so prevalent it's still there. The difference is that the rules do not bias the system nearly as much as the linear advancement established by D&D.
What many RPGs don't do nearly as well is tell story arcs involving a fall, with one prominent exception.
[h=3]Taking a Fall[/h]A steady ongoing fall in emotional valence requires an inversion of the power arc inherent to D&D. Characters must lose something as the game progresses, with a slow, inevitable march towards oblivion. The study uses Romeo & Juliet as an example, but tabletop role-playing has its own version in Call of Cthulhu. Kenneth Hite explains:
Although no published Call of Cthulhu scenario of which I am aware casts the players overtly as overreaching madmen, the rules work to slowly enforce such a fate on all Investigators in a kind of metanarrative encompassing the entire course of the character’s existence. According to the rules of Call of Cthulhu, learning more about the “Cthulhu Mythos” (whether by reading books, seeing monsters, or casting spells) costs Investigators their Sanity, which lowers permanently as their Cthulhu Mythos knowledge scores increase (Call of Cthulhu 2004, 40, 67, 75 - 76). Thus, every Investigator by definition becomes an overreacher, doomed to the same fate as the hapless narrators of “The Call of Cthulhu” or At the Mountains of Madness. As Sandy Petersen, the game’s designer, writes: “The whole concept of Sanity permeates the game and makes it what it is.”
In essence, the more a character plays, the worse he gets, until he suffers a combination of death, madness, or homelessness. This inversion of the traditional D&D power structure is what makes Call of Cthulhu excel at telling horror stories.
[h=3]The Other Exceptions[/h]Where D&D is biased towards a "rise" arc, Call of Cthulhu can be nothing but a "fall." As a result, certain types of stories are easier to craft with these games. It is, of course, possible for a "fall" arc in D&D in which the character gets progressively worse over time, but these tend to be either additional rules that attack the core attributes of the game (e.g., level drain, ability damage, permanent hit point loss) or the removal of treasure (e.g., curses, theft, death, taxes). Similarly, it's possible to run Call of Cthulhu as a "rise" power arc in which characters defeat Cthulhu -- this was precisely what happened in August Derleth's The Trail of Cthulhu, in which a nuclear weapon is used to take out the eldritch abomination.
The beauty of analyzing a thing is knowing how it works. With the six literature story arcs as a template, game masters can determine which stories they want to tell by the games they choose to play.
Mike "Talien" Tresca is a freelance game columnist, author, and communicator. You can follow him at Patreon.
