I understand where this aversion comes from. Since the earliest days of this blog, I've often shared it. At the same time, I don't believe stories have no place in roleplaying games. However, like many others, my earliest experience as a roleplayer were from a time when attempts to inject "story," – by which I mean a deliberate, authorial structure of rising and falling action, dramatic turning points, and satisfying resolutions – were usually ham-fisted at best and outright railroads at worst.
There’s a reason why one of Grognardia’s most widely read (and most frequently argued about) posts is “How Dragonlance Ruined Everything.” The post touched a nerve because it spoke to something many of us experienced firsthand: modules and campaigns that confused narrative structure with narrative control. These were adventures where the outcomes were preordained, its dramatic beats carefully plotted, and the players expected to play along rather than play through. The referee, in such cases, became less an impartial adjudicator and more a frustrated novelist trying to drag the player characters through a plot that offered very little in the way of choice. Unsurprisingly, this left a bad taste in the mouths of those who cherished the open-ended freedom of the early days.
But here’s the thing: an emergent story is still story.
Take my House of Worms campaign for Empire of the Petal Throne. More than a decade of weekly play has produced a very detailed chronicle of events, consisting of actions taken, choices made, consequences endured, victories won, and, occasionally, defeats suffered. None of this was plotted out in advance. Most of it arose organically, through the interaction of player decisions, random tables, misread intentions, and lucky – or bad – rolls. Yet, looking back, I can trace arcs and patterns. I can recount the rise and fall of rivalries and the strange twists of fate that brought certain aspects of the campaign to greater prominence while others dropped away. I can talk about betrayals and reconciliations, discoveries and reversals. That’s a story. It may not be a tidy one. It may not resolve neatly – but it's a story nonetheless.
Too often, I think certain strands of OSR thought fails to acknowledge this and I don't exclude myself from this criticism. In rejecting plotted stories, we too quickly rejected the very idea of story itself. However, stories don’t have to be plotted. They don’t have to follow the Hero’s Journey. They don’t even need to have a central protagonist. They can simply emerge from play, from the piling up of decisions and consequences, the unpredictable results of dice rolls, and the slow evolution of characters over time. This is, in my view, one of the greatest strengths of the hobby.
Likewise, many classic modules – yes, even old school ones – contain what we might call a plot, even if it's implicit or only lightly sketched. A fortress inhabited by giants who've been raiding civilized lands is not just a list of rooms and monsters. It's a framework for conflict, danger, and mystery. It implies certain questions and challenges: Who are these giants? What do they want? Why are they raiding the lands of Men? These questions don’t force a narrative, but they do provide the raw material out of which one might grow. A good adventure isn’t inert; it suggests motion and consequence, even if it doesn’t prescribe them.
That’s where I think the OSR’s kneejerk hostility to “story” often goes astray. It’s an understandable overreaction, but an overreaction nonetheless. It’s shaped by the bad experiences of railroads, boxed text, and scripted scenes. However, in pushing back against those things, we risk throwing out something valuable. If we mistake any form of narrative structure for narrative imposition, we blind ourselves to one of the most powerful and rewarding aspects of roleplaying: the ability to discover a story in play, rather than impose one from above.
James,
ReplyDeleteI don't know how you do it, but yet again your insight cuts through like a vorpal sword. Very clear and concise. We done, sir. I couldn't have put it any better.
I capitalize Narrative for a reason. The lurking shadow that has possessed almost all other institutions, wearing the former tropes like a skinsuit converges towards its dream of eternal darkness:
ReplyDeleteJournalism has been replaced by Narrative. Industry has been replaced by Narrative. Community has been replaced by Narrative. And yes, story has been replaced by Narrative.
We have kept our mouths shut and our heads down in a society operating - seemingly - as it always has, hoping to find an ally who remembers what life was like before the insidious tendrils of Narrative began to overtake our friends and family and co-workers, slowly overtaking them, now playing them like puppets.
Finally, we find someone we recognize from Before, a mustachioed, curly haired professor who looks an awful lot like Donald Sutherland in 1978. We approach cautiously, hopefully, thirsting for the connection to the people we were born to be, only for his eyes to widen, his finger to point, his mouth to gape, and for the inhuman howl of the Narrative to pierce and condemn us.
I do not recall you, ever once - of all people, oh Keeper of the Pulp Fantasy Library - to have eschewed story. It has always been the bleak and soulless Narrative, the Lie of the Last Age, the Grand Illusion, the Great Deception, deceiving even the Elect, were that possible (and it is!), the converging, suffocating Outer Darkness, the Void against which the lonesome grognard takes his final stand.
"Let the dice decide, let the players choose and the story will take care of itself."
ReplyDeleteThat's the crux of the matter. Along with that goes some advice for DMs. Don't be afraid of the player who questions what's going on. Invite that sort of inquiry, encourage it, and riff on it.
Jim Hodges---
ReplyDeleteI had no idea story, plot, narrative were looked down upon. I don't know I ever encountered that prejudice in my experience and never felt that way myself, so it's a puzzling thing to learn about today.
As for Dragonlance, it's not so much that my crowd blamed it for anything, it's more that by then we'd moved on and Dragonlance belonged to our younger brothers' era.
“But here’s the thing: an emergent story is still story.”
ReplyDeleteBut what it isn’t is plot. You’re sort of redefining what people who play story gaming mean by the term. “Let the dice fall where they may” is antithetical to that culture.
“Story Now” isn’t about letting the dice fall where they may. The term “murder hoboes” wasn’t created to “let the players choose”. The mechanics of story games were not created to let “the story… take care of itself.”
Humans will never, by definition, stop turning things that have already happened into stories. But there’s a giant abyss between the plot-driven, even script-driven, mindset of storygaming and what we’ve come to call roleplaying.