Part 2 (2/2)

In this sample story, the detail that the labels on the message tubes were switched was not included until Alex (playing David) asked about the labels. This fact was added in by the DM on the spot as a response to the playeras question, and it changed the way the characters interacted with that encounter. My party was entirely convinced that the labels being switched meant that someone had purposely tried to disrupt communication at the Blaze Arrow outpost, when in fact this was simply a detail added at the whim of the DM to answer Alexas (playing David) question. From reading the final narrative, it is impossible to tell which details were created beforehand and which were added during the gaming session (although my interview with the DM revealed this). Some stories, then, come not from the s.p.a.ce created before the beginning of the game, but from questions asked and directions suggested by the players during the game.

Many details of the world get fleshed out only as the players (characters) progress through them; however, certain events in the world progress regardless of the charactersa involvement with them. For example, my interview with Scott revealed that once the party had moved on from their encounter with the orcs, the Blood Fist tribe continued on to fight the Skullbash tribe and win. This storyline is one of many in the world that was not narrated (at least not until my interview), but it clearly shows that an expansive world exists outside the narrative. In this way, we see that the storyworld itself does not mean that any given story will become a part of the game.

Campaign settings are designed not to tell stories, but to create s.p.a.ces for stories. Monte Cook explained that he consulted travel guides in order to get a feel for the layout and format he wanted for the published version of Ptolus (personal communication, June 30, 2009). He wanted his manual to read like a travel guide to a fictional world. While he did include a set of adventures that DMs could run within the Ptolus world, Cook also created a s.p.a.ce with the potential for many stories, not just those he engineered.

Manuals for Stories.

In addition to ready-made campaign settings, gaming companies also publish ready-made adventures, or modules. These modules give the DM a setting, NPC characters (complete with motivations and suggested actions), and a plot outline. As we have seen in the case of The Temple of Elemental Evil (Temple), which is part of the Greyhawk campaign setting, the form of these modules often reads more like an instruction manual or report than a narrative. For example, there may be an overview of the entire adventure at the beginning, like an abstract. Then, there might be a list of characters, or a list of locations. These characters may be given certain motivations, and certain events may be triggered at certain locations. However, the players may never visit certain locations or may visit them in a different order than the DM antic.i.p.ates. It isnat until the DM arranges the features in the process of the game that the text begins to resemble a narrative format.

Often these modules are intended to be one-time adventures, although a DM may string together a series of them to create a more coherent campaign. In doing so, the DM often adapts these modules to fit his or her needs and, thus, takes a degree of authors.h.i.+p over these textsa”a point I engage more fully with in chapter 7. For example, although the world of Sorpraedor was created by Scott for his campaign, he continually took aspects of this world from already existing modules. These modules might provide a map of a city, or an interesting NPC, or a plotline that Scott found appealing. However, he would only take that one piece of the preexisting text rather than the module as a whole. These practices are common among gamers and accepted by the gaming industry. Modules are not published with the expectation that they will be read exactly as written, rather, that they will act as a guide for a DM.

However, modules can also be played in their entirety, and they offer some narrative pa.s.sages within the preprinted text. Most modules have sections of text that are meant to be read aloud to players, and it seems that this might be a good place to look for a more narrative structure. Returning to the idea that in linguistic narratives the narrator takes a longer turn of talk, we might be tempted to say that these sections set aside for DMs to read aloud are narrative pa.s.sages. An a.n.a.lysis of these pa.s.sages finds that they are often almost exclusively description. The following excerpt from one of these pa.s.sages in the module shows the detail often used in the description of s.p.a.ce: As you approach the Temple area, the vegetation is disconcertinga” dead trees with a skeletal appearance, scrub growth twisted and unnaturally colored, all unhealthy and sickly looking or exceptionally robust and disgusting. The ruins of the Templeas outer works appear as dark and overgrown mounds of gray rubble and blackish weeds. Skulls and bones of humans and humanoids gleam white here and there amidst the weeds. [...] Everything surrounding the place is disgusting. The myriad leering faces and twisting, contorted forms writhing and posturing on every face of the Temple seem to j.a.pe at the obscenities they depict. The growth in the compound is rank and noisome. Thorns clutch, burrs stick, and crushed stems either emit foul stench or raise angry weals on exposed flesh. Worst of all, however, is the pervading fear which seems to hang over the whole areaa”a smothering, clinging, almost tangible cloud of vileness and horror [Gygax & Mentzer, 1985, p. 35a”36].

The deliberate break from gameplay for oral description calls attention to setting in the TRPG, but does it create a narrative?

Just as these descriptive interludes may be considered a break from normal gameplay in the TRPG, descriptive utterances have often been considered separate from narrative. This claim exists on the premise that description does not seem to need to follow a particular order, whereas in narrative there are causal connections between events. However, as Meir Sternberg (1981) points out, the relations.h.i.+p between description and narrative is extremely complex. According to Sternberg (1981), adescription is no more doomed to disorder than a narrative of eventsa (p. 65).

Often, the descriptions given by the DM in D&D are chronologically organized. If we return to the story of the orcs from the Sorpraedor campaign, we find that the order of the description does establish a narrative order.

You approach the Blaze Arrow outpost. The bastion that guards the frontier of the city of Gateway is silent except for the distant cry of gathering carrion birds. You notice that the ground around the outpost has been scarred by the hobnailed feet of dozens of invaders. The three story tower is surrounded by a now broken gate. The smell of burning orcish flesh, the smell of death, profanes the air. As you enter the gate, you find the remains of a ballista that once defended the outpost. Another rests farther in, still fully loaded, its human operator dead beside it. All in all, twelve human bodies lie around, evidence of the attack that took place only hours ago. It appears the victors have suffered losses as well, but their dead have undergone the cremation rituals known to exist in orcish societies. There are also orc bodies piled up and smoldering. Yet the process seems to have been done quickly and was perhaps not completed. Some remains of orcish clothing and some s.h.i.+elds have been left behind. They are marked with the symbol of a b.l.o.o.d.y hand, which you recognize as the sign of the aBlood Fista tribe of orcs.

First, there is the order of progression followed by the reader. At the time of the gaming session, this description was presented in the general order that the party came upon Blaze Arrow. First they would see the footprints leading to the tower, then the broken gate, then the bodies inside the gate. Had the party approached Blaze Arrow from a different direction, the description might have been different. Furthermore, the way in which the DM constructs these descriptive pa.s.sages also clues the party in to the events that happened previously. Orcs advanced on the tower (the footprints), they broke down the gate, breached the tower, and killed the soldiers. Stories like this are rarely narrated directly by the DM; rather, he or she will present the evidence in a descriptive form that allows the group to formulate an event sequence in their minds. The cognitive power of narrative is still present here, and it allows the audience to establish connections between the descriptive details that form a sequence of events. Sternberg (1981) claims athat spatial features are subject to chronological or even causal sequencing, which explains their order of presentation in terms of some order of occurrence, is no paradoxa (p. 72). Description and narrative are not necessarily at odds, even when we limit the definition of narrative to the progression of causal events. The descriptive accounts in D&D, while immersing the player spatially, do not necessarily negate the progression of plot.

Descriptive pa.s.sages offer the ability for players to reconstruct past events in narrative form. As we have seen with the Temple module, though, players may never completely uncover the story embedded within the modules. In terms of looking at the TRPG as a narrative, the print sourcesa”both campaign settings and modulesa”are used as reference materials and can not be seen as narratives any more than an authoras notes for his novel can be. On the point of spatial exploration, looking at the TRPG seems to support ludologists claims that a narrative perspective does not account for all aspects of gaming. Both campaign settings and modules are written more as manuals, devoid of narrative form; nevertheless, they create a storyworld.

However, the TRPG is not simply an exploration of this storyworld. Unlike a computer game that may be focused on graphic and visual elements of game design, TRPG s.p.a.ce seems to revolve more around its narrative potential. While a skeletal outline for the world of Sorpraedor exists, only parts of interest to the narrative become fully developed s.p.a.ces as they are enacted in the gaming session. Similarly, areas of a module may not all be explored and, thus, may never be developed or narrated. Spatial exploration does not seem to drive the TRPG narrative as much as the narrative drives the spatial exploration.

Any game (whether it uses a module or not) allows for some flexibility, but games played as one time events or in the context of conventions may be more limiting. Where players in a home game may have greater freedom to explore whatever parts of the world they choose, gamers at a convention have to stick more closely to the chosen module. However, I would argue that the exploration of s.p.a.ce in more restricted games is even more driven by narrative progression. The Role-Players Gaming a.s.sociation (RPGA) is an official gaming organization run by Wizards of the Coast. They hold tournaments and events both on a local and national level for gamers to get together and play adventure modules in worlds such as Living Greyhawk and Living Forgotten Realms. Because members of the RPGA move from one adventure to another, often with different DMs or players, there must be some attempts to maintain consistency in the world and the plotlines experienced. Thus, the DM of an RPGA game does not have the same flexibility that other DMs enjoy. In addition, time is often a constraint. In the game I observed, sessions were scheduled for six hour blocks and DMs were expected to wrap up the module in that time period. As the group I watched got sidetracked, partook in a dinner break, and generally took their time working through the adventure; the DM was forced to speed through both the exploration of s.p.a.ce and the storyline. Because he was expected to get to a certain point in the story by the end of the session, it was very important for players to only explore locations that were key to the story. As time was called for the gaming session, he quickly gave an overview of what the group did not get to. The group quickly switched from an interactive narrative experience to direct narration by the DM. In a home campaign, the session would have gone longer or been resumed at another time. However, the constraints of the RPGA convention meant that the DM needed to convey certain information about the world and the story for these players to move on to other games during the course of that weekend that would build on this adventure. Therefore, rather than exploring whatever areas of s.p.a.ce and elements of plot interested this particular gaming group, there was a pressure to cover certain storylines.

We see that s.p.a.ce is important to the TRPG, so much so that entire books are written only to describe storyworlds. Nevertheless, the actual exploration of that s.p.a.ce within the game is almost always connected to narrative. Just as a narrative aesthetic may be grounded in a history of linguistic and print texts, the idea of spatial aesthetics seems more appropriate for digital environments with strong visual elements. While it may take hours of gameplay in a CRPG of exploring s.p.a.ce to find the right location and that gameplay may be satisfying because of the visual display involved, often in the TRPG the players can skip ahead to important locations. For example, when playing the Temple CRPG, I had to go into every building in town in order to ascertain its purpose. As a player, I needed to keep notes on which building was which so that I would know where to return. While a TRPG could certainly be run like that, more often players make statements such as aI go to the tavern,a and the DM then a.s.sumes that the players are able to locate the tavern and begins describing the scene there.

Explicating these differences in the use of s.p.a.ce between CRGPs and TRPGs shows the difficulty with turning to a spatial aesthetics to study the TRPG. As previously noted, the majority of current studies have focused on videogames and thus do not account for the way these concepts might or might not apply to other games. Because s.p.a.ce is virtually unlimited in the TRPG, s.p.a.ces are only revealed as they have relevance to the story. This is very different from playing a CRPG where a storyline may be complete, but the player continues to explore s.p.a.ce because there is still a black unexplored area on the map. However, this player also knows that there will be boundaries to his or her exploration and that a point will be reached where their exploration is complete and can go no further. No such point exists in the TRPG, even a module can be added to by a knowledgeable DM. Thus, on the point of games as spatial exploration, we find that an a.n.a.lysis of the TRPG neither falls on the side of the narrativists or the ludologists. They are neither narratives in their entirety, nor are they journeys of social exploration. Rather TRPGs represent a combination of s.p.a.ce and narrative in a way that may be specific to their medium.

Narrators and Narratees.

The other main objection that ludologists have to viewing games as narratives is the lack of a clear narrator and narratee. Again, this perspective does not account for various types of games. Even within videogames there are often scenes with more direct narration or logbook features, where character actions are listed in narrative fas.h.i.+on for review. In the TPRG, the DM most often acts as a narrator. In addition to the descriptive pa.s.sages like those seen in this chapter, the DM may recap what players suggest for their characters to do. The player may articulate the desire for their character to complete an actiona”I take out a dagger and cut through the rope to escape from the orcs. The DM may then narrate the success or failure of that actiona”You feel the ropes loosening as your dagger slips between the knots. The story goes back and forth between the player and the DM, both of whom narrate key parts. The other players serve as narrattees listening to the story as it is being told.

At other times, the DM may take full control over the story. The following pa.s.sage is from Maureenas story. It was narrated exclusively for Mary through a private message. Although this particular pa.s.sage transpired via email in order to keep Maureenas experience secret, similar narrations frequently take place orally in the face-to-face game setting. In this story, Maureen had decided to take the blood suckle drug, a drug that caused a metamorphosis over which Maureen (played by Mary) had no control. Scott, as DM, completely narrates the scene: You lie down, though you feel energy coursing through your veins, and close your eyes for a second. Then the visions. .h.i.t you, and it is a strange dream where you feel like you are running through fog and everything seems blurry around the edge of your vision.

You are sleek. Muscular. Darkly beautiful. You see a few peoplea” some thieves, some guards, a few stragglers coming homea”and you see them playing a game of cat and mouse as they try to catch their prey and escape from their predator. They are so fragile, these peoplea”you see this now. So puny, and so weak. But almost none see you; you seem to be able to melt into the shadows, and fast. Oh yes.

On a whim, you leap to a roof of a building and move closer, just to see what someone will say when they do see you. You drop into the alley behind someone dressed in soiled black clothes. You can smell the fear on him even before you see him turn in slow motion and his eyes widen. He holds a rusty blade in one hand as you advance and makes a feeble attempt to stab you.

You smack the weapon from his hand and knock him across the alley with hardly a thought. You hear his heart stop beating and you realize that he dies before the scream on his lips even had a chance to come out.

You start getting confused and then everything goes black. When you open your eyes from the dream with a start, you still feel powerful but very tired. You also notice that your sheets are completely ripped to shreds and your fingernails have a little blood on them. Probably yours, seeing the condition of the bed, and you must have cut yourself in tearing the sheets as you acted out your dream.

Unlike the descriptive pa.s.sages from the module, there is clearly action here. One event leads to another. Maureen takes the blood suckle drug, she transforms, she jumps from the rooftops in her panther form, is confronted by an a.s.sailant, kills him, and returns to her room, unaware of what has transpired. Or we could interpret the entire story as a dream sequence that Maureen hallucinated after taking the blood suckle drug. Despite a clear chain of events, this narration is still somewhat unusual because it is in present tense and addresses the narrattee in second person. Monik Fludernik (1994) explains that asecond person texts frequently undermine this story-discourse dichotomy by the very nonnaturalness of their design, telling the narrateeas or addresseeas story.a As such, she sees second person narratives as post-moderna”they reformulate the relations.h.i.+p between narrator and narratee from traditional structuralist terms. In the sense that a story is told to one person (a narratee) by another person (a narrator), this pa.s.sage clearly fits the definition of a narrative. However, even in these pa.s.sages that consist clearly of storytelling, the story is far from traditional.

Furthermore, while the DM may act as narrator, this is not the only role that the DM fulfills within the gaming session. He or she also rolls dice to determine actions, voices the parts of NPCs, and maintains social order to the group. Again, no single perspective can account for the multiple layers of the game. A narratological stance would a.n.a.lyze the DM as narrator, but might not provide a framework for the DM as world builder or as rule enforcer. Although the TRPG cannot be excluded from narrative status on the grounds that it does not have a narrator, it also must not be limited to only studying this one aspect.

A Social and Rhetorical Approach to Narrative.

When I say that the TRPG apossesses narrativity,a I mean that it contains narrative, but is not exclusively a narrative. The game does appear to favor story over exploration of s.p.a.ce, and does consist of narrative interludes with a clear narrator and narratee. More importantly, whether or not ludologists or narrative theorists would consider games such as D&D narratives in terms of their formal structure, many gamers feel that their experience with the TRPG is a narrative experience. Rather than dismiss the views of gamers for not using the careful terminology as defined by scholars, it is our obligation to reconcile the actual gaming experience with our scholarly accounts, even those produced by scholars who are themselves gamers.

If we take a social rather than a formalist approach, we quickly see that narrative is an important element of gameplay for many role-players. Ed Stark from Wizards of the Coast, the company that now owns D&D, comments that apeople often say playing D&D is like writing your own moviea (as cited in Waters, 2004). When asked by BBC News Online to comment on their memories of D&D for its 30th anniversary, partic.i.p.ants noted the feeling of controlling a storyworld. James Dodd of the UK states that D&D provides aa chance to star in your own subjective version of any film or novel.a Paul Grogan also says that D&D gives you a chance to arecreate cinematic moments, kinda [sic] like being in a film where there is no defined script.a Diana Thirring agrees, noting that ait is like writing a story without knowing the outcomea (as cited in Waters, 2004). Whether or not a formal a.n.a.lysis reveals a story in narratological terms, it seems clear that those partic.i.p.ating in the TRPG are aware of a story behind the game.

Furthermore, narrative can be seen not as a form, but as a response. When talking more broadly about rhetoric and the rhetorical situation, Lloyd Bitzer (1968) argues that awe need to understand that a particular discourse comes into existence because of some specific condition or situation which invites utterancea (p. 6). Bitzer talks of discourse here in terms of speech, but his basic idea has more widely applied. The argument that a situation is rhetorical and that such a situation calls forth a particular response is also the basis for the rhetorical definition of genre applied in chapter 2. Something about the TRPG invites a narrative response, and it seems that narrative theory, whether or not it can elucidate all aspects of the gaming genre, can help us explain why we respond to this form as a narrative.

This notion of experience rarely factors into definitions by ludologists or narrativists, although Ryan (2006) opens the door for such an approach. While she doesnat argue that retelling what happened during a game makes the game a narrative (in a structural sense) as it is being played, she does say that athe greater our urge to tell stories about games, the stronger the suggestion that we experienced the game narrativelya (Ryan, 2006, p. 193). We see an important move here away from Aa.r.s.ethas (1997) view of narrative as a form to see narrative as an experience (whether that be a cognitive experience, a social one, or both). That we can experience something as narrative, regardless of its form, is an important s.h.i.+ft in perspective when looking to explain the comments of gamers that they see themselves as a playing a role in an ongoing movie or novel. Aa.r.s.ethas (1997) notion that in hypertext (as well as in games) the areader must produce a narrative versiona and that the text adoes not contain a narrative of its owna (p. 95) is ultimately not at odds with studying games as a narrative experience, only as a narrative form.3 The insistence of ludologists that narrative does not exist as a form in games needlessly restricts us to a formalist view that limits the study of games, rather than establis.h.i.+ng a new lens for their study. In contrast, a rhetorical perspective allows us to bring the study of narrative into the study of game by focusing on the experience of the players, thus reconciling the either/or debate between ludologist and narrative perspectives on game studies. This perspective is especially important to the TRPG because of the social nature of the game.

5.

Frames of Narrativity in the TRPG.

The tabletop role-playing game (TRPG) does and does not fit traditional definitions of narrative. A narrative is a frame through which the audience sees that world. It is that act of re-framing that const.i.tutes a narrative act. Linguist William Labov (1972) explains that the abstract, which begins an oral narrative, is a way of re-centering to a narrative world; and the coda, which ends the narrative, is a way of returning to the actual world (pp. 363a”365). Traditionally, linguistic narratives have been described as longer turns of talk by one individual. The re-centering to the storyworld occurs, the story is presented, and the conversation returns to the actual world. However, gaming groups frequently s.h.i.+ft between conversation about the storyworld, the game, and the actual world. Thus, the linguistic structure of the TRPG is necessarily different from that of oral narratives. It is clear that re-centering to multiple worlds takes place during the gaming session, but these worlds may or may not be story-worlds. I a.n.a.lyze the different frames of the TRPG, the types of speech in the TRPG, and the degree that narrative is present in each.

To date, there have been very few studies of the TRPG that focus on narrative, yet nearly every a.n.a.lysis features a look at the multiple layers or frames in the genre. Gary Fine (1983) uses frame a.n.a.lysis to talk about gamers as people in a social world, players in a game world, and characters in a fantasy world (p. 186). Sean Hendricks (2006) accepts Fineas three frames, but focuses his own a.n.a.lysis mainly on the fantasy frame (p. 43). Daniel Mackay (2001) splits Fineas game frame category into three frames for a total of five frames: [T]he social frame inhabited by the person, the game frame inhabited by the player, the narrative frame inhabited by the raconteur, the constative frame inhabited by the addresser, and the performative frame inhabited by the character [p. 56].

A key move that Mackay makes in his redefinition of Fineas frames is use of the term narrative. Fine, instead, seems to conflate the narrative world with the fantasy world, a separation that both Mackay and I find important. As shown in the previous chapter, a fantasy world is not always a narrative world. Mackay (2001) also focuses on the dramatic aspects of the TRPG and thus it is important for him to separate out constative utterances; which include description that becomes the narrative, and performative speech that involves partic.i.p.ants speaking in-character (p. 55). I, too, f

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