Lessons for Narrative Design from Modern Tabletop RPGs

[Music] i'm catherine and i play a lot of role-playing games yep give me your dice rolls stat checks epic campaigns fiction first mechanics gnarly character creation i'm down for that i call that a saturday um so i have found my gaming home in modern tabletop rpg so as a resident of this weird and wonderful country of play i'm here to help spread the good word of story gaming to all you folks here and see what hard-won lessons of narrative design we can bridge across formats let's start with introductions as is only proper i'm 50 of thorny games we're an indie game design studio and publishing company making story driven tabletop games up to this point our games all revolve around language in some form or another we find language

as a subject matter is a surprisingly effective inroad to emotionally connecting with players in our designs we try to explore the deeper side of language and what it means to people be it through culture identity or just how we perceive the world thankfully we've had some successes to date the community on kickstarter has been kind to us and we've seen kindness also in the form of some awards and recognition at places like indicate and south by southwest all of this is just to say that we think there's something powerful in these topics it resonates with enough folks for us to continue to do what we do and we are stoked to forge ahead so as someone who is passionate about role-playing first and foremost at thorny games we try to make a habit of crossing barriers between different gaming communities and then introduce new players to the excitements of tabletop story gaming and that is why i am here you may be totally new to tabletop role-playing games great

let's talk about what they are um you two may be a deep convert and play them to bits also great let's get mutually excited about them together so tabletop role-playing games are analog games where players focus on telling stories together so some of these stories are tried and true like storming a dungeon and looting the treasure but more and more in the modern scene they are quite different you might be telling the story of the downfall of the civilization with some fatal flaw building the language of a people born in isolation or find yourself as a world war ii era soviet air woman fighting hitler by night and the patriarchy by day right yep there's a lot to unpack here so as digital narrative designers why should we care if you're looking for inspiration off the beaten path these games are provocative they're treading innovative ground and design and telling new stories that many mediums just aren't touching

games about community identity loss they're truly pushing the boundaries of what modern gaming is exploring increasingly the word is also getting out these games are getting more and more attention no longer content to just being on the sidelines doing their own weird thing people are talking both for more established games and in the indie setting so down at indicate last year the jury's prize award winner was a fantastic indie rpg called bluebeard's bride one of the creators is in this very room about cree about creeping feminine horror so as indie rpgs are breaking through to mainstream recognition we now regularly see projects on kickstarter that are raising in the thousands if not millions and so right now this is a bid for all of us to be on that edge and to learn from the narrative design challenges and insights that these games have had but

before we start talking about the avant-garde of table top role playing we should establish the mainstream the most common example of a tabletop rpg is of course dungeons and dragons in d players each create and then embody characters on an adventure usually revolving around overcoming various challenges through combat as they adventure they get better at what they do and they increase their various stats which might make them great at magic or swordsmanship or inspirational singing or something the narrative itself is a collaboration between players and one very special player called the game master though not in a totally equitable style players will control the actions of their characters and roll dice to determine their success but everything else comes from the game master so determining what the characters encounter who needs their help how difficult the challenges they face are the gm introduces all of these during play by describing what the characters see what

the players see and sense as they move through the world that's been created so rpgs as a whole are undergoing a huge surge in popularity right now the fifth edition of dungeons and dragons really nailed popularizing and making the game much more accessible and recorded play and streaming are just going bananas it's a time of feast so we've named the established stalwart of the genre let's talk about the indie side of tabletop role playing these are games that are primarily focused on the narrative experience of the players rather than overcoming strategic or tactical challenges that's different from dungeons and dragons where most mechanics revolve around combat and the job of weaving a narrative around them is typically done outside of the core system of the game alternatively indie rpgs often lean into this fiction so generally they're not about winning or losing though of course every rule has exceptions in a

challenged base game like d d there kind of needs to be a loss condition so that the challenges that form the focus of play are meaningful but in most indie rpgs standing up and failing a challenge might be just as impactful and a character's narrative arc a success would be and therefore can be just as satisfying so for story games the mantra is often play to find out rather than aiming to win with a capital w you're here to find out how the story naturally evolves according to all of the tinder that we've brought and lit together as people at the table so counter-intuitively even though they're called role-playing games embodying a character totally not necessary is a defining component many folks prefer the term story games there may be no characters explicitly defined we may share control of a single character these games contain multitudes so i've said that the mechanics should drive

a narrative experience in a story game that the fiction should come first so let's ground this in an example here is a slice of the rule set from apocalypse world a fantastic game about life in the post-apocalypse by vincent and miguel baker it is also one of the most widely known indie rpgs today so in apocalypse world the mc master of ceremonies kind of an analog of the game master is encouraged to do as little prep as possible before the game starts and then develop the narrative collaboratively with the players in this example this move is triggered when a character attempts to read a charged situation and the answers to the question all help drive the narrative forward so the reason that this is different than something like rolling a perception check say in a more traditional rpg is that the mc probably hasn't started the game with any answers to any of these questions and we'll be establishing new fiction in

response to the question so through the question and answer a significant new piece of the narrative is born ultimately it's the system that adds to the narrative the player has established how things became charged and then the mc responded to the move by providing an immediate threat suddenly we have a game so full stop here uh for some healthy wardings uh when you recount trends in history there's much that is dramatically incomplete and that is also true of this telling um all of this is offered to you as a taste in anticipation of future conversation and play so take this generously let's place our focus in the modern era for these games many of the tabletop rpgs that are most widely known dungeons and dragons call of cthulhu pathfinder they actually have their roots in games

that are decades old so even though they've gone through dramatic iteration significant dramatic iteration the core focus of the game and what it tells the players to care about has been essentially untouched so traveler is a wonderful example of sort of more traditional design that has some really interesting ideas about mechanizing the story of a character through um character creation through something called life paths and it probably goes down into history as one of the only well-known games where you can die as a character as you create them interesting um so as a focus of study we'll talk um about a more modern brand of rpg so we'll root ourselves in the glorious 90s arts and tens that gave us games like fiasco where you relive a coen brothers s catastrophe during play a microscope where you tell a story of fractal histories using nothing but index cards at the table

or the quiet year a map building game about community along with very many others so story games are tremendously useful as case studies for narrative design for a number of reasons for one they're forced to wear their design choices on their sleeves because they need to be run by the players at the table so if a gm is facilitating a game it can really help if they have some unobstructed view of the designer's intentions then they can lean into them that's why the books of these games are often very candid in the decisions gone into design and what their fundamental intent is so design discussion also has been very public through a variety of well-trod online forums one of which is sadly disappearing in a week goodbye google plus they've traditionally been the projects of highly passionate folks who love really nothing more than

getting into long-winded forum discussions or dissecting different types of narrative play and finally they iterate super quickly take apocalypse world which was released in 2010 and has already spawned countless variant systems these games are said to be powered by the apocalypse in the main online repository hosted on the apocalypse world website you can find hundreds of powered by the apocalypse games many of them bending the established systems and taking them in completely novel and fascinating ways so let's highlight some ideas that we can consider from modern indie role-playing games i'll introduce a concept that's been explored in recent story games and offer you a question that this concept raises for narrative design as a whole

let's start with a topic in modern story game design that's everywhere and that everyone has an opinion about and that is the role of the gm the person who has traditionally shepherded the entire narrative experience so historically tabletop rpgs viewed the game master as an ultimate authority it's not unusual to hear them use terms like my game and my players with a sense of ownership they were in charge of making play world building and honestly really the vast majority of the experience at the table while the players controlled their individual characters the gm gets to build worlds write histories place props and objects one narratively convenient uh they had special authority within the mechanics of the game and then were generally the source of antagonism conflict and plot for everybody so in many ways the gm role as separate and apart has been nurtured by many components of

the game systems themselves gm's have different books full of different content even though they operated with the same basic system rules as players they had scripted module players they had scripted modules that players weren't allowed to look at and they even had a physical barrier between them and the rest of the table when you think about tabletop rpgs this is probably the image that springs to mind but story games have been blowing this assumption wide wide open for a long time let's talk about that so let's take fiasco as an example this game is all about setting players as characters in a complicated interwoven caper where everything goes to very quickly the tagline is ordinary people with powerful ambition and very poor impulse control it's a fantastic game the game begins by setting up relationships between characters using

cards in its newest iteration or dice in the classic form along with other plot elements that will be part of the story so glossing over the overall structure but essentially in each turn a player will set a scene with some subset of the other players at the table to develop on some thorny situation that they were originally put in maybe they need someone beaten up and maybe their cousin is a bookie and they can help them out you get it um as the scene reaches a climactic point the players at the table not in the scene determine if things go well or if indeed they go very poorly for the active players the active players will then use that prompt to resolve the tension of the scene so from the example of fiasco i think that we can see that there actually wasn't a whole lot about the narrative

authority being vested in a single party that was fundamental to the form in fiasco the role of the gm is spread dynamically among everyone at the table depending on how you look at it you might say that this means that there are either no gms leading to the term gm list or perhaps that everyone is a gm in this in this case giving us the term gm full and the paradox being that both of these terms end up meaning very similar things so with fiasco this distribution of narrative authority is done mechanically but this is by no means the only way of splitting narrative authority and how it can be handled so another great example of this is the game a thousand and one nights by miguel baker where players each improvise tales in the style of 1001 arabian nights so here gameplay is split between the present day you are members of an arabian court

going about your daily lives and its intrigues and the various stories that you use to that you used to connect with others so when telling a story usually to expand on a juicy point that came up in court the players will start to improvise in the style of a thousand and one nights and when they need to introduce a totally new character for their story they'll recruit another court character to play the role then this recruited player has narrative of authority over that part of the story so in a thousand and one nights narrative control flows from the fiction itself rather than being heavily mechanized which is a nice distinction between it and fiasco another way in which games have sought to do away with the role of gm has been to carve it up and distribute discrete chunks of it to players explicitly so two games that split narrative authority in this way are

downfall and archipelago downfall by caroline hobbs tells a story about the fall of a culture that we create during the game that ends up succumbing to its fatal flaws it does this by splitting authority over players who control the roles of the hero the pillar and the fallen who then each push and pull each other by representing different elements of the society so in a scene in each scene the hero tries to save the world naturally the fallen tries to corrupt it and the pillar an average person tries to stifle change maintain status quo every two scenes rolls rotate and that allows each player to embody all of the roles over the course of the game each role also comes with certain mechanical responsibilities like framing scenes which again effectively carve up the gm's traditional role archipelago is another great example

that experiments with narrative control through a few different mechanics important narrative license and environmental themes are divided among the players themselves so for example if we're playing a game in a sailing boat traversing the pacific one player may control the element of the weather or the ship and whenever uncertainty is raised about that element you will have authority over what happens it also intersperses that with moments of narrative surprise by employing these really neat things called ritual phrases that players can use to prompt one another to change things so for example you can use a card like that might not be quite so easy to signal that you want to ramp up an answer and go another way all of this stems from sort of a core principle that's prevalent in the story gaming design language that's called the sega principle it states that when one person is the

author of both the character's adversity and its resolution play is not fun so all of these examples give us ways to distribute that work between players to make sure that even when narrative authority is split there isn't a player just stuck in a loop answering their own questions so finally we can ask ourselves with all of these games distributing narrative control and interesting ways where does that necessarily lie within your medium with my medium who provides adversity and what does that come from or where does that come from in a game if your default is to consider that it should come from the system the players are engaging with maybe it's time to challenge that you may be able to introduce more distribution and narrative authority than you think and in doing so you can give players much more agency over the things that they want to explore

so who has control of what goes past just who unfolds the next narrative beat but also fundamentally what topics someone wants to engage with and it really ensures that players can investigate the themes that they enthusiastically want to these choices inform the themes that ultimately define the narrative so that it's not tied to the fiat of one single creative authority so i offer you this question who is in charge here another concept that i'd like to offer is something called the fruitful void which has really helped me structure thoughts around narratives in the past it has its origins from some of the community discussion boards in the 90s and has since become entrenched in the design language across the whole discipline

dogs in the vineyard i'm giving you lots of good wrecks today is a game by vincent baker based on a west that never quite was it's a gm's game and players are god's watchdogs or just dogs and as part of their duties they travel from city to city delivering the mail helping out with community functions and also of course enforcing judgments of the true faith of the king of life as you do so vincent baker once published this image on his blog and all of the arrows or mechanics in the game you don't need to know what they represent specifically in the game but just to know that he stated that what was in the whirlwind itself was what the game was actually about what those mechanics are pointing towards this concept of the real meat in your game being about what isn't mechanized has been formalized many times so for example my life with master

this is a game about role-playing as minions of this powerful master or mistress uh it mechanized stats like wariness and self-loathing but it never talks about defiance even though that's what all the mechanics in the game are hurling at the player to think about so similarly uh part of emily care boss's romance trilogy breaking the ice is a great great game for two people who play characters over the course of three dates hopefully to find love and the game mechanizes things like attraction and compatibility but as emily says right here um thinking about mechanizing the moment of falling in love is just silly so she described the fruitful void of that game as being love and vulnerability so when designing the mechanics around the emotional impact and narrative arc that you want the players to have

consider what it is and isn't um and what is explicitly mechanized so what's nailed down and what are the mechanics swirling around and throwing into question if you have an explicit system that measures the morality say of the player's actions how would that change the player's reaction to it and if your system really is about morality how can you add force behind those pinwheels causing it to twist and turn now i offer you a final concept artifacts of play so these are side products of play that exist in the physical world the one that we occupy as humans these can really help increase the emotional resonance of a narrative that the players experience in game by bridging the physical world that they live in and then the imaginary one that they occupy and play so these artifacts live past the game familiar cases of this in the digital

context may be stuff like automatically generated tweets based on cute words that are used in word games that are funny even if you're not actively playing the game or some of the pictures that you could take and keep in firewatch so story games have been experimenting with these for a while and they can pack a good punch one example is from the quiet year by avery alder so avery alder's game about telling the story of a single quiet year experienced by a community before the jackals return so every turn the active player turns over a card which then asks them to answer one of two questions about what is happening to the community they then get to take an action of their choice to help address the challenges that the community is facing so a completely brilliant part about this game is how these changes are all reflected on a map that the players are collaboratively drawing and creating during play

so you create the map it's a game of cartography and storytelling um this map exists in the physical space and that both the players occupy as human beings so that you can touch it you can fold it doodle on it interact with it but having this physical artifact really bridges the worlds the one within the narrative and the one that the players live in as humans it becomes also a living record of this particular instance of the game for a second example i offer one of our games to reinforce that artifacts don't necessarily have to be physical so in dialect players tell the story of an isolated community by building their language over the course of play i will explain in every turn of dialect players add to the story of the isolation while simultaneously

modifying the language so in each turn players define new words for their community and start using them as they role play members of the isolation that means that they gain fluency in their own dialect as the game progresses so things happen to the community language shifts and becomes more layered to reflect it and so in doing so players discover the essence of these people that they're creating together and the dialect they make becomes a language map say of what has happened to them the language that you create and dialect is definitely an artifact of play um but why does this enhance the narrative experience the game tells about the language itself so every game centers upon the entire life cycle of the language it starts from its birth all the way to its eventual demise the story experienced in the narrative is actually paralleled by the experience that the players have at the table so the language that

they're speaking together is born as the language of the isolation but when the isolation's language is lost or you stop playing this game the players find themselves also as the sole speakers of this dialect that they just created so they too will go through this process it's by blurring the line between what is real and what exists in the game in this case the language that we can mirror and experience the characters have the depth of their language with one the player's experience abruptly losing their language that they've been speaking in for the last three hours that is a powerful connection to be left with so i ask what can you build during play that lasts beyond the game consider whether or not the experience that your players have as characters can be mirrored as a real experience that your players have as humans can you share elements between the two

and if so you may find that the narrative hits home and packs a punch at a deeper and much more genuine level our time here is short and so i leave you with these concepts and questions a small slice of the ground that indie rpgs are breaking there's lots that narrative design across all mediums can learn from this incredible game space in order to tell deeper and more resonating stories the only thing left to do is to go out there and play them do it thanks a bunch i think we have two minutes for questions a lot uh never play fiasco so i will

definitely try it i want to come back on the game master position because like you said the preview is the first tabletop rpg it was too much i would say impact on the game master itself so if it was a bad okay master of player it could be under faults of player expense so no you show example where we are splitting the responsibilities between the player or putting it on game mechanics do you think that using personal assistant or ai types like amazon alexa can be also some way of using the game master and replacing it could you repeat the question one more time yes do you think that using ai type like amazon alexa personal assistant and machine learning can be also a way to put the game master out of players position i certainly would hope so and i would challenge everyone here to think about that because i think that there are big returns for doing so yeah thank you hey i wanted to know how

you feel about emerging narratives and games that uh promote them like them games like what i'm sorry about that allow these emerging narratives to uh to blossom um i am enthusiastic about them as you can imagine any favors you have huh i'm sorry any favorites that you have oh it's so hard to choose um but at least in the world that i live in in tabletop rpg uh they are everywhere emergent narratives are the name of the game so okay okay thank you i think we are officially at time i'm happy to answer questions outside thank you so much for coming