TTRPGs are Storytelling Engines
A fundamental theory of TTRPGs
Note: To make it more accessible, I’ve renamed this blog from “Dragna’s Den” to “Dramatic Questings,” a play on the term “dramatic question”—what I consider the building block of narrative design theory. Expect more posts here in the future, especially as I continue to refine and expand my efforts to develop an applied ludonarrative framework for TTRPG campaigns.
Everyone knows what a “story” is. Here’s a simple (and familiar) one:
A little girl wearing a red hooded cape leaves to deliver food to her grandmother. While walking through the woods, she meets a hungry wolf, who asks where she is going.
When the wolf learns her destination, he advises her to pick flowers for her grandmother as a distraction. He then sneaks off to her grandmother’s house, devours her grandmother, and disguises himself in her grandmother’s clothes.
When the girl arrives, she notices her “grandmother’s” strange appearance. After she comments on her “grandmother’s” teeth, the wolf leaps out of bed and eats her. While the wolf sleeps off his meal, a hunter arrives and cuts the wolf open with an axe, freeing the girl and her grandmother.
This is “how the story goes.” But what if it wasn’t?
Imagine, if you will, that this story is told by four people instead of one: the little girl, her grandmother, the wolf, and the hunter. The hunter is quite pleased with how the story turned out—he shows up when all seems lost and is celebrated as a hero. But the girl, her grandmother, and the wolf aren’t quite so happy.
So, we rewind the story back to the first moment when the characters disagree. This might be:
the moment when the girl goes to pick flowers instead of warning her grandmother
the moment when the wolf enters the grandmother’s house
the moment when the girl arrives at her grandmother’s house
the moment when the hunter arrives
What happens if the girl insists that she would have noticed the wolf’s malintent, but the wolf insists that his deception was complete? If the wolf insists he made no sound at the door, but the grandmother insists that she would have heard him? If the wolf insists that he ate the girl fair and square, but the girl insists that she would have gotten away?
The answer is simple: We create a natural system for adjudicating storytelling disputes—a set of rules—and designate a chosen adjudicator to apply and interpret them.
In other words: we create a TTRPG—and choose a Dungeon Master (or Game Master, to be more universal). (By tradition—though not by necessity—the Dungeon Master also creates the setting in which the characters act and represents the interests of all non-protagonist characters, though the position could easily be divided into three roles or more.)
A TTRPG is not simply a game, like Monopoly or chess. A TTRPG is an engine for producing authoritative versions of collaborative stories when different characters disagree about how the story should go. Put differently, a TTRPG is a machine that turns gameplay into narrative.
Stakes
If TTRPGs are engines for adjudicating disputes about how stories should go, how do those disputes arise? We can define these disputes as stakes: statements about the story that different characters disagree on.
For example, in Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf and the girl disagree on the following stakes:
The wolf deceived the girl into picking flowers for her grandmother, giving him a chance to sneak away and reach her grandmother’s house first.
The wolf wants this statement to be true. The girl wants this statement to be false. Through playing the game—through gameplay—the two fight to win the stakes for themselves.
A character wins the stakes when they successfully add that particular statement to the story. For example, if the girl wins her game against the wolf, the story might instead read:
Although the wolf spoke honeyed words, the girl saw through his ill intent and tricked the wolf into chasing a rabbit in the bush. While the wolf was distracted, the girl fled to warn her grandmother.
A character loses the stakes when they fail to change or stop a statement being added to the story. For example, if the girl loses her game against the wolf, the story will instead read:
The wolf deceived the girl into picking flowers for her grandmother, giving him a chance to sneak away and reach her grandmother’s house first.
As such, all gameplay is defined by the characters’ efforts to win particular sets of stakes—to make certain statements about the story true or false.
Objects
Not all storytelling disputes are between characters and other characters. Many are between characters and inanimate entities or phenomena—what we might call objects.
An object is not, strictly speaking, tangible. Instead, if a “character” is an entity in the story that has interests of its own and is able to act on those interests (e.g., the girl wants to keep her grandmother safe), an “object” is an entity in the story that has no such interests or agency and exists only to help or hinder the characters in achieving the stakes.
For example, we might classify the following entities as objects:
a healing potion
a flow of lava
a stone wall
a raging blizzard
There are three kinds of objects: tools, threats, and things:
a tool is an object that is currently helping a character win the stakes
a threat is an object that is currently hindering a character from winning the stakes
a thing is an object that is currently neither helping nor hindering a character from winning the stakes
Notably, because TTRPGs exist to resolve disputes over stakes, one character’s tool is an adversary’s threat (and vice-versa). Furthermore, through gameplay, a character can turn a thing or threat into a tool (such as by purchasing the potion or using the wall as cover) or turn a threat into a thing (such as by diverting the lava flow or obtaining a pair of magical anti-blizzard snowshoes).
Subgames
A “story” is a sequence of narrated events. For example, consider the top-level story of Little Red Riding Hood:
A little girl delivers food for her grandmother’s house but is devoured by a wolf that ate and disguised itself as her grandmother. As the wolf sleeps, a hunter arrives and frees them.
However, this sequence would still be a story if we lopped off the last sentence—albeit a more macabre one:
A little girl delivers food for her grandmother’s house but is devoured by a wolf that ate and disguised itself as her grandmother.
(To be sure, the original version of the story ended here. According to Wikipedia, the happy ending was added later.)
From this, we can learn that stories are fractal: each story contains smaller substories within it.
Furthermore, as we descend further in detail, these sub-stories develop smaller and smaller stakes. For example, Little Red Riding Hood has the following sub-story, which we’ve already discussed:
The wolf deceived the girl into picking flowers for her grandmother, giving him a chance to sneak away and reach her grandmother’s house first.
This substory is a single excerpt of the larger story. As such, if disputed by the wolf and girl, this substory becomes a subgame within the larger game. These characters must then compete through gameplay to determine how the sub-story is told.
In TTRPGs—and in D&D especially—we can reduce the vast majority of stories to a small set of repeating subgames:
The Fight, in which one character aims to incapacitate or kill another.
The Flight, in which one character aims to escape another.
The Sneak, in which one character aims to avoid another’s notice.
The Talk, in which one character aims to change another’s mind.
The Search, in which one character aims to find something hidden.
The Deduction, in which one character aims to deduce a conclusion.
The Move, in which one character aims to move to a different location.
We can call these recurring subgames minigames, because each instance of a particular subgame—such as the Fight or the Sneak—follows identical rules to all other instances of that subgame. As a result, we can model all games as sequences of recurring minigames that obey shared sets of rules.
For example, we can model Little Red Riding Hood as:
The Talk (the wolf deceiving the girl)
The Sneak (the wolf sneaking up on the grandmother)
The Fight (the wolf devouring the grandmother)
The Talk (the wolf deceiving the girl again)
The Fight (the wolf devouring the girl)
The Fight (the hunter freeing the girl and grandmother)
Minigames, of course, might contain other minigames within themselves (e.g., a character attempting to hide from view to gain an advantage during a fight) or take place concurrently with other minigames (e.g., a character attempting to flee an adversary while struggling to navigate treacherous terrain).
The smallest level of a TTRPG’s game is the microgame: an atomic game that cannot be divided into further substories or subgames. In a TTRPG—and especially D&D—a microgame is most often an action, in which one character attempts to interact with the world in a particular way, while other characters attempt to help or hinder them (i.e., through reactions). For example, Little Red Riding Hood contains the following microgame:
As the girl realized the wolf’s identity, he leapt out of the bed and attempted to eat her!
Because collaborative stories must treat all participating characters equally, all characters in a microgame must have an equal chance to act and react. As such, TTRPGs proceed in turns and rounds:
A turn is a single microgame, in which a particular character acts and all other characters have an opportunity to react.
A round is a collection of turns in which every character has an opportunity to act exactly once. (Some characters—especially villains—might have more narrative weight than others. When this occurs—which is rare—that character might receive additional turns in which to act each round.)
This, in turn, creates a need for a system to adjudicate the order in which the characters can act and react—a system of initiative.
Systems
As we’ve discussed, a TTRPG is an engine for resolving storytelling disputes between characters in that story. Put differently, a TTRPG is the “physics engine” that dictates how the world of that story works. We can further define a general-purpose TTRPG system as a TTRPG that can adjudicate the outcome of any arbitrary game.
This leads us to a critical conclusion: A table’s choice of story is orthogonal to the table’s choice of system; while the choice of system changes how the game is played and likely changes how the story can end, any general-purpose TTRPG system is compatible with any arbitrary story.
Thus, a table’s choice of TTRPG hinges upon three questions:
Does this TTRPG promote the kind of gameplay I enjoy?
Does this TTRPG promote the kind of story I want to unfold?
Does this TTRPG promote the kind of behavior the world should have?
If the answer to all three questions is “yes”—or if the TTRPG can be easily modified or extended such that the answer becomes “yes”—then the TTRPG adequately suits the table’s needs.
In the following essays, we’ll discuss how a Dungeon Master can craft a story with competing interests, as well as a set of proposed mechanics for the minigames described above. Stay tuned for more!