To Be Resolved

Narrative and Historiography in Tabletop Gaming

Rowan's excellent post from this past week on the OSR Onion has reignited some useful commentary on Objectivity in Game Design and the historical term-as-ammunition of the Quantum Ogre, so I wanted to navel gaze for an evening on the concept of narrative and truths in tabletop games.

As one does, I was reading the introduction to Saint Augustine's City of God last night. At one point, the author mentions that by the time he was writing CoG, Augustine was accompanied by his biographer. The idea of a contemporary biographer has always sort of tickled me; while I love reading history, I don't often reach for a biography as a comfort read. What I do appreciate, from a literary perspective, is that biographers have the ability to editorialize their subjects in order to construct more interesting narratives than simply the chronology of the subject's life. Many biographies have the benefit of hindsight as a context to extract this narrative, so I began thinking about the construction of biographical narrative in near-real-time.

Meanwhile...

Over the last few months, probably starting around when I wrote my first post on how I think (thought) about diegesis, I have been interested in peeling back what narrative means in the context of tabletop RPGs. After all, one of the big selling points of the hobby as an art form is that it is a truly unique mode of storytelling. My thesis has been that narrative is the emergent property of the interactions between the:

in response to the actions and decisions of all players. Or, as Vincent Baker has more pithily described it, the handoffs between the "dice" and the "clouds". Thanks to Jay Dragon for the reference! I've also previously said in a conversation about games, "Everything in the world is a bunch of stuff that happened until it is experienced and sorted into a narrative by an observer".

If we zoom out from games for a minute though, it's worth thinking about what narrative is. Here I know that we have talked about narrative as the end result of the synthetic process between dice and clouds, but for now let's think of what we have previously called a game's narrative to be its History, the assembled and recalled events shared at the table over time. To expand on this, I read Silencing the Past by Michel-Rolph Trouillot earlier this year, a book about historiography and the modes by which capital H History is produced (or ignored). He talks about history being produced in four major steps:

  1. The moment of fact creation (creation of sources)
  2. The moment of fact assembly (creation of archives)
  3. The moment of fact retrieval (creation of narrative)
  4. The moment of retrospective significance (creation of History)

Silencing the Past is a beautiful treatise so I am a little bit embarrassed to be citing it in a blog post about tabletop RPGs, but it is a compelling and short read that is worth your time.

Fact Creation

In general, Tabletop RPGs create stories that are experienced in first person (or third person depending on if you play Close or Distant). In most "Adventure Games" and "Hero Games", this story is experienced primarily in the present tense. This means that, from the perspective of the players, facts about the world are created as they learn them at the table. The events of the game, the outcome of each dice roll, and each narration from the GM is a moment of fact creation for the player.

From the GM's perspective, facts can be created years before play or they can be created as they are exiting her mouth - game preparation is a process of fact creation. In some games, players may be encouraged to perform some level of Fact Creation through the process of writing a backstory or through collaborative worldbuilding exercises. It rocks that we have a variety of tools at our disposal for fact creation, but all players need to be on the same page about where truth comes from! Blorb principles argue that the truest facts are created during the GM's prep, but that is not the only way to run games. A pre-planned hero's journey based on your OC's backstory may be just as true as long as all of the players feel engaged and interested in that as a source of facts.

Fact Assembly

During play, each player may then record some of these new facts in notes to refer to later. The more players that participate in this process the better; if only one player remembers a fact established in play, especially if it is not the GM in this blogger's experience, then the fact probably does not feel grounded in the imagined world.

Fact Retrieval

The continuous processes of assembly and retrieval are key to maintaining equifinality of the Imagined Space; this is why beginning-of-session recaps and end-of-session reflections help maintain narrative momentum at the table. I find myself continuing to return to equifinality as a concept, and maybe these two excerpts from MIT Press's The Rule Book will help you to understand why:

Finally, in practice, we cannot ensure that players have a shared understanding of the codified rules: indeed, it is common that players have very different sets of interpreted rules. Contradictions can exist as long as all players play with equifinal rules: even if players understand the rules differently, it does not cause problems as long as their interpretations produce indistinguishable consequences. If players discover contradictions while playing, the equifinality conflict has to be resolved before the play can proceed.

Players playing together will usually make a serious effort to weave together a coherent narrative, even if there are obvious gaps and discontinuities or technological problems. Despite best efforts, players’ diegeses can never be uniform: even in the best cases, interpretations have subtle differences. In order for the shared play to continue, the players’ diegeses must be just as equifinal as the formal rules of the game: if equifinality conflicts are detected, they usually need to be arbitrated for the play to proceed.

Retrospective Significance

The moment of retrospective significance is often the source of the most surprise, fun, and story for the table, and it can come from either end of the GM screen. Every gamerunner has the experience of their players piecing together two previously-unrelated facts from the game and asking, "did you plan that?" If you respond with anything other than "...YES" followed by furious scribbling, then you've wasted the opportunity of a campaign! These moments are what drive the feeling of a game's living, breathing History.

I know that some story games give players agency in the past tense, but I won't have experience with that until my friend Noel runs me some Blades in the Dark. My understanding, however, is that this gives players opportunities to introduce modifications to the process of fact assembly and fact retrieval in a way that Adventure Games and Hero Games often do not. This agency in the narrative/game history dimension is what gives players in story games the ability to affect the game world outside of the actions of their avatar and allow them to emulate specific genres so effectively.

The end result of this TTRPG-as-gamified-historiography is that when players are standing at the water cooler the day after a game, they get to chat about the retrospective significance of how they interacted with these steps of fact creation, assembly, and retrieval and piece together some version of the game's History.

Part 2: Narrative, Play Structure, and Conflict

For Part Two of this post, see here!

Gamifying this Process

So what would it look like if we took another step toward the gamification of this historiography process? I opened this post with the idea of the contemporary bibliographer because, during my six hour drive home from the holiday weekend, I worked my way through a thought experiment of a game specifically about the creation of narrative. Enter the Mad Biographers.

The Premise

Players are authors who, due to scheduling constraints, have found themselves in a group interview with an adventurer of some renown played by a GM. Each author, or Personal Chronicler, is modestly well-known within their chosen genre but is seeking to option the biography of the adventurer.

The GM attempts to narrate their most recent adventure in the first person, providing the PCs with sensory details of their experience. The PCs each ask clarifying questions about the scene, framed as "what did you see when you...", "what did it sound like when..." to get a better sense of the experience. When the PCs have their heads wrapped around the lay of the land, a Chronicler may pitch a course of action that the adventurer must have taken, either based on a logical next step or based on their personal genre preference. This sort of statement is typically preceded by "What I'm hearing is that you..." or "It sounds like you must have...". If the course of action is deemed to be True, then that becomes an established fact; the GM continues to narrate their adventure from that point onward.

Based on their backgrounds and genre preferences, PCs may have different proficiency with Dialog, Technical Writing, Metaphor, Conflict, and Rhetoric, which each may have different effect on their ability to pitch courses of action. Other mechanisms of modifying the narrative of the adventure may involve interviewing key figures to get their sides of the story or taking Plot Holes (narrative wounds) in order to change established facts. By the end of the adventure, each PC attempts to construct a genre-appropriate narrative of what happened in order to advance the fame of their subject and their own literary career.

I'm probably going to spend the next few weeks noodling on what this may look like, mechanically, but the idea really tickled me today and I think the right table could have a blast with it. Similar to RAM, this feels like a fun and dynamic way to play through an OSR module from a unique perspective! It doesn't feel like a stretch for the GM to narrate the Rot King's Sanctum from first person while a room of ornery writers shouts at them about how to handle the river of sewage.