Two articles appeared on Wizard’s website this week, both part of ongoing series: This week’s Legends & Lore by Mike Mearls, and this week’s The Dungeon Master Experience by Chris Perkins. They offer very different sides of D&D, as Mearls talks about the development of D&D 5th Edition (a.k.a. D&D Next, using the same naming theories as professional wrestling) and Perkins discusses a regular if busy campaign he runs. They form an interesting point/counterpoint for D&D, looking at it from the standpoint of a designer who’s trying to build or fix a system and a player who’s trying to maximize the use of the system that exists. Both are interesting reads.
The differences between the articles really hit home this week. In Mearls’ “This Week in D&D”, he says that Wizards is aiming for a smaller set of rules mechanics, instead focusing on things that make sense in common language rather than focusing on making new mechanics. The example he gives is making an “archer” rather than a character who has “Rapid Shot”, because “archer” is a more recognizable term. As long as there’s still some option in this that prevents all archers from playing exactly the same, I can get behind this. It eliminates or reduces problems with the scope creep, and it suggests that the real focus on a character will be how they act at the table and how they feel rather than what numbers are on their character sheet.
But he starts the article by saying that the development teams want to “shift [their] emphasis to story”, which says to me that we’re back to the world of pre-programming how the world works rather than trusting players and DMs to come up with their own. I’m not against having fluff in the books, and anybody who’s heard me gush over the Pathfinder bugbear can attest to this. But the story of D&D is best managed by DMs and players, not by the book that settled on the world months before any campaigns start. The more in-depth a system’s story is, the less respect I have for it.
The comments are all aflutter over this, mostly with approval, and mostly because they assume that a focus on “story” means a focus on “a default D&D campaign setting”. It looks like Greyhawk has a fanbase much larger than I thought, and I can’t really argue with what the customers want. Though it’s not escaped my notice that players want a focus on common language like “archer” but are fine with a focus on specific language like “Moradin”. It’s enough to make me think that players don’t know what they want, just that they want it.
On the opposite end of the scale, Perkins’ “Make It BIG!” explains that players and DMs best remember the events, settings, and characters that are over-the-top rather than the mundane path of a game. Though my evidence is largely anecdotal, I can agree with this. Players don’t remember the Monster Campaign because the plot was gripping, and I’m pretty sure half of the players couldn’t even tell me what it was. But they do remember the nimblewright launching a subterranean castle into the air to destroy his own airship, the myconid* dying when he tried to crawl into the mouth of a fiendish dinosaur, and the half-dragon orc getting into a toe-to-toe punch-up with an eldritch giant named Bootylicious.
The contrast between these articles is somewhat striking, as Mearls says “Let’s hold back on the rules so we can work on the story” and Perkins says “Nobody cares about the story until the players make it worthwhile”. Certainly large, interesting adventures aren’t precluded by the design aesthetic of 5E. But I think it’s a huge mistake to expect that designers can make those things happens. Just give the players the rules they need to play the characters they want, give the DM the framework he needs to build the plot the players like, and trust the customers to make their own story without a designer’s help.
I think it’s another conflict between Int-based design and Cha-based play. I’ve said before that Int-based design is a good way to lose sight of the system itself. Our situation has not improved.
* – You know, both my highlight reel and Chris Perkins’ involve myconids. Maybe, like Greyhawk, they also have a fanbase much larger than I thought.
“Story” is a super-loaded word. The core “story” in D&D is a band of adventurers doing stuff. They do that stuff within a familiar world, which is part of the appeal of the game. Now, whether that world is just the classes, races, monsters, and magic system, or whether that also encompasses a particular campaign setting and even meta-plot… well, I don’t think it really matters. All that stuff is really just setting and not “story”. You can write all the campaign books you want and you’re still just adding window-dressing.
Then again, there’s not all that much “story” in traditional D&D games, regardless of setting. You nailed this one: there are events, often determined by random chance. Particularly exciting or unexpected events become memorable, and we sort of string together a narrative of “what happened” after the fact which (as you’ve pointed out) doesn’t really capture the sequence of narrative events so much as all the cool stuff that happened.
That doesn’t mean there can’t be story. You’ve done a decent job of making D&D campaigns about story (as has Blake). But it’s not something that just happens in D&D, beyond “We’re on a quest, hooray for us!” To get anything more than that you have to have people committed to long-term narrative, character development, and setting up real conflicts and choices. There is nothing in the rules of traditional D&D that supports this, though 4E made some baby steps in this direction.
So I think all that said I agree with you. D&D is about experiences, not story. It’s about “Remember that time when we dropped a castle on the dragon?”, not, “Remember how we won the heart of the ice queen and saved the prince and the dwarf finally learned how to trust his friends?” That doesn’t mean that in a future edition it can’t be able to be about both – but if you want that, you need to have explicit rules that support narrative stuff and character development. And you certainly won’t get there by writing detailed campaign settings, no matter how many splats you can turn out.
That’s the point, that D&D’s story is irrelevant to the system as long as the system gives the framework to allow a story to happen. A story (in fact, the same story) can happen regardless of system. The fact that most players think story == setting weirds me right out.
Though there’s no definition of “story” that restricts it to narrativist play–by definition a story is any sequence of events. Mega Man has a story even if he didn’t come out the other side learning the value of friendship.
I agree that story == setting is really, really strange and alien to me, though I do get it from a class of players that is used to the DM just “running them through his story”. There are remarkably many of these people – people who prefer a more passive style of roleplaying. If you extend this to the DM him/herself, and they’re not particularly interested in coming up with adventures and settings and modules, then from that particular gaming group’s perspective, the “story” is just whatever Wizards wrote.
That said, a lot of modern games go beyond simply providing a “framework to allow story to happen”. A lot of games have specific rules designed to facilitate certain types of story (or at least certain story themes). One of the things that the campaign rules in Monsterhearts – the game we’re playing on Fridays – specifically aim at is characters growing up and learning the value of friendship/to be responsible/how to control their urges. It’s actually baked into both the advancement system and the “season” or arc structure.
But you don’t have to go to hipster indie land to get this. Think back to our Dresden Files game. If you asked me to tell you about the “story” in that game, it would be about how Daniel came out of his shell, how Rev. Stone saved a girl from vampires, had to deal with the awkward relationship that resulted, and ultimately learned to follow through on his way to becoming a hero. If it had been a d20 game set in a similar world, I think a lot more of the “story” would have been about epic fights with vampires and ogres and a lot less about the characters’ personal trajectories.
Don’t get me wrong. That d20 game would have been awesome. But systems do dictate the kind of story that you can tell playing a game, whether they set out to do so or not. System does matter.