Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [16]
Cybertext, however, involves the addition of another plane: that of negotiation. In cybertext the reader must negotiate with an intermediary in order to unfold the plot (Aarseth, 1997, p. 125). The gamer in a textbased adventure game may have to work with the computer to find the right language to progress through the text—this is negotiation. Aarseth (1997) explains that the gaps in adventure games are “not used to complement the written parts in a game of imagination; rather, they are used as a filter, in which only the ‘correct’ response lets the user proceed through the text” (p. 111). This extra level of effort to traverse the text sets cybertexts apart from traditional narratives as well as from hypertext (p. 110).
Negotiation in Aarseth’s model does not change the actual events in the narrative. Negotiation is merely a means of puzzle solving. In fact, we might say that this sort of interactivity is neither selective nor productive. Readers ultimately have no choice at all in the actual textual events, only in how they get access to them and even that choice is not unlimited. In adventure games, there are only certain commands that are recognized by the “voice,” which is the computer system. For example, in the game Deadline, if the player gives the command “stroll around,” the computer responds, “The word ‘stroll’ isn’t in your vocabulary” (Aarseth, 1997, p. 116).2 Likewise, if the user enters in an action that is not expected by the computer, such as “hit Leslie with roses,” the computer responds with the script for a losing ending in which Leslie falls dead and the character’s avatar is arrested (Aarseth, 1997, p. 121). This ending may be analogous to one of the many unsatisfactory endings in the pick-a-path books. Yet, rather than selecting a pre-scripted action and turning to the correct page, the user of the adventure game must try to figure out the command that the computer is looking for in order to proceed. Leslie dying from being hit by roses is not a pre-scripted choice that the reader willingly followed; it is a mistake, a miscommunication between user and interface.
Interactivity in the TRPG
While gamebooks were attempting to create interactivity in print form, and adventure games in digital form, the TRPG emerged and made use of a combination of print and face-to-face interaction. Thus, the interactive possibilities in TRPGs have always been significantly different from these other genres. These differences may help account for the historical difference between the TRPG and these other forms of interactive narrative that emerged at the same time. While D&D is often credited as a foundational text, references to influential gamebooks or text-based adventure games are rare, and they continue to be distributed only within extremely niche markets. Their fan-bases have dwindled to near extinction, while TRPGs have continued to grow and recruit new audiences, even beyond the original D&D game.
The structure of interactivity in the TRPG may depend on the particular TRPG being played and whether or not that game is a part of a larger campaign created by a GM or DM or whether it is based on a preprinted module. For example, the plot layout of a D&D module might look similar to a pick-a-path gamebook, particularly one like Winter Wizard that is marketed as “A Dungeons and Dragons Adventure Book.” In the module Speaker in Dreams (Wyatt, 2001), which I ran as a DM, there is a flowchart in the back that resembles the narrative structure of Winter Wizard. Many such modules are organized around “encounters” or locations where the player will encounter some sort of action—whether that involves fighting a monster or talking to a non-player character (NPC)