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By Root 472 0

the DM may recap what players suggest for their characters to do. The player may articulate the desire for their character to complete an action—I take out a dagger and cut through the rope to escape from the orcs. The DM may then narrate the success or failure of that action—You feel the ropes loosening as your dagger slips between the knots. The story goes back and forth between the player and the DM, both of whom narrate key parts. The other players serve as narrattees listening to the story as it is being told.

At other times, the DM may take full control over the story. The following passage is from Maureen’s story. It was narrated exclusively for Mary through a private message. Although this particular passage transpired via email in order to keep Maureen’s experience secret, similar narrations frequently take place orally in the face-to-face game setting. In this story, Maureen had decided to take the blood suckle drug, a drug that caused a metamorphosis over which Maureen (played by Mary) had no control. Scott, as DM, completely narrates the scene:

You lie down, though you feel energy coursing through your veins, and close your eyes for a second. Then the visions hit you, and it is a strange dream where you feel like you are running through fog and everything seems blurry around the edge of your vision.

You are sleek. Muscular. Darkly beautiful. You see a few people— some thieves, some guards, a few stragglers coming home—and you see them playing a game of cat and mouse as they try to catch their prey and escape from their predator. They are so fragile, these people—you see this now. So puny, and so weak. But almost none see you; you seem to be able to melt into the shadows, and fast. Oh yes.

On a whim, you leap to a roof of a building and move closer, just to see what someone will say when they do see you. You drop into the alley behind someone dressed in soiled black clothes. You can smell the fear on him even before you see him turn in slow motion and his eyes widen. He holds a rusty blade in one hand as you advance and makes a feeble attempt to stab you.

You smack the weapon from his hand and knock him across the alley with hardly a thought. You hear his heart stop beating and you realize that he dies before the scream on his lips even had a chance to come out.

You start getting confused and then everything goes black. When you open your eyes from the dream with a start, you still feel powerful but very tired. You also notice that your sheets are completely ripped to shreds and your fingernails have a little blood on them. Probably yours, seeing the condition of the bed, and you must have cut yourself in tearing the sheets as you acted out your dream.

Unlike the descriptive passages from the module, there is clearly action here. One event leads to another. Maureen takes the blood suckle drug, she transforms, she jumps from the rooftops in her panther form, is confronted by an assailant, kills him, and returns to her room, unaware of what has transpired. Or we could interpret the entire story as a dream sequence that Maureen hallucinated after taking the blood suckle drug. Despite a clear chain of events, this narration is still somewhat unusual because it is in present tense and addresses the narrattee in second person. Monik Fludernik (1994) explains that “second person texts frequently undermine this story-discourse dichotomy by the very nonnaturalness of their design, telling the narratee’s or addressee’s story.” As such, she sees second person narratives as post-modern—they reformulate the relationship between narrator and narratee from traditional structuralist terms. In the sense that a story is told to one person (a narratee) by another person (a narrator), this passage clearly fits the definition of a narrative. However, even in these passages that consist clearly of storytelling, the story is far from traditional.

Furthermore, while the DM may act as narrator, this is not the only role that the DM fulfills within the gaming session. He or she also rolls dice to determine actions,