Creation of Narrative in Tabletop Role-Playing Games - Jennifer Grouling Cover [57]
Thus, in contrast with most texts, in TRPGs, decisions made in the AW directly affect the TAW. For example, in the interview I conducted, Scott noted that if the party had not chosen to talk to the orcs and had not asked the right questions, he would not have explained the motivation for the orcs’ attack on the towers. The motivation would not have disappeared from the APW or the TRW, but the view of the orcs presented in the TAW would have been quite different. Furthermore, the way in which the DM presents the TAW affects the decisions the players make in the AW. These decisions, in turn, have an effect on the APW. If the players had not asked the right questions and had not made successful rolls to convince the orcs to respond to those questions, they would not have discovered the motivation for the attack and might have responded differently. Scott explains that he planned for several different possible outcomes before the session, though he was also open to other outcomes based on the players’ actions. If the party had defeated the orcs and prevented them from making their journey into the mountains to defeat the Skullbash tribe, Scott had planned that the orcs would have vowed vengeance and in several months time they would have accumulated a greater army and come to attack the city of Gateway. This outcome was certainly affected by both the TAW and the AW, for had the players not been presented with the motivations of the orcs, they would likely have reacted differently to the both the narrative and the gaming situations.
How does one keep all of these actual and possible worlds straight? Especially when Ryan (1991) states that stepping into the APW means “erasing the linguistic signs” that this world is a fiction (p. 23)? Participants in Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) continually switch between the APW and the AW; but once they have entered the APW, they do not need to continually signal that it is not the AW. The actions that the players take don’t need to begin with the phrase, “Let’s pretend that.” Even though participants continually go back and forth between the AW and the APW, they rarely clarify whether they are referring to the AW or the APW. Ken Lacy (2006) points out that even when going from out-of-character to incharacter roles involves a gender change, participants rarely use traditional linguistic markers to call attention to these changes (p. 106). While this occasionally causes some confusion, the majority of the time there is no question about which world is being referred to. In reference to gaming in general, Goffman (1961) explains that the notion of frames allows gamers to sustain both a side encounter and the main encounter with relatively little confusion (p. 20). This holds true for D&D, even though the frames are extremely complex.
Levels of Narrativity in D&D
Separating the TRPG session into frames that refer to different possible worlds and that use different types of speech lends insight into the question of how to separate the narrative from other modes of immersion in the gaming session. The types of speech used in the TRPG have varying relationships to the actual world and the APW and indicate that both narrative and non-narrative can exist within the same text. Rather than concluding that the entire D&D session is or is not a narrative, I propose a model for TRPGs (figure 3) that involves levels of narrativity that reflect the relationships among the multiple worlds accessed