Dungeon Theory

  Homo Narritas. The story-telling animal. I remember vividly the day I bought a chainsaw.  It’s not the price that sticks with me, or the store, or even the salesperson. What I remember is that the technician who demonstrated how to properly fire up and run the chainsaw told me in unambiguous terms, “If you do this wrong, you’ll kill yourself.”  It was a compelling story.  As gamers, players and masters, that’s at the heart of what we’re after: a compelling story. For Walter Fisher , this is at the core of what it means to be human. It’s not the tight argument, the preponderance of evidence, or the rationality with which we provide our reasons. Telling the story is how we secure buy-in, change beliefs, influence attitudes, and motivate actions. It’s story or nothing: the narrative paradigm .  Has there ever been a convincing national origin, religious mandate, or political push that has not been framed in terms of story? Roleplay gamers know this deeply. The ...

  As in my previous posts about the use of language in D&D, the theory of Dramatism conceptualizes language use and choice as symbolic action. Words are symbols which represent ideas. We use those symbols with motivation to affect the people and world around us. In tabletop gaming, the words by and large create the world within which the players act. Dramatism , for its founder Kenneth Burke , is a method of language (and thought) analysis that seeks to understand the actions conveyed, rather than the information contained. Burke is regarded as one of the twentieth-century’s leading rhetoricians . To him, language isn’t just about transmitting information, but about planning, acting, and responding to others’ language choices.  A DM’s use of language helps explain character motivation, clarifies goals players may want to achieve, and establishes rules which guide the game’s action. Without language (at least according to Burke), we couldn’t have a host of the key elemen...