Tell me a Story: The Narrative Paradigm

 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 telling and retelling of stories is a monumentally powerful process which invites imagination, participation, and co-creation that no other human endeavor approaches. According to Fisher, every aspect of our lives is narration, which isn’t really all that helpful. Narrative, a symbolic act, is believed to have consequence and meaning for the people who participate in those narratives. Dungeons & Dragons, is a narrative that involves not only a game master who crafts the bounds of the world, but also a set of players who narrate their own actions, ask questions about the parameters of action, and react to the actions’ (and dice rolls’) consequences. 

According to the narrative paradigm, narration is a broad concept: it is both verbal and nonverbal, abstract, all-encompassing, and the foundation of rhetoric. Fisher saw the narrative paradigm as a move away from (or a contrast to) an older rational-world paradigm. To put it into gaming terms, think of Connect Four, Battleship, or chess. The decisions you make in any of these games are (likely) rational, scientific, and explicit in their purpose. I place my token here in order to accomplish a strategy so that I might win. I block you to prevent your winning. The games are logical. However, unlike these games, the narrative paradigm is built around a different understanding of human behavior.

In a narrative framework, people aren’t rational. They’re storytellers who base their actions on subjectively-determined “good” reasons, which vary from situation to situation. In D&D my gnome witch doesn’t pick her spells to maximize her chance of winning the game. She does so in line with her backstory, character, and motivations at the time. She chooses them to remain faithful to herself. In-game, this gives me (as her player) a sense of faithfulness to her personality. It makes her more real and consistent of a character, even if she isn’t a min-max build.

As a dungeonmaster, building my gaming world involves a lot of asking myself why certain things are happening. I think that to keep the game immersive, the story has to hang together. It’s what Fisher would term narrative coherence. If there is a pestilence in the land that has been established, the fields need to be full of rotten vegetables. The aurochs need to be thin. The peasantry haggard and begging. Thankfully in D&D we don’t often have to worry about the logical tests of reason that would beset real life situations. Here there be dragons. But I do want to be able to explain (at least to myself, and perhaps to my players) why events are occurring the way they are or why certain NPCs behave as they do. To help out your players, your world should operate reliably, your NPCs with some degree of predictability.  

A second test of a good story, in addition to its coherence, is its fidelity: does it ring true to the listeners.  Do my players believe and understand the motivations set before them? When your world has narrative fidelity, it squares well with the players’ expectations. D&D sets out a number of the expectations for DMs when it comes to general principles, take dragons for example. The Monster Manual divides dragons into the broad categories of chromatic (evil) and metallic (good). A dungeonmaster would do well to abide by the guidelines presented and keep the white dragons icy, feral, and fearsome. Keep the bronze ones talkative and friendly. The fidelity to the rules as written, and the monsters as described helps to group your game in the expectations your players have and saves you (as the DM) a lot of work in deciding how you’re going to develop each kind of monster.  

There is, of course, value in subverting the stereotypes and expectations, both for seasoned and novice players. Veterans can always be pleasantly surprised by a situation in which the kobolds are smart, the goblins are refined, and the tarrasque wears tap shoes. But, I think that if those show up in your game, they should also remain faithful to the narrative you’re attempting to create. In the narrative paradigm, fidelity is more about aligning the story with listeners’ values than it does with truth. 

Within a narrative paradigm, truth takes a secondary role to values. If truth is an NPC, listener values are the PCs. Narrative messages contain values embedded within them. Values guide decisions simply because audiences perceive consequences to be associated with either adhering to (or abandoning) values. The more values align with listener worldviews, the more likely they are to feel powerful and unavoidable motivations for action. Think of a classic greedy chaotic neutral rogue presented with the opportunity to steal from a corrupt official. The value of that narrative is clear, relevant to the rogue, carries consequences, and overlaps with her worldview. It’s a compelling narrative full of fidelity to the rogue’s perspective.