Dungeons, Dragons, and Designing Narrative in Three-Dimensions
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons. In one of my first sessions, he said something that stuck with me:
“Video games have ruined D&D!”
I thought he was being a bit dramatic, but he elaborated later on:
“Gamers are stuck thinking in linear terms. They see a problem, and they try to solve it with only one solution: attack.”
Granted, he gave me this tidbit of knowledge after I tried to kill an orc with a rapier. (Spoiler alert: I died. Badly.).
What I found interesting about the design of D&D is that it is the purest form of sandbox gaming; everything and anything can be attempted. Your choices are only limited by your imagination — which, in theory (and minus the supernatural elements), is a close proxy to real life.
In contrast, and by virtue of their programmed composition, video games have always been designed with limitations. Even as procedurally generated content is becoming more mainstream, clearly defined constraints, i.e. “missions,” and the length it requires to accomplish them, still determine the value of that game to the player. The narrative design of these games helps add value to these mission objectives.
But as video games move towards a more “hyper-realistic” era of Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality/Mixed Reality, I’ve been wondering: are there ways to design games that forces gamers not to think so linearly? From the narrative standpoint, how do we make games feel more “real,” and less programmed?
I GOT OUT MY PENCIL
For the purposes of this thought experiment, I’m going to focus specifically on the Role-Playing Game (RPG) genre. Here’s a rough (very rough) sketch map of how a typical RPG storyline may appear.
In written terms: the player is introduced to a “heroic” player character, who starts their journey to defeat X, making choices along the way (multiple competing mission objectives, character creation and management, dialogue tree, etc.) which determine their unique narrative path. For economy, they will probably hit a narrative “choke point,” (a scripted event in which all players will experience the same plotted moments), before they reach the ending, which may or may not have alternate options depending on the path the player chose.
Overall, it’s a pretty good system! We are giving players a fair amount of choice — but gamers are a savvy bunch. They understand that by taking certain choices they may be eliminating other future choices, which then governs how they play the game. Some titles, like Fallout: New Vegas, had a compelling faction system built into the game, but even then, gamers figured out how to delay choosing a side until the very end.
Because narrative choices can be distilled to binary decisions, gamers will typically choose what will make them the most successful in the game, rather than choosing who they want to be in this world — the “role-playing” element of these games is diluted into an avatar and hit points.
If we can figure out how to give more ownership to the players, allowing them to imprint their own identity (or the character they aspire to be), they will have a much more fulfilling emotional experience with the game.
LET’S GET AN ALIGNMENT!
Going back to D&D, there is some good design material to borrow. Namely, the alignment system:
To those uninitiated, the alignment system actually means very little to the tactile gameplay of D&D. Instead, it’s used as a tool to help players make decisions about who they want to be in that world. It determines how “lawful” or “good” a player is, which in turn provides guidance as to how a player might react to certain situations.
It’s a little confusing to parse at first, but I found this very crass rendering that sums it up:
To be clear, utilizing this chart for narrative is not an original idea. There are plenty of games, as recently as 2017’s Torment: Tides of Numenera, which have adopted this model and improved upon it.
However, they have done so in a very specific way, catering to niche audiences who already understand these concepts. The alignments are advertised to the player, whereas in a more realistic and broader model, I would advocate having the system hidden from the user-interface/user-experience (UI/UX).
So how would we work this into a narrative design framework into a game? By using a statistical model.
DON’T WORRY, THERE’S ANOTHER CHART COMING
The first step would be determining the world and player character and figuring out where they would fall on this alignment as a starting point.
Using an X-Y graph laid over the alignment chart, we could assign numerical values to a character (0,0 Purely Lawful Good; -50,-50 Purely Chaotic Evil). As the game unfolds, players would have choices that would be assigned a weighted number according to how “virtuous” and “lawful” these actions represented in the context of the world.
Example: In real life, we could all agree that murdering someone would be considered “purely chaotic evil,” but if you’re battling zombies and trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic hellhole, it may not be weighted as heavily. It could even be considering virtuous! And in other games, like the successful Uncharted franchise, morality is all a matter of interpretation; context matters when designing this system.
As players make moral choices through the game, their alignment could change — instead of creating multiple endgame states, we are actually creating multiple in-game states, which would affect how characters interact with the player.
Players can now shuttle back and forth between alignments according to how they wish to advance. Because these choices are weighted, the player can not whipsaw between being purely good and purely evil (evil is obviously easier to achieve, but to become good from evil would be much more difficult).
By adding another dimension to this graph, the Z-axis, which represents time, we would get a new three-dimensional narrative map.
Imagine a game where the player character begins as an anti-hero, probably falling somewhere in the “Chaotic Neutral” box. As the game advances, they could become “Lawfully Good” by the end of game, but it would require a very arduous the journey to get there. There would have to be many decisions that reflected a conscious choice made by the player to become a more traditional heroic figure.
By providing this type of architecture for an emotional character-building journey, we are giving players real agency for their actions, blurring the line between “gaming” and “reality.” The player’s path becomes less about eliminating options, and more about playing their role in the world that the developers have created — a novel and fulfilling experience for both designer and player.
