Is D&D a roleplaying game or a different sort of roleplaying game?
The term “roleplaying game” is delightfully meaningless.
It applies to stats-driven adventure games for some reason. Is it roleplaying to add an extra point to your Constitution score? It’s certainly part of a game, but is it roleplaying?
And it applies to narrative-driven games where you play the part of a character.
D&D is somehow both, which is sort of funny if you think about it.
Stats-driven games are empowerment fantasies. You start out as a chump who struggles to kill rats. You win a lot of fights, do some cool stuff, until you wield powers that make the gods themselves tug at their shirt collars.
Any narrative worth its ink is the opposite. The main characters fail – or, at best, succeed at a cost. While the protagonist is clawing their way to victory, fingertips bleeding, the Big Bad casually walks their way to winning.
It’s only in the climax that the characters are allowed to win for real.
The two aren’t mutually exclusive, but they do pull in opposite directions.
You probably don’t care – the game works fine without addressing the conflict here.
But still, maybe you find yourself wondering – as I often do – how to make your campaigns more epic and narratively satisfying.
It defaults to stats-driven stuff at the expense of the story, but it doesn’t have to.
Here are ways to keep your PCs in combat without undermining the basic rules of storytelling.
Losing in “cut scenes”
Your players will win most of their fights.
That doesn’t mean you have to let the players achieve their goals?
This is like a video game where you defeat the bad guy in fight, then they beat you in the following cut scene. The party fights to protect the mayor. They wipe the board clean of all enemies…
… only for a magic, insta-kill arrow to appear out of hammerspace and kill him.
This, technically, satisfies both sides of the RPG coin. The party wins the combat – as they should in a stats-based game – only to lose the encounter – as the narrative demands.
It’s an awful approach. Don’t do this. It’s bad enough when video games do it – if you do it as a GM, expect a riot.
Still, I had to mention it.
Winning trivial battles
Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem is a classic game for the Nintendo Gamecube. It tells the story of multiple heroes throughout history fighting against eldritch horrors.
Most of them score a minor victory, if that, before dying horribly.
It could be an interesting approach to running a campaign, but that’s not quite what I’m thinking.
The party can win (in accordance with the stats-driven gameplay) but it’s a victory that the enemies don’t care about. Yeah, you wiped out an orc patrol and saved a village. No worries, there are plenty more patrols where that came from.
This approach makes it even more exciting when they’re finally in a fight with stakes. If they know that this battle could actually bloody their enemy’s nose, they’ll fight all the harder.
Win or lose, it’ll be much more exciting.
Winning at a cost
This move is straight out of screenplay school.
The heroes win the fight… but they lose their greatest weapon.
They stop the bomb… but their ally turns on them.
D&D and similar games build this into the mechanics. Even a victorious fight costs resources – spell slots, ammo, hit dice and the like. If you keep them from resting too often, even victories start to hurt.
Losing the fight
Of course, sometimes the PCs won’t win the fight.
If they lose, then great – the needs of the narrative have been met. Kudos to you, GM.
You might find that wiping out the party is too tempting here. Honestly, they probably deserve it. It’s not the only option, though. If this were a novel or movie, they wouldn’t die – they’d fail forward.
The stakes will be much higher and direr. They’ll be depleted and demoralised. They might owe someone unsavoury a few favours now.
That’s all great as far as the story goes.
You know what else makes for a great story?
Distinctive, believable and realistic characters.
Even better – distinctive, believable and realistic races.
No, not all elves or Vulcans should think the same as each other. Races shouldn’t be homogenous. That doesn’t mean they have to be just like humans but in funny costumes.
You can design a species’ conscious template, making them seem alien while also allowing for specific people to have their own personality.
If you think the human mind is the best and only way for creatures to think, you need a dose of the Call of the Gods. It’ll make coming up with exotic and interesting minds as simple as fudging your dice rolls.
Go here to find it: