About a year ago, I read a post about sharing narrative control with players over on Gnome Stew that just blew my mind. After my initial reaction of “Are you kidding me? The DM is the narrator, end of story,” I realized that I already did some narrative sharing because I encouraged the players to describe their attacks during combat.
When I read Chatty’s article about using 4E action points to grant narrative control, I decided I needed to explore some additional ways to allow player narrative that I would be comfortable with. As I started preparing for the current 4E campaign I am DMing, it occurred to me that the minor quests mechanic might be an excellent method for sharing narrative control with my players.
Declaring your major and minor
Quests are a new mechanic in 4E Dungeons & Dragons. Well, “new” is a bit of a misnomer. Quests have been around forever in the form adventure hooks. They’ve just been given a little extra bling in 4E in the form of an XP award. This is an obvious nod to a principle CRPGs and MMOs put into practice long ago: reward the players for investing in the story.
There are two types of quests in 4E: major and minor. If you have seen any of the published 4E modules, you’ve noticed that major quests are the central goals of the adventure. Minor quests are subplots that don’t necessarily impact the outcome of a major quest. More importantly, minor quests are tied to individual characters. From page 103 of the 4E DMG:
Often, minor quests matter primarily to a particular character or perhaps a subset of the party. Such quests might be related to a character’s background, a player goal, or the ongoing events in the campaign relevant to one or more characters.
Major quests are pretty easy to implement. You come up with them when you are designing the adventure (or they are provided by the module if you are using published material). Minor quests can be a lot more work, even if, like me, you ask your players for information on their character’s background, beliefs, and goals. That kind of customization requires a lot of analysis and preparation on the part of the DM.
But they don’t have to. Toward the bottom of page 103 in the 4E DMG, there is a little paragraph about player-designed quests. Who better to come up with quests tied to their personal goals and background than the players?
A minor quest for narrative control
In our game, I hand out index cards for the major quests. To facilitate player-designed minor quests, I hand out 3 blank cards to each player. If a player thinks of a goal related to the current adventure that they would like to accomplish, they write it down and pass the card back to me. I then do my best to incorporate it into the adventure. When a player runs out of cards, I will give them another set of 3 blanks.
We had a successful implementation of this in our last game session. One of the PCs is an apprentice in the local mages’ guild. During an audience with the local lord (which produced a major quest), the player noticed the veiled disrespect for his master in some of the NPCs’ comments. He decided he wanted to investigate and uncover the reasons behind this behavior.
Before the party left town for their delve, I had the player roll a Diplomacy check and we did a little spotlight roleplaying where he reported back to his master about his observations. His check was successful, so he learned that the High Septarch of the guild had only just been an apprentice himself when the old guild was destroyed during the Bloodspear War. This, along with the fact that few other arcanists living near or passing though Fallcrest have seen reason to join the new guild, led many to hold the view that the High Septarch has a rather inflated opinion of his abilities.
Completing this quest earned the party an additional 100 XP at the end of the session, which broke down to 20 XP per player. This amount is less than half of what I used to give individual players as awards for good roleplaying back when we played 2E AD&D. More importantly, it gave the player who designed the minor quest a little bit of narrative control, and that’s really what I was hoping to achieve.
Kameron Franklin is a published fantasy fiction author and a 26-year RPG veteran. He is currently DMing his first 4E Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and blogging about it and other explorations of RPG play and design at pathsofadventure.com.
I love this minor quest cards idea.
I played in a light campaign several months ago with a DM who informally did minor quests (he did one for his girlfriend and that was all… probably only because she was his girlfriend). I played a cleric who was basically a communist–not anachronistically so, but he had similar guiding principals and was an atheist who harnessed “the power of the people” instead of the power of his god. I frequently roleplayed in ways to start peasant uprisings, but the DM constantly forced my character to fail at this regardless of my roleplaying, the situation, and how the dice fell. I was handing him minor quest ideas and trying to make it happen, but he frustrated my efforts.
As the campaign wore on, I gave up on trying to roleplay the character to his fullest potential and resigned to just being a regular old healbot cleric with lasers. It really killed my enjoyment of the game–if the DM had followed your advice and actually fostered some player narrative control, I would’ve enjoyed the game significantly more.
.-= evizaer´s last blog ..From Absurd Gamism to Moderate Simulationism =-.
I like your idea about giving the players the option to influence quests. That’s a cool method for getting your players to tell you what they like about your story and what you should give them more of. Awesome stuff. However, I’m not sure I would define it as giving them “narrative control” since they aren’t actually influencing the world or the fiction. Instead, they’re providing flags for you to use based on the session’s events. Thus, they’re telling you what’s important to them and letting you follow it up.
Similarly, your players “describing their attacks” isn’t giving them narrative control, it’s simply descriptive roleplaying. Sure they’re participating in the narration, which is awesome, but they don’t actually have any control over the outcome – you’re still telling them if they succeed and what happened. True narrative control happens when they roll the dice, see the result, and say “My sword slashes him across the throat and he falls to his knees as his life slips away.”
Using your example: The player picked up on the conversation between his master and the others and signaled to you “This interests me!” by giving you the card which you followed-up. That’s cool because irregardless of how important it was in your original story, it’s now become an element. However, at no point did he have any influence on the actual narrative outcome. How could you have provided him with narrative control? Have him narrate what he found through is investigation. In other words, he tells the table (including the GM) what he discovered.
The big issue with letting players have narrative control is that you the DM are releasing narrative control. That’s pretty hard to do, especially if you are used to having complete control of a game. It also means that the DM is discovering facts as the players do, which can be scary (and fun) because you then have to react on the fly.
As an example I might allow players to describe how they succeed at something. This places a large degree of narrative control in a players hand. I like it because it frees me up from having to invent stuff. If they say they want to sneak into a castle to rescue the princes, I ask them to roll stealth and if they succeed describe how they did it, and they then describe crossing a moat, using the overflow pipe, entering through the dungeons, sneaking passed two guards, and climbing the outside of the tower to get to the window I’ve now got loads of details about the castle that I can use at a later time.
You don’t even need a mechanic for narrative control. Just decide what level of detail you are willing to let players narrate on the fly. I don’t even blink if one of my players says I swing on the jib sheet, or I grab a bottle from the bar and hit him. Each of these allows the player a tiny amount of narrative control – they are creating items in the world. I’m happy if they invent locations – one of my favourite locations in my game is “It still floats” – a ‘used’ boat dealership in Sasserine. One of my players just announced he was going there – and I agreed. I’m also happy to have them invent NPCs on the fly – half my game world were invented by the players.
The way I look at it – its the GMs responsability to make sure the players have a good time (its also the player’s responsability but thats fo another discussion) but that doesn’t mean he has to do all the heavy lifting. I draw the outline but I’m happy for anyone to fill in the details.
@Harnish: It might not be narrative control as per say, but it is a significant way to provide background developing tools to you player in a fair way.
I might not use this as is but it did gave me an idea that I will use in my game.
@Yan – I would completely agree – it’s a cool method for getting players involved.
@Declan – one of the difficulties for many systems is that they focus on task resolution (i.e., the stealth check just gets you by the first guard) rather than on a more global conflict resolution in one shot (i.e., one stealth check gets you in and back out of the castle). It’s hard for many GMs to cope with the idea of one skill check being enough to define what may be several minutes to several hours of game time. We’ve all been through the situation where a GM has demanded skill checks every round. 🙁
With 4E, skill challenges kind of walk the line between the two situations: The individual tests tend to determine the outcome of specific discrete events, but the whole is designed to simulate the whole “mission” in a more compact, succinct way. In fact, skill challenges are one of the easiest opportunities for a 4E DM to hand over narrative control: Give them the series of skill checks, tell them how well they succeeded, and then leave it up to the players to tell you what actually happened during that time. This won’t work for all skill challenges but easily could be used for overland travel or even investigation if the DM is willing to improv.
.-= MJ Harnish´s last blog ..Weekly Wormy =-.
Ever played the Prince Valiant RPG?
The storyteller hands out minor quests to the players that they can trigger when they want to (subject to game master approval). When they trigger a minor quest, they become the storyteller for said quest (and the game master takes the time given to get his other stuff in order, take a break, etc). When the minor quest is over, they get a certificate as a thank you for running said quest and then they can cash in that cert later like an action point / special daily power.
Once you get into the groove of the game, the suggestion is to stop giving the players the side quest sheets. They make up their own encounters along the way and you give them the yes/no as storyteller. So as they travel from Camelot to where the saxons are, one of the players asks if they encounter anything interesting along the way. The Storyteller turns the question around with a “do you?” and next thing you know one of the players is running an encounter with a knight on a bridge, another has a “goblin” ambush (actually a filthy peasant pretending to be a goblin), and then someone has them run into forward elements of the saxons.
Then you get back to running the game.
Did I ever mention that Greg Stafford was way ahead of his time? It even uses the d02 system (it know no limit!)
.-= Dyson Logos´s last blog ..Mutant Future, Gamma World, and Me =-.
@MJH: When I say “attack”, I include both the action and the result. Sorry for the lack of clarity.
I knew I was stretching the definition of narrative control with my implementation of minor quests. It’s probably more the equivalent of directorial control.
.-= Kameron´s last blog ..Wood for the campfire =-.
The cards is a really good idea, and not just in D&D. I’m currently planning my groups next campaign for the Star Wars roleplaying gamer. I’ve always been trying to get the players to get their characters more into the story, this may be it.
.-= Katana Geldar´s last blog ..It’s about trust =-.
@MJ Spot on, sir. Good form!
The combat descriptions and minor quests are good tools to keep players interested. I did similar things myself with great success during my college and slightly after college gaming.
But things really get wild and crazy when you take the reins, hand them to the players and start acting as a facilitator. All of the sudden, the hard work of story creation happens at the table instead of hours before anyone else shows up. Now you’re all surprised together when the count betrays the party because one of the players just threw it in there!
To paraphrase the Sons of Kryos (who I think were quoting someone else) “Hand them the spoon!”
.-= Rich Rogers´s last blog ..Pondering the Monday one-shot =-.
It also occurred to me that handing the reins (or the spoon) of narrative control to the players can result in frustration or stall the game if the players aren’t motivated by storytelling. My current group leans toward power gaming as a primary motivator, with exploration and storytelling as secondary and tertiary motivations. I think small steps, like combat narration and minor quests, provide a good intermediary step for both the players and the DM to get used to sharing narrative control.
.-= Kameron´s last blog ..Heroes of Nentir Vale =-.
Kameron – you’re dead on about that. Some groups (or players) simply do not want any real input into the fiction, or are really uncomfortable (or even bad) at it. In my own group, we have 1 or 2 players who struggle when given the chance to narrate and so I usually leave it as an option when they’re playing. Some systems like FATE even account for this through the use of fate points.
It sounds like your group is all interested in a more of a traditional, “reactive” style of play in which they each say what they want to do and then the GM handles the rest. 4E (and D&D in general) really lends itself to that style of play and is pretty much constructed to be played that way (hence why we’re all talking about ways of adding it in), and in turn tends to attract those types of players. Hence, I would lean towards the “option” of adding to the narrative and see where it takes you.
Often, if you want to, you can shift players in to a more narrative play style by doing things like this or simply introducing more narrativist (aka Story Now) kind of games as one shots: This is what I’ve done with my own group and how I teach kids how to roleplay (because to be honest I find the “I’m GM and thus god” style of play really uninspiring). For example, with my main adult group. I began running games like InSpectres, PTA, and Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries as one-shots. Nowadays, almost everyone is in to taking narrative control, although some more so than others. In contrast, with the kids at the club I took a much more gradual approach, because they’re very reactive and most are strictly in to power-gaming. Therefore, I started asking them to describe their attacks (giving them a bonus when they did), and then move in to having them describe the outcome (again with a bonus associated with doing so), and then later began allowing them to add to the fiction by using group campaign creation. Once I had them involves with those kinds of activities, I started introducing one-shot games – InSpectres in particular has been very successful in to teaching them how much fun it can be to actively contribute to the story, as well as how failure can also be fun.
.-= MJ Harnish´s last blog ..White Wolf sale going on at RPGNow.com =-.
@Kameron
That’s a fair point. I’ve had moments in groups where it was obvious players weren’t comfortable with “the spoon”. I think, again, MJ hits it just right with mixing the control amongst the group, like dials. I still think most “reactive” players can be tempted to the other side if they are coaxed and rewarded for participating, though.
.-= Rich Rogers´s last blog ..Pondering the Monday one-shot =-.
I think The combat descriptions and minor quests are good tools to keep players interested. I did similar things myself with great success during my college and slightly after college gaming.