What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About Story Conflict
By Lance Schaubert | December 6, 2014 |
photo by Benny Mazur
Today’s guest is aspiring novelist Lancelot Schaubert. Lance has sold work to markets like McSweeney’s, Poker Pro, Scars, Encounter, Brink, and many others. He wrote, produced, and directed Cold Brewed which reinvented the photonovel. Currently, he’s finishing his first novel in between large batches of various soups (today’s soup, for the curious among us, is white chili).
His essay for WU, which draws comparisons between conflict in novels and in the roll-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, will speak to your “inner geek.” (Don’t pretend you don’t have one.) And if you really are questioning why D&D? Consider this: D&D is all about story and conflict.
You can learn more about Lance at lanceschaubert.org and on Twitter, or join the guild of renegade imaginations receiving his updates.
What Dungeons and Dragons Taught Me About Story Conflict
Confession: I spent way too much money on comic books, D&D dice, and video games in high school. Lucky for me, some of it came in handy for my career as a writer. Actually most of it came in handy, but this isn’t an apologetic for geek stores. It’s an article about conflict.
And conflict is strange. Really strange.
We literary types use the word “conflict” like business people use “synergy” and churchy people use “missional” and politicians use “foreign policy.” We use it so often, we have almost no freaking clue what it means anymore. I know I didn’t at first.
The first time someone told me, “Your story needs more conflict,” I wrote a battle scene into a non-battle story. Think: Matrix-meets-Sleepless-in-Seattle. Frustrated, they tried again to explain what they meant. I didn’t get it.
It’s because conflict has become our nonsensical buzzword. And we’re actually kind of proud of it, even if we’re clueless as to its true meaning. You might think it would be good to try another word, but we’re stuck with the word “conflict.” Dispute limits the topic to arguments. Sexual tension only works for erotica and certain scenes of romance. Fight sounds broader but still only includes interpersonal conflict and some forms of external conflict. Negotiation keeps us in the verbal and economic spheres but limits us where violence, pacifism, and forces of nature are concerned. Voyage takes care of the nature part, but limits us concerning still, small voices.
We’re stuck with the word, so I figured I might as well get to know it.
Robert McKee’s section on conflict in STORY helped me a bit:
Conflict is to storytelling what sound is to music… The music of story is conflict…. Writers who cannot grasp the truth of our transitory existence, who have been mislead by the counterfeit comforts of the modern world, who believe that life is easy once you know how to play the game, give conflict a false inflection. Their [stories] fail for one of two reasons: either a glut of meaninglessness and absurdly violent conflict, or a vacancy of meaningful and honestly expressed conflict.
I started to understand and then I remembered how conflicting dice rolls work in D&D. Now if you’re a women’s lit writer, hang with me – this will apply to you too, I promise.
But first, let’s get one thing out of the way: I’m not talking about the recent versions of D&D the new kids play. I’m talking about version 3.5 or earlier. In the early versions of the game, you create character sheets that are pages long. Everyone has a base set of abilities like “strength” and “wisdom” and then adds those bonuses to various skills. If you’ve ever played any of the Elder Scrolls games (or any fantasy game at all, really), you understand how this works.
How do these things affect a character? Let’s consider Noah from The Notebook.
Noah had a base ability of charisma that was off the charts but his wisdom was… well, let’s just say that wisdom didn’t really come into play when he decided to jump on the outside of that Ferris Wheel cart. Regardless of genre, characters have basic abilities. And then skills. Noah wasn’t wise, but he did have a knack for poetry because that’s where he invested his time. That often made up for his foolishness.
If you want to do something in D&D – speak, discover, flirt – you add three numbers: ability, skill, roll.
photo by Lydia
The first is an ability like “strength” or “intelligence,” a measurable potential like IQ or EQ. My character might be an idiot savant and have +3 intelligence but lives in the body of an eight-year-old boy and so has -3 strength. His abilities work like the bones of his character.
To ability, we add skill. Every time your character gains experience in D&D, she gets an allotted amount of skill points to invest. She might have added no skill points to “grappling” but five to “knowledge: history.” These skills come into play on an action-by-action basis. We might call these “quirks” or “talents” or even “vocation” in a story, like Noah’s knack for poetry.
Finally for a given task we add the die roll. Chance factors into stories by way of the author – this is the unknown, the relative efficaciousness of any given action, the question did the action work?
In D&D, you roll for everything. Say another character goes to grapple your character and you’re this eight-year-old boy. They’re the hulking weight-lifting champion of the world. They have +3 strength, you have -3 strength. They’ve invested 3 points in grappling, you’ve invested 0.
Then they roll a 19, you roll a 19.
The final score?
Them: 25; You: 16.
They’ve got you tight in a bear hug and they’re not letting go. You loose that conflict.
Make sense?
Everything you do in the game pits one character’s roll against another character’s roll. If you want to pick a lock, you pit the lock difficulty (25) against your lock-picking ability (1 dexterity + 2 lock picking + 19 roll = 22 fail). Remember Marv in Home Alone? That was a fail at lock picking.
If you want to stay outside during a terrible weather storm you pit the danger of the lightning (20) against your survival skills (2 wisdom + 3 Survival + 15 roll = 20 success… just barely). Remember Katniss in the climax of Catching Fire? That was a skin-of-her-teeth success at surviving a lightning strike.
If you want to persuade a person to let you see a secret document (30), then you’ll use skills you’ve invested in diplomacy (-2 charisma + 7 diplomacy + 17 roll = 25 fail, but try again later). Remember Snape and the Marauder’s Map in Harry Potter? That was a fail at diplomacy and, later, at deciphering the map.
If someone lies to you (20) all you have to do is sense their motives (3 intelligence + 6 sense motive + 12 roll = 21 success like Matt Damon does to Eddie KGB in Rounders) to call their bluff. Works good for poker, eh?
If someone tries to flirt with you (20 for bluff) you can roll to sense their motives (24) and refuse to acknowledge their advances just like Katherina in the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew.
If you fail the roll, though, you might end up like Katherina at the end of The Taming of the Shrew.
In the old Dungeons and Dragons, you roll for everything. You roll to jump over a chasm. You roll to inspire troops. You roll to research various hard, harder, and hardest concepts. You roll to decipher code. You roll to see if your arrow hit the dragon (probably not) or if it missed and hit instead one of the forty guards behind the dragon (probably so). You roll to see if your beer spills down your beard. You roll to find hidden paths. You roll to sneak past watching eyes, make sexual advances, cure cancer, fight demons, uncover mysteries, and wonder at the fate of humanity.
You rolled to see if you got to the bathroom in time. One time, my friend Andy’s character rolled a critical fail on peeing on a dead body. The guy running the game said, “You piss your pants.”
Which was hilarious.
Until we tried to sneak up on these monsters with heightened senses of smell. They smelled the urine and we lost. Terribly. They call it a “party wipe” in DnD because everyone gets murdered by the bad guys. We did, however, learn how to mask smells on that campaign and that came in handy later. Good characters always learn from their mistakes and that’s why we tell one another stories.
When an object or character stands against you in DnD, it rolls a conflicting die (if it’s animate) or starts out with a default number for difficulty (if it’s inanimate). Highest number wins.
That’s goals in conflict: winner moves forward and loser tries to find a new way to struggle through.
Conflicting rolls cover external, interpersonal and internal conflict. Does this cover everything that happens in a given DnD story? Well no, there are Non-Playable Characters in the game that tell you what’s going on. There are also clues and trails and alternate story lines, all of which you can choose to engage or ignore.
However, character action moves the story along. The game wouldn’t be half so addicting if you could just waltz into a dungeon, fill your pockets with treasure, and walk out. Conflict makes the game and moves the story. You could say the conflict — the goals in active opposition that result in a winner and a loser — is the story.
Or, if you prefer, when you find yourself stuck in the middle of writing a screenplay or a book, ask yourself: are there any obstacles?
If not, what can I add?
If so, what’s the conflicting roll and how good is my character at overcoming these sort of things? If they’re terrible, can they get around it somehow?
In DnD you can (1) pick a building’s lock or break the lock or (2) break down the door the lock’s on or (3) try sneaking in through a window or (4) seduce the owner until they open it or (5) bribe someone else to open it or (6) cast a spell to make you walk through it or (7) employ any number of other options to get inside or…
There’s never one way. There are infinite paths.
Interesting stories create that very same environment:
If your main character’s a high school science teacher burdened with the debt of a cancer diagnosis, he can’t cure cancer, but can he make meth?
If he’s a billionaire playboy philanthropist who hates companies that profiteer off of war, he can’t stop profiteering, but can he use a green-energy arc reactor to make a formidable threat to said companies?
If she’s an FBI agent worried about the lives of Ms. America contestants, she can’t go undercover as the prettiest, but can she get in as the most congenial?
Conflicting rolls show us back doors into and out of sticky situations and help us understand that awful literary buzzword: conflict.
Assess the difficulty of every given situation.
Then find a clever way around within the skillset of your character.
That’s a story.
Thoughts to share? The floor is yours.
Lancelot Schaubert has sold his written work to markets like The New Haven Review, McSweeney’s, The Poet’s Market, Writer’s Digest (books and magazine), Poker Pro, Encounter, The Misty Review and many other similar markets. He reinvented the photonovel through Cold Brewed and was commissioned by the Missouri Tourism Board to create a second photonovel — The Joplin Undercurrent — that both fictionalizes and enchants the history and culture of Joplin, Missouri.
Ah, Sprawly Jack, I might have known you were a D&D buff from way back. (The new-fangled D&D editions are way less cool than good ol’ 3rd and 3.5.)
I was never a huge D&D fan, but cut my RP teeth on various other roleplaying games — MERP, Rolemaster, World of Darkness, Cyberpunk, etc etc etc. And what I learned playing characters and, more importantly, running games taught me how to be a storyteller.
Interesting take on equating conflicted rolls with conflict in stories. It makes me want to break out my dice.
Agreed.
MERP is the most chaotic roleplaying game every. Anything that determines the fate of any given move based on a 1 in 100 chance is out of control. You rolled a 66 and got served an auto-death – that’s like the opposite of story and borders on lotter, eh? The rest were cool, but with MERP I felt like… maybe it was too real?
Me too. And me too.
Interesting take on equating conflicted rolls with conflict in stories. It makes me want to break out my dice.
I love the analogy. I’m reminded of a lesson I learned from (I think), “Story Engineering” by Larry Brooks. You start with an idea. The new author will jump right into the story with that idea and, of course, end up with something that is not a story. But we learn to add character and conflict to our idea, making it a premise. My favorite example was:
A small town sherriff (character) who is afraid of the water (weakness) goes up against a giant shark (major league conflict).
If the sherriff was an experience shark hunter, big whoop. The weakness makes the story all the more intriguing.
Thanks for the great post.
Lancelot–
Your post opens a yawning generational divide for me: although my son-in-law is a great fan of D&D, I’ve never played. In fact, I’ve never played any video game. This means it would be foolish of me to comment on your post. But–and again, I suspect this too is unfortunately more and more a generational “thing”–I feel obliged to offer something related to what you’ve written.
A “roll” is what’s done with dice in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and it’s also “a small piece of baked yeast dough.” A “role” is, among other things, “a part played by a character in a book, play, film, etc.” These two words are what’s called homophones, same exact sound but different meanings.
Is this a small-minded quibble? I have to hope not. Whether the writer is an old codger like me, or a millennial, or anyone in between, I remain convinced that Marshall McLuhan was right when he said “the medium is the message.” Your post is no doubt valuable to those able to follow the discussion. But you are talking about the roles played by fictional characters, not rolls served with soup. This means that, for anyone who knows the difference, your message is weakened when the medium, in this case language, is flawed by a homophone.
Hey Barry,
Thanks for the critique – I obviously fouled up here. However, my sin may not be so much one of commission (at no point was I talking about “roles”) as one of omission (I was unclear). I find this personally hilarious because my position is exactly where Porter was a few weeks back and I made a similar critique of him that you’ve just made of me, though yours was much more succinct than mine. Bonus points there.
For clarity: conflicting “rolls” my be better stated as “conflicting mathematics.” A dice roll of 20 conflicts with a dice roll of 15 and the number 20 wins. In the game, you apply the math to any action – conflicting math, conflicting rolls. I am proposing to think of character action mathematically, regardless of the role the character plays.
And this transcends nerdy boardgames like Dungeons and Dragons.
Where your generation is concerned, I believe we could draw better analogies from (1) poker, (2) the boardgame RISK – circa 1959 – or (3) engine maintanence.
Concerning poker, the conflicting “roll” would actually be conflicting bets. I realize that No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em is what the kids play these days, but five-card stud and Omaha work fine for our purposes. In poker, you can win a hand one of two ways. You can either (1) force your opponent to fold by betting more than they’re willing to throw into the pot or (2) win a showdown by having a better hand. Most hands in professional poker are won by forcing a fold. This is where we writers sourced the phrase “raising the stakes.” If you raise, you have a chance of winning more money or shutting down the hand. So two conflicting hands – two conflicting players – go at each other with more and more money until one wins. If either puts all of their money into the pot (and we hope the story comes to that), then it comes to the showdown. McKee would call this the moment of “irreversible change.” Early moments in the story would be forced folds and smaller hands like pairs beating high cards and the like. As in a poker tournament, your protagonist whittles down their opponents and narrows the field until they get heads up with their antagonist. The final all-in hand shows whether they win or loose.
In this scenario, you have two math systems at work: pot odds and hand odds. You have the odds of winning a show-down (Aces beat Kings) and you have the odds of the money you win over time (calling a $20 bet into a $400 pot is good odds if you’re drawing for a flush because you have a 1/5 chance of hitting that flush). YOUR math goes up against your opponents math and that’s how you determine who wins. The winner of showdowns has a better hand. The winner of money over the long haul makes great calls and forces more of their opponents to make bad calls.
When we say to our characters “it’s your call,” those are moments where the math parallels poker. (1) How much have they invested in this decision? And (2) do they have the winning hand?
A similar thing happens in the boardgame Risk, but it’s simply one army verses another and whoever has the most players PLUS the highest roll wins a conflict. Win the most conflicts and you win the country. Win the most countries and you win the continent. Win the most continents and you win the game.
As for engine maintenance, everything in an engine works on balance – regardless of whether it powers a rocket ship or a Geo Metro. Tensile strength of bolts combat torque and G-forces brought about by things like centrifugal force. The rhythm of each piston must time out with one another through both the crankshaft and the camshaft – if you’re off even a little bit on the camshaft, you can snap off the intake valves (on old cars) and have metal rattling around inside the combustion chamber of a gas-powered machine. Engines do blow up, after all. In regards to character action, that mathematical balance is that conflict: torque verses bolt, piston five verses piston four, brake verses accelerator.
My point isn’t to cheerlead D&D so much as showing that conflicting rolls – conflicting mathematics – are an easy way to frame up every character action.
It’s your character’s action (X)
verses the action of another character or inanimate forces (Y)
to equal an outcome that sets the stage for the next action (O)
X/Y = O
2O = (X/Y) / XxYy
And so on. Obviously there’s no real formula to it, it’s simply a visual way of representing conflict – your character’s math (roll) verses the math (roll) of the forces of antagonism. Call it opposing bets, opposing armies, or opposing physics, but it all gets us to the same place: a place where the roles don’t matter so long as the rolls define one another over the whole course of the narrative.
Rolls define roles.
Spot on of course! I openly confess to being only a chronicler of my world- and without getting too technical this piece points in the direction why. The major events are on the record.
As a Game Master, you have to surrender some control over the outcomes, because if you don’t you wind up talking to yourself. The players need to feel involved- and I think players are a fair analogy for readers. They need to FEEL that the outcome is not certain, and sense the same urgency, the need to succeed or survive that the characters do- this is key to empathy and immersion.
Neatness counts in penmanship, but life is messy and none of that changes in a fantasy work. As I’m sure Lance will agree, “No plan survives contact with the players”. Doesn’t mean you don’t plan- but stay humble. The most amazing things happen outside your intent.
On the flip-side, you can go too far down the dice-rolling road. I would be manfully rolling away behind my screen, encounters, reactions, who knows what, and slowly realize that all conversation in the room had died down. Looking up, I’d see a roomful of expectant faces staring at me. It was then I first came up with one of my best responses. With a stone face, I said
“SUDDENLY… nothing happens.”
That’s exactly right, Will. Hell hath no fury like a Gamemaster rolling behind the shield…
Re: plans – yes. The best example in film is Joss Whedon’s “Cabin in the Woods.” The teens can grab any of the artifacts and set in motion any terrors, but the ones they choose – and the ways in which they respond – define them and help illuminate their various pasts baggages.
Or, as Lisa would have it, their moments of misbelief.
I love the analogy :)
Thanks Dangdut!
I was never a D&D fan, but I did get into White Wolf gaming for a bit. It’s true you can learn a lot about conflict and other aspects of writing from RPG. Come to think of it, the popularity of RPGs has to be as Lisa Cron states, we are wired for story. And, I’ve heard tell that the Wachowskis were inspired to write The Matrix after playing Mage.
I’d never heard that, Bee, but as a long-term player of Mage, that totally makes sense. Love it.
Yeah, it translates well. Some of the best storytellers I know are DMs that will never write a novel, but who have written KILLER campaigns.
Literal and figurative, of course.
I know nothing about D & D, but it’s wonderful when a writing principle begins to make sense because of another pursuit. Nothing we do gets wasted, right?
Nothing at all. John Granger called Rowling’s sources a “compost heap of classic literature.” I like that – even refuse can become fertilizer.
Not only have I stayed up way too late playing D&D (I remember those character sheets!), but I’ve invested quite a few hours in the Elder Scrolls games (how I love you Skyrim let me count the ways) and it occurs to me that some of my gaming characters are eerily similar to some of my main characters.
Nice essay :)
Totally. I actually referenced several video games in an early draft because that same basic math exists:
A + S + R = O
Where:
A = ability
S = skillpoints
R = roll
&
O = outcome
If you don’t have high enough ability and skill points, the odds are stacked against you to face something out of your league. Like… a dragon? Sure, why not. A dragon.
But it’s true too of NHL97 and FIFA and Madden Football – all of the players in the sports games have base abilities, skillpoints, and then moment-by-moment attempts. Even a great gamer can’t beat poor gamers if the team they’re using has trashed ability and skill levels. Think if the Dallas Cowboys faced off against Ohio State. Or Chicago Bulls verses Salem Highschool Wildcats. There’s no comparison – the students are unprepared.
Same goes for nerdy boardgames, Call of Duty weapons, and the tools in the Zelda series.