Something games historically struggle with is maintaining a coherent theme across all the various threads they must weave in their world. Often the result is a Skyrim where the sidequests are incredibly entertaining and beloved, but the main quest gets criticized or even just ignored. While side quests are often entertaining bottle episodes, akin to what you see in a good tv show, each episode doesn’t always feed back into the central story. If the sidequest is an episode, then the overall story is a season arc, but it’s a season arc where the player isn’t forced to follow along. In the time it takes to do these side quests, you probably don’t even remember the plot. Something about dragons and a prophecy? Who cares? I’m gunna go unleash a demon haunting this guy’s house.
This is a symptom of a pacing problem you find in nearly all modern games. You’re listening to story time about the dragon prophecy, but that’s boring so they let you go kill some skeletons for a while, but that lacks meaning, so they sit you down and tell you more about the dragon prophecy again. I’m picking on Skyrim today, but this is how nearly all games operate, oscillating between story and gameplay back and forth at just the right tempo to keep the player moving. This criticism applies to nearly every AAA game on the market, especially open world ones. However, if you’re a regular at this blog you’ll know that my goal is to blur lines as much as possible, and find new ways of approaching these kinds of industry-wide problems.
Today I’m here to talk about my approach to layered narratives. These are stories which layer on top of one another so that every piece reinforces the whole no matter which path the player may choose. I formalized my solution to this problem while running D&D games, so today I’m going to discuss my approach to planning out a TTRPG campaign, and how that relates to the Skyrim problem of side quests drawing focus away from the main plot.
First, let’s establish our goal. I mentioned earlier that side quests are like a good episode of a TV show. If a side quest is an episode, then the game is the whole series. Some TV shows will be “serialized” which means that they are telling a single, overall story. Other TV shows will be “episodic” which means that they are just about exploring ideas with a single cast of characters. Both approaches are valid and will find an audience.
If we look at Skyrim, you may notice something right away. Side quests are episodic. You’re exploring a bunch of ideas with a central cast (ie: The player’s character), and each “episode” is unrelated to all the others. At the same time, however, Skyrim does also have a central story it’s trying to tell, which means that the game is also serialized.
Well that seems weird!
Why is Skyrim trying to tell its story in two different ways?
AAA video games all seem to agree on one thing: There is a central storyline that you must complete no matter what else the game may be doing. There are, however, exceptions to this format, usually found in smaller scale Indie projects. Some games have decided that they don’t need a story, that they’ll just be story generators instead. We call these games “emergent” and we say they have “emergent narratives” which means that the story emerges as you play. These games don’t have a central plot, they let you play and the plot comes from whatever happens. Think of Minecraft where you’ll explore The Nether, but you don’t have to listen to anyone go on and on about the nether’s history. The stories in these games only exist when you tell your friends about what happened.
I propose that “emergent” games are equivalent to episodic TV shows. Minecraft doesn’t have a central story, you just explore the world and stories pop up as a result of the character (you) interacting with the world in your unique and silly way. While Minecraft chooses to focus on one character, other games let the player control a group, or allow multiple players into the same session (think multiplayer Minecraft or just indie game Valheim) and the story comes in how that group functions together. In either of these cases, the story structure stays the same, the entertainment comes in how the main character (or characters) interacts with the world around them. In other words games like Minecraft are like Buster Keaton shorts, focusing on the exploits of a single person. A more direct comedic example of that protagonist-as-Buster-Keaton idea may be found in something like Untitled Goose Game, where the goal is to have zany adventures all through town while role playing a goose. You can pick your own TV show example as you feel is appropriate, but my point here is just that Minecraft operates like any other story about the actions of a single (or small group of) character(s), and that we can compare episodic stories with emergent ones in this way.
Identifying the above may be interesting, but what does it have to do with our Skyrim problem of two story types in one game? For that, we should try and up the scale to the maximum, to see what happens in the opposing context to our emergent indie games. Let’s look at MMORPGs for a moment. MMORPGs might be the closest structural equivalent to an episodic TV show, as they tend to just get more and more content until it’s no longer profitable, and their stories are built to accommodate that structure. MMOs, notably, often won’t have a single central narrative like Skyrim does. MMOs will create a world that can generate many conflicts off of a central premise, but often that premise needs disruption every now and again. Just look at all the big shake-ups that have happened to the story in World of Warcraft over the years. What we get here is something like an episodic show where each season has a central arc. Season 1 might be about establishing the world, but Season 2 will be about what happens when the Blood Elves show up and shake up the current cast. Then season 5 will introduce the Pandarin to add something new. Each of those seasons comes with a story, and those stories are self-contained so that the next season can explore something a little different. This is a kind of mixture of episodic and serialized, a bit like what we see in Skyrim. This structure tends to exist when the scale gets very large, because it’s very extensible. WoW can build a world where you explore as much as you want, and then they can bolt on a new island or reveal a portal to a secret dimension, and suddenly the player has much more to do, and a reason to maintain their subscription.
The benefits we get from mixing Serialized and Episodic stories is that we can fill the world with whatever we need to meet production demands. The dragon prophecy story gives you a motivation to move around through all the spaces, and the episodic side quests give you something to do while you’re there. Having both is great because you can write a side quest and not have to change it if you change the central quest chain, which means all this works great in production. The problem, of course, is that because the game is so large it’s easy for the player to get lost within it. Unlike a TV show where you’re watching episodes for an hour at a time and you may need to commit 20 hours at most to understand what’s going on, people play Skyrim for hundreds of hours. Sure, the main plot may be 20 hours long, but I’m playing 5 hours of Skyrim for every 1 hour of its story I see. That’s a lot of time to forget what’s going on with the dragons.
This is something that TTRPG games also struggle with. It’s easy to spend weeks doing inconsequential nonsense in a TTRPG campaign, and completely lose sight of what’s happening in the main story.
At this point I hope that you understand the problem I’m trying to solve. My goal is to tell a story where there is a central plotline, but also every side quest reinforces that central plot. Ideally this will happen while allowing the player to engage with the content they want to see, and skipping the rest. We want to give ourselves a main story so that the player understands when they’re done, and get some good catharsis. We also want to be sure that everywhere they go, every choice they make, results in something fun for them to do. Lastly, it also needs to stand up to the process of production so that it can actually get made.
Now let’s stop talking about the problem and start digging into my solutions.
TTRPGs are a great place to practice narrative structures because a single person is in control of the story, and you can adapt to the needs of your players in real time, something we could only dream of in video games. I run my games as open world sandbox experiences, creating situations where there are many different storylines to explore and the players simply choose which one interests them the most. This is usually done without conscious thought, I present a number of different hooks and they will naturally feel like one of them is the most important to pursue.
As an example of this, the players might see a dragon flying overhead towards a village. They might also run into a pair of farmers arguing about the use of a new technique for automating their farms via golems. They might also then hear a rumor about a wizard nearby practicing dangerous magicks. I’ll give the players these hooks as inconsequential moments during their travel. “You notice a dragon flying overhead” I’ll tell the party as they walk, and they can decide whether or not that seems interesting. The players will naturally pick a hook to pursue and then they’ll travel towards that hook. When they make that choice, they won’t necessarily think these hooks have anything to do with one another, but they’ll eventually come to find out that the wizard’s dangerous magick is creating golems that the farmers are using on their farms, and the wizard is creating these golems because he intends to use them to kill the dragon. Everything is connected.
Weaving stories together like this is generally considered good practice, but is also generally considered difficult to do. My approach is to start from a top-down perspective so that stories tie together naturally without much effort
For example, I may start outlining my campaign’s plot by writing a single sentence to describe the overall narrative:
“A nearby wizard is trying to kill a dragon by summoning hundreds of golems”.
Once I have that sentence, I start to explore how that story impacts the world around it. In this case, I figured that if a wizard is making tons of golems, some of them are probably escaping, so they’re popping up on nearby farms and villages. Some farmers might want to use them as assistants, while others would be wary of losing their crops to such untested techniques. This simple conflict creates a scenario you could explore in a sidequest. The scenario is also large enough to create additional scenarios. Farmers might respond to these golems by trying to put them on their farms, but maybe the townsfolk are finding them useful in taverns or mines or whatever else.
The important feature here is that we’re creating stories that are not isolated, they impact the world around them.
Each part of our original sentence needs to be something which can change the surrounding world in some way. Hundreds of golems being summoned to fight against a dragon can inadvertently go rogue and start wandering the countryside. Golems going rogue will wind up in unexpected places. Golems winding up in unexpected places means people will have to decide what to do about them, and thus we arrive at the story hook upon which we can hang any number of smaller narratives.
That’s all complicated and abstract, so let’s turn that idea into something more concrete, and offer an example:
At the top here we see the sentence we wrote that describes the overall scenario we’re building. Below that we see a sentence which describes a smaller situation which comes as a direct result of the one above it. Because hundreds of golems are being summoned, some of them are going rogue and getting lost all over the countryside. Because golems are getting lost all over the countryside, some are showing up on farms, and some farmers are starting to use those golems while others aren’t, creating a conflict. That conflict is then embodied by 2 characters, Farmer Ann and Farmer Joe. One sentence comes directly from the other, each time getting more specific and smaller in scope.
At the bottom, we see what happens at a personal scale. The original sentence we wrote described a situation which impacts many people. The next sentences down impact far fewer people, but still a group. While using this technique, you reduce the number of people impacted by each sentence until you arrive at an individual story. In this case, I tell a story about Farmer Ann, her son, and her neighbor. Critically, this small-scale story must include the characters and the thing they want. This represents a subquest, so it must be clear what the player will need to do. In the Farmer Ann example, the son is begging for peace. This is a little vague, but you do generally get the idea that you will be playing peacemaker. Assuming this is a game, the means for accomplishing this will be based on your mechanics. If we’re writing this for D&D, we immediately understand that this is a quest demanding high charisma, insight, and other interpersonal skills. The players can then figure out how they want to solve the problem. Some groups may just kill the opposing farmer, others may negotiate politically, others may search for a more novel solution. D&D is all about exploring solutions, so we can call this side quest done.
In that example you follow a linear story. You meet Farmer Ann’s son, you learn some farmers are using mysterious golems to plow their fields while others are opposed to this and that this situation is causing conflict in the town. In learning all of this, your players may start to investigate where the golems are coming from, which creates an on-ramp for them to eventually find out about the wizard who is summoning the golems. The purpose of the Farmer Ann story is to be a trailhead for your adventurers, but it’s very easy for your players not to follow that trail. They may not be all that interested in these golems, and honestly why would they be? It’s only one farm and one farmer, we’ve hardly made a case for the party to devote time to this. Fortunately, we can expand this by adding additional options like so:
Here we see two distinct impacts of the rogue golems story, one being the Farmer Ann story we had before, but we also have another example about the Farmer’s Guild. Now we understand that the rogue golems impact more people beyond just Farmer Ann, and we give the players a second option of a questline to pursue. If they didn’t like Farmer Ann for whatever reason, or they just never met her, they can start the same chain of quests with the Farmer’s Guild instead. We also see stories outside of the farmer storyline. Not only are the golems winding up on farms, but also in towns where other characters are being impacted by them. We could also create other stories here just as easily. Maybe there’s more farmers who have been impacted by these golems in different ways. Maybe there’s more townspeople impacted as well. Maybe we see some other impacts these golems are having out in the countryside, some animals being impacted, or just nature as a whole.
Each of these examples gives the players a new hook to get caught on. They may not find the golems compelling just because Farmer Ann was having a fight with a neighbor, but what if the golems keep popping up? What if the party meets Farmer Ann and Farmer Steve and some traveling merchant named Tam and all of them are being affected by the golems? Chances are much higher that your players will start to wonder what’s going on here, and as their curiosity grows, they’ll eventually want to investigate.
The point of all this is to build curiosity and drive the players towards your central plot, but what if they still don’t find the golems interesting? Using the same structure we’ve had, you could now take this premise and explore other aspects of it. All the above examples are about the golems, but what about the rest of that sentence?
“A nearby wizard is trying to kill a dragon by summoning hundreds of golems.”
Surely having a dragon nearby is impacting people, right? And if a wizard moves in and starts doing a ton of magic, that’s probably also going to have an impact as well. Just as we added stories alongside the Farmer Ann story, we could slide in more sentences alongside the “Summoned golems are going rogue and wandering the countryside” one, expanding out our chart here to encompass explorations of every single aspect of the sentence we started with.
“A nearby wizard is trying to kill a dragon by summoning hundreds of golems.”
This time I’ve highlighted the 3 nouns of our sentence in different colors. We can start telling stories about any of these 3 things. The Farmer Ann example is all about “hundreds of golems” but other stories we tell might be about a “nearby wizard” or “a dragon”. Depending on our worldbuilding, the verbs “summoning” and “kill” could also be relevant, and we might choose to explore the rules of our world and how the people react to summoning things or killing things. Either way, we can see that just by dissecting this sentence, we can harvest a number of seeds that we can grow into full stories of their own. By doing this, each of those smaller stories will naturally reconnect to the whole, because it’s all coming from the same place.
We’ve now created a story where the side quests are echoing the same plot, but we’ve also built a story that only impacts a small area. A dragon fighting a wizard is just 2 characters and this story impacts only a small part of the world. Depending on the scope of our game, this might be plenty. However, if we find ourselves in need of more story, we can go up the scale just as we went down earlier. Farmers using golems is a good way to show the smaller-scale impact of a story about a dragon fighting a wizard, but why are the two fighting in the first place? If we want a bigger story, we create bigger stakes. Maybe there’s a long-running feud between wizards and dragons, so we see this happening all over the world. Maybe this is happening now because there was a recent brood of dragons born into the world who have all reached maturity and begun hunting for homes. Maybe this happened because of a single dragon wizard who is the descendant of the ancient bloodline once banished from wizard culture when anti-dragon bigots rose to power thousands of years ago.
With those additional sentences as our example, we can fill the world with dragons and wizards and they can all be fighting one another. We can create more stories like our golem farmer story, and those stories can explore the impacts of having dragons or wizards living nearby. We can create stories based on any of the large-scale ones we set up, and bring those down into as small a scale as we need. All the world could be full of stories, and they all relate to one another because they’re all based on this central plot thread.
Let’s revisit the chart we showed earlier, but add our new sentences onto the top of it.
At the very top we have the central plot point. In our new example, this would be:
"Anti-dragon bigots are in control of the Wizard Council and their rule is destroying the ecosystem of the entire world."
This new sentence gives us a number of concepts to explore, and our example shows some of those. Things like "A wizard is breeding dragons to take revenge for the exile of his bloodline from wizard society.", and “"A wizard vs dragon feud is being exacerbated by a new brood of dragons."
In the above chart I leave it all linear, but obviously this will expand quite large with this many layers involved. Here we can see a very simplified chart of how this will expand based on the layers I show above:
All of that comes from just dissecting different parts of a sentence in exactly the same way as we did before.
I think at this point you can see how fast this balloons out into something completely insane. At the same time, you also don’t have to write all that. If you’re building a TTRPG campaign, it’s ok to write just these single sentence summaries, and then make up the rest as you play. Maybe they start off in the region affected by the dragon/wizard fight with the golems. In that case, you start with the previous example, here:
You can write all these stories relatively quickly. You can create little fights and things to do related to all of these, and the scope is small enough as to be manageable. Maybe you only choose to write these 4 example stories. That’s plenty of stuff for a group of players to explore for a while. It’s ok to not write anything else.
NOT writing things is a critical part of this workflow. As you can see in that previous image, this technique generates a terrifying amount of scope very quickly.
You don’t write all that.
Never write all that.
Only write the parts that your players might run into. If they stay in the golems region, great! Let them explore until they run out of the base stories you’ve written, and only add more when you need it. Once they’ve covered the basics, you can start to pull down parallels between creating golems and breeding dragons, pull down other plot lines about how excessively summoning golems is draining resources from the land, just like the wizard council is doing to the world as a whole. You can start to move up and down this chain of narrative once you have it, allowing you to quickly adapt as needed with full confidence that as long as what you’re doing relates to the rest of the story outline you’ve built, it will all feel connected and intentional.
And with all of that in mind, take a breath. Digest the ideas. We let our scope get a little crazy there, didn’t we?
Let’s go back to video games now. Skyrim’s side quests feel disconnected because they are. They aren’t explorations of the dragon prophecy, they have nothing at all to do with the central plot line. Why is that one house haunted? Why does that matter to the story of the Dovah-Kiin? Game devs are infinitely creative. If you let them, they will always find interesting stories to tell in your game’s world, and those stories will often be quite fun. Skyrim is a very fun game, beloved by many. However, unrestricted creativity will often create a product that doesn’t quite connect to itself.
If you’re building a video game, the techniques I’ve been describing may offer some additional benefits. Imagine you’re the narrative director of a project. You want to give your team the tools to make good choices, but you can’t possibly be in every meeting. You can’t be the bottleneck through which all content must pass. Instead, by creating a layered narrative of single sentences, as I showed above, you are building something the rest of the team can use. If I know my regional story here is about a wizard summoning golems to kill a dragon, I can give that sentence to my team. The artists can use that to inform the assets, designers can use that to inform gameplay, and quest designers can bake that concept into the stories they’re telling, as can dialogue writers. I no longer need to be directly involved because I’ve given my team the prompt and as long as they stick to the prompt our game will feel coherent and intentional. My job is no longer to worry about every single line of dialogue or to critique the story of every quest, I just have to be sure that things are broadly following the theme. This is both easier for me to do, and more satisfying for my team, who now feels much more free to do their job.
The other benefit here is that you’re writing all of this so broadly. In my example, you can pivot regions relatively easily as long as the core of the game remains about a wizard and a dragon. Each layer you may add to the scope of your story has its own example sentence which can be argued over by whatever stakeholders need to argue such things. Once that sentence is approved, you can pass it down to the team and let them go wild with the details. If something at a large scale needs to change, you can adjust the sentences to maintain the parts that are important for the sake of keeping old assets. Maybe you change the dragon to be a griffon. Well at least you know that your wizard side quests and your golem side quests aren’t affected.
To recap the workflow we’ve described so far:
You start with an arbitrary situation described with a single sentence.
Once you’ve got that situation, you can go down in scale by asking yourself “How does this impact the world around it?” and generating sub-scenarios you may want to explore.
You can go up in scale by asking yourself “why is this happening?” and then creating a situation which leads to the one you already described.
You can do both of these things as many times as you want until you have a story which is the correct scope for the game you’re making.
You may, at this point, ask how you can know what the correct scope is for your game. The answer to that is “It’s hard!” but the more useful answer is that each of the small-scale stories you’re generating becomes a quest. How many quests do you have the budget for? That number is the one you’re orbiting around, the one that will tell you when to stop writing new quests. If you’re an indie and you don’t have a quest budget, then pick an arbitrary number that seems doable for you and your team.
The other point of data you’re looking for here is “How many subquests should I be generating per main quest?”, which is to say that you can generate any number of explorations of that idea of a wizard summoning golems to take down a dragon, but how do you know when to stop? Well this is a similar question to the previous one, you can check your budget or make a best guess, but there’s also something else to keep in mind. The more subquests you have that are related to the next bigger quest, the more the player’s going to understand that bigger quest. In other words, if my big quest is about a wizard trying to kill a dragon with golems, I can help to tell that story with the subquests leading up to it. The more subquests I’ve got, the more the players understand about what’s going on between the wizard and dragon. Too many, and players will be annoyed and yell “Alright! I get it!” but too few and players will need lore dumps and long cutscenes that explain what’s happening. A good practice here is to offer way too many subquests, and let the player skip them and just go directly up to the big quest when they’re ready. That way they control their own pacing and won’t be as likely to find the quests annoying, because the moment they “get it” they can just move on. The ability to opt in and out freely is crucial. If you force the player to do a quest, you are removing most of the benefit of this style of design.
And that’s it for today! Hopefully this wasn’t too complicated for you to find it useful. Take the parts of this that seem valuable to your own production, your own TTRPG campaign, and I hope that my way of thinking about all this helps you to find yours.Thanks for reading!
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