Storytelling and Narrative - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 177

CHARACTER-AGNOSTIC PLOTS AND KING OF DRAGON PASS

In most role-playing games (RPGs), the player gets to design her avatar from scratch at
the beginning of the game—to choose the avatar's race, sex, profession, and many other
details. The game's plot, therefore, must be character-agnostic , which is to say, the
details of the plot do not depend on the character. Such plots have some of the same
problems as plots created for nonspecific avatars, which were introduced in Chapter 6,
“Character Development.” However, there is a difference. Nonspecific avatars have no
details the designer can work with. When a player creates an avatar, she creates those
details, and the core mechanics and storytelling engine can work with them.
The plots of the stories in most RPGs aren't very sophisticated, so for the most part this
doesn't matter much. The player completes a quest, usually by killing a lot of monsters,
and the plot moves forward. It may branch one way if the player is choosing to role-play
as an evil character, and another if she is good; but it's usually a large foldback story that
ends up in the same place regardless.

The game King of Dragon Pass , published in 1999 by A-Sharp, is an important exception
that deserves more attention than it received. The game is set in Glorantha, the magical
world of the RuneQuest tabletop RPG games. Superficially, King of Dragon Pass appears
to be a sort of management simulation. The player spends much of her time managing
food production and looking after her tribe. What sets King of Dragon Pass apart, how-
ever, is its storytelling mechanism.

The goal of the game is to become king of an entire region known as Dragon Pass,
through a combination of economic growth, warfare, and diplomacy. The player leads
her tribe assisted by a Council of Elders, consisting of seven NPCs. Each Elder has his or
her own appearance, personality, and other attributes, and the player may call on any of
them for advice when a critical situation arises that demands a decision. The advice the
player gets naturally depends on the personal characteristics of the Elder that the player
asks — some Elders are aggressive, some timid, some diplomatic, and so on. The player
may also send Elders on missions of one kind and another, and the outcome of the mis-
sion may depend on which Elder the player sends. Sending a warmonger on a diplomatic
mission can have disastrous consequences; sending a skilled negotiator on a purchasing
mission can be highly profitable.

Ordinary RPGs treat the story as a journey, and their character-agnostic plot situations
are normally associated with a particular location. If the player avoids visiting the loca-
tion, she never experiences the situation. Also, most of the situations in ordinary RPGs
must be resolved through combat, so no matter who the player has in her party, she has
to fight her way out of it one way or another.