 Welcome to Mapkrow, the RPG art show. My name is Kyle. Today we are talking about the four different kinds of storytelling that Henry Jenkins wrote about in his article Game Design as Narrative Architecture from 2004. Now, Henry was using this terminology in application to video games, and we're going to try to apply it to tabletop RPGs, which there's not always going to be a really clean fit for things because it's not a computer program. Things that are happening at the table between humans is going to be far more porous than perhaps these terms allow. But try to meet me halfway on this because I think there's a lot to learn here. The four kinds of storytelling today that we're talking about are embedded narrative, emergent narrative, evocative narrative, and enacted narrative. I might have preferences for what kinds of storytelling I like in my games, and you might have yours, but the point of this is not to establish a hierarchy of what's good or bad or more acceptable for tabletop games, but to understand all of them equally and understand how they may or may not have a place in the game that you want to run. So let's unpack each of these terms and see if we can't negotiate a way that they could apply to tabletop gaming. So let's start with embedded narrative. Embedded narrative is basically any kind of narrative that the player really isn't expected to interact with. It's that bit of box text, that narration caption that the GM is supposed to read to kind of kick off the adventure or a monologue from an NPC that is supposed to be basically read verbatim. This kind of storytelling is often looked down upon in tabletop gaming spaces as railroading or it's hamfisted, but I don't think there's anything wrong with setting a clear context or even a set of goals for the players to overcome. Being explicit with the expectations of the story that is going to come from interaction is really important. Negotiating that and making sure that you have an understanding and baseline consent from everybody is really important, and that's where embedded narrative really shines here. It's starting out your Star Wars campaign by saying a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's starting your electric Bastionland game and saying Bastion, the electric hub of mankind, the only city that matters. Treasure is your only hope, right? Like it's getting everybody in the mood and on the same page, but like any ingredient, a little goes a long way. And if you have like 10 minutes of text to read aloud to your players, probably people are going to start rolling their eyes and feeling disengaged because the players are there to play, to interact. They're not there to hear you recite text at them that they can't interact with. Embedded narrative in tabletop games I think also takes the form of setting or lore that is important for the players to know in order to operate properly according to the rules of the world and the genre conventions of the world. If somebody pulls out a phaser in the middle of a vampire game, suddenly you have to renegotiate exactly what kind of vampire game you're playing. Something else I might identify as embedded narrative in tabletop RPGs is character backstory. Oftentimes, these are non-negotiable, that backstory is kind of arrived at by the player of that character without too much input from the other players. Going back to the shapes of adventure video, embedded narrative is really important for getting things on track in a linear adventure. But it can be used in any shape of adventure. Now our next term is most closely associated with rhizomatic adventure structures or sandboxes. And it's probably the term that you're most likely to have heard of before, emergent narrative. This kind of narrative sprouts, it grows, it emerges. When players are engaging the systems and the world, it is the narrative that results from their actions in the game. If you're playing a hex crawl or a point crawl like ultraviolet grasslands for instance, there is no story without the players doing something. It is about following them on their journey to their destination and the story is whatever happens to them according to the random tables and hex locations. If you're running a published dungeon adventure module, the embedded narrative is assuming that your players are going to rush to the bottom and slay the evil dragon and steal the blue jewel and save the day. But if instead your players decide to befriend the enemy at the end of the dungeon and begin their campaign of evil against the surface world, then that becomes the story. That is the story that emerges, the emergent narrative, if you will. The divergence between embedded narrative and emergent narrative often results in what high-up muckety mucks who talk about games would call ludonarrative dissonance. Oftentimes, games that are centered around epic heroic fantasies have an assumption that the player characters are good guys, when in fact the emergent play tells us that they're a bunch of murdering assholes who will just do whatever they want whenever they want and they're completely living in the id. This is only a problem if you want it to be a problem, but I thought I would bring that up because it's a fun excuse to say ludonarrative dissonance and sound like a cool guy. Our next term is evocative narrative, and this one was a little harder to apply to tabletop games, so I'm going to start by talking about its original context in explaining video game narrative. In video games, everything you see and everything you hear and anything that you feel through the vibrations in your rumble pack, that can be part of the narrative as well. Environmental storytelling, world building, even the colors and mood that are conveyed on the screen or in the music can contribute to how you perceive the story. Even if it's just backstory or something that never gets explained, it adds to the verisimilitude, the believability of the game world, and therefore has its own unique part to play in storytelling. So what is evocative narrative at the tabletop? It's player aids, it's maps, it's that music you're playing in the background, it's anything that you're bringing in to the game to enhance the aesthetic experience of your players. It is your particularly well-painted mini of the bad guy that you've been hiding for weeks and have now unveiled and that emotional jolt that you get from the table when that comes out onto the battle mat, that is evocative storytelling. It is any kind of lifting of the story that is conveyed in a less than explicit way. It is a voking story as opposed to stating story. Finally, we come to enacted narrative, which is renegotiating or changing the rules by which players can engage with the story space. The clearest example of this is when a player character levels up. They get better abilities or better stats or more spells. By changing the nature by which the players are interacting with the systems of the world, that becomes part of the story. Oftentimes, leveling up plays an important part of a power fantasy. I want to get to level 20 so I can get my Wyvern mount and get my wish spell and do all this kind of stuff. That becomes part of the story and it is only delivered by changing the rules that I as the player have to interact with the game. It can go the other way just as easily. Some monsters in some games drain levels or steal stat points even temporarily from players. Or, you know, a thief might steal an important magic item that the players have come to rely on too much. It can also take the form of minigames or subsystems or expansion modules. Any time you change or renegotiate the verbs or systems that the players use to interact with the game, you are altering the possibility space of emergent narrative and that is enacted narrative. Well, I think that just about does it for this episode. If you didn't get anything out of this, I hope you at least enjoyed watching me do watercolor painting of a manticore in the background. I didn't want to have just another video of you watching me write words onto a white paper with pencil. I'm going to have some links in the description that go into more detail on the subjects we discussed today. So maybe check those out. Maybe join the Discord and continue the conversation over there. Maybe leave me a like, maybe subscribe, and maybe I'll see you on the old roads. Until next time, farewell.