A few weeks back I wrote about the Dramatic Question and how it works in games.

In short, The Dramatic Question is what a scene or encounter is about.

Will the characters achieve their objective?

The biggest difference between stories and games is how they resolve the Dramatic Question. In stories, the storyteller creates the resolution and the audience passively receives it. In games, the resolution is produced by the interaction of the players with the situation and the mechanisms of the game.

The players and game master actively create the resolution which is not known to the group before play begins. If the game master imposes the resolution on the players (railroading) then this is no longer a game but an interactive story.

As game designers, game masters and players; we can get to the root of a problem in a game by thinking about The Dramatic Question a game is trying to answer and how the game resolves the question.

If the Dramatic Question is not interesting or is not resolved in a way that is acceptable to the participants then there is a problem with the game. Examining those two elements of the game can help to produce solutions that can be used to improve the game or determine if the game is not capable of producing an acceptable outcome.

Most problems in role-playing games can be reduced to the following statements.

“This game doesn’t ask or answer a dramatic question I find interesting.”

From the beginning of the hobby, there were many dramatic questions that players wanted answered and had to create their own systems, sub-systems, monsters, magic items, house rules and more to answer. Rat on a Stick the adventure for Tunnels & Trolls asks, “Can the adventurers establish a successful fast food chain in this dungeon?” Not something most gamers were interested in but it’s a fun adventure to play for a laugh.

A lot of the so-called “fiction first” games ask dramatic questions I have no interest in. How will the teenage werewolf cope with his crush on the vampire boy down the street? Not for me but enough people are interested in it that Monster Hearts is still around.

“This game asks and answers a dramatic question I find offensive/obscene/disturbing.”

Often as not, when this is a problem, it is a mis-match between participant and game.

If you don’t like grimdark fantasy, that’s fine, but some of us do and would like to enjoy our games without being accused of being some sort of …ist when what we are up to is catharsis and escapism. There are gamers who feel certain sorts of content, “have no place in RPGs.” I am in vigorous disagreement with that idea.

Censorship has no place in RPGs.

“This game provides an acceptable answer to an interesting dramatic question but the mechanics could be better.”

This is one of the great incentives of game designers and publishers. A game may have a great Dramatic Question and a mechanism that produces a good result but the path between the question and result is convoluted, complicated, or in some way unappealing.

This can also be participant-game mismatch. Some people don’t mind rolling a fist full of dice and adding up the result. Other people think if you are rolling more than one die at a time it’s a problem. Rules light. Rules heavy. It’s not that the game is bad, it’s just not to the taste of the participant even though they like content of the game.

Call of Cthulu, Trail of Cthulu, D20 Call of Cthulu, Mythos World, and Realms of Cthulu all have the same setting (more or less) and answer the same dramatic question. Will the investigators prevent the terrible horror they have discovered from doing more harm? They all answer the same question using different mechanisms.

“The probabilities of certain outcomes are out of sync with my expectations.”

The Dramatic Question and the range potential outcomes are acceptable but some outcomes that should happen more often don’t and outcomes that should happen less often occur more frequently than desired. This requires tuning of the mechanisms.

Sometimes this is a question of taste. Something that the player expects to happen doesn’t happen often enough or it happens too often. The game designer may have the mechanism doing exactly what he wants it to do and at the frequency he has intended but a particular group of players would like it to be otherwise.

Sometimes this is a real problem with a game. If the designer intends for certain outcomes to occur infrequently but didn’t work out the mechanisms properly, there can be a mismatch between intended frequency and actual frequency.

“This game doesn’t do what it’s designer says it does.”

Sometimes gamers place unreasonable expectations on rules, misinterpret rules and the expected outcome isn’t produced because it wasn’t what the designer intended or created.

Other times it can be that the game was created using a set of rules that didn’t fit the setting and dramatic question. (5E Doctor Who...I’m looking at you). If the Dramatic Question being asked and the rules or mechanisms are mismatched, the game is flawed.

Another problem could be that the game designer had done a poor job of communicating how the game should be played. I see this in OSR games a lot. The designers and publishers assumed that the people who were buying their game already know what a classic fantasy adventure game is and how to play it. It turns out that gamers who have only played more recent versions of D&D are now trying the game and assume it has the same underlying premises, when they are actually very different.

Conclusion

For game and adventure designers, understanding the Dramatic Questions that your game or adventure asks and how it goes about answering it is a tool you can use to assess the success of the design.

For game masters, the Dramatic Question is a diagnostic for what games you want to try, how you run your game, and how you adjudicate matters that the rules don’t cover.

Ask yourself when you are getting started or when you run into a problem;

What’s my Dramatic Question?

Is my Dramatic Question interesting to my target audience?

Is the Dramatic Question appropriate for my target audience?

Do the mechanics of the game produce a satisfying answer to the Dramatic Question?

Does the game do what it claims to? Am I applying the tools correctly?

While this isn’t the only way to assess the success of a game or adventure it is one tool you can use to help narrow down problems and fix them. Because RPGs exist at a junction point between game and narrative, the tools of storytelling have some application.

The Dramatic Question is one of those tools.