I’ve been interested for a while in thinking about narrative or storytelling techniques from different media and how they apply to RPGs. The Jank Cast recently started a series of podcasts along these lines that I’ve been very interested in. In episode 119 they discussed “perspective”, although I think I’d be more likely to use the term “viewpoint” (I found this book to be a great resource on the topic). I felt that the discussion in the podcast lacked a solid grounding by glossing over the basics and ended up conflating a number of issues, such as viewpoint and stance. Since this is a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while I wanted to get some of my thoughts down in a blog post.

In written fiction there are a few commonly used viewpoints: First-Person, Third-Person-Omniscient, and Third-Person-Limited. The first-person viewpoint involves a narrator telling a story they participated in to the reader. This viewpoint lets the author communicate the thoughts and feelings of the main character directly to the reader, and also allows the writer to use the descriptions and narration of the text to contribute to the main character’s characterization since what the character chooses to relate to the reader tells us important things about the character. The third-person-omniscient viewpoint, by contrast, has access to the inner thoughts of all of the characters and the narrator is generally not a defined character in the story. While this allows the author to communicate lots of information to the reader it usually means that only the actual events of the story, rather than how they are related, can contribute to an understanding of character because it usually requires the narrator to be somewhat neutral and distant. The third-person-limited viewpoint is a sort of “best of both worlds” approach. Instead of having access to the inner thoughts of all characters it limits itself to the thoughts of one character at a time. Since the text is so tightly tied to a particular character the author can use description, etc., to contribute to characterization. In some ways it allows the reader to be even closer to the character than first person because there is no particular narrator relating the story to the reader: Harry Dresden isn’t telling me this story, I’m experiencing the story the way Ned Stark did. In addition to those viewpoints, there is also what is sometimes called the third-person-cinematic viewpoint. This viewpoint doesn’t relate any of the inner thoughts of any characters, it only tells the reader what they’d be able to observe if they were watching the scene as they would in a movie. Unless the characters explicitly verbalize their thoughts, the reader can only infer what they are thinking via their actions. This viewpoint has many of the limitations of third-person-omniscient but few of the advantages so it’s rarely used in prose fiction, but it’s the way that most movies or plays would be written.

Thinking about these viewpoints in an RPG context gets very fuzzy very quickly. Looking at the classical player/GM split, the common case is that each player controls a single character so the temptation might be to say that they experience that character’s story in the first-person viewpoint, but I’m not sure that’s true. Even though the player is responsible for deciding the inner thoughts of the character, it isn’t always common to articulate those thoughts. Putting aside for a moment the issue that the player is contributing to the creation of the fiction, would the player’s experience of the character’s story be appreciably different from a reader’s experience of a third person account of it? Since the GM in this scenario tends to not have input into the character’s voice, the biased descriptions that we usually associate with first-person or third-person-limited aren’t used. Since the GM in this scenario is most commonly responsible for describing an environment that any person there would perceive, I think the closest match is actually to the third-person-cinematic viewpoint. Sure, RPG players sometimes articulate the inner thoughts of their characters, but frequently only to the extent of communicating attitude or emotion (“I’m going along with this, but I’m suspicious”, “I’m being nice to his face, but I actually hate this guy”) the way an actor would use nonverbal communication in a film. I think this helps explain why references to film or television techniques, such as describing what the camera sees, are so common in RPGs even though, as a verbal medium, one might initially assume they had more in common with written fiction.

However, in the podcast Todd did offer one interesting example of something that seems closer to third-person-limited: in Apocalypse World, the GM is instructed to bring fictional details to the attention of particular players. By threatening an NPC that a player cares about and bringing that to that player’s attention the GM is subtly shading the world description: you notice this because you are the type of person that would care about this. I think I also stumbled across a technique for doing third-person-limited in game design with my Ronnies game Brick & Mortar: Last of the Independents. Since it’s a GM-less game, instead of relying on a GM to contribute external fictional details I have Apocalypse World-style moves that tell players when to do certain things. By framing the “when” condition of the move in a particular way a game designer can shade how the player will interpret the fiction contributed by the other players. For example, my Survivor character has this move:

Quiet! Did you hear that?: Whenever people are engaging in unproductive bickering, mention the ominous thing you just noticed.

This contributes to the characterization of the Survivor: they are the kind of person that expects the people around them to engage in unproductive bickering. When a player is being vigilant for “unproductive bickering” their perceptions are subtly shifted, similar to how a third-person-limited author would use narration and description to color the story in a characterful way. Although Brick & Mortar has some issues as a game, I think this technique is an interesting one that could use further development. It should be especially useful in the “tightly focused situation with defined characters” genre of games.