"These are people who have been clearly raised on the language of modern D&D, who are woefully let down by that language. They've been taught to use the word "story" in its alternate corporatised sense, who do so because they have no other language they can use. It's quite possible to see them fighting for language throughout the documentary... not because they do not know what they believe, but because they've been saddled with a vocabulary that really does not express what they need to convey or want to. They've been let down. This does not make their genuine faith or love for the game less so; it only makes it next to impossible for them to talk to someone who is not in fact like them." — Unmodified: Real People, Fantastic Worlds
Diagnosing a problem is never enough. Saying the above, it falls upon me, not a convenient person whom I might hope woud address the problem, to undertake the task myself. I've said the the word "story" is treated in role-playing as a kind of linguistic solvent, dissolving languaged distinctions between player actions, player decisions, game consequences, interaction/improvisation taking place in game, setting and rule structures, memory of past events and actual back-and-forth play between the players and the DM. "Story" is used to describe all of these. However meaningful or nostalgic the word might be, it cannot meaningfully describe what's happening when we play D&D. Yet,
"So I'm a theatre teacher. One of the things that we talk about in theatre history is that theatre itself started as a way to tell a story. Telling stories is just a part of human culture. It is what we do, it is how we express ourselves. Across any medium. It could be writing, theatre, art, music — they're telling a story in some way... you go to an art museum right now and you look at a Picasso, you can't tell me there's not a story that you can just read right there. Stories are important to our culture. What tabletops are is a way for a group of people to collectively tell a story at once together."
For all the poetical faith and belief that's here, it's not difficult to see that translating these phrases into game play, without already knowing what game play is, would be impossible. Imagine for a moment that you know exactly nothing about "tabletop" as an activity. How does the above tell you what it is? it does not describe what participants do, what constraints they operate under, how time is structured, how decisions are made or what distinguishes tabletop play from any other social or artistic practice. Instead, it situates tabletop gaming inside a sweeping, almost metaphysical claim about human expression, where everything is already "story" and therefore nothing needs to be specified. From the point of view of an uninformed listener, "tabletop" could just as plausibly be a discussion group, a collaborative writing circle, an improv exercise or a ritualised form of conversation. The quotation relies entirely on cultural resonance rather than description.
What's especially telling is that the speaker does not once refer to rules, chance, constraint, failure or risk. There is no mention of dice, turns, authority, disagreement or uncertainty. These omissions are the price that's paid for universalising the concept of story. The word becomes operationally empty. Everything meaningful becomes story, which means story no longer distinguishes anything. If all human expression is story, then tabletop gaming has no specific identity left to articulate.
Let's take a moment and evaluate one word in the above: risk. In a creation of the things named, writing, theatre, art, music... there is no risk involve. I'm not committing to a risk right now as I write this. True enough, it may not be liked, it may not make me world famous, I may include a spelling error (who are we kidding; there will be a spelling error)... but these things aren't really "risks." There's no risk that I won't finish the article. There's no risk that in failing to spell the next word, I can't just go back and fix it, no harm done, no foul, no awareness for the reader of the word that's been fixed. Picasso's painting "story" does not incorporate a risk; every stroke of the brush is either done right or it is redone. The painting's subject tells a story, but the act of creating it does not. The act of creating is a series of efforts performed in an order until a result is achieved. Process, the making, is not "a story," the finished product portrays a story, but in itself is not one. This is where all the arguments made in the quote above fall apart. The picture of a pipe is not a pipe.
Tabletop is entirely different from an art form because it is not something that can be changed later, like this essay can be. Choice is committed under uncertainty; when resolution occurs, it cannot be revised. Once the die is rolled, all possibilities outside of that die's dictates are lost forever. Ceasar cannot recross the Rubicon. Once cast, once the declaration is made, the outcome stands and propagates forward. Chance creates consequence, consequence constrains choice.
After the fact, the past series of events can be framed as a story, but it cannot be experienced as a story while it is ongoing. That difference is vital. Yet is it not grasped because those who speak of game play have no language that makes a temporal distinction between game as "now" and game as "was."
We play games in the present. It is the only time frame physics allows. By definition, "story" is a temporal artefact. The moment we are able to say "this happened," we are no longer playing; we are recounting.
Let's set aside, then, that what happens at the table is a story being told. What is it? Well, a series of constrained actions — that is, behaviours or movement that occurs within explicit limits — in the case of tabletop, agreed upon rules. I grant that "constrained actions" doesn't have the poetical metre of "story"... it's missing that warm, round "O" sound, that pleasant stretching of the lips as we widen the mouth to say "ree..." — but then, poetry has it's place and its not here. Our goal is conceptual clarity. A lugnut isn't poetical either but it keeps the wheel from falling off.
Too, let's cast aside any arguments that clarity is somehow hostile to creativity. Mechanical precision does not diminish the ride, it conceals the bolts and fabricates the paint that adheres to the metal, producing on the one hand security and on the other, beauty. In writing, my field, we use all the words, not just the pretty ones. This does not lower the experience of the reader.
We can begin with a distinction between game procedure and game outcome. Dice, turn order, character capabilities, referee judgments, spatial relationships and resource management all belong to procedure. These are mechanical and social systems that generate uncertainty. We don't know how much of a thing we'll have, or how far we'll be from the enemy, or what the status of our capabilities will be, in any given turn, as well as what the dice will roll or what the DM might invent or in what numbers. Yes, this does include how the DM interprets a rule, but in large part the DM's simpler influence of deciding what player a given monster attacks will have far, far greater influence over the game's procedure than how a given spell might work under these rare conditions.
Outcomes are alterations that have occurred in the past that affect the present, outside the present's procedure. The loss of all the party's food, for example, the death of a character, the obtaining of tools or benefits, the advancement of a level, the addition of a new game participant (a meta-outcome), positions gained or lost in a battle, allies gained or lost through choices made and so on. They're not things that can be interpreted, but things that are established as facts and now influence the game's balance. They change what can be done next. They narrow or expand the future decision space.
We can make another distinction between experience and representation. What happens at the table is the experience: players act, decide, wait, react, succeed, fail and mentally adjust to conditions as they happen. These things occur in real time, often driven by human hormonal impetuses, such as the manufacturing of dopamine when a fictional enemy is killed, seratonin when someone's a hero, epinephrine as things get tense, oxytocin as players slap each other in gratitude or encourage each other to succeed; cortisol when we fail. So much of what's happening in the moment is chemical reativity that bypasses conscious thought that we often forget that the human body isn't really designed to always think things through before acting. If we were, we'd have all died by mammoth long ago.
This is emotionally phrased in the documentary, but is completely lost in the players' language. Feeling one's blood rise is something every serious D&D player experiences, and wants to experience. Yet it directly contradicts the idea that players are intentionally "telling a story together" in the moment. They're not composing; they're coping, seizing opportunity, snatching dice, flinching from loss, riding tension. Reflection comes later, after the fact, when the hormones have depleted and the nerves are unbothered by their harrassment. It's then that story appears, not during the game.
That part is where representation occurs. A representation is an artefact made after the experience has concluded, whether that artefact is a spoken anecdote, a written recap, a memory or a critical analysis. At that point, events can be selected, ordered, accentuated and interpreted. I tell you that I should have swung on that mastodon instead of trying the spell and you tell me that you never knew before how much damage a mastodon could really do. I tell players in the other campaign about the mastodon and they tell me about the Jabberwock they fought that was three times bigger than a mastodon. And while some of this is story, a lot of it just isn't. Thinking about what I'm going to do the next time I meet a mastodon, or picking over my spells remembering the mastodon event of 2025, are representations that are not stories. Story is too limiting for the way we naturally think about the past. Human reflection is messier, more utilitarian, more recursive than narrative theory allows for.
We can also make a distinction between fiction and meaning. Fiction is the imagined content of play, consisting of haracters, places, events, creatures, objects and descriptions. It is the mastodon, the spell, the Jabberwock, the dungeon corridor, the throne room. Fiction answers the question "what is happening in the imagined space?" It is representational, malleable and, on its own, inert. It's not distinctively story-driven because it doesn't have to be narrative. Fiction can be a referrent: a mastodon floating in space and nothing else. Referents can exist as setting, situation, object or condition without implying sequence, causality or resolution. A room can be fictional without anything happening in it. A world can be fictional without moving toward a conclusion. Narrative is one way fiction can be organised, but it is neither necessary nor primary.
This is another reason the "tabletop equals collective storytelling" claim collapses under scrutiny. Much of what players engage with at the table is non-narrative fiction: spatial relationships, tactical positions, inventories, capacities, threats and affordances (a possibility for action made available by a situation, object or environment). These elements are fictional in reference but functional in use. They are manipulated, tested and exploited, not narrated. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot. Each can be manipulated, tested and exploited without narration occurring. Their significance lies in what they allow or prevent, not in how they contribute to a plot.
Treating fiction as inherently narrative imports expectations that do not belong to play. It suggests that events should build, themes should develop and resolutions should occur, when in fact play is perfectly capable of producing meaning through stasis, repetition, failure or abrupt termination. A campaign can end without climax and still be meaningful because meaning did not depend on narrative completion; it depended on committed action under constraint.
This distinction also clarifies why so much tabletop language feels strained. When people are taught to describe all fiction as story, they are forced to narrativise experiences that were never structured narratively in the first place. They reach for arcs, themes and lessons where what actually happened was exploration, optimisation, attrition or survival. The language fails because the category is wrong. People ask whether a session had a good "arc," whether a choice was "in character," or whether events were "satisfying," when the relevant questions are about risk exposure, information flow and consequence. In fact, the all-encompassing embrace of "story" derails evaluation and clear thinking altogether, as people attempt to judge a live system of constrained action using categories meant for finished artefacts.
Consider a session where players cautiously explore a ruin, avoid several fights, misjudge a risk and retreat after losing resources. From the standpoint of play, this may be an excellent session: information was gained, danger was correctly assessed, losses were meaningful but not catastrophic and future options were clarified. However, let's suppose the "goal," to find the McGuffin, was not in fact accomplished, and now the players must return to the ruin and explore it again. Under such circumstances, many participants are now being trained to think of this as "story failure," because the target wasn't reached. The fact that even if the target were, we'd still expect to enter something like the ruin anyway, and see new things, just as we will if we revisit this ruin... in effect, we're putting the achievement before the actual adventure, pretending the latter didn't happen if the one tangible expectation was not met.
Meaning is not contained in fiction. Meaning arises from the interaction between fiction and constraint. It is produced when fictional elements are encountered through choice, risk and consequence. Killing a mastodon is not meaningful because mastodons are impressive fictional animals; it is meaningful because the choice to engage it was made under uncertainty, because failure had costs, because success altered future possibilities and because those outcomes persisted. Meaning is an emergent property of commitment. It is experienced, not described into existence.
Confusing fiction with meaning leads directly back to the "story" problem. People talk as though meaning resides in the fictional content itself, as though describing the right things automatically produces significance. This is why so much discourse fixates on lore, backstory and worldbuilding while remaining silent on procedure and risk. But lore does not create meaning. Meaning is created when players discover, through action, that something matters because it can be lost, failed or foregone.
Backstory does not create meaning because it does not participate in risk, choice or consequence. It is fictional information established prior to play. It describes what has already happened, not what might happen. Because it is fixed, it cannot be lost, failed or altered through action. No decision made at the table can endanger a backstory event, undo it or force it to change. At most, it can be referenced or reinterpreted. That makes backstory inert with respect to meaning. It can inform context, but it cannot produce stakes on its own.
A clean way to see what meaning is by seeing what changes because of an action.
Imagine two situations at a table.
In the first, the referee tells you that a bridge collapsed here fifty years ago and many people died. That information may be interesting. It may colour the setting. It may even feel tragic. But nothing you do can alter that fact. You cannot save anyone, lose anyone or be forced to choose between competing consequences or costs. The information sits there. We have a fiction and nothing more.
In the second, you are standing on a bridge now. It is old. You can hear it creak. Crossing it will get you where you want to go, but it may collapse. Turning back will cost you time and resources, and something elsewhere will be lost if you delay. You choose to cross. The bridge holds. Or it does not. Either way, the future is now different because you acted. The meaning is not the bridge. The meaning is not the description of danger. The meaning is the fact that, because you chose to cross, certain futures are no longer possible and others are now unavoidable. You cannot go back to a world where you did not test the bridge. That irreversible narrowing of possibility is meaning.
From this, it may look like dice create meaning, and they do, but with an important qualification: the dice sever intention from outcome. Once they are introduced, wanting something to happen is no longer sufficient to make it happen. That break is what exposes players to loss, surprise and constraint. When the die is rolled, possibilities collapse into a single fact that must be lived with. From that moment on, the future is altered. Meaning appears precisely there, in the gap between what was hoped for and what now must be dealt with.
But if the consequence of the die is dismissible, meaning is not made. Suppose I fight an orc; I swing and miss, the orc swings and misses... we have just both rolled dice, technically established that neither of us hit on the first swing, but the actual game effect is zero. The only thing that has changed is the time to resolve this particular combat, and that time loss occurs out of game. The die rolls before the one that makes an impact are just noise. Procedural churn, which is necessary for the system to function, because they preserve uncertainty, but not in and of themselves meaningful.
Let's try and wrap this up. When people say they play D&D "for the story," what they usually mean is that they value coherence, consequence and intelligibility when reflecting on play. The first, coherence, is the property by which events can be recognised as part of a single whole. This allows a player to say, "given what happened before, this makes sense." The causality of this makes a narrative desirable. We know we're now at the temple because we followed the road from the gap in the mountains that we were told about by the old man in the village whom we met after we needed the antidote to the poison we got from the snake in the first dungeon we entered when we started the adventure. Being able to outline these choices to ourselves in the present provides coherence that tells us why we're here now. Coherence feels like all this is happening in the present, because we're remembering it in the present, even though it happened in the past — which appears to gloss over the temporal distinction made earlier, without actually doing so.
Consequence is related to this; when the players look back at the snake in the example above and remember that they almost didn't enter, they realise that they might not have met the man with the antidote and thus they might never have found the gap in the mountains nor the road that led to the temple. This encourages players to believe that the consequences they experience in game play are part and parcel to the overall story they are presently experiencing.
What is rarely understood, or at least rarely acknowledged, is that the belief in consequence depends on the rejection of inevitability. If players come to believe that had they not done A, B or C, the dungeon master would simply have manoeuvred them onto the same road by some other means, then the apparent continuity collapses. The chain of remembered causality becomes decorative. This is partly why players don't listen when they're told the DM is liable to manoeuvre them... because even the player recognises that to believe this is corrosive. It is the equivalent of sticking fingers in their ears and crying la la la, which enables the DM to continue to manoeuvre them.
Intelligibility is the capacity of participants to understand the current state of play well enough to make informed choices. Players must be able to look at the current state of play and reasonably infer what kinds of actions are available, what sorts of costs those actions might incur and what kinds of failures are possible. This does not require certainty, but it does require legibility. The world must answer in ways that are constrained by its current conditions rather than by an external need to arrive somewhere else.
This is extremely hard to create. The players must be able to read the situation, form expectations about what will happen if they act and then have those expectations resolved in a way that corresponds closely enough to the DM’s internal model that the players can trust the connection. That trust is what makes learning possible. When expectations are met, the players can infer that their reasoning was valid: they correctly assessed risk, they correctly understood an affordance, they correctly predicted a cost. The reward is not success; the reward is intelligibility itself, because it tells them that their choices are grounded in an environment they can understand. The moment that connection holds consistently, players can begin to build a predictive map of the world, which is the precondition for informed choice.
However, if the DM’s internal model differs from what the players were reasonably led to believe, then outcomes stop teaching. The players cannot tell whether they made a bad choice, misunderstood the situation or were simply surprised by a private rule in the DM’s head. Once that ambiguity enters, players lose the ability to update their understanding. They cannot learn from outcomes because they cannot locate the cause of outcomes.
The DM must supply something that restores a sense of order, even if that order is no longer grounded in shared causal understanding. This is where the turn to a narrative model begins, often unconsciously. A narrative model compensates for the loss of intelligibility by replacing causal predictability with structural predictability. Instead of outcomes needing to make sense because they follow from the situation as the players understood it, they only need to make sense in terms of sequence and dramatic logic. Events no longer answer the question "what happens if we do this?" but "what happens next?" That shift reduces the burden of alignment between player expectations and the DM’s internal model, because narrative structure can absorb inconsistencies that causal systems cannot.
This is why narrative compensation is self-reinforcing. As intelligibility declines, the DM leans more heavily on story to keep play coherent. As story takes precedence, player choices become less causally effective. As choices lose effect, intelligibility erodes further, because there is less and less for players to learn from the consequences of action. The narrative model does not merely coexist with diminished agency; it accelerates it.
We need to pause here and establish still again that this "story model" is still fundamentally different from literary storytelling. The "story model" in tabletop is a construct designed to provide a sense of coherence and structure to a game that is otherwise filled with chaos, uncertainty and risk. It's a way of maintaining engagement, ensuring that events make sense to the players even when the underlying system doesn't always provide a clear narrative thread. In this model, the focus is less on the growth of characters or the unfolding of deep, meaningful consequences and more on the presentation of events as though they are part of a cohesive storyline. The DM often acts as the storyteller, shaping the events and the players' choices to fit a desired structure, or at least to mimic a structure that resembles a story.
But it's not about the characters' evolution as characters — they don't grow or evolve or reach a resolution, nor does the narrative, though it appears to when the string of events that are followed come to an end. But this ending is not redemptive or transformational. It's merely an end, like a commute to a workplace that accomplishes a task, furthers one's income, but in fact offers very little for the soul. The only option thereafter is to repeat the commute again the next day, and the next, until the commute itself becomes hollow and the players go through the motions.
There we have it. We've developed comprehensive vocabulary to discuss various aspects of tabletop gameplay and storytelling. Every word here existed prior to my inclusion of it in this post; all of it can be looked up and further explored with exactly the meaning I have given it here, so that if the reader wishes to further pursue intelligibility, meaning, affordance, risk exposure or whatever, there won't be any problem doing so. Of course, there's a lot to remember. This is a complicated game, and it needs people ready to dive into a complicated vocabulary.
