When we think and talk about storytelling in our games, the thing we usually focus on is the various events that feed the narrative: character stories, major plot points, how players resolved or reacted to circumstances. Sometimes we’ll talk about interesting themes, how they express through the fiction something relevant to our real lives. Most of the time that’s as far, as deep, as we go, so we miss the rest of the storytelling iceberg.
Let’s be coy a bit longer, explore this idea before we speak its name. Consider this story description:
A London police officer uncovers an intricate web of corruption and conspiracy while investigating a series of grisly murders in an otherwise idyllic village. The truth he discovers leads him to seek justice in a bloody, violent shootout with a murderous cult’s members.
That certainly paints a picture, but let’s give it a little contrast to see what emerges:
This buddy-cop comedy is an uproarious pastiche of over-the-top American action movies and British “cozy mysteries” mashed-up to with stunning effectiveness
Oh, wow - could those be more different?! Personally, I’m all-in on the latter and a weak “maybe” on the former.
But…
You probably already know. They’re the same movie: Edgar Wright’s 2007 buddy cop action comedy masterpiece Hot Fuzz.
So what’s the deal - how do two totally accurate descriptions of the same movie evoke such totally disparate conceptions of the story itself?
I’ll admit those descriptions are incomplete, with very little intersection between them. Someone might call that “dishonest”, so we’re all glad someone isn’t around to poop our party. The first makes it out as the sort of dark and gritty, film noir affair that likely sees Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman asking Kevin Spacey about the contents of boxes; the second gives us three wildly different movie genres, and assures us with respect to their successful integration.
Let’s play the role of Sergeant Nicholas Angel and review the salient facts:
- Factual articulation of the main plot of the movie
- Accurate description of the stylistic influences
- It is an actual, verifiable, existing (and highly-watchable) movie
So what gives? What is this missing link that reconciles all of this? When - oh, when! - will our author stop beating around the bush and just say the name of the thing that he wants so badly to tell us all about?
Alright - here we go. It’s tone.
Tone is that precious alchemical compound that makes the four-note motive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony swing from imperious dominion to pastoral bliss; it tell us the Galactic Empire are the bad guys and the Rebel Alliance carries hope on the (x)wing; it’s how we soldier through the imminent planetary bulldozing of Earth in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy without falling apart in tear-streaked panic; tone is what keeps every Agatha Christie-novel murder mysterious rather than tragic.
So what is “tone” and how do we use it? Tone is usually an abstract, subjective concept that we use to describe the general attitude of a work and the mental state that work means elicits. While it is often a matter of individual interpretation, people tend to agree.
A work overall will have a general tone, but the truth is that it is a composite of many individual tones working together in aggregate. The Scorsese film The Departed is deeply serious, with many jaw-clenching tense scenes because the stakes for the characters are the legacies of their life’s work, not just life-and-death. In Romeo and Juliet we have a tone-progression from the excitement of young, exuberant love turning into despairing misery. Munch’s The Scream dramatically expresses existential angst. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony wings us through oppressive to carefree to turbulent struggle before ending in exultant triumph.
Works are at their best when the tone of each part references and reinforces the other parts. Some works get a little confused, though, and have their parts at odds with each other.
The Phantom Menace is mostly a dry, serious, and cautious movie with terminally buttoned-up Jedi negotiators, shadowy co-conspirators celebrating their chance for vengeance, tense intra-planetary diplomacy, and a system of chattel slavery just beyond the reach of galactic law. I don’t want to pile on criticism of a decades-old character, but Jar Jar Binks is tonally at odds with every scene of that movie. While he was intended to provide comic relief from the oppressively dire tension, the actual result of his Battlefield: Three Stooges is so entirely disconnected from the rest of the work that the character ultimately undermines, rather than reinforces, the intent of the work overall.
Similarly, the Adam Sandler movie Click swings drastically from a whimsical, low-brow comedy into a devastating, heart-breaking story of relational dissociation, detachment, and regret. It’s not just that the tone shifted, it’s that the shift was so extreme and so intensely opposite the lightheartedness of the early movie as to be upsetting. Creatively, the movie actually succeeds at driving an important point, but the tone-shift is off-putting enough to alienate the audience and degrade the work overall.
Let’s pull some of these ideas back into the world of games, though. Curse of Strahd is one of the most revered, celebrated modules for D&D 5e, if not every RPG. No spoilers (I’ve never actually played it), but word on the street is that it’s a horror campaign about a vampire who also happens to hold dominion over the realm of Barovia. As a horror work, it has a dark, serious tone; as a RPG module, it is open to adaptation and modification by the players. Suppose we choose to modify the titular vampire lord’s personality just a bit and re-imagine him as Count Strahd von Frank-N-Furter. Putting aside whether and how this new characterization colors the deeds of the now-sex-obsessed hedonist darklord, ignoring whether there is ironic humor to the play, I’m going to very strongly suggest that this would not be a welcome change - even for the most die-hard Rocky Horror Picture Show fan.
Likewise if our GM chooses to narrate the opening raid on Greenest from Hoard of the Dragon Queen with graphic, sound-effect filled descriptions of the slain voiding their bowels while Yakety Sax plays. It doesn’t matter that this narrator’s gag is repetitive and juvenile, that it will wear thin immediately, it’s a tone that simply does not fit. The incongruity, the misfit nature, of the tone from these elements detracts from the work as a whole; they alienate the audience and degrade the work overall.
Obviously these are extreme examples, but they illustrate the point that the story components of our games should harmonize with each other to reinforce the overall tone of the game experience. We need to exercise some care to think through the elements we bring into our games: explore the tone, consider the purpose, and examine the fit.
Consider these hooks, using that tonal framework:
- Our dark, seedy urban underbelly is thick with well-resourced and respected aid workers
- This egalitarian utopia relies on the interminable suffering and isolation of one innocent child
- The galaxy-spanning, all-consuming cybernetic organisms can only be countered by the healing power of a hug
- The legendary riddle of the sphinx is a knock-knock joke
- An ascendant Cult of the Dragon is amassing a treasure hoard to summon the final word in genital-enhancing magic
Some of these might work as comedy. One of them is the central conceit of a notable speculative fiction short story. With the right tone most of them can work, and may do so quite well, but absent the right context it stops mattering if the idea is good: it undermines the experience.
What we as players (hey GMs, you’re players, too!) should strive for is a harmonious integration of our characters and stories with the setting and themes of the game experience. We can have fun, we can explore big ideas, we can enjoy silliness, poke fun, be earnest, have poignant encounters, and blow off steam - but we should also honor and extend the spirit, the tone, of our shared game world.