GLoGtober 23: The Storyteller and the Game Master
Image: Artist unknown, Wood engraving of Johann Peter Hebel's "The Unexpected Reunion," 1811. Public domains source.
GLoGtober Challenge #4: Essential, non-RPG reading for any GM.
I'll admit it: I am sufficiently out of touch with non-academic circles that I have no idea if the name Walter Benjamin rings any bells to someone not in the fields of visual art, art history, and media criticism.
Benjamin (1892 - 1940) was a German Jewish philosopher and media theorist. He was largely unknown in his own lifetime, working mostly as a magazine culture critic, but in the last 20 years or so his work has exploded in popularity to the point of becoming the boring canon that disaffected students complain about. He's known primarily for his influential essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" - reflections on the nature of the unique work of art and the process by which history accumulates respectively. Both of these are worth the read, but not the text that I would recommend to any game master (or really anyone interested in making).
No, for this audience, I heartily recommend "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.".
At first glance, this 14 page essay is a descriptive treatment of an obscure Russian author. In truth, Leskov merely provides the traction for Benjamin's meditation on the nature of storytelling. Why do stories grip us? How can we communicate experience through words? When does a story benefit from providing information and when should it stick to a "chaste compactness which precludes psychological analysis"? In a nutshell, if you want counsel, both concrete and theoretical on how to tell more impactful stories, this text is for you.
I won't comb through the essay line by line, but I do want to pull out a few gems for closer examination.
On Information
"Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it." (VI)
For Benjamin, relaying information and storytelling are opposed modes of communication. Information is intended to be immediate, "lays claim to prompt verifiability," where the story gains its power in duration. The storyteller relays their account and it's the listener, through the process of resolving the story's ambiguities and relating its events to their own experience, who derives the pleasure and meaning of the text.
To me, this resonates deeply with the problem of maintaining the thread of a scene as GM. On one hand, you need to provide a consistent ping of information, describing and redescribing the same scene from different angles in order to paint in a coherent, imaginary space. I imagine a bat using echolocation to detect the bounds a room, wave after wave of sound rebounding to convey its shape in the bat's mind.
The advice here though is to describe the facts of the room but stop short of explaining their significance. We describe the ogre, what the ogre says, but to describe why the ogre is there, either in game terms or in in-fiction motivational terms, would be to short circuit the whole event. The GM's job is to provide evidence, not analysis. It's the process of connecting the threads of the scene that creates a story in the players' mind, and it's that story, lingering like smoke after a campfire, that lives on in the players' memory.
On Death
"Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell." (XI)
Much ink has been spilled about the lethality of OSR/NSR style games. Recently, 5e circles seem to be having a moment talking about whether or not death and serious injury ought to be fully consensual at the RPG table. I don't aim to relitigate those conversations here.
What Benjamin flags is that death is a source of the storyteller's authority. Benjamin relays with great admiration a passage between two story beats in Johann Peter Hebel's "Unexpected Reunion." A character dies, then:
“In the meantime the city of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake, and the Seven Years’ War came and went, and Emperor Francis I died, and the Jesuit Order was abolished, and Poland was partitioned, and Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed. America became independent, and the united French and Spanish forces were unable to capture Gibraltar. The Turks locked up General Stein in the Veteraner Cave in Hungary, and Emperor Joseph died also. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland, and the French Revolution and the long war began, and Emperor Leopold II went to his grave too. Napoleon captured Prussia, and the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the peasants sowed and harvested. The millers ground, the smiths hammered, and the miners dug for veins of ore in their underground workshops. But when in 1806 the miners at Falun . . . ”
The argument here is that death is deeply interlinked with the passage of time. When two events happen a long time apart, that's not significant because the number of years is large, but because much about the world has changed. People have lived and died. The panoply of natural history passes by like a carousel and leaves the events of the story behind.
To me, this speaks not to Gygax's old canard about accurate time keeping, but rather to the importance of grounding injuries in the effect they have on the setting. What happens if instead of taking glee in rolling a limb-lopping on the Death & Dismemberment table, we extend our gaze beyond the players and into the time that it will take them to recover?
Benjamin also makes cogent points in this vein about how much more common death was in pre-industrial society: "There used to be no house, hardly a room, in which someone had not once died." It is difficult to cast our minds back to such a mindset, maybe impossible, but it does seem like a novel challenge that pen-and-paper roleplaying might be uniquely suited to tackle.
On Borrowing
"The cardinal point for the unaffected listener is to assure himself of the possibility of reproducing the story." (XIII)
The GLoGosphere is a huge ball of appropriations. There are folks doing original work, of course, but at some baseline we are all scurrying around beneath the ponderous steps of the world's oldest roleplaying game. GLoG classes are full of pop cultural pastiche and outright lifted mechanics. Advantage and Spell Dice ricochet around in a myriad of minor alterations. I find all of this glorious.
As I alluded to previously, for Benjamin a story is virtualized in the listener. That is to say, the storyteller relays it to the listener and they do the work of turning it into a synthetic memory via interpretation and imagination. I think this process also describes the particular joy of hacking together heart-breakers. They aren't original works exactly, they're the virtual memory of a past game combined with all the personal hopes and dreams we might have for a game.
I think there is a lot more to be written on this subject, likely in a future blog post.
On So Much More
I've only touched on a few points here. Across 19 subsections, Benjamin treats everything from fairy tales to the role of miracles to the serious work of daydreaming. Any given section may have some mote of advice or even directly applicable content for the table. Generally, I want to lay groundwork here for a future essay - Benjamin's criticism of the cut and thrust of storytelling provides a useful theoretical model for reflecting on one's own game mastering craft and potentially for describing how certain situations at the table turn into the stories we tell after the session has long expired. I find his work deeply influential. I hope you do to.