Olaf Hits the Dragon With His Sword, and Dice Stories

Though you might not think to look at it, Olaf Hits the Dragon With His Sword is an RPG, even if the entirety of the game is summed up by its title.

The mechanics are simple enough: you and your fellow player have six colors of dice, and you answer a few narrative questions about your character — Olaf or the Dragon, natch — and their motivations. Each different answer corresponds to a color of die, and you put said colored die in the central pool after giving your answer.

After the questions are asked, Olaf hits the dragon with his sword.

The outcome of Olaf’s attack depends on which color die rolled highest in the pool. One sword swing, and the story is done. The players detail the epilogue, and the game is over.

Olaf was born when the author remarked in a tumblr conversation that “it doesn’t make sense to talk about combat and roleplaying as separate activities in tabletop roleplaying games, because a battle can be a story.” I think most of us can agree with this sentiment; we’ve seen enough action scenes in movies and books to comprehend how action and narrative intertwine.

However, I think this sentiment is a little overly simplistic. A battle can be a story, yes, but there are different kinds of battles, stories, and battles-as-stories in RPGs.

Consider the meta-narrative. We’ve all played games where “I couldn’t roll above a 10 to save my life,” or “I rolled a crit on the final blow to kill the deamon.” There are stories of the lucky roll saving the day. Stories of the knight getting dropped by a lucky blow, and frantic strategizing to get the healer in range while the rogue ran interference. These stories aren’t “the wrong kind of story” to be told by RPGs.

But can we say they are incidental? If we were playing a strategy board game — a game that is not an RPG but still uses systems and mechanics — these metastories still happen. They aren’t necessarily connected to any game-narrative, and in fact could be in opposition to it: We’ve all had obstacles that should be easy turn out to be real struggles, or end-bosses that end up easier to kill than the random encounter in the previous room, just because of some lucky rolls or serendipitous slip-ups.

One of the interesting things about Olaf is how it simplifies and yet exemplifies a fundamental aspect of RPG narratives. Olaf explains his motives and adds a die to the pool. The Dragon describes its nature and adds another die. They banter, more dice. Then the dice are rolled, and the epilogue is revealed. The fundamental structure of the game is: the players influence the likelihood of different endings by describing themselves and how they act.

Put even simpler: the only thing we know about Olaf at the end of the game is why Olaf is there and what he said to the dragon. All we know about the Dragon is how it behaves. There is no such thing as an “attack roll,” yet how Olaf and the Dragon are portrayed, played, and displayed dictates how the game ends. It is perhaps the quintessential example of a narrative-focused game, and its done by ascribing different endings to different colors of dice.

Dice are not great at telling stories. Or rather, not stories as we usually mean the term. Consider any book you’ve read, any movie you’ve seen, and then try and map die-rolls onto what happens. It’s an interesting experiment. You can sometimes see skill checks, attack rolls, critical successes or fumbles…You might be convinced that you see the game in the story.

But don’t fool yourself; someone created that story. We could talk about the tyranny of dice or the ability of the GM to fudge or finagle the story back into shape, we could talk about railroading (and we will), but at the moment I’d like to ask how the meta-narrative can influence the game-narrative.

Earlier, when I mentioned La Torra’s dwarf Lord Scurlock, I didn’t touch on his mention of sample-size. The fact is, in any narrative-focused game, we may only roll a specific skill or stat a handful of times. In Olaf, we only roll them once. With an equal chance of a d20 turning up 1 or 20, a few rolls can drastically change the course of a character’s story. We can hope to influence the dice, of course, but in the end it is just that; hope.

If a random band of supposed-to-be-weak goblins turn out to give your players trouble, is there anything stopping you from making these goblins actually-a-lot-stronger-than-regular-goblins in the story? Suddenly a simple clean-out-the-caves mission becomes the player’s first interaction with a band of demon-worshiping cultist goblins, who have infused their bodies with the strength and fury of the infernal pits. No wonder you were having trouble hitting them.

But that still puts a lot of pressure on the goblin-dice. In most games, an attack roll is a roll to find out if your sword connects with goblin-flesh, not to find out if these goblins are actually infused with demonic energies. And what if the goblins aren’t difficult at all, except for your warrior who keeps fumbling? Do we just blush gently and tactfully ignore how Thug the Barbarian, bane of trolls and slayer of dragons, couldn’t hit a piddling goblin? Or do we have to invent some deep-seated fear of goblins in our otherwise fearless warrior to explain why they kept missing while the wizard got a few hits in with their dagger?

Why not? Just because you could hit a lizard the size of a mountain doesn’t mean you can hit a quick-footed goblin. And maybe Thug was just feeling overconfident, laughing at the hopping gob as it ducked and weaved around their swinging axe. Isn’t it up to the players to explain why the game unfolds the way it does? To turn the meta-narrative into a game-narrative?

It seems to me that if we say dice can’t create good stories, then we have to also be suspicious of Oracles, random encounter tables, and anything else that use dice as a means for inspiration. We can look at dice and rules as obstacles to storytelling, or we can look at them as inspiration for telling a good story.

But that’s the thorn in the pudding: what makes a good RPG story?

It’s an impossible question to answer succinctly or universally — art is subjective, after all — but since half of the purpose of playing an RPG involves creating a story, I think it behooves us to at least ask the question. Perhaps we can consider what narrative differences there are between RPGs and other mediums.

After all, if the medium is the message, then what sort of message is an RPG for?