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You know what The Great Summoner Retcon reminds me of?

DawnPaladin·12/3/2014, 6:12:31 AM·55 votes·6,591 views

There's a common pitfall that newbie Dungeon Masters fall into in games like Dungeons and Dragons.

It starts with the best of intentions. The DM is excited about the game. He has an epic story he wants to tell. He spends months creating his gameworld and preparing plot threads for the players to follow. Cities and countries and people-groups are invented out of whole cloth. A cast of NPCs emerges, each with their own backstory and motivations. The DM prepares the plot meticulously, forgetting nothing, segueing one twist seamlessly into the next, making sure every detail comes together into one glorious narrative tapestry. When his preparations are finished, the campaign is a work of art, a brilliant story for the characters to experience.

The first night of the campaign, the DM sets out drinks and snacks for everyone. The players arrive one by one. Everyone sits down at the table, and the story begins. On the road into town, the party meets the mysterious young man who is secretly heir to the throne. Little do the players know they'll be helping him reclaim his kingdom in just a few levels!

And then one of the player characters decides this NPC isn't giving him the respect he deserves, picks a fight with him, and kills him right there on the side of the road.

All is lost. All the DM's careful planning collapses into ruin. In hair-tearing frustration, the DM flees to an online message board and asks "How can I keep my players from messing up my story?"

If the DMs he consults are wise, they will say "Stop trying to make it your story. Your game is not about you or the NPCs you create; it is about the player characters. Keep the focus on them, let them drive the story, and the game will be fun."

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I have an enormous amount of respect for Riot because of the difficult tasks they set for themselves and regularly succeed at. The Player Behavior team doesn't just ban all the flamers--they are committed to reforming some of the most toxic gamers on the Internet. The team that redid Summoner's Rift didn't just make a gorgeous new map, they optimized it until it would run as well or better than the old one, even with all the new details they added in. New champions that Riot designs aren't just fun to play, they're fun to play against. Any of these teams could have settled for "good enough", and at most companies that would have been just fine, but Riot consistently sets very high goals for themselves and achieves them. That's just how they roll, and that's what made me a fan of this company.

Why is it imperative that a 5v5 game is deeply connected to our characters? -- RiotOpheli

That's why I'm disappointed in the Narrative team. With quotes like the above, they are declining to tackle the tough problem of creating a meaningful narrative within the context of a MOBA. The Narrative team seems to believe that creating a meaningful narrative adjacent to a MOBA is good enough.

Creating an evolving story in a competitive game is an incredibly tough problem. (See this Extra Credits episode that examines why this is difficult.) I am sympathetic to the challenges Riot faces. But the path they're pursuing now won't work because it excludes the one special thing games bring to storytelling: player choice.

Different forms of storytelling have different strengths; this is why converting a successful book into a movie doesn't always work. The stories games tell are special because their outcome is not predetermined. They demand that the player decide moment-to-moment what happens next, and they succeed most powerfully when the player looks back on them and says "This is my story. The decision as to what kind of story would be told was mine, and I am satisfied with my decision."

This was the strength and downfall of the Mass Effect series. BioWare empowered player choice in a way that no-one had ever seen before, with countless small but meaningful choices accumulating across hundreds of hours of play, allowing each player to create a narrative tailored to them personally, rich and hearty with unforgettable moments and characters. And when it was revealed in the end that those choices did **not **matter nearly as much as people expected they would, the players revolted.

So when Riot's Narrative team embarks on a venture to build a story for this game in a way that's completely divorced from player choice, I am disappoint. They will produce some quality material, I am sure--Azir's story was quite interesting--but it will never be as good as it could have been, because they're leaving out the ingredient that makes games special. They're putting out content like a movie studio (writing stories in isolation, marketing them with teasers, and releasing them when they're done) rather than a Dungeon Master (collaborating with players and weaving their ideas and choices into the storyline).

It's a huge challenge, but if they abandon their current course, I believe Riot can create something special. The MOBA field is not barren of multiplayer storytelling ideas! Dawngate treats every game played as a vote for one choice or another in a massively multiplayer Choose Your Own Adventure game. League Factions writes new lore every month guided by tournaments on Summoner's Rift. It can be done, and I so want Riot to try. Please don't let me down!

68 Comments

Spellbound187512/3/2014, 3:02:55 PM20 votes

...Games don't have choice though. They have the illusion of choice. You are on rails, moving from point A to point B and you may be able to steer your character a bit but you don't decide your destiny or the outcome. Even Mass Effect 2 had this. You always end up fighting the Collectors. Whether or not you do the optional missions is your choice, but no one can die on them. Success is literally the only option unless you turn the game off. Death is a slap on the wrist, and even the suicide mission ending where you and everyone in your squad dies isn't meaningful choice. It's the game telling you to go play out all the nice padding Bioware wrote for you. When I finished Mass Effect 3 I thought the ending was bad because it was lazy and had plot holes. When people started complaining about lack of choice I didn't understand it. You never had any choice that someone didn't write for you in advance. If you assume a game should meet that standard you are going to be disappointed.

Beyond this, in a multiplier game player choice is even less likely to exist. You can't let everyone make meaningful choices that affect characterization. There are too many people and too many ways to value their opinions. But even if they could manage to provide this to everyone... well that would be a new thing wouldn't it?

In the old league of legend lore you never made a meaningful choice. They just had an awkward moba story that was designed to justify a game with no purpose. Why do these characters come together and kill each other over and over again while making no progress on their goals? In the short term it worked but it did so by assuming the story would never progress. Then league got bigger, more champions came and it became harder to justify why they'd come here to fight. I honestly don't find Riot's decision to cut out a big piece of useless lore out to be a bad move. Just as they've been removing poor design decisions from the game. AP Tryndamere and AP Yi are old enough to have come from a time where the idea of spell scaling was still in it's infancy. The idea of AD spell scaling was just too weird. So champions with no reason to build ap were given gigantic ap ratios so that if they built a triforce they could at least feel like they were getting something from it. Riot looked back, saw this was a bad idea and rectified it. Rightly so I feel. Both were annoying ways of playing the game. They retcon lore all the time too. When they didn't change a champion and just the little blurb people didn't react with nearly this much vitriol.

And separating the game from story is a good thing in theory. It all comes down to what they do with it. The first thing I'm waiting on is a champion dying. With the overt separation between game and story that's an option that has finally opened up. I don't know if Riot is planning to do this but I feel if they aren't willing to use the freedom this change gives them then it really is just change for changes sake.

That got a bit off topic. The point I've been trying to make is, if you're going to decry this change, could you decry it for one of the more plausible reasons then pinning over something we never had. Like the lack of communication, arbitrariness of change, slowness of the alterations, etc.

Baval12/3/2014, 10:18:34 PM13 votes

Bad DMs scrap the whole campaign and cry on the forums because they cant think of what to do next (looking at you Rito)

Good DMs turn that NPC into a random dude and promote another random dude into the future heir. Players are none the wiser.

Great DMs continue the campaign as planned and let the PCs investigate many long levels to find the missing heir only to find out they murdered him. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hckIjL7z5z4

Damorion21512/4/2014, 1:49:29 AM9 votes

Lore team done fucked up. Only way they can actually make things better is if they reverse the retcon. I doubt whatever they come up with next will be better than what they already had.

Diana x Me12/4/2014, 6:55:35 PM9 votes

I feel like everyone is ignoring the elephant in the room. The retcon basically makes the game name no longer LoL because their is no league it's just a bunch of random people but, Warriors of runeterra that end up some how all agreeing to be on a team of 5 random people vs another team of 5 random people that some how came to the agreement to fight the other team in a hidden arena in the middle of nowhere. Some how knowing this place will resurrect them when they die, while also knowing that some guy will give you stuff if you give him invisible coins that you don't actually pick up when you kill things to make you stronger. The game.

Alright, now that's the Canon version of it in which you are the champion and summoner no longer exist which now gives reasons as to why they are fighting in this arena. Bona a tutti?:

Done2512/3/2014, 3:58:28 PM6 votes

Actually Spell, I must disagree with you! Riot can and ALREADY HAS done this very own thing. When Rengar and Kha'zix are on other teams, the one to kill the other gets a unique bonus. When Vi/Cait are fighting Jinx a little counter shows up to show who has defeated the other one. Just little touches like that bring the game to life.

Imagine if the first of Ashe, Sejuiani, or Lissandra to reach level 18 got a 10% stat buff and was declared winner of their war.

OblongOtter12/3/2014, 8:34:44 PM5 votes

New champions that Riot designs aren't just fun to play, they're fun to play against.

Yasuo Kalista

And this is a really cool idea, Riot would just need to be really smart to know how to do it properly.

Impetual12/4/2014, 7:30:57 AM2 votes

Here's a well thought out intelligent post. Let's hope for a red response from the narrative department.

I'm curious to hear what they would think about it.