“To Make Stories Out of Sounds”: TTRPGs and The Return of Oral Storytelling
Contains minor spoilers for Worlds Beyond Number Ep.23
Dimension 20 — an actual play TTRPG show produced by Dropout TV — recently performed live at the London Apollo in front of a sold-out crowd. The show was sensational, the cast was completely captivating, and the story that was borne out of the Time Quangle was bizarre, brilliant, and perfectly aligned with the jubilant vibe of the audience.
At the time, I thought Dimension 20 (D20) selling out at the London Apollo twice was a big deal. Then, D20 sold out Maddison Square Garden in under 10 minutes. To put that feat in perspective, only eleven comedians have ever sold out at MSG.
While the rush for tickets did cause a regrettable kerfuffle, it highlighted the reality that the demand for oral storytelling has never been higher — and it’s not just actual play shows that are booming.
According to Wizards of the Coast estimates, more than 50 million people have played Dungeons and Dragons and new entrants, like Daggerheart and MCDM RPG, show that there’s serious interest in gathering around a table and telling stories with friends through the artifice of a TTRPG.
Clearly, our appetite for well-told stories is not yet wetted. But why have our oral storytellers suddenly lept to the forefront of our collective imaginations and enchanted us with their dulcet tones and velvet voices?
A History of Oral Stories or, “All the World’s a Stage”
As a lover of fiction and fantasy, I become reflexively didactic when writing about storytelling and our imagination. Whenever a friend or family member even hints at the idea that stories and games are silly, I have to fight down the urge to yell “Don’t you see: All the world’s a stage! You fool!”. While my impulse to defend the honor of “silly games” could use some tempering, a simple fact remains: where there are humans, there are stories.
It’s also reasonable to assert that, for most of human history, our primary method for sharing stories was not through the medium of written prose or scripted plays, but through the spoken word. While it's impossible to say which story is the oldest, the first stories were likely both coordinated belief systems and folkloric tales. Scholars point towards examples like the First Nations people’s Dreamtime, which dates back 65,000 years and refers to a time when spirits created the land and the people.
Oral stories that have survived millennia continue to influence popular media today, too. Long before Robin Williams voiced the wonderful, electric-blue genie that steals the show in Disney’s Aladdin, Scheherazade invented the original Genie of the Lamp to save her own life in the collection of spoken we now call One Thousand and One Nights (originally, Alf Laylah wa-Laylah).
But, as any bibliophile will tell you, the story of Scheherazade is more than an amusing series of allegorical fables meant to teach readers a clear moral code. While “The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor” does exalt the value of perseverance, and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” encourages us to guard against greed, we aren’t drawn back to the tales simply to become better people. Instead, something rather more interesting is happening: we, like King Shahryar, are being enthralled and enraptured by the tales. We are losing ourselves in the parables and demand more when the story comes to a close.
Stories that Move the Mind
Humans are creatures constituted in, through, and by language*. We think of ourselves using language and engage with the world by using words as symbols to represent ideas. The primacy of language is awfully handy, too. It comes in clutch when we suddenly remember “milk!” when the grocery store and ensures we’re able to recall “three lefts then a right” when behind the wheel.
Language also gives us a way to ascribe value to things. It helps us think of certain actions as “brave,” “caring,” or “kind.” Equally, it gives us a chance to call some things “evil,” “greedy,” or “unfair.”
It’s little wonder, then, that word-rich spoken stories so easily captivate our minds and move our spirits. This insight is echoed by the neuroscience of narrative which posits that good stories are engaging before they anything else. As researcher Paul J. Zak explains, good stories actually raise our oxytocin levels and make us more prosocial. However, eliciting a response that increases oxytocin is difficult as “attention is a scarce neural resource because it is metabolically costly to a brain.” This may be why we somewhat shut down on a conscious level when engaging with a good story: we’re cutting down on operations and are willing to suspend our normal activity in order to prioritize the imaginative experience going on in our brains.
Interestingly, it may be that oral stories are more readily captivating than written ones. While it’s reductive to state that one is better than the other, data collected by the National Literacy Trust shows that 44.5% of young people say that listening to audiobooks got them into reading. This points towards the idea that oral storytelling may be more immediately impactful and accessible to a wider audience who want to get lost in a good tale, but who are reluctant to pick up a book and sit down to read for a lengthy period.
Spoken vs Written Word
Although recent research suggests that our brains don’t distinguish between reading and listening, telling an oral story changes the way we wield language. Using spoken word to tell a story shifts the way we communicate in a few notable ways:
Editing: You can’t edit the scary story you tell to your kids around the campfire in the same way you would a written story. You can’t cross out a sentence once spoken and you can’t put red pen through a tangent that goes nowhere.
Style: You use a different meter, tone, and syntax when telling a story with spoken language, compared to the written word. A sentence like “He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink.” is flooring when presented in the prose of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway but is unlikely to elicit the same result if you’re gossiping with your friend about an emerging love-triangle.
Punctuation: Rather than relying on punctuation to produce emphasis, you have to leverage pitch, tone, and inflections to properly captivate an audience. This brings a certain “bodiliness” to the spoken word; even if you can’t see the speaker.
These fundamental differences mean that a well-told written story must take a different shape from a well-told spoken story. These differences may be why oral storytelling has seen a recent resurgence in the digital age, too. Now more than ever, we can find spoken stories that explore long-form narrative arcs and use the familiar patterns of verbal parlance that our brains have evolved to latch onto. Like children huddling by the campfire after dark, we are communing with our favorite storyteller on digital platforms and are listening to the yarns they weave with words en masse.
The Future of Oral Storytelling
It’s doubtful that our desire for oral stories has ever truly waned. Rather, the issue has been with the supply side of storytelling, rather than demand. In years gone by, the biggest audience your town’s best storyteller could command was likely the patrons of the closest pub. Now, however, whispered secrets and amusing anecdotes can spread freely across the world on platforms like Spotify, YouTube, Patreon, and Twitch.
Worlds Beyond Number, whose tagline is “We play games to make stories out of sounds”, exemplifies the recent uptick in interest in narrative-driven TTRPGs and spoken stories. In a little over a year, the group of storytellers has leaped to the top of the Patreon charts with nearly 50,000 paid subscribers thanks to their approach of championing narrative over gaming. In that year, they’ve already produced over 45 hours of free-to-listen content for folks around the world.
The production value of serial podcasts like Worlds Beyond Number is elevating the potential of the spoken word, too. Every episode contains moments that feel like the listener is bearing witness to real magic. For example, when GM Brennan Lee Mulligan describes Ame (portrayed by Erika Ishii), one of the show's protagonists, teleporting to the North Pole with the following:
“Snow. Endless and eternal in a place of constant cold, here in the depth of night. In the vast darkness, yet still illuminated by the reflection of star and snow, endless crystal whiteness emanating out through vast expanse in the far north of this world. A flicker, much like a candle, bursts into being for a moment. Wind. Snow. And suddenly: Ame.
GM Mulligan then tosses the ball over to Erika, and asks them to describe “a geographical feature,” “a celestial feature,” and “what the weather of this world is doing.” Erika sticks the landing in this scene with a poised description of Ame’s arrival. All of this is backed by a subtle score produced by Taylor Moore and features flutes, chimes, and a hammered string melody. While the production value of this single scene is far beyond even the wildest dreams of Shakespeare or Sophocles, this is the norm in WBN.
Clearly, things are looking up for the future of the spoken word, yet there lies a looming specter ready to take a chunk out of the fledgling industry: The Market. As with all mediums, the influence of the market is almost certain to shape the way we create, produce, and share spoken stories in years to come. Market pressures already direct creative production in the book industry and are sure to preside over choices made in the podcasting and narrative storytelling realms in years to come.
But, for now, that all seems far away. Rather than fretting over the inevitable intrusion of bean counters, I am looking forward to popping on my headphones and enjoying the resurgence of the spoken word as it emerges into the mainstream.
* in” because language surrounds our experience, “through” because we have a relationship with language, and “by” because language actively shapes our experience.