MMOs and Storytelling: FFXIV, WoW, and Constructing Living Worlds

This wouldn’t really be our first blog post if it wasn’t about video games. 

Welcome to The Art of Fireside Epics, a new blog about storytelling, TTRPG design, and narrative design. We’re Sadie and Amber, creators in the TTRPG sphere, and for our first post, we’re here to talk about TTRPG campaigns as MMORPG worlds, storytelling through the lens of world and character, and what we can learn about building a TTRPG campaign that feels alive in every aspect.

This post will contain spoilers for the most recent expansions (and entire games!) of FFXIV and WoW.

Introduction

We’re going to attempt to encapsulate two lives’ worth of gaming and storytelling into one brief, comprehensive introduction—because the context of our gaming experiences helps frame the discussion of why we’re choosing to write this about massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) specifically, not just video games.

Sadie

I started with a beloved Nintendo 64, which became a GameCube, which became a PlayStation 2—and so on and so forth. I started with games like Mario Party, Mario Kart, and Super Mario 64 (they were kid-friendly) and tumbled into Spy Fox, Pajama Sam, and Putt-Putt games on the computer. My first real taste of truly expansive and story-driven games was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and that game defined my media tastes early—I wanted stories.

I’ll focus on a few favorites: the Mass Effect trilogy, the Dragon Age trilogy, and the Persona series. These games, investing in choices, stories, and deep character arcs, were mainstays in my ever-growing list of not just favorite games, but defining games. 

BioWare games both encourage and reward investment in your companions and their stories. Not only that, your choices define the “stand-in” protagonist that you play. While the Legend of Zelda and the Persona series more rigidly define the characters you follow, both tell character-centric narratives. In Persona, every stage of the game, especially in Persona 4 and Persona 5, is a character arc—the story does not move forward without these delves into the characters.

I started Final Fantasy XIV Online in my twenties, then World of Warcraft. Amber is going to talk about her video game history, and then we’re going to dive in: we’re going to compare these two MMOs to RPG video games, then discover how and why they are incredible examples for building a TTRPG campaign.

Amber

My very first console was a Playstation 2 that homed well-weathered copies of Sonic Heroes and Rayman 2. While my Playstation was eventually joined by a Gamecube and a Nintendo DS, I always had one foot in PC gaming, even as a child. I started with classics such as Spy Fox and Pajama Sam, but my computer games soon collided with my family’s favorite franchise: Star Wars. 

After playing the Jedi Knight and Knights of the Old Republic games, it is likely unsurprising that I would gravitate to my dad’s new favorite pastime—a massively multiplayer online role-playing game known as Star Wars Galaxies. While the single-player games had given me a familiarity with playing in a universe that existed far beyond the game itself, the scope of Star Wars Galaxies as an open-world, multiplayer experience blew my young mind.

And when Star Wars Galaxies’ popularity dwindled, I dutifully followed my dad on to a new, burgeoning MMO—World of Warcraft. I started playing WoW at age 11, and from then on practically grew up playing it.

What I would come to understand from my time playing MMOs and Star Wars games (especially Knights of the Old Republic, which was my gateway to other BioWare RPGs) is that I loved enormous worlds and deep lore. I spent hours trawling wikis to learn the history of Azeroth, to study the timeline of the Old Republic era, and to research the cultures of Dragon Age and Mass Effect. To scratch this itch, I dipped my toes into other MMOs throughout the years—including Guild Wars 2, Star Wars: the Old Republic, and, eventually, Final Fantasy XIV.

Nowadays, there are two things I can say for certain that I love—vast worlds and telling stories within those worlds—and there are two MMOs I connected with the most for those points. Let’s take a look at the first of them: Final Fantasy XIV.

The FFXIV title card (c) Square Enix

Final Fantasy XIV Online: Vibrant Character, Stagnant World

The title sounds worse than it is—it’s important in our comparison to talk about this. What FFXIV accomplishes is that despite its system as an MMO with millions of other players, it weaves a character-centric narrative, and that is important to analyze as you create a populated TTRPG world.

As a brief rundown before we really dive in, FFXIV has the base game (A Realm Reborn) and three expansions: Heavensward, Stormblood, and Shadowbringers.

One of Many

When you play an MMORPG, the immediate storytelling difficulty is this: Your character is one of millions.

Mass Effect will always be the story of Commander Shepard. You can play paragon Shep or renegade Shep, romance someone different every time (Tali for life), and make different choices, but you are always Commander Shepard, and that is your favorite narrative on the Citadel.

When we (Sadie and Amber) log into FFXIV, between us we have, off the top of our heads: an au’ra bard, an elezen aether-studying scholar, a destiny-denying hyuran dark knight, a miqo’te bard—and these characters join millions in accomplishing certain plot aspects.

Literally—millions. On July 22, 2020, Square Enix announced that FFXIV had 20 million registered users. These players band together to accomplish certain game objectives: raids, dungeons, the Ishgard restoration, etc. You can’t play FFXIV without interfacing with hundreds and thousands of other people throughout your experience. It’s one fish in a giant sea of schools of fish—the ocean and currents you create help wear away at the rock, but you will never be a whale.

Or will you?

The Warrior of Light and Darkness

You will, actually!

MMOs (and RPGs in general) tend to give a blanket title for the protagonist to help fill in voice lines. They can’t predict that you’re going to name your character Pickleschnitz Oprah, so they depend on those titles: WoW uses “Champion,” Dragon Age: Inquisition uses “Inquisitor,” Dark Souls uses “Ashen One,” Bloodborne uses “Hunter,” and FFXIV uses “the Warrior of Light.” It’s what allows the characters to voice, “Inquisitor, over here!” after you named your character, you know, Pickleschnitz.

While the title is more mechanical than anything throughout A Realm Reborn, the title begins to develop into an important storytelling tool in later expansions, but particularly in Shadowbringers. In the latest expansion, the Warrior of Light is brought to a world flooded with too much light, and thus they become the Warrior of Darkness, restoring balance. 

And this is massively effective in focusing the narrative on the player character! In A Realm Reborn, your character is part of a group called the Scions, which defeat threats called primals across Eorzea. The Scions aren’t even led by your character; 16-year-old Alphinaud Leveilleur takes the helm. As Alphinaud makes mistakes in leading the Scions, the threats grow beyond these primals, and your explorations become more far-reaching, the narrative places the Warrior of Light further and further into positions of plot importance.

The Scions of the Seventh Dawn. Look at ‘em. Nerds, all of ‘em.

Over the course of Heavensward and Stormblood, and very subtly, your character develops into not just a member of the Scions, but a hero within the Scions. By the time we reach the end of Shadowbringers, they are the Warrior of Light and Darkness.

… Joined by millions of other warriors of light and darkness, right? Those 20 million other registered players? How can a game possibly make you feel special in a world where 20 million people are achieving the same things you are, gaining the same titles, being the same hero?

But Shadowbringers did.

Not only did it win the Excellence in Multiplayer award at the 2020 SXSW Gaming Awards,  Shadowbringers was the single best hero-framing, character-focused, you-as-a-player-are-special story I have ever seen.

Here’s what it comes down to: scope, narrative framing, and personal twists.

A Hero in a World of Heroes

This is the section to pay attention to for creating heroes in populated, vibrant worlds. Because there’s a balance to be had here: if your world has no heroes, your party’s heroism is cheap. If your world has a million heroes but your party doesn’t stand out, then they’re a fish in a school in a sea.

If you can take a world that is very much alive with heroes and make your party walk away feeling important? Special? That’s where the magic is.

Let’s talk about how FFXIV did it.

Scope. Appropriately scaling the scope is the first and easiest way to create heroes in a world of heroes. This is particularly important not for FFXIV’s 20 million players, but for the Scions. We start with the primals, we introduce more threats, then more threats, then more threats—by the time we get to Shadowbringers, the Warrior of Darkness is the single person who can save an entire planet from being consumed by light.

This is not something the Scions can do. While all of the Scions can help with the primals and aid with the wars in Stormblood and Heavensward, only the Warrior of Darkness can consume the light. What the Warrior of Darkness is being asked to do is bigger in scope than anything done before—so they are a hero in a world of NPC heroes.

Even if your party is being aided, helped, or allied with, what large-scope mission can they do that no one else can possibly do?

Narrative Framing. But we still have 20 million other non-NPC heroes, right? The next step is narrative framing, which is hard to do elegantly and subtly. 

Narrative framing is a story within a story—in this case, I am using it somewhat loosely to describe how the world talks about something. It’s not just how the game is talking to the player, but how the world reacts to something/the narrative it inwardly creates.

In FFXIV, the user interface says to the player, “Do this raid with 23 other players.” But zooming in, the in-game narrative says, “Hey, protagonist—this is going to be a rough battle. Bring some of your closest allies and friends.” And on an even deeper level, the narrative framing—the camera angles that place your character up front, the dialogue directed to your character, the way the characters talk to you about it afterward—frames your character as the protagonist. Once the mission is complete, no NPC talks about the 23 other players. They talk about you, your mission, and what you need to do next.

my blessed FFXIV friends went through their screenshot folders for 30 minutes and then unsynced a dungeon so I could show you these camera angles

they literally spent like an hour doing this so you, the reader, could see that it places your character up front/in the middle

This is subtle, but it’s important. Your party, in any given session, will be interacting with allies, villains, citizens, guards, historians, other heroes, victims, etc. When they complete a mission with an ally, who gets lauded? When a character outsmarts a villain, how is that talked about? If you’re in one character’s arc, are the NPCs talking about them on a wider scale? Do they know who they are?

Framing someone as a hero is easy—you can narrate people throwing laurels at their feet, rolling out red carpets, and calling them “the greatest hero the world has ever seen.” I wouldn’t, but you can. Easily.

The much harder task with narrative framing is doing it in such a way that it feels real—that the stories being told around the heroes and the way they are being interacted with believably reinforces the idea that they are becoming special.

NPCs ask them for their opinion more often. NPCs turn to them in times of despair. NPCs leave big decisions for them. NPCs slowly change how they talk about them. Keep it slow, keep it subtle. Leave the other 20 million users behind, bit by bit, until you are looking at one Warrior of Darkness.

Personal Twists. This one is, I think, one of the most important methods FFXIV used to achieve what it did in Shadowbringers. We’ve been talking about large-scope events and framing the heroes as heroes as they do heroic things. But Shadowbringers singled out your character in a narrative way that makes it easy—not just fun, but easy—to see your character as the most important person in the room.

Let’s try to summarize this: In A Realm Reborn, you meet villain-of-the-week, 9-5 Traditional Villains known as the Ascians. They hover around in dark purple shadows looking generally shady and saying ominous things. There are only a few of them, and they’re generally shown to be behind the scenes, pulling the strings of the world and chess-mastering events as they want them.

Let’s be frank: they were pretty boring through most of A Realm Reborn, Heavensward, and even some of Stormblood.

When Shadowbringers decided that it was time to flesh out the Ascians, they gave them an in-depth and fairly tragic history—they were on a now-dead world in which the powers of creation ran away from them, and as they experimented beautifully with these powers, they inadvertently created their own doomsday. Though they tried to save themselves at the last moment, only a few Ascians survived, and those Ascians have been trying to raise what is effectively their god, Zodiark, and restore their world to what it was.

As you go throughout Shadowbringers, you learn about members of the Convocation. Their story is told through quotes echoing from stones, flashbacks, and a ghostly recreation of their once-capital city. You are set against them in deeply passionate ways—they see you as the one person standing between them and the people they loved. You see them as the destruction of the world and people you love.

And then you find out you were once one of them.

The Warrior of Darkness faces the last of the Ascians, a man so driven by his duty to his people that he has forgotten himself. And in that moment, you find out that you were a member of the Convocation known as Azem, and that you defected from the rest when you found out about their plans.

In that moment, you realize how utterly tied into this universe, these villains, this lore, and this world you are. You realize how deep of a history you had and that you are the last of the Convocation. You gain a new title: Azem, the Wanderer, the forgotten fourteenth seat of the Convocation of Fourteen.

And though 20 million registered users are watching this cutscene, you get to decide what Azem was like, you are being told you were the Fourteenth seat, and you are filling the gaps that the game leaves you to fill so that the Fourteenth seat is yours.

It was the first time I had ever seen an MMO character given so much personalized attention.

People walked away from that feeling important.

How does your party become this intricately tied into the plot of the world? What personal stakes do they have? In my campaign, I revealed that the character who was “cursed” for a mysterious reason was the descendent of the woman who the BBEG cursed. Now she has personal reason to stand against him—and now it feels like it couldn’t have been anyone else.

How can you tie them in?

For just a moment, you appear to Emet-Selch as an amaurotine. And he recognizes you as a once-friend.

A Stagnant World and Mitigation

The downside? Nothing tends to happen until the Warrior of Light shows up. Conflicts tend to be stagnant unless they’re involved. Nothing moves without their say. As soon as you leave one zone, it tends to be still, with no progress happening until you return to it for a new plot point.

The plot is focused around the Scions and the Warrior of Light, and only them. When you apply that to a TTRPG campaign, it can make your world feel stale and unbelievable. Imagine a country going to war only when your party decides to visit it, and then experiencing no fallout of that war after they leave.

It’s pretty dull.

However, we have seen FFXIV try to mitigate this effect. Through side stories and various mechanics, they have added small ways in which the player becomes aware of the wider world.

Several times throughout Shadowbringers, the player takes control of different characters, creating brief looks away from the main conflict:

• You briefly play as Thancred in a boss fight against Ranjit.

• You play as Alphinaud meeting Gaius.

• In the best example, you play as Estinien and Gaius in Garlemald, investigating the schemes of the Garlean Empire together.

Two bros… investigating the empire… 10 feet apart ’cuz—

FFXIV also releases the Tales from Eorzea stories, which snapshot side stories of characters after the focus has left them. These are optional and do not influence the story, and thus they aren’t don’t wholly bring life to the world. However, they do flesh out the world and create a sense that the world is moving behind the scenes, so they are worth mentioning.

Between the two of these factors, some of this stagnant world is mitigated.

You could, as a DM, send characters stories of what is happening in another part of the world, or even (if you’re feeling particularly bold) let them play a session or two as other characters across the world. Let them feel that things are happening.

Conclusion

What FFXIV does well is creating a world full of heroes in which you, the player, feel special. Your Warrior of Light and Darkness feels special. You are a hero among heroes—in a world of war, primal threats, godlike beings, and dying worlds, you stand out against those who are also addressing those threats.

When creating a TTRPG campaign, and when filling it with people, make it full of heroes. Fill it with heroes, villains, and everything in between, creating a world that is vibrant and alive with three-dimensional characters. Then make your party stand out:

• Give them bigger things to do than the other heroes. Let them start off questing with others, then let them start slowly delegating as they take on the large-scope threats—the threats no one else can face.

• Slowly change how people talk about them. Change how they’re being portrayed in posters, in politics, in whispers. Let them feel how the universe narratively frames them more and more, with each new act they do.

• As you approach larger and larger plot lines, tie in the members of the party in personal ways. Tie them in so deeply that they walk away feeling like it couldn’t have been anyone else.

Creating these arcs for your heroes is important to making a world feel realistic and a story feel epic, but it’s not the only or the most important way to make a world feel alive. We’ve already touched on some of this, but there is one MMO that makes a world that feels far more alive than many others—and that is why, now, we’re going to talk about World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft title card (c) Blizzard Entertainment

World of Warcraft: Living World, Overshadowed Character

World of Warcraft is one of the most well-known MMORPGs in the world—and was one of the most well-known video games in its early years for how often it was mentioned in mainstream media, referenced in pop culture, and used as case studies for both medicine and economics. It is a long running title, with eight published expansions (The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, Warlords of Draenor, Legion, Battle for Azeroth, and Shadowlands), that is part of a larger franchise that includes the three preceding real-time strategy games and countless tie-in novels, comics, and supplementary materials.

In contrast to Final Fantasy XIV, World of Warcraft weaves a world-focused narrative. This is due in part to early tech limitations, as in recent expansions we have seen steps taken to give player characters more focus in the narrative, but in the ways WoW established itself and developed over time, the story will always revolve more around the world at large than it will around individuals, especially player characters.

It is a much different experience than Final Fantasy XIV, but one that is equally important to analyze to create a living, breathing TTRPG setting for your party to become standout heroes in.

One of Many (for Real, This Time)

As mentioned earlier, the issue with telling character-centric stories in MMOs is that players are just one of millions—and in World of Warcraft those numbers are staggering. WoW has over 100 million registered accounts and approximately 5 million active players (a number that has likely increased since Shadowlands’ recent release) as of 2020. 

However, real-world numbers aside, even gameplay elements reinforce the one-of-many atmosphere. In another comparison, Final Fantasy XIV allows you to play all classes and experience (almost) all of its content on one character, while World of Warcraft not only restricts you to one class per character, but also further limits the content you can experience through its infamous faction system. As such, to experience all possible content you have to make multiple characters, which subconsciously contributes to the feeling that your individual characters are only one of several million others that adventure the world of Azeroth.

To its benefit, this does make the world feel populated. However, you are certainly just one hero among many—one nameless adventurer in a realm full of would-be-saviors, all of you crowded around one NPC to turn in the same quest where you have fended off the latest apocalyptic threat to the realm.

Or are you?

The Evolving Story of Azeroth (Not You)

You are. Kind of.

No really. You are.

While FFXIV might tell the story of you as the Warrior of Light, World of Warcraft tells the story of Azeroth, where you, the adventurer, are at most one of the influential pieces that help shape that story.

However, players normally don’t come to the table of a story-driven TTRPG campaign to be a wingman to your world. They want to feel important and influential—that their role in the story has meaning. This section is not meant to be a direct contrast to the character-centric tips given from analyzing Final Fantasy XIV. Rather, it is a complement. We will analyze how WoW tells the story of Azeroth to see how you can tell the story of a living world alongside, but not overshadowing, the story of your party.

As mentioned earlier, World of Warcraft has taken recent steps to focus the narrative on characters, but this hasn’t always been the case. We will cover the three “eras” of WoW’s storytelling to see how each used different methods of character involvement to tell Azeroth’s story, after which we will discuss how World of Warcraft’s gameplay and supplementary content helps create a living, breathing world, then see how these aspects can be applied to your TTRPG campaign and its setting.

First up, we’ll cover the ways World of Warcraft has framed player characters through its narrative: as collectives, witnesses, and representatives.

A Hero’s Role in a Larger World

Before we dive into the timeline of World of Warcraft, it would be remiss to not discuss its history. WoW is preceded by three real-time strategy games (Warcraft, Warcraft II, and Warcraft III), each of which covers one of the recent, infamous wars in Warcraft history after the orcs arrived on Azeroth. However, prior to the First War (covered in Warcraft) there is nearly 15,000 years of history, and the mythos that leads up to that history. 

While not every time period in those 15,000 years is covered in depth, it’s important to understand that Azeroth has a backstory—as surely as any player character in a TTRPG. The backstory of the world influences its past and present development, and gives players something to dig into and explore. 

There is no pressure to fill out your world’s history all at once; after all, World of Warcraft has been filling in those blanks for over a decade since its debut. Instead, it may be useful to consider major historical events, then discover over time what fills in the blanks by using your world’s environment to enrich the present story being told. 

With that said, let’s return to those earlier methods that player characters have been framed throughout WoW’s years of storytelling.

Characters as Collectives. The earliest years of World of Warcraft—its initial “Vanilla” release through the Wrath of the Lich King expansion—frames the player character as one adventurer among many. In this era, adventurers are not quite mercenaries, but are best described as freelance agents for their respective faction (the Alliance or Horde) with a surprisingly good track record of accomplishing tasks. 

The storylines of individual regions often revolved around adventurers proving their worth to quest givers and racking up enough repute to be directed to other people, until they were eventually sent to deal with the foremost problem. Some quests would direct you into dungeons (5-player group content), but rarely would they specifically ask you to enter raids (10 to 40 player group content, depending on the expansion and raid). Rather, raids were more often used as environmental storytelling during questing rather than culminating in an objective you were sent to deal with. 

While in gameplay, parties of player characters would handle raid objectives as end-game content, in canon lore these raids were dealt with by factions—for example, the Argent Dawn for the original Naxxramas in Vanilla, or the Shattered Sun Offensive for Sunwell Plateau, or the Ashen Verdict for Icecrown Citadel—with assistance from adventurers. 

This leads into the framing for the player character during this era, which can be best described as a “stand-in for adventurers.” You represent adventurers as a collective and their influence on events during this era. While your name will come up in dialogue and quest text, the sparse voice-acting in these early years rarely bothered addressing you, even with a generic title. Your actions were rarely highlighted in any significant fashion, as storylines tended to be self-contained and usually never influenced each other, especially over regional lines.

This is the least character-centric focused narrative that World of Warcraft ever had, but there are still ways it can be useful in TTRPG storytelling. Your party can act as a stand-in for a larger force, influencing the success of a greater conflict on a smaller scale. For example, if your party works with a force of rebels within a tyrannical kingdom, even though the rebels may be named characters acting elsewhere, it is the party’s actions that influence the success of failure of the resistance—not unlike player characters in WoW needing to defeat a raid boss, even if the lore success is not attributed solely to them.

Characters as Witnesses. The middling years of World of Warcraft (which I consider to be the Cataclysm and Mists of Pandaria expansions) focused on storytelling as a primary objective. Cutscenes were first introduced in Wrath of the Lich King, but elaborate in-engine cutscenes were first introduced in Cataclysm—to mixed responses. Few people who played during this era can forget the bogged-down and bug-riddled Indiana Jones questline in Uldum.

Rather than give up on this form of storytelling, developers trained their sense for when, where, and how long to use in-engine cutscenes, and so we saw significant improvement in their usage during Mists of Pandaria. During this era we also saw a change in how the stories themselves were told—we began to focus less on collectives as characters, but instead on key casts of characters. We would not always accompany these NPCs, but they were recurring and gave players people to connect with and provided a through-line for storytelling.

During this era, player characters were framed not as stand-ins for all adventurers, but as an individual person. However, this individual was a witness to major events rather than influencing them directly. You might help in the preparations that led up to a major event (such as the war in Jade Forest that led to the release of the Sha of Doubt) but you neither specifically incited it nor participated in it—though you may be one of the few to survive it.

You were often acknowledged for your hand in helping with proceedings, but it was recurring non-player characters who specifically set things in motion and carried out the most important steps. As well, storylines still tended to be self-contained to regions rather than contribute to a greater narrative throughout the entire expansion.

In TTRPG storytelling, you may find it useful for your player characters to witness and survive major events—such as the cataclysmic destruction of a city at the hands of the big bad, or the consequences of an event they had a hand in. This can be used to establish stakes without penalizing the player characters or to set a plot point in motion, and the world at large should recognize the player characters for what happened there. However, keep in mind that this technique should be used sparingly—players often don’t like being inactive, and you should be prepared for characters intervening during or after scenes of this kind.

There’s just a big sword sticking out of the world now. It’s fine.

Characters as Representatives. The end of Mists of Pandaria, leading into Warlords of Draenor, marked the start of the current era of World of Warcraft’s storytelling. From this point on, we started to see a clear overarching story emerge, one that helped expansions transition more seamlessly into each other. The events that ended Mists led into Warlords, and during the events of Warlords of Draenor we saw the emergence of player-centric narratives alongside the character-centric narratives of the middle era. 

In Warlords, you became the commander of your faction’s garrison on the distant world of Draenor. In Legion, you were a champion of your class and the leader of their order hall. In Battle for Azeroth, you were your faction’s representative to the people you were trying to recruit. Finally, in the most recently released Shadowlands, you are a Maw Walker, and the ally to several important lore figures who depend on you to rescue them.

Suddenly, quests to enter dungeons and raids are no longer one-off sidequests, but the culmination of the storylines in zones and content patches that specifically addressed you to gather your allies and defeat a rising threat or achieve a specific objective you had been working toward this whole time. Player characters have become more important than ever, tasked with representing their faction, their class, or mortals as a whole in the expansion storylines. 

However, you are still overshadowed by major NPCs, even if you stand on the same footing as them. This is most evident in the difference between rendered cutscenes and in-engine cutscenes. Player characters are never featured in the former, as they need to be animated and rendered by developers rather than programmed using the in-game engine to include the player character. To return to comparisons, Final Fantasy XIV’s cutscenes keep the same style, so the differences between player-focused cutscenes and NPC-focused cutscenes are subtle, usually only obvious in the extent of animation and choreography between NPCs and player characters.

Still, the player character of World of Warcraft has developed a reputation as an individual hero of Azeroth, one that has made close allies and companions of major lore figures, including the racial leaders of their faction. In addition, expansions now see an overarching storyline that connects zones and sees your actions reflected in the world and acknowledged by NPCs.

Here we get the closest to the kind of storytelling spearheaded by Final Fantasy XIV. In your TTRPG story, allow your party to rise in prominence until they are trusted by the movers and shapers in your world—whether those be sovereigns, deities, or other powerful individuals. Let your party’s voice (or even individual characters) represent other people, acknowledging the influence they have on the larger world, and let that influence ripple outward and be reflected in how the larger world treats them.

As a Maw Walker and trusted ally, it’s time to save your friends from LITERAL HELL.

A Living, Independent World

Unlike in a TTRPG, World of Warcraft never fools the player with the expectation that their character is the only hero. Even in Shadowlands you are a Maw Walker, not the Maw Walker. However, it has built and depicted a world that not only feels populated, but develops apart from the player character’s actions.

In part this can be attributed to the gameplay differences between World of Warcraft and an MMO like Final Fantasy XIV. FFXIV requires that you play through its story in order to unlock content such as dungeons, trials, or raids. As such, the world and its threats cannot move apart from your progress in the story. However, you can level in WoW without killing a single creature, nevermind without completing a single quest. 

While a player could go out of their way to avoid defeating a single raid boss, it is still assumed that those threats were dealt with—whether you were involved or not—when the next patch or expansion comes around, and you can pick up and play new content without ever finishing the content that preceded it. 

Some of this old content (such as raids or dungeons) can be completed later, but there have been many events in World of Warcraft’s history that are unable to be experienced again. Some of these were limited from their conception, such as pre-expansion events, while others were phased out because of gameplay revisions and setting overhauls, such as when the original Naxxramas raid was moved to Northrend in Wrath of the Lich King or Cataclysm changed the entirety of Azeroth’s landscape and questing experience. 

Aside from exclusive content, the faction system also reinforces a world that changes without the player’s presence. In many expansions, the story of the Alliance and Horde play as two sides of a single coin. Some regional storylines will not give you the whole picture unless you experience both sides. Cataclysm’s Stonetalon Mountains and Southern Barrens or Mists of Pandaria’s Jade Forest are prime examples of this—yet the most prominent is Battle for Azeroth’s entire storyline. Many times you are asked to go between the islands of Zandalar and Kul Tiras and experience the aftermath of something the other faction did or set up something the other faction will eventually see. 

As well, plot points that tie important in-game events together are depicted in expanded universe material, such as the novels or comics. The War Crimes novel explains in detail what happened with Garrosh Hellscream’s trial, which bridged the end of Mists of Pandaria and the beginning of Warlords of Draenor. The massacre at the Gathering, an event that would lead into Battle for Azeroth’s Fourth War, is told in the Before the Storm novel. An even earlier example is from World of Warcraft: the Comic, which explains the disappearance and reemergence of King Varian Wrynn before Wrath of the Lich King. During the comic, the black dragon Onyxia, a raid boss during the original release of WoW, is canonically killed by Varian and his allies.

While these events are sometimes directly summarized to players in-game or can be pieced together from context and in-game texts, they are usually never explained in their entirety. While the ongoing nature of the storyline and its expanded universe tie-ins can be sometimes frustrating, it does its job in creating a world whose events and story are independent of any one of its characters. The world, therefore, does not depend on the player character to move it forward.

While it’s not recommended to have your storyline move in the absence of your party, it is good to remember that your party cannot be everywhere at once. There will be events that happen, decisions that are made, and stories occurring that they are not around to see. You can lay hints of these events directly or indirectly in your campaign—perhaps a rebellion overthrows a noteworthy king and your player characters come upon it, or they hear it through rumors in another city. Alternatively, if you have the time and desire and there are NPCs that players have connected with, you can write supplementary material covering their actions while the party is no longer around them. A more hands-on option could be running supplementary one-shots, where your players create new characters and can witness events happening tangentially to their main campaign.

“You did this? …. I did this.” - Varian Wrynn

Conclusion

While World of Warcraft doesn’t have a narrative that makes its player character the focus of its storyline, it does depict a world that is as much a character with a story as any one of the important characters that drives the greater narrative. The world lives and breathes, populated by vibrant cultures and people enriched by a storied history.

When creating a TTRPG campaign, consider making your world a character of its own, and tie that world’s storyline intrinsically with the stories of your players’ characters—but be careful not to overshadow the party’s storyline! Complement rather than drown out. Let your party become the most important driving force of this world’s current era. Mix and match some of the ideas we discovered by analyzing World of Warcraft: 

• Use your world’s history as an opportunity to motivate and enrich present events, and give your players lore to uncover through environmental storytelling.

• Have player characters “stand-in” mechanically for larger collectives they are part of (such as factions or causes), allowing their successes and failures to drive how events play out.

• Allow player characters to witness and survive major events, and have their presence at such moments be recognized and considered throughout the campaign.

• Give your player characters more and more influence on the world throughout their adventures, allowing them to represent people in official capacities and be recognized as influential allies by prominent figures in your world.

• Have events occur tangentially to your party’s storyline that influence the direction of their campaign, events they could eventually influence or guide directly or indirectly.

• Provide your players with supplementary material that fleshes out your world, or allow them to experience it firsthand in one-shot adventures.

• Show the off-screen movement of additional parties (allies, enemies, or neutral parties) occasionally, while reserving their largest moments for things the party can influence.

It’s important to make your player characters stand-out, but they should not wholly eclipse the setting they inhabit. Rather, they should grow and develop into people who become driving forces in a world that has its own story. Let the world move, let the player characters witness the cause and effect of those movements, and then let them rise to the occasion to be among those who direct those movements. 

Finale

While there is plenty else that could be said about both of these games and their methods of storytelling, this blog post is already quite long! We hope these analyses have been insightful and that some of the tips will be useful in your future TTRPG storytelling to help make your party and your setting shine.

What other methods of storytelling do you think could be incorporated into TTRPGs from either of these MMOs or another one? What other topics or games would you like to see us discuss in the future? Let us know!