What makes an TTRPG a "Narrative Game" (Daggerheart Discussion)

[hawkeyefan]

So far, everyone's answer feels wrong to me. (Sorry.)

The problem with the term "narrative" is that in this context it has both an ordinary definition such as @MacDhomnuill and @soviet provide and it is also a term of art with a more specific technical meaning. People encounter the term in different contexts, and they try to understand what is meant by it, and they apply either inference or their commonsense understanding, and we end up with dozens of different competing definitions one of which @DEFCON 1 provides which represents a common feature of Nar games but is not their defining feature in my opinion.

To me the big take away for this is that if you are going to invent a new term of art don't do it in the same language that you are speaking. Borrow a term from Greek or Latin or make use of German's word agglutination to come up with a unique term lacking an obvious meaning to the reader. Don't just repurpose a well-known English word because you'll only create confusion.

Anyway, to me the defining feature of a narrative system is that resolution of a scene depends on the scenes context in the meta-fiction and not on the scenes context in the fiction. By this I mean how the scene plays out depends on where it is in the story and the story factors that go into it. In traditional play, you call out in fiction factors like, "We're flanking the target.", "I have a spear +1", "I'm on the high ground." or "I have proficiency with thieves' tools." in order to decide what happens next. All these are things the characters in the fiction observe. In a narrative game you call out features of the story that the players observe in order to decide what happens next. "Is this the first act?", "Is this the final act?", "My character is secretly in love with the victim!", "My character believes truth will always come out in the end!", "In the second act, the villain told us that we couldn't win because he had the high ground, but now we have the ground!". The goal is to have the resolution of the scene depend not on what is logical to happen in the scene, but what would be best for the story.

What specific games are you describing here? What games actually work this way?

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Regarding the language objection that someone raised earlier: It's perfectly fine to call it whatever, but you start tossing around terms like, I dunno I'll make up something stupid like Ludus Ex Fabulum (I don't speak latin, sorry) or something like that people might rightly start calling you a smartass for not using a more common-sense English term like Narrativism.

What specific games are you describing here? What games actually work this way?

I can only recall one system that matches it, and that's the detective story system with old ladies and lovecraftian cults. I forgot the name, but it is a system where the culprit is actually decided collectively by the players as they discover more clues.

 

[Thondor]

The first "writer's room" game I encountered (played it at an event) was Universalis (first release in 2002, very Forge Era). I pretty much described it that way before I heard the term (it feels like you are a bunch of writers brainstorming a movie or TV series.)

Most systems I've played along these lines seem like making sketches/outlines with the occasional fleshed out bit. You are not writing the full novel or reading the full script. You let your imagination fill in the gaps.

Many GMless games seem to fit this space, sometimes less explicitly than Universalis. I'd argue The Quiet Year does, and Belonging Outside of Belonging engine seems to. My latest work, God-Killer Prophecy feels like collaborating on an epic fantasy novel and I'd call it writers room (there is a prologue, three chapters in book one, three chapters in book 2, a final confrontation and an epilogue). Play rotates between a prophecy phase, which is a kind of chapter/world-region creation, and an adventure phase.

Todd has always called the ScreenPlay engine writers room (ScreenPlay, High Plains Samurai) -- mostly I think this is in the "player's are encouraged to introduce NPCs." We didn't do that when I played a 1 hour demo of it though.

n.b. links are to Compose Dream Games Marketplace which I run. I get 15%, the rest goes to publishers. There is a UK site as well with many of the same titles.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In the current debates in the daggerheart forums, there is the talk that Daggerheart is a "narrative game". This claim is made primarily as an opposition to 5e, which is "not a narrative game". But what exactly is a narrative game? I thought about it, and here's what I've come up with.

We can imagine a few tiers to consider:

Narrative Presentation
In this version, narrative is more a style of presentation than it is anything to do with the mechanics of the game itself. The game actively mentions that players should feel empowered (and GMs should encourage) to actively create elements of the world. While all TTRPG give players descriptive control over their characters, this is more about the world itself. The idea that a player can decide what kind of scar an NPC has, or what metal is holy for god XYZ, etc.

If there are standard adventures for the game, the game might stop at points and specifically note that players get to decide XYZ about the world they find themselves in.

In this area, I would agree that Daggerheart IS narrative. It clearly wants players to feel empowered in these areas, and mentions a few times in its example adventure for GMs to let the players decide some things about the world.

Narrative Mechanics
In this version, a narrative game offers some mechanic that "breaks the mechanic", perhaps through the spending of a limited resource. A good example of this is Buffy the RPG, in which the Slayer is quite powerful by the core mechanics, while the side characters gain meta currencies that literally let them change a scene, sometimes extensively. This is mainly on the player's side, as most games assume the GM as the creator of teh world has the ability to make changes as they see fit to the story.

Daggerheart I would say is NOT a narrative game under this category. While the GM can make certain alterations through the fear mechanic, the players don't have similar capabilities expressed in the rules.

Freeform Resolution
In a standard TTRPG mechanical framework, players decide they want to do something, they utilize some random determiner (cards, dice, etc), and than the GM decides what the ultimate outcome of that action is. And the focus here is on the WHAT that happens, rather than the HOW. I think most games are perfectly fine with players describing how a certain attack hit or how they used that weird fact about mimes to solve a given puzzle, etc. Where games differ is more what the actual result of the action is.

In this version, while the GM might constrain what a "success" or a "failure" in the resolution has to entail, the game gives the player a wide berth to decide how that resolution comes about and what are the other secondary consequences. As an example, a player succeeds at a persuasion roll against the court lady. The GM notes this means that the lady will give up the secret password to the secret entrance. However, the game empowers the players to run with it further. The player decides the lady falls head over heels for them....in fact so much so that it becomes an awkward point later on.

I would say Daggerheart is NOT a narrative game under this context. The rules give the GM a lot of berth in resolution mechanics with the "succeed/hope, succeed/fear, fail/hope, fail/fear", but it is still up to the GM to decide what the actual resolution is (which is pretty standard in nearly all TTRPGs). Most mechanics in daggerheart are fairly packaged, you have a power card that does X thing, and while the player is welcome to narrative the look and feel of those abilities, the actual game resolution remains anchored in the mechanic itself.



Those are my initial thoughts, what do you think?

Well, I think that games like, say, Dungeon World --a PbtA game-- define things a bit differently:
1) The resolution mechanics provide for the GM to frame an obstacle/setback/consequence/cost on some outcomes, and the player to define what they're doing and what success will look like. Some negotiation and potentially table-wide discussion of both is allowed for in case of a disagreement about what exactly forms a principled and genre appropriate adjudication. The GM also determines which specific move is triggered when action declarations are made, giving them a handle on how the mechanics are employed.

2) The game initiates without any presuppositions about what direction and content will appear in play, there's no preexisting milieu or setting. The players generate characters in accordance with the process given in the rules, and then session 0 is used to hash out things like bonds between PCs, and the GM asks questions, using the answers, to frame some sort of initial scene. The rest of the game follows from this in a highly character centered fashion. The GM is allowed, at this point, to prepare material in the form of fronts, which can be introduced according to the strictures of agenda/principles/techniques in following scenes. All of this is VERY centered on player input and cues.

3) The entire orientation of the game is to generate a kind of escalating, snowballing situation where the GM's moves push the players, and the GM's questions plus outcomes push framing to include specific fictional elements. The game very heavily emphasizes the sorts of things these are, fantastical world elements, dangerous situations, opportunities for heroic action, etc.

There is NO freeform resolution at all in PbtA, particularly. Dungeon World has no 'breaking mechanics' of any sort, and this is also not particularly a thing in PbtA-based design. Dungeon World certainly includes many admonishments along the lines of 'Narrative Presentation', but these are not simply suggestions and guidelines, they are presented with the force of definitional rules that are intended to define what @clearstream might call the 'lusory attitude' or orientation of play. It is not that the GM is ASKED to "ask questions, use the answers" it is literally presented as a part of the process which any DW GM must go through if they are to run the game as-written.

I haven't read Daggerheart, maybe I will, so I don't really have an opinion on where it falls in terms of the sorts of things described above, but IMHO 'Narrativist' games MUST put the players centrally in terms of where play is going at some level. Some of the stuff you mention may be useful in that, and does exist in some Narrativist game designs, but it isn't really what defines it. Finally, there can definitely be games that are mixed in some sense. Narrativist games, for instance, could very highly constrain the core premise of play. Like in BitD the PCs are absolutely always a group of criminals forming a gang and confronting the Doskvol milieu. It is still Narrativist, firmly so, because, within the bounds of the premise, the players formulate the trajectory of play along with the GM.

The fundamental difference with trad play being this. A game is not Narr if it puts the GM in charge of the significance of and relations between the fictional elements and steers the general direction of play based on that. This is why 'module play' can't be Narrativist, because the structure of activity is directed by the GM and organized around the adventure. In this model the PCs are then conceived in a way that provides the needed orientation towards the activity. In Dungeon World it is the opposite, a 'dungeon' might exist because it serves the interests of the players, allowing the fiction to take a form they want, and the orientation of the characters DECIDES what that will be, not the other way around. Again, no opinion on where Daggerheart is falling on this currently.

 

[MacDhomnuill]

I don't see how you got from that essay to any of those assertions. I also don't think it's productive to unearth ancient grudges in any discussion whose aim is enlightenment.

You asked for a citation and it was provide. Just because you don't like the evidence provided does change the facts. Have a good one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So far, everyone's answer feels wrong to me. (Sorry.)

The problem with the term "narrative" is that in this context it has both an ordinary definition such as @MacDhomnuill and @soviet provide and it is also a term of art with a more specific technical meaning. People encounter the term in different contexts, and they try to understand what is meant by it, and they apply either inference or their commonsense understanding, and we end up with dozens of different competing definitions one of which @DEFCON 1 provides which represents a common feature of Nar games but is not their defining feature in my opinion.

To me the big take away for this is that if you are going to invent a new term of art don't do it in the same language that you are speaking. Borrow a term from Greek or Latin or make use of German's word agglutination to come up with a unique term lacking an obvious meaning to the reader. Don't just repurpose a well-known English word because you'll only create confusion.

Anyway, to me the defining feature of a narrative system is that resolution of a scene depends on the scenes context in the meta-fiction and not on the scenes context in the fiction. By this I mean how the scene plays out depends on where it is in the story and the story factors that go into it. In traditional play, you call out in fiction factors like, "We're flanking the target.", "I have a spear +1", "I'm on the high ground." or "I have proficiency with thieves' tools." in order to decide what happens next. All these are things the characters in the fiction observe. In a narrative game you call out features of the story that the players observe in order to decide what happens next. "Is this the first act?", "Is this the final act?", "My character is secretly in love with the victim!", "My character believes truth will always come out in the end!", "In the second act, the villain told us that we couldn't win because he had the high ground, but now we have the ground!". The goal is to have the resolution of the scene depend not on what is logical to happen in the scene, but what would be best for the story.

The definitive nar mechanic and one of the first ones in gaming comes from the game Toon, which had as a rule, "If it is funny, then it works." That's adjudicating the outcome of a scene based on an external story factor and not on the basis of the fictional positioning internal to the fiction.

I think this is a miss. Quintessential Narrative (maybe we should use Story Now instead) don't in any sense mention 'meta-fiction' at all. In Dungeon World for example the actual process involves looking at the fiction and making determinations based on that plus player action declarations "Oh, you want to shoot arrows at the orc out in the field, OK roll 2d6 for Volley!" which is not really very different from D&D at some level. TB2 doesn't deal in meta-fiction either, really. At most players have some currencies that are based on things like "acting in accordance with my nature", which generally isn't going to involve meta-fiction. FitD does allow players to ask for devil's bargain, and decide if they do/don't want to resist consequences, but this is also fundamentally rooted in the fiction. I guess a FitD player is free to consider 'meta-fiction' as a criteria for how they invoke these mechanisms, but nothing in the game's text suggests this is an intended technique.

Honestly, I would more associate these sorts of meta-fictional considerations being manifested in play process as likely to be a neo-trad kind of thing. Players envisage certain character trajectories, and then the game gives them tools to alter the fiction in ways that manifest those desires. FATE springs to mind, though even there the actual mechanics are not really described in meta-fictional terms.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Those are my initial thoughts, what do you think?

This all runs into my textbook "People who seldom play narrative games talking about them" filter. Apocalypse World is pretty clearly a superb narrative game - but it has neither "Narrative mechanics" or "freeform resolution". (And neither does it have @DEFCON 1 's categorisation; combat has its own distinctive suite of mechanics, especially in AW2e)

My flag for narrative games is "How do characters grow?" If character growth is purely "Numbers go up linear" with most of character development being set very early on (with the textbook example being a D&D fighter) it is definitely not narrative. If it's mostly skill growth and based on what you do (e.g. WoD XP to raise whichever skills you choose) it probably isn't. If character transformation is both expected and open ended (e.g. the Gunlugger becoming the Hardholder or the Hardholder packing it in to become a Gunlugger) it almost certainly is - as it is in a game with a limited story where the characters can't really be used again (e.g. My Life With Master because they're dead or escaped).

 

[pemerton]

Narrative was originally used as a marketing term by the forge bros to describe how much better their games were than "traditional" or "trad" games. Trad was the negative term, Narrative was the positive.

Huh? "Narrative" isn't used as a label by Edwards, Baker, Czege, Crane at all, as best I know. (I assume these are the "Forge bros".)

And "trad" is a term that I've only seen come into use in the past five or even fewer years.

 

[pemerton]

Ahem...

The Forge :: Narrativism: Story Now

indie-rpgs.com

"Narravitism" isn't the same word as "narrative".

And very few posters on ENworld who actually talk about "narrativist" or "story now" play use the adjective "narrative". For instance, you'll notice in this thread that all those posters are pushing back on your post about The Forge!

 

[pemerton]

You asked for a citation and it was provide. Just because you don't like the evidence provided does change the facts. Have a good one.

So let's set aside the issue that the thread is about "narrative" games and you produced an essay about "narrativism" as a creative agenda.

Let's look at what that essay says (s-blocked for length):

Spoiler

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.

Let's say that the following transcript, which also happens to be a story, arose from one or more sessions of role-playing.

Lord Gyrax rules over a realm in which a big dragon has begun to ravage the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also meets this beautiful, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that she and the dragon are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her. Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's now all old, to his home.
The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue. . . .

Narrativist play makes special use of the general role-playing principle that the participants are simultaneously authors and audience. The common metaphor of improvisational jazz applies quite well, better than any other medium-comparison. "Entertainment," in role-playing in general and in Narrativist play especially, does not flow from playwright to script to production team to audience. Instead, the shared-imagining act = the shared-performance act = the entertainment = the audience feedback. . . .

For Narrativist play, the key is to focus on conflicts rather than tasks. A conflict statement is, "I'm trying to kill him," or, "I'm trying to humiliate him," whereas a task statement is, "I swing my sword at him." (It doesn't matter, by the way, how much in-game time and space are involved; conflict resolution can be "very small" and task resolution can be "very big." We can discuss this more on-line.) I submit that trying to resolve conflicts by hoping that the accumulated successful tasks will turn out to be about what you want, is an unreliable and unsatisfying way to role-play when developing Narrativist protagonism.

How does this relate to game mechanics? I'll take the most-common example of Fortune systems. The big distinction I want to make is between Fortune-in-the-Middle and the more commonly-understood Fortune-at-the-End. For the record, I think both go back to the very beginning of role-playing; I didn't invent anything by naming them. . . .

Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out. Let's say a character with a sword attacks some guy with a spear. The point is to announce the character's basic approach and intent, and then to roll. A missed roll in this situation tells us the goal failed. Now the group is open to discussing just how it happened from the beginning of the action being initiated. Usually, instead of the typical description that you "swing and miss," because the "swing" was assumed to be in action before the dice could be rolled at all, the narration now can be anything from "the guy holds you off from striking range with the spearpoint" to "your swing is dead-on but you slip a bit." Or it could be a plain vanilla miss because the guy's better than you. The point is that the narration of what happens "reaches back" to the initation of the action, not just the action's final micro-second.

There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict and task. At one end, the task does fail, but the goal fails too, perhaps with a nuance or two. The other end is much wider in interpretative scope: we know the character's goal (killing some guy) doesn't happen, but with those in place, narration takes over to provide all the events involved. Applying different judgments along this spectrum, for different parts of play, is a big deal in games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Sorcerer, and HeroQuest. In Sorcerer, failing a dice roll means failing the goal, almost always due to failing at the task; in Dust Devils, certain card outcomes dictate that you fail at the goal, but whether the task failed or succeeded within that context is entirely up for grabs and determined by that scene's designated narrator. HeroQuest and Trollbabe permit the group to customize between these extremes as they see fit for that scene.

Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates Narrativist play in a number of ways.

• It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too.
• It permits tension to be managed from conflict to conflict and from scene to scene. So a "roll to hit" in Scene A is the same as in Scene B in terms of whether the target takes damage, but it's not the same in terms of the acting character's motions, intentions, and experience of the action.
• It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens in tandem with the real-people statements.

Not all versions of this principle are alike. Some of them involve scene-scale resolution (Story Engine), some involve narration-trading (Dust Devils), some are heavily integrated with tactics (The Riddle of Steel), and some of them require role-playing "bits" to justify incorporating system features (The Dying Earth). . . .

Does Fortune-in-the-Middle define Narrativism? No, nor does it even facilitate it in isolation. It's merely a strong component of many Narrativist-facilitating combinations of Techniques; I've left its potential integration with reward and behavioral mechanics out of this discussion.

Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see discussions at the Forge of Human Wreckage and The World the Flesh and the Devil.

Is Fortune the only resolution method for conflict resolution? The answer is emphatically no. The two main alternatives are apparently Karma + Resource management, which I consider to be underdeveloped at this point, and highly-structured Drama, which may be investigated through Puppetland, Soap, and to a lesser extent Universalis. . . .

Since Exploration is best understood as a medium and tool in Narrativist play, rather than a product itself, the role of "in game reality" needs some review - not so much about who has authority over it (the usual concern in Simulationist play), but what the heck it is. The answer is, it's a medium and tool for addressing Premise, and nothing more at all. . . .

Before going on, I'll take a quick break to discuss "narration," which is no more and no less than saying what happens in the imaginary events. I want to distinguish saying what happens (narrating) from establishing what happens (currently a non-named concept), because they are often confused. I'm taking the

I'll break it down.

• Narration is not a Drama mechanic unless it is literally the means of resolution.
• Narration is in practice shared among members of a role-playing group and far less centralized than most people think.

The only concern about narration per se is that its relationship to establishing-what-happens must be clear. That entails that how things are established is itself clear: is it ad-lib? is the GM where the buck stops? is it traded about, organized in any way? or what? Those are good questions, but once they're established, narration is a no-brainer.

Game texts are typically astonishingly bad at explaining this issue. Positive exceptions for Narrativist-leaning games include Soap, The Pool, and Universalis, and other recent games like InSpectres, Otherkind, Dust Devils, Trollbabe, and Donjon, which all distribute narration around the group as a means of distributing who establishes what. . . .

Earlier, I listed some of the various roles and tasks usually associated with the term "GM." As I said, the question is not whether there is a GM (there is always one or more for any scene during play), but rather how the GMing tasks are distributed. The potential range of diversity is staggering. The most important variables include: - Which of these roles are most important to be formalized for this game - Whether the roles are centralized in one person - The concept of "the buck" - in the event that different people suggest different things, who says what goes

In the interest of space and keeping the complexity of these sections limited, I'll only provide examples for the centralization-issue. - Centralized: The Riddle of Steel, Sorcerer, Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein, HeroQuest, The Dying Earth - Widely distributed: Universalis, Soap - In between: Trollbabe, The Pool, InSpectres, Dust Devils, Violence Future . . .
Classically, a story has the following structure: (a) introduce character and situation, (b) introduce conflict, (c) rising conflict, (d) climax, and (e) resolution, of which (a, b, d) are the key pieces. Most stories indeed follow this model regardless of their chronological presentation, point-of-view, or any other details. There's usually no particular worry that Narrativist play will fail to produce a story (of whatever quality), without any overt effort to force it. However, it is also at least possible for overall story structure to be part of System. . . .

Character behavior mechanics
This topic is potentially rather a sore point among role-players, unless they have experienced play which shows the diverse strong points along the entire spectrum. It concerns how limited characters' behavior may be.

At one end of this spectrum, there's nothing of the kind: just contextual material that prompts the issues and perhaps a character descriptor here or there. The primary engine for Narrativist play is purely personal fascination with the issues at hand and with working them out. Castle Falkenstein, The Whispering Vault, and Over the Edge are good examples.

Moving just a little over, characters' behavioral descriptors are required, but they don't have any special role in determining what the character does - except for providing secondary bonuses to some resolution events, as in The Pool and HeroQuest.

Moving well toward the other end of the spectrum, specific behaviors have generalized consequence mechanics. Sorcerer, Trollbabe, Dust Devils, The Riddle of Steel, and Orkworld are all examples - the characters have free will regarding what to do, but immediate mechanics provide significant effects.

Far at the other end of the spectrum, behavior is heavily structured, for either or both character-creation and scenario-play. This kind of game often entails playing "against yourself" for the character, and the GM is potentially semi-adversarial, even ruthless, playing both external and internal adversity. Examples include Wuthering Heights, Extreme Vengeance, Violence Future, My Life with Master, Le Mon Mouri, InSpectres, Otherkind, and The Dying Earth. "Schism", "Urge", and other sorcerer/demon combination versions of Sorcerer effectively shift the game's play into this category.

So one thing to notice is that nothing in @Stalker0's OP touches on the issues that Edwards is interested in: there is nothing in the OP about framing, resolution, etc techniques for ensuring thematically-oriented player protagonism.

Second, the canvassed system features - allowing players to directly establish elements of the fiction without having to declare actions for their PCs (whether via free narration, or by expending currency) - have no particular connection to thematically-oriented player protagonism. They may be a component of that or may not be, but that depends entirely on other features of a system. For instance, BW players are allowed to introduce NPCs - Relationships - into the fiction as part of the process of PC build; but these feed into thematically-oriented player protagonism because of obligations that fall onto the GM in relation to the incorporation of those NPCs into framing and consequence. And the OP of this thread says basically nothing about the GM's role at all.

Does DaggerHeart have potential to support narrativist play? I haven't read it closely enough. But the issues that the OP raises are not really relevant to answering that question.