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.
