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

[Campbell]

I don't view protagonism as a universal good or a synonym for my decisions mattering. Moments of protagonism are about your character's concerns and desires being central to the situation at hand and the decisions you make being instrumental and how those situations turn out. That happens incidentally in all sorts of play but happens far more often when the GM is actively framing situations towards characters' concerns.

The sort of design in a game like Apocalypse World (and much of the instruction in Daggerheart) is about enabling a process of play where those moments are frequent and by design rather than incidental.

 

[Celebrim]

Let me try to address some of the silliness of some of the claims here that "nar" is defined solely by player driven, no myth play, where the player sets the premise by discussing what is for me a non-hypothetical.

Suppose I as a college age DM have a younger family member come to me and say, "I wanna play D&D" and I have no prepared solo adventure ready. So I let the player create a character and they create a 1st ed. AD&D thief. And then based on the character he creates and after a few questions about his backstory, I improvise a story on the spot about the characters adventures in a large urban area and his dealings with a gang of thieves he belongs to, and his conflict with a group of slavers who kidnap another street urchin. Now this is entirely player driven, no myth play, where the conflict is set by the features the player defined for their player character. This is "story now" play.

And then again, a similar thing happens with another young player and they say, "I wanna play D&D" and I have no prepared solo adventure ready, and this time they create a 1st ed. M-U, and after asking a few questions about the character, I improvise a story about a young apprentice whose master has just been murdered before he can finish his apprenticeship and who has to make his way in the world and is struggling (or sometimes not struggling) to resist the temptation of dark magic to help him survive the situation he finds himself in. Again, this is "story now" play in 1e AD&D. The play is driven by the character and what the player told me he wanted to test based on how he described his character and why he told me his character what wanted to become a wizard.

If that is all it takes to be "nar" then 1e AD&D is a nar game, and so is every other single system. And that means that "system doesn't matter". So clearly, maybe while "Story now" might always be a feature of a nar game, it's not the sole defining feature and there is something else going on here. Either that, or this is all word salad with no fixed meaning and everyone is taking away different things because of that.

Don't get me started on how much of this is just pretension of "I'm a better more artistic sort of gamer because my game is narrative and so its about a story and has real protagonism." Transcript as story is a feature of all creative agenda is something even RE acknowledged; toxic and pretentious as he might have come off at times, he didn't get that wrong.

 

[MuhVerisimilitude]

Let me try to address some of the silliness of some of the claims here that "nar" is defined solely by player driven, no myth play, where the player sets the premise by discussing what is for me a non-hypothetical.

Suppose I as a college age DM have a younger family member come to me and say, "I wanna play D&D" and I have no prepared solo adventure ready. So I let the player create a character and they create a 1st ed. AD&D thief. And then based on the character he creates and after a few questions about his backstory, I improvise a story on the spot about the characters adventures in a large urban area and his dealings with a gang of thieves he belongs to, and his conflict with a group of slavers who kidnap another street urchin. Now this is entirely player driven, no myth play, where the conflict is set by the features the player defined for their player character. This is "story now" play.

But this is just what you're doing because you're a good game master. It's not something you're doing thanks to the system itself. The system does nothing to facilitate this kind of play at all. Your other example is the same thing.

You could have a crappy GM instead who has read the exact same rule books as you have but who has no idea how to deal with a game with only one character and who can't make up a story on the spot. They need a module. They cannot improvise because they haven't been prepared to do it.

 

[soviet]

I improvise a story

this is entirely player driven

I improvise a story

Sounds GM-driven to me. Driving to where the player said they wanted to go isn't the same thing as letting them take the wheel.

 

[pemerton]

The fiction does not matter in resolution.

Ever? Whose D&D play are you talking about?

It's quite possible to play D&D as a skirmish game without any roleplay, and many people do. People roleplay because they enjoy roleplaying, not because it helps them win the battle.

I actually don't think many people play D&D as a skirmish game in which fiction doesn't matter to resolution.

I'm sure some do - arena night! - but I don't think it's all that common. Even in combat-focused games, fiction will matter to resolution - eg there's mud on the ground, so someone makes an attack roll at disadvantage.

 

[Celebrim]

To emulate something like that it isn't just important that it is hard to die, but that even in cases where death seems likely, death isn't actually likely.

Maybe. I don't know that I have a hard and firm opinion on this because I've never tested it.

But it seems to me that in AT the characters don't know that they can't actually die. The characters don't know that they are immortal.

And if you had a game where the characters were animated by players rather than merely puppets of the game master, and the players of those characters knew they couldn't die, I'm not sure that they would actually behave like AT characters. I think that this might create some overcompensation leading to players playing characters in a way that a storyteller wouldn't.

While you might be able to handle the problem of "players know they can die so they play safe" by getting away from death in the game, I don't think you can get away so easily from the problem that the agenda of the players doesn't necessarily match the agenda of characters so easily as that. There is always the problem that a character in a story is protected by the power of plot in a way that in a game they aren't.

Which isn't to say that you couldn't have an AT game where death doesn't happen. I mean you could run AT using Toon and that would make a good deal of sense. But recreating AT in a game is going to be challenging no matter what system you use, because games don't lend themselves to nice tight story arcs and if you try to force nice tight story arcs you tend to take away either player choice or else end up with a story boarding experience and not a game as story experience.

In any event, I think this isn't really a matter of system so much as what aesthetics of play and what talents partipants have. Is the player funny? Is the player a good thespian? Does the player want to play a somewhat goofy cartoonish game?

 

[pemerton]

Isn't this is just nit-picky semantic pedantry though? (Which I appreciate to certain degree.) But surely it is clear that even though people might not use the exact same word ending they are attempting to refer to the same thing?

No. Because nearly everyone on ENW who talks about "narrative" RPGs talks about stuff that has nothing to do with "story now" or "narrativism". See, eg, the OP to this thread.

On ENW, the adjective "narrative" is normally used to describe RPGing that roughly resembles the sort of White Wolf-y play or Ars Magica play that "story now" is a reaction against.

 

[pemerton]

This is shaping up to be a typical Narrative rpg thread. There isn't a consistent definition of what a narrative rpg even is. We go back to Ron Edwards' exercise in academic discussion and find that games calling themselves Narrative rpgs don't fit that definition.

Here's the thing - most posters on ENworld are not very interested in the sort of play that Edwards was describing using the terms "narrativism" and "story now".

And in attempting to talk about it, they tend to focus on player-side mechanics (eg meta-currency, or the ability to stipulate fiction without having to declare and resolve a PC's action) when the key to the sort of RPGing Edwards was describing all sits on the GM side.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Then you have story telling games like Dixit. Where do you draw the line? Or, I think the more important question is SHOULD you draw a line? My opinion is trying to put things into boxes can lead to a failure to see what is really going on. It’s inherently reductionist.

You can role play in Cluedo if the players want.

If you think that someone “roleplaying” in Cluedo is anything like what an RPG should be, then your game is even worse than I’ve imagined.

Makes no difference. The fact that he felt the need to go after anyone implies a lack of impartiality which throws the whole thesis into doubt.

No it doesn’t. You said you are a scientist, right? And you pointed out how Newton and Einstein were wrong, right?

Ideas can be challenged. Views can be challenged. That you celebrate “not blindly accepting” something in one post and then criticize someone for challenging convention in another… well, it doesn’t sound very scientific.

If my understanding of Story Now is correct, it allows players to add things to the game that had not previously been established as existing. This would be contrary to a simulationist approach.

However, I don’t think a narrative game is necessarily Story Now (although it certainly can be). So a game can be both narrative and simulationist.

I don’t think your understanding of Story Now is correct.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

No. Because nearly everyone on ENW who talks about "narrative" RPGs talks about stuff that has nothing to do with "story now" or "narrativism". See, eg, the OP to this thread.

On ENW, the adjective "narrative" is normally used to describe RPGing that roughly resembles the sort of White Wolf-y play or Ars Magica play that "story now" is a reaction against.

No, I don't think so. People might not exactly know what narrative or narrativism means (but does anyone?) but they tend not mean that by it.

This is what they mean:

And in attempting to talk about it, they tend to focus on player-side mechanics (eg meta-currency, or the ability to stipulate fiction without having to declare and resolve a PC's action) when the key to the sort of RPGing Edwards was describing all sits on the GM side.