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

Celebrim said:

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 it. 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.

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Celebrim said:

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.

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DEFCON 1 said:

For me the simplest way to designate something as a "narrative" game is to just check whether the game has a separate mechanical suite for combat, or if it uses the same exact mechanics for combat as it does everything else. D&D has its own suite of mechanics for combat, so it isn't. Champions has its own suite of mechanics for combat, so it isn't. FATE's mechanics are a single suite that can be used for arguments or obstacle courses or fist fights, so it is. And many other games have mechanics that don't presume combat is going to occur at all, so they are as well.

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thefutilist said:

This phrase used to really annoy me, as if stories aren't logical. Then I spoke to a lot of role-players and they all seem to hate stories, endlessly pick them apart and proclaim they're filled with things called plot holes. So maybe there's something to it...

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DEFCON 1 said:

For me the simplest way to designate something as a "narrative" game is to just check whether the game has a separate mechanical suite for combat, or if it uses the same exact mechanics for combat as it does everything else. D&D has its own suite of mechanics for combat, so it isn't. Champions has its own suite of mechanics for combat, so it isn't. FATE's mechanics are a single suite that can be used for arguments or obstacle courses or fist fights, so it is. And many other games have mechanics that don't presume combat is going to occur at all, so they are as well.

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MacDhomnuill said:

This is a pretty good way to identify the designers intent on play style, and as a bonus this definition would mean that Risus was the first Narative game to have been published (to my knowledge anyway). I do find it strange that "narrative" focused games are more or less defined by having very abstracted universal system mechanics.

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soviet said:

But I think this is the issue with it. It allows people to tilt at this vague writer's room non-RPG without ever defining which games fall into it. It's a way of dismissing various types of games without engaging with how they really work in the specific.

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MacDhomnuill said:

To be honest I think calling "narrative" games writer room games is a more accurate and less loaded nomenclature. I really don't like it when people, companies and groups try to change language in very unorganic ways to fit their desired meaning or in this case marketing. 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. That seems to have switched as more people use narrative game as a way to describe something they are not interested in playing.

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