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

hawkeyefan said:

Maybe something like “My concern would be that it all seems very mechanistic… is that the case? How do you avoid that?” Or “Is that the sole focus of your play? Do you allow for x?”

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One thought I had was that if it turns out that one can construct an example of something actionable but suspension of disbelief breaking, then that will imply that actionability alone is unreliable as a means of making the imagined feel objectively real.

Although I harbour an intuition that it will be possible, I haven't invested effort in doing so because a) I like the approach, and b) I do not see it as incompatible with what I've been advocating.

@pemerton my direct reply to your last may feel as if it intends to take away from your notion of interconnectedness. I want to clarify here that it does not. Your notion to my mind echoes Wittgenstein's web of meaning. I believe interconnectedness has a significant role in making the imagined feel real. A very good contribution to this line of discussion.

Where I might diverge is that I do not see it as incompatible with my earlier proposal... in fact, I see them working most successfully together.

pemerton said:

I mean, someone upthread - or in another active thread? - talked about how great it was to spend N hours debating Trotskyism, as their PC, with another PC. But if you want to have intellectual conversations with your friends about Trotsky, what is the RPG medium bringing?

I'm not saying there's no answer, but I would expect some answer.

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I mean to me it is rather obvious that there is a difference talking about something from your perspective and doing so from the perspective of your character. The former is not roleplaying, the latter is.

Autumnal said:

The truth can be out with much more simplicity and less Sartre. I do like dramatic tension and the testing of characters, though I do so in a framework with less Egri in it. But I also like emulation of characters and environments in contexts where there is no testing to speak of going in - simply imagining another place and someone to be within it. I think there can be some great storytelling in which conflict is absent or incidental or off-screen in some way. See, for instance, Kishotenketsu - a plot structure without conflict and Adam Nevill’s short story collection Wyrd And Other Derelictions, a set of stories without characters, each about the aftermath where something terrible happened.

For me, the intensity is like a meal I’ve to ration my consumption of because too much of it sets off an allergy or makes metabolic problems or interferes with a medication in too-great concentrations or whatever, as well as just plain liking other types of meals in the same overall menu plan.

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Right, well said. I think this basically about the same thing I tired to express earlier, you just did it way better. That one sees a thing beneficial, doesn't necessarily mean that one wants the game to be solely about that thing. I want sessions that have more intense moments, and more laid back moments. I want to have exploration of characters, and I want have exploration of the world. I want have moral dilemmas and I want to have just practical problems for characters to solve.

I also feel that the less intense moments help to give weight to the more intense ones. If we first have characters to just chat and joke for a while, then when their friendship is tested later it has more impact. When we first spend a bit of time causally strolling in a village and interacting with the residents, then the fate of the village later feels more personal. Stuff like that. And yeah, perhaps sometimes these casual moments have no payoff, and that's fine too. They were fun on their own right and it is not a railroad.

Crimson Longinus said:

Right, well said. I think this basically about the same thing I tired to express earlier, you just did it way better. That one sees a thing beneficial, doesn't necessarily mean that one wants the game to be solely about that thing. I want sessions that have more intense moments, and more laid back moments. I want to have exploration of characters, and I want have exploration of the world. I want have moral dilemmas and I want to have just practical problems for characters to solve.

I also feel that the less intense moments help to give weight to the more intense ones. If we first have characters to just chat and joke for a while, then when their friendship is tested later it has more impact. When we first spend a bit of time causally strolling in a village and interacting with the residents, then the fate of the village later feels more personal. Stuff like that. And yeah, perhaps sometimes these casual moments have no payoff, and that's fine too. They were fun on their own right and it is not a railroad.

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Do you think that "IC" back and forth "chatting and joking" is an inherently more meaningful way of constructing character connections and shared desires then a focused chargen session via guided Q&A that establishes a web of relationships, emotional loading, and conflicts? Because narrativist games ranging from PBTAs through Daggerheart do OOC work up front to anchor your characters to each other and the world in a very metagame way. Then, in actual play, you have all this fiction to grab and rely on when the GM tests the characters, or you conflict with each other.

As @Manbearcat said, the goal is establishing actionable fiction. When my players used teh questions to construct things like "there's a guy courting me in the village, not sure how I feel about it, he's eager to prove himself & in the militia" I can grab that and deploy it to create a moment. When the players established in creation that "Kiet is the one who stood beside me [Zel, the Judge] against a creature of chaos," I can flip around and ask said character what in their visions of impending doom made Kiet come to them, what reminded them of the dangers they were in together, and then the two of them have a moment of focused RP + metagame mixed that deepens their relationship as characters while defining the upcoming conflict.

Every moment of GM/player back and forth is either deepening or extending the shared fiction. And then players always have space to invoke unstructured moments outside of the focused scenes to chat. Hell, there's a literal move in Stonetop called Keep Company, which puts the idea in the player's heads that they themselves can go "hey, so we're in camp around the campfire and I'm really curious Zel - when Kiet charged heedlessly forward despite your warning what did you think?"

zakael19 said:

Do you think that "IC" back and forth "chatting and joking" is an inherently more meaningful way of constructing character connections and shared desires then a focused chargen session via guided Q&A that establishes a web of relationships, emotional loading, and conflicts?

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Yes, yes I do, though you can do both. But it is basic “show don’t tell.” You can just say that these connections exist, and it may be a good starting point, but they will have more emotional weight if you actually experienced them in the game.

Crimson Longinus said:

Yes, yes I do, though you can do both. But it is basic “show don’t tell.” You can just say that these connections exist, and it may be a good starting point, but they will have more emotional weight if you actually experienced them in the game.

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Someone actually playing out having your back carries a lot more weight than a sentence on your character sheet saying someone has your back. Not to say that having the sentence there doesn't help reinforce the relationship. It's the difference between a forced relationship and an unforced one.

Crimson Longinus said:

Yes, yes I do, though you can do both. But it is basic “show don’t tell.” You can just say that these connections exist, and it may be a good starting point, but they will have more emotional weight if you actually experienced them in the game.

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Interesting! See, if you'd said "I just prefer unstructured RP to define characters" I'd say ok we just have different preferences and experiences, but asserting superiority is very different.

My experience with non-explicitly narrativist games differs greatly from yours. Absent the clear focus on joint character creation and links, I've found that, say, D&D games rely heavily on the players at hand and the DM's direction to get that sort of unstructured RP to go anywhere useful. You can see the natural evolution here in the Wildmount setting's (which Matt Mercer had a huge hand in writing and designing) "Heroic Chronicle" guided path to character creation + NPC & PC links up front that you build with the DM and other players, to where they've ended up with Daggerheart where that same sort of thing is loaded into the core ruleset to facilitate narrative RP.

Without that clear direction, my experience is that there's often a lot of flailing around about "why are we here doing stuff" or "ok, I guess I'll emote in my little box created for me as we follow the DM's breadcrumbs forward." Those extended scenes of just RPing with no focus, weather it be with the DM/NPCs or each other, I firmly believe happen more because non-narrative rulesets lack the focus and guide towards PC input in creation of themselves, the party, and the world state.

Wolfpack48 said:

Someone actually playing out having your back carries a lot more weight than a sentence on your character sheet saying someone has your back. Not to say that having the sentence there doesn't help reinforce the relationship. It's the difference between a forced relationship and an unforced one.

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Narrative games give you an initial hook to hang your stuff on beyond "I sat down and wrote for a while." So the question becomes not, "we wrote a sentence that you had my back" but "what does it mean for our relationship today as we go forward" that, to quote the actual Heavy playbook from Stonetop: "Which one of you can I trust to always have my back?" Like, you ask that question during character creation and people start to think. This isn't a thing you just write down! You ask it in a stage, and then people go "well, my character's instinct is X and their background is Y, and you've said Z about yourself, so maybe blah blah blah" and then you have a new bit of shared fiction that a player can lean on going forward. And then the DM can challenge that in play!

Classic D&D, you just write stuff on your character sheet and hope your DM does a good session 0. Narrative games bake development into the ruleset up front.

zakael19 said:

Narrative games give you an initial hook to hang your stuff on beyond "I sat down and wrote for a while." So the question becomes not, "we wrote a sentence that you had my back" but "what does it mean for our relationship today as we go forward" that, to quote the actual Heavy playbook from Stonetop: "Which one of you can I trust to always have my back?" Like, you ask that question during character creation and people start to think. This isn't a thing you just write down! You ask it in a stage, and then people go "well, my character's instinct is X and their background is Y, and you've said Z about yourself, so maybe blah blah blah" and then you have a new bit of shared fiction that a player can lean on going forward. And then the DM can challenge that in play!

Classic D&D, you just write stuff on your character sheet and hope your DM does a good session 0. Narrative games bake development into the ruleset up front.

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Even if you go through that process (or even the less effective sentence on a sheet), there comes a point at which that character actually has to play out having your back. The process by which you get there is great, but it must at some point become real in session. Roleplaying the source of the motivation out always will reinforce that source (process or sentence) in play.