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

[Crimson Longinus]

You think most people make some sort of technical distinction between narrative and story? I really can't agree with you here other than to say that the genesis of the Narrativist philosophy was trying to deliver on the "storytelling game of personal horror" that V:tM promised and failed to deliver on.

Yes, people do not mean WW style games when they say narrative, narrativism fans have been loud enough that most people know that that is not what it means. It is associated vaguely as some sort of opposite of simulationism, where the mechanics run more on story logic and the player may have control of the fiction by means not causally related the direct action of their character. For example I think most people would think flashbacks and quantum gear from Blades as narrative mechanics, they wouldn't think humanity from Vampire as such.

 

[hawkeyefan]

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?

I don’t know if it is, honestly. I get why people are saying that… because it seems that the folks who are advocates of Narrativism/Story Now games are simply refusing to accept others calling that type of game “Narrative”. But it really isn’t that simple since so many different attributes are being attributed to “Narrative” games that aren’t present in Narrativism/Story Now.

It makes things unclear. Are we talking about two different things? Or are people simply attributing things to a type of game that they shouldn’t be? I think it’s more the latter… but it’s not always clear.

I think maybe examining the context of how Daggerheart may have used the word “narrative” in its promotion. I haven’t seen anyone post it, the OP just references it. I don’t recall how it’s used.

Sure. Which happens in most RPGs.

Not necessarily.

Think of Curse of Strahd, for instance. Who’s the protagonist?

That's obvious hogwash. Of course PCs can be protagonists, even though they encounter preauthored situations, as long as outcomes of their interaction with the situation is not determined.

I don’t know. Perhaps we’re being a bit too specific about protagonist, but it’s about who drives the story. Whose actions propel things.

In plenty of the RPGs I play in, I wouldn’t describe my PC as fitting that description.

No, let's not! It is a module, canned adventure. Of course it is limiting, at least if you play it inflexibly by the book. But that's not what I mean. You don't need to play canned adventure, you can easily play a game where the characters significantly influence the direction of play without playing a narrativist game.

But isn’t this a key aspect? The game can be played (arguably is most often played) in this manner. That’s what play can be. So then should we describe a rules system that allows for that kind of play as being concerned with the same things as Narrativism/Story Now?

I don’t think we can.

Is it possible that folks start with such a system, and then approach play in a way that is more specific than given in the rules, and therefore play such a game in a more Narrativistic/Story Now type of way?

I think that’s possible, to some extent, depending on the system and what changes are made.

But that’s a different question.

 

[Celebrim]

And this is exactly so. Any game can be run in a narrative mode, but it requires a lot of heavy lifting on the part of the GM.

What I did required no "heavy lifting". I wasn't fighting against the system in any way. 1e AD&D was a smooth vehicle for the story I was creating along with the player, stories that often went in directions I didn't anticipate. For example, I anticipated that the 1st level M-U would recognize the bad guys and not want to cooperate with them. That was the story as I originally had it in my head. In fact, the player neither recognized the bad guys or was able to reason out that they murdered his former master, nor was in any way unwilling to cooperate with them provided they gave him access to the power that he wanted. The player ended up allying with the faction that I thought would be the antagonists of the story. And that was fine. The system didn't get in the way of that at all. Had play continued for longer I would have just reversed the factions and maybe later tested the player on the question again at a later point.

Especially to give the players some authority over the story. A game designed as narrative has mechanisms in place to help the GM and players determine the outcome. It also has them to make sure that the randomness of the game affects play, so that neither the players, nor the GM are purely in charge.

This is just so freaking vague. Every single RPG in existence has mechanics to give players the ability to determine the outcome, and to help ensure that narrative authority is shared between all participants (including the GM, if a GM even exists in that system). You're not functionally distinguishing "game designed as narrative" from anything with this vague description.

This is what is driving me nuts about this thread is that so much of it is just tautological assertions.

While you can run any game with a narrative bent, games designed with this in mind make it easier for less skilled GMs to do this.

How? Just by telling them to do it? I mean, I grant you that you are hitting on one of the problems have I with certain games that have a pretense of being "nar". But really, I think you are missing the point entirely here. The hardest part about running a nar game and the reason that real nar games are so relatively unpopular compared to something like DW or Blades, is that to run one you need relatively skilled players. The more narrative authority you put on the players, and the more the players have to be involved in premise and conflict creation and the more they have to be the narrators, the bigger burden you are putting on them. GMs are used to doing that sort of thing, and most players don't want to do those sort of things because among other things they are relatively speaking "heavy lifting". You have to have players that have the same sort of story telling skills as a GM and who are engaging at more of a level than just deciding "What would my character do?"

 

[Neonchameleon]

Yes, people do not mean WW style games when they say narrative, narrativism fans have been loud enough that most people know that that is not what it means. It is associated vaguely as some sort of opposite of simulationism, where the mechanics run more on story logic and the player may have control of the fiction by means not causally related the direct action of their character. For example I think most people would think flashbacks and quantum gear from Blades as narrative mechanics, they wouldn't think humanity from Vampire as such.

So what you're saying is not that narrativism fans have been loud but that narrativism haters have presented a flanderised version of narrativism that has nothing to do with Edwards' definition, nothing to do with the most popular and influential narrativist game around - and everything to do with what people who hate their imagined idea of it think. Which might on this board be true - but it's why there is pushback.

And Humanity from Vampire is an alignment mechanic. The metacurrencies are blood and willpower (that's twice as many as Fate has - and Fate, unlike AW, was never designed to be narrativist).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No, let's not! It is a module, canned adventure. Of course it is limiting, at least if you play it inflexibly by the book. But that's not what I mean. You don't need to play canned adventure, you can easily play a game where the characters significantly influence the direction of play without playing a narrativist game.

You CAN try, and to some degree of course you may succeed. However, 5e is still built around GM architected plots, for example. You can try to eschew that, but then you will run into issues like the resource management architecture of 5e working against you. The core 'task' based binary pass/fail resolution system doesn't do the sort of snowballing that PbtA or FitD games rely on, etc. It is a poor fit.

As for working from the example of a module, that is what 99.99997% of all 5e play is coming from. That's the real lived experience of play in that system. I mean, I've played a fair amount of 5e, with a skilled GM.

No. There are a ton of shallow stories that do not address such concerns where there still are clear protagonists. Whether you do affects the depth of the story, not whether there is protagonism.

"A protagonist is the main character of a story. The protagonist makes key decisions that affect the plot, primarily influencing the story and propelling it forward, and is often the character who faces the most significant obstacles."

None of this sounds like RPing a day of muffin baking. Yes, sure, the conflicts can be local, even personal, but there needs to be a conflict to be explored, and it needs to be weighty enough to concern us, at least at the scale of the protagonist, or it isn't really going to make very interesting play. I mean, sure, tastes vary, if your enthusiasm for RPing whether or not you can get the souffle to turn out or not is great enough then go for it!

Yes. But as addressing problematic human issues can happen without protagonism and protagonism can happen without it, it is completely unrelated to the thing! Sure, doing so probably makes your games more interesting, but trying to marry it to this specific style of play is just weird.

We can TALK ABOUT problematic human issues, but without protagonism we are not going to be able to engage with them at the level of imagining playing them out. I find that trying to deny that there is a specific kind of play which puts these things in the central position and relegates other considerations to the periphery is what is 'just weird'.

It's a spectrum and you have to again use the extreme example of a canned module to make a point. In any case, you cannot hijack normal world like "protagonism" and say it only can exists in the games of your preferred style, as by normal understanding of the worlds that is not case. This is the sort of Edwardsian Newspeak which is intended to smear other approaches.

Nonsense. Look, you have your preferences, but if you are going to claim I'm 'hijacking' a word, then tell me how my definition, which I have taken from credible sources, isn't justified. Trad play is de-protagonizing in several ways, and I'm FAR from alone in coming to that conclusion, nor have I used any unusual language or leaps of logic in doing so.

I did not say that he didn't have any worthwhile insights. They're just buried in toxic and pretentious blathering.

Yeah, well, read it. I just went back and read the whole "Narrativism: Story Now" essay, and your characterization of it is completely off base. There are a number of areas that are discussed and it all hangs together quite well. To call it 'blathering' is simply silly, and if you call ordinary writing 'toxic', I think that's not a reflection on the writer in this case. The Forge :: Narrativism: Story Now

 

[Crimson Longinus]

So what you're saying is not that narrativism fans have been loud but that narrativism haters have presented a flanderised version of narrativism that has nothing to do with Edwards' definition, nothing to do with the most popular and influential narrativist game around - and everything to do with what people who hate their imagined idea of it think. Which might on this board be true - but it's why there is pushback.

Like I said, it is mistaking the trappings for the thing itself. It is not malicious.

And Humanity from Vampire is an alignment mechanic. The metacurrencies are blood and willpower (that's twice as many as Fate has - and Fate, unlike AW, was never designed to be narrativist).

Neither blood or willpower are metacurrencies, as they're not meta, they represent things that are diegetic.

 

[SteveC]

What I did required no "heavy lifting". I wasn't fighting against the system in any way. 1e AD&D was a smooth vehicle for the story I was creating along with the player, stories that often went in directions I didn't anticipate.

In your example, you ran a spontaneous AD&D game. Unless there's a lot more to this story, there's nothing inherently narrative about that. Unless you made some mechanical adjustments, the rules of AD&D aren't kind to the example characters you used. Perhaps this was largely a roleplaying/social experience, which AD&D largely did without rules, but level 1 wizards and thieves are notoriously bad at doing the things you would expect them to do in the fiction.

I've said repeatedly that you can run a narrative game in any system, but one designed for that play will have more options for the players to have agency, let the GM adjust to what the player does on the fly (again, mechanically) and have that random chance element that neither the player nor the GM have at their control. That's what a good narrative game does. You can do a lot of those things with a game like AD&D, but a game that's designed around that will have you asking "Should I let that happen? What's reasonable in this situation?" a lot less. And it will also let a less experienced GM do it. I've played Blades in the Dark with a first-time GM and while it took a bit for them to get their footing, they got it and ran a good session for us. I don't think the same thing would have happened if they wanted to accomplish the same ideas for a game with AD&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you realize just how insulting these remarks are to everyone who doesn't subscribe to your point of view? Setting tourists, watching the story happen, because the players didn't have a hand in creating the situation they are in besides deciding to go there? So your PCs actions are otherwise meaningless? Are you interested in discussing the pros and cons of different playstyles, or just trashing anything that isn't your definition of narrativist?

Excuse me, where did I use the term 'Setting Tourism'? Where did I use any phrase meaning "PCs actions are meaningless?" We can certainly discuss many things. The topic of the thread was "What makes a TTRPG a 'Narrativist Game'". I wasn't addressing the virtues, or even particularly the limitations, of other kinds of play, except in the sense of distinguishing one from the other.

I mean, if you are insulted by the notion that various 'schools' of RPG play and design exist, and that the particular one you seem to favor may not do everything that some other one does, then I don't know what to tell you. 5e D&D, as typically played, is nothing like DitV, as typically played. I can't suggest that? I can't discuss what those different things do and do not do? I'm not hiding my preferences either, but really at least if people want to complain could they call out my actual words?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Not exactly. Story Now requires that each scene be framed as an act in a previously existing conflict that tests the stakes of that conflict, where initial conflicts are introduced by the players and then tested, and that the resolution of the conflict is always a matter of player choice. Introducing new elements to the fiction is a tangential concept.

I don’t think this is accurate. The “resolution of conflict is always player choice” in particular seems way off.

If players set the premise is the entirety of being "nar" then the Star Wars game I'm running with WEG D6 is nar just because the players said, "Can we be in a Star Wars game where we all play bounty hunters?"

I think perhaps the relevant premise you’re talking about being set by the players would be a bit more specific than that, no?

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.

Please. You’re tossing casual insults all over the place. Don’t accuse others of being pretentious.

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.

The game is not designed to specifically deliver that experience. So, no.

 

[pemerton]

Sure. Which happens in most RPGs.


But that really has nothing to do with protagonism. You can have the characters be protagonists, without addressing "problematic feature of human existence," (although it is probably more interesting if you do.) You can also address such things without the PCs being protagonists (although it is probably more interesting if they are.)


That's obvious hogwash. Of course PCs can be protagonists, even though they encounter preauthored situations, as long as outcomes of their interaction with the situation is not determined.

This is what I dislike about Edwards. He makes overreaching claims that seem to be aimed to disparage other playstyles, and jumbles a bunch of unrelated things together.

I wish people would stop accuse one of Champion's greatest advocates, and one of RunQuest's greatest advocates, of "disparaging other styles". It seems that Edwards may not particularly care for D&D. That's not a crime.

As far as "protagonism" is concerned, and to reiterate some of what @Neonchameleon posted not too far upthread:

Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing. "Address" means:

• Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world, "fixing" them into imaginary place.
• Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.
• Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the circumstances. . . .

The Now refers to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying attention to one another as they do it. . . .

There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). . . .

In all role-playing, the player-character is the lens of the Creative Agenda at work. That's right, I said all role-playing.

• Simulationist = the character "fits" - its setting, capabilities, outcomes, behavior patterns, and so on, all reinforce the Dream for everyone.
• Gamist = the character is a direct opportunity for player-strategy. Its construction doesn't hamstring the player (except with agreed-upon handicaps) and permits him or her to Step On Up.
• Narrativist = the character's predicament is how Premise is seen/felt in full, and what he does, and what happens is how a theme is realized.

By definition, a character faces "relevant stress" for the Creative Agenda. The term used most often for that is "adversity," and it is required in all three modes of play. Without it, there is no Situation. Without Situation, there's no role-playing, just sitting around and diddling. You can tell when this happens: everyone stops paying attention to one another, and quite likely the one person talking is only paying attention to himself or herself. Adversity, which may come from any participant during play, is the key.

Now we run into a conceptual tangle. In literary terms, if there's a story, there's one or more protagonists. Since story can arise from any sort of role-playing, then protagonism of the relevant character comes with that, part and parcel. However, "protagonism" at the Forge as discussed most frequently by Paul Czege, tends to focus on very specific processes of play: those which prompt Premise-addressing interest in a given character among all of the real-person participants; in other words, a specifically Narrativist process.

That's a real terminological conundrum. I shudder at the thought of co-opting the term "protagonist" into anything besides the fictional context of a story, regardless of how it was produced. However, I also want to preserve Paul's point that people may establish emotional, relatively high-stakes connections to other people's player-characters. But neither are restricted to Narrativist play.

Fortunately, for discussing Narrativist play by itself, the two things are one and the same. Which means I shall happily relegate debate about the term in a larger (all of role-playing) sense to the forums and neatly dodge it for purposes of the essay.​

Edwards is not unaware of the terminological problem. But there is a real phenomenon he is describing. One doesn't make it go away by removing the language to describe it.

Consider an adventure path - say, the 3E module Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, or the 2e module Dead Gods. The module consists of a series of events. It gives advice to the GM on how to "hook" the players, via their PCs, into that series. It gives advice to the GM on how to ensure the transition from event to event. A lot of the logic and content of the imagined events follows - in the fiction - from the offscreen doings of characters whom the players may be only dimly aware of.

Those who play these modules can compare stories about What happened when my group encountered the <such and such>. All the groups go through the same events, and very similar things happen to them.

This is not "story now". What is at stake is established by the GM (who takes it from the module). What happens next is established by the GM (who takes it from the module). The theme - the response to premise - is already given, by the module author.

Think about everything that constitutes an adventure path, and strip it away. Imagine that the players hook the GM - eg one of the players, in building their PC, says "Here's what I'm about: I'm going to use my sister's connections in town to bring down and take the place of the Master Assassin of this town." (This is an example from the BW Revised Character Burner.)

And now that is what play is about.

And not in the sense that the GM sets up enough dungeons, which the PC's sister points the PC to, such that the PC can reach 10th level and hence be entitled to challenge the Master Assassin to a duel. This is what play is about, in the actual "now" of play.

The difference between GM-driven RPGing, and player-driven RPGing, is real. It doesn't disappear because of an ambiguity or (delibeate) equivocation in the use of the word "protagonist".

To relate this to Daggerheart: is Daggerheart a game about player-driven RPGing? That will depend on the GM-side rules for framing and resolution. Not on the things the OP of this thread mentions.