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

[Crimson Longinus]

What do you mean by "narrativist game"?

Do you mean a game specifically designed to facilitate narrativist play? Then yes, it's trivially straightforward to do narrativist RPGing without using such a game. As Edwards talks about in his essay.

I've done it using AD&D, and Rolemaster. Neither is an ideal vehicle. I've done it using Classic Traveller, which turns out to be quite a good vehicle provided one just ignores the onworld exploration rules. I've done it using 4e D&D, which is a fine vehicle but rather abashed in its self-presentation.

Do you mean you can have player-driven play that is not "narrativist" in Edwards's sense?

I don't know, as the definition seems elusive.

Then I'm more doubtful until you tell me what you have in mind. If you mean there can be non-railroad dungeon crawling of the classic B2 G1-3, S2, C1-2 variety, then yes. Classic dungeon-crawling is player-driven in the sense that the players choose how to engage the challenge, what their gear and spell load-outs will be, etc. But concepts of "story" or "protagonism" are barely applicable to that sort of play. It's much closer to wargaming in its ethos and concerns.

No, I don't mean just that. Though it indeed is player driven in a sense.

If you mean that you can have player-driven play although the GM is the one who establishes situation, all the significant elements of situation, who the "BBEG" is, what consequences flow from successful as well as unsuccessful actions - then I don't think so. I've done that sort of RPGing. The players contribute colour. But not a lot else.

What I mean is the sort of game where whilst the GM is in control of the world, it is the players who decide where to go, who to oppose, who to befriend, what goals to pursue etc. There can and will be events that the players need to react to, but there shouldn't be "main plot" or "existential main threat" that warps everything to be about that, thus robbing the player the freedom to choose what to do.

 

[pemerton]

Those features you described your earlier post are often found in narrativist games

But they're not! Prince Valiant doesn't have them. Apocalypse World doesn't have them. Burning Wheel does permit players to frame scenes - via Circles - but it is action declaration and check-based, and if the check fails then the GM gets to frame the scene instead (in AW language, "turning the player's move back on them").

The game most often noted for having "player-side mechanics (eg meta-currency, or the ability to stipulate fiction without having to declare and resolve a PC's action) " is Fate, which is - as best I can tell - not typically played in a narrativist fashion.

People do not associate narrative with Storyteller games, they associate it correctly with Apoc World, Blades etc.

To reiterate, AW does not have the mechanics that the OP to this thread talks about. That is not how it supports narrativist play. The way it supports narrativist play is in virtue of its instructions to the GM, and the way that its action resolution mechanics integrate with those instructions.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

All I can say is that intentions have nothing to with outcomes. "No myth" is not the be all end all of "Story Now", which reading RE's Story Now essay would make clear. Further, even if it was, "No myth" doesn't inherently mean it's the players that fill in the myth - who has narrative authority is a tangent to Story Now which was my main point. Rather Story Now is focused on who defines the conflicts ("premise" in forge speak) not who defines the myth, as I said. A GM running a Story Now game could have sole narrative authority (that is to invent the myth) but would be expected to invent myth that tests the conflict ("premise") introduced by the player characters.

I'm not sure I follow you on intentions and outcomes, though I don't especially disagree that outcomes MAY not be related to intentions, but surely they FOLLOW FROM the intention. I think that's pretty much a basic tenet of criminal justice.

You are correct, No Myth and Story Now are different things. However, there's a very direct relationship between Myth and Protagonism! Story Now doesn't demand that the premise be invented by any specific participant, or at any specific time, but it does demand that it address the PCs directly, that they are effectively the protagonists of the story. I mean, you can see where some games, like My Life with Master, bend that, but in fact it is still the central factor, that the object of play is to act as the protagonist, to be the one addressing the premise. So, I don't think we are particularly disagreeing.

This is made obvious in the context of DW where you are encouraged as the GM to "draw maps and leave blank spaces", so it's not even "no myth" but just "myth light". If DW is Nar then so is B1: In Search of the Unknown (maps with blank spaces).

If that was the ONLY technique which distinguished them, then yes. I don't think it is...

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'm not claiming that the players even set the premise, just that they address it. That they are central to the resolution of the premise and 'lead the story'.

Player characters as the protagonists is a standard feature of pretty much all RPGs. The fact that you have to write "in the true sense of the word" shows that I'm not one trying to redefine words.

I'm not redefining anything, you all often use protagonist to just mean "a character that gets a bunch of spotlight", @Neonchameleon rather brilliantly pointed out that these are 'PoV characters' but not necessarily protagonists. Just because the game features PCs looting the Caves of Chaos doesn't make them very protagonistic, the whole setup was concocted without regard to these characters and only incidentally involves them in a pretty shallow 'conflict'.

Being player driven and has the player characters as protagonist are concepts that could apply to any sandbox game. To claim otherwise would be to define protagonism such that the protagonists of most stories aren't protagonists, which is surely silly. To make it clear, most protagonists don't get to define what their own story is about and yet they are still very much protagonists. All that is required to have protagonists is for them to be the main character of the story and the one that is responsible resolving the main conflicts of the story. Now, that second condition can lead to some surprising facts, such that Indiana Jones is not the protagonist of "Raiders of the Lost Arc" but actually the deuteragonist - a main character who is of secondary importance responsible only for resolving only the conflicts side plot. But that being a "true" protagonist requires you to both establish the conflict as well as resolve it is both wrong and borders on committing one of the most common fallacies of nar play.

There's a huge difference between characters who are simply placed into the milieu where they're simply a generic 'point of view' and just act out a version of the story and one where everything is built around a conflict that is central to the characters.

I mean, we have have semantic hair-splitting sessions till the cows come home, but there's a huge difference between the play I experience in Stonetop vs 5e where each one is played in a fairly typical fashion (and let me say that my 5e play was pretty 'evolved' play, the GM was quite good, it wasn't just stock module play). This difference has to do with the relationship between the 'things that matter' and my character.

 

[pemerton]

To address the title of the thread. Narrative game tends to be used in two ways.

The first is that you have a number of Ogre counters and you can spend one to have an Ogre turn up. Something like that. The players can establish facts about the world or there’s some kind of meta-currency, meta because it doesn’t align with the characters actions. All that kind of stuff.

The second is a game that facilitates Narrativism (as defined by Ron Edwards)

I think the first usage is so common people can just have it. I think the second usage is actually really tricky because if you ignore the GM sections and just focus on mechanics, then yeah almost every game can. Does it mean some games are better at it, if we ‘just’ look at mechanics? That’s kind of impossible to say because it’s going to come down to preference.

If we forced every drama student in the world to play RPG’s in the Edwards, Narrativist style, then my intuition tells me that some mechanics would be heavily favoured over others. Who knows though, in the future we might see a ground swell of people who are really glad Edwards laid out the foundation of the style so they could use it in their 1E D&D play. I mean it seems unlikely but...

I love, love, LOVE this post!

Your first example - the Ogre counters-based RPG - is what the OP of this thread talks about. Is what I most often see referred to as "narrative" on these boards. Is (in barest outline) what Fate is about.

Can it be used for narrativist play? Maybe, maybe not. Who decides the flavour of the GM's counters? If the GM does, it's probably not going to be narrativist. And can the player use their counters to avoid or win all the hard situations, that might change their character or the thematic meaning of events? If they can, then it's probably not going to be narrativist. It will be a version of what Edwards called high concept simulationism; or else it will be a version of what he called gamism, but probably where the competition is reasonably low or at least light-hearted, and the fiction is very prominent and colourful.

Do most games designed for narrativist play look like your Ogre counter game? Not to the best of my knowledge. They mostly look either like Prince Valiant and Maelstrom Storytelling (HeroWars/Quest, Burning Wheel, 4e D&D in the pemerton/@Manbearcat/etc style) or else like Apocalypse World (PbtA, FitD, Agon 2e, etc).

Re you closing sentences: after reading Edward, I did 4 or 5 more years of fortnightly Rolemaster play. (So 100s of hours.) What he said definitely helped me do what I wanted to do! And the treatment of the endgame in Czege's Nicotine Girls, which I learned about via Edwards (I can't recall the exact pathway) really helped me bring the RM game to a conclusion that I wouldn't have been able to do otherwise.

But it is true that I've not gone back to RM in the subsequent 15 and a bit years.

 

[pemerton]

What I mean is the sort of game where whilst the GM is in control of the world, it is the players who decide where to go, who to oppose, who to befriend, what goals to pursue etc. There can and will be events that the players need to react to, but there shouldn't be "main plot" or "existential main threat" that warps everything to be about that, thus robbing the player the freedom to choose what to do.

When you say "the GM is in control of the world", that is incomplete information.

I mean, in AW the GM is in control of the world - but the process of PC build, plus the first session, mean that the elements that are found in the world that the GM is in control of are not solely authored by the GM.

Also, in AW the GM - when making a move - has to provide opportunities or announce badness, and these are relative to the concerns the players have established for their PCs, which will have factored into the way the world has been established. So the GM is the one who controls the world, in the sense of deciding what happens when a player says "I open the door - what do I see?" - but the GM has to answer that question with something that speaks to the player's concerns for their PC.

In your RPGing, which way is it going? That will tell you whether or not you are playing narrativist. To be honest, my gut feeling - based on my many ENworld conversations with you - is that you're not. But my gut is far from a precision instrument!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

They also talk about all the restrictions on the GM side that are part and parcel of that style of play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

But these 2 characters are extremely fragile, and classic D&D doesn't really have mechanics that will allow them to operate well independently, nor much in the way of mechanics that deal with anything outside of combat (which neither of them is equipped to deal with in any way). I mean, you have picked the two classes with the MOST non-combat utility, the MU can cast spells, though the restrictions on doing so are going to be pretty awkward. Still he can certainly get some use out of his magic. Likewise a thief has a bunch of obviously useful skills, though his chances of success with them are, shall we say, problematic. But beyond that there's very little that 1e is doing for you here. It has costs for equipment and hiring people, some reaction mechanisms, and the general movement/exploration rules.

I guess what I'm saying is, sure you can run a narrativist game with, probably, any system, like this, but you're pounding a square peg into a round hole. Running it with Dungeon World would be MUCH better! I haven't even more than touched at the ways it would improve the play experience in this situation for both GM and player. Beyond that, DW provides an entire 'recipe' for this sort of play, it is what you WILL get here. Sure, a suitably knowledgeable GM with expertise in Narrativist play can 'get by' using 1e, but if we alter the scenario only slightly and have the kid's friend GM for him, then the difference between using 1e and DW is HUGE, as 1e is guaranteed to end up employed in a more traditional way (albeit they may work out ways to make it playable, like multiple characters per player, DMPCs, free henchmen, whatever).

 

[pemerton]

They also talk about all the restrictions on the GM side that are part and parcel of that style of play.

Well many seem to want to assert both that the GM is unrestricted and that the GM is not driving play.

Which is something of a contradiction, I think.

 

[pemerton]

Running it with Dungeon World would be MUCH better!

Right. This is why I've not gone back to RM in 15 years. Burning Wheel is just better for RPGing that is character-focused, player-driven, and features a 100+ entry skill list.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

That is exactly my point of view on the subject.