Celebrim
Legend
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.
I didn't say there was. In fact that there is nothing inherently nar about that is my point. I'm trying to prove that merely being no myth, story now, or whatever is at most necessary but not sufficient to be nar. (And in fact, many obviously nar games aren't no myth.)
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.
What's that got to do with anything? How powerful the character is changes genre but not whether they are the protagonist.
I've said repeatedly that you can run a narrative game in any system
I don't agree. I agree that you can create a narrative in any system, or that you can improvise in any system, or that you can give characters agency in any system. But that would render "narrative game" a meaningless term if that is what it meant.
, 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.
This is just such vague meaningless pablum. Inherently to random chance, neither the player nor the GM have it at their control. You aren't actually distinguishing anything specific about the game with the above description.
Last edited: