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

[Emberashh]

Oh gosh, yeah, when I point out how you literally condemned all Narrativist play to being 'mother may I' and 'railroaded', complete with a 'choo choo' onomatopoeia

Yeah see you're not even paying attention to who you're talking to.

CONDEMNED AN ENTIRE STYLE WHOLESALE.

Level headed criticism with a dearth of supporting arguments is condemnation now? Again, I think you're conflating 3 or 4 people here.

What would you suggest I say when someone utterly misrepresents something

I would say first identify who you believe you're speaking to and then calmly discuss the issue without getting lost trying to defend games from criticism.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah, absolutely. They’re not nearly as dogmatic about this stuff as many here. They were willing to try it because they trusted me, they knew I wanted something different from play, and they knew if we didn’t collectively like it, nothing would stop us at all from going back to the previous game.

Luckily, everyone has been enjoying these games quite a bit, so we’ve continued with new games!

I think people should try different sort of games. It doesn't even need to become your new favourite, but doing things a bit differently now and then is interesting. Like you might have your favourite food, but if you ate it everyday, something else might feel welcome occasionally.

 

[pemerton]

But basically there is malleability in the reality that doesn't exist in some other approaches, and that malleability is what allows a lot of the mechanics of the game to work. Flashbacks are an obvious example, but often the consequences can rely on this too. Like in our last game the location of the guards was dependent on out roll to perceive them.

I feel that this claim - or rather, the ostensible contrast that it is intended to support - is exaggerated, even for BitD.

It's quite legitimate, in "trad" RPGing, for the GM to roll a random encounter, and for the result of that roll to dictate that guards are present.

Having the presence of guards turn on a roll is therefore not distinctive to BitD.

What is distinctive is the way the rolls, and their relationship to decision-making by the participants, to framing, and to consequences, are structured.

Here is one illustration, in relation to combat resolution:

Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out. Let's say a character with a sword attacks some guy with a spear. The point is to announce the character's basic approach and intent, and then to roll. A missed roll in this situation tells us the goal failed. Now the group is open to discussing just how it happened from the beginning of the action being initiated. Usually, instead of the typical description that you "swing and miss," because the "swing" was assumed to be in action before the dice could be rolled at all, the narration now can be anything from "the guy holds you off from striking range with the spearpoint" to "your swing is dead-on but you slip a bit." Or it could be a plain vanilla miss because the guy's better than you. The point is that the narration of what happens "reaches back" to the initiation of the action, not just the action's final micro-second.​

Both methods of resolution involve rolling the dice to establish what happens, following the announcement "I attack". But they are differently oriented to what is at stake. The first narrows what is at stake to does my blow, that I commence and that is in motion, connect? The second sets as the stakes the much more broader does my goal, which is to take down the guy with the spear by attacking with my sword, succeed?

(Note that the reference to "the group" discussing the fiction is optional and a bit of a distraction: in Burning Wheel, for instance, it is the GM, not the group, who decides what happens, and how, "from the beginning of the action being initiated". But BW still uses the second method.)

The imagined fiction, in the second approach, is not more "amorphous". Both approaches involve the setting of the scene and declaration of the action - sword-PC attacks spear-guy. The difference is in how framing, roll, stakes and consequence-narration are established. The first approach is more "neutral", in that the narrator of consequences doesn't get to inject their own opinion/intuition/preference/taste into the narration in the same way that that narrator does in the second approach. This brings us right back to @Campbell's comments about the difference that processes of play make, if one is looking to play narrativist. "Neutrality" and narrativism are at odds.

The combat example of course generalises to all sorts of action declarations. But let's look at a guards example.

Consider: the players declare that their PCs go to place X, and look around. The passage of in-game time prompts the GM to roll the random encounter dice. The result is guards. The GM tells the player they see guards. The GM, here, is neutral in that all they have to do is track time, make rolls, read results.

Vs, the players declare that their PCs go to place X - this is low stakes in itself, and so the GM narrates the PCs arriving at place X, which is described as (or perhaps which everyone at the table knows to be) ominous, foreboding, likely well-protected, etc. The players declare that their PCs look around, to make sure the coast is clear. The player rolls their dice. The roll fails. So the GM "reaches back" to the initiation of the action - and tells the player that the coast is most definitely not clear - their are guards, and they've spotted you!

The first approach is pretty unremarkable for D&D play, or Traveller, or Rolemaster. The second could be an example of Burning Wheel - the GM says "yes" to we go to place X and then calls for a roll on Perception when the PCs look around, and the roll fails, and so the GM narrates failure via intent and task. It could also be an example of Apocalypse World - the GM makes a soft move in response to we got to place X - narrating the foreboding place, etc - and then the player has their PC read the situation and fails, and so the GM makes as hard a move as they like, putting the PC into a spot. I don't know the details of BitD very well, but I suspect from my knowledge, and from the example I've quoted at the top of this post, that the second approach could also be an example of BitD.

There is no more or less "amorphousness" in either example. But in the first, the players' main incentive is to minimise the passage of ingame time (which is a type of resource, perhaps: actions relative to encounter checks). There is no tight relationship between player goals, and what is at stake in rolls. The second example is different in both respects: in declaring actions the players are not managing a resource, and the connection between player goals and what is at stake in rolls is very tight. The focus of play is quite different.

A third pair of examples is confined to Burning Wheel vs D&D and similar approaches. Consider, again, the players declaring that their PCs go to X, and look around. The passage of in-game time prompts the GM to roll the random encounter dice. The result is guards. The GM tells the player they see guards. The GM also rolls the encounter dice, and they come up 12 on 2d6 - enthusiastic friendship! The GM thinks quickly - recalling that, as per established backstory, place X is in the home town of one of the PCs, the GM narrates that the PC recognises the guard as a childhood friend. And so the encounter unfolds . . . (On a reaction roll of 10, maybe the GM makes the same decision about background connections, but the guard isn't friendly to the potential interloper, and so the GM has the guard tell the PC "If you turn around now, I'll forget that I saw you . . . but I'm not going to let you in.") The GM's quick thinking, guided by the dictates of the reaction roll, reflect an aspiration to neutrality rather than imposing of will by the GM.

In BW, let's suppose that the players declare that their PCs go to place X, and the GM says "yes" because this is low stakes. And now a player says "I'm in my home town, I know people here. I make a Circles check: I'm hoping that one of my old friends is on guard here, so that they will let us in!" The Circles check is made, and lo-and-behold, it's as the PC hoped. Things unfold just as in the D&D-esque example with the 12 on the reaction dice. (If the check fails, maybe the GM narrates things as per the reaction roll of 10, because that is what will put the most interesting pressure on the Beliefs that the player has authored for their PC.)

Again, fictional "reality" is not more "amorphous" in one case then the other. But the relationship between rolls, stakes, framing, consequences etc is quite different.

TL;DR: framing the contrast in terms of "amorphous fiction" is, I think, unhelpful. As @darkbard said upthread, narrativist play typically produces rich, vibrant, concrete fiction for its participants. The contrast is in the process of play and how decisions-making around framing, stakes, consequences and rolls all fit together. There is no neutrality in narrativist play; on the GM side, no attempt to simply present a situation and perform roll-guided causally-constrained extrapolations from it. That's the difference.

 

[pemerton]

What conflict resolution (especially the more moment to moment sort seen in Apocalypse World) does is it continually volleys the ball back to the GM to frame situations/scenes that speak to the premise of the game or the characters. Task resolution inherently results in focusing on things outside the core premise of the characters and/or game. When I run Masks I'm always making GM Moves that speak to what's come before, but also bringing in new elements that are relevant to the characters (address their personal situations, reputations, come between player characters, etc).

The point of task resolution is to allow that drift of premise, but that means at some point if addressing that premise is like important to me than I have to intercede the flow of task resolution. There can be benefits to doing so, but it's fundamentally different in nature to the level of focus on character level concerns that conflict resolution allows.

Like you use task resolution because you want some level of conceptual drift, some focus on color, some focus on things outside the premise. Because those things will occur just in the play of the game regardless of intention when we use task resolution. It's an inevitable outcome of the process of play. It's also the sort of outcome I sometimes value because sometimes I want to play in or run a game where the spotlight is as much on the settings' factions or NPCs as the player character.

I see this as a pithier version of what I posted just upthread!

 

[clearstream]

Sure ... If you want to think of tabletop RPGs as inferior video games that shouldn't attempt to anything that isn't done far far better by computers.

That doesn't follow from my thought, so I must have explained myself badly or you read into it something I didn't intend. For avoidance of doubt, I am thinking of TTRPG. One of the core concepts of narrativism per Edwards is the recognition of the player duality (which others had noticed around the same time.) Player as audience and author... and this would mean nothing if the authorship was not in the play itself. There is I think clearly an understanding that a narrative mode in play would be novel in contrast with a narrative mode in prewritten linear fiction. But what Edwards wants to do with this understanding is develop in play what is important in Western dramatic story: the resolution of premises by the author (in play, through the ludic duality, players).

This is all extremely important thinking. From a ludological perspective however, it contains room for disappointment: why limit ourselves to what has been developed in prewritten linear narrative? This dissatisfaction is part of what drove a rift between ludologists and narratologists for a time (now reconciled so far as I can make out in post-classical narratology.)

Both Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World started out as "can ludonarrative be an improvement on freeform narrative". Vincent Baker's first playtester is his wife Meguey Baker and she is a highly experienced freeform roleplayer. He knows he has a good design when she reflexively reaches for the dice both because they don't get in her way and they improve the experience.

You'll have to say more about the relevance of this, as it's not clear to me. The desire is not to improve on freeform narrative, but to find new features of narrative. It's not particularly interesting, in a sense, to find that resolving premises is compelling: that was already known.

​

Narrativism is a no-brainer in this regard, as it is defined by the metagame attention to creating a story of critical merit (i.e. "good").​

Given I am fascinated with ludic rather than traditional forms of story, I'm unconvinced that the "critical merit" being thought of has any standing with me. One hindrance is that robust concepts for criticism for games is a work in progress.

Some examples of what I do find interesting are what is being done in games like Ironsworn, Microscope, The Ground Itself and Artefact. The seeding of player imagination allowing them to spin unexpected - surprising even - narratives out for themselves. Another example, seen in Blades in the Dark, is what I think of as a clockwork-TTRPG, where the imaginative play drives a formal mechanism (the crews game.) I call it "clockwork" because it yields tempo in the proper ludic sense. Torchbearer 2 provides another example, with the grind.

 

[Emberashh]

Some examples of what I do find interesting are what is being done in games like Ironsworn, Microscope, The Ground Itself and Artefact. The seeding of player imagination allowing them to spin unexpected - surprising even - narratives out for themselves. Another example, seen in Blades in the Dark, is what I think of as a clockwork-TTRPG, where the imaginative play drives a formal mechanism (the crews game.) I call it "clockwork" because it yields tempo in the proper ludic sense. Torchbearer 2 provides another example, with the grind.

The former is exactly the sort of thing I was going for with what I called Oracles, that I now call Events, where players will potentially roll prompts that they can then riff off of and combine with each others Events, leading not just to a generally interesting travel sequence, but to some very satisfying side adventurers when they snowball.

And the latter is why my entire game hinges around Time. It not only provides a mechanical backbone for virtually everything, but also lends a potent reinforcement in how the Players play.

While time necessarily slows and speeds up as needed for practicality, the clock is always running in a manner or speaking, and the mechanic in turn is what drives the living world the players are a part of.

The entire gameworld could see its circumstances change from turn to turn and every choice made, and the players can only make the best of what they know and what they desire to do, because the world doesn't care about what they do until they make it care.

 

[Neonchameleon]

That’s actually a good point, and maybe it’s a misunderstanding on my part. Are there narrative games where players ARE trying to form the “best” story in the moment? Or are they immersing themselves down in the trenches of the adventure and doing whatever makes sense in the moment and looking back at story later?

I had the impression that some narrative games have plot levers that make the game session more like writing a collaborative novel than immersing into game world and experiencing an adventure. The former always seemed very meta to me.

I can make an argument that there are a few that are; Fiasco and The Quiet Year come to mind, and then only for some players. And one of the things they have in common is that they are GMless. In general and in my experience "trying to form the best story" is the domain of trad or neo-trad GMs.

 

[pemerton]

Gameplay where we solve a murder mystery where the culprit, clues, motivations, red herrings etc are predetermined, and one where the rolls and/or the GM determines those things on the fly just are drastically different things.

But the difference is not about the "reality" of the fiction. It's about what play involves. In classic CoC, the players' goal is to learn the stuff the GM has written up in advance by declaring actions that will prompt the GM to tell them that stuff, but won't prompt the GM to tell them that their PCs are arrested and sent to prison, or are mind-blasted by catching a glimpse of Nyarlathotep.

The GM may be good at responding to prompts - neutral, fair, measured, etc - or may be terrible - a real viking hat. For present purposes, that contrast in GM skill and personality is not relevant. The point is that the underlying logic of this approach to RPGing creates a very different player orientation towards the fiction, and the GM's decision-making, from (say) Burning Wheel.

Two games that illustrate this contrast incredibly well are The Green Knight - hardcore gamism, because in each scene the GM has set hidden objectives that the players have to uncover, using their knowledge and intuition of Arthurian knightly tropes - and Agon 2e - competition, and hence gamist, as between the players (because each has a reason to be the best hero in each conflict), but not vis-a-vis the GM's situation, because it is the players who interpret the signs of the gods, and so who ultimately set their own stakes and establish the criteria for their success.

This doesn't make Agon "easy mode" - I've GMed multiple Agon session where the PCs have failed - but it makes its whole rationale and "feel" in play different from The Green Knight.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

TL;DR: framing the contrast in terms of "amorphous fiction" is, I think, unhelpful. As @darkbard said upthread, narrativist play typically produces rich, vibrant, concrete fiction for its participants. The contrast is in the process of play and how decisions-making around framing, stakes, consequences and rolls all fit together. There is no neutrality in narrativist play; on the GM side, no attempt to simply present a situation and perform roll-guided causally-constrained extrapolations from it. That's the difference.

OK. But your examples rely party on amorphousness. Like for a roll being able to determine that the character's acquittance is there relies on the fiction being amorphous regarding the friends location and the identity of the guards.

And your D&D examples feel (as usual) very outdated to me. I'm not sure many people do random encounters anymore, and reaction roll is so ancient that it has fossilised. And I wouldn't run those situations like that in D&D.

And I definitive have concrete experience of the reality feeling more amorphous in Blades that it does in trad games. It just has more of a collective story creation rather than being in a story feel. Though that might be partly related to the GMs approach, but then again I've played trad games run by this same person and it was not so in them.

I also don't think that amorphousness is even a bad thing. It is just a different thing.

But all that being said, you might still be right about me focusing on the wrong thing. But could you perhaps give some examples in which this difference in GMing principles you identify as the real distinction produce different end results for similar fictional staring situations?

 

[Emberashh]

But the difference is not about the "reality" of the fiction. It's about what play involves. In classic CoC, the players' goal is to learn the stuff the GM has written up in advance by declaring actions that will prompt the GM to tell them that stuff, but won't prompt the GM to tell them that their PCs are arrested and sent to prison, or are mind-blasted by catching a glimpse of Nyarlathotep.

The GM may be good at responding to prompts - neutral, fair, measured, etc - or may be terrible - a real viking hat. For present purposes, that contrast in GM skill and personality is not relevant. The point is that the underlying logic of this approach to RPGing creates a very different player orientation towards the fiction, and the GM's decision-making, from (say) Burning Wheel.

Two games that illustrate this contrast incredibly well are The Green Knight - hardcore gamism, because in each scene the GM has set hidden objectives that the players have to uncover, using their knowledge and intuition of Arthurian knightly tropes - and Agon 2e - competition, and hence gamist, as between the players (because each has a reason to be the best hero in each conflict), but not vis-a-vis the GM's situation, because it is the players who interpret the signs of the gods, and so who ultimately set their own stakes and establish the criteria for their success.

This doesn't make Agon "easy mode" - I've GMed multiple Agon session where the PCs have failed - but it makes its whole rationale and "feel" in play different from The Green Knight.

A very long winded way of repeating that players can just make things up and the GM isn't allowed to poopoo their bright ideas, something that is so innocuous the only thing you have to do to add it to any game is just to have a GM who isn't being anti-social.

Plus in terms of how this speaks to the play experience that comes out the other end of these systems, its a bit of an oversimplification of, well, all of the listed games.

Call of Cthulu in particular isn't just about the players being the passive recipients of lore that have to push the right buttons to get the lore nuggets. COC is an exploration game, and Players have to engage with the gameworld in more ways than just those that get the GM to say something. In doing so, the actual gameplay experience is much more robust than you're giving it credit for, particularly as its supported by the cosmic horror theming of the game which is not just induced via COCs classic atmosphere even with weak Keepers, but mechanically through things like Sanity and the fact that it has a combat system even though you'll never bring down Cthulu - the whole point is to emphasize the hopelessness of even trying assert the human ego over cosmic forces.