What is a "Narrative Mechanic"?

[Reynard]

I'll take it over edition warring. Or various fiascos round sensitive subjects. It's not really something that gets personal or offensive.

Lol. Have you read this thread?

 

[Neonchameleon]

Lol. Have you read this thread?

I've been through edition wars.

 

[Tony Vargas]

If your join date is before 2015, you've seen some edition warring... making liberal use GNS...

 

[pemerton]

WtH is it with FitM. The terminology, I mean.
"Fortune" surely, dice other randomization tool? Yes?
But in the middle of what?

In the middle of establishing the fictional context for the action and its resolution.

Here's an example, from Gygax's DMG (pp 80-81):

Someone once sharply criticized the concept of the saving throw as ridiculous. Could a man chained to a rock, they asked, save himself from the blast of a red dragon's breath? Why not?, I replied. If you accept fire-breathing dragons, why doubt the chance to reduce the damage sustained from such a creature's attack? Imagine that the figure, at the last moment, of course, manages to drop beneath the licking flames, or finds a crevice in which to shield his or her body, or succeeds in finding a way to be free of the fetters. Why not? The mechanics of combat or the details of the injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes - or fails to escape - the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the game.​

The crevice was there, all along, as part of the fiction - but it is not established, at the table as part of the fiction except subsequent to the resolution of the saving throw (ie if the player saves, it turns out there was a crevice there for their PC to duck into).

The contrast is with something like RQ, where the existence of a crevice should be established in advance, and provide a modifier to the die roll to avoid/survive the flames.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'll take it over edition warring. Or various fiascos round sensitive subjects. It's not really something that gets personal or offensive.

I'd rather have edition warring. Edwards' insulting opinions about people who enjoy process sim are offensive to me.

 

[Micah Sweet]

In the middle of establishing the fictional context for the action and its resolution.

Here's an example, from Gygax's DMG (pp 80-81):

Someone once sharply criticized the concept of the saving throw as ridiculous. Could a man chained to a rock, they asked, save himself from the blast of a red dragon's breath? Why not?, I replied. If you accept fire-breathing dragons, why doubt the chance to reduce the damage sustained from such a creature's attack? Imagine that the figure, at the last moment, of course, manages to drop beneath the licking flames, or finds a crevice in which to shield his or her body, or succeeds in finding a way to be free of the fetters. Why not? The mechanics of combat or the details of the injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes - or fails to escape - the mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the game.​

The crevice was there, all along, as part of the fiction - but it is not established, at the table as part of the fiction except subsequent to the resolution of the saving throw (ie if the player saves, it turns out there was a crevice there for their PC to duck into).

The contrast is with something like RQ, where the existence of a crevice should be established in advance, and provide a modifier to the die roll to avoid/survive the flames.

RQ makes much more sense to me personally.

 

[Tony Vargas]

In the middle of establishing the fictional context for the action and its resolution.

That is ... not exactly intuitive... so the fortune happens in the resolution, but retroactively establishes the fiction of the scene so it's more like resolution in the middle of establishing what's to be resolved. Like, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey type stuff.

Not:

There are three places the random input can happen:

• before the declaration and resolution
• between declaration and resolution
• after narration of the story outcome

randomization between declaration & resolution

which was what leapt to my mind when I heard it, and probably what I'm going to remember, since there is a relation between that and the label.

Was the whole Forge dedicated to obfuscation, or was it just Edwards.

RQ makes much more sense to me personally.

It's a better game on many levels. Didn't crawl out from under D&D style random chargen, tho.

TBH, I don't see anything in RQ or 1e AD&D that like, demands, you tie up the fiction and set it in stone before resolving an action, nor vice versa. Guess that's a hazard of paleogaming.

 

[pemerton]

I'd argue that a narrative mechanic is any procedure within a game that bases the resolution-- of a conflict or a question-- on factors that are not intrinsic to actors/objects within the game world itself.

A Paladin who does more damage when smiting creatures who are more offensive to their moral code is still diegetic. A Rogue who is more likely to find hidden treasures because they are hungry for gold is diegetic, but a Rogue who finds X% more treasure or +Y items in a given hoard because they are hungry for gold is narrative.

Why? Being hungry for gold is a relational property that inheres in the rogue.

 

[pemerton]

Honestly, the more I read about people trying to define Narrative in the way indicated by the OP (that is no more present in Apocalypse World than e.g. GURPS) the more I think that what's being talked about here are "Fudge Mechanics" (no relation to the game) - that is mechanics written to get from any A to any B with the designers not quite sure how to do it unambiguously so leaving it in the hands of player-facing metacurrency. (This is also a category I'd put hit points in).

Narrative games, especially ones written before 2012 just used fudge mechanics a lot more because writing games to lead to stories without pre-authoring the stories themselves is not an easy challenge.

A gloss on, or perhaps footnote to, this: Greg Stafford went a fair way to meeting the challenge in 1989, with Prince Valiant. It doesn't rely on fudge mechanics; rather, it allows PC emotional state to be an input into the dice pool, and it has a resolution system that is very flexible across the full range of conflicts, and that permits great latitude in establishing what is at stake, and what the consequences of failure will be.

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is ... not exactly intuitive... so the fortune happens in the resolution, but retroactively establishes the fiction of the scene so it's more like resolution in the middle of establishing what's to be resolved. Like, wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey type stuff.

Not:

randomization between declaration & resolution

which was what leapt to my mind when I heard it, and probably what I'm going to remember, since there is a relation between that and the label.

Was the whole Forge dedicated to obfuscation, or was it just Edwards.



It's a better game on many levels. Didn't crawl out from under D&D style random chargen, tho.

TBH, I don't see anything in RQ or 1e AD&D that like, demands, you tie up the fiction and set it in stone before resolving an action, nor vice versa. Guess that's a hazard of paleogaming.

I still like random chargen.