What is a "Narrative Mechanic"?

[Micah Sweet]

They're quite different. Pendragon relies on a set of virtue/vice pairs, and 'passions'. Any time a character is doing something interesting in game mechanical terms they will need to make a test on one of these. Half of the v/v pair traits are 'good' and the other half are 'negative', a character always has a total of 20 in each pair, so 13/7 brave/cowardly for instance. If you might run away, you test cowardly. If you want to do something really brave, you test bravery. The passions are Love, Family, Hospitality, and Honor, they don't really have opposites, though later they came out with 'classes' that use different ones and more were added.

The main point is, there's no focus on things like 'skills' and such, everything is governed by 13 v/v pairs and the passions. Characters are knights, they adventure once a year, and then there's a 'domain system' kind of thing where you do 'other stuff'. Character marry, have kids, etc. If you get old and die, your son can take over. Early editions used random chargen, but the '90s and later editions are point buy. Earlier editions also had a lot of supplements to run things like vikings and whatever, but most of that was abolished in the last couple of editions, you are a Knight of the Round Table in classic fantasy 5th century Britain, and Arthur is king!

In its newer forms it has almost a neotrad kind of thing going. You make up the personality you want, and then you play to it. Sometimes 'stuff' might happen that isn't quite how you planned it all out, but your character concept strongly defines how you play, within the limitations of the milieu/genre of the game. Situations are meant to represent stuff that might happen in Mallory, basically. Questing after beasts, meeting damsels in distress, warlocks, enchanters, 'black knights', etc. The domain part of things is also fairly involved, though you can get more or less into that. A lot of times the adventures and yearly events may tie in together.

So, one of the things about it is the game is pretty hard and fast locked to its genre. You could, in older editions, play a Pict, a Welshman, a Saxon, or a Viking, but they were still basically landed warriors or similar. Adventures might vary based on the sorts of characters in use, but modern versions stick to stuff that is pretty much Mallory straight up. It isn't a super gritty sort of game, but the GM does pretty much make up the adventures in a rather classic fashion.

Between the two, Pendragon and Prince Valiant, I always thought the later game was the fundamentally stronger design. Pendragon is flirting with some of the more narrativist ideas to a degree, but I think PV's design just does KA stuff better. But for whatever reason PV has not had as much love, though it did get reissued a few years ago (and Pendragon has a fairly current edition too I think).

I'm familiar with Pendragon (by the way, I'm reading the new boxed set right now, and it absolutely has skills that are rolled on whenever appropriate, so I'm not sure where you're getting that from). I wanted to know about Prince Valiant, also written by Kevin Stafford, which you spoke very little about, other than to say it's "stronger". I assume that means it fits your preferences better, as they're no other viable metric.

How does Prince Valiant work compared to Pendragon, and how does it play? Please.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Upthread you said 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."

Hunger for gold is a factor inherent to the rogue.

Now you seem to be adding some additional constraint - eg that the resolution only have regard to elements of the fiction that, in the fiction, matter causally to how the attempted thing would unfold. That is a much stronger constraint than the one I responded to!

Still a pretty reasonable constraint though, to my mind.

 

[payn]

I get character ideas too. If the dice and the system let me play them, I do. Otherwise I put it on the shelf and play a different idea, or come up with something on the spot based on what I'm given by the RNG. Plenty of characters in the sea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't want an answer in meme form, so if you can't just tell me your opinion, then nevermind.

 

[Umbran]

I don't want an answer in meme form, so if you can't just tell me your opinion, then nevermind.

Within the rules of the site, folks get to respond how they wish. Do remember that, while they may be responding to your post, it is not a private conversation - you are not the only audience.

 

[Tony Vargas]

They say a picture is worth a sounds words...
...but a gif uses more than 2k of disk space...

(this joke brought to you by the internet of the year 1990, and an old tech jargon meaning of 'word')

It affects the Rogue, though, and their ability to find the wealth that exists. The Rogue's hunger for gold should not make more wealth exist in the world to be found-- though what a wonderful world this would be, if wealthy billionaires actually worked that way!

Say's Law.
(Now, most economists don't actually buy into Say's law "Supply creates its own Demand" anymore, but it's not completely off base. The idea is that someone wanting something, be it specific or just 'wealth' creates whatever, and so do others, and, then, through a market, or even just barter, get what they want.) So, in fantasy, lust for gold leads to hording gold, lack of money to pay for things gold can buy drives mining, which causes the accumulation of more gold, which the Thief steals, then a dragon eats the thief and hordes the gold. It's like the cycle of life or the velocity of money or something...

 

[hawkeyefan]

Inventory system

How is this non-diegetic? It all happens within the fictional game world.

Flashbacks

This is similar. This is all established in the game world. Yes, the player calls for one, but aside from the timing of it, the character is the one doing everything. It's just something that's established retroactively in play.

But there's plenty of that which happens in more traditional play.

Any ability that lets a player spend stress to use an ability. (Player facing Resource pools nearly always are non diegetic). *magic can be a notable exception as it can work in fiction exactly how the mechanics say.

But Stress is a thing in the game world... it's something that builds up and of which the characters are aware. They have to actively take action to reduce stress.

Any ability where the player gets to define success - Basic play loop in Blades constantly does this. Characters in the fiction don’t get to define what success looks like. (Intent based mechanics tend to lean toward non diegetic - because fictional intent doesn’t impact what happens in the fiction).

How do you figure that characters don't define what success looks like? The player states the goal of the action roll... I want to stab this guy, I want to climb that wall, I want to convince this Bluecoat to turn a blind eye.... that's success defined. The goal is stated before the roll is made.

None of those action declarations would be out of place in D&D or most other games.

Whether full success is achieved or not depends on a roll of the dice.

 

[MichaelSomething]

How come no one brought up Race as class and other racial class restrictions? Gygax made those rules to enforce a human centric narrative!

 

[Fenris-77]

How is this non-diegetic? It all happens within the fictional game world.



This is similar. This is all established in the game world. Yes, the player calls for one, but aside from the timing of it, the character is the one doing everything. It's just something that's established retroactively in play.

But there's plenty of that which happens in more traditional play.



But Stress is a thing in the game world... it's something that builds up and of which the characters are aware. They have to actively take action to reduce stress.



How do you figure that characters don't define what success looks like? The player states the goal of the action roll... I want to stab this guy, I want to climb that wall, I want to convince this Bluecoat to turn a blind eye.... that's success defined. The goal is stated before the roll is made.

None of those action declarations would be out of place in D&D or most other games.

Whether full success is achieved or not depends on a roll of the dice.

I think the use in this thread of several different terms to talk about the same ideas is perhaps confusing the issue. If we change adiegetic there to narrative (as I defined it upstream as mechanics that aren't based on possible character decisions in the moment) then those BitD mechanics do seem a little different from the basic attack mechanics or whatever in most games. Personally, I would agree that all three are primarily diegetic for much the same reasons as you outline but I also think that the issues some gamers have with those mechanics aren't actually anything to do with diegetic or not. As we are primarily discussing this at the theory level I think mechanics like flashbacks are different enough in important ways that they should probably have their own descriptor.

Specifically on the issue of dice pools I think a lot depends on the specifics. Stress in BitD, for example, I quite like because it is fairly easy to explain diegetically. Anyone who's ever played sports or done anything, really, that is stressful knows the feeling of being able to summon up reserves of energy and also completely running out of gas. That's not a scientific answer but it makes enough diegetic sense that it doesn't bother me from, say, an immersion standpoint.

 

[pemerton]

People will hold differing views on the things you mentioned and they don’t consistently fall into a clear category for all of them.

On these boards the divisions are actually very clear. See eg this post: https://www.enworld.org/threads/supposing-d-d-is-gamist-what-does-that-mean.687974/post-8623492