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The above is very close to the standard Narrativist model for situational play but I want to emphasises a few things. One big difference is that you almost always want to start with, at the very least, an implied connection between the agendas of the player characters and the NPC's. In other...

So to ramble on about it. Best interests were (and I think still are) Vincent's term for the motivating force of a character. As a game mechanic in IAWA, they're formalised so as create an unstable situation (characters in conflict) and to guide the GM in framing scenes (kind of). They're...

I believed the same thing for years and often said GNS would have gone over better if it was just a Narrativist manifesto. When I'd got a really clear idea of what I was doing, playing with a variety of other people changed my mind. It really does seem people fall into one of two camps, Gamist...

Gamers can be weird but if we're talking the human population as a whole, maybe half of them. I don't think they'd describe it in precisely those terms though.

Yeah very good point that I should have mentioned especially given that… In the example I gave it's the 'go aggro' mechanic (created by Vincent) that means Jill can't back out of her commitment to the threat which then forces escalation.

There are lots of configurations of moral crisis. I'm not a huge fan of Vincent's definition for that reason but it serves it's purpose. Here's an example of rising action through escalation. Jill has a sick brother and no money to pay her medical bills. So she decides to rob a bank She...

Well if a hypothetical you were interested in that type of stuff happening then you could create characters and setting that made it far more likely to happen. Then you could also use a system that operated on a granularity where those decisions weren't undercut by tactical choices, or put...

Yeah that's an important clarification. Back then it didn't refer to what it refers to now.

It was Luke Crane that coined it. I'm pretty sure I've read the thread where he did so but I'm not sure where it was, maybe storygames or Lumpley. It referred specifically to the Indiana Jones movies. At a guess I'd say maybe 2007 but possibly much earlier. It wasn't widely adopted amongst...

The framing of social conflict in a lot of those early games is a bit under developed. As a rule they don't want to force a priority change on you. Sorcerer for instance, uses a stick mechanic, you don't have to change your behaviour but your next action will be at negative dice relative to the...

Everyone knew every all the different characters goals, so similar to IAWA in that respect. I do actually think IAWA uses dice to resolve conflicts, it uses a system called the Anthology Engine. In the AE there are three conditions, shamed, injured, exhausted. Any given game uses two of them...

To create a story through resolution of a situation you need characters with conflicting wants and ethos. You put the characters together in scenes and see if things change between them and how. This is the situation in the last game I played in. There is a plague devastating the land of...

The rules text is a bit of mess because it doesn't seem to want to commit to anything. Its resolution system is the worst offender because the authors don't seem to know why they have one, then vast chunks of the book are dedicated to it. On the other hand, it's probably the best beginner...

This is why it's worth asking, why use resolution mechanics in the first place. What are they for? what's the fun of the game? The resolution mechanics fit within a broader framework, how does it all hang together? Take Apocalypse World and the cook. Now AW can be interpreted a few different...

Good call. I use this distinction all the time as a basic technique. One is very much in the vein of Apocalypse World where various 'things' are distinct threats and therefore implicitly in play as people as far as the resolution is concerned. It's great as a way of framing conflict resolution...

Oh yeah 100% agree.

Yeah I just found it amusing that you independently created a very similar demarcation. In GNS speak: Crumbly rocks is color, the nature of the writing in @pemertons example is actually color as well until the resolution system kicks in and then it gains situational positioning. I'm also not...

You probably picked up using the word color from conversations around GNS, which does have different categorisations for this stuff because it is extremely important for looking at how systems are different. To give a really clear example, there's a game called 'The pool'. When you win a roll...

Things can get weird because a lot of Narrativist best practices aren't actually best practices and what gets ported between games is obviously reliant on the group. The three most influential games on Narrativism used to be Sorcerer, Burning Wheel and Inspectres. They all had different...

I don't really buy that for the numerous reasons the 'Nar side' has gone over. I can give you my take on what's probably happening. Think of a scene as a chunk of stuff with entities in it. The entities can be people or even things, like a cliff face, numerous winding corridors, like discrete...