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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6682355" data-attributes="member: 42582">I'm not sure what you mean by "narrative mechanics". From my point of view there are two main devices/techniques that support "story now" play. One is player authorship of backstory as an adjunct to action resolution. The other is player authorship of backstory as an adjunct to scene framing.The first mechanics that I know of that both permitted and also regulated player authorship in relation to action resolution were the James Bond RPG's fate points (Bond points? I know the game by reputation, not first hand). This is from the early to mid 80s. But informal player authorship was a big part of RPGing before that - you can see it rife in early D&D (spells, new/variant mechanics, whole classes in some cases). You can also see Gygax starting to crack down on it in his DMG, for instance in the attack upon monsters as PCs (whereas in the original D&D books monsters as PCs was lauded, not condemned).As was debated at length in another thread a year or two ago on a similar topic, Classic Traveller's Streetwise skill in effect permits player authorship, by letting the results of a Streetwise roll determine what sort of contraband might be available on a particular world. (This is an odd intrusion of "indie" techniques into an otherwise straight-down-the-line process-sim game.)As far as player authorship connected to scene framing - ie the players hooking the GM rather than vice versa - I mentioned some of the origins of this upthread. You can see it in Champions/HERO relationships. I also mentioned the case of Oriental Adventures' family/mentor/etc rules. These are early-to-mid-80s.<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Here is Ron Edwards on "story now" play in the context of early RPGs</a>:I think that Narrativist play goes back to the beginning of role-playing. Yes, a "non-Narrativism" shroud descended over role-playing design and publishing, but I think that dates from the mid-late 1980s. In other words, the "Narrativist revolution" of 2000-2003 is not an innovation, but a return to a lost art. Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some Tunnels & Trolls, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". I also recommend reading and playing Marvel Super Heroes, reviewing the entire Strike Force text in light of the 1st and 2nd editions of Champions being used by that group, reviewing the extensive documentation of Champions play presented in the APA-zine The Clobberin Times', and giving Toon, Ghostbusters, and James Bond a try. I am not saying "These are Narrativist games," but rather, evidence supports the claim that these rules-sets supported some Narrativist play back then.In other words, indie games didn't invent this stuff from whole cloth. They built on existing RPG practices and techniques.An important <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">point that Edwards makes</a>, and that is relevant to thinking about games like 4e or 13th Age as well as some of these earlier games, is thatStep On Up is actually quite similar, in social and interactive terms, to Story Now. Gamist and Narrativist play often share [a range of techniques] . . . one or the other of the two modes has to be "the point," and they don't share well - but unlike either's relationship with Simulationist play (i.e., a potentially hostile one), Gamist and Narrativist play don't tug-of-war over "doing it right" - they simply avoid one another, like the same-end poles of two magnets. Note, I'm saying play, not players. The activity of play doesn't hybridize well between Gamism and Narrativism, but it does shift, sometimes quite easily.RPGs like D&D and Champions were designed to give players lots of mechanical decision-making points, both in PC-building and in action resolution. Those decision-making points can provide the input for gamist play, but also for narrativist play. It is the move to simulationism in the mid-to-late-80s that marks the transition to the sort of play that you, Saelorn, are characterising as the paradigm of RPGing.In some simulationist games, like say RQ and CoC, players are deprived of mechanical decision-making points. More common, I think, is the AD&D 2nd ed, or WW, approach, in which an ethos is developed that players should only engage with those decision points from an in-character point of view. That is, the game mechanics permit just as much metagaming as was common in classic D&D play, but the instructional text is full of mantras about metagaming being a bad thing. This was not part of RPGing in its origins. (Eg look at Gygax's advice to players on the closing pages of his PHB before the Appendices. It is pure metagaming, beginning with a discussion of how to choose the right PCs from a stable of characters, and ending with advice on how not to be outmanoeuvred by the GM's dungeon-building tricks. The notion of in-character play does not figure at all!)</blockquote>

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