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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6682871" data-attributes="member: 6775031">Player authorship of backstory is one example of a narrative mechanic, since it involves the player reaching into the game world at an author-level and establishing things beyond just what the character is capable of. Note that, even before the game starts, the players can't establish anything about the world or its inhabitants without the GM explicitly declaring it to be so.The second type of narrative mechanic would be anything that happens because it's dramatic, or because it's a story, rather than accurately reflecting the nature of the game world. Savage Worlds is full of that sort of thing, where you would be called to make a check (with potentially fatal results), but you only need to roll when it would be dramatically appropriate.In other words, indie games didn't invent this stuff from whole cloth. They built on existing RPG practices and techniques.We all know that RPGs started from miniature wargames, and Gygax addresses them as though they were the same thing. Original D&D was intended as just a game, and the use of "role" in the name is more like the 4E usage as the role you play in the party, rather than the way an actor would use the term. (And we've all heard what Gygax had to say about wannabe play-actors.)For that reason, I don't consider early D&D to qualify as a real RPG, in the "role-playing" sense of the term. You could certainly role-play within it, if you were so inclined, but that wasn't the point and the rules were not designed to facilitate it. Or at least, there was no indication if that was supposed to be the point, and a very loud voice telling us that it wasn't.Just as fluff is inextricably linked to the crunch which represents it, though, the instructional text on how to apply the rules is every bit as much of a real rule as the number of HP you gain with each level. Thus, I would put the modern role-playing era at about the point when the rules actually told us to start role-playing rather than treating it as a board game. Anything before that is, at best, an unfinished idea or proto-RPG. If something like early Traveller asked the player to make a check in determining what was available in a certain region, rather than asking the GM to determine its existence and having the player make a check to try and locate it, then that's either because the game wasn't designed for in-character role-playing or the hobby was as-yet undeveloped to such a degree that they didn't know how to convey that appropriately.</blockquote>

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