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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7913473" data-attributes="member: 4937">So, it occurs to me that we might not be talking about exactly the same things.When I talk about "character driven" play, what I imagine is play that revolves around exploration of a characters feelings and beliefs.  "Character driven" play usually involves low melodrama and is focused on intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts.   It mostly involves a whole lot of talking and involves play that is what Forge calls "actor stance" and often involves players using method acting techniques to get inside the head of a character and experience that characters emotions.   It involves the fantasy of being an alternate self.   You barely need any rules for it.  Your average four year old engaged in make believe has some amount of character driven play going on, and often has more real character driven play going on that your average table of adult RPG players.To successfully engage in "character driven" play you need a table of players that all consent to it. The most important thing in character driven play is to be willing to be a sounding board for another player and to not be trying to win. Most attempts at character driven play I observe at tables fail either because the players lack the skills to respond to character driven hooks offered up by another player, or if they do respond the respond in a stance of trying to win as if a challenge has been offered up, often very obviously from a stance of real life annoyance because they feel the player is distracting from the "real game". Basically, if you have anyone at the table that has a 0% in how much value they perceive in character driven play, then you really aren't going to be successful with it as a player, or in fostering it as a GM. This is one of two reasons why "character driven" play as an aesthetic of play favors small groups. The other reason is that character driven play is slow and inherently puts spot light on a few players at once. If you have more than three or so persons engaged in low melodrama at a time, you have cacophony. Think about how a soap opera tends to put characters in two and threes, and allows the story to develop through interactions between individuals. This means that everyone has to be willing to wait there turn while people are involved in scenes, and the more people you have the harder that is. If you do have a large group that wants to play low melodrama, the most functional arrangement is little or no GM moderation and engaging in some sort of LARP where people can break into smaller groups to perform scenes. On the other hand, "narrative driven" play is any sort of play that focuses on the production of a story. Such play may or may not be "character driven" just as some stories aren't really character driven. Most often in RPGs you see narrative driven play in high melodrama, that is, involving contests between groups and ideological forces of which the characters are representatives or even archetypes. Where "character driven" play depends explicitly on the skill of the players, "narrative driven" play often depends explicitly on the skill of the GM to both lay out appropriate conflicts, and also to improvise creatively and opaquely to the players actions so that regardless of what the PCs do, it feels like the story is continuing in a meaningful manner. The common campaign format of "Adventure Paths" is designed to produce narrative driven play. In my experience though, it usually fails at this by offering too rigid of a framework, and most GMs simply fail to have the improvisational skills to keep the story going in a naturalistic way where the actions of the players seem to matter. This is the real failing of for example, the "Chronicles of the Dragon Lance". The possibility of a grand epic narrative is certainly there, but most players probably only experienced a railroad because it's entirely improbable that a DM wouldn't have to play the story out differently than it was laid out.I've certainly experienced really great narrative play in a wide variety of systems, and I really feel that it is - like character driven play - independent of the system because the things that make it work work just as well without a system, playing make believe.   One thing though that bothers me is the difference between creation of story through play and creation of story through meta-play.   Just as [USER=29398]@Lanefan[/USER] suggested that one way to get character driven play is to do it in the downtime, many independent or modern game systems seem to throw up their hands at the idea of creating narrative through actual play, and instead try a variety of techniques for creating narrative through meta-play.  For example, they may encourage you to retroactively and collectively craft a story explaining what just happened.  They may encourage the group to brainstorm about what the events of play meant, and to come to conclusions about how their character would respond to those events and mark some mechanical change in their character sheet.   And that annoys me to distraction, because we are no longer focused on creating good play, but on creating good transcripts of play.  Instead of experiencing a story through play, it seems like so many designers expect you to just produce the record of a story.   I consider this the difference in experience of being a character in a story, and being a member of a script writing team collectively producing a screenplay.   Both end up with a story, but the production of story wasn't in and of itself the experience I was going for.</blockquote>

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