Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="FrogReaver" data-source="post: 9625064" data-attributes="member: 6795602">I’m a bit behind on the thread but it seems to me like there are 2 meanings of find, discover, reveal, etc. being used in this discussion.I agree that narrativist games allow for a 'who-done-it' scenario without details preauthored and that this can/will produce an answer to that question through play.  In some sense whatever answer play produces can be called finding, discovering, revealing, etc. the answer to the mystery of 'who-done-it'.But when a solution is pre-authored and yet-to-be-found/discovered,revealed then that play produces both that same kind of finding, discovering, revealing etc. that was mentioned above, (usually producing a less interesting and compelling fiction in the process, narrativist games are great for more book/movie like narratives emerging from play) AND it produces a kind of finding, discovering, revealing, etc. that isn't present in narrativist games, namely, the finding, discovering, revealing, etc. of the preauthored solution.Definitionally that may be a bit tautological, but it's precisely the difference we are talking about.  So why does this difference matter?  Because knowledge of the fact of preauthorship impacts how the game is played, sometimes in process, sometimes in how players make decisions, and oftentimes in both.  Essentially it's the difference in what you love about narrativist games, and what we love about non-narrativist games.  (IMO, how players make decisions is one aspect narrativism doesn't emphasize enough due to it's focus on process and distribution of authority, but it's at the heart of where I see the differences arising).More broadly, this discussion is hard to have because the words we are using almost always apply to both game styles in some way.  We've went through this same exercise with 'fiction first' (albeit party roles were reversed).  We've went through it with 'player authorship' and 'agency'.  We don't have strong terms to delineate the differences and so we stay right at square one.</blockquote>

Verification