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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6031066" data-attributes="member: 42582">I thought I'd ignore your last sentence and say something in reply to this!The Forge places a lot of emphasis on incoherence in game design, and also the idea of drifting. For a lot of traditional RPGs, I think these two ideas are important to understanding their use in narrativist play.For me, Oriental Adventures (the mid-80s version) was the first RPG supplement to really lead me to the sort of vanilla-narrativist approach that I like. Of course it was incoherent in the Forge sense. Edwards talks in one of his essays about Lot5R being incoherent because it simultaneously asks questions about honour, and purports to answer them. Here are some <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">relevant</a> <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">quotes</a>, and they can also be applied to OA:AD&D2, Vampire, and Legend of the Five Rings are especially good examples of incoherent design that ends up screwing the Simulationist. You have Gamist character creation, with Narrativist rhetoric (especially in Vampire). You have High Concept Simulationist resolution, which is to say, easily subverted by Gamism because universal consistency is de-emphasized. And finally, you have sternly-worded "story" play-context, which in practice becomes game-author-to-GM co-conspiracy. . . L5R . . . in the absence of Drifting, poses some irreconcilable problems in how its behavioral parameters are constructed, such that it simultaneously asks about Honor and dictates the answers. . . Legend of the Five Rings . . . require<s> extensive Drifting to achieve even halting Narrativist play despite considerable thematic content.</s><s></s><s></s><s>Mid-80s OA has much the same design inchorence - gamist PC creation (roll 4d6, etc), incoherent resolution which lends itself to breaking (eg some of the martial arts builds), and considerable thematic content that tries both to ask about, and dictate answers about, honour.</s><s></s><s>But it can be drifted fairly easily - play down the alignment rules, use the honour mechanics as a focus of contention rather than a club to beat your players with, and play up the thematic stuff about the Celestial Bureaucracy, a world of spirits and monsters, etc.</s><s></s><s>The development of my RPGing since then has been gradually working out (i) how to get rid of those elements of action resolution that distract from theme, conflict and tight scene framing, by pulling the focus onto mundane process (timekeeping and the petty resource management associated with it is a prime example of this), and (ii) how to handle thematic material and adjudication of action resolution so that things neither climax too early, nor sputter out. (The end run of Claremont's X-Men in the early 90s I regard as a prime exmaple of sputtering out, and my first big Rolemaster campaign ended in the same ignomious way.)</s><s></s><s>For me, 4e has several features thatmeans it doesn't need much drifting to support vanilla narrativism - ie play focused on theme, with the players having genuine freedom over action resolution so that the story that emerges is not predetermined by anyone, but an emergent consequence of my scene framing around their PCs, and their engagement via their PCs with the conflicts I set up: (i) plenty of thematically rich story elements; (ii) almost no mundane process elements to action resolution; (iii) action resolution mechanics that support the right sort of pacing for those thematic elements to emerge; (iv) action resolution mechanics that generally don't break, and that minimise the need for GM force to make things resolve; (v) PC build mechanics that generally don't break, thereby allowing the players to push hard without having to worry about a breaking of the game.</s><s></s><s>My drifting has been pretty minimal. At the start of the game, I directed that each players' PC must (i) have a reason to be ready to fight goblins, and (ii) must have some loyalty to someone/something else. These aren't quite at the level of Sorcerer "kickers", or Burning Wheel beliefs, but were the PC-authored "hooks" on which I have hung various encounters and scenarios. Of course, as the game unfolds these backgrounds get developed, added to and extended in play. I use paragon paths and other PC build choices to inform this, which is probably a type of mild drifting. And I also use thematic considerations to inform page 42 adjudications (as per my examples posted upthread in response to Hussar), and that's probably also a mild drifting. But these drifting don't require correcting any incoherence. They are additions rather than alterations to the game as presented.</s><s></s><s>I think the game I'm describing is very obviously not My Life With Master, Sorcecer or Dogs in the Vineyard. It's not even Burning Wheel. But a narrativist game doesn't have to be like them. Narrativism isn't defined by any particular set of funky techniques. It's about (i) putting theme front and centre in play, and (ii) letting the players make genuine choices about how they engage it, and hence about what the overall play of the game says in response to it. I think any version of D&D can probably be drifted this way, and 4e is particularly suitable because it lacks many of the traditional D&D mechanics that get in the way of narrativist drifting.</s></blockquote>

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