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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5637840" data-attributes="member: 42582">In my post above, I cited Ron Edwards discussing fortune in the middle:Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates Narrativist play . . . It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent goofsBy chance, I was just reading an extract from a new FR sourcebook on the WotC side, and came across this "grandmaster training" power that PCs can acquire:Drizzt’s Kick * Level 8 Uncommon Drizzt innovated this attack when he found his swords locked with an opponent during training in Menzoberranzan. <snip> Daily Attack (Minor Action) Requirement: You must have missed an enemy with a melee attack during this turn. Effect: You make a melee basic attack against the same enemy. On a hit, the enemy grants combat advantage until the end of your next turn.Why is this interesting? Compare the flavour text and the requirement: they show that the 4e designers acknowledge that a miss, in 4e, need not be a feeble or failed attempt, but could in fact represent expert ability thwarted by an equally expert foe ("locked swords").Here is another pertinent <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/" target="_blank">quote from Ron Edwards</a>:Gamist and Narrativist play often share the following things: *Common use of player Author Stance (Pawn or non-Pawn) to set up the arena for conflict; *Fortune-in-the-middle during resolution, to whatever degree - the point is that Exploration as such can be deferred, rather than established at every point during play in a linear fashion. *More generally, Exploration overall is negotiated in a casual fashion through ongoing dialogue, using system for input (which may be constraining), rather than explicitly delivered by system per se.This seems to me to capture 4e pretty well. I think it helps explain why Balesir, chaochou and other can play gamist 4e, and I can play narrativsit 4e, without anyone having to do a great deal of rewriting or ignoring of the rules.And here's another quote, <a href="http://www.lumpley.com/hardcore.html" target="_blank">this time from Vincent Baker</a>, about the relationship between play and narration:In your game, the game you're actually playing, a) in which stage does invention happen, and b) in which stage does meaning happen? Invention - creating setting, character, nifty toys, potent powers - invention can happen before the game or during the game. (It can't really happen after the game, can it?) A game where the invention happens mostly pre-play would be one where there are maps, characters, factions, technology, societies, interests, all in place when the game begins. I can't think of a good example of this in fiction - maybe Babylon 5? - but clearly lots of roleplaying happens this way. Look at all the dang setting books! A game where the invention happens mostly during play would have the same list of things, maps characters societies etc., but they'd be created at need as the game progresses. We have one serious bazillion examples of this from fiction: Howard wrote Conan this way, their writers wrote Farscape and Buffy this way, and lots of roleplaying happens this way too. It's underrepresented in rpg books because it doesn't call for or produce 'em. . . Similarly, meaning: A game where the meaning happens mostly pre-play is one in which somebody or everybody has something to say and already knows what it is when the game starts. You can always tell these games: the GM expects his or her villains and their schemes to be absolutely gripping, but they aren't; the players keep wanting to play their characters as well as the characters deserve, but it's not happening. I make my character a former slave but when it comes up in play it's because I force it to, and my fellow players dodge eye contact and the GM wants to get on with the plot. A game where the meaning happens mostly during play is also easy to spot: everybody gets it and is engaged. Other players than me are into my former-slave character, and when she gets passionate about something, the other players hold their breaths. The GM lets the players pick the villains through their PCs' judgements, then plays them aggressively and directed-ly and hard. Every session is hot. Nobody sacrifices the integrity of his or her character for the sake of staying together as a party or solving the GM's mystery - the action comes right out of the characters' passions. And a game where the meaning happens mostly post-play - telling it is better than it was. Sometimes there'll be one person, the GM or the GM's favorite player, whose needs the game mostly met, and if you talk to that person the game will sound rockin', but if you talk to the other players, it'll sound eh. If people talk afterward about how cool this kind of game was, they'll talk about highlights that happened once every three, four, five sessions - as though a game with one gripping, thrilling, passionate moment per twenty hours of play were a successful game. My goal as a gamer and a game designer is to push both invention and meaning as much as possible into actual play. Problem: the hobby, represented by the books in your game store and the conventional habits of most gamers, prefers the pre-game over the game. . . The solution is to design games that're inspiring, but daydreaming about how much fun the game will be to play seems pointless and lame, and you can't create extensive histories or backstories because that stuff's collaborative - - so you call a friend.And while I'm quoting better theories than The Alexandrian's, here's Baker on GNS (on the same page):So you have some people sitting around and talking. Some of the things they say are about fictional characters in a fictional world. During the conversation the characters and their world aren't static: the people don't simply describe them in increasing detail, they (also) have them do things and interact. They create situations - dynamic arrangements of characters and setting elements - and resolve them into new situations. . . Why are they doing this? What do they get out of it? For now, let's limit ourselves to three possibilities: they want to Say Something (in a lit 101 sense), they want to Prove Themselves, or they want to Be There. What they want to say, in what way they want to prove themselves, or where precisely they want to be varies to the particular person in the particular moment. Are there other possibilities? Maybe. Certainly these three cover an enormous variety, especially as their nuanced particulars combine in an actual group of people in actual play. Over time, that is, over many many in-game situations, play will either fulfill the players' creative agendas or fail to fulfill them. . . As in pretty much any kind of emergent pattern thingy, whether the game fulfills the players' creative agendas depends on but isn't predictable from the specific structure they've got for negotiating situations. No individual situation's evolution or resolution can reveal a) what the players' creative agendas are or b) whether they're being fulfilled. Especially, limiting your observation to the in-game contents of individual situations will certainly blind you to what the players are actually getting out of the game. That's GNS in a page. I don't think I've said anything here that Ron Edwards hasn't been saying. I do think that I've said it in mostly my own words.I think 4e is a particularly unsatisfactory RPG for those who not only want to be there, but want to get there by daydreaming before play even starts.</blockquote>

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