Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5761782" data-attributes="member: 42582">If you look at how the notion of "narrativism" is actually used by Ron Edwards, I think you'll see that that definition is too narrow. For example, Edwards (correctly, IMO) identifies The Dying Earth as aimed at narrativist play, but it isn't aimed at resolving the sort of premise described in the official definition. It's aimed at producing cynical humour in the course of play.I tend to think of "narrativist" play in terms of the actual way The Forge uses the term, then, rather than the official definition - something like play aimed at producing something worthwhile from an evaluative/aesthetic perspective. This can be heavy, moral(-ish) stuff of the sort that Paul Czege produces, or lighter narrativism of The Dying Earth variety, where the aesthetic goal is humour. My game is certainly lighter than something like My Life With Master or Nicotine Girls. It's closer to 70s and 80s Marvel supers - fairly commonplace thematic stuff of the sort one might do using mainstream fantasy tropes.I think a lot of this is fairly easily achieved without having to drift very far (and not at all on action resolution, I don't think). It's all in encounter building and treasure awards.As you say, the game points in the right general direction. If, as a GM, one builds encounters that pick up on those pointers, and has players who are interested in following those pointers, then nothing else needs to be done to make those issues emerge in play (for example, the action resolution mechanics, at least in my experience, doesn't make the game get bogged down in something else, like the minutiae of polearms or of exactly how hard it is to set a library on fire).If treasure parcels are decoupled from killing enemies - very easily done - and follow wish lists put forward by players interested in following the thematic pointers, then there is no reward mechanism pulling away from the narrativist goal of play. It's equally true that there is no mechanism like (for example) the BW artha cycle to reinforce that goal, but as long as everyone at the table is on the same page, the game isn't prone to throwing up distractions and red herrings (quite different in this respect from more purist-for-system games, at least as I've experienced them).As for your point about resolution, this is what (I hope) epic tier will be for. I already found the whole idea of taking a paragon path a very good opportunity to push the players into making some meaningful choices that ramify very interestingly in the themtically-oriented aspects of the fiction. This, I think, is the biggest drifting in the way my group has approached the game, because the rules as written are pretty silent about the story dimension of gaining a paragon path (or an epic destiny).</blockquote>

Verification