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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5745863" data-attributes="member: 42582">Even in narrativist play, I would say that the story is "what happened". But the mechanics and the play of the game are set up to ensure that what happens will be interesting - ie there will be drama with a thematic point. And it seems to me that BW with it belief system is likely to push in that direction.But I would agree that compared to TRoS or HeroWars/Quest, the narrativism would be of a more mechanically vanilla variety - as you note, there are no Spiritual Attributes or Relationship Mechanics to bring to bear. But then the same is true of 4e! - which (as you know) I still think can be easily bent to narrativist purposes because of other features of the design.Besides its belief mechanics, the other feature of BW that stands out to me is the reason that it gives to the players for having their PCs tackle challenges againt hopeless odds (namely, the advancement rules). This, in combination with the focus on intent rather than task in resolving failure, seems to be set up to encourage players to take their PCs where the action leads, even if their's no hope of success, and to make sure that GMs will build on that rather than just shut the PCs down. The mere fact that there are mechanics that discourage turtling/optimisation at every turn I think provides serious support for non-gamist, non-operational play.(As you also know, I think that 4e has mechanics that play a comparable functional role, and therefore differentiate it from earlier versions of  D&D as far as the support of various playstyles is concerned.)I know this post probably seems silly, trying to contradict the designers of a game in diagnosing the sort of play it might support - but a game whose slogan is "fight for what you believe in", and whose scenario design advice (in the Adventure Burner) can be summed up as "build situations that will force the players to make choices that ramify upon the goals/values that they have identified as their priorities for play", is just asking to be labelled with the narrativist tag.The attraction for me of BW is that, in many ways, it can be looked at as akin to Rolemaster or Runequest - purist-for-system PC build, very strong elements of purist-for-system in action resolution - but "done right", with just enough tweaks - "say yes", "let it ride", "intent rather than task as the focus of failure", and the belief mechanics feeding in on both the player and the GM side - to make it deliver the sort of player-drivien, situation-focused game that I think is very hard to get out of Runequest and reasonably hard to get out of Rolemaster (especially at low levels).</blockquote>

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