lordabdul
Explorer
The more I'm reading about narrative RPGs, and the more I'm confused about what they're supposed to be. This post above is the first I've seen in a long time that actually makes sense to me!
I mean, mechanics are always in a sense invoked to create interesting changes in the story.... even in a "standard" game like D&D you do a Stealth roll not purely because you're stealthing, but because the GM decides that it would be narratively interesting to know if the story goes that way (the PCs sneak into the house) or another way (they get caught). If, for some reason, there's nothing interesting or desirable from the "get caught" outcome, the GM might not ask for a roll at all... although I guess we're getting into the fact that the "narrative" aspect of an RPG is as much a factor of how the GM runs it as what mechanics are used (a simulationist GM might always ask for a roll). But in the end, the fact that there was a house to break into, that it needed being stealthy, whether it's easy or not, etc... is mostly the GM's doing. If that scene is narratively satisfying within the overall arc, and whether it's in line with the game's expected tropes (the house might be a high fantasy castle, or a gritty cyperpunk corporation HQ, or a tower with a princess in a romantic medieval tale) would all be mostly resting on the GM's shoulders.
A "storygame" however might encode more of the expected tropes in the rules. The fact that a romantic medieval tale expects a knight to, say, be madly in love might be encoded as special mechanics (like traits/passions in Pendragon). This gives incentive, or a least a framework, to players to follow the tropes of the genre being played in. As such, this removes some of that burden from the GM's shoulders. And the tropes could be completely structural instead of thematic. For instance, most stories follow an arc structure where protagonists go through a series of low and high "states". So HeroQuest does that: it gives guidelines/rules for the GM to set the difficulty of a task (like breaking into that castle/HQ/tower) based on whether we are in, say, the beginning of Act 2, or the end of Act 2. Of course, again, the GM doesn't necessarily need to run HeroQuest to do that, they can do it in D&D, but it requires reverse engineering a few things.
So basically I'm leaning towards a definition where a system is more/less a "storygame" ("narrative RPG") if it does more/less offload narrative GM duties into mechanics. These mechanics can be either incentive-based mechanics, where players act according to the tropes without realizing it (like CoC's SAN system making players cover their eyes to not see the monsters), or they can be explicit mechanics that tell the GM or, more often, the players how to act and/or what to do next.
I'm wondering if it's more a matter of incentives to follow established tropes, or something?
I mean, mechanics are always in a sense invoked to create interesting changes in the story.... even in a "standard" game like D&D you do a Stealth roll not purely because you're stealthing, but because the GM decides that it would be narratively interesting to know if the story goes that way (the PCs sneak into the house) or another way (they get caught). If, for some reason, there's nothing interesting or desirable from the "get caught" outcome, the GM might not ask for a roll at all... although I guess we're getting into the fact that the "narrative" aspect of an RPG is as much a factor of how the GM runs it as what mechanics are used (a simulationist GM might always ask for a roll). But in the end, the fact that there was a house to break into, that it needed being stealthy, whether it's easy or not, etc... is mostly the GM's doing. If that scene is narratively satisfying within the overall arc, and whether it's in line with the game's expected tropes (the house might be a high fantasy castle, or a gritty cyperpunk corporation HQ, or a tower with a princess in a romantic medieval tale) would all be mostly resting on the GM's shoulders.
A "storygame" however might encode more of the expected tropes in the rules. The fact that a romantic medieval tale expects a knight to, say, be madly in love might be encoded as special mechanics (like traits/passions in Pendragon). This gives incentive, or a least a framework, to players to follow the tropes of the genre being played in. As such, this removes some of that burden from the GM's shoulders. And the tropes could be completely structural instead of thematic. For instance, most stories follow an arc structure where protagonists go through a series of low and high "states". So HeroQuest does that: it gives guidelines/rules for the GM to set the difficulty of a task (like breaking into that castle/HQ/tower) based on whether we are in, say, the beginning of Act 2, or the end of Act 2. Of course, again, the GM doesn't necessarily need to run HeroQuest to do that, they can do it in D&D, but it requires reverse engineering a few things.
So basically I'm leaning towards a definition where a system is more/less a "storygame" ("narrative RPG") if it does more/less offload narrative GM duties into mechanics. These mechanics can be either incentive-based mechanics, where players act according to the tropes without realizing it (like CoC's SAN system making players cover their eyes to not see the monsters), or they can be explicit mechanics that tell the GM or, more often, the players how to act and/or what to do next.
