Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
White Dwarf Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Nest
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions, OSR, & D&D Variants
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
EN Publishing
Twitter
BlueSky
Facebook
Instagram
EN World
BlueSky
YouTube
Facebook
Twitter
Twitch
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions, OSR, & D&D Variants
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Narrative Games - three very distinct categories
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="lordabdul" data-source="post: 7855043" data-attributes="member: 6994956"><p>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!</p><p></p><p></p><p>I'm wondering if it's more a matter of incentives to follow established tropes, or something?</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="lordabdul, post: 7855043, member: 6994956"] 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'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. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*TTRPGs General
Narrative Games - three very distinct categories
Top