D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[AbdulAlhazred]

Ok, now that you are done with the ad hominem argument against me, maybe you can try to adress the substance of the matter? My posts in this matter has mainly been me phrasing my understanding of what @The Firebird has tried to explain. He at least claim experience in games that claim to more or less ensure nar play from my understanding. So has he managed to play these games wrong? Or have I completely misunderstood his posts, despite him liking quite a few of them, including the quoted? Or is there anything substantial you can contribute with to explain how the fundamental analysis is wrong?

Mind you, I think noone claim playing these game feels the way described. From my end it has been an attempt at bringing to light a subtle bias these games appear to produce that are likely to cause some, but not catastrophic inteference with the illusion of an independent world. Firebird in his testimony also attested to that, that he didn't observe this (conciously) before GM-ing himself, but that it did affect his experience at least to some extent after that.

(@The Firebird , sorry if I misgendered you - I tend to try to avoid pronouns, but in this case it became too demanding. Went for he by default)

First of all, there's a somewhat different attitude towards characters and roles. Trad play is fundamentally rooted in a competitive skill-test model of play where the GM's goal is to play the opponents. So, in that model of roles, the idea of trying to subvert this opposition by some meta-channel is a viable concept. But this kind of arrangement of roles is absent in Narrativist play. I'm exploring the nature of my character, and/or possibly some other elements of the fiction that form the premise. There's no concept of petitioning anyone. I can propose fiction, or interpretations of fiction, perhaps enact them.

You're fundamentally misunderstanding what the roles are and what is being accomplished. I'm in no position to critique other poster's play of systems like Dungeon World, but DW particularly, but not uniquely, is well-known to often be played as largely a trad/neo-traddish game. Hell, the developers of DW2e have literally absolved themselves of any notion of Narrativist play. IMHO they are not even understanding what that is. So, yes, I am deeply skeptical of the idea that someone ran a certain game system means they're particularly well-versed in the style. As with other types of play there's also different opinions on certain things.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think FFG's Star Wars/Genesys demonstrates that the full suite of tiered success can work in a trad(leaning) system if it's built with it in mind. Though I don't think it would take much effort to retrofit it to D&D - tiered DCs are a common enough houserule.

There's a fair bit of that baked into some elements of Pathfinder 2e, and it didn't seem to break anything.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Metacurrencies are often considered narrative, because you use them not to do the best manipulation of the rules (which would be gamist), and are instead used to make the resulting story turn out as you want it.

Well, honestly, they can be used for either and often are used for both at the same time (i.e. improving success at a critical moment).

 

[Pedantic]

It might be better to pick a different one. There are clearly two different conceptions of agency...and both sides think their method leads to more agency.

Perhaps we can frame them as agency as player and agency as character.

When I as a player say "my character examines these runes" or "my character picks the lock", I am asserting agency as a character. My character interacts with the world and to the extent that the world is fixed my character's actions have specific effects that can improve the game state.

When I say "I hope the runes are this", roll and that becomes reality, I'm asserting agency as a player. Or perhaps an author? I'm authoring new fiction to generate the outcome my character hoped for.

My point is that these two types of agency are opposed. For agency as character to be meaningful, the actions must be interacting with an objective game state. If I read the runes, get a 10+, and they turn out to be beneficial, I didn't exercise meaningful agency as character because I didn't take a specific action which improved the game state. Instead the roll led to meta result of good and the player was permitted to author some new fiction.

From the character's perspective...the author is still not me. It is someone else. And the fact that someone else can roll dice and see what happens with my life, and this takes precedence over the actions I choose to take, means I have very little agency indeed.

I've tried to express this difference as "narrative" or "creative" agency vs. "ludic" agency. The latter often constrains the former. My test for ludic agency is "how could a player, trying to do well, play badly, ideally in a non-trivial way?"

If you can't present a case of poor tactics or strategy, then you probably aren't describing an activity with gameplay, though it may still be playful.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think one of the strange things is that sometimes metacurrencies are just currencies. There is nothing meta about Willpower in World of Darkness or Strings in Monsterhearts. They're just abstractions of diegetic phenomenon.

While the line is fine, part of it is that the degree to which people could actually discuss them as phenomena in-setting varies. Metacurrancy-that-has-an-actual-in-world-existence are definitely a thing, though, and go all the way back to Luck, or in the most blatant case, TORG Possibilities.

 

[clearstream]

It might be better to pick a different one. There are clearly two different conceptions of agency...and both sides think their method leads to more agency.

Perhaps we can frame them as agency as player and agency as character.

When I as a player say "my character examines these runes" or "my character picks the lock", I am asserting agency as a character. My character interacts with the world and to the extent that the world is fixed my character's actions have specific effects that can improve the game state.

When I say "I hope the runes are this", roll and that becomes reality, I'm asserting agency as a player. Or perhaps an author? I'm authoring new fiction to generate the outcome my character hoped for.

My point is that these two types of agency are opposed. For agency as character to be meaningful, the actions must be interacting with an objective game state. If I read the runes, get a 10+, and they turn out to be beneficial, I didn't exercise meaningful agency as character because I didn't take a specific action which improved the game state. Instead the roll led to meta result of good and the player was permitted to author some new fiction.

From the character's perspective...the author is still not me. It is someone else.

That's an interesting take!

I wonder if the problem can be restated in terms of the lusory-trinity (player as author, actor, audience)? It would go something like, as a player when I author part of the fiction I remove the possibility of reaching that narrative state through my acting. But isn't that equally true if someone else authors that part of the fiction? At first glance, the difference seems to be more about sincerity rather than agency.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, quite. That should probably tell you something. Even @Hussar, who doesn't align with those self-identified simulationists, defines it in a way that's contrary to Edwards and Tuovinen.

Well, in my case I think its malformed, butting together two things that I absolutely don't think are normally part of a common agenda for many people.

 

[The Firebird]

I wonder if the problem can be restated in terms of the lusory-trinity (player as author, actor, audience)? It would go something like, as a player when I author part of the fiction I remove the possibility of reaching that narrative state through my acting. But isn't that equally true if someone else authors that part of the fiction? At first glance, the difference seems to be more about sincerity rather than agency.

I think it is can be equally true if someone else authors that part of the fiction, but it depends a lot on how the fiction is authored. @Enrahim had some nice posts about this a while back. From what I recall, the point is that the GM is constrained in authoring that part of the fiction by the fixed details of the world.

For example, in the rune case, if you go to investigate and the GM says "hmm, I think it would be nice for the players to get out of here. Let's make it a map", then you aren't exercising much agency as actor, because the GM's authorship overrides your decisions as actor.

But if the world had already been authored such that the runes are a map, then the GM has to present them as a map. Then you exercise a lot of agency as actor, because the direction of the fiction is deterministic with respect to your decisions.

 

[clearstream]

I've come to believe you can't evaluate agency, in the sense of gameplay, without explaining the goal and the evaluation of victory. Agency doesn't exist without a purpose it can be applied to; if there isn't an evaluable goal, then the question is meaningless. You have to want something for any discussion of your ability to get it to take place.

I'm not sure about the "evaluation of victory" part. What did you have in mind there?

Omitted is something about intended obstacles and skills, or experiences. Bernard Suits covers all this quite well in The Grasshopper.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know, really. I have asked people to share examples of this Doylist influence a player has that would be specific to narrativist games... but no one has really offered anything other than their vague idea that this is how these games generally work. If you can tell me what you mean, then that may allow me to elaborate.

I think that in most cases, settings in narrativist games are not as set in stone as those in trad games, and that is to allow players to help shape the setting... but I don't know if this is through Doylist influence.

Absent that, my original point was that exploration of setting is generally not as big a part of narrativist games. I mean, it may be an element... certainly, Stonetop involves physical exploration of the geography, and Spire involves navigating the strange city that gives the game its name... but neither is the focus of play. They are just elements.




But the die roll is made because of the player wanting something, attempting an action of some sort. What happens next is therefore based on what the player was attempting and how that attempt went. That's the player driving the game.

I'm not sure Watsonian vs Doylist is the same thing as Trad vs Narrativist. Our play is as much 1st person reasoning as the character as trad play! I do both, and the notion that one is a kind of analysis of narrative from outside is not valid. In fact most real play is not 100% one or the other. Or at least much of it looks the same.