NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9703318" data-attributes="member: 42582">The issue is not in-game time. In-game time can pass at the rate of seconds per hour of play, or years per hour of play, depending on how the participants and the system they are using choose to handle it.I'm talking about what play, at the table, is focused on. What it is about.This is why the notion of "what counts" is also misleading, in my view. I'm not talking about "tick a box" criteria. I'm talking about what sort of experience a group of RPGers is looking to get out of their play. If the play at your table is focused on rising conflict across a moral line as authored by the players, I think you will know: because what you will be focused on, as a player and as a group, is what the conflict is and how the characters, as played by their players, respond to it and what follows from those responses.I don't see Vincent as offering a definition, either in the sense of necessary and sufficient conditions or in the sense of offering an account of what narrativism "means". He's pointing to a type of paradigm or typical case.The first time I read <a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/_articles/narr_essay.html" target="_blank">Edwards's "story now" essay</a>, I could see that there were cases of narrativist play that didn't quite fit his "official" description: for instance, he correctly identifies Pelgrane's Dying Earth RPG as supporting narrativist play, because " its Situations are loaded with the requirement for satirical, judgmental input on the part of the players." However, that satirical, judgemental input will not necessarily mean that "at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence [is] addressed in the process of role-playing." It's likely to be a bit more wry and "meta" than, say, Burning Wheel or HeroWars/Quest play.Upthread I also pointed to my own BW play involving Aedhros, where the line over which the conflict arises is as much an ethical (ie self-regarded evaluative) as a moral (duties to others) line.Still, the idea that a question of value is put into play, and that play somehow "speaks" to it via player-decision-making, is what everyone is getting at. The contrast is being drawn with tactical play, "game board" play, etc of the sort that a lot of RPGing shares in common with wargaming; and also with play where the players are expected to subordinate their evaluative, aesthetic etc judgement to the system and the fiction.I think that last point is, in terms of the nature and history of RPGing as a hobby, pretty key. For two related reasons:(1) Because of the way that RPGing sets out to emulate, draw inspiration, etc from fiction, it often presents value-laden situations: but does so with an aspiration to present an interpretation or a re-enactment of that fiction (upthread I used the word "fidelity"); (2) It's fairly notorious that RPGing can give rise to "power struggles" between the GM and the players over the fiction, and these issues of fidelity can be an aspect of that ("that's not what a paladin would do"; "that's not what your character would do/know"; "that's not what the oath of your clan requires"; etc, etc).Conventional D&D play even has a slang term that only makes sense because of these issues: "murder hobo". The whole concept arises because the way the game is structured tends to create no particular game play incentive to portray anyone but an expedient, self-serving sociopath; but most RPGers can see that they want a fiction with more admirable protagonists; and so a standard of fidelity to in-fiction demands or expectations (alignment, or being a law-abiding citizen, or whatever) is adopted to solve the problem.Anyway, I know that you - @thefutiist - don't need me to rehearse all the above to explain what "narrativist" RPGing aspires to. You're well aware of it.I think Vincent points to rising action/rising conflict because he is especially thinking about game design, and how a game's approach to framing and consequences can reward and foster narrativist play, as opposed to tending to squelch it or shut it down when it does rear its head.But that same orientation in thinking can, in my view, be helpful in thinking about play.For instance, there are features of one conventional approach to D&D play that mean that the "kill the prisoners" thing tends to get squelched: the PCs are a party, and need to keep working together; they are on a mission or trying to complete an adventure together, and so need to avoid intra-party conflict; at the meta-level, the focus of the group is on playing the adventure, and so the moral argument or moral conflict is treated as a one-off, maybe providing some colour, but doesn't ramify into future events (future framings, future action declarations etc) or if it does ramify that is in operational/expedience terms (eg now someone wants revenge against us) rather than in terms that focus attention of the moral meaning of the choice.I think a RPGer who want to foster or develop their own narrativist play, and isn't sure how to do so or is wondering about why it tends to fizzle out or fall a bit flat when it happens, can be helped by thinking about how to sustain that rising conflict across a moral line. I know, in my own experience, that I had to abandon some more conventional approaches to framing and consequence to get there in my own play.To follow on from what I just posted, this is where approaches to framing, consequence etc matter. Which is why ideas like "fail forward" and principles like "make the players' characters' lives not boring [while also] be[ing] a fan of the players' characters" come in.For instance, if the players decide that their PCs travel overland, in violation of the ancient treaty, then the next time a check is failed the GM can have regard to that in establishing a consequence. If the GM establishes as a consequence, "You've run out of rations", then (everything else being equal) that shifts the focus of play towards logistics. Compared to, say, "You see a group of riders cresting the rise ahead of you", which shifts the focus of play towards the treaty. Or let's suppose that, for whatever reason, its been established that the PCs are running low on rations. The GM saying "You can see smoke on the horizon, most likely from a village" pushes play towards a focus on the social tensions of the situation, compared to "You come across a bush covered in berries - do you eat them?"I'm not saying that there are unique paths here: even typing the previous paragraph, I've thought of other ways that the GM could frame a scene in response to the PCs running low on rations that still rise the conflict across the moral line: eg "You see a deer through the trees" - do the PCs compound their treaty violation by hunting? or "You come across an overturned cart: there is a bag of grain half-spilled on the trail, and the driver is nowhere to be seen" - do the PCs eat the grain, or try and find its owner and/or the cart driver as a way of balancing out their treaty violation?But although there are no unique paths, there are ways of fostering the focus of play on the conflict across a moral line, or of tending to sideline or suppress that. And those ways are not just about particular decisions made, but also about the processes, heuristics, principles etc that guide those decisions. My experience, for instance, is that using typical random encounter rules from (say) Gygax's DMG or the Rolemaster books will not foster rising conflict across a moral line as well as other approaches that attend more deliberately to that aspect of the fiction.This is closely connected to what I said above, in this post, in reply to [USER=7044566]@thefutilist[/USER]. Authored by the players is establishing a contrast with authored by the GM or dictated by the setting or the inspirational material.It's about the players choosing how to interpret the moral line, how to respond to it, what to treat as a conflict.Whenever I read a GM posting about the BBEG that they have authored or made salient in the fiction, I form the view that - even if their play features rising conflict across a moral line, which I tend to suspect it doesn't have much of - it is not authored by the players. Because the GM has decided who the villain is.There's also a difference, here, from simple player freedom of action declaration. What I have in mind, in saying this, is that even if the player is free to have their PC ally with the BBEG (that is, the GM or the rest of the table is not requiring that the player play their PC as opposing the BBEG), that doesn't tell us whether or not play is narrativist. If it's taken as given that the PC who does this is also a villain, has chosen evil, etc, then it is not the player who is authoring the moral conflict.This is a difference between (say) Pendragon, or D&D played with GM-adjudicated alignment, and (to draw a strong contrast) Dogs in the Vineyard or In A Wicked Age or Apocalypse World. D&D can be played in the manner those latter RPGs assume: I personally discovered this in the second half of the 1980s.</blockquote>

Verification