Are you taking "narrate" in the basic pattern to mean "say something meaningless"? You earlier argued that saying something meaningless was not narration in an RPG sense.
No. I am using
narrate to mean
introduce, by way of stating it, some fiction.
The narration that Baker characterises as functionally optional is not meaningless. Eg “Amek tears out after him,
shouting for his men" (IAWA, p 15) is not meaningless. But it doesn't generate rightward arrows. Even if Amek's player says nothing at all, "
the game just chugs along" because the players can compare the dice rolls, pass the advantage die as appropriate, roll the next round, and (once the third round is resolved, or an absolute victory is achieved earlier) apply the appropriate consequences.
The same can be true of D&D's hit-point based combat resolution. This is why
conditions pay such a vital role in 4e D&D, because they generate leftward arrows with concrete changes to the fiction (a character is prone, or is burning, or is poisoned, or is pushed or teleported or frozen in terror). The rightward arrows remain fewer than in, say, Dungeon World or Burning Wheel (as @AbdulAlhzared posted about upthread) but the connection to the fiction is more intricate than in purely hp-oriented D&D combat.
In my example of narrating minimal damage, a player felt something - an anxiety about the outcome that motivated a retreat. The results were relevant: something changed in the fiction. What to narrate is down to each DM at the table.
But the player could decide to retreat based purely on the hp numbers.
I played the little wargame with my daughter again on Wednesday afternoon. I used an ability to retreat one of my forces, because I could see that the formation it was part of was going to lose to my daughter's formation. But there was no fiction involved.
If you refuse to produce meaningful narration, then it cannot be surprising when we find that narration to be "functionally optional".
I don't see what this has to do with Baker's analysis. It seems to talk about something quite different. Baker is not talking about
refusing to narrate vs
narrating. He's contrasting
being compelled to narrate with merely
being permitted or
being enjoined to narrate. The latter is what he describes as a system that "lacks teeth" and hence makes the arrows between cues and fiction that it urges functionally optional.
The distinction that Baker draws is not a novel one in general - the difference, in process design, between one which can't be gone through without doing all the desirable things associated with the process, and one that depends on urging and goodwill for all those things to be done, I think is fairly well known. Baker's insight consists in seeing how this distinction manifests itself in RPG design and hence RPG play.
Baker is concerned to do something that I say is in the end unachievable.
Well, he clearly thinks he's achieved it, with DitV. I think he's also achieved it with Apocalypse World. I can see the difference he refers to when I compare how 4e plays with how MHRP/Cortex+ plays (a rather comparable degree of boxes to boxes with sometimes merely optional leftward arrows) to how Burning Wheel or Classic Traveller players (lots of rightward arrows at nearly every point of resolution, with Duel of Wits being a bit of an exception in the case of BW).
It's not that hard to design a resolution system that makes fictional position a necessary input. It can be harder to have the system also be a satisfying one (Classic Traveller has a few rough edges, compared to AW), but the basic design is not unachievable.
Here's two rule compared, that illustrate the difference:
From 4e D&D, the 16th level Sorcerer utility Dominant Winds: As a move action, enable yourself or one ally in a close burst 5 to fly a number of squares equal to your Dexterity modifier as a free action.
From Classic Traveller: When you activate your ships jump drive, make a dice throw to avoid mis-jump, applying <specified modifiers> and requiring <specified target number> for success.
Neither rule is especially fancy; both pertain to movement. The Classic Traveller one is, at its core, structurally the same as an AW or DW player-side move - an action performed by a character in the fiction requires a check. And the consequences of the check feed back into the fiction: if it succeeds, the ship enters jump space and travels to its intended destination; if it fails, then the ship ends up jumping to some random destination determined by the referee (canonically via a random dice roll, though I can report from experience that it doesn't hurt the game to do it a bit differently - I rolled the specified number of dice to determine the mis-jump distance, but placed a world at that point, drawn from my handy file of pre-generated worlds, rather than having the PCs just die in empty space unable to refuel their vessel).
The 4e D&D rule is specified almost entirely in "cube" terms: the trigger and the flight time are both specified in terms of an action economy, the targetting is specified by reference to squares on a map (ie cues), the distance flown is specified by reference to a cue (ie a Dexterity bonus), and the movement type itself (flight) involves a whole lot of cue-ish things.
In order to get functionally non-optional leftward out of the 4e move, the GM has to take deliberate steps in establishing the situation, such as terrain that requires or ate least invites flying to circumvent it; and to get rightward arrows you need stuff like winds that blow flying creatures around, or low ceilings that flying creatures might bang their heads on, and the like. (Again,
@AbdulAlhazred has posted about this upthread.)
To somewhat echo
@Ovinomancer, none of this is to assert that Classic Traveller is a better RPG than 4e D&D. In fact I think it is easier to create compelling fiction in 4e D&D than it is in Classic Traveller! But there is no doubt that to do that in 4e requires those additional techniques of very deliberate situation design - for instance, the first ever combat I ran in 4e was adapted from the B/X module Night's Dark Terror and involved the PCs on a boat on the river, with a chain across the river to stop their boat, enemies swimming to them and coming to them on a raft, a sandbar to move to from the boats, an enemy slinger on one bank, etc. Beside the colourful nature of it, all that stuff helped to ensure that both leftward and rightward arrows would be generated, and thus that the fiction would seem "real" in Baker's sense - again, that is not
real in the sense of "realistic" but
real in the sense of a feeling of "heft" and independence of will and artifice.
It's obvious, given the amount of criticism that was directed towards 4e over the 4 or so years of its active lifespan, that many RPGers did not succeed in generating those arrows in their 4e play: for them it was just a miniature skirmish game with boxes to boxes. Whereas while I think it is quite easy for Classic Traveller to generate
boring fiction - for instance, you don't have to read very hard between the lines to see that this was a concern informing a lot of the Traveller commentary in early 80s White Dwarf - I don't think many players of it would fail to generate arrows to the left or the right. At least its resolution systems make
that easy by default.
I advocate a radical interpretation of 5e. Let's call the game played my way 5e*. To be playing 5e* a DM must ensure that "narrate" means "say something meaningful". When it comes to ability checks they must prefer the plain rule about meaningful consequences. When it comes to combat, they must narrate results in ways that are meaningful. They're expected to use their power as an author of fiction to achieve that ("the orc winds its horn!")
I think I'm missing how this is
radical. You're saying that the GM should narrate fiction. Didn't the 2nd ed AD&D books say something similar?