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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8500938" data-attributes="member: 42582">We might say that, for any event that occurs, there is a corresponding true description of it. Now this principle can break down if the event is so complex it can't be described using the resources of human language; or if it is so novel that there is not the adequate vocabulary. But RPGing, and game play generally, I think is unlikely to cause this sort of break down. Therefore we might say that, for any game that is played, there is a corresponding description of the play. We can call that description a narrative - an account of the events of the play of the game.But that does not make the game a "narrative game". A "narrative game", at least as I think would typically be meant - my daughter calls them "imagination games" - involves as part of the process of play the creation of a shared fiction. This is not just the description of the play itself.The difference manifests itself in various typical ways - the narrative of a chess game refers only to actual things (pieces, players, etc), whereas the fiction of an imagination game refers to imaginary things like dragons, superheroes etc. But we don't need to point to those typical differences to draw the distinction in general between games as amenable to description of their play and games whose play itself includes generating descriptions. There are possible corner cases - Over the Edge contemplates self-referentiality comparable to that found in films like Adaptation and Pain and Glory, but I don't think these break down the distinction, as opposed to create some puzzles over particular semantic contents.Not all narrative/imagination games are RPGs. My daughter's imagination games involve participants adopting first-person "avatars" within the imagined setting and situation, and performing actions from that perspective - but they do not have the formalised or even semi-formalised rules of a RPG, and so all changes to the shared fiction are purely consensual. In other words, there is no system that is separate from "social contract".A game that I can recommend is A Penny for My Thoughts. It involves a type of collaborative story-telling via a rules-structured process - so it has a system. (Whereas my example above, of the JRRT/Lewis storytelling game, relied on coin tosses to allocate authority, A Penny for My Thoughts uses a mixture of round robin and guided player choice.) But it is not a RPG, because participants do not declare actions for avatars from a "first person"/"inhabitation" perspective. Rather, each participant is a person within the fiction, whose decisions gradually build up the full conception of the shared fiction, including elements of rising action and climax (in the game, this is flavoured as a particular form of memory recovery by amnesiacs).The challenge in "narrativist"/"story now" RPG design is to combine the first-person action-declaration aspect of RPGing with the generation of a robustly structured dramatic narrative that is found in a game like A Penny for My Thoughts. In my earlier post not far upthread I said a bit about how I think a game like Apocalypse World meets this challenge, through the way its system establishes who gets to add what content when, and under what constraints, with all of that correlating in various ways to player-participant action declarations.</blockquote>

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