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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9761869" data-attributes="member: 4937">This is a good point.  It's probably best to not begin a discussion without defining terms.  I was assuming that "narrative game" referred to games that were influenced by the narrativist viewpoint of GNS theory, but this could be incorrect.I don't think they ignore the "internal elements of the fiction" but they certainly relate to them differently and don't treat them as the sole inputs when determining outcome.   Hillfolk, Fiasco, Sorcerer, maybe FATE Core would qualify.  Obviously, there is a bit of a spectrum here.  I hear some people calling "Blades in the Dark" a narrative game, and I can't buy into that, but perhaps I just assume they mean "narrativist" when they have some other definition.  "Narrative" is a very loosely thrown around term much like "cinematic".  In one of his early essays explaining the Narrativist philosophy Ron Edwards cited this rule as evidence of narrativist design in RPGs from as early as 1984.  I think if you would look at the context of what you are quoting, I said modern narrative games arose as a reaction to big plot heavy story telling elements of the 1990s - think 2e D&D with its gamified novels or particularly Vampire:The Masquerade's published scenarios or even in some cases published adventures for Shadowrun.  I didn't say Toon arose in reaction to it.  What I said was:"The idea then was to make new mechanics that resolved not according to a process that depended on the internal elements of the fiction, but rather on elements of the meta such as "what is the goal of this scene". The typical example of a rule of this type is the metarule in Toon that said, "If it is funny, it works." "Rule of this type" refers to "mechanics...that depended on elements of the meta" and not to "games that arose in response to failures of plot heavy games of the 1990s".  That's not true at all.   In narrativist play the participants are all expected to do what is best to deliver the story now.  The narrativist referee is explicitly not the passive referee of trad play delivering unbiased judgments according to the cold logic of the scenario, but rather doing his best to always bring the drama.  The narrativist referee invents new problems and complications on the spot without referencing the established fiction purely to make the scene more dramatic.  That's strongly encouraged by narrative games.I think you are mistaking dice rolling with narrative force.  Narrative force is who gets to say what is true about the fiction.  In a true narrative game you are rolling not to determine the outcome of the action, but for the right to play out the scene.  For example, in typical narrative mechanics two participants (one of which may be the GM) have a disagreement about how a scene will play out and they each give their preferred outcome ("the stake") and then they use some fortune mechanic influenced by narrative currency to determine whose vision for the scene will play out.</blockquote>

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