Trying to Describe "Narrative-Style Gameplay" to a Current Player in Real-World Terms

[Micah Sweet]

Yes, @innerdude is hoping that the player will play the game in the way innerdude intends it to be played.

But the OP does not ask "How can I achieve my hope?" As per the thread title, it asks about how to explain what one is hoping for.

I don't really see a difference here. The OP isn't trying get the point across to their player for strictly educational purposes. They want them to agree.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really see a difference here. The OP isn't trying get the point across to their player for strictly educational purposes. They want them to agree.

But the thread doesn't ask "Is my hope achievable, hopeless, right or wrong?" It asks "How would you explain this stuff to someone?"

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Reading through this topic it just proves itself exemplary of the exact over-obsessiveness with storytelling in the hobby that I've been observing over the years, with the issues debated here the exact ones that obsessiveness leads to.

Ironically, that issue is just a different kind of railroading. Rather than letting a theme emerge out of play, a player is being dragged into a conflict with their GM over forcing a specific thematic premise, and its wrapped up in, as is tradition, all this waffling over playstyle that really is so besides the point.

Has to be said that games are, ultimately, an interactive medium of storytelling when it comes down to it. If you want to use a game to retell Star Wars in a way that uses the medium at its best, you need to focus on how interactions lead to that story, but then you also need to accept you'll never actually retell it, unless you're okay with railroading.

A while ago I came up with a good example of the difference by pointing at Iron Man. In a movie, to focus more than a token few scenes on how he builds his first suit out of a box of scraps in a cave would be misuse of the medium, not because such scenes are boring (From the Earth to the Moon's Spider episode proves you can make straight up engineering into a super compelling narrative), but because movies are a visual medium, and in Iron Man the film, the story being told doesn't need more than those few scenes to convey Iron Man's effective origin as a hero.

But, games aren't movies, and if we were to play a video game about Iron Man but couldn't engage in some manner with actually building a suit, then its a lost opportunity at best (as presumably we still get actual gameplay wearing the suit), and a tragic misuse of the medium at its worst (where we don't get any suit gameplay beyond cutscenes).

In tabletop, it just seems theres a lot of internalized defeatism at the idea that mechanical gameplay can be both compelling and leveraged to tell a compelling story, or, better yet, allow one to emerge organically through play, rather than trying to inorganically recreate a story told in an entirely different medium, which really, truly, can only be done by removing play from the equation.

Even Improv ultimately has to suffer for this inorganic, non-emergent narrative, which speaks to the problem. Its not impossible to allow for truly emergent, non-railroady, themes to come out of a mechanically driven game (just recognize and design for the Improv Game and integrate mechanics with it properly), but the stories that can be constructed out of what happens are never going to look like or be structured like a Movie, and its a fool's errand to try. You'll either get a pale, boring imitation, or you'll completely misuse the game as a medium to do whatever it is you actually did. (Likely both)

One also has to keep in mind, before certain obvious responses are given, that as RPGs are fundamentally Improv Games, the principle of Yes,And goes three ways. The Players, the GM, and the Rules themselves are all participants and have to Yes,And each other if you don't want the Improv Game to break down (eg, cause railroads and other forms of blocking).

If a game has mechanically made it important as part of its interactions to engage with gear, you should really play something else if thats not the kind of game you wanted to play, or, you could stop trying to force a story and just play the game, on its terms, and let a story emerge from play.

Its a lot more fun for everyone, and you'll spend far less energy arguing on the internet to boot.

Medium Emulation I have noticed, is sort of interpreted as a value neutral way to make roleplaying games better but if anything, it sort of tries to recreate or reimpose the limitations of the mediums being emulated-- you can end up in a place where a fight is framed as uninteresting because it isn't interesting in a particular kind of media (perhaps because in most media, the heroes wouldn't lose, or couldn't lose to monsters they just find in a room) and its interpreted that the TTRPG should emulate those medium conceits, or that doing so is more narrative than not doing so.

Its something that I feel like produces games that are themselves fun and valid, but has produced a mental block on the narrative potential yielded by non-emulation of other medium, I think it's relevant to this thread in terms of the tension of how we see star wars as movie and it's concerns (which are a much a product of the constraints of runtime as artistic intent), as opposed to how it plays out as a grander universe, and what it means for a game to be "Narrative" a lot of the theory-work done on establishing a distinct Narrative play-style is interesting in what it leaves behind or what it prioritizes, conversations like the one OP had with their player produce a kind of shadow in terms of what narrative elements it doesn't care for.

Even the term "Narrative" as used here is flirtatiously dancing on a line between a specific sense of the word, and having that specific sense of the word take over it's basic definition, which I think is a more salient through-line than critiquing the use of jargon in and of itself. Is the game in other words, "narrative" or "Narrative" what does that distinction mean, and why is it being made, what parts of narrative are left on the table by the concept of Narrative.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

But the thread doesn't ask "Is my hope achievable, hopeless, right or wrong?" It asks "How would you explain this stuff to someone?"

You need to know what you're talking about and have a coherent idea of how it must be done, and why it must be done, to explain it in the first place.

 

[niklinna]

You need to know what you're talking about and have a coherent idea of how it must be done, and why it must be done, to explain it in the first place.

Based on what I know of @innerdude (indeed from the OP alone), they have all that. Who did you have in mind with your statement?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Based on what I know of @innerdude (indeed from the OP alone), they have all that. Who did you have in mind with your statement?

I'm not sure anyone in this thread does in a way that's salient to this player, rather than simply being OP's problem, it's whats leading to the conflict over Jargon as much as I don't think Jargon is per se the problem, because it needs to be understood in a way that can be explained to someone who doesn't already value those things or see them as necessary.

I'm just not seeing that level of understanding in this thread, and there's interactions here that would really put it on display, such as those with @Micah Sweet and I know they've been asking a long time. The process of explaining the concepts that OP is engaged in need to be persuasive, and they need to relate to their player's understanding of what it means to roleplay. I can see why the underlying theme of Micah's arguments in the thread is "Is teaching the right frame of mind to be in right now?"

It's part of the reason I'm raising concerns related to the way system values the elements the player does, and how those intersect with OP's ethos toward the particular system and what it incentivizes, and whether it's copacetic with that (I hear System Matters.) But it's really more about how these playstyles should be meeting and interacting, and what this playstyle has to offer the player-- and I'm not really seeing that here.

 

[kenada]

I haven’t read the thread because I don’t have much time for ENW lately (due open source contribution stuff, new baby, etc). I had a conversation with my brother recently about the difference between D&D 5e and Blades in the Dark. He’s never played a tabletop RPG before but was interested due to playing Baldur’s Gate 3 on PC.

I explained the differences in terms of what they do with a bit about how people approach them as players (in terms of how they develop and relate their characters). I didn’t talk about theme or premise or other jargon (from all the various jargons). I’ve said it before, but I really dislike the tendency in the hobby to categorize everything, which is why I didn’t use it here either. It seems more like tribal identification than anything really useful.

(However, I should note there is useful stuff, but it tends to be more about design and how games work rather than on how they are played. It can be interesting to talk about it in terms of design, but it gets annoying when people want to apply that to themselves or their play.)

From what I can tell from the OP, there’s a mismatch between the game the player wants to play and what the GM wants to run. That’s something that should be sorted out when the game is pitched, though having a conversation during the game is also good (as was done here) when it’s clear there’s a misunderstanding.

I haven’t played the FFG Star Wars games, but it seems weird to have a bunch of detailed gear stuff and not actually incorporate it (and gear progression) into the game. I don’t know whether that’s a design whiff or if the OP wants to run a game that’s a bit different from what the designers intended. It’s okay to tweak a game, but discussing that’s (again) a session zero thing to make sure everyone understands.

 

[Emberashh]

Medium Emulation I have noticed, is sort of interpreted as a value neutral way to make roleplaying games better but if anything, it sort of tries to recreate or reimpose the limitations of the mediums being emulated-- you can end up in a place where a fight is framed as uninteresting because it isn't interesting in a particular kind of media (perhaps because in most media, the heroes wouldn't lose, or couldn't lose to monsters they just find in a room) and its interpreted that the TTRPG should emulate those medium conceits, or that doing so is more narrative than not doing so.

Its something that I feel like produces games that are themselves fun and valid, but has produced a mental block on the narrative potential yielded by non-emulation of other medium, I think it's relevant to this thread in terms of the tension of how we see star wars as movie and it's concerns (which are a much a product of the constraints of runtime as artistic intent), as opposed to how it plays out as a grander universe, and what it means for a game to be "Narrative" a lot of the theory-work done on establishing a distinct Narrative play-style is interesting in what it leaves behind or what it prioritizes, conversations like the one OP had with their player produce a kind of shadow in terms of what narrative elements it doesn't care for.

Even the term "Narrative" as used here is flirtatiously dancing on a line between a specific sense of the word, and having that specific sense of the word take over it's basic definition, which I think is a more salient through-line than critiquing the use of jargon in and of itself. Is the game in other words, "narrative" or "Narrative" what does that distinction mean, and why is it being made, what parts of narrative are left on the table by the concept of Narrative.

The way I see it, capital-N Narrative is just a way to disguise that different kind of railroading I mentioned, a railroad of thematic premise rather than plot, that makes it sound like thats not what it is.

A game "about" teenage superhero angst can only ever be a game about teenage superhero angst, after all. Even within the same supers genre, the farther you stray from the premise of a game that enforces that particular railroad, the more it breaks down.

From a design perspective, we don't have to go down this road to get games that are about something, but it is tricky to get right in a way that embraces true agency, and while I have a pretty good idea of how Im doing it through my own game, I wouldn't claim its perfect. When one looks past the genres my game blends (epic fantasy and slice of life), you'll find a deeply embedded theme of destiny versus free will as well as that of resilience and rebirth. The game's ongoing lore is dripping with these themes (amongst other, lesser ones), but the key thing is that is what the world is about, not what the individual stories of the player characters are, or their story as a collective group, as defined through play.

What my game does to prompt the question of theme is, mechanically, derivative of Changeling's Quest and Ban system, but I elaborate on it considerably by changing it to Fate and Volition (tying it to the broader themes of the world), and tying it together with my Luck system, through a Birthsign system, which taken together prompts behaviors and does a lot to continually provide feedback on the players choices as their Character.

When you select a Birthsign, you're effectively defining how you're going to gain and lose Luck through your actions, which is where the game prompts you to explore different themes within the genre blend, and it reinforces these choices by tying them to how you progress and how different things manifest in the world.

Luck can be positive or negative, and mechanically both values are desirable, as negative or positive you still gain your Luck die, which is crucial for progression reasons (can't max a Skill without maxing out Luck to either end). But, Luck has varied effects based on whether you go towards your character's Fate or their Volition, and these aren't disclosed to the player. (In a nutshell though, negative Luck favors quantity, positive favors quality)

What results is that the only undesirable luck score is 0, but this is exactly how we want it, because thematically someone whose become stuck at 0 or is passing through on their way to the other end is someone whose either unsure of who they are or someone still going through a change. This is excellent fodder for exploring not just the broader premise of the gameworld, but also the more specific premises the Birthsigns themselves prompt the players to explore.

And what I think makes it particularly clever is that, as players learn more about the game's lore, they'll eventually come to understand that Fate doesn't actually exist (it wad actually destroyed as a concept) and its always just been free will.

This is not only a poignant twist on the world's premise, but is also delightfully meta given how much of my game's design is about fostering a truly integrated experience between Improv and Systemic mechanic design, and the concept of True Agency which gives roots to the game's Living World system, where the gameworld can and will move on without the Players if they don't get involved its greater happenings, but will still also be responding to what they do choose to do, no matter how insignificant. Its a game where being cutesy high fantasy Bakers has as much relative depth as being epic questing heroes.

So overall, the idea I pursued is essentially to make it systemic. While the individual themes players might explore individually are prompted, they are also numerous, and explicitly designed to interact with each other mechanically and narratively; the themes that could emerge from these interactions are impossible to predict, particularly when the gameworld gets involved, with its own themes interacting with those of the Players, but then also when the Keeper gets involved, as their characters will also be under similiar systems.

Its a three way improv game, and the permutations are effectively unpredictable.

Jargon as much as I don't think Jargon is per se the problem, because it needs to be understood in a way that can be explained to someone who doesn't already value those things or see them as necessary.

The main value, I think, in the idea of pursuing a thematic premise is that it leads to a more compelling, emotionally resonant narrative at the end of the day, one that goes beyond just being a retelling of awesome game moments. (Which it should be said, are just as valuable)

I think the issue, though, is that the pursuit of it can go very very wrong, not all that dissimilarly to how trying to tell this epic narrative can go wrong in Traditional RPGs.

Both issues, I argue, are rooted in the same thing, which I harkened to earlier, that RPGs are fundamentally improv games, and the issues that manifest in them can be explained very simply in those terms, and addressed through many of the same techniques.

The simplest way Id argue to get the player in the OP on board is to just have them get into a first person space for their character, and identify their motivations as a character. A person being a greedy gear fiend isn't unheard of, and one can easily imagine how such a character might spiral out into something poignant depending on how that motivation evolves over time. Thats in effect what Han Solo's arc was about, after all.

The key is just understanding that you'll maintain this pov as you play. This is where I think a lot of people, including many of the people in this topic, go wrong when they try to deny that immersion isn a thing or that it isn't valuable. This particular kind of player would probably find it easiest if they approached play from the goal of being immersed, because that in turn will make it a whole lot easier to get into the right headspace to engage some kind of premise.

But, this has to be said, this is all in the context of forcing it rather than letting it emerge, and the real prize would be having a game thats designed to do that without telling people who also like mechanics and gear and all that that their fun can't be had at the same time.

 

[pemerton]

I'm just not seeing that level of understanding in this thread, and there's interactions here that would really put it on display, such as those with @Micah Sweet and I know they've been asking a long time.

I don't know anything about the player in @innerdude's game beyond what has been posted in this thread.

But I have had a lot of interaction with @Micah Sweet. I don't believe that Micah Sweet is confused about how (say) Dungeon World or Burning Wheel is played - or at least, if he is confused I don't know why given the hundreds or thousands of posts he's read, the examples of play he's been pointed to, etc.

Not liking something doesn't mean it's not understood. And conversely, explaining something isn't always, or even typically (at least in healthy social contexts) an attempt at conversion.

 

[pemerton]

what it means for a game to be "Narrative" a lot of the theory-work done on establishing a distinct Narrative play-style is interesting in what it leaves behind or what it prioritizes, conversations like the one OP had with their player produce a kind of shadow in terms of what narrative elements it doesn't care for.

Even the term "Narrative" as used here is flirtatiously dancing on a line between a specific sense of the word, and having that specific sense of the word take over it's basic definition, which I think is a more salient through-line than critiquing the use of jargon in and of itself. Is the game in other words, "narrative" or "Narrative" what does that distinction mean, and why is it being made, what parts of narrative are left on the table by the concept of Narrative.

It's likely that there is more in heaven and earth than dreamed of in most philosophies, certainly than in mine.

Nevertheless, and despite that concession, sometimes it is helpful to talk about things using generalisations.

It is in my view beyond doubt that @innerdude is hoping to have a RPG experience that is different from the experience offered by picking up a copy of Gygax's AD&D rulebooks, dungeon module C2 Ghost Tower of Inverness, and pressing "play".

And I think it's also clear that he is looking for an experience that is different from that offered by picking up a copy of the 2nd ed AD&D rulebooks, the Planescape adventure module Dead Gods, and pressing play.

He has chosen a phrase to describe what he is looking for - "narrative-style gameplay". I don't know where he learned that phrase from, or why he chose. It's not a phrase I would normally start with, but from reading the OP it's fairly clear what he has in mind.

Maybe there's some ambiguity whether he's aspiring to something more "story now"-ish (that's a phrase whose meaning is clear to me, as there is an essay that coins the phrase and establishes its canonical meaning, by reference to a range of RPGs and approaches that I have sufficient familiarity with to work out what is meant by it), or something more "neo-trad/OC"-ish (a phrase whose meaning is reasonably clear to me, by having followed various online discussions about this popular style of play). But whichever he is aspiring to, it's fairly clear that power-up-by-collecting-the-loot-and-gear is not meant to be a big part of the game.

I don't see why we can't talk about that, without having to police the terminology being used.