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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Emberashh" data-source="post: 9500796" data-attributes="member: 7040941">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.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.</blockquote>

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