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Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 9834197" data-attributes="member: 70468">I don’t think of Baker is a revolutionary. I think of him more as a game designer who is very happy to share his thoughts and experiences designing games (and one who apparently has always been able to make money doing it). People are interested in how Apocalypse World is put together, so there’s a lot about that and the ideas that contributed to it, but he’s designed games other than narrativist games.The second article mentioned in the <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/vincent-baker-on-narrativist-rpging-then-and-now.717100/post-9833518" target="_blank">OP</a> talks about one of them: Murderous Ghosts.To deal with the next couple of ideas, I think we need a working example of a game dynamic that isn’t narrativist. Let’s use the one in Murderous Ghosts: <ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The character’s a cool and likeable stand-in for the players, not necessarily passionate and driven. Once the game’s underway, they have no vision or motivation but escape.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The character’s not caught in a conflict of interests, exactly, or not necessarily. They’re in a dangerous situation that’s over their head, trying to survive.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">They’re not “fit.” If they escalate against the ghosts they’ll lose, we all know this. We aren’t playing to find out who they are, what they’ll sacrifice, where they draw the line, what it’ll cost them. We’re playing to find out only if they can get out of here alive.</li> </ul> If we entertain Egri’s theory of stories, playing Murderous Ghosts doesn’t give us one. And indeed, playing Murderous Ghosts is fun and exciting in its own right, but it’s not satisfying in the same way a compelling story game is. People who go into it expecting a literary or even a folk ghost story are often pretty disappointed by it. What you get instead is a quick, tense little nightmare of simple action, shallow or nonexistent character, unclear motivations, and unanswered mysteries, with (usually) an anticlimactic death cutting it abruptly off.He’s also started designing an OSR game. He has a <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/total-party-save-147027551" target="_blank">discussion</a> of it on his Patreon. There is a playtest rules document, but it’s only available to patrons. The way he does attacks and saves is interesting.But this thread is about Baker on narrativism, so I’m going off topic.</blockquote>

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