Was Pendragon the proto-Story Now game?

[Campbell]

Well, now I want to see radically different takes on Vampire and Ars Magica.

Vampire 5th Edition does basically go full circle by adopting Sorcerer style play group defined Humanity.

 

[Aldarc]

Well, now I want to see radically different takes on Vampire and Ars Magica.

Urban Shadows 2e would potentially be a good base for that.

 

[Campbell]

Pendragon, Ars Magica and Vampire are all antecedents of Story Now games, but mostly as something to react to. They form an important first step in that they had mechanics that were fundamentally about who your characters were as people, but lacked player provided premise for play and were about reinforcing the conception of the character instead of finding out who the character was through play. I'm not sure Sorcerer gets made without Pendragon, Ars Magica and Vampire, but they are not proto-Story Now games in my opinion.

I do hope I'm not underselling how important of a game Pendragon was and still is. Not just indie games but games like L5R 5th Edition and Chronicles of Darkness (which I absolutely adore) owe a huge debt to Pendragon.

 

[pemerton]

I think Pendragon is complicated. So @Campbell is right. But so, in an important sense, is @Vinicius Lessa.

In terms of "orthodox" taxonomy: Ron Edwards discusses Pendragon as a simulationist game here, but compares it to Wuthering Heights in this review of the latter, and classifies Wuthering Heights as narrativist here. So I'd be inclined to say that Pendragon as it presents itself is simulationist - a type of procedurally very tight high concept simulation - but that it lends itself to drift in a narrativist direction.

It's not a coincidence, I think, that Christopher Kubasik's worked example of a "story entertainment" in his influential Interactive Toolkit is highly (highly!) drifted Pendragon. Pendragon PCs are laden with premise, and lend themselves to situation-oriented story now/narrativist play.

I've often posted that I prefer Prince Valiant to Pendragon: I regard the former as Stafford's true Arthurian masterpiece. (Without in any sense dismissing the achievement that is Pendragon.) Prince Valiant strips away some of the process simulationist legacy that is still found in Pendragon (eg the rules for recovery and death are very easy: they happen when the GM says they do, based on what the player has staked in play); and it has simple but robust rules for social and emotional conflicts and consequences. (Similar basically to simple or extended contests in HeroQuest Revised, so a bit simpler than HeroWars extended contests.)

Hopefully the above will prompt some responses!

 

[RivetGeekWil]

I don't know about Pendragon specifically, but we were playing RPGs "fiction first" or "story game" style long before there was a term for it. It's one of the reasons I took to games like Fate, FitD, and Cortex Prime so readily because they matched how I had been playing RPGs all along.

 

[aramis erak]

No one? No one see anything in common between Pendragon and the kind of playstyle PbtA pushes for these days? No vestiges of narrativism at all?

Only I see it?

I think you're seeing connections that exist only coincidentally.

Pendragon's mechanics are typically opposed roll, and modifiers are liberally applied RAW. In a system where staring character skills pretty much cap at 0-20, I've seen modifiers in excess of 15 routinely (Inspired +10, Charging +5, Vs Foot +5)...
Advanced PCs? I've seen skills up to 30.

Plus, several notables in the Forgite tradition liked pendragon.