NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9134750" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've been glancing through the thread and I see a lot of people who have a vague sense of what a narrative mechanic is but not a concrete enough understanding of what such a mechanic is to explain it clearly.  So they can often correctly identify a narrative mechanic, but not clearly explain why it is a narrative mechanic.I also don't want to overly get into a GNS framework, though in my description above you can kind of see where I think the GNS framework actually came from and maybe also where I think it went wrong.  I can define the other two categories (and in a little I will) but differing from the conclusions of GNS, I can imagine mechanics that are in intention none of those three things or in effect more than one of them.  For example, in a "Wheel of Time" RPG, because the author put into the game universe an explanation for characters having plot armor then there would be in a well-constructed RPG of that setting a mechanic which was both narrativist and simulationist in its intention because there really existing in the setting something tangible and detectable that acted to ensure narrative conventions were adhered to such that the universe produced structured stories (and indeed, it is implied, variations on the same story over and over again).A gamist mechanic is one that exists only for the sake of the game rules, to make them a better game, such as keeping the rules simple to the sake of ease and speed of play, or for maintaining balance between character concepts that might not be otherwise justifiable from the narrative or situation, or because it was simply just a good mechanic that created interesting choices in play for the player. Gamist mechanics are typically not interested in whether they are simulating something, or whether they are good for a story, but focus on just making the game rules themselves good, usually with a focus on aesthetics like challenge and competition and a certain extent fantasy (is it "cool"?).  A simulationist mechanic is one that takes the imagined situation as primary and attempts to define the other two layers on the basis of "What could be expected to happen here?"  So it will take the more complex and finicky implementation of a rule over a simple one if the complex one produces a range of results that seem more believable to the designer/participant than the simple rule produces, at the expense of for example speed of play.  It will tend to want to see narrative as emergent rather than defined by the mechanics - the winner of the battle is the one with the advantage in the battle, not the one with right on their side, or the scrappy underdog that the storyteller might prefer to win for narrative reasons.   Luck will be simulated with real luck in the fortune, and not by using luck as an excuse for achieving a goal of play.  If hero gets lucky, it's because the player got lucky with the dice, not because the luck is needed for the hero to save the day. Death is a strongly simulationist mechanic, especially when it depends on luck and not intention of the participant ("Do you accept death at this time?"), as it is neither good for the game nor generally good for the narrative.Good games are in my experience a blend of these three goals and not purist for any one of them.  That's because most participants in an RPG are engaging with multiple aesthetics of play and have some sort of preferred blend, and even where you have a participant with relatively pure and simple aesthetics of play, it's rare for the whole table to share the same aesthetic.  Blended games with concessions to multiple areas therefore allow the game to be shared more equally by all the participants, with each getting something out of it.</blockquote>

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