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="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9134870" data-attributes="member: 87792">I think the problem with "narrative mechanics" is that they seem to be being used as a snarl-word by people saying "I don't want this to happen" independently of what happens in actual games. And the people insisting that certain things are "narrative mechanics" are people who hate those games, don't want to play those games, and struggle to come up with any actual games that in actual play work the way they are saying that narrative mechanics work. Or games that have been actually popular in the past decade. (The two games I recall that use meta-currency in the indicated way for a "narrative mechanic" rather than tying them through means such as aspects to the game world) are Cinematic Unisystem and Cortex Classic, both about twenty years old at this point and, so far as I can tell, barely played.Meanwhile the examples being given aren't so much narrative mechanics  as "don't want to deal with that nonsense" mechanics. If you want a mechanic that is good for narrative it's either something that provides strong motivation (such as XP for GP - ironically also the textbook example of a gamist mechanic) or something that makes irrevocable and persistent changes that need to be continued with (such as Apocalypse World's "When life becomes untenable pick one of four options (each may be picked once only)" where one of those options is "change your playbook to another one").And let's not go full GNS and bring Simulation into this. Simulationism was Ron Edwards talking about things he didn't like, didn't see the appeal of, and wouldn't deep dive. GNS is a manifesto for more and better narrative games - and we're so far beyond where we were when he was writing quarter of a century ago that it's ridiculous. Simulationism was never right and "narrative" games have gone way beyond anything we could have forseen when he was writing those essays as a reaction to Vampire: the Masquerade and the rest of the oWoD not delivering what they promised.</blockquote>

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