clearstream
(He, Him)
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha has Passions. Although intriguingly something like Passions first appear on the NPC record form for Griffin Mountain, (c) 1981 in the edition I am looking at, and thus four years before Pendragon was published.This is nothing to do with "modalism".
@FrogReaver made the assertion I've quoted. I express scepticism about it, not on a prior grounds but because I've played both RPGs and have thought a lot about the differences between them.
Here are two main ones:
*In RM melee resolution, attack and defence are determined, round-by-round, from the same pool; whereas in RQ, attack and parry are separate skills which are rolled independently;
*In RM PC build, a player determines how to allocate their build points from level to level; whereas in RQ, skill development is randomly determined based on skill use.
The latter difference permits a RM player to send signals via their PC build. The former difference permits a RM player to adjust the stakes of melee via round-by-round decision-making.
Neither difference is one of degree.
The same sort of comparison could be done between RQ and Pendragon, too. Like, it would be relatively trivial to put RQ onto a d20 rather than d% chassis, with some loss of granularity and a few tweaks around the edges being required. But the presence of Trait and Passion rolls is a tremendous change, whether these are rated on d20 or d%.
I'm finding it hard to parse out your meaning. Did you mean that adding Passions to the main text of RQ is a tremendous change? It can be, depending on how a group use them.
The many, many game texts riffing off one another and drifting are themselves proof.You and @FrogReaver are making these claims about possibility, but neither of you has presented anything in the neighbourhood of a possibility proof. It's just assertion, as best I can tell.
I don't expect to convince you and (on this score) nothing you've said has convinced me: hence agreeing to disagree as I said up thread.
What follows is a prediction that we'll see more and more hybridisation from here on out, as features that collectively form what folk label "narrativism" are experimented with and found to have utility to other modes of play.And?
A book can have advice for how to this thing, or how to do that thing. This does not, on its own, show that it is possible to do the two things at once, or that the two things lie on some continuum. Like, the instructions for my stereo system tell me how to pick up and play radio broadcasts, and how to connect it to a CD player. But I can't use it to listen to CDs and the radio at the same time.
It's unsurprising that a RPG rulebook hoping to sell to a variety of people will have advice that suggests the game can be played in multiple ways, to pursue different aesthetic goals. It's also unsurprising that it may even tend to blur the differences between those goals.
But I don't know what is supposed to follow from that.
Relating to @Arilyn's post such games will be narratavistic without being "narrativist", as that labels a specific set of features that must all be present, including those sited in a culture of play. Due to that latter, narrativistic games will be amenable to drift to "narrativism". Daggerheart may prove to be an example.
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