What makes an TTRPG a "Narrative Game" (Daggerheart Discussion)

[pawsplay]

Narrative does not necessarily mean "narrativist" in some strict technical sense by someone, and distributing GM and world building does not have a direct relationship with being narrative. If something has sort of general methods of resolution, that's enough to make it narrative to me. If I try to pick a lock and my result is "hope," that's a narrative game.

 

[pemerton]

It might not make the game narrativist in the Edwards sense, but it definitely counts as a narrative mechanic in my book. Too many of those and you cross the "narrative event horizon", and to my view you have a narrative game. Extensive use of metacurrency, for example, is a big checkbox in my view.

Fine, you can use words as you like.

But please don't equate your use of "narrative" - which is, basically, about certain mechanics - as having anything to do with AW, BW, narrativism as defined in GNS, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Narrative does not necessarily mean "narrativist" in some strict technical sense by someone, and distributing GM and world building does not have a direct relationship with being narrative. If something has sort of general methods of resolution, that's enough to make it narrative to me. If I try to pick a lock and my result is "hope," that's a narrative game.

But a game in which you try to pick a lock and your result is "hope" could be the biggest railroad of all time. Couldn't it?

And how is earning "hope" for picking a lock any more "narrative" than classic D&D's earning XP and levels for carrying off gold? There's a meta-mechanic if I ever saw one, though it operates in relation to PC build rather than directly upon action resolution.

When Vincent Baker tells me that the design of his game follows from Edwards's "story now" essay, that tells me a lot about what his game is meant to do, and lets me anticipate some of the ways that it will work.

What information am I supposed to get from you telling me a game is narrative, in your sense? I mean, I can work out that its different from AD&D or GURPS. But is Ars Magica "narrative" in your sense?

 

[Celebrim]

Sometimes the dice have other plans, and if you run with it, you end up with something that no one was expecting. That's the random effect.

It takes a bit of learning to trust in the dice. A lot of new/younger DMs want to go, "The dice are wrong." But the older I get, the less I fudge and the more I am able to run with whatever happens.

As for what I'm typically using a random encounter for, it's worldbuilding. Random encounters are meant to simulate a world more diverse than I can plan for or detail out. They are there to make the world come alive. And yeah, they aren't always hostile. I no longer tend to rely on a purely random roll to determine reaction the way old school D&D did, but not every group you are going to find going to tilt hostile. The determining action is generally, "How do you react?" If the PC's react by attacking, most of the time the random encounter will react accordingly - flee, fight, surrender, whatever. If the PC's react by trying to be friendly, even if it is with say a carnivorous plant (this has happened) we spontaneously get a very different kind of encounter than I expected (assuming the PC makes some sort of social interaction check).

A more Narrative game has this sort of thing happen more often and can be baked right into the rules.

I'm not sure I buy that. Can you give an example? In the nar systems I'm familiar with wierdness happens, but not as the result of random chance but as the result of GM empowerment. GMs are empowered to respond to situations where they have the narrative control to make up whatever weirdness they want. Nar games tend to allow and even encourage what would be in a trad play GM metagaming and railroading because the players failed the test or got some sort of "consequences" on the test, and now the GM is allowed and even encouraged to make up new challenges.

Maybe this is something that you hate in games.

Randomness? No. I don't hate that at all. But I am leery of the amount of power that Nar GMs have over the situation. It's one of the reasons I'm not particularly a fan of that style of play except for one shots, and it's the reason that I generally don't GM Nar games. I don't really enjoy that level of power over the scenario. I like having the dice make the decisions for me when consequences are unclear.

I must admit that I hate the "whimsy" rolls that some DMs used back in the day, but I think that bringing something that no one was expecting to happen into play can make things more interesting if it's done well.

Agreed.

 

[pawsplay]

What information am I supposed to get from you telling me a game is narrative, in your sense? I mean, I can work out that its different from AD&D or GURPS. But is Ars Magica "narrative" in your sense?

In a mechanistic game, a test or challenge gives you a result. In a narrative game, the game asks you to provide one.

 

[Celebrim]

If I try to pick a lock and my result is "hope," that's a narrative game.

I think there is something to that. I also think it's quite possible that "hope" here is just a fancy term for success and will largely be translated as such in play. If this is a typical fortune in the middle process of play where you are testing things like, "Can I pick the lock?", my inclination is that it is the later.

UPDATE: Did some reading on Daggerheart and yeah, the problem with your assertion is that in dagger heart your result isn't "Hope". Your result is success or failure plus hope or plus fear where hope is a player metacurrency that represents positive momentum toward a goal and fear is a GM metacurrency that represents rising obstacles in the face of a goal. In general the system creates ever slightly so much hope than fear, which means unlike a lot of systems it is skewed toward player success.

 

[SteveC]

I'm not sure I buy that. Can you give an example? In the nar systems I'm familiar with wierdness happens, but not as the result of random chance but as the result of GM empowerment. GMs are empowered to respond to situations where they have the narrative control to make up whatever weirdness they want. Nar games tend to allow and even encourage what would be in a trad play GM metagaming and railroading because the players failed the test or got some sort of "consequences" on the test, and now the GM is allowed and even encouraged to make up new challenges.

Sure! If you look at Environment in Daggerheart 1.3, you see events built into the scene that come out of player rolls. You have something the GM can activate with Fear, and other things that the players can use Hope for.

You might have a scene where the players don't roll enough Fear (and I've seen this in sample combats we ran: in one case we rolled 0 times with Fear) but you do have a random event for the specific scene. I know that I've seen this in adventures for other systems where pseudo-random events happen because of die rolls.

The best example I can think of for this was a crazy time travel game a friend of mine ran at Gamehole Con. It was a game with every different character from time travel movies or media. He did a thing where any time you rolled a 13 on a check/or attack (this was in a 5E based game) you rolled again. On another range of dice your character had Scott Bakula's Quantum Leap character jump into them and temporarily possess them. On another range you had the "evil leaper" from that series possess them. You got a whole new character sheet when this happened. Now that was 5E, and the DM tacked that onto the rules, so you can obviously do that in any game.

 

[Emberashh]

I'm still of the opinion that ultimately what pretty much this entire topic is arguing about, but not really getting their teeth into, is that this is just different variants on the improv game, specifically an elaborate and long term narrative improv game, where the various improv players have differring levels of input on how the overall scene or string of them progresses.

The rules are a player, as is the GM, as are the colloquial Players, and all three contribute to the overall scene(s) in terms of what happens, how it happens, and why it happens, and how all of these scenes connect with one another in sequence. People have found the idea that the rules are an improv player weird, but they should keep an open mind, as it is the cornerstone of what makes RPGs not just improv. (And after all, theres a reason theater kids end up getting into RPGs, and why the most popular recorded/live plays all end up with a heavy improv focus; its not because it happens to be entertaining)

The types of games that tend to be pointed as "narrative" tend to depress the GMs input while increasing that of the rules and the Players. We can see that taken to its (imo) best form with Ironsworn and Star Forged, where the GM can be eliminated entirely.

That, however, doesn't mean only those games are capable of that balance. You can run any RPG in existence with the MythicGM, and it will work, in terms of how the improv game works, in the same way as those games.

Meanwhile your more conventional (re: popular) games tend to have relatively equal balances (DNDlikes outside of modules), with some depressing Player input to some degree (COC). And of course as mentioned, things like modules or Adventure Paths will typically depress GM and Player input in heavy favor of the rules, which it should be said, is entirely intentional, as such things are intended for groups that are either completely new to the improv game, or those who simply don't want to put in that kind of effort at all.

Modules and APs don't reflect on what a given game is or isn't, because no RPG that has ever been written was designed to work only with such things. But even if there is one, it'd have to be one convoluted design if it somehow breaks if the GM and the Players start concocting their own story threads.

That all said, I did have a couple side points:

I thought "Trad play IS de-protagonizing" to be a very revealing claim, especially since it seems to require a definition of protagonist that:

a) Doesn't agree with the ordinary use of the term.
b) Doesn't agree with the typical use of the term as when discussing RPGs.
c) Offers a definition of protagonist which most games that people would agree are nar games would fail to meet.
d) Seems solely to be offered up to insult other players in the discussion regarding their gaming preferences or else to support the idea that their gaming preferences are better.

All the justification seems to depend on straw men like "protagonism is more than spotlight" or "protagonism is more than viewpoint". Like, duh; a discussion of how trad players feel about "railroads" regardless of spotlight or viewpoint would be in order.

None of this is exactly surprising, given these folks are rhetorically descended from the Forge whose sole purpose beyond teaching people how to self-publish was to invent a bunch of jargon so they could make their own in-group.

Particularly because in this example we're witnessing a hijacking of a word based on the completely wrong kind of protagonist and justified by a surface level reading of a Wikipedia topic synopsis.

Game Protagonists do not have the same functions as a Written Protagonist. A game protagonist hinges around interactivity (ie, gameplay), which is what drives the story of that protagonist, whether its a prewritten movie script ala Mass Effect or a completely generated story ala Dwarf Fortress.

A written protagonist, which is whats trying to be held up as the applicable definition here, doesn't work like that. Written protagonists are 100% as prewritten as the overall story is, and not a single thing they do in a given narrative is emergent from anything whatsoever. The author made it up, and there are no Players.

And meanwhile, as should be obvious now, the idea of "de-protagonizing" even being a thing is complete hogwash.

top of that, I have people quibbling with whether my characters could be protagonists because they were weak and not effective which I think is a huge tell here.

I have had the misfortune of having read much of the forge, going back as far as I could. I don't think its coincidental I kept getting the impression a lot of their motivations were rooted in really, really bad DMs screwing over their OC characters. Or just their characters being bad because they didn't actually like the game they were playing enough to make a good one. Even still today, I believe a lot of people don't actually like RPGs but don't otherwise know how to articulate what they do like and go do that instead.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Narrative does not necessarily mean "narrativist" in some strict technical sense by someone, and distributing GM and world building does not have a direct relationship with being narrative. If something has sort of general methods of resolution, that's enough to make it narrative to me.

I think it is clear there's a bunch of people here who would like to 'take back' the usage that Edwards coined 20 years ago, with the additional caveat that he doesn't label anything as being 'narrative'. He DOES define, or at least use, the terms Narrativist and Narrativism as terms however, with a fairly specific meaning. While there may be some people who would rather his usage was forgotten, or feel that their own ideas better fit that label, that is unfortunately not how the world works, generally. Edwards' coinage was fair, he explains it in terms of NOT reusing other existing terms in a confusing way! In any case, 'general methods of resolution' is pretty vague, all games have 'methods of resolution' and I would consider most of them to be pretty 'general'.

If I try to pick a lock and my result is "hope," that's a narrative game.

I don't understand what you even mean by this, how does play proceed from here?

 

[Celebrim]

Sure! If you look at Environment in Daggerheart 1.3...

Hmmm... Ok. Not really seeing that one way or the other. What I am seeing that I kind of like is that the game is trying to define what "with consequences" means in the general case, which is really nice.

As an aside, on the originally topic, Fear is definitely a narrative currency but the overall feel here to me is "informed by nar but not actually nar". Sure, it's got a functional sort of fail forward thing going that is very modern, but that's not really 'nar' just an aesthetic choice. It's the sort of design that is designed to fulfill multiple agendas that in the abstract I consider good design and RE back in the day would have invented disparaging terms for.

That said, while I like "fulfills multiple agendas/aesthetics of play" in the abstract, I'm always skeptical of systems that empower the GM to improvise on every dang roll AND also don't pass narrative authority. (Passing moves around isn't the same thing.) I see that so often in modern design and feel that's more likely to create dysfunctional play than a more purist sort of system would. A lot of the text reads like Monte Cook's Numenera with maybe a bit more interesting and robust fortune mechanic.

I do really like the group action mechanic though, as that so simplifies certain types of scenes from a GMing perspective.

All that being said, Daggerheart very much reminds me of so much I see in modern tRPG design and publications where it is not actually doing any heavy lifting for me. There is this scene in Gaimen's "Sandman" comics where Dream curses a victim to having ideas, and the victim begins spouting hundreds of ideas. And in the commentary on the comics Gaimen talked about how "penny for your thoughts" was actually an unreasonably high rate because most thoughts aren't even worth that much. Ideas are cheap. Inspiration is everywhere. Creativity in and of itself isn't worth much. All the real value is in the effort of turning the ideas in something useful and concrete.

Daggerheart to me and almost all modern RPGs and RPG supplements feel Dreams curse of useless ideas, worth little unless a GM puts in all the valuable effort to actually make something of them.

I'd play Daggerheart but nothing is making me want to run it, and I think it's a game that favors really expert GMs. To run this sort of thing, you really have to be able to thrive in the chaos and have a pretty relaxed, functional, extroverted(!), and high skill party. It feels like it is going to work for Matt Mercer, and making moves means Mercer gets a lot of GM spotlight, but well, I'm not convinced that this is going to be a ton of fun for your average group.

tl;dr: "Is Daggerheart a nar game?" It's complicated.