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

[clearstream]

Like you, I don't mean to be flippant here...but if "there is no concrete reality (with the caveat that there is no reality in any game) to begin with" in your Blades game, then people at the table don't know what they're supposed to be doing. I don't know who and how many (whether its just the GM or the GM and some players or all players), but I do know that saying "you can't plan at all in Blades" and you can't/don't concretize a Score in such a way to make strategic and tactical decisions?

I'm sorry, that is fundamentally not understanding how the game works and is just ignoring so much of the game's engine/features which govern the running and the playing of it. This feels a little bit like when I brought up the Social Interaction module of D&D 5e back in late 2015 (year after release) and commented on how it looks to be cribbed from Apocalypse World and the silence from ENW was absolutely deafening. The whole site, in unison was all "huh...what is that?" When I explained it, everyone was all "hmmmm...that is interesting...never saw that section...well, no one reads the DMG anyway and no one would run that social minigame anyway!"

1) The setting is concretized via all of its default information and the various statistics (Scale, Range, Tier, Magnitude, locations, Faction HQs/Leadership/Assets etc, each District's value for Wealth/Safety & Security/Criminal Influence/Occult Influence and Fortune Rolls around these) in the books that you either (a) lean into/rely upon or (b) transparently change in the course of play.

2) A session's Score should be plenty concretized/fleshed-out (location dynamics, obstacle/threats dynamics, opposition roster dynamics, any starting Mission/Racing/Tug-of-War/Faction Clocks that structure/govern the Score....all of which lean on that 1) above) in the course of the Info Gathering/Free Play phase and then post Engagement Roll where the situation is framed and opening Position/obstacle 1 is going to follow-on and be constrained by game statistics, action resolution machinery, Clocks, enforced fidelity to and transparency around Win Con. The potential constellation of consequences looming around the Score should be fairly well understood if not outright known and any given consequence (or multiple consequences) for an Action Roll (and subsequent Resistance Roll) should be telegraphed to inform player decision-making.

Yes, there is going to be a little bit of grey area with Devil's Bargains and Flashbacks and a possible cascade of multiple (non-Resisted...which is stupendously rare) 1-3 Action Roll Consequences bringing in some wild cards for dynamic fiction/gamestate. But its not even close to just a pile of wild cards and mutable fiction/wobbly gamestate. Its like a potential few wild cards (and plenty to most of those are either Resisted outright or they're wholly in the hands of the players via accepting/proposing/resolving Consequences, Devil's Bargains, and Flashbacks...so the "wild-carditude" is almost wholly mediated through the players and system) in any given Score.

If your game of Blades is or feels like a complete ass-pull without any player-facing fiction providing borders/parameters + without reliance upon and integration with FitD's significant statistical/keyword arrays and procedures + without table-facing Clock tech governing resolution? Then something has gone wrong.

Like here is a quick example I can jot down right now:

The Crew determines they want the Duskvol Times to run a story indicting an Enemy Faction (lets say the Lampblacks). Here is a quick and easy schematic that could come about via established play, game statistics, and info gathering/free play.

* Inkrakes: Tier 2, HQ Charterhall (W4, S&S4, CI0, OI0), Faction = Allied with Bluecoats and friendly with Lampblacks and Lord Scurlock while negative with The Crew, Editor-in-Chief Gabby Byrnes (Master Threat, leader, connected, cunning, reckless), Assets include Scale 1 Bluecoat (including Expert Threat leader) patrolling perimeter and 2nd floor halls of Area/Scale 4 building and Skilled Threat Hull (tough, shields, protocol) that mans front desk security.

* Structure is ancient and the haunted canals (Mag 1/Scale 2 Hollows) beneath lead to the first foundation of the building, long-sense closed, that features a dumbwaiter shaft to the 2nd floor (egress hatch into the building soldered).

* The spirt that animates the Hull is Gabby Byrnes ex-lover (the Lampblack's former leader who suddenly disappeared without a trace), who was going to leave her, so she killed them and forever chained them to her via the Hull. It hates Gabby but it can't overcome its protocol by itself.

Then you have whatever Score archetype the players choose, the detail, any further assets they employ, maybe a bit more Free Play/Info Gathering beyond what generated the above (which might include actual Action Rolls with risk if they push too hard for stuff) and whatever Clocks get generated (value and type) based on how they approach things.

If Scores aren't being concretized, if framed situations/obstacles aren't well-rendered and given specific parameters (relying upon game statistics/keywords) when introduced? Then yeah...I guess both the game layer and the setting will feel like an amorphous pile of goo where folks are making uninformed decisions upon a substrate of shifting sand? That would suck. But that is in defiance of the agenda/principles/best practices and the beefy, robust game engine that Blades in the Dark relies upon.

One take I have is that the crew game is as real in the most concrete way a game can be real. Which is as a mechanism.

 

[Neonchameleon]

That it is abstract doesn't mean it is not direct. Getting hit by a sword and thus being hurt is pretty direct, even though the exact nature of hurt was left a bit vague.

At risk of opening an old discussion losing hp doesn't mean you are hurt other than as action movie cosmetic damage. You are 100% as able to do Stuff after losing hp if still above 0 as you were before, and you recover in sporting event recovery times not in wound recovery times. I'd argue hit points are the biggest meta-currency in the history of RPGs.

In most non-D&D games there's a death spiral. Apocalypse World avoids this but a PC who takes injury also rolls the Harm move; getting hurt has actual and unpredictable concrete consequences. And injury only heals naturally at up to 2 harm; 3 harm is stable, and 4-6 are various degrees of debilitated and dying.

When you suffer harm, roll+harm suffered (after armor, if you’re wearing any). On a 10+, the MC can choose 1:​

• You’re out of action: unconscious, trapped, incoherent or panicked.
• It’s worse than it seemed. Take an additional 1-harm.
• Choose 2 from the 7–9 list below.

On a 7–9, the MC can choose 1:​

• You lose your footing.
• You lose your grip on whatever you’re holding.
• You lose track of someone or something you’re attending to.
• You miss noticing something important.

On a miss, the MC can nevertheless choose something from the 7–9 list above. If she does, though, it’s instead of some of the harm you’re suffering, so you take -1harm.​

 

[Neonchameleon]

I was doing this in AD&D back in the 80s, never heard of Forge until here. But then I started playing in 1977 and am a thinking human being. Maybe it was a Dragon or Different Worlds article that mentioned something in passing when talking about making stat tests. In any case, I don't need a system to come up with any of these.

"You don't need a system to be able to house rule" is entirely correct - but also doesn't turn a house rule into something that is a fundamental part of the game or even common to most tables.

 

[thefutilist]

Or alternatively it empowers the players to make impactful decisions with real meaning as the fictional reality their characters inhabit is not an amorphous mutable mess.

I’m a famous no-myth hater and so I endorse this message but it’s a bit more complicated than all that. It depends what no-myth means in the context it’s used.

There isn’t actually a reality behind the scenes and so what we’re talking about is the process of (1) deciding what things are in a scene (2) deciding what things can enter a scene (3) deciding what previously established ‘stuff’ changes that doesn’t appear in a scene.

So let’s look at fixed stuff first. The most common fixed elements are locations and NPC attitudes. If you have a dungeon map and the process of deciding what’s in a scene involves looking at the map, and in fact you ‘have’ to look at the map. We can consider that fixed.

Fixed = must be this way, you’re not allowed to suddenly change it.

Then, time and distance is commonly added but at different levels of granularity.

So in Sorcerer I might write that Maximilian is going to blow up the telecommunications tower on Tuesday. It’s a bit fuzzy though and so I ‘can’ choose the most dramatic time to blow it up, as long as it’s on Tuesday.

At greater granularity I might have to decide the actual time it blows up.

Same with space (and everyone can see how this connects with time). The entrance to the ruins are in the wetlands v the entrance to the ruins are 3 miles south by south east into the wetlands.

Anyway this matters a bit because when you decide what’s in a scene you may have to track where various npc’s are and the different levels of granularity matter.

So my general process of scene framing, in Sorcerer and Apocalypse World, is to figure out where the NPC’s are (roughly) what they’re up to (called Bangs), then see what the various P.C’s are doing and seeing if they intersect with each other in some way, that’s where I’ll cut to. I do that with somewhat fuzzy granularity unless it matters but it’s never on the granularity of something like GURPS.

Anyway I might have gone off on a massive tangent. My main point is that there’s a process by which stuff is introduced and thinking about stuff in terms of the imaginary world can obfuscate that process.

Now no-myth at it’s best is a reminder that we can use the fuzzy granularity and the non-fixed points to make things cool. Also to be wary of what points we fix and how we fix them and how we communicate that information to make sure choices can retain thematic charge.

For instance: Imagine you decide that the Players lover has been kidnapped and is being held in a basement under the tech building. The player doesn’t know this and blows up the tech building for unrelated reasons. Well then you’ve committed yourself to saying their lover is dead.

Which, I think you should do and I think it’s perfectly legitimate. Yet you can see how this starts collapsing all theme into what basically amounts to, naughty word happens. Which isn’t particularity satisfying.

So one very good use of no-myth is to contrive ways to communicate consequences and to do this constantly. In fact I do this all the time.

At it’s worst (and in fact in it’s original form), no-myth basically gives unilateral control to the GM with the instructions ‘make it interesting and thematic.’ Which means the GM is now part entertainer, part psycho-therapist.

Anyway, in my ideal world people wouldn’t use the term because I tend to use it in it’s original context and if people are using differently (which happens a lot) then I have to figure out what they mean. That’s maybe a me problem though.

 

[Wolfpack48]

"You don't need a system to be able to house rule" is entirely correct - but also doesn't turn a house rule into something that is a fundamental part of the game or even common to most tables.

It's the difference between needing a rule for every possible situation or using rules as inspiration that can accommodate as many situations as possible. In almost every case I can think of, less is more. If you are slave to rules, you'll spend more precious gaming time with your nose in a rules book than actually gaming. One of the things I appreciated about RQ when it arrived, is that a lot of looking up things in tables went away, and you were guided to interpret tests as needed at your table. I guess others need more hand holding than we did.

 

[Campbell]

What conflict resolution (especially the more moment to moment sort seen in Apocalypse World) does is it continually volleys the ball back to the GM to frame situations/scenes that speak to the premise of the game or the characters. Task resolution inherently results in focusing on things outside the core premise of the characters and/or game. When I run Masks I'm always making GM Moves that speak to what's come before, but also bringing in new elements that are relevant to the characters (address their personal situations, reputations, come between player characters, etc).

The point of task resolution is to allow that drift of premise, but that means at some point if addressing that premise is like important to me than I have to intercede the flow of task resolution. There can be benefits to doing so, but it's fundamentally different in nature to the level of focus on character level concerns that conflict resolution allows.

Like you use task resolution because you want some level of conceptual drift, some focus on color, some focus on things outside the premise. Because those things will occur just in the play of the game regardless of intention when we use task resolution. It's an inevitable outcome of the process of play. It's also the sort of outcome I sometimes value because sometimes I want to play in or run a game where the spotlight is as much on the settings' factions or NPCs as the player character.

 

[Autumnal]

Can anyone point me to a thread where people discuss minute semantic distinctions?

Not till you provide a satisfactorily clear definition of “point” and “minute”.

 

[Celebrim]

At it’s worst (and in fact in it’s original form), no-myth basically gives unilateral control to the GM with the instructions ‘make it interesting and thematic.’ Which means the GM is now part entertainer, part psycho-therapist.

Well, we have a word in RPG play for that GM - Railroader. Hop on board the choo choo train. At its worst, No Myth becomes the validation for keeping a game on the rails because the GM believes that the story he envisions is the most interesting and thematic one available. And so of course he doesn't let "stuff" happen unless it's that thing he thinks is interesting and thematic.

Committing to some fictional positioning you intend to stick to and resolving tests through fortune are two of the most powerful ways to limit GM power and thus share the fiction with other participants. A GM committing to some fixed fiction is the least control the GM can have over the scenario, and not the most. If the GM doesn't commit, everything because "mother may I" and any action that isn't considered desirable can be countered. The reason for not committing is to increase GM control ostensibly for the good of the story, but that can so go wrong.

Only slightly worse is that No Myth encourages GMs to believe that worlds you don't put thought and effort into generate better stories than ones that do. I've been running a bounty hunter campaign and an implied part of that is, "There is someone to catch which is non-trivial to locate, else someone else would have already done it and not be paying someone else to." Which means part of each adventure involves gathering clues to find the acquisition, often with forces trying to stop you from doing so. Often, I have to have detailed timelines of events leading up to the present so as to imagine what clues have been left behind to find. There is just no way I could do a good job with these sorts of things trying to event everything on the fly. If you'd look at my notes, you'd see I've left a lot of things pretty vague and if you could compare my notes to my games sessions, you'd see that I was improvising a lot. But also, there are some things that involve concrete details that are just hard to improvise.

You mention that you think having fixed consequences leads to the theme "stuff happens". I think rather in your example the theme is, "Maybe you shouldn't be so quick to blow up a building."

As a player I really struggle with No Myth or Low Myth games because they are so transparent to me and I can't invest any belief in them. Even with a GM screen up, I can generally "see" what another GM is doing "behind the screen" and so know how hard the reality I'm exploring is. And if it's not hard at all, and the notes consist of just some vague sentence fragments and lists meant to be evocative then well, I have a really hard time sitting through that for more than about 2 hours.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Not till you provide a satisfactorily clear definition of “point” and “minute”.

What Words Mean 101, 103, 110, and 112...

 

[Neonchameleon]

It's the difference between needing a rule for every possible situation or using rules as inspiration that can accommodate as many situations as possible. In almost every case I can think of, less is more. If you are slave to rules, you'll spend more precious gaming time with your nose in a rules book than actually gaming. One of the things I appreciated about RQ when it arrived, is that a lot of looking up things in tables went away, and you were guided to interpret tests as needed at your table. I guess others need more hand holding than we did.

The funny thing about this? Narrative games are almost always at the light end of the spectrum. RQ is slow, number-bound (how many skills? How many hit locations? How many attacks per fight whiff?) and people spend far longer with noses in books than they do with AW