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

[pemerton]

To me, that's because if the goal is to produce a narrative during play, the game mechanics should allow us to play, effectively, in real time. That is, you should be able to get through a two-hour movie's worth of game in about two hours. Of course, a bit of extra time is allowed for food, bio breaks, a bit of table talk, decision making, etc. But if it takes you four six, ten hours or more because of things like detailed conflict resolution mechanics or combat mechanics, the game utterly fails as a narrative game. If the line "30 minutes of fun packed into four hours" can be applied to the game, it's clearly not a narrative game.

I'm going to offer up a different take.

A narrative game is one that will naturally produce a narrative when played. Here I'm using the standard, real-world, writers' definition of a narrative. It's a narrative game if, when you play it, you end up with a story that could be reformatted slightly to be a novel, a comic book, a TV series, a play, or a movie. If you have to add in tons of things like plot, theme, coherent story structure, etc...then it's not a narrative game. If you have to remove tons of things like redundant scenes, superfluous characters, dead air, side quests, dead ends, etc...then it's not a narrative game.

The two best examples we can look at are Record of Lodoss War and Critical Role. Compare the RoLW replays with the manga, anime, novels, etc that were produced later. Also compare the CR actual play with the comics, cartoon, novels, etc that were produced later. They both had to add in a whole lot and remove a whole lot more to beat their games into something like a story or narrative.

Things like Dimension 20 and Worlds Beyond Number likely come much, much closer to producing a narrative just from play, but that's down to the people involved all being professional improvisers and storytellers. They're professional storytellers who happen to be using an RPG to tell a story rather than gamers who are trying to produce a story from their game.

To the best of my knowledge, there are no games we'd recognize as tabletop RPGs that do that. Some games produce a nearly endless string of complications that must be dealt with, for example games that are PbtA and FitD. But that's not all you need for a narrative. Games like Fiasco try with a more formal scene and act structure, but it generally produces a separate narrative-like thing for each player rather than a single, unified narrative from the whole experience.

In his "story now" essay, Edwards notes that

the key to un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting, cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not include that option, at least not very easily.​

The lack of editing is a big issue in RPGing.

But I have had RPG sessions that get close to you "2 hours of story in 2 hours of play" desideratum. Cthulhu Dark and Wuthering Heights one-shots; Prince Valiant; and almost, but perhaps not quite Burning Wheel; and falling even a little bit further short, Torchbearer and Classic Traveller. What helps is both relatively speedy resolution (eg versus tests in BW and Prince Valiant) and having consequence narration and scene framing tightly integrated (which all of these systems have) - this latter means that a lot of time is not spent working out details of consequences that are relatively insignificant from a thematic point of view (eg damage tracking), and likewise a lot of time is not spent getting everyone onto the next "page"/"scene" of action.

RPGs that have no hope of doing it, in my experience, include D&D (any version - 4e is weird here because skill challenges belong in my previous paragraph, but its combat doesn't), Rolemaster, and Cortex+ Heroic (I love the system, but resolution takes too long to achieve your goal).

Most designers have things by the wrong end, I think. They're trying to add story elements to games, rather than adding game elements to creating stories. For me, doing that latter would get you far, far closer to making an actual narrative game.

Have you played A Penny for My Thoughts? It's not a RPG. I have always called it a "storytelling game". I think it is closer to what you are calling an actual narrative game.

 

[Distracted DM]

I think the other term I've heard bandied about with PbtA games is "Fiction-First," unless that's already been mentioned here. Since folk take umbrage with the term "narrative," although I guess you end up with the same issue.

 

[pemerton]

I think the other term I've heard bandied about with PbtA games is "Fiction-First," unless that's already been mentioned here. Since folk take umbrage with the term "narrative," although I guess you end up with the same issue.

Well, in the acknowledgements in the first version of AW (I don't own the revised version", Baker says this (p 288):

The entire game design follows from “Narrativism: Story Now” by Ron Edwards.​

So why can't we just call Apocalypse World "narrativist" or "story now"? I mean, that's what I do, if I need to give it a label to explain how it sits in the taxonomy of RPGs.

 

[Reynard]

It would be AMAZING if we could actually talk about narrative games, and fiction first games, and play to find out games, without this sense of ownership over the language. Because as it is, I see lots of people shutting down what other people are saying just because they want to own the language and force adherence to a particular jargon. Some of you may have read enough of my posts to know that I have no love for jargon.

As it relates to this game, what we want to do is invite players to have a say in how to interpret the results of die rolls. That's it. That is the "narrative" aspect: letting players share the world building responsibility.

By making tis thing more complex it needs to be by incorporatinga bunch of bespokse, exclusionary jargon, you undermine the basic idea of the system which is simply: players are allowed to tell something of the story themselves, too. In plain English it is easy to understand and provides plenty of guidance.

Here is what I do not like about jargon: almost always, jargon is the result of some very small number of folks talking about stuff everyone has been doing for a long time, and they give it a name and call it new when it isn't anything special or new. you can see it from the very earliest days of the hobby: folks were debating literally everything we talk about now. But when we force the use of terminology, we develop an exclusionary and elitist paradigm of discussion that is completely unnecessary except the person who made up the jargon term wants to hear/read other people use it.

I legitimately believe we can talk about anything theoretical or philosophical in the RPG space without resorting to jargon, because what we as roleplayers so exists, by definition, in the space of natural language. "I want to sneak behind the guard and make my way through the gate," is the most natural thing in the world and probably the most common player statement in RPG history.

 

[pemerton]

It would be AMAZING if we could actually talk about narrative games, and fiction first games, and play to find out games, without this sense of ownership over the language. Because as it is, I see lots of people shutting down what other people are saying just because they want to own the language and force adherence to a particular jargon. Some of you may have read enough of my posts to know that I have no love for jargon.

As it relates to this game, what we want to do is invite players to have a say in how to interpret the results of die rolls. That's it. That is the "narrative" aspect: letting players share the world building responsibility.

By making tis thing more complex it needs to be by incorporatinga bunch of bespokse, exclusionary jargon, you undermine the basic idea of the system which is simply: players are allowed to tell something of the story themselves, too. In plain English it is easy to understand and provides plenty of guidance.

"Narrative game" is jargon too. I mean, until I read this post of yours I had no idea that by "narrative game" you mean that a player has a say in interpreting the results of dice rolls.

5e D&D can trivially be played that way. So can GURPS, I imagine.

Although you also talk about "world building responsibility". But then D&D can trivially be played that way too - I think there are examples in the early 80s Puffin book "What is Dungeons & Dragons?" - although the world building responsibility, in D&D, typically won't extend to building the dungeon the PCs are exploring.

If this is all you mean - and if this is what you count as "players are allowed to tell something of the story themselves" - it hardly needs a whole new approach to RPG design, does it?

And just for clarity - when I, and I suspect some other players, talk about player-driven RPGing, I am meaning something different from what you describe in your post.

 

[pemerton]

"I want to sneak behind the guard and make my way through the gate," is the most natural thing in the world and probably the most common player statement in RPG history.

Yet it turns out that the RPG design to allow this to actually be resolved, without relying on on-the-spot decision-making by the GM about whether or not there is another bystander who sees the character and calls out to the guard, wasn't achieved until some time between c 1989 and c 1998 (I'm using Prince Valiant and Maelstrom Storytelling as my book-ends).

And it turns out that actually describing, analysing, reproducing and building on that design benefits - like any other technical endeavour - from having terms to describe what is being done, both in the use of the tool (ie in RPG play) and in the design of the tool itself.

 

[Celebrim]

In Dungeon World for example...

Hot take here, but DW isn't a nar game and anyone that thinks it is just fooling themselves. There is really anything about the game that more empowers you to play "story now" than D&D.

 

[Celebrim]

What specific games are you describing here? What games actually work this way?

Well, I gave one example of a nar game with a nar mechanic in "Toon". I don't play a lot of these games, so I'm hardly an expert, but "Ten Candles" is an example of a game that would meet my definition.

I don't know what threshold is necessary for me to declare a game is a nar game, but to me it has to fundamentally embrace nar mechanics as its core gameplay aspect. Blades in the Dark is an example of a game that to me has a lot of nar influences but isn't really a nar game but a hybrid. So some games may have that one aspect that is a nar mechanic, but if the game is overall very trad in its approach then that's not enough for me to talk it nar.

In general, any game that defines characters through ad hoc descriptors tends toward nar - and example here is Dogs in the Vineyard. If you can call on relationships to give yourself mechanical advantage, that's a nar mechanic - an example would be Monsters and Other Childish Things. Likewise, games with narrative currency that you trade back and forth either with each other or a game master, that tends to be a nar mechanic - especially if the currency has no in universe explanation and if that currency is awarded in exchange for deliberately failing a task. Deliberately failing a task to get a reward you can use later is very nar. At least some variations of FATE have that, as does say Mouseguard IIRC.

Narrative control is also an important part of nar games. In a lot of nar games, the responsibility of creating the world is shared and arbitrated through some formal means. If a participant wins narrative control, even if they aren't the GM, they can narrate the scene with the sort of authority normally reserved only for GMs. That's very nar.

One problem with talking about this is there are a number of obviously not nar games that love to bill themselves as nar as a marketing gimmick because it sets them apart and makes them sound distinctive - "D&D isn't for telling stories but this game is!" sort of pretentious crap. But there is nothing in them that is particularly non-traditional.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Well, I gave one example of a nar game with a nar mechanic in "Toon". I don't play a lot of these games, so I'm hardly an expert, but "Ten Candles" is an example of a game that would meet my definition.

I don't know what threshold is necessary for me to declare a game is a nar game, but to me it has to fundamentally embrace nar mechanics as its core gameplay aspect. Blades in the Dark is an example of a game that to me has a lot of nar influences but isn't really a nar game but a hybrid. So some games may have that one aspect that is a nar mechanic, but if the game is overall very trad in its approach then that's not enough for me to talk it nar.

In general, any game that defines characters through ad hoc descriptors tends toward nar - and example here is Dogs in the Vineyard. If you can call on relationships to give yourself mechanical advantage, that's a nar mechanic - an example would be Monsters and Other Childish Things. Likewise, games with narrative currency that you trade back and forth either with each other or a game master, that tends to be a nar mechanic - especially if the currency has no in universe explanation and if that currency is awarded in exchange for deliberately failing a task. Deliberately failing a task to get a reward you can use later is very nar. At least some variations of FATE have that, as does say Mouseguard IIRC.

Narrative control is also an important part of nar games. In a lot of nar games, the responsibility of creating the world is shared and arbitrated through some formal means. If a participant wins narrative control, even if they aren't the GM, they can narrate the scene with the sort of authority normally reserved only for GMs. That's very nar.

One problem with talking about this is there are a number of obviously not nar games that love to bill themselves as nar as a marketing gimmick because it sets them apart and makes them sound distinctive - "D&D isn't for telling stories but this game is!" sort of pretentious crap. But there is nothing in them that is particularly non-traditional.

That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t really know.”

 

[Celebrim]

That’s a lot of words to say “I don’t really know.”

Ok, so are you denying that "Ten Candles" works that way?