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

[AbdulAlhazred]

And they simultaneously empower the DM to ignore them entirely!

EXACTLY! ALL you get to do is pick one from a short list. Even that's an optional 5e rule, so technically until you clarify with the GM which rules are in play... I mean, honestly, I count it as something, but lets compare it with the fairly bare bones for a PbtA Dungeon World approach. You have a bond, which needs to be set with another PC, and then we get into the entire question of what the goals and premise of play is, which is all explicitly decided by the entire table during session 0. DW does NOT guarantee that the PCs have much backstory, or that they've got a LOT of interpersonal history, etc. It AT LEAST says you've got places where you can get XP for doing something related to another PC, and then you have to establish a NEW bond with a PC which also will get you XP, and so on and so forth. It already has 5e beat, and I'd say it is the LEAST compelling of PbtA games in this regard.

 

[pemerton]

I think in our first Torchbearer session we had some discussion of how it comes about that all the PCs converge on the same ruined tower at the same time - as the rulebook instructs - but I don't now recall what it was. The game bakes party play into the rules, both implicitly (helping is crucial to success in action resolution) and expressly (all the PCs move from adventure to camp to town phase together). The introduction will have been a fig leaf at the time, and having done its job it has now faded from memory!

Given that the game does not have a "bonds"-type mechanic, but does have relationships (to NPCs) and Beliefs and Creeds, it is these latter elements that are the focus of my GMing. And this is where the PCs find their lives interwoven in ways that manifest in play - eg Golin's enemy Golin is a member of the Void Kult, and thus has some sort of (as-yet unrevealed) connection to Lareth's Fiery Eye Kult. And Lareth is Fea-bella's half-brother, the daughter of her mother and of a NPC mage who was the (now-deceased) occupant of the ruined tower and, before that (although I don't think the players have yet joined the dots) the owner of Megloss's house (Megloss having been Fea-bella's enemy).

The tone of my Burning Wheel games is more serious than Torchbearer. In my most recent game, the two initial PCs were Aedhros and Alicia. They had both disembarked from the same ship, both dirt poor, and both somewhat sinister types, and this prompted them to work together. Alicia has since been badly injured (by overtax from spell casting) and my friend is playing a different character, Thoth the necromancer. Thoth was introduced into play as a result of a failed Circles test by me - when Alicia collapsed, Aedhros hoped (beyond hope, as it turned out) that a helpful necromancer who knew how to heal here would come by at just that moment. But it turned out to be Thoth instead.

We know that there is some unhappy backstory between Thoth and Aedhros, but there has been no need yet to establish what it is. It's sufficient for me, in playing Aedhros, to have the Belief that I will free Alicia and myself from the curse of Thoth! (This is quite a way from Aedhros's original Alicia-related Belief: Only because Alicia seems poor and broken can I endure her company. This is one illustration of how PCs in Burning Wheel change.)

I guess my point is that there are many ways to approach the issue of establishing, and using, connections between PCs. But I prefer ways that drive play.

 

[pemerton]

DW does NOT guarantee that the PCs have much backstory, or that they've got a LOT of interpersonal history, etc. It AT LEAST says you've got places where you can get XP for doing something related to another PC, and then you have to establish a NEW bond with a PC which also will get you XP, and so on and so forth.

This is not too different from Torchbearer, in basic structure. The focus is on what happens now rather than what happened then.

That tends to support a certain "romp"-ish feel to play, which for both games relates to their connections to B/X D&D.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is not too different from Torchbearer, in basic structure. The focus is on what happens now rather than what happened then.

That tends to support a certain "romp"-ish feel to play, which for both games relates to their connections to B/X D&D.

Yeah, in contrast BitD posits the existence of a crew, which the PCs are the members of, which is an actual ongoing enterprise, not simply a juxtaposition of characters in time and space. To be fair it doesn't mandate any particular history or structure to the crew, you could literally instantiate it as a random collection of people who just met in a bar, but that would be a bit odd to say the least! Also, since the PCs have things like friends and a nemesis, a vice purveyor, etc. they've got various 'hooks' into town, which are likely to tie them to each other, given that these will form the context and resources from which the group will build a score.

Stonetop goes further of course, inviting the players to name and define the major NPCs of 'their' Stonetop, as well as relationships to other PCs and NPCs, all of which is likely to be the genesis of whatever conflicts and dangers then animate play.

I agree, TB2 doesn't actually bother with much in the way of "why are you a group?" There's sort of an implication that you and the other PCs are simply whatever washed up out of the gutter this week and would you please see yourselves out the town gate, please take as little stuff with you as we can get away with handing out. It's thin, but then again you are probably worrying more about where the next meal is coming from than who the heck that goddamned elf is.

 

[clearstream]

I'd place the latter two on the same level, with the caveat that the middle is likely to be following from the last. Your OOC answers about the world lead to, as @Manbearcat said actionable character moments that move the fiction. Without the OOC work up front and along the way, my personal experience is that you don't get much of the middle - just idk, banter? Which is fun and all, for the people involved, but can quickly get spotlight hoggy and boring.

I think the lines blur quite a bit: it's all conversation between the players. What some game texts do is provide prompting, structure, and mechanical consequence. Groups observably can do those things for themselves, but I would say that knowing what to put in place, and judging how it should pay out (such as via the progression system), takes practice and benefits from playtesting cycles.

But it is also down to the group to engage with it. I've observed DW and MotW character bonds becoming for some groups quite perfunctory. Some D&D campaigns as a result of DM curation and player inclination have had far stronger inter-character action going on. Particularly the sort of campaign I would label "political" campaigns. But then in those campaigns I recollect a lot of OOC conversation, as well as IC... and in many cases with the lines-blurred; one segueing seamlessly into the other. I've never experienced much IC talking for the sake of talking, overall.

Stonetop prompts and structures an extensive web of player answers to character and world questions. Referring to @pemerton's post up thread, one could foresee that to mesh players into the world in a way that develops and strengthens meaning. Their establishing imagined facts and sharing them creates - each to the other - an objective reality. I personally experience that establishing imagined facts and externalising them puts them outside of me in a way that reifies them for myself, but I recall others on these forums saying that they don't experience that. I'm looking forward to playing it, although I'm starting to question my decision to wait until the books arrive.

Reading the last several exchanges on all this, one could assess it as just a question of "how do we want to spend our time at the table"? A preference. Why waste time on a web of relationships if it's performance on the battle grid that you most care about? I personally see play as ever-changing: so that even if we're focused on the battle grid for a few sessions, we'll likely do what we want to with that and move on to interest in emotional conflicts pretty soon after.

At the same time, one could assess it as an evolution of technique that isn't locked to any particular mode of play. A valuable expansion of the techniques available for design and play. I'm inclined toward that in part because of what I have already said about achieving objectivity. OOC steps in play are effective in my experience in establishing that which we can go on to successfully pretend is objective reality. Some may want to argue that it is locked to one mode, which if so should lead to some interesting conversation.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We played it straight, man! This is it, right out of the box! Heck, it's worse, nothing in any version of D&D grants players the slightest backstory authority! 5e has canned backgrounds, you definitely pick one, but there's STILL nothing granting you the slightest license to elaborate on that or link it up to those of other PCs. The only way any of this happens in a game of this type is with the GM supervising, unless you are all old buddies AND your very clear you aren't stepping on someone's toes.

So you need the book to give you permission to do the thing you know to be eminently sensible thing to do? Certainly in any D&D game you're expected to give your character a background and work out with the GM how your character fits in the world. I would understand if total newbies who had literally never played an RPG before or seen one played would be confused about this, as 5e advice on such things is poor, but for veterans with decades of experience it is just wilful self sabotage.

And they simultaneously empower the DM to ignore them entirely!

I mean rules also allow the GM to declare "rocks fall, everyone dies," but as that probably wouldn't be conductive towards a fun game either, maybe just don't do that?

 

[clearstream]

So you need the book to give you permission to do the thing you know to be eminently sensible thing to do? Certainly in any D&d game you're expected to give your character a background and work out with the GM how your chracter fits in the world. I would understand if total newbies who had literally never played an RPG before or seen one played would be confused about this, as 5e advice on such things is poor, but for veterans with decades of experience it is just wilful self sabotage.

I mean rules also allow the GM to declare "rocks fall, everyone dies," but as that probably wouldn't be conductive towards a fun game, maybe just don't do that?

I feel these debates about D&D often founder on the fact that the game is "high DM curation" and actually "high player inclination" too. It means that X will say their play has always been like so and so, and Y will say their play has always been like such and such, and who really knows because the game text itself doesn't settle it.

One can also observe - as you do - that we're in a post-between-the-covers world. By which I mean that the metagame or around-game heavily influences play and it's incomplete analysis to go only from the text within the covers. That was always true, but doubly so today... so much that in the games industry one now regularly sees teams with "around-game" in their mission statements.

What one can concretely say though, is that game texts that do settle it (and many have been listed here) are liable to more consistently encourage it. Where those games are intelligently designed and well playtested, the prompting, structure and mechanics are likely to guide groups toward a more consistently satisfying result. Equally, as I observe up thread, that isn't guaranteed.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

We know that there is some unhappy backstory between Thoth and Aedhros, but there has been no need yet to establish what it is. It's sufficient for me, in playing Aedhros, to have the Belief that I will free Alicia and myself from the curse of Thoth! (This is quite a way from Aedhros's original Alicia-related Belief: Only because Alicia seems poor and broken can I endure her company. This is one illustration of how PCs in Burning Wheel change.)

Yeah, personally I can't properly roleplay like this. This the sort of malleability of information that just doesn't work for me. If I am to roleplay a relationship with another character, be it PC or NPC, and there is some beef between them, then I actually need to know what it is. Otherwise I cannot properly put myself in the mindspace of that person.

Also, who plays Alicia? Are you again playing two characters? Another thing I cannot do if I am to immerse myself into character. Constant hopping between two viewpoints is quite disruptive for that.

Not criticism, if it works for you, then great! But there are reasons why a lot of people don't do it this way.

 

[pemerton]

Yeah, personally I can't properly roleplay like this. This the sort of malleability of information that just doesn't work for me. If I am to roleplay a relationship with another character, be it PC or NPC, and there is some beef between them, then I actually need to know what it is. Otherwise I cannot properly put myself in the mindspace of that person.

Well, Thoth has - as a personal effect purchased during PC build - a lock of Aedhros's late spouse's hair. Given that Thoth was 2 years old when that death occurred, the exact meaning of this is a bit unclear. Also unclear is how exactly it relates to Thoth's necromantic inclinations.

Thoth's relevant Belief is Aedhros is a failure, so I will bind him to my will. (Also, perhaps, I will give the dead new life.)

So Thoth's orientation towards Aedhros is pretty clear, I think - Aedhros is his "Igor". And Aedhros has some sort of chance at redemption, or at not failing again (as he failed when his spouse died), if he can free himself and Alicia from Thoth's grip.

I don't really need to know the full backstory to play this - the tropes are pretty clear, and it's about bringing those out as an emotional and aesthetic response, not intellectually grasping a character's history. The nuance and variation is going to come out in the details of the actual play, driven by those emotional and aesthetic responses.

Also, who plays Alicia?

Alicia is (or was) my friend's PC. But is lying on a slab in Thoth's Death Art workshop, recovering from the mortal wound caused by overtax. Hence Thoth's role as a PC.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I mean rules also allow the GM to declare "rocks fall, everyone dies," but as that probably wouldn't be conductive towards a fun game either, maybe just don't do that?

That depends on the game. Some games, that would be against the rules.

And even in D&D, where nothing except whatever social contract is in place stops the DM from taking such action, there’s a world of difference between “rocks fall, you die” and a DM simply not incorporating the background choice of the character. I mean, we’ve had plenty of debates about Backgrounds and their features and when/how they can be used, and plenty of folks advocated for essentially ignoring them.

Conflating these two instances of DM fiat is problematic. It’s no where near as obvious to new… and quite frankly even many experienced DMs… not to ignore player input and choice.