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

[clearstream]

I don't know what this means. The notion of what is at stake in a scene is about the player of the game. It's a concept that sits in the same general domain as literary criticism: like, we ask what is at stake for a protagonists.

In the context of RPGing, if we're establishing and resolving stakes for NPCs, then we've left player-driven RPGing way behind in the rearview mirror!

From the Apocalypse World rules

STAKES
These are based very closely on stakes in Ron Edwards’ game Trollbabe.

Write a question or two about the fate of the threat, if you’re interested enough in it to wonder how it will turn out.

You can write your stakes questions at a wide range of scales. Start here:
-- A person’s or a small group’s circumstances or living conditions.
-- A person’s life or the lives of a small group of people.
-- The safety, success, failure, growth, or decline, in some particular, of an organized group of people.

And if one of the players is playing a hardholder, include:
-- The safety, growth, or decline, in some particular, of the entire holding

It sounds like you might not have employed this technique, so what I find is that by having stakes in mind for NPCs a GM can better discern emergent conflicts. It broadens the definition of "adversary" to include any creature whose stakes could conflict with the characters' which can obviously be just as much about good and positive things those creatures lives hinge on, as malign.

In Daggerheart I noticed this

Ground the World in Motive
The characters in Daggerheart are driven by their motivations. An ambitious baroness wants to gain status and increase her sphere of influence, so she acts in ways that extend her power. A large swamp serpent is motivated by hunger and the desire for safety within its territory, so it hunts outsiders, but it might not chase them beyond its territory if it’s full.

Each adversary stat block suggests a couple general motives, but when you’re depicting important NPCs, consider both their short-term and long-term goals and desires. A renowned thief might be most immediately driven by a desire to steal crown jewels from a caravan traveling through the forest, but their ultimate goal is to avoid being caught by the king’s guard—if both of these impact their decisions, this helps create a multidimensional character.

The players might not always know a character’s true motives, but if you keep motivation in mind, you can depict the world with depth and consistency. When you hint at or reveal an NPC’s motives, this helps the players make moves to push and pull on those hopes and fears. Show how motivation leads the party’s allies to act in solidarity with them even at personal risk.

Action without motivation can feel like choreography. When a supposed ally betrays the party, your story will probably hit harder if the players understand those motivations, truly making the betrayal both sudden and (in retrospect) inevitable.

From Trollbabe then

Stakes & Consequences
Every adventure of Trollbabe includes something called "the Stakes,” which is to say, a conflict at hand in the setting of the adventure. Someone or perhaps a whole bunch of someones, in this place, at this time, want something, and cannot get it easily. The Stakes are whatever is desired.

Is the person who desires the Stakes a victim of injustice, or its perpetrator? Is the desired thing a person, a relationship, a resource, a status, a political goal, or what? How does this factor into the troll and human issues discussed previously? Preparing and defining these things are left for a later section, but the key point here is that any adventure is filled with individuals, run by the GM, who are busily in action regarding problems and agendas.

The point of having Stakes is to generate something else entirely, called Consequences. Consequences are how the conflict at hand turns out: the resulting status of the Stakes and the fates of everyone involved. Again, a trollbabe’s very presence tends to amplify or to complicate most people’s takes on whatever situation is occurring, and therefore tends to move a conflict about some Stakes into a resolution with Consequences.

The player has no responsibilities regarding Consequences; the trollbabe does not have to “fight for justice” or be anything to anyone – except that, given what she is, she will be involved as far as everyone else is concerned. Consequences will occur, as the Stakes must change, develop, and come to any form of resolution through the course of the trollbabe’s presence and voluntary-or-involuntary involvement in the situation.

Stakes and Consequences occur at a specific Scale, or basically, the extent of people and territory that are affected by the outcome of the situation. The smallest Scale would be one-on-one interaction, with the Consequences essentially affecting the well-being of single or very few persons. Larger Scales include extended family, an organized group like a war company, on up to villages and whole lands. The range of Scales is presented later in the rules. For now, the point is that Trollbabe play begins at the personal level, and that the Scale of play may increase specifically and only at the request of a player, between adventures.

Eventually, if the players want, Stakes and Consequences may be occurring at the level of the entire land, in which case results might include such drastic events as the trolls wiping out humans, humans wiping out trolls, or some sort of accord being reached for good and all.

So I think you could possibly read this as only players "want something and cannot get it easily" i.e. have stakes, but that is not how I read it and Baker implies outright that he did not either. For me, it immediately chimed with something I was already doing which was to ensure creatures had motives... what do they want? what's at stake for them? And it's then in the interplay of those stakes with the players that conflict emerges.

To make the same point by reference to actual published games: the GM in BW or in DitV can't "say 'yes'" to a NPC's declared action; in AW the GM never rolls the dice - Seize By Force, Go Aggro and Seduce/Manipulate are rules the players invoke, that resolve stakes for their PCs.

Another way (although I had formerly seen it as complementary) is to determine the direction the fiction should go in (via the flow from fiction to system to fiction) and then make the creature's stakes fitting... or ignore them entirely I suppose, embracing them as the philosophers zombies that they kind of are.

He and I have both answered this: by "the nature" of the fiction, @hawkeyefan meant whether or not what is at stake, and the thematic nature of resolution (assuming resolution has some thematic nature), is established unilaterally by the GM

Okay. Calling it "nature" obfuscated that pretty well. I assumed it was something more than establlishing authority.

I still don't know what this means. Like, what sort of narrative is organic to books? Off the top of my head, I think of four books: The Woman in White, The Quiet American, Myself and Marco Polo, and Ulysses.

Or to films? I think of Black Panther, The Seventh Seal, Citizen Kane and Ashes of Time.

Similarly, I have no idea what narrative is organic to games. Or even to RPGs.

That's surprising, because it's foundational to Edwards' concept of narrativism. The reason player must be understood as simultaneously author and audience is because of differences in the medium of games (non-linear, dynamic) and books or films (linear, non-dynamic). Narratology eventually had to make an adjustment to this, leading to post-classical narratology. Ludologists like Espen Aarseth called ludonarrative "ergodic literature" meaning it was literature you had to do some work to unearth.

I put it myself that

Narrative subsists in a reader traversing a set of signifiers, organised with in mind a meta-property, which is their collective signified. This applies to games as well as books, films, and comics. A reader works to traverse a “text”. Whether that is as little as turning the page or keeping their eyes open, attentive, and processing, or as much as making decisions that rearrange the signifiers. Narrative intention lies in the organisation or curation of the signifiers, without which we could otherwise call ordinary living "narrative".​

So a ludonarrative is an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers (think of elements like snippets of history, illustrations of forests and towers, rules modules such as character ancestries, creature descriptions and parameters, and so on: all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story).

I was using organic but perhaps supervenes is a better word: ludonarrative is the kind of narrative that supervenes on storygames, and not storybooks.

It's not true that, ordinarily in a sandbox, the players decide what's at stake in a scene. Very often this is established by the GM, as part of the process of keying the sandbox.

I suppose you could argue that the narrative vocabulary (the curated signifiers) are both finite and chosen by the GM, so that in some way the volume containing all tellable stories is predetermined and thus players never get to decide what's at stake for them other that to choose stakes that can exist within that volume. I think that count (of possible stakes) is so vast and unpredictable that it sure seems to me that players are deciding what they want to put at stake and pursuing it. The greater difference is what @Campbell said - "play that addresses the thematic premises embedded in the character" - which now I reread it can be understood a few different ways, but generally a sandbox could conceivably be considered play that address the thematic premises embedded in and between character and world.

 

[Autumnal]

I'm following two threads at the moment.

This one is (lately) about how narrativism doesn't really exist and players of D&D 5e are just as empowered to drive the story.

The other one is about how background traits in D&D 5e are terrible because they give players the ability to fiat content (criminal contacts, ships they've crewed) into existence, but players can't be trusted not to abuse this, and strict GM veto power is necessary to maintain the consistency and plausibility of your game world.

It's quite a whiplash clicking back and forth!

There’s a song about that.

 

[clearstream]

Why is it so difficult for some to differentiate the presence of certain pieces of content within a scene and what is at stake in a scene?
Say, for example, a PC has entered into a jousting tournament. The presence of a duke and his daughter in an observation box, the duke's loyal knight dressed in tournament regalia to fight the PC, an audience of village peasants and royal observers, and a jester are all content of the scene.

But what's at stake?

Say the player says, "If I win this tournament, I expect to have an opportunity to meet the duke's daughter, alone, in the castle gardens to discuss the duke's plans related to his sworn enemy, Baron Updike."

In Ironsworn, the player invokes a Compel move to "Charm, pacify, barter, or convince" the duke to allow this visit---even if the duke isn't aware of what will be discussed. The player describes the persuasive action, perhaps with some banter, swordplay, and flattery.

If the Compel succeeds with a strong hit, the rules clearly state that the person who has been compelled will "do what you want or share what they know."

At this point, the GM has now, by rule, agreed to these stakes assuming the other parts of the Compel move are met ---

This move doesn’t give you free rein to control the actions of other characters in your world. Remember: Fiction first. Consider their motivations. What is your leverage over them? What do they stand to gain or avoid? Do you have an existing relationship? If your argument has no merit, or your threat or promise carries no weight, you can’t make this move. You can’t intimidate your way out of a situation where you are at a clear disadvantage. You can’t barter when you have nothing of value to offer.

If the GM disagrees that the stakes are relevant, then the GM can suggest or revise how far the duke is willing to assent to the player's declared intent. But once the stakes are set, it is imperative on the GM to faithfully maintain the intent if the player succeeds---even to the point of "revising" or "introducing" elements of the fiction that maintain fidelity to the player's declared stakes in the outcome.

One thought I had been following up is whether it depends on if one pictures NPC motivations to be sort of free-floating and revisable during play. It could go that the player says they want to put at stake resisting a Tyrant so now the King's motivations are revised to some sort of tyrannical leanings in order to drive that conflict.

I think "realists" want their scene set up that the included in placing a King in the scene (a piece of content) are that King's motivations. So the piece of content includes motivations. That's common in games: the properties and possibilities of the pieces are built into the pieces. Fully implied through including those pieces in the list of contents for the scene.

So then if you don't want the King's motivations to be present, don't have the King present. Seeing as the players are present in every scene, their stakes are always in the spotlight. They're what we care most about, still, to paraphrase not to at all denigrate what you are saying but to offer a mirror to it (and without making commitments in that direction, either)

Why is it so difficult for some to appreciate that the presence of certain pieces of content within a scene implies what is at stake in a scene?

In trad/GM-driven play, there are no mechanics that can compel the GM to agree to a set of relevant stakes and then adhere to them upon success. If the player wins the tournament, the GM is, BY RULE (or lack thereof), not bound to the stakes. (S)he can introduce some other complication or "thing" that derails the intent. The GM may decide that despite the duke's intent, the daughter refuses to meet with the PC. The GM may decide that it's "realistic" for the duke's guards to take offense at the PC and waylay him/her before the meeting ever happens. The GM may decide that the duke's archrival murders the duke's daughter before the meeting happens. There's any number of ways the GM might "decide" that to "maintain game world fidelity" that the PC's meeting with the daughter never happens.

Perhaps my paraphrase captures it. When the players decide to confront the King, there is conflict if and only if their stakes are at odds with those of the King. If motives are all in harmony, the scene will be most likely short and friendly, perhaps a bridging scene to move things along in some direction (will you? why I most certainly shall my dear friend! oh thank you).

Reflecting on the way I defined rules in another thread, as emphasising, extending and overriding norms, when we say that there are no mechanics to compel a GM to X, well, there are no mechanics for skipping in D&D but one supposes many GMs are going to say yes to skipping.

That said, I do agree that written mechanics in the game text will help things along, and that in their absence what you say could turn out to be right. What is far more interesting though, is the question of whether some players prefer it that way and if so what they find satisfying about that?

Now of course, can a 5e / trad GM follow the same guidelines and adhere to the player's declared stakes? Of course! But there's no rule or compulsion other than "GM thinks this is interesting." Whereas Ironsworn constrains the fiction that the GM introduces to maintain fidelity to the player's success.

Or of course the GM can ignore the constraints placed around the Compel move entirely. At which point the GM has ceased playing Ironsworn and is temporarily playing some other game, because the GM is no longer playing by the agreed-upon rules.

That comes back to what I said up thread relating to DH and GM moves, that if we really want GMs to follow the rules, we need rules that apply to GM. Both in principle (the game text has to say the rules apply to the GM) and as mechanics (there are GM mechanics and/or what the GM does is incorporated into other mechanics.)

But D&D has committed itself so far as I can see to leaving it open, saying little on principles, and high GM-curation. Meaning who can really say what will go on at each D&D table. Presumably (and hopefully) something each group finds satisfying!

To avoid this sort of compulsion, in 99% of my experience with D&D 3e and Savage Worlds (when I'm not GM-ing), the GM just sets the stakes for individual actions or scenes to be incredibly low, basically never allowing the full realization of a player's intent, and instead puts up road block after roadblock, since simply giving the player their declared success is somehow "boring" or "easy mode" or "emblematic of the wussification of Gen Z" or whatever.

Low stakes is a preferences thing, I think. Players can sometimes prefer it, too.

 

[clearstream]

This one is (lately) about how narrativism doesn't really exist and players of D&D 5e are just as empowered to drive the story.

To be fair, Edwards in a recent interview said that

gns is moronic and that it is a short-lived transition in the development of ideas it just happened to be the time when light was being shown on that dialogue right and that's the form in which it escaped at least the term in which it escaped off to the wild

And if I recall correctly went on later in the interview to repeat his earlier assertion that simulationism doesn't exist... meaning at most we have gamism and narrativism to work with, if we want to adhere to the isms. GN?

Baker has said in reference to GNS that

But, of course, RPGs aren't three games either. Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.

So I would say that today, it's quite respectable to say that gamism, narrativism and simulationism are "artificial categories" that folk are unfortunately "cramming games into".

The other one is about how background traits in D&D 5e are terrible because they give players the ability to fiat content (criminal contacts, ships they've crewed) into existence, but players can't be trusted not to abuse this, and strict GM veto power is necessary to maintain the consistency and plausibility of your game world.

My above doesn't take away from critical and technical discussion on what might be preferred, what has proven to contain more exciting potential, what better works the medium, and so on.

When I do not advocate for narrativism, that is not because I do not advocate for many of the concepts that have been historically associated with the ism. I just don't see them as exclusively belonging to some special "narrativist" play that the other kids just don't get. And I do not see them as all or nothing: they can be used in part, in degree, some and not others.

 

[clearstream]

Well, it is nice to know that I am not the only one who thinks that narrativism is strongly associated with the players having access to acausal reality editing.

Now what I do not agree with is, that such are needed for players to have significant impact on the direction of the game.

I do observe the Backstory features being treated in an inconsistent way. No one has any trouble with Fly being player-invokable and breaking our humans-don't-fly norm, and nor do they have trouble with Summon Celestial summoning a celestial.

On the other hand, most player-invokable features are costed, balanced, and reasonably unambiguous in effect, while the Backstory are generally, uncosted, horrifically unbalanced relative to one another, and often ambiguous. As invokable-mechanics, they read like an afterthought.

So my take is that the reason Backstory features are a hot potato is not because folk are against player-invokable reality-editing, which is after all par for the course, but because the player-invokable reality-editing of Backstory features is badly designed.

 

[pemerton]

a ludonarrative is an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers (think of elements like snippets of history, illustrations of forests and towers, rules modules such as character ancestries, creature descriptions and parameters, and so on: all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story).

So on this account a prompt that an English teacher gives to the class - say, that contains a photograph, an obituary, a calendar page and a snippet of narrative text, with the instruction to the class "write a story that incorporates these prompt elements" - is a ludonarrative.

So are some poems, and some visual artworks.

And that's because all you are describing, with the words "an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers . . . all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story" is a collection of imaginary stuff deliberately put together, that might inspire someone to imagine a story that incorporates them all.

Confining these "ludonarratives" to the RPGing context, they seem to describe what would conventionally be called a RPG rulebook that includes some setting elements - eg the Burning Wheel rulebook, or the Classic Traveller rulebook, or the 4e D&D rulebook. Even the Rolemaster rulebook.

This has nothing to do with "story now" or "narrativism" as an approach to RPGing, except that narrativism is an approach to RPGing.

ludonarrative is the kind of narrative that supervenes on storygames, and not storybooks.

But there is no such type of narrative. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by a "story game", but there many types of narrative that can be created via the play of one - eg I have played Rolemaster and 4e D&D and created narratives about mythic figures who save the cosmos from some apparent fate, by stepping outside the (seemingly) pre-ordained cosmological laws or principles; and I have played Wuthering Heights and created an over-the-top story about over-sensitive Victorian individuals in a class-ridden and convention-constrained society, with an occult twist to it.

None of these stories supervene on any story games. The stories could be different with no change to the game's rules, or rules text, or setting. (Maybe you are using "supervenes" in some non-standard sense?)

I have no idea in what way any of them is supposed to be a "ludonarrative", in that none of them is an assemblage of the sort that you describe.

In addition, it seems obvious to me that there is no story, nor any meaningful class of stories, that supervenes on (say) the Burning Wheel rulebook. If you know that someone is playing a game of Burning Wheel, you can conjecture that their fiction will probably involve mediaeval fantasy elements. And that's it! If "ludonarrative" is nothing more than "stories of a genre that fits the rulebook", I don't find it a very helpful category.

(I did briefly review the Wikipedia entry on "Ergodic Literature". It has a list if examples that includes choose your own adventures, which were the first things I thought of. It also mentions D&D modules, though I think the discussion of those on the page is woefully underanalysed - for a start, it appears to assume that there is a single "the story" of the module, which is true for some modules (eg some DL ones) but not others (eg B2). I don't believe that the notion of "ergodic literature" sheds much light on RPGing outside of the context of playing through railroads.)

From the Apocalypse World rules

<snip>

From Trollbabe then

I'm pretty familiar with AW and "stakes questions" as part of front design. And I know that they are taken from Trollbabe.

Stakes are not an in-fiction property of people or events (to use some people's favourite word, they are not "diegetic"). Stakes are an aspect of the fiction that is described by actual people who are playing the game. This is why I say there are no stakes for NPCs: unless the GM is playing the game with themself! Stakes are about finding out, via the play of the game, what happens to the things the players are connected to via their PCs. And this is why the AW rulebook puts the fate of the holding at stake when a player is playing a hardholder. This is why threats and fronts, and the associated stakes questions, are written after the first session in which it has been established who the PCs are, what matters to them, etc.

A RPG in which the GM decides, in advance and unilateraly, what is at stake in all the key moments of play - eg the DL modules - is the opposite of player-driven RPGing. It's what I call a railroad.

 

[pemerton]

To be fair, Edwards in a recent interview said that

Can you provide us with the link? The last time someone produced an interview of Edwards supposedly repudiating his analysis, he wasn't at all.

One thought I had been following up is whether it depends on if one pictures NPC motivations to be sort of free-floating and revisable during play. It could go that the player says they want to put at stake resisting a Tyrant so now the King's motivations are revised to some sort of tyrannical leanings in order to drive that conflict.

I think "realists" want their scene set up that the included in placing a King in the scene (a piece of content) are that King's motivations. So the piece of content includes motivations. That's common in games: the properties and possibilities of the pieces are built into the pieces. Fully implied through including those pieces in the list of contents for the scene.

This is completely orthogonal to the issues that @innerdude, @soviet, @hawkeyefan and I are talking about.

In some RPGs, the motivations of the NPC Tyrant are set by the GM as part of the GM's prep. Examples include Apocalypse World (assuming the Tyrant is a threat), Sorcerer (based on Edwards commentary - I haven't read the whole rulebook) and Prince Valiant (at least in many of the "episodes"). In other RPGs, the motivations of a NPC are liable to be flexible, and settled fully as part of the process of adjudication and resolution. This is a technique that I use in 4e D&D (to accommodate check results within a skill challenge), Classic Traveller (to accommodate results on the reaction table, or the results of Streetwise or Admin or Bribery checks) and sometimes in Burning Wheel (if the NPC doesn't yet have Beliefs or Instincts written). My thinking on the second of the two approaches was heavily influenced by this two-decades-old post by Paul Czege:

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

As Ron Edwards explained, also two decades ago, there's no particular connection between either technique and "story now" play:

A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for "making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional for Narrativist play, but it is indeed an important issue for role-playing of any kind. So it's not a bad idea simply to ask, for a given group or session, when and how is the Explorative context (setting, situation, whatever) established?

• High improvisation during play: e.g., Universalis, InSpectres, Extreme Vengeance
• Rock steady based on preparation - Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein, HeroQuest, Sorcerer
• In between - Trollbabe, The Pool, Dust Devils, My Life with Master

Many people get unnecessarily hung up on this issue ... playing Universalis is not "more Narrativist" than playing Orkworld, for instance. Also, this issue is not at all correlated with centralizing vs. distributing the various GM-tasks discussed previously.​

Seeing as the players are present in every scene, their stakes are always in the spotlight. They're what we care most about, still, to paraphrase not to at all denigrate what you are saying but to offer a mirror to it (and without making commitments in that direction, either)

<snip>

When the players decide to confront the King, there is conflict if and only if their stakes are at odds with those of the King. If motives are all in harmony, the scene will be most likely short and friendly, perhaps a bridging scene to move things along in some direction (will you? why I most certainly shall my dear friend! oh thank you).

I don't know how you are using "stakes" here, as it is not how @innerdude uses it, and it is not how Baker or Edwards uses it.

The players have desires. Some of those desires are about what happens to their PCs in the fiction. Typically those will be aligned with imagined desires of the PC. The NPC also has desires, typically authored by the GM (assuming a conventional allocation of tasks to players and GM). Conflict will result if those desires come into conflict - what is at stake in that conflict is, roughly, what the characters are fighting about.

The crux of player-driven vs GM-driven RPGing, when we are talking about stakes, is - who decides what is going to be at issue in these conflicts? Or, more generally, who decides what scenes, and play as a whole, is about? That is quite different from the question who authors the desires and motivations of the NPC.

For instance, in my Torchbearer 2e game, various actions taken by, and decisions made, by the players meant that two things that were at stake were what will the NPC Gerda's future be? and what will the fate of the cursed Elfstone be? I was the one who made decisions about NPC motivations that oriented them towards these stakes: I decided that Gerda, having been a bandit, would steal the Elfstone, and subsequently try to retain it when the PC Fea-bella wanted it back; and I decided that the NPC Megloss would oppose rather than join with Gerda, to try and get the Elfstone for himself. That first decision was motivated, in part, by a desire to set up conflict between the PCs, as Gerda was the PC Golin's friend but, by stealing the Elfstone, would become an enemy of Fea-bella. The second decision was motivated, in part, by the fact that Megloss was (as a matter of stipulation during the course of initial PC build) an enemy of Fea-bella, and the game rules state that the GM should "use" enemies to establish opposition, trouble etc for the PCs of whom they are enemies.

The detailed technique is not the same as setting up a AW threat. But the basic idea is not wildly different.

What is far more interesting though, is the question of whether some players prefer it that way and if so what they find satisfying about that?

<snip>

Low stakes is a preferences thing, I think. Players can sometimes prefer it, too.

I don't think this is very interesting at all, to be perfectly honest.

The fact that different RPGers have different preferences is a pretty straightforward observation. What is non-trivial is identifying useful techniques for actually satisfying those preferences. For instance, reading the Paul Czege post that I quoted above opened my eyes to an approach to GMing NPCs that I had not consciously though of before. Putting it to work made my GMing better at satisfying my preferences.

 

[clearstream]

So on this account a prompt that an English teacher gives to the class - say, that contains a photograph, an obituary, a calendar page and a snippet of narrative text, with the instruction to the class "write a story that incorporates these prompt elements" - is a ludonarrative.

So are some poems, and some visual artworks.

And that's because all you are describing, with the words "an assemblage of deliberately chosen signifiers . . . all containing narrative potential without committing to a single told story" is a collection of imaginary stuff deliberately put together, that might inspire someone to imagine a story that incorporates them all.

For sure it has been notoriously difficult to pin these down, and doubly so in a few short sentences. The "dynamic" aspect of games means that some of the signifiers too are dynamic, or are bound by dynamics. I should add that.

Confining these "ludonarratives" to the RPGing context, they seem to describe what would conventionally be called a RPG rulebook that includes some setting elements - eg the Burning Wheel rulebook, or the Classic Traveller rulebook, or the 4e D&D rulebook. Even the Rolemaster rulebook.

This has nothing to do with "story now" or "narrativism" as an approach to RPGing, except that narrativism is an approach to RPGing.

So TTRPG is not about traditional-narrative, it is about ludonarrative. Narratism would then be a subset of that.

But there is no such type of narrative. I'm not 100% sure what you mean by a "story game", but there many types of narrative that can be created via the play of one - eg I have played Rolemaster and 4e D&D and created narratives about mythic figures who save the cosmos from some apparent fate, by stepping outside the (seemingly) pre-ordained cosmological laws or principles; and I have played Wuthering Heights and created an over-the-top story about over-sensitive Victorian individuals in a class-ridden and convention-constrained society, with an occult twist to it.

None of these stories supervene on any story games. The stories could be different with no change to the game's rules, or rules text, or setting. (Maybe you are using "supervenes" in some non-standard sense?)

I have no idea in what way any of them is supposed to be a "ludonarrative", in that none of them is an assemblage of the sort that you describe.

All of them are assemblages of exactly the sort I described. However, it's not important to me that you understand this. You asked, I answered. Read more on post-classical narratology. I'm morally certain there are folk who are better at explaining these concepts than I am.

In addition, it seems obvious to me that there is no story, nor any meaningful class of stories, that supervenes on (say) the Burning Wheel rulebook. If you know that someone is playing a game of Burning Wheel, you can conjecture that their fiction will probably involve mediaeval fantasy elements. And that's it! If "ludonarrative" is nothing more than "stories of a genre that fits the rulebook", I don't find it a very helpful category.

There are vastly many stories that supervene on Burning Wheel, once you take into account too the signifiers each player contributes to the set in play at their table. Conjectures of the sort you give are exactly what one expects to be able to make, and it is quite right to say "stories of a genre that fits the rulebook"... in a sense, that is what folk have been arguing so ardently about. That stories of a certain sort don't fit the 5e rulebook (so must arise if at all from what players contribute) while they do fit some other rulebooks.

And here I think you develop a sense that story exists not just in the rendering of what happens, but in how the rendering is experienced by readers. Hence the reader's traversal in my description.

(I did briefly review the Wikipedia entry on "Ergodic Literature". It has a list if examples that includes choose your own adventures, which were the first things I thought of. It also mentions D&D modules, though I think the discussion of those on the page is woefully underanalysed - for a start, it appears to assume that there is a single "the story" of the module, which is true for some modules (eg some DL ones) but not others (eg B2). I don't believe that the notion of "ergodic literature" sheds much light on RPGing outside of the context of playing through railroads.)

Ergodic literature was an early and somewhat influential take by Espen, and I agree it is inadequate. Espen later revised or supplemented that description of games with other notions. Generally, he proposed treating games ass mechanisms and establishing a meta-model for comparing them.

I'm pretty familiar with AW and "stakes questions" as part of front design. And I know that they are taken from Trollbabe.

Stakes are not an in-fiction property of people or events (to use some people's favourite word, they are not "diegetic"). Stakes are an aspect of the fiction that is described by actual people who are playing the game. This is why I say there are no stakes for NPCs: unless the GM is playing the game with themself! Stakes are about finding out, via the play of the game, what happens to the things the players are connected to via their PCs. And this is why the AW rulebook puts the fate of the holding at stake when a player is playing a hardholder. This is why threats and fronts, and the associated stakes questions, are written after the first session in which it has been established who the PCs are, what matters to them, etc.

A RPG in which the GM decides, in advance and unilateraly, what is at stake in all the key moments of play - eg the DL modules - is the opposite of player-driven RPGing. It's what I call a railroad.

There is a difference there between having such stakes in mind, and deciding what's at stake. The players decide what's at stake. One way is through their choice of what they do, who they interact with and confront, where and when. Another is through saying what they have at stake and GM developing play around that.

Sometimes the players look to the GM to force the play, often by bringing someone or something into the picture, or escalating something, that ideally has something to do with their stakes. How hard one wants to adhere to that is a matter of degree, and I observe groups finding satisfying play all along that range.

AP play is not at all what I have in mind. I agree that those sort of fully scripted adventures lay it out so that what's at stake in a scene is predetermined. Often by nobody at the table.

Examples: I wonder, will Birdie get a better place to live? I wonder, will Roark live through this? I wonder, who will join Tum Tum’s cult? I wonder, will Foster break Uncle’s holding?

It can't matter that GM thinks about Birdie getting a better place to live, if diegetically Birdie is completely disinterested in a better place to live and quite (and not falsely) satisfied with where they live now. It can't matter if GM wonders if Roark will live through this, if Roark would rather not live through this. GM ought to be wondering something like, will Roark go out in X way or do X before they go, or whatever. And it cannot matter if GM wonders if Foster will break Uncle's holding if diegetically Foster hasn't the least interest in breaking Uncle's holding.

At the same time, in TTRPG, such NPCs have motives on through our pretence.

 

[Autumnal]

I’m in the midst of rereading Lord of the Rings, and that Czege quote certainly fits how Tolkien wrote a lot. Have a character show up and do something interesting, and figure out why along with other characters.

Also, I originally wrote “Lorre of the Rings”, and now I kinda really wanna play that.

 

[clearstream]

Can you provide us with the link? The last time someone produced an interview of Edwards supposedly repudiating his analysis, he wasn't at all.

You have seen or linked the video of the interview yourself, either earlier here or in another thread.

This is completely orthogonal to the issues that @innerdude, @soviet, @hawkeyefan and I are talking about.

In some RPGs, the motivations of the NPC Tyrant are set by the GM as part of the GM's prep. Examples include Apocalypse World (assuming the Tyrant is a threat), Sorcerer (based on Edwards commentary - I haven't read the whole rulebook) and Prince Valiant (at least in many of the "episodes"). In other RPGs, the motivations of a NPC are liable to be flexible, and settled fully as part of the process of adjudication and resolution. This is a technique that I use in 4e D&D (to accommodate check results within a skill challenge), Classic Traveller (to accommodate results on the reaction table, or the results of Streetwise or Admin or Bribery checks) and sometimes in Burning Wheel (if the NPC doesn't yet have Beliefs or Instincts written). My thinking on the second of the two approaches was heavily influenced by this two-decades-old post by Paul Czege:

I frame the character into the middle of conflicts I think will push and pull in ways that are interesting to me and to the player. I keep NPC personalities somewhat unfixed in my mind, allowing me to retroactively justify their behaviors in support of this.​

As Ron Edwards explained, also two decades ago, there's no particular connection between either technique and "story now" play:

A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for "making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional for Narrativist play, but it is indeed an important issue for role-playing of any kind. So it's not a bad idea simply to ask, for a given group or session, when and how is the Explorative context (setting, situation, whatever) established?​

​

• High improvisation during play: e.g., Universalis, InSpectres, Extreme Vengeance
• Rock steady based on preparation - Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein, HeroQuest, Sorcerer
• In between - Trollbabe, The Pool, Dust Devils, My Life with Master

Many people get unnecessarily hung up on this issue ... playing Universalis is not "more Narrativist" than playing Orkworld, for instance. Also, this issue is not at all correlated with centralizing vs. distributing the various GM-tasks discussed previously.​

I don't know how you are using "stakes" here, as it is not how @innerdude uses it, and it is not how Baker or Edwards uses it.

The players have desires. Some of those desires are about what happens to their PCs in the fiction. Typically those will be aligned with imagined desires of the PC. The NPC also has desires, typically authored by the GM (assuming a conventional allocation of tasks to players and GM). Conflict will result if those desires come into conflict - what is at stake in that conflict is, roughly, what the characters are fighting about.

The crux of player-driven vs GM-driven RPGing, when we are talking about stakes, is - who decides what is going to be at issue in these conflicts? Or, more generally, who decides what scenes, and play as a whole, is about? That is quite different from the question who authors the desires and motivations of the NPC.

I agree with the above: it matches what I was talking about. It looks like we have slightly different meanings in mind for "stakes" that are getting in the way of understanding. Is it right that you want to reserve the word for the motives or desires of player characters? So even if you also talk about desires and motives of NPCs, you don't label those stakes. The reason being that you want the word to serve the purpose of labelling specifically what drives and in the end is resolved in conflicts.

If right, that's a reasonable usage as it echoes stakes in other game contexts, such as in Poker. What players put at risk.

One reason I include the desires and motives of NPCs is in part with in mind GM as player. Equipping them to let "the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality, driven by the player's characters, answer it."

For instance, in my Torchbearer 2e game, various actions taken by, and decisions made, by the players meant that two things that were at stake were what will the NPC Gerda's future be? and what will the fate of the cursed Elfstone be? I was the one who made decisions about NPC motivations that oriented them towards these stakes: I decided that Gerda, having been a bandit, would steal the Elfstone, and subsequently try to retain it when the PC Fea-bella wanted it back; and I decided that the NPC Megloss would oppose rather than join with Gerda, to try and get the Elfstone for himself. That first decision was motivated, in part, by a desire to set up conflict between the PCs, as Gerda was the PC Golin's friend but, by stealing the Elfstone, would become an enemy of Fea-bella. The second decision was motivated, in part, by the fact that Megloss was (as a matter of stipulation during the course of initial PC build) an enemy of Fea-bella, and the game rules state that the GM should "use" enemies to establish opposition, trouble etc for the PCs of whom they are enemies.

The detailed technique is not the same as setting up a AW threat. But the basic idea is not wildly different.

I don't think this is very interesting at all, to be perfectly honest.

In shocking news, we sometimes turn out to be interested in different things.

The fact that different RPGers have different preferences is a pretty straightforward observation. What is non-trivial is identifying useful techniques for actually satisfying those preferences. For instance, reading the Paul Czege post that I quoted above opened my eyes to an approach to GMing NPCs that I had not consciously though of before. Putting it to work made my GMing better at satisfying my preferences.

Here perhaps the only difference between us is that I'm willing to say that techniques that have been associated with a movement sometimes self-identifying as narrativist, are available to play falling outside what that movement would count as narrativist. I get the sense folk generally agree, too, that groups can find themselves employing those techniques even without their being incorporated in game texts, even if there is equally a sense that designers do useful work incorporating them (researching, communicating, streamlining, testing in other contexts, etc) that can lead to their more probable, consistent and effective application. My view is very far from - game designers have nothing to offer!