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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9316392" data-attributes="member: 86653">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. 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.</blockquote>

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