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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9334983" data-attributes="member: 42582">So, "narrativism" - as used by Edwards, and hence by me - is a description of an aesthetic goal of  RPG play.So I don't think that the notion of "narrativist elements" makes sense, in my usage. It does make sense to talk about episodes of narrativist play. As Edwards notes with his Clancy-esque hardware analogy, these episodes of play may be punctuated by episodes of play with a different aesthetic goal.If by "narrativist elements" you mean elements of design - eg a particular mechanic or technique - that are commonly associated with RPGs designed to facilitate narrativist play, then it is obvious - isn't it? - that these can appear in RPGs that are not primarily used for, or designed to facilitate, narrativist play.For instance, various techniques that first appeared in Apocalypse World - eg carefully described GM "moves" - are used in a range of PbtA games that are not primarily aimed at, or used for, narrativist play.And the same is true of so-called "neo-trad" RPGs:Apocalypse World and Prince Valiant fully conform to your stated preference here for how certain declared actions (like "I try and remember that . . ." or "I look around for . . .") are resolved.But players making their own choices doesn't, on its own, tell me whether or not you are playing narrativist. Like, I've spoken with people who play Planescape and they say that players can make their own choices - but the moral significance of those choices is typically established by the setting as authored by Monte Cook et al and as adjudicated by the GM. So the players are not authoring rising conflict across a moral line.I have no trouble grasping this. I'm the one who posted the Edwards passage about toggling between narrativism and simulationism. But I do think there is a question of "primacy". For instance, if the players get to author rising conflict across a moral line today, and then the GM tomorrow gets to (say) establish as a cosmological fact that the true moral answer is this other thing, then my prediction is that that will make for unsatisfactory RPGing.And it can happen in other ways too - eg rather than cosmology, the GM could do this by playing a NPC who (it is established) is a moral exemplar or lodestone for the PC (eg a cleric's god, or Batman to Robin, or whatever). I've seen this sort of thing. It doesn't make for good play in my experience.I don't know, in your games, whether the PCs are "adventurers", and - if they are - how they find themselves on adventures, and who decides what their goals are, and how the pursuit of those goals manifests (if it does) rising action across a moral line. So I don't know what the context is in which these moral choices arise, nor the context in which "bad guys" who need to be stopped turn up.Maybe you're playing relatively vanilla narrativist, maybe not.</blockquote>

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