D&D 5E Wondering Monster- Once Upon A Time

[I'm A Banana]

See, I think as defined by the "first school," every game ever created has a story. Tetris and Pong and Tag and Poker and every test you took in grade school and....

....because those all pass the threshold of the "intro -> rising action -> climax -> aftermath" requirement. It's really a feature of human psychology when interacting with a conflict, which is really all a game is: endless, cyclical conflict. Every time you roll a dice, you have something you want to do, and an outcome that comes from it.

Which is actually at the heart of the "second school," too, though couched in more arcane jargon. Thesis? "I want this pie." Antithesis? "There is an orc in front of the pie." That forms your introduction. Rising Action? "I attack the orc." Climax? "Roll to see if you hit." Aftermath? "The orc is dead, and you take the pie," or "The orc is not dead, and you cannot have the pie."

D&D's flexibility -- in allowing people to choose their own theses, to choose their own rising action, to define their own climax, and to define what they'd like their aftermath to be, at the micro level -- makes it hard to impose a structure from the outside. You can't easily say, "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!" because then you have a PC more interested in running a shoe shop than in slaying the dragon, and that's D&D, too.

I think that's a strength of D&D in comparison to most RPGs, because it enables a hyper-local kind of structure to develop, which is how it recognizes the hyper-local nature of the tabletop RPG in general.

Which is why I think stories like this are great options, but lousy assumptions. The more and stronger assumptions the game carries, the more it works AGAINST that hyperlocality, which ultimately weakens it, often critically IMO, because we've got millions of entertainment options where we show up to be told or participate in a story of someone else's telling (like this Dryad story as The Dryad (tm) would be), but precious few where we show up to tell our OWN stories, using a toolbox given to us (like this dryad story as one of many possible dryad stories would be).

Because it's hard to say "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!", but D&D should make it easy to say, "Tonight, your characters are going on a dangerous adventure..."

 

[pemerton]

The way I learned it in school is (according to Wikipedia) defined by somebody named Freytag. You go from Exposition to Rising Action to Climax to Falling Action to Denouement. Unless its externally enforced by the DM, no edition of D&D (AFAICT) does anything to impose such a structure.

4e's combat mechanics are designed to engender this structure as a natural consequence of combat resolution. (It works pretty well for my group; I gather other sorts of party build and GM approach to encounter design can produce different, less successful results.) The basic mechanical underpinning is the difference in PC vs NPC/monster build. NPCs and monsters have more hit points and greater base damage, but PCs have resources to unlock - APs and limited-use abilities to boost their base damage, and healing surges to bring them back from failure.

4e doesn't do a lot to impose this structure on the broader arc of play, but few RPGs do. Even games like HeroWars/Quest, or Marvel Heroic RP, which - by those who use such labels - would typically be labelled as "story games", don't geneate an inherent tendency towards dramatic structure. They rely upon the GM.

In my experience, what is important here is that other mechanics get out of the way. In classic fantasy RPGing, the mechanics that get in the way of imposing dramatic structure are recovery mechanics (replenishing hit points, replenishing food, replenishing arrows, etc) and exploration mechanics (the game now grinds to a dramatic halt as we all search the dungeon again looking for the secret door that we missed; and make sure we're not too encumbered to actually walk through the dungeon at all!). I don't think it's a coincidence that 4e significantly downplays these traditional elements of D&D play.

While this may lead us to think "See, Ratskinner! D&D's got story, you just showed it!" In reality that structure is imposed completely by the will of the DM/author.

<snip>

And when a DM/author does push for such structure, its often seen as "railroading" or "linear". Many of the most-loved adventure modules (to hear people speak of them) are just "sandboxes" that lend themselves very poorly to such a structure.

<snip>

the method that seems to have influenced Forge thinking the most heavily. The idea is called "Dialectic" and involves starting with a thesis ("Zombies are thoughtless eating machines, and cannot be a part of society.") introducing a conflict with through antithesis ("This zombie has rudimentary thoughts and emotions.") the conflict is resolved into an synthesis ("Zombies and humans can live together in a strange new society."--thank you Warm Bodies) In Forge thinking, games that focus on this sort of resolution are called Narrativist, and generally rely on the game to set up the conflicts and the players to resolve them by creating the synthesis. To do so, the characters have strong mechanical motivations to press their individual theses and the players are rewarded for doing so, often with control over the narrative of the synthesis result.

I don't see the Forge approach as an alternative to the dramatic approach. I see it as a solution to the problem of railroading that you identify. Instead of the dramatic arc being laid out in advance, the PCs are built so that both these things are true: (i) they have a dramatic arc inherent in them (their antithesis in opposition to the GM's thesis); (ii) no one knows in advance what the resolution (synthesis) will be, because it can't be realised except via actual play and the back-and-forth of resolution between players and GM.

You're correct that D&D doesn't have the mechanical bells and whistles to drive narrativist play (though they're not inherent to HeroWars/Quest either, to pick one example - it is possible in that system to build a PC with no relationships, for instance). That's why I've always referred to me 4e play as vanilla narrativist, and very light narrativism at that (ie pretty generic and low-risk fantasy tropes and themes).

As I already mentioned, what is important for me in 4e is that it's mechanics get out of the way of pushing other agendas (simulation/exploration). Also, even though you don't have to build a PC with relationships, it's very easy to do so (because of the way the gameworld, which is itself riven by conflict, is built into so many PC build elements).

 

[Ratskinner]

4e doesn't do a lot to impose this structure on the broader arc of play, but few RPGs do. Even games like HeroWars/Quest, or Marvel Heroic RP, which - by those who use such labels - would typically be labelled as "story games", don't geneate an inherent tendency towards dramatic structure. They rely upon the GM.

Oh, I agree. Even my beloved FATE, so oft-cited as a story-based game, utterly fails in this regard (but no worse than 4e or the others you mention). I don't agree with your assessment of 4e's combat mechanics, but I also don't hold 4e to any special standard that way. For reasons unclear to me, people are very eager to label games as "Story Focused" when what they really mean is "Fiction Oriented" (which I consider different things.)

Honestly, the games that I've played which I consider the most Narrativist or Story-generating are also the ones that have people questioning or complaining whether or not they are role-playing games at all.

In my experience, what is important here is that other mechanics get out of the way. In classic fantasy RPGing, the mechanics that get in the way of imposing dramatic structure are recovery mechanics (replenishing hit points, replenishing food, replenishing arrows, etc) and exploration mechanics (the game now grinds to a dramatic halt as we all search the dungeon again looking for the secret door that we missed; and make sure we're not too encumbered to actually walk through the dungeon at all!). I don't think it's a coincidence that 4e significantly downplays these traditional elements of D&D play.

I tend to disagree here. Not that I want a lot of mechanics actually getting in the way! I think Narrativism is generally better served with more abstract lighter mechanics. However, I don't think that simply removing those impediments actually makes a game more story-oriented or Narrativist. D&D, and through inheritance most other rpgs, hold to a lot of conceits that work against Narrativism mostly in the reward and advancement mechanisms, which are almost entirely Gamist (IMO).

As I said in the previous post "In reality that structure is imposed completely by the will of the DM/author." When you're arguing for the other mechanics to get out of the way, you're arguing for precisely this concept. Which, honestly, is a fine way to approach the game both as a DM and as a Designer. Many of the acclaimed "story" games work well in this mode: FATE, MHRP (Cortex+ in general?), Burning Wheel (I suspect), Dungeon World, and a bevy of lesser known games.

I don't see the Forge approach as an alternative to the dramatic approach. I see it as a solution to the problem of railroading that you identify. Instead of the dramatic arc being laid out in advance, the PCs are built so that both these things are true: (i) they have a dramatic arc inherent in them (their antithesis in opposition to the GM's thesis); (ii) no one knows in advance what the resolution (synthesis) will be, because it can't be realised except via actual play and the back-and-forth of resolution between players and GM.

I don't think they're incompatible at all. I think they both work for almost any story, its just a matter of how you want to analyze a given story.

When it comes to rpgs, I actually suspect that rules-light is necessary for Narrativist play simply to avoid the railroading issue.* Heavy mechanics force the GM to script scenes (or at least adversaries) ahead of time. So, if you want to have a story arc in a heavy game, you need to script it...and then protect the script! Oops! now you're railroading. The other option is to create soo many scenes and adversaries that you don't really care what the PCs do. Then, you've given up on a structured story (allowing it may happen by chance) and are playing a sandbox game.

4e's streamlining helps significantly in this regard, but I've seen people giving advice about preparing all the encounters ahead of time and using the inter-encounter narrative space to reflavor the encounter as needed to give the illusion of player choice...."Pay no attention to the railroad behind the curtain!" (Although if no one minds or finds out...who cares?) So, while I thought 4e reached (or approached) sufficiently easy scene construction, apparently some others didn't.

However, that doesn't mean that mechanics can't enforce a story arc without the heavy-handed scripting that people dislike in Railroading! Capes (yeah, I know Capes again! ) keeps track of losses and accomplishments in the game with things called Inspirations, and to use them, players need to reference the narrative source of the Inspiration. This tends to drive ongoing tension (since you can improve your Inspirations before using them by referencing them) until they can be used most effectively to win (at the player level) a climactic scene. Fiasco as well, is unscripted, but generates an arc. Admittedly, neither of those is anything close to D&D, but that's kinda my point.

*I'll give a possible exemption to Gumshoe for Railroading, due to the nature of the genre its going after, although even Gumshoe stays very rules light in comparison to D&D. So light, in fact, that I've read descriptions from Gumshoe GMs of their methods for running a mystery story without prep!

 

[Manbearcat]

This is a good conversation and one I very much appreciate in our hobby. Unrelated, I typically use Freytag's dramatic structure for conflict resolution (one of the primary reasons I very much enjoy the Skill Challenge framework because it serves as the perfect medium). I've always felt that the most lean determinant format for Story Now Creative Agenda is:

1 - Establish premise to be addressed.
2 - Address premise as mediated by system, GM scene-framing/bangs, player decision-making and deployment of resources/means, and finally fortune resolution of some kind.
3 - Discover veracity of premise.

D&D can certainly be played in a Story Now fashion. Is it is profound as Sorcerer or Burning Wheel or Dogs in the Vineyard? No. It doesn't attempt to delve too deeply into dualities, moral dissonance, etc. It most often attempts to address some very standard archtypical genre premises by way of (i) the depth of character info and deployable resources available to players and (ii) the means of the players to author their own bangs such that the macro-conflict interfaces with the content they seek or re-frame the present micro-conflict such that it captures something about it or outright reflects it.

In 4e, one of the primary ways this is done is via the Quest system. Players authoring their major/minor quests (or co-authoring with GM) is a very transparent way of addressing (typically high fantasy archtypical) premise. "I will clear my name and punish those who framed me" attempts to address a very fundamental, time-old genre premise; This hero was wronged and unjustly punished for a crime he didn't commit...who committed the crime and what justice do they deserve? During play he may have loaded his character with multiple thematic resources to deploy towards moving units toward conclusion and ultimately addressing premise (Background, Skills, Combat Powers, Theme Features and Utilities, etc). During play, everything above in 2 will move us toward 3....which is the resolution of his quest and the D&D version of addressing premise. Now this might change throughout the course of play due to various things. Perhaps clearing his name puts someone innocent in danger? Perhaps those who framed him are already dead, etc? Or, perhaps there is no catch-22 and the bad guys are mustachio twirling Dick Dastardlies that always have a handy puppy to kick. Either way, the premise is laid out (the quest). There are incentives to seek it out (XP and archetype rendering). There are scenes framed, resources deployed, fortune resolution intervention, scenes re-framed and as much player authorial control as the system/GM allows. In the end, the premise is addressed in some way shape or form; (i) the hero isn't tough enough and dies along the way, (ii) the hero allows the death of an innocent for the sake of his vengeance, (iii) the hero forgoes his retribution and redemption for the sake of another, (iv) the hero's vengeance is stolen by the hand of another who snuffed his enemies first, (v) the hero came out with both barrels loaded, punched Dick Dastardly in his mustachio twirling, puppy-kitten head and rode the shoulders of the layfolk to the mayors office for the key to the city.

Again, its typically not profound stuff. Its genre-specific cliche' usually. But there are means to establish, address via mediation of system/GM/player synthesis, and confirm/deny. The important thing is that the premise is transparently established and the collaboration of players vs/+ GM as mediated by system causes the discovery of the conclusion of that premise, during play (not beforehand as in an All Roads Lead to Rome Railroad).

I remember one Major Quest of my players was turned inside out at the end of the Heroic tier due to the failure of an ultimate stakes Skill Challenge. We found out that his God forsook him and his atonement would never be found (he was not a paladin...this wasn't about power). He has played a forlorn soul, evolving into an embittered nihilist, but still bound (automaton-like) by the lifelong ritual entrapments of duty and honor, ever since. That was pretty awesome.

 

[pemerton]

For reasons unclear to me, people are very eager to label games as "Story Focused" when what they really mean is "Fiction Oriented" (which I consider different things.)

Can you elaborate? To me, "story focused" could mean two things - (i) the play is aimed at (re)producing a pre-authored story, or (ii) the play, as supported/yielded by the action resolution mechanics, is aimed at producing in real time the experience of a story. Personally, I associate (i) with classic 2nd ed AD&D or 90s-White Wolf railroading, and (ii) with a "modern" game like Burning Wheel.

When I describe my 4e game as vanilla narrativist, I'm talking about a version of (ii).

By "fiction oriented" I would think that fictional positioning is very important to action resolution. I'm inclined to think that if fictional positioning is irrelevant to action resolution, then you're not playing an RPG at all - because at that point the shared fiction has become purely epiphenomenal, as in a wargame or a collectible card game. In a game like 4e, fictional positioning is less important to resolution than in (say) Burning Wheel, for at least two reasons: (i) more rigidity of mechanical structure, especially in combat; and (ii) the use of pre-determined DCs to ensure balance/predictability/pacing in resolution, which then means that significant parts of the fiction is narrated after the event to fit the mechanically-dtermined resolution, rather than narrated in advance as an input into the resolution. Burning Wheel, by contrast, uses "objective" DCs (ie determined by considerations of ingame fiction) and uses more ad hoc modifiers to resolution derived from a character's fictional position (and uses other devices, like Let it Ride and "fail forward" to help with balance and pacing).

I don't know if my usage of the two phrases is very close to yours, but on my useage I find it easy to nominate at least one RPG (or family of RPGs) that is fiction oriented but not story focused, namely, classic D&D (OD&D, Moldvay Basic, Gygaxian AD&D and similar games). A game that is story focused but not so strongly fiction oriented would be HeroQuest revised (and perhaps also AD&D 2nd ed, if the GM fudges over the implications for resolution of fictional positioning "in the interests of the story"). A game that is both story focused and fiction oriented would be Burning Wheel. I'm not sure I can think of a game that is neither story focused nor fiction oriented - I think that is drifting away from RPG territory (perhaps some ways of playing 4e - eg those tables where fire damage doesn't set scenery alight because the keywords are not taken seriously from the point of view of fictional positioning, and in which play really is just a serious of tactical skirmishes linked by some improv roleplay - would Encounters be like this?)

I think Narrativism is generally better served with more abstract lighter mechanics. However, I don't think that simply removing those impediments actually makes a game more story-oriented or Narrativist. D&D, and through inheritance most other rpgs, hold to a lot of conceits that work against Narrativism mostly in the reward and advancement mechanisms, which are almost entirely Gamist (IMO).

I don't see any particular connection between light mechanics and narrativism. Burning Wheel, for instance, is not mechanically very light, but seems pretty solidly oriented towards narrativist play. As long as the mechanical decisions that have to be made draw you into the narrative stakes, rather than push them out of consideration, I don't see the issue.

As I said in the previous post "In reality that structure is imposed completely by the will of the DM/author." When you're arguing for the other mechanics to get out of the way, you're arguing for precisely this concept.

Not necessarily - unless "the will of the author" includes the players. Simulationist/exploration mechanics of the sort I mentioned are (in my experience, at least) an impediment to narrativist play because they require either suspension of the action resolution mechanics (ie GM fudging) or else they draw the table's collective attention away from the narrative stakes and onto mere proceduratl minutiae.

Conversely, when they are not there, transition between scenes becomes much more free - it can be done by reference to narrative considerations rather than the dictates of recovery and exploration mechanics - and this can be in the hands of the players as much as the GM: even when (as in my preferred approach) it is the GM who actually frames scenes, it can still be the players who choose what scene will be framed (eg the players decide - "OK, we're going to do this thing now because that's where the action is" and the GM then frames whatever "this thing" is).

But you are right that in the sort of vanilla narrativism I'm describing, it is the will of the participants external to the resolution mechanics themselves which generate the unfolding dramatic arc.

Many of the acclaimed "story" games work well in this mode: FATE, MHRP (Cortex+ in general?), Burning Wheel (I suspect), Dungeon World, and a bevy of lesser known games.

Burning Wheel and MHRP both try to build the dramatic arc (at least in general terms) into the PC build rules: BW via relationships and beliefs, MHRP via distinctions and milestones. Relationships and milestones are meant to both guide the GM in framing scenes, and push the players in both asking for and engaging scenes, to ensure the dramatic arc; and distinctions and beliefs should colour the way players have their PCs actually undertake action resolution, therefore bringing the narrative stakes into play in the course of resolving scenes. I'm not sure that's entirely external imposition - it's an attempt (via invisbile hand incentives) to have at least some elements of the dramatic arc emerge spontaneously within play.

4e combat, understood in narrativist terms (which I know you're sceptical about) is meant to be a bit like this too. That is, the persona of the paladin, or the rogue, or the fighter, should emerge out of the play choices that are incentivised by the mechanical elements built into the PC. In my game I generally find this works OK (though as I've often commented, the archer ranger seems to carry a lot less thematic oomph than the other PCs) though I'm conscious that I'm designing encounters that I think will create the space/opportunities for this to happen.

I hope the previous couple of paragraphs make sense, and aren't too diluted by the 4e illustration that I think you disagree with.

I actually suspect that rules-light is necessary for Narrativist play simply to avoid the railroading issue

<snip>

4e's streamlining helps significantly in this regard, but I've seen people giving advice about preparing all the encounters ahead of time and using the inter-encounter narrative space to reflavor the encounter as needed to give the illusion of player choice...."Pay no attention to the railroad behind the curtain!" (Although if no one minds or finds out...who cares?) So, while I thought 4e reached (or approached) sufficiently easy scene construction, apparently some others didn't.

I've always thought that this is part of the point of 4e: that there are a wide range of antagonists statted out for you in the MMs (plus its pretty easy to stat up new ones), and so you can choose from the list as you need them.

Capes (yeah, I know Capes again! ) keeps track of losses and accomplishments in the game with things called Inspirations, and to use them, players need to reference the narrative source of the Inspiration. This tends to drive ongoing tension (since you can improve your Inspirations before using them by referencing them) until they can be used most effectively to win (at the player level) a climactic scene.

Can you elaborate this a bit? There's at least two things I'm missing: Why does referencing the source of the Inspiration in play, so as to build it up, create tensions?; and, Does referencing the source of an Inspiration require fictional positioning of the PC in relation to that source, or just the player making some sort of allusion in the course of narrating a PC's action, or something else that I haven't thought of?

 

[Samloyal23]

I like a good origin ecology for a monster, but origin myths are part of the culture, the "reality" that the characters believe in. Is the myth true? Who knows? It may be a symbolic code for what really happened, religious or political propaganda, or pure wishful thinking on the part of a race's members. In this thread http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?320670-My-Campaign-Notes I include a story copied below about the origins of the Bullywug in a setting I am creating. The story explains the social position of the frogmen and the origins of their degenerate culture dedicated to larceny and grift. I have not decided if the story is "factual" within the setting, but it sets a clear tone for relations between bullywug characters and other races so in as much as it creates the reality the frogs live in it "true" whether it is factual or not...

The Origin of Bullywugs

Long ago in the kingdom of Lyonesse, when it was a client state of the vast Kironan Empire, the king had a son who was finicky and difficult and refused to wed any of the potential brides his parents found for him. No matter how lovely, he always found some flaw that repulsed him in every noble lady he was introduced to. Time and again the arrogant young prince would end up insulting another princess who did not live up to his impossible standards of beauty. Eventually his exasperated father decreed he would have no say anymore in who he would have to marry. The king sent out a decree calling on any who would marry the prince to come to the palace on the first day of Spring so that the king and queen could pick a bride for their wayward heir.

Hundreds of women from across the Kironan Empire and beyond arrived, lining up to be judged by the king and queen. Finally, after days of deliberation, a dark-eyed beauty from the distant land of Thosia turned the heads of the royal couple. The king summoned his son and introduced him to his new bride. He was struck by her beauty, declaring her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

But when the mysterious and haughty princess from the East spoke her voice was far from lovely and made the prince cringe. Resigned to being married at the command of his father, he grinned and beared it through their engagement and wedding. At last, however, on their wedding night, while in the throws of passion for their first time, he could endure it no longer. He blurted out, "Bloody hell, you sound like a frog, I cannot stand your voice!" The princess was shocked and humiliated. Then she was furious! "A frog? " she screamed. "You think I am frog? I will show you a frog!" she sputtered with rage. She began chanting in the Thosian tongue. First the prince, then his family, then his retainers and servants, and soon everyone in the castle and the royal estates doubled over in pain and collapsed. As her keening reached a shrill crescendo they all changed, their skin turning a mottled green, their eyes bulging, their mouths stretching, their very bones warping inside their bodies. When it was done they were all transformed into loping half-frog monstrosities.

The Thosian princess turned into a cloud of dark smoke that smelled of incense and was gone, never to be seen in Lyonesse again. The accursed people of the castle fled in horror and shame, hiding wherever they could. The people of Lyonesse rebelled, provincial dukes through the country into civil war, either fighting to sieze the throne or striving to split away their territories into new kingdoms. The entire nation fell to pieces until the legions of the Kironan Empire were sent to restore order and the emperor raised up a duke who had not been touched by the curse to become the new king of Lyonesse.

The Accursed, as they were now called, who had once been the mighty and fair of the nation, were now driven out of the capital to dwell in the wilderness and become beggars and thieves. The curse stayed with them and was passed on to future generations. These descendents came to be called the Bullywugs. After the Age of Cataclysm those that made it to the Last Lands settled on the moist southern coasts in Ys and Shosnar, become merchants and seamen of the lowest, least honorable type...

Read more: http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?320670-My-Campaign-Notes#ixzz2eTRoo2AV

 

[Ratskinner]

Can you elaborate? To me, "story focused" could mean two things - (i) the play is aimed at (re)producing a pre-authored story, or (ii) the play, as supported/yielded by the action resolution mechanics, is aimed at producing in real time the experience of a story. Personally, I associate (i) with classic 2nd ed AD&D or 90s-White Wolf railroading, and (ii) with a "modern" game like Burning Wheel.

Very close to my way of thinking. To my thinking, the two modes of viewing/analyzing a story (action arc or dialectic) give us two methods of attempting to create "story" through mechanical invention. Narrative doesn't need to be created, folks are good with that. We can even do that fairly well with quite primitive mechanics like old-school D&D. I see a parallel with professional sports. During play, some kind of narrative will be produced. Whether that narrative is a good engaging story is rather haphazard. Although, at least the NFL in the US seems very interesting in making sure that all teams in the league are fairly balanced, as that leads to the best opportunity for dramatic games and tensions approaching playoffs. However, no sports league has (to my knowledge) enacted rules to ensure that good drama happens on the field ("If you're winning by 15, you must bench your first-string QB."). But I digress...

So for a game to be story-oriented, it probably takes one of those two tacks. The way I see it: your type (i) games saw "story" through the "action arc" eye. At that time, the only way game designers had to really view producing a story lead them to think they needed to railroad. I'll give a special shout out to a little game called Whispering Vault (1993). Which had a structure that produced an action arc as its "default" session without a lot of railroading. However, the structure was not generalizable beyond its particular horror genre. (The game also featured a proto-thesis engine, but I found its implementation very suspect.) More recently, the Gumshoe engine also manages this for the particular type of investigative scenario that it handles. The GM can set up all the clue scenes ahead of time, the players kind of work their way through them. When they have collected enough clues, climax usually happens. Again, though, difficult to generalize beyond investigation. I've actually considered using something like 13th Age's escalation die across an entire session. The PCs would be hard-pressed at the beginning, but at some point triumph as the odds switch to their favor. I think this might well create the sort of thing some action heroes go through where it seems like they only lose for the first half, get their bearings and stomp all over everybody by the end. Fiasco also has this structure built in for its particular sorts of scenarios. I'm not sure if Fiasco counts as an rpg, though I suspect a similar engine might be more generalizable for an rpg-like experience. Capes, as well, has been accused of leaving the rpg realm, but I can say with certainty that its resolution engine could be applied to almost any genre I can imagine.

So that's all for the Action Arc, what about dialectic? Enter the Forge, et al. I think your characterizations of their primary methods and modes is pretty spot on. If there's a problem with that method, its that it doesn't usually provide any form of mechanical feedback on your progress (how could it?) That means that the sections on how to resolve the story are almost universally vague, which leads to that oh-so common phenomenon of "you have to learn it by playing it with the author at a convention" that seems rife for Forge games.

By "fiction oriented" I would think that fictional positioning is very important to action resolution. I'm inclined to think that if fictional positioning is irrelevant to action resolution, then you're not playing an RPG at all - because at that point the shared fiction has become purely epiphenomenal, as in a wargame or a collectible card game. In a game like 4e, fictional positioning is less important to resolution than in (say) Burning Wheel, for at least two reasons: (i) more rigidity of mechanical structure, especially in combat; and (ii) the use of pre-determined DCs to ensure balance/predictability/pacing in resolution, which then means that significant parts of the fiction is narrated after the event to fit the mechanically-dtermined resolution, rather than narrated in advance as an input into the resolution. Burning Wheel, by contrast, uses "objective" DCs (ie determined by considerations of ingame fiction) and uses more ad hoc modifiers to resolution derived from a character's fictional position (and uses other devices, like Let it Ride and "fail forward" to help with balance and pacing).

Very much how I see it. I'm more squeamish about they way 4e did it, to me that's how Gamism can interfere with Narrativism (but that's arguable).

I don't know if my usage of the two phrases is very close to yours, but on my useage I find it easy to nominate at least one RPG (or family of RPGs) that is fiction oriented but not story focused, namely, classic D&D (OD&D, Moldvay Basic, Gygaxian AD&D and similar games). A game that is story focused but not so strongly fiction oriented would be HeroQuest revised (and perhaps also AD&D 2nd ed, if the GM fudges over the implications for resolution of fictional positioning "in the interests of the story"). A game that is both story focused and fiction oriented would be Burning Wheel. I'm not sure I can think of a game that is neither story focused nor fiction oriented - I think that is drifting away from RPG territory (perhaps some ways of playing 4e - eg those tables where fire damage doesn't set scenery alight because the keywords are not taken seriously from the point of view of fictional positioning, and in which play really is just a serious of tactical skirmishes linked by some improv roleplay - would Encounters be like this?)

My hesitation to calling classic D&D "fiction oriented" would be a lack of standardized/unified...or even stated... mechanics for accomplishing that. So, if the DM/author is including some new feature in the dungeon, they often have to invent rules for it. Often (IME), classic DMs might even have to come up with new mechanics/rulings on-the-fly to deal with the fiction. Otherwise I'd agree. Of course, that flexibility is often a strength of Classic D&D, permitting a skilled DM to adjust to his group. Unfortunately, it requires a skilled DM to pull it off.

Not necessarily - unless "the will of the author" includes the players. <snippage>

But you are right that in the sort of vanilla narrativism I'm describing, it is the will of the participants external to the resolution mechanics themselves which generate the unfolding dramatic arc.

It can, and we seem to be in agreement on the rest.

Burning Wheel and MHRP both try to build the dramatic arc (at least in general terms) into the PC build rules: BW via relationships and beliefs, MHRP via distinctions and milestones. Relationships and milestones are meant to both guide the GM in framing scenes, and push the players in both asking for and engaging scenes, to ensure the dramatic arc; and distinctions and beliefs should colour the way players have their PCs actually undertake action resolution, therefore bringing the narrative stakes into play in the course of resolving scenes. I'm not sure that's entirely external imposition - it's an attempt (via invisbile hand incentives) to have at least some elements of the dramatic arc emerge spontaneously within play.

I'm not as familiar with BW, but Marvel and FATE share a similar quirk in this regard. Namely, they have mechanics that can drive "story" (either dialectic or action arc, I would think) but the success of doing so would depend greatly (IMO) on the player's choices for open-descriptor traits (milestones, distinctions, or aspects.) I tend to suspect that that is a very good thing, as it allows one player to push a dramatic arc for his character and another to "ride-along" while still being integral and prominent in play. I haven't had the opportunity to play Dungeon World for long enough to see how its relationships work in this arena.

4e combat, understood in narrativist terms (which I know you're sceptical about) is meant to be a bit like this too. That is, the persona of the paladin, or the rogue, or the fighter, should emerge out of the play choices that are incentivised by the mechanical elements built into the PC. In my game I generally find this works OK (though as I've often commented, the archer ranger seems to carry a lot less thematic oomph than the other PCs) though I'm conscious that I'm designing encounters that I think will create the space/opportunities for this to happen.

I hope the previous couple of paragraphs make sense, and aren't too diluted by the 4e illustration that I think you disagree with.

They make sense to me. I think my hesitancy with your impression of 4e combat is due to my feeling that dialectic can "bottom out". By that I mean that I think the gravitas(closest word I can think of) of the thesis and antithesis matter. I mean, we don't view a game of checkers as two players coming at it with opposite and equal theses of "I will win!", although we technically could in the theory's view. Of course, as I say that, I must admit that I didn't approach 4e that way when I was running it, and I doubt that any of the DMs who I (briefly) played under viewed it that way either.

I've always thought that this is part of the point of 4e: that there are a wide range of antagonists statted out for you in the MMs (plus its pretty easy to stat up new ones), and so you can choose from the list as you need them.

I think very much so. Even ratcheting an appropriate foe up or down a few levels is relatively trivial to my thinking. Now, I don't think off-the-cuff encounter design produces the best encounters, but I'd imagine one could get better at it with practice. From my limited experience, though, were I to DM 4e now, I'd probably just prepare a wide variety of encounters to start with...attempt a limited sandbox type of thing.

Can you elaborate this a bit? There's at least two things I'm missing: Why does referencing the source of the Inspiration in play, so as to build it up, create tensions?; and, Does referencing the source of an Inspiration require fictional positioning of the PC in relation to that source, or just the player making some sort of allusion in the course of narrating a PC's action, or something else that I haven't thought of?

First let me say that Capes' mechanics are so outré that it can be hard to describe (I honestly have no idea how it was invented). It is heavily steeped in conflict resolution and the dialectic model and has two separate economies going on to manage play. Capes is also very fluid: there can be multiple versions of the same character, characters can change hands, new Conflicts are invented, etc. all while the players are competing for control of the narrative. So, if this makes little sense...I'm trying my best to avoid writing the whole book out!

Inspirations are created when a Conflict is resolved. They come with a number and narrative value: "Flash stole my date!:3" "Vincent has the key.:1" Bigger number means bigger impact when used.

To answer your questions:

• Why does referencing the source of the Inspiration in play, so as to build it up, create tensions?
  • Because you need to use a turn to get the ratchet up effect. This conveys a strong signal to other players about what kind of things will distract you from their goals, and what sorts of things you are intending to accomplish narratively. (Unless you're bluffing...but let's not get into that.)
  • To use the Inspiration also requires the fictional positioning. So you don't want to let contentions drop....which means that more Conflicts will revolve around it....which means that more Inspirations will be created...etc. Eventually that comes to a climactic head within the fiction and somebody (at the player level) loses enough control of the fiction that their resources are basically voided.
• Does referencing the source of an Inspiration require fictional positioning of the PC in relation to that source, or just the player making some sort of allusion in the course of narrating a PC's action.
  • Yes, although its very loose. Its perfectly legit (if not default) to narrate a despondent character monologue-ing on the Inspiration's source and finding greater heroic inspiration therein.
  • To ratchet up the Inspiration, the player has very wide berth on what they narrate: anything from simple speech to destroying a building, and whatever they say is "true." (The game imposes other limits which are fluid depending on the table state at the moment. You can't, for instance, narrate anything that effectively resolves an open conflict.) However, it must somehow still relate to the source of the inspiration, even if loosely. (I dunno how "Mary Jane turned me down.:3" relates to a building being destroyed, but hey! If you can make it work.)

 

[pemerton]

Thanks for the info about Capes. I need to look into that game some more.

I think my hesitancy with your impression of 4e combat is due to my feeling that dialectic can "bottom out". By that I mean that I think the gravitas(closest word I can think of) of the thesis and antithesis matter. I mean, we don't view a game of checkers as two players coming at it with opposite and equal theses of "I will win!", although we technically could in the theory's view.

I agree about the need for gravitas, and about your analysis of checkers (which I think is also relevant to [MENTION=2067]Kamikaze Midget[/MENTION]'s post a few upthread - orc and pie is not per se a dramatic narrative, in my view, even if one can impose a dramatic structure upon it). In my view, this is closely related to "4e can't do filler combats".

As far as my 4e combat play is concerned, I think there a couple of things I do to help with this.

One is external to the game, but is probably highly relevant - a long experience and enjoyment of pretty traditional fantasy RPGing, which makes my tolerance for the mechanical tropes, and associated colour (init rolls, attack rolls, numerical recording of capabilities and consequences, etc) very generous.

Within the game, it is about using combat antagonists that are inherently connected to the broader narrative stakes (the most obvius is Undead to Orcus to Raven Queen) so that each round of the combat isn't just procedural in its significance (do the PCs survive the thugs so they can get on and achieve their goal) but poses dramatic stakes as well. Threatening NPCs, or requiring gates to be opened or closed by calling upon divine/arcane powers to which the PCs are connected, is another fairly common device that I've used.

My problem with a lot of published adventures is that the goals really are just McGuffins (and this is so ubiquitous that that term has come to be used on these boards, and I assume elsewhere, to refer to any goal in an adventure), and the encounters completely interchangeable from adventure to adventure subject to superficial things like level and generic colour (this time its hobgoblins, next time its gnolls).

An example of a combat of that sort that I have run is the "menagerie" room that is the first encounter in the Well of Demons in H2. But in that encounter - which involves some random dungeon dwellers and a ghoul - I inserted an animated statue taken from another part of the module, which creates allusions to the deeper backstory (which in turn I had linked in to the background of dwarves, and therefore the dwarf PC), and had the ghoul as the (now dead an reanimated) controller of the statue. The wizard PC then was able to focus on taking control of the statue as part of the resolution of the encounter. In the retelling, this is obviously far from the greatest story of all time. But in the actual play it's more than merely procedural, as the players (and their PCs) piece together the backstory, the signficance of the ghoul and it's connection to the statue, the wizard masters the arcane link between the two, etc.

This is the sort of thing that I think 4e lends itself to pretty well for a game with fairly traditional combat resolution mechanics (because of the inherent pacing of its combat mechanics, its high degree of tolerance in resolution, and its flexibiity via p 42) - far better than classic games like RQ or RM, I think, which lack the degree of flexibility and tend to suffer from "sudden death" pacing. But the designers don't really seem to have even tried to bring this out in their adventure design, despite seeming to go to a fair bit of effort to seed it in both their NPC/monster design (espcially a lot of their controllers) and in their monster and setting backstories.

If there's a problem with that method, its that it doesn't usually provide any form of mechanical feedback on your progress (how could it?) That means that the sections on how to resolve the story are almost universally vague, which leads to that oh-so common phenomenon of "you have to learn it by playing it with the author at a convention" that seems rife for Forge games.

BW has very little to say about resolving the story. It seems to want the dramatic tightness of a "story game" and the open-ended play of a classic fantasy campaign. Perhaps an unstable combination.

4e tries to build in an endstory via Epic Destinies, but says bascially nothing about how this is to be realised other than GM fiat narrative - the better hints are in the fact that the highest level antagonists tend to be gods and primordials, which generates an implication that resolving conflicts at high level means resolving the fundamental cosmological struggles that are at the core of the setting. Again, though, the desire to preserve open-endedness and "replay value" seems to have compromised the willingness to actually talk about how the endgame is meant to work.

 

[Ratskinner]

D&D can certainly be played in a Story Now fashion. Is it is profound as Sorcerer or Burning Wheel or Dogs in the Vineyard? No. It doesn't attempt to delve too deeply into dualities, moral dissonance, etc. It most often attempts to address some very standard archtypical genre premises by way of (i) the depth of character info and deployable resources available to players and (ii) the means of the players to author their own bangs such that the macro-conflict interfaces with the content they seek or re-frame the present micro-conflict such that it captures something about it or outright reflects it.

I think a lot of games can be played in a Story Now fashion, that's not at issue. I think your second sentence there is probably a reasonable synopsis of my thinking. When I look at D&D and compare it to these other games...I'm not really seeing Story Now as an objective of the mechanics. (Witness those who play 4e purely as a tactical exercise.)

In 4e, one of the primary ways this is done is via the Quest system. Players authoring their major/minor quests (or co-authoring with GM) is a very transparent way of addressing (typically high fantasy archtypical) premise. <snippage>

Again, its typically not profound stuff. Its genre-specific cliche' usually. But there are means to establish, address via mediation of system/GM/player synthesis, and confirm/deny. The important thing is that the premise is transparently established and the collaboration of players vs/+ GM as mediated by system causes the discovery of the conclusion of that premise, during play (not beforehand as in an All Roads Lead to Rome Railroad).

Forgive me, perhaps its because I only have the DMG1 for 4e. How are Quests substantially different from 2e's "Story Award" XPs? At least in practice, IME, those didn't perform any differently than how Quests are described in my DMG.

I remember one Major Quest of my players was turned inside out at the end of the Heroic tier due to the failure of an ultimate stakes Skill Challenge. We found out that his God forsook him and his atonement would never be found (he was not a paladin...this wasn't about power). He has played a forlorn soul, evolving into an embittered nihilist, but still bound (automaton-like) by the lifelong ritual entrapments of duty and honor, ever since. That was pretty awesome.

Sounds awesome.

 

[Ratskinner]

See, I think as defined by the "first school," every game ever created has a story. Tetris and Pong and Tag and Poker and every test you took in grade school and....

To some extent, I agree. That's why I said that stories are how humans see the world, and any sort of non-trivial activity that goes on for an extended period of time will produce something that someone can interpret as a story. I don't even think that's limited to the first school. However, I don't think that prevents us from discerning that some games are designed specifically to create interesting stories whereas in others an interesting story is more happenstance.

....because those all pass the threshold of the "intro -> rising action -> climax -> aftermath" requirement. It's really a feature of human psychology when interacting with a conflict, which is really all a game is: endless, cyclical conflict. Every time you roll a dice, you have something you want to do, and an outcome that comes from it.

I think "every time you roll a dice" is conflating what's happening in the table/player realm and what's happening in the character/fictional realm. That is, for most games, a roll represents a single event in the fiction. So while you or I can dramatically tell the story about how some player made some roll and it was interesting*...that's not a story within the game fiction, because stories involve series of events, rather than a singular event.

I would also point out that some story games are not, in fact, endless cyclical combat (conflict). Fiasco immediately spring to mind.

*While I was writing that I actually recalled anecdotes about die-rolling in rpgs....is that a bad sign?

Which is actually at the heart of the "second school," too, though couched in more arcane jargon. Thesis? "I want this pie." Antithesis? "There is an orc in front of the pie." That forms your introduction. Rising Action? "I attack the orc." Climax? "Roll to see if you hit." Aftermath? "The orc is dead, and you take the pie," or "The orc is not dead, and you cannot have the pie."

This is one of those areas where I tend to disagree with the Forge interpretation (as I understand it), which I mentioned in another post on this thread. I called it "bottoming out", which is to say that: the thesis and antithesis have to have some gravitas (still not sure that's the right word) to make the story interesting or indeed count as a story at all in the case of truly trivial theses.

D&D's flexibility -- in allowing people to choose their own theses, to choose their own rising action, to define their own climax, and to define what they'd like their aftermath to be, at the micro level -- makes it hard to impose a structure from the outside. You can't easily say, "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!" because then you have a PC more interested in running a shoe shop than in slaying the dragon, and that's D&D, too.

I think that's a strength of D&D in comparison to most RPGs, because it enables a hyper-local kind of structure to develop, which is how it recognizes the hyper-local nature of the tabletop RPG in general.

I think there's something to this thinking. I actually think that 4e did a little too much to say that "D&D is about going on adventures and having exciting tactical combats of a certain style." I personally chaffed a little bit under that. I don't think I'm alone in the impression that the extant WotC editions seemed to be trying to eliminate that hyper-localism in favor of a "good" or "best" way to play D&D. I would also add that I think D&D's ability to do this in the pre-WotC editions seems to me to be more of a happy accident, rather than genius design.

Which is why I think stories like this are great options, but lousy assumptions. The more and stronger assumptions the game carries, the more it works AGAINST that hyperlocality, which ultimately weakens it, often critically IMO, because we've got millions of entertainment options where we show up to be told or participate in a story of someone else's telling (like this Dryad story as The Dryad (tm) would be), but precious few where we show up to tell our OWN stories, using a toolbox given to us (like this dryad story as one of many possible dryad stories would be).

Because it's hard to say "D&D is ABOUT going on dangerous adventures!", but D&D should make it easy to say, "Tonight, your characters are going on a dangerous adventure..."

[MENTION=42582]pemerton[/MENTION] has mentioned before that he thought Ron Edwards believed that there was this great untapped mass of people who would be Narrativist or story gamers, but they don't seem to have appeared and rallied around the games that came out of that experimentation. At least locally, I've come to be of the opinion that they are much less common than the typical Sim/Gam D&Der. On the other hand, some board games that have rudimentary story structure seem to be very popular, some even with a fantasy theme, so....go figure, I guess.

Overall, I wouldn't argue that they should somehow re-cast D&D as a strong story game. (I would listen to the proposal because...well, who knows?) Heck, saying that D&D wasn't a very good story game and should be left to its own strengths was the comment that started this OT game-theory discussion. IMO, letting individual groups develop or impose their own story structures over the game seems like the best route for D&D (both for sales and aesthetic reasons.)