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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ratskinner" data-source="post: 6179841" data-attributes="member: 6688937">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.I tend to disagree here. Not that I want a lot  of mechanics actually getting in the way! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> 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 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! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> ) 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!</blockquote>

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