Quote from: CRKrueger;860178Any game can be played in a narrative fashion, all it requires is a mindset of the players to have an agenda and decision process that is not their characters and focused on making a good story.

Many narrative games, however, cannot be played in a non-narrative manner, or I should say, in an in-character immersive manner, because the game mechanics require you to make decisions from a point of view outside the character.  Some games make these mechanics optional or easily removed, in others they are baked into the fundamental mechanics.

I think that is a key difference for me. The 'narrative' games feel like their rules force me into a relatively narrow playstyle... whereas with 'traditional' games I feel free to dip in and out of various styles.
I really don't need rules to reinforce what most 'narrative' games are trying to pull off. I was in a BRP game over the weekend that was every bit as 'narrative' as a person could want (I think, maybe)... but there were no extra rules in place... it's just how the group ran with it (it was actually a lot hammier and metagamey than I usually prefer).

Quote from: Simlasa;860229I think that is a key difference for me. The 'narrative' games feel like their rules force me into a relatively narrow playstyle... whereas with 'traditional' games I feel free to dip in and out of various styles.

To me most Narrative Games read either like a DiY toolkit or a Adventure Path/Campaign Setting then a RPG proper. The mechanic for the most part consist of cute dice tricks rather than a representation of the odds of how often various actions succeed or event occur in the setting.

Quote from: ArrozConLeche;860174From the horse's mouth (none other than the father of the OSR, Ron Edwards):

Well that's a whole lot of words that in a rather unclear way say nothing. It's ironic that a guy who was so interested in story was so bad at writing prose.

Quote from: CRKrueger;860178In a traditional roleplaying game, your job is to roleplay your character.  In a narrative roleplaying game, your job is to roleplay your character and author the emerging story.  So if your game contains mechanics that allow the player, not the character, to influence events through something other than character-driven choices, then you have a narrative game.

CRKrueger, on the other hand, I find quite clear.

Quote from: fuseboy;860220By 'contrived', I mean that the participants are unconsciously making these decisions to support an artificially narrow slice of the human experience within the setting, for example with a sustained, abnormally high level of excitement and conflict.  (Both in terms of the character's life and in terms of the moments that we choose to focus on.)

We're so good at cooperating in this way that we do it without thinking about it. It becomes second nature, so instinctive that we can actually tell ourselves that we're just playing our characters in a naturalistic way.

And yet, when I look at the multi-year D&D campaigns that somehow never take a two month detour through cooking school, or helping the villagers plough the fields for six sessions of a difficult autumn (however much our characters are supposedly) or a nine-session respite from monster attacks .. it seems like we had to be nudging it into that groove all along.

I think that you underestimate the level of conscious choice in most, if not all, of the decisions that you label as unconscious.

Of course people usually choose to play a character who is a thrill seeker or a rebel or is plagued with wanderlust. Because we consciously choose to play an adventurous game, not a mundane game. Because most of us live mostly mundane lives and when we roleplay we want something a little different. If we didn't we probably wouldn't have time to roleplay as we'd be spending every waking hour founding a Fortune 500 company or climbing Everest without a guide or sailing pirate infested waters for the thrill. The notion that anyone is making the choice to play exciting characters in an exciting setting unconsciously seems rather difficult to support. We all know we are choosing exciting characters over dull characters don't we?

I think you are also underestimating or ignoring games like Runequest that include players running ordinary (for their world) characters. Sure my Runequest barbarian can cast spells, but so can everyone else in his culture and so can almost everyone else on the planet. So in terms of the Runequest world, he’s normal, even ordinary. And the BRP Viking campaign does include the farmer PCs planting crops. Though we obviously don't play that out on a minute by minute basis.

Time gets compressed or expanded to serve the needs of play. Pendragon uses the pacing mechanic of one adventure per game year, to allow time to pass quickly enough for generational play. That was a conscious design decision that is explicitly talked about in the rules. And when we played Star Wars, even though the game didn't require it, we included down time for our characters because a years-long game that runs like 24 the whole time seemed silly to us. We figured even our adrenaline junky PCs needed a break. So we consciously included downtime for the characters. Some of which was played out with the exciting drama of cooking a meal, going on a date, hanging out at a favorite bar, sailing on a nice day, going to the beach, or shopping. Again, we all know we are choosing this pace and I think we all know why we are choosing the pace we choose. Don't we?

Quote from: fuseboy;860220But when someone tries to claim that they're playing their character in a fundamentally distinct way than someone playing out a Fiasco scene, I think that's a pretty tough claim to prove.

Why?

Someone came up with Fiasco to do something different, right? If everyone was doing the exact same thing unconsciously there'd be no need to invent Fiasco. And there certainly seems to me to be an obvious difference between someone consciously fitting character choices to a predetermined outcome and finding out the outcome based on (mostly) unfettered character-based choices (conscious or unconscious). And when I choose for my character to do something for non-character based reasons,* I’m aware that I am doing that as I’m doing that. Or so it seems to me. And I’m certain that disproving that I am aware of the decisions I’m making when I make those decisions would be really tough to do.


* Like to meet a time constraint, or to let someone else have some more spotlight time for their PC, or because I think that one choice that my character might choose could lead to a TPK and another choice that my character also might choose won’t do that. I’m aware of those reasons when I make my choices. Aren’t most people?

Quote from: Nexus;860051What makes a game "Narrativist" (or a Story game or are they different things in your opinion?) to you? Do you consider it a binary situation or is there a spectrum between "traditional" and narrativist? And what would you consider narrativist mechanics?

I prefer to call them storytelling games (STGs). Storytelling games are defined by narrative control mechanics: The mechanics of the game are either about determining who controls a particular chunk of the narrative or they're actually about determining the outcome of a particular narrative chunk.

This can be contrasted to roleplaying games, which feature associated mechanics -- i.e., the mechanical choices you're making are directly associated with the choices made by your character. (Thus, the act of playing a roleplaying game is, in fact, the playing of a role.)

Neither of these are purity tests. You can drop some narrative control mechanics (like Karma Points) into an RPG and people are still going to recognize it as an RPG. You can drop some associated mechanics into an STG and it's still going to play as an STG. (Although STG fans are generally more flexible on this point because the actions of a particular character is, in fact, one form of narrative control.)

Roleplaying Games vs. Storytelling Games

Quote from: Bren;860259I think that you underestimate the level of conscious choice in most, if not all, of the decisions that you label as unconscious.

Yes, I concede the point.

What I'm trying to establish is that 'playing my character' for their inherent truth is only one part of traditional play, there's an ongoing process of constraining the character's choices and evolution (consciously, unconsciously, habitually, whatever) to support the genre, pacing, etc.  I think we're on the same page about this.

Quote from: Bren;860259And when I choose for my character to do something for non-character based reasons ... Like to meet a time constraint, or to let someone else have some more spotlight time for their PC, or because I think that one choice that my character might choose could lead to a TPK and another choice that my character also might choose won't do that.

This is a good list, and I think if we noodled on it a bit, we'd find half a dozen other items to add to it.

Quote from: Bren;860259And there certainly seems to me to be an obvious difference between someone consciously fitting character choices to a predetermined outcome and finding out the outcome based on (mostly) unfettered character-based choices (conscious or unconscious).

To talk about Fiasco specifically for a moment, I notice a few different things going on when I'm involved in a scene. I'm advocating for what I think the character wants, and I'm sometimes choosing to portray someone with very different decision-making habits than my own (which is usually a conscious effort).

At some point during the scene, the audience will tell me whether I get what I want.  I'm not sure this is materially different than rolling the dice to see whether I hit and being told I fail.  Now, there's a little bit of time between the audience choice and the scene having definitively rendered the failure.  Like I might be at the vet's office, struggling with the vet to force him to give me narcotics; I'm then told I fail.

In D&D, I might just let the dice stand and narrate nothing (since the mechanical implications of a miss are pretty clear). The GM might narrate the failure, and I've also seen players get into it and describe what it looks like as their PC fumbles (or blushes, or drops the glass vase, or whatever).  I see what happens in Fiasco as the same type of failure-narrating activity, just in a greater quantity - I might shove the table aside threateningly, accost the vet, grab him by the lapels, say a line of dialogue, but then state that I slip on a spilled urine sample (at which point the vet player might take over, narrating hauling me out of the back door and tossing me into the alley or whatever).

Now, I'm not trying to minimize that this doesn't feel weird to some players, there are lots of players that don't ever describe aspects of their characters failing.  I'm just trying to establish that "role-playing" is made of up lots of different kinds of statements, and that many weird-seeming games just have them in different proportions, rather than being a materially different kind of role-playing.

The games most strongly self-identified as narrative seem to focus on theme in the literary sense. Creating a character with a particular internal conflict defines what the game is about (or one thing, since there are usually multiple player-characters). Any "victory condition" in a scenario is a distant second in importance to exploring that theme. There is no winning or losing in that process, though there may be a criterion of completion (as a dramatic story has a climax and denoument).

This exploration of a character's values is I think an aspect of role-playing that is often done without especial "narrative game" techniques. What those techniques facilitate is shaping the external world to correspond to the internal agon, ensuring that events stay to the point of that exploration rather than sidetracking or prematurely aborting it.

Note that theme is not identical with a preconceived plot. To be most interesting, the questions should not have settled answers at the start of play.

The same techniques, though, can be used to set up anything as most important, not necessarily theme in that highbrow sense. They can create a situation tailored instead for advantage in pursuing an external victory condition.

Since that objective is of negligible importance in the designer's intended context, the rigging can be so powerful that it effectively ensures victory. Then the challenge that many of us consider the essence of a game is diluted to the point that what's left is just an exercise in wish-fulfillment fantasy.

Another consideration is that de-prioritizing simulation of the external world can greatly simplify the abstraction. A factor such as "hardened mercenary" or "needy and manipulative waif" can stand in for a host of game stats. Going further, mechanical modeling of all sorts of situations can be reduced to a rule for determining who has "narrative authority" in the case at hand.

Original D&D and T&T were already pretty lightweight, leaving a lot to the participants' judgment. The GM's power as final arbiter included the freedom to let others have their say and delegate decisions. In my experience, the "social contract" has commonly brought in a lot of collaboration even if it's not always formal. People's opinions on what's plausible or entertaining have normally shaped the adjudication of events.

A  relationship of trust and good communication among the players and GM can thus do what might otherwise require many pages of formal rules.

I've seen a tendency for players in their first few years to seek ever more elaborate abstractions, then go in the opposite direction. Players very experienced not only with the game form but with each other often go notably free form even if they have, e.g., a stack of RoleMaster or GURPS books at hand.

It does not follow that their priorities are otherwise in line with "story game" ones. They might find some handbooks designed with the latter in mind convenient, since they are accustomed to ignoring 'rules' that don't fit their game (however essential the handbook authors might think them).

As CRKrueger says, contrivances can be made for many reasons. Two players may have different reasons for doing the same thing, neither of which is what the mechanic's designer had in mind.

Besides how things may be meant to call attention to themselves, there's the matter of what we're used to. Before ever encountering an RPG, we've probably learned that games tend to have peculiar and arbitrary rules. If something is fun simply as a game, we may get so used to it that however it theoretically conflicts with role-playing matters little to us in practice.

When something is not what we're used to as "the way to play an RPG" then it can loom large even if there's a reasonable argument that it's not remarkably further from role-playing than what we are used to. It may be to others one of the innocuous things they take for granted from formative experience.

What really matters is how it affects the experience of the person in question. As the proverb goes, one man's meat is another man's poison.

Which is which is a live and potentially consternating question when strangers get together. A group of individuals who have been playing together for years is more likely to have a common understanding that doesn't need (and may not easily reduce to) formal statement as a philosophy.

Quote from: CRKrueger;860191WFRP1 had Fate Points.  ... As written, it is an OOC mechanic, but can easily be made completely IC by having the GM keep tracks of Fate Points assigned and used, thus with no knowledge of how many Fate Points left to use, the player can not make choices based on that fact.

Actually, all it takes to make it IC is simply not to pretend that the character does not possess the information. If a dude can ask, "Lo, god o'mine, how many lives have I got left?" and get the answer, then there's no 'OOC' issue to start with.

In any case, it's just the same as Hit Points in games such as D&D. I reckon most people take for granted player knowledge of their own characters' HP, regardless of whether this is stipulated in the handbook.

If people decided that a Cleric should not know that he can cast so many spells of given levels, then that decision would create an OOC issue if it were further decided to let the player know. Most people do not choose to create that problem, preferring instead to assume that character knowledge matches player knowledge.

Quote from: Bren;860259Someone came up with Fiasco to do something different, right? If everyone was doing the exact same thing unconsciously there'd be no need to invent Fiasco.

That makes sense to me. I'm not acquainted with Fiasco -- and I am acquainted with the periodic phenomenon of supposedly revolutionary game innovations that turn out to be reinventing a previous wheel -- but it does stand to reason that more than one somebody has found something distinctive there.

Quote from: fuseboy;860305I'm just trying to establish that "role-playing" is made of up lots of different kinds of statements, and that many weird-seeming games just have them in different proportions, rather than being a materially different kind of role-playing.

Well, what's actually going on in someone's head as they are doing something they call roleplaying and comparing that to what's going on in other people's heads as they do what they call roleplaying is difficult.  

I can only tell you the pattern I've seen.

Player who enjoys narrative roleplaying: Nah, there's no difference.
Player who does not enjoy narrative roleplaying: Um, yeah there is.

Make of that what you will.  

What I make of it is that some people, as I argued in the Roleplay thread always have a metalayer when they roleplay and enjoy integrating it actively, where as others seek to make that metalayer fade into the background as much as possible.

Task resolution, "Mechanics as Physics" rule systems seek only to determine success or failure of character's intent. There is no active engagement of the knowledge that we are playing a game, no interfacing with that meta-layer. But, heavy levels of abstraction (like Hit Points for a lot of people) make ignoring that meta-knowledge difficult.

Conflict resolution, bennie economies, narrative mechanics, genre conventions, all actively make use of the knowledge that we are playing a game, they engage directly with that meta-layer.

If what you desire while roleplaying is not to engage with that meta-layer at all, then yes, they are two very different things.

Quote from: fuseboy;860305What I'm trying to establish is that 'playing my character' for their inherent truth is only one part of traditional play, there's an ongoing process of constraining the character's choices and evolution (consciously, unconsciously, habitually, whatever) to support the genre, pacing, etc.  I think we're on the same page about this.

We're at least in the same section.

QuoteThis is a good list, and I think if we noodled on it a bit, we'd find half a dozen other items to add to it.

We could, but to what purpose?

QuoteTo talk about Fiasco specifically for a moment, I notice a few different things going on when I'm involved in a scene. I'm advocating for what I think the character wants, and I'm sometimes choosing to portray someone with very different decision-making habits than my own (which is usually a conscious effort).

Advocating for the PC sounds very different to me than playing the PC. More like what goes on within a group of script writers who are collaboratively writing a script. While I agree that advocating for one's character occasionally happens during traditional RPGs, it is usually a briefer, more simple, and sometimes less overt process and it is clearly a different activity than playing one's character. Advocating to a group for one's PC is probably as close to deciding what kind of pizza to order as it is to playing your character - which is to say it's not the same thing at all.

QuoteNow, I'm not trying to minimize that this doesn't feel weird to some players, there are lots of players that don't ever describe aspects of their characters failing.  I'm just trying to establish that "role-playing" is made of up lots of different kinds of statements, and that many weird-seeming games just have them in different proportions, rather than being a materially different kind of role-playing.

I think that for some players describing how their character fails does seem like a narrative device. When I fail in real life, typically I don't decide how or in what manner I fail. The universe does that for me. So I think some players prefer the GM to take on the role of the universe and answer that question. So describing how one's PC fails feels unnatural to them.

And then there are some players who really dislike having their PC fail - especially at things they want their PC to be good at. So narrating how they fail focuses extra attention on the perceived incompetence of their PC and that is uncomfortable for those players.

As a player, I like narrating unusual failure nearly as much as I like narrating  unusual success. Sometimes more. I recall one example from a Star Trek game I played in back in the mid 1990s. One of my bridge crew characters was a Vulcan Science Officer who had a very high Sensors ability. He failed his roll in a situation that the GM, in hindsight, probably would have preferred not to have asked for a roll. Personally I didn't like the idea of that character failing to detect something with the ships sensors based on human error - after all he's not human. So without missing a beat,  I said, "Commander, I cannot detect the away team. This area of the planet posses unusual mineral deposits that are interfering with our sensors."

Now it was clear at the time that I was stepping into an authorial role. Since I was a co-GM in that game, it wasn't a particularly jarring action and I tried to make the creation as small as possible to get the effect I wanted by limiting the mineral deposits to "this area of the planet." And of course the GM could have overruled me had my little insertion messed with her setup.

Quote from: Phillip;860308In any case, it's just the same as Hit Points in games such as D&D. I reckon most people take for granted player knowledge of their own characters' HP, regardless of whether this is stipulated in the handbook.

Back when we first played OD&D we did consider having the GM both PC and NPC hit points and providing a general idea of their status, like just a scratch, slightly damaged, half damaged, very damaged, and nearly dead. We scrapped the idea as too complicated for the gain, but I have heard of other groups who have used a similar method. I agree that it's not the usual method of play though.

Quote from: CRKrueger;860323Player who enjoys narrative roleplaying: Nah, there's no difference.
Player who does not enjoy narrative roleplaying: Um, yeah there is.

Again, I find myself in the middle. I do enjoy narrative roleplaying (sometimes and to some extent), but the two are clearly different things with qualitatively different experiences.

Currently I have one player in our group who usually prefers not to know things that her character doesn't know. She finds that sort of OOC knowledge hard to manage. I have a couple of players who are pretty good at managing  OOC knowledge and keeping it (mostly) separate from the decisions they make as their PC. And I have one player who enjoys having the OOC knowledge and is just fine making "bad" decisions because the PC doesn't know what she knows.

In general, I think it is easier to introduce people to playing an RPG if they only need to focus on what their character knows and does than to have them constantly switching between taking on the the role of writer, director, and actor. And as you say, there are people who really prefer to be the character and to treat the character and the world as an imaginary reality.

Quote from: Phillip;860308In any case, it's just the same as Hit Points in games such as D&D. I reckon most people take for granted player knowledge of their own characters' HP, regardless of whether this is stipulated in the handbook.

Back when we first played OD&D we did consider having the GM both PC and NPC hit points and providing a general idea of their status, like just a scratch, slightly damaged, half damaged, very damaged, and nearly dead. We scrapped the idea as too complicated for the gain, but I have heard of other groups who have used a similar method. I agree that it's not the usual method of play though.

Quote from: CRKrueger;860323Player who enjoys narrative roleplaying: Nah, there's no difference.
Player who does not enjoy narrative roleplaying: Um, yeah there is.

Again, I find myself in the middle. I do enjoy narrative roleplaying (sometimes and to some extent), but the two are clearly different things with qualitatively different experiences.

Currently I have one player in our group who usually prefers not to know things that her character doesn't know. She finds that sort of OOC knowledge hard to manage. I have a couple of players who are pretty good at managing  OOC knowledge and keeping it (mostly) separate from the decisions they make as their PC. And I have one player who enjoys having the OOC knowledge and is just fine making "bad" decisions because the PC doesn't know what she knows.

In general, I think it is easier to introduce people to playing an RPG if they only need to focus on what their character knows and does than to have them constantly switching between taking on the the role of writer, director, and actor. And as you say, there are people who really prefer to be the character and to treat the character and the world as an imaginary reality.

Quote from: Bren;860349Back when we first played OD&D we did consider having the GM both PC and NPC hit points and providing a general idea of their status, like just a scratch, slightly damaged, half damaged, very damaged, and nearly dead. We scrapped the idea as too complicated for the gain, but I have heard of other groups who have used a similar method. I agree that it's not the usual method of play though.

Its the norm at any table where only the DM knows for certain the players HP. Seen it a few times here and there since at least the late 80s.

Moving from the theoretical to how discussions usually go,

If you like "narrative" games, any game you like you will find "narrativist" elements in.

If you don't like "narrative" games, any game you like you will be able to prove has no "narrative" elements in it.