EVENTS are always making, though we may prefer to spend our time in ways that involve more swordplay, sorcery and monsters than Jerry pretending to be Jerry.

As with real lives, that doesn't mean we're trying to tell a story, and people who DO want that will quickly agree that we're not scratching their itch.

Anyone of course is free to tell a story after the fact, even about a game of Canasta. That doesn't make Canasta a story-telling game! More to the point, D&D and its heirs are a variation on war-games, and were (and often still are) approached with the same expectation that what happens is whatever happens while the players pursue their in-role objectives regardless of whether that is dramatically satisfying from a literary perspective.

A story-telling game is one in which the process itself is a game of telling a story, in which telling a story is the INTENT and OBJECT of the proceedings.

The confusion here arises from the fact that the way we play an RPG is by talking about imaginary figures performing imaginary actions in an imaginary world. The TALKING part is what impresses people enough to get worked up about the "story" in a game of D&D even though it may be far more a mere wandering through "shit happens and then you die" than a video game of jumping and shooting through a sequence of levels with a carefully planned dramatic structure building up to a climactic "boss fight".

Is it some kind of weird 10th anniversary throwback you are re-enacting?

I was going to reply to a few things, but then figured this is easier.

Hybridartifacts: Since people were using the words "narrative" and "story" interchangeable prior to his arrival in this thread(barring some talk of Ron Edwards-specific jargon, of course), switching to definitions that people weren't using is shifting the goalposts. Also note that in arguing against something I said, he did the same thing with the word "force." Until such time as he argues against what we actually said, which would require using the words without changing the definitions mid-discussion, I really don't have anything more to say to, or about, him.

nDervish: You are telling a story -- or at least part of the story -- of your character disarming the bomb while your character is disarming the bomb. These two things are not mutually exclusive in the slightest, and how closely you identify with your character during the process doesn't change this. Also, I honestly don't see how a story could possibly not be produced during play -- once anything happens, a story exists. It might not be a good story. It might not be a full story. It may or may not become such things as time goes on. But these are issues of quality and completeness, not existence.

Quote from: Hybridartifacts;861592You don't see a narrative as something that also occurs as it happens or is experienced?

I don't see that perspective as especially relevant to how I have played or want to play RPGs.  I want to find out what the story is, I don't want to direct where the story goes, nor do I want anyone else at the table authoring or directing a story. That preference is one reason I don't talk about an 'unfolding narrative.'

Quote from: Hybridartifacts;861592Or is that what you mean when you talks about "an authorial perspective of trying to push the character in a particular direction" that sense of of an evolving narrative in process?

I suppose it might be.

Authorial perspective is the player choosing what should happen next based on what that player thinks will make the most interesting story - whether "most interesting" means that what happens next aligns with rising action towards climax, the structure of three act plays, or 'my PC is a big, damn, hero' doesn't really matter to my assessment of the process of how the group finds out what happens next.

Quote from: nDervish;861593I tend to subscribe to the dictionary definition and I agree that it's tautological that you get a story as the end result of the game, when you look back on (and potentially retell) it.

Where I see the arguments mostly taking place is over the question of whether the act of playing the game is also inherently the act of telling a story.  That is to say, everyone agrees that an RPG produces a story after the fact, but not everyone agrees on whether it already is a story during play.

I disagree that playing an RPG is inherently or necessarily telling a story. People that claim that typically do so by equivocating on the various meanings of narrative and narration.

First they use the general meaning of narration as talking to say that people are narrating during the game (and hence are narrators). Next they say that the resultant of all the various things said is a narration. Finally, they use the meaning of narrative as a story in the literary sense, to claim that therefore people are telling a story.

Now telling a story might be what some players want to do and facilitating that desire seems to be the point of certain story game system mechanics. Such mechanics facilitate the player (and often the GM) acting as an author of a story. The mechanics may, for example, include a system for deciding what POV prevails in any conflict between the many potential POVs of the players (GM included) at the table or  may suggest, mandate, or encourage a literary type of structure in what happens at the table. A story directed by the GM or a story alternately created by people taking turns at the table's is just not something I find very interesting nor that I have much interest in doing.

I don't want someone directing what happens next in an attempt to tell a better story. I want to find out what happens based on the reality of the game world and the actions of the PCs in that game world. We may end up with a game that is dramatic, heroic, tragic, or comic but that is because the events that unfold are ones in which we see heroism or tragedy or comedy, in the same way that we can drama, heroism, tragedy, and comedy in the real world all around us despite the fact that most people, most of the time do not choose to act so as to make life more dramatic, heroic, tragic, or comic.

Quote from: Hybridartifacts;861595I think we are actually entering a post-novel era of storytelling where stories are no longer fixed things that have a sense of single authorship.

I'm very doubtful that a group created story (in the sense of a novel) will be a more satisfying or interesting story for a non-participant than something created by a hardworking, talented person with a single, coherent vision. Nor do I think we will see novels replaced by a rising tide of cooperative fan-fiction or original shared tales. To use an example from another form of entertainment, sing-a-longs have always been a thing. People like to do that. It's entertaining...as a participant--even when the participants are amateurs and maybe not too skilled. But as a non-participant, I'd much rather listen to skilled professionals. Most people would, which is one reason that we as a society are still willing to pay money to create and maintain a professional class of entertainers.

Quote from: nDervish;861596I disagree, and note that I did not say that it has to be a final state to be "story".  My personal position is that playing an RPG can be an act of telling a story, but it doesn't have to be.

I find myself in 100% agreement with all that you said here.

Quote from: Phillip;861660

The confusion here arises from the fact that the way we play an RPG is by talking about imaginary figures performing imaginary actions in an imaginary world. The TALKING part is what impresses people enough to get worked up about the "story" in a game of D&D even though it may be far more a mere wandering through "shit happens and then you die" than a video game of jumping and shooting through a sequence of levels with a carefully planned dramatic structure building up to a climactic "boss fight".

[strike]This tool.[/strike]
EDIT: Oops that should have read. "This too" as in this, also.

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?

If a game's mechanics are designed in such a way that the enforced assumption is the player will be dealing with the events in-game from a third-person PoV or authorial standpoint, rather than a first-person PoV/actor standpoint, then I'd call that a "storygame".

Individual mechanics can go either way, and there is a full spectrum of what a game could include without overall being a storygame. But ultimately, yes, its a binary situation, insofar as the game itself. However, most games can be played as either, depending on how the GM and playgroup approach it. For example, its perfectly possible to play a storygame using the rules from AD&D, just as its possible to play Dungeonworld as a traditional rpg experience. Its only when it becomes impossible to play the game's rules without being forced to adopt an authorial stance that the game itself is a "Storygame", for example Smallville, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, or The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;860434I speak from 10 years of watching people argue over this.  When the day ends, 99% of the time that's what it boils down to.

Young'un. I've been reading arguments over this for close to 25 years. A&E was chock full of em.

Quote from: TristramEvans;861806Its only when it becomes impossible to play the game's rules without being forced to adopt an authorial stance that the game itself is a "Storygame",

I'd say something can be in the storygame section of the spectrum well before that point, but fair enough.

Quotefor example Smallville, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, or The Adventures of Baron Münchhausen.

I get how that's true of Baron Munchausen, since it's literally nothing but narration, interrupting narration, and responding to interruptions to the narration, but how does it apply to the other two? I have both, have played both at least a little, and in actual play they handle scenes and conflicts in a pretty traditional manner.

I recall seeing the Baron Munchausen game and thinking it looked interesting, though I never got acquainted with it.

Less radically, R. Talsorian's Castle Falkenstein looked like a beautiful design that would probably lose some of its charm without some things that might put it in a 'hybrid' category -- at times role-oriented, at others perhaps authorial, both important.

Quote from: Phillip;861820Less radically, R. Talsorian's Castle Falkenstein looked like a beautiful design that would probably lose some of its charm without some things that might put it in a 'hybrid' category -- at times role-oriented, at others perhaps authorial, both important.

I got the same feeling from the SAGA Rules System, for Dragonlance: Fifth Age and the second Marvel game.

At one time, I kicked around replacing the card play in SAGA System (the Marvel version) with dice tosses. The designers seemed to see the card game as adding a narrative feature, but to me it was just a distraction from everything that wasn't a card game.

EDIT: The cards could actually be handy in their role of suggesting themes for improvisation. It's the more mechanical use that I found off-putting.

This seems to be pretty usual in my response to supposedly "story focused" game systems.

The Pool as I recall strips things down pretty well to the point, with an abstract system that is not too cumbersome. Trouble is, then the point itself seems almost pointless.

I'm tempted to think that a lot of 'narrativism' is really a kind of 'gamism'. (I'm not using those terms in Forge sense except by accident, just using them the way that in my experience most people understand them.)

Quote from: GeekEclectic;861818I get how that's true of Baron Munchausen, since it's literally nothing but narration, interrupting narration, and responding to interruptions to the narration, but how does it apply to the other two? I have both, have played both at least a little, and in actual play they handle scenes and conflicts in a pretty traditional manner.

Its been too long since I've read the games for me to give specific examples, but the way the mechanics are handled in both those games gives a precedence to abstract narrative conceits over emulating an actual interaction between a character and a "real" world. I do at the least recall in the MHR rulebook, about halfway through, there was a section where it said something to the effect of "here's a break in the rules during play, this might be a good chance to get some roleplaying in". To which I, perhaps even outloud, responded "Its suppose to be a roeplaying game, why am I not roleplaying the whole time?"

Phillip, they once wrote over on the Forge, "Scratch a Narrativist and you'll find a Gamist."

For whatever it's worth.

Geekeclectic, I don't know about the games you are discussing, but I've had people here adamantly insist that Dogs in the Vineyard is a traditional game that gets lumped into the indie/sg/Forge category out of pure tribalism. Ultimately I decided it was because they had a very different experience of traditional games so for them, the practices encoded in the rules and gming guidelines of DitV were pretty much what they already did. There may also have been some selective ignoring of the more SG elements of the game.

Quote from: Arminius;861841Phillip, they once wrote over on the Forge, "Scratch a Narrativist and you'll find a Gamist."

Combine that with the notion they had that Simulationists dont actually exist, and that means....everyone is just a gamist? So Forge Theory ultimately tells everyone that plays roleplaying games that they are gamers. Enlightening.

No, they didn't think Simulationists didn't exist. They just defined Sim in pretty much the suckiest terms possible, as either massively railroaded/illusionistic style gaming, or (rather vaguely) dry-as-dust enactment of tropes with no real investment in character or outcomes.

The conclusion was that if you claimed to like Sim, you were either playing a GM-led story and lying to yourself about it, or else you were probably subconsciously drifting your game's rules & practices toward Narrativism, with the implication that you'd be so much happier if you'd drop the Sim trappings of your game and play one of the Forge darlings.

To address the OP, if the following don't define Narrativist games, they're strong markers:

• Conflict resolution
• Dissociated mechanics
• Somewhat as a corollary of the previous two: "Say yes or roll the dice"
• Also, related to the diss. mech., and as others have said, a requirement that players take an authorial stance toward the game rather than acting through in-character POV
• Aggressive scene-framing ("Get to the Conflict"/"Escalate, escalate, escalate!")
• Underpinning this: articulated themes and "character issues" that inform the scene-framing ("Kickers" leading to "Bangs")

The more of these there are, the more narrativist/story-gamey the game is.