What 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?

Quote from: Nexus;860051What makes a game "Narrativist" (or a Story game or are they different things in your opinion?) to you?

I would say that they aren't the same thing necessarily.

Story game is a nebulous category that covers a variety of games. Some of them I would argue are definitely proper tabletop RPGs, such as the various Cortex Plus games. And some I would concede are not, such as Fiasco and Dread(the one with Jenga). At this point, I find the designation so fuzzy as to be almost entirely useless.

Narrativist mechanics, on the other hand . . . I'm not entirely sure. They seem to be the kind of thing you know when you see. And while story games are more likely to have them(and more of them), it's not unheard of for some more traditional games, like Pendragon, to make use of them in some ways. Here are a few examples of things I believe fall under the "narrativist" category.

Sharing the GM role: This can be done in a variety of ways, and to different degrees, but it involves giving more than one person authority over aspects of the game traditonally controlled entirely by a single GM. On the light side, which you'll see even in a number of otherwise pretty traditional games, are points that allow the players to add minor details or change outcomes. Unisystem games have them. Savage Worlds has them. Fantasy Craft has them, sort of. Fate games often have them. etc. Near the middle, you might have rotating GM roles, which allow all players to have a turn being a player, but also require everyone participating to be willing and able to be a GM. And then at the far end, things can get wonky.

Focusing on non-standard stats: In most traditional games, the stats considered most important(and sometimes the only stats you have) are tied to your base ability, specific skills your character possesses, and perhaps various powers if it's a game with magic, superpowers, or the like. Some games like to focus elsewhere by giving you stats related to entirely different things. Cortex Plus Dramatic has Values and Relationships. Burning Wheel has . . . I forget what they're called, but basically important goals that give you a bonus to your roll if you can illustrate how that goal is relevant to your current action. I'd say both of these examples are somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. C+D still has distinctions(skills and attributes) and powers. And so does Burning Wheel. I've seen games that eschew traditional stats altogether, but haven't played any myself. That's weird even by my standards.

Group setting creation: If the GM role is shared in some way, every player is often allowed to add to the setting; in such cases, there are usually limits in place to keep a single person from dominating. I saw one game meant to let you play LotR-style "fellowships" on epic quests, and each player had to be a different race. After the game starts, that person is allowed to answer questions about their race and have their answer be authoritative in the setting. Some games, like various Fate games, have a process that the group engages in prior to, or as part of, their first session. Fate Core has the GM establish the basic setting, then has the players work on their backstories simultaneously so as to work their characters into both the setting and into the backgrounds of at least a couple other PCs, but afterward it's run pretty traditionally w/ a single GM. Dresden Files allows the players to work together to build the city where their adventures will take place.

And I hate to even say this, because even I'm disgusted by the idea, but it would be dishonest not to include . . .

Forcing a Narrative/Ensuring a Story Mechanics: The only game with something like this that I can tolerate is Fiasco, and that's only because all that's determined prior to a scene is whether the character will fail or succeed. The details are left up to the players in the scene. I think of Fiasco as more of an improv exercise where you're given a loose guideline and then have to work with others to act out a scene that fits, but it's definitely not a proper tabletop RPG in my opinion. I've seen other games that do something similar, but with stricter criteria(such as dividing the session into "acts" and giving each act a theme to be catered to). And I've seen games that claim to be about storytelling as opposed to those other RPGs, but which are written by people who don't seem to understand that it's not possible to play an RPG, regardless of the specific mechanics, and not end up with a story at the end. That just strikes me as a bit pretentious.

My opinion there -- and I'm pretty sure I'm right -- is that the story/narrative is simply what you end up with as a result of playing. It is an unavoidable result that naturally comes from play, and needs no special mechanics to "make it happen."

QuoteDo you consider it a binary situation or is there a spectrum between "traditional" and narrativist? And what would you consider narrativist mechanics?

Definitely a spectrum, and see above.

Def: one of the players sucks or has ro be high to contribute anything interesting.

background: shadow of yesterday sessions. Idk it'been a minute

You don't define such games, they define your game.

Narrativist/Story Games all boil down to one thing. Everyone sitting around the table trade off being the person telling the story.

The rules structure of a particular Story Game may restrict which areas and which character or characters you may focus on while it is your turn being the person telling the story. The rules also set up how the role of being the person telling the story gets transferred from one player to another.

That is basically it.

This is why I agree with the assertion they are NOT Role Playing Games. They are their own thing.

Quote from: One Horse Town;860089You don't define such games, they define your game.

This is axiom of truth that underscores GeekEclectic's post. These mechanics can define your gaming experience if you let them.

I have fairly mature players. So when I'm running Savage Worlds or Edge of the Empire or Fantasy Craft, these mechanics have been fairly fun, mainly because I will veto the shit out of anything ridiculous.

But my games tend to be "serious" with a dash of swashbuckling, so these mechanics can often be good to progress things in interesting directions. YMMV

It's a matter of emphasis in intent, with a spectrum of how much that's weighted.

Before D&D, simulation games often involved an element of role-playing; the "role-playing game" category recognized that here it was not secondary but was the main thing. The most common shift away from that is back toward a "war game" in which r.p. is secondary.

A more recently prominent shift is toward prioritizing the telling of a story. There's a very important distinction here between an affair in which the GM is basically telling the story to the players (a la the Dragonlance Saga in the 1980s), and one in which the players themselves are significantly the authors (which is what's usually the subject in "story first" circles today).

A story involves characters, and to some extent even a sole author tends to see things from their perspectives. However, the author is also concerned to shape the narrative according to dramatic concerns such as theme and a satisfying plot structure. Lately, the influence of visual media such as television and video games tends to make what "looks cool" an important consideration as well.

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?

These words are just tokens that evoke a cluster of ideas, which is different for different people.  Some games have more of these things, some have less.  Trying to draw a sharp distinction is a waste of time; it makes way more sense to talk about specific features of the game's mechanics, its play advice, the group's play style, and so on.

So, if you imagine a hypothetical game where players choose plausible characters in a plausible situation, the GM moderates PC intents and world events trying to make things plausible and as naturalistic as possible, and the game is played out in real time - you'll most likely get a session that bores everyone to tears.

Game play invariably makes concessions from this. If we only play once a week for three hours, we make all manner of contrived decisions to try to make the session interesting. We contrive the choices our PCs make (perhaps to be a thrill-seeker rather than someone who longs for the cobbler's life), we contrive the environment (so the wilderness is stocked to a ridiculous density with novel and interesting challenges and treasures), we manipulate the pacing (so we resolve a day's travel in the wilderness in a few minutes, but zoom in for impromptu dialogue, investigating tracks, or a fight) to focus on the more interesting content.

One thing I find is that a game is more likely to be considered a story game the more attention it draws to this contrivances.

Pacing for example - striking camp, setting off for a day's trek through the forest, rolling a random encounter and finding wolf tracks, investigating.  There's a clear discontinuity in pacing. But if you go so far as to call the investigation of wolf tracks a scene, then you've invoked story-telling language. The resulting play style might be identical to games that don't refer to 'scenes', but you've moved into story land in terms of your game's associations.

Some games, of course, hang mechanics on scenes, doubling down on this language. Bleeding in Burning Wheel Gold, for example (which is super deadly), progresses in scenes. Now you can't ignore the story language, it's part of how you have to think about bleeding.

Another example is choosing a campaign.  Most groups hem and haw about what they want to play next, who the characters are and the sorts of challenges the characters will face. When you sit down to play Shadowrun, for instance, there's a definite well-worn path of who's likely to be in the party and who they're likely to be shooting at or running from.  If a game makes this explicitly part of the setup, however, (like Fiasco does), then it calls explicit attention to player authorship of the world, so again the association is increased.

Players often do quite a bit of worldbuilding in their character backstories, for instance, and GMs quite often ask players things about their characters long after play has started. Players often lobby for continued and expanded relevance of their backstories (e.g. "Say, GM, I'm from this town, do I recognize some of these peasants?").  When this gets encoded in the rules (e.g. BW's circles mechanic) then the whiff of story increases, even if it's just encoding a totally normal play occurrence.

Now, again, I'll underscore that I'm not saying all differences between games are cosmetic, some games hang mechanics on these explicitly named concepts.  (Some do a little, some do a lot, making a spectrum.)

The other is the GM's description of his or her rationale for making certain choices. In some moments, the GM might be making choices without regard for how interesting the outcome is to anyone present, only 'what would happen.'  Sometimes GMs take player suggestions because, Steve's right, it would be hilarious if Wazard's hand got stuck in that portable hole.  Sometimes GMs skip past stuff to move things along, "Okay, guys, just buy whatever you want from the equipment list while you're in town." Sometimes GMs make choices differently because it's the beginning or end of the session, or based on a gut feel about what would happen to the party if they made this or that choice.

Some games, groups, or play styles embrace using poetic or story logic for what would happen next.  (Like, a thug who shot out the tires of his last victim getting a flat tire on his way home, because that's funny or whatever.)  Games that do this a lot tend to become self-referential; concepts and themes recur as participants try to bring it to a satisfying conclusion that ties up loose ends (or leaves them poignantly unresolved), like a movie might.

Thing is, people basically suck at explaining/understanding their own decision-making processes (though we're great at coming up with post hoc stories about that fit the evidence we choose to remember), so I don't put much stock in our ability to quantify our biases when about how we make GM decisions.

There certainly are huge stylistic differences, but I suspect it's a broad, fuzzy spectrum, and that most people who believe they're clinging to principled heuristics are talking out their ass.

Now, I know there are folks that disagree on the next point, but I think pacing is a big one.  A lot of more story- or character-focused games I've played seem to consciously be trying to skip to the key moments of significant plot or character developments.

Rather than letting them emerge organically over a longer period of more naturalistic play, the games, pacing is an explicit ingredient in the GM choice of resolution options. D&D's 'take 20' a mild example of this - we decide ahead of time that searching for secret doors for an hour is going to be boring, so we have a mechanic that lets us skip that. Some are much more pronounced, like games that have scene economies (both Fiasco and Burning Empires, for instance, have limits on the number of scenes of various types that players can initiate).

I don't have much to add, because I think the definition of "narrativist" changes from web-forum to web-forum too much to allow people to talk about the same thing much of the time, but I'll say that I find fuseboy's post really well-thought out and interesting.

From the horse's mouth (none other than the father of the OSR, Ron Edwards):

QuoteStory Now

Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing. "Address" means:

Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world, "fixing" them into imaginary place.

Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.

Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the circumstances.

Can it really be that easy? Yes, Narrativism is that easy. The Now refers to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying attention to one another as they do it. To do that, they relate to "the story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays, and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments. Think of the Now as meaning, "in the moment," or "engaged in doing it," in terms of input and emotional feedback among one another. The Now also means "get to it," in which "it" refers to any Explorative element or combination of elements that increases the enjoyment of that issue I'm talking about.

There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). Story Now has a great deal in common with Step On Up, particularly in the social expectation to contribute, but in this case the real people's attention is directed toward one another's insights toward the issue, rather than toward strategy and guts.

That quote from Ron really nails it:

QuoteTo do that, they relate to "the story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays, and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments.

In other words, there is a conscious awareness that something is being created, live, at the table, and this part is key: not only through the act of roleplaying, but also through the act of authorship.

Is is that simple, yeah it is.  In 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.

Any 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.

A metric fuckton of Sturm und Drang has been expended on this site over the debate as to whether a roleplaying game that requires you through non-optional mechanics to not roleplay should be classified differently.

Storygames, on the other hand, are first and foremost about the story, and the mechanics are usually some form of method used to determine authorship.  The reason Apocalypse World set the Storygames world on fire was it brought roleplaying back to Storygames.  Sure, it's chock full of narrative mechanics, but many of them are meant to be used while playing the character, instead of being completely divorced from the character.

Goddamn you CRKrueger. Now you made me think.

I don't think Ron's own Sorcerer game has authorship mechanics of that sort it it is considered narrativist ( I think). You can still act as your character, and through your character in service of the story.

Maybe it is in the essay, but I've  read Ron say somewhere that narrativist play is about hard choices addressing the premise. If I can find the quote, I'll link it.

Quote from: tenbones;860182Goddamn you CRKrueger. Now you made me think.

:hatsoff:

I agree with some of what Fuseboy wrote above.  But "contrivances" as he puts it, can be done for many different reasons.

WFRP1 had Fate Points.  However, the conceit was that the characters were special, recognized by the Gods as people who could affect things in the war vs. chaos and so were harder to kill.  They could only be used to escape death, so the player really didn't have any options as to choose when to use them or not.  They weren't a resource that fueled any point economy.  If your character went out foiling cultists attempts to destroy the world, you probably used them up and got them refilled through incredibly important actions.  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.

Shadowrun 1-3 had Karma Points, which functioned like experience, but also could be placed in a Karma Pool, which allowed for a pretty complete set of standard Luck Point perks.  Rerolls, guarantee success, etc...  However, is Karma a narrative mechanic divorced from the setting?  We can argue this I guess, but the answer is NO.  If you look at how magic works in Shadowrun and what originally was a sister system set in the past, Earthdawn, and you look at certain things done by ancient beings that existed in both systems (the Harlequin adventures) then you see that Karma is a "thing" in the world, some form of cosmic ephemera that all "Name-giver" species have.  Shadowrun 4-5 - completely different animal.

Moving on from Karma, there's a difference between what happens in a Shadowrun game, or a GURPS game based on Heat, and Fiasco.  In Shadowrun, you run into the same types of people because that's the type of work you do.  You need someone who can kill things, both up close, personal and silent as well as full-blown mil-spec rock and roll.  You need a computer guy.  You need a security guy.  You need someone who can perform certain magical offense, defense and utility.  You need a face guy.  But, you may not need them all at the same time.  The nature of what you're doing determines what you need.

If someone is playing a "Cyberpunk genre" game, then you need a Case and a Molly because "That's What Cyberpunk Genre Means".  That's the whole point of Fiasco, we begin from the first principles of "We're about to kind of roleplay through a Cohen Brothers movie."  The genre-aware narrative metalayer is there from the getgo.  Which is kind of necessary for a one-shot party game, not so much for a long-term roleplaying campaign.

If someone is playing in my Shadowrun campaign, they might have started as a Shadowrunner in Seattle, but are now an underground rocker living in LA fighting against Aztlan.  Or they're a shadow mechanic/gunsmith, doing custom work for gangers, runners, mercs, and corpers alike.  Or they run a club/heavy duty shadowrunner hostel out in the Redmond Barrens, with enough connections to keep the Corp Council from dropping a Thor Shot on them...barely.  You can do anything you want, and the world will respond in a way that makes sense for that world, which has an emergent history different from all other Shadowrun campaigns.  There is no "you're the {genre role here}".

Pacing contrivances are pretty common, but they usually arise from an abstraction of the math to keep everyone sane...or they are there to fit a narrative construct.

• Take 10 and 20 is there simply to prevent the "I roll until I make it." and shortcut the process.
• WFRP3 clearly separates scenes in the modules with mechanically defined rest breaks in order to construct and deliver a narrative experience.
• Shadowrun Lifestyles aren't pacing, but a generic abstraction for the purposes of math and preventing having to make a "20xx Price Guide for Everything That Exists."
• Shadowrun contacts are an OOC mechanical abstraction of personal relationships.  To what degree the player and GM use the mechanics of Contacts as opposed to the player simply interacting is dependent on game version.
• RQ6 has a Luck Point mechanic which is not solidly tied to setting like WFRP1 Fate Points or SR Karma, and a Passions system which is more of a personality mechanic that isn't tied to the setting like Earthdawn's were but also aren't as mechanically supported and narratively focused like The Riddle of Steel.  Based on everything you know about me, you might say "How can you like RQ6?  Well, I can play with or without Luck Points and Passions and use them exactly how I see fit and all the core task resolution mechanics aren't affected at all.

Bundling every abstraction from minute-by-minute play into "contrivance" or every type of mechanic other than pure task resolution as "narrativium" is easy shorthand, but it masks the true purpose and intent behind the mechanic, which is important in the more specific discussion of why those games use those mechanics and why or why not, players and GMs chose to play those games based on those mechanics.

Quote from: CRKrueger;860191I agree with some of what Fuseboy wrote above.  But "contrivances" as he puts it, can be done for many different reasons.

I think we're using the words slightly differently, so bear with me.  I'm going to set aside for a minute mechanics that let players control the world (which I agree are worthwhile distinction).

Let me refer specifically to the free-form decisions that the participants make - what personality should I play, how should my dude react to that, would Mr. Boss send his goon after the party, if so, when would they kick in their door, etc.

By '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.

The fact that we have special words for it (e.g. 'genre', 'fast paced') doesn't make it less contrived, only a familiar, subliminal contrivance.  (Which is fine, obtrusive contrivances seem .. contrived!)  In fact, the whole idea of a role-playing game's 'genre' is to help us all tacitly contrive in the same manner without having to talk about it during play.

'Contrived' sounds like a pejorative, I just mean that it wouldn't happen without a lot of collaboration from the folks around the table.  The genre- and pacing-aware metalayer is there, merely invisible.

Again, I'm not talking about narration-sharing mechanics, I think that's clearly a separate category.  But 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.