What makes an TTRPG a "Narrative Game" (Daggerheart Discussion)

[FrogReaver]

Why? Why is this needed? It seems incredibly mechanistic way of looking at things. I just do not recognise that this is necessary. The Blades game I'm playing in has this, but it is no more player driven than my D&D game.

What about your d&d game makes you call it player driven?

 

[Wolfpack48]

Conflict resolution mechanics that allow for degrees of success, fail forward, and player-side action declarations would be a good start. All that has to be hacked in by a DM baseline. If it's reliant on DM home-brew, it's not suited from the system design perspective.

RQ/BRP/CoC has had degrees of success for years (5 levels), and the idea of "failure" not translating to immediate death or irrevocable roadblock has been around for awhile too. Many times, all the failure means is that something took longer than expected, and it matters only in cases where time may be a factor. In other cases, it may just mean additional rolls might be needed to determine the final outcome.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

If the players are not expected to challenge the GM's NPC tyrant, why is the GM framing them into that scene at all? There may be an answer, but it's obviously not going to be one that connects to player-driven RPGing!

Presumably because if this is player driven game, the players decided to seek an audience, or at least answer the summons? Or that's how it would be in my game. The scene is framed because the players decided to go there. Also, one might imagine that in a negotiation with a king, there are other things one can discuss than violent abdication of said king. That such a topic might not be terribly well received should hardly come as a surprise to anyone.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What about your d&d game makes you call it player driven?

I didn't call it player driven, I just said it is at least as player driven than narrative games I've played. (Which admittedly are not many.)

But player driven aspects are that the players decide where to go, what to do, what goals to pursue. It is a faux sandbox.* And whilst there is certainly stuff going on, and situations the PCs can stumble into, there isn't any sort of overarching "main plot" that demands to be addressed. I also have no preplanned notions of how things "should go," so players are free to try crazy stuff and address or ignore problems as they see fit.

(*Faux, because every distant location or faction actually isn't fully preplanned, but detail get added once players exhibit interests to a thing. This is just due me being lazy, rather than for any reasons related to gaming ideology.)

 

[FrogReaver]

I didn't call it player driven, I just said it is at least as player driven than narrative games I've played. (Which admittedly are not many.)

But player driven aspects are that the players decide where to go, what to do, what goals to pursue. It is a faux sandbox.* And whilst there is certainly stuff going on, and situations the PCs can stumble into, there isn't any sort of overarching "main plot" that demands to be addressed. I also have no preplanned notions of how things "should go," so players are free to try crazy stuff and address or ignore problems as they see fit.

(*Faux, because every distant location or faction actually isn't fully preplanned, but detail get added once players exhibit interests to a thing. This is just due me being lazy, rather than for any reasons related to gaming ideology.)

This gives me some ideas on the differences but cannot comment in detail at the moment.

 

[zakael19]

Why? Why is this needed? It seems incredibly mechanistic way of looking at things. I just do not recognise that this is necessary. The Blades game I'm playing in has this, but it is no more player driven than my D&D game.

Because when a system facilitates a play style, it's more likely to materialize? Why is this so hard for you to at least consider? Every time we mention this (and it's in fact the premise of the thread!), you push back with a "but my table is amazing and we don't need it!"

People aren't writing rulesets for CL's game + players. They're writing for a community writ large, to facilitate a style of play.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Because when a system facilitates a play style, it's more likely to materialize? Why is this so hard for you to at least consider? Every time we mention this (and it's in fact the premise of the thread!), you push back with a "but my table is amazing and we don't need it!"

People aren't writing rulesets for CL's game + players. They're writing for a community writ large, to facilitate a style of play.

Because I don't understand how it facilitates it. I simply have not seen it happening, and it is not clear to me how it should.
I am not even saying that you cannot be right, but if that's the case, then I'd like to understand the hows.

And I don't think my table is any sort of amazing. It is good, but I'd think it is pretty basic. I also don't think our Blades game is somehow terrible. But I just do not see the difference these different mechanics are supposed to produce.

 

[SteveC]

I've written about this so many times I must sound like a broken record. You can have narrative play in any game system, but the ones that are designed for it make it work easier.

Every game I run, I use the "conversation" style play I first heard about in PbtA games. I ask questions right back to my players and let them create setting elements when they want more detail. I let them suggest what will happen on successes and failures. We will have wagers in games that don't have meta currency to give control to the players.

Now what playstyle is that? I would call it narrative but I'm sure it 100% doesn't meet some definition that some will use. But in less formal terms, that's what it means to me. Daggerheart, as well as PbtA or FitD games, have mechanics built into the game to make those ideas formally a part of the game, so they make it easier.

 

[clearstream]

The notion that anyone in LotR is a PC or NPC makes no sense to me. It's a novel.

Agreed, however I was following your example that for the sake of argument required then to have that status.

My point is that, in the inspirational fiction for D&D, a major ruler - Theoden - is challenged in his court and has his mind changed.

If the players are not expected to challenge the GM's NPC tyrant, why is the GM framing them into that scene at all? There may be an answer, but it's obviously not going to be one that connects to player-driven RPGing!

That really depends on what the given players choose to drive. Challenging play is generally strongly player driven, but surely that wouldn't amount to the sort of "player-driven" you have in mind.

Well, I'm pretty confident that I know what @hawkeyefan's contrast was about, as I described it and hawkeyefan liked my post and didn't post any correction of me. (Whereas, when I understated what he meant about RPG as a medium that is different from film, he did politely correct me.)

I don't know of any RPG that permits what you describe - the player establishing an NPC's backstory like that. But I know plenty of RPGs that take it for granted that the players can establish what is at stake in a scene, and what their PCs' goals are in that scene.

Can they establish what is at stake for NPCs?

There is a sort of play that follows an adventure path that lays out what's going to be at stake in each scene. I witness very little of that sort of play. I can imagine it has its adherents. That's not what I'm discussing here. Included in what I'm discussing are projected possible modes of play, as well as current ones. I'm relying on the reader's own stock of game texts and examples of play, as well as their ability to imagine what projected modes of play could be like. The rough problem I'm trying to solve is - what is the difference between the nature of the fiction and its content? @hawkeyefan wrote

I think that’s largely what sandbox play consists of. Yes, player choice matters, but always in how it relates to what the GM has already prepared. So in a hexcrawl kind of game, perhaps the players decide that their characters head off to chart the dark forest to the north rather than staying near the coast and dealing with the pirates who’ve been threatening the port. Certainly these choices yield different results as to the content of the fiction. But not to its nature.

The court and the King are presumably content, so what must nature refer to? Ordinarily in sandboxes, players decide what's at stake in a scene... otherwise the scene doesn't occur. Surely the concern cannot be solely that GM mapped the physical geography, seeing as that will imply the distinction can be dissolved by giving players a say over said geography. Which is underwhelming (hopefully I'm wrong.)

I don't really know what "ludonarrative" means - it's not a term I'm familiar with - but I'm not surprised that some of what you describe about RPGing is not narrativist. After all, you are not a notable advocate or expositor of narrativst RPGing.

The meaing of ludonarrative is that it is the sort of narrative organic to games, as distinct from that organic to other mediums such as books or films. As for advocating, let me quote Baker once again

You know how you can assign a given rule to Drama, Fortune or Karma, if you want, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how the rule works, or why, and it creates illusory clusters of rules instead of fostering real understanding? And the same thing with FitM vs FatE? And the same thing with Effectiveness, Resource, and Positioning? They're convenient stand-ins for what's actually going on, when what's actually going on defies such simplistic taxonomies?

Same thing with GNS.

I was developing the idea of technical agenda as the technical component of creative agenda, and the further I developed it, the more patent it became to me that G, N and S were arbitrary, not reflective of real divisions in actual design or actual play. That while you can, if you want, assign a given instance of gameplay to G, N or S more or less consistently, you do so by asserting false similarities and ignoring some true similarities between other instances of gameplay. GNS is a convenient stand-in for what's actually going on.

I don't advocate narrativist RPGing because it's a chimera. A convenient but inevitably-inaccurate label. That noted, I do advocate play that possesses properties historically associated with that label. Among them, that players establish stakes is crucial. Of course, I then go and ruin it by including GM among players...

There are many, many variations on this. Who gets to decide the PCs' goals within the scene, and what is at stake? I mean, as you describe it this could be an episode of Apocalypse World - but AW permits the players to establish stakes (by use of moves like Read a Situation, Read a Person, Seize By Force, and Seduce/Manipulate).

Yes, I agree it can go many different ways.

I don't know what you mean by "players set the scene up". I mean, is a player saying "I look around for a <useful person fitting such-and-such a description>" and then succeeding on the check (say, Streetwise in Classic Traveller - a 1977 RPG! - or Circles in Burning Wheel) an example of this?

I mean that they decide together if there is a court, and if there is a King, and what the King's motives are, and so on.

I don't know what you mean by a player being empowered to "edit the scene". In MHRP the player can, under certain circumstances, declare an action to establish an Asset, or spend a PP to establish a Resource - does this count as editing the scene? In some versions of D&D, a player can spend a spell slot or memorised spell to make it true that the scene includes a creature under their control (in the fiction, the PC casts a summon-type spell) - does this count as editing the scene?

In a sense that's perspicacious. Fiats over a scene via game mechanics can effectively edit the scene. For example, a spell that changes the Kings predispositions. But what I meant was more what @Crimson Longinus touched on, which was stepping out of play and making OOC or metaplay edits to the scene. An example is the Devil's Bargain. Or a flashback.

These descriptions of play that are devoid of specifications of actual play processes, of the relationship between clouds and boxes, etc, seem pretty unhelpful to me.

This just makes no sense to me at all.

We just have different approaches to figuring things out. It unfortunately causes a lot more head-butting than possibly we either would intend or desire. My interests are also more in analysis than explanation, and I'm very interested in abstract or universal patterns.

As far as I know, of active participants in this thread I'm the one to have most recently run a MERP/LotR-type game with Gandalf statted up as a PC. In that system - a MHRP variant - there are multiple ways that Gandalf freeing Theoden could be resolved. Theoden could be a Scene Distinction - King Burdened by Weariness and Wormtongue - and Gandalf's actions would be aimed at eliminating that Distinction, with Wormtongue as a statted NPC providing the opposition.

I don't think how it would be resolved is under contention. Is it? It's the setup itself. The King's motives. How they respond to the PC's actions. Whether player will communicate to GM some stakes with the expectation that GM will adjust the scene if needed to respect and center on those stakes? And whether that can be done in the moment, or must be part of setup going in.

Which approach to use is a matter of taste and skill in GMing that system. I don't know how either is supposed to fit into your A/B/C schema, which as I've said doesn't actually make any reference to the processes of play that I and (I believe) @soviet and @hawkeyefan are interested in.

As I read that OP, it fits A. GM set up the scene or it was written into an AP. I'm fairly disinterested in that. I'm more interested in what power players must have, at what level (play or metaplay) and moments (during the scene, prior to it) in order to make the scene count within @hawkeyefan's definition of "nature".

 

[Wolfpack48]

Because when a system facilitates a play style, it's more likely to materialize? Why is this so hard for you to at least consider? Every time we mention this (and it's in fact the premise of the thread!), you push back with a "but my table is amazing and we don't need it!"

People aren't writing rulesets for CL's game + players. They're writing for a community writ large, to facilitate a style of play.

Maybe do an example of each (traditional vs narrative table) using the same (short) scenario to illustrate?