Yeah, sounds reasonable to me. But from this it also follows that one can choose to play D&D narrativisticly.
I think that some effort can be made to do so, yes. I don’t think the game, as written, is all that suited to it. I’d go so far as to say there are inherent elements that actively work against it.
You talk in terms of storytelling, but certainly you also understand that stories are not non stop conflict? That there are slower moments, discussions that establish the personalities and relationships of characters etc. And all this is also part of a good story.
When we think of stories and how they’re told, we have to consider the medium of their telling. So if you make a movie, you have to think of your story in scenes and about how to convey the ideas visually. When you’re telling a story as a novel, you can rely on description and narration more heavily. And so on.
When you’re crafting a story with an RPG… let’s just think of it that way for now for the sake of discussion, though there are many people who would fight tooth and nail against that very idea… you have to consider your story in terms of what is satisfying game play. Barring a game that consists of professional entertainers like Critical Role or the Glass Cannon Network, the performance element of a game is likely not up to par to justify that being the focus. You have to use the play of the game to help propel the fiction. So the more you can maintain that momentum… the more the game moves… the better off you’ll be.
I mean it is literally telling these things to the participants. You tell that you're a friend with such and such, instead of showing it with roleplaying interaction with said friend.
Establishing a fact isn’t really the important part of this, I don’t think. If two PCs are established to have an important bond… siblings, childhood friends, significant others, whatever… once established, how do you then show the importance?
If it’s merely in character interaction that displays it but nothing more, is that all that meaningful? What if we compare that to play where that importance is tested in some way? When it’s put on the line? What do the characters do then? How does that play out? What do we learn about these characters?
Like I said earlier, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with something that’s just about portrayal and nothing more. But does that show the characters’ connection more meaningfully than a scene where that connection is the actual focus? Where it’s tested in some way?
And to connect this back to the origin of the thread, this sort of heavy and involved combat system is something DH shares with D&D, albeit they work rather differently. So should that count against DH being narrative?
In what way? I’ve looked through the DH playtest, but I’ve not yet played it, so I can’t really say for sure. I think a lot of the design elements give the players a lot of advocacy for their characters. I think the player principles and the GMing principles provided in the book really support a more narrativistic approach.
I can’t yet say exactly how play feels, but it’s possible something plays differently than it reads. Or that I’ve missed some bits that work against that style… but I don’t know what those may be.