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

[zakael19]

Try the 3.5 climbing rules. The player can know precisely what outcome they'll get from trying to climb something, and facing a described situation, leverage that knowledge to achieve a desired outcome. A player declaring an intent to climb something isn't asking the GM to design a resolution mechanic or looking for permission to achieve a specific outcome; the outcome has been written ahead of time in a general case, and the player is leveraging it in a specific case to get the board state to something they prefer.

Perhaps it's better understood via the fortune mechanics; players aren't rolling to see if they get an outcome they want, they're rolling a percentage chance to activate a specific action, with a specific outcome baked in. Resolution isn't the roll, it's applying the specific effects of the action to the boardstate.

Can you map this to narrative themes? Or is this just an aside like in your original post? I personally can't conceptualize how this generalizes out.

 

[Pedantic]

Can you map this to narrative themes? Or is this just an aside like in your original post? I personally can't conceptualize how this generalizes out.

No, and I think that's orthogonal to my point. I was specifically calling out an excluded middle; it's too reductive to separate mechanics into "GM decides" and "narrative player driven." I found Campbell's post helpful in refocusing the discussion:

I don't speak "player driven" is a very good descriptor. I think play that addresses the thematic premises embedded in the character is a much better one. What conflict resolution brings to the table is a way to keep the focus on consequences that relevant to things players are trying to address through their characters without set outcomes or play drifting away from those concerns as a natural result of setting extrapolation.

The big difference we see in more traditional play is that the premises we are addressing are either established by play or the GM's situation framing (that is usually not in regard to the thematic premises a player sets for their character). That and premise drift naturally occurs because consequences need not (and often do not) to the thematic concerns of the characters.

It makes clear that driving what occurs is a separate concern from the narrativist premise. If I'm perfectly blunt, I think the trad/nar tension in so much as it ever weighed on D&D's design, especially around the 4e era as a reaction 3e, and then 5e as a reaction to 4e, had the unfortunate side-effect of driving design sentiment to extremes; either you bake your position into your resolution mechanics and focus play around it, or you're not doing it at all and the GM decides everything, when I think there's whole other axes of player agency/decision making and design goals to consider.

This is an aside, however, so pulling it back to the point on the table, I think perhaps my point is that neotrad design, the kind of "narrative" that Daggerheart and similar games might be going for, embraces some of those player-driven/character theme exploration goals, but does not concede that conflict resolution is a preferred means to achieve them.

 

[Campbell]

Um. Daggerheart uses conflict resolution. It explicitly uses Apocalypse World style GM moves and its rules for action rolls snowball in exactly the same sort of way action rolls do in Blades.

Success With Hope = You get what you want.
Success With Fear = You get what you want and GM Makes a Move (or takes a Fear)
Failure With Hope = GM Makes a move.
Failure With Fear = GM takes a fear or makes a hard move.

 

[zakael19]

Any reason but assume it’s in line with a thematic premise embedded in the character. Feel free to make something up for purposes of the example. Or any example that illustrates the differences in playstyle.

I'm not going to script out a full conversation, but I think the key difference will be in how the player responds to a framed scene. You're likely to get a DM frame (keying in on things of narrative focus to set teh fiction for potential mixed success/hard moves) -> player delivers some fiction -> some DM NPC play -> a move is triggered -> resolve -> fiction evolves -> soft moves until things are clear and players declare a new move via fictional + meta action.

In my experience with classic play, DM describes tavern with flavor. Players talk to bartender, you get some back and forth, and unless there's a clear next step players keep looking at the DM for either a fiat resolution (you get what you want), or hope for a skill check to be called for so they have action resolution.

 

[FrogReaver]

I'm not going to script out a full conversation, but I think the key difference will be in how the player responds to a framed scene. You're likely to get a DM frame (keying in on things of narrative focus to set teh fiction for potential mixed success/hard moves) -> player delivers some fiction -> some DM NPC play -> a move is triggered -> resolve -> fiction evolves -> soft moves until things are clear and players declare a new move via fictional + meta action.

In my experience with classic play, DM describes tavern with flavor. Players talk to bartender, you get some back and forth, and unless there's a clear next step players keep looking at the DM for either a fiat resolution (you get what you want), or hope for a skill check to be called for so they have action resolution.

So I agree when resolution has occurred is often more clear cut in say blades in the dark than d&d (for a more concrete example). That said, free play in blades in the dark is much like free play in d&d in my experience. One might could argue I ran that part wrong, but I’ve seen enough other accounts that it’s certainly not unusual if so.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I didn't want to derail this discussion, but there's a bit of an excluded middle between 5e's skill system and conflict resolution (or even skill challenges). You can have specific actions coded into player facing skill mechanics without further embracing the model. Just write down what each action does, how long it takes, and the appropriate modifiers, then process the resulting fiction from success/failure.

5e doesn't do this, but it isn't an intrinsic feature of task resolution to not provide player agency in action selection. GM permission doesn't need to be wedded to resolution that way; this can be entirely shifted to a question of setting/scenario design (framing if you like, but I find the term groups together too many GM roles to make the point).

I have advocated for 5e having more robust skill system in form of actual examples of what skills can do and at what DCs, instead of just mostly relying on the GM coming up with all of that. It doesn't need to be exhaustive, but some benchmarks would help the GM to be more consistent and would communicate to the players what they can expect to achieve.

 

[zakael19]

I have advocated for 5e having more robust skill system in form of actual examples of what skills can do and at what DCs, instead of just mostly relying on the GM coming up with all of that. It doesn't need to be exhaustive, but some benchmarks would help the GM to be more consistent and would communicate to the players what they can expect to achieve.

4e's clearcut examples and sub-systems were great, and they should consider bringing that forward. In fact, just bring the entire 4e skill system forward...

 

[Pedantic]

4e's clearcut examples and sub-systems were great, and they should consider bringing that forward. In fact, just bring the entire 4e skill system forward...

No, it's straight up incompatible with that view. Skill challenges are precisely the opposite of that, and 4e's non-SC skill system was mostly an anemic holdout from the 3e approach. SC's explicitly abstract the impact of any given player action declaration (usually down to 1/3 of success or failure) and use a DC by level system that does not output specific actions for specific difficulties.

The point of a specified action skills system is to fix all of those decisions in advance, at the system level, so that players can use the information to their advantage. Getting into a castle cannot be abstracted into a several check challenge, because the precise checks the players pick will yield different fictional situations, and only by parsing the results of each check can the final situation be reached.

I am probably much more hardline on this point than @Crimson Longinus, in that I think the GM should at best be a designer of last resort. I want rules texts to strive to lay out the complete set of actions players can take, not merely advise the GM on what's generally appropriate.

 

[zakael19]

^ since your “that” has no referent and my response was to somebody else about clarity of skill uses and examples, you’re once again in the weeds for me.

4e’s skills & SC system at least has the bones of systematic narrative play. You just have to ignore the guidelines written by people who didn’t quite understand where their system could go.

Looks like Daggerheart is trying to marry 4e-ish combat systems with PBTA/BITDish resolutions and that’s neat.

 

[hawkeyefan]

What does "player choices mattering in fundamental way" actually mean? Because I think I have played and run many games in which I think they do. And I definitely do not feel that "fundamentally mattering" is happening in the Blades campaign I play any more than in the D&D I run.

It means that the choices made by players shape play in a meaningful way. And more so, they must do so. Play cannot proceed without that.

We're not just going to run Tomb of Annihilation. We're going to play a game that is about my character, and the other players' characters. The story must be theirs and cannot be anyone else's. You can't just swap out PCs and continue on as you could in most classic or trad type play.

I am not unsure of the differences. It just seem that some people seem to read "there doesn't always need to be conflict" as "most of the time there is no conflict."

I mean, you seem to read that there cannot be any color in a game that's trying to always push toward conflict, so I suppose this is just an unfortunate aspect of discussion.

The focus of such a game is going to be challenging the characters and their ideals or beliefs. Putting the things they care about in crosshairs and seeing how they respond. It doesn't mean there'll never be a scene where two players just kind of play their PCs in a way that reinforces what we know... it just means that's not the "main ingredient" as you called it. Such scenes are going to be short and to the point and part of building toward something more.

Yes, it obviously have plenty of narrativism inspired elements. Someone just made a point that heavy combat crunch of D&D would make it poorly suited for narrativist play, so I merely asked whether the heavy combat crunch of DH is similarly detrimental to that. And if it isn't, then we need to examine what the difference is, as it obviously then just isn't about the amount of focus on combat, but how the rules are implemented.

I didn't make that point... I don't think I agree with it. I mean, combat is one of the high points of player agency in traditional D&D. We know the rules and how they work, and we have a good sense of the odds, and what we are capable of. We can look at two different actions and have a good idea of which may be the more helpful to take.

So, I don't see combat as limiting agency, or narrativist play.

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.)

Yeah, your understanding is on point.