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

[clearstream]

Or to flip it around: you've provided no argument that combining author and audience means that they themselves become constituent elements of the work they produce, in a way that they wouldn't if they were separate.

Speaking specifically of TTRPG, players are also part of the rendering. A notion in wider game studies is player-as-subject to game, and it might mean that what I want to get at is that specific facet of player.

I mean, playing guitar for my own pleasure is different from playing for a friend, but that doesn't mean that in the first case I am part of the music I create where in the second case I'm not.

When I am looking for a pemertonian-performance I cannot get that from any performer who isn't pemerton.

 

[pemerton]

Some sessions, or some parts of the single session address the theme. But some sessions or some parts of the session also address other things.


Some scenes do, some don't. Some scenes serve other purposes.

Sometimes there is. But not always.

Sure. Ron Edwards wrote about this, back in 2003:

Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.​

In addition to the risk that Edwards describes, there is the fact that both the process of working through the "hardware" scenes, and of dealing with the fallout from those scenes, either (i) produces fiction that blocks the previous rising action across a moral line, or (ii) produces fiction that gets in the way of player determination of future stakes and conflicts.

Again, I report that this is actual experience from actual play of narrativist AD&D and RM. It is very very easy to fall back into GM-driven scenes with GM-driven resolution.

Like this is blatantly obviously trivially possible, and done by countless gamers routinely. It is always all or nothing for you, but not everyone approaches things that way.

It's nothing to do with all or nothing. Where are these countless examples? For the past many pages I have asked you and @FrogReaver to point me to some. You're yet to do so. (Unless you mean Critical Role. That's already been discussed to death in this thread and I've got nothing to add.)

 

[clearstream]

I took spectrum to be used with its natural language meaning.

You'll need to have words with Darkbard about that.

I mean, X is better suited for purpose P than Y is entails (trivially) that Y is less well suited for purpose P than X is. So we have it established that some things are better suited to certain purposes and others less suited. This is true of most tools (or other means0 and most purposes, I think. (If someone has a counter-example, of a purpose for which there are not means that exhibit various degrees of suitability, I'd be interested to hear it. I'm not thinking of one off the top of my head. Maybe some ethical or religious purposes?)

But that suitability of the range of possible means to a given purpose is a matter of degree doesn't tell us that there is any sort of spectrum.

A fortiori it doesn't tell us that there is a spectrum of purposes, nor a spectrum of means.

I recall once you accused me of sophistry. What you wrote was

When it comes to "completely changing all mechanics" I don't know what you have in mind. 4e D&D, for instance, doesn't completely change all of AD&D's mechanics. It doubles down on some of them and changes others.

Burning Wheel doesn't completely change all of RQ or RM's mechanics. If you're a RM or RQ player, and you look at a BW PC sheet, you're going to recognise the significance of the long list of skills, the derived attributes, etc. You'll quickly work out that spell tax is like PP or POW depletion.

But there are key elements of BW that differ from RQ and RM, and that make it better suited for narrativist play. As I've already posted in this thread, I doubt very much I'll ever GM RM again, having found a game better suited for my purposes.

I take it that you didn't intend to imply (as this does) that there were a range of elements, each of which may be well or less well suited for a diversity of purposes. And you were not thinking of mechanics as "means".

Or if you were, perhaps you were thinking of each mechanic as discrete, such that if there is a mechanic "advantage" there is no mechanic "like-but-not-identical-to-advantage". Possibly saying that none of the mechanics or elements you hinted at above were of that sort: unavailable in anything but discrete binaries of mechanic to purpose.

If so then I disagree. Dropping "spectrum" as contested, there are a range of purposes and a range of means, and purposes and means can be in degree, and of course means can suit purposes in degree... which I read you to now clarify was your only intended implication. For avoidance of doubt, I don't take anything about that to challenge a "modalistic" description, and especially not to mean that the sum can't be more than the parts.

So going forward we'll just need to take that disagreement into account.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Sure. Ron Edwards wrote about this, back in 2003:

Simulationist play works as an underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play, even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up pleasing neither enough to attract them further.​

I guess that's why none of us has heard of this Tom Clancy guy as his novels were an abysmal failure...
Like can you conceive that a lot of people care about both the premise and the tech aspects and think that having the book contain both is a feature not a bug?

In addition to the risk that Edwards describes, there is the fact that both the process of working through the "hardware" scenes, and of dealing with the fallout from those scenes, either (i) produces fiction that blocks the previous rising action across a moral line, or (ii) produces fiction that gets in the way of player determination of future stakes and conflicts.

Again, I report that this is actual experience from actual play of narrativist AD&D and RM. It is very very easy to fall back into GM-driven scenes with GM-driven resolution.

But you are again being single-minded. Even if such thing sometimes would occur, it is not a problem as we don not care about being narrativist 100% of time. Also, there is a lot of you can do with choosing and interpreting the elements of the simulation so that the end results still be thematic.

It's nothing to do with all or nothing. Where are these countless examples? For the past many pages I have asked you and @FrogReaver to point me to some. You're yet to do so. (Unless you mean Critical Role. That's already been discussed to death in this thread and I've got nothing to add.)

It is futile, because your definitions are unclear and when provided examples no-true-Scotsman goalpost shifting commences. I don't care for your narrativist seal of approval, but I do know that many of the qualities you list regularly happen in RPGs that are not usually considered narrativist. Players determining the direction of the game, rising action, addressing themes, moral conflicts, characters dealing with personal issues. All basic stuff found in one degree or another in most games.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Mate, the question answering is part of the ride. And the gold being excuse to do interesting stuff is as much a thing in the Blades than in the D&D, or arguably more, as it actually is pretty central conceit in that game. Like in that game too my chracter cares about getting rich, but it is not that I as player try "win" getting money, it is just an excuse for doing the heists, which challenge and put pressure on my character. Exact same thing in D&D. And like I said, it is just one possible motivation among many, and definitely not most interesting one.

For some players, they just want to get to the adventure and care less about their character motivation and will just hook on "getting rich" to put something quick and easy. Other players care more about their character background and greater goals in life. I mentioned previously our character was seeking to find his father, another was on his shamanic journey, another was seeking to start a new cult, another was opening a trading business. As players come up with ideas, these can all be worked into backgrounds and session 0s.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah, sure. But what I meant that the point of neither game is really acquiring money. Acquiring money is an excuse for putting the characters into interesting situations. The money obviously still can be useful in the game (and definitely is more so in Blades than in D&D), but you're not trying to "win" the game by gathering most gold.

I don't know. The crew's goal is to grow in influence and power, and coin is a big part of that. Coin can also be used for other goals like long term projects or crafting... lots of things. And it can also be converted to Stash, which is literally the savings that the criminal may hope to retire on; that actually may be winning the game for some people if that's what they decide to do. In a game I played in, we had a player who retired his character once he'd filled his Stash... it was pretty late in the game, but we still had some things left to handle over the course of several more Scores... but he had decided once he had enough to retire well, that's what he'd do.

So coin is an actual goal for both characters and players in Blades. It's not just an excuse to get into trouble (though it is that, too). It's an actionable thing that has an impact on play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Games certainly are mechanisms, and game-as-artifact tools for fabricating said mechanisms. Recollecting that for TTRPG we can't exclude the players. And the topology I'm describing simply treats those as entries in a multidimensional (and in this case rendered visually) database. The dimensions are the "specific traits, functional and non-functional" and as I said, the sum may be greater than the parts. In saying that the "sum can be greater than the parts" I am saying that as well as traits there are meta-traits.

The topology doesn't "solve a given problem", it's a visualisation of all possible TTRPGs that takes as an underlying assumption that some combinations are more functional than others (and/or they better fit some segment of the tastes of the time). I've described it in simple three-dimensional terms, but obviously it is more than three-dimensional and it would be better to picture modes as dense or hot spots in the volume.

By "specific" you could mean that the "traits, functional and non-functional" of the mechanisms are such that TTRPGs are incommensurable. Seeing as that would contradict or void the comparisons between modes of play that many in this thread are making, I'm assuming that's not what you intend, right? It'd be a pretty radical claim so let me know: it'd be interesting to entertain it. For one thing, it'd mean that comparisons folk are making between modes are meaningless.

Were it true, then yes, games would each have distinctly different lists of dimensions and couldn't be mapped into the same conceptual space. They would still be mappable on the basis of any dimensions they shared, which is what I've observed in this thread, unless folk are making much stronger arguments for privacy or exclusivity of the "traits, functionl and non-functional" than I am reading them to.

I'm pushing against your 'landscape' concept, which is describing, mathematically, a continuum of possible game elements, which implies they can simply be juxtaposed and you could then assign a 'coordinate' in your landscape to each one like it has X amount of A, Y amount of B, etc. It is much more accurate to portray games instead as being like, say, watches. Sure, there are MANY arrangements which could function, but only specific discrete arrangements of gears will make a watch, all the other random assortments of gears which happen to mesh, or variations in the size of the different gears, leads to non-functional or misfunctional outcomes.

Now, RPGing being a primarily aesthetic exercise involving a lot of creativity, I will caveat that to a degree. Many games could 'work' in some sense, but not produce results that are particularly interesting. In many cases the definition of 'works' cannot be agreed upon and we can only say 'works for some, not others', etc. Honestly, I don't think these sorts of analogization, yours or mine, are really worth much. Play of specific games, and the specific experiences garnered from that play is fundamentally the only useful standard. Again, as I have said before, this was the 'Forge Rule', you HAD TO talk about actual play, or Ron et al would just kick you off the forum. It was a powerful rule, instead of the EnWorld 20 years of endless kvetching about this or that spherical cow, an entire genre of games arose out of that discussion in a matter of 4 or 5 years, and most modern RPG design still references those ideas heavily.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One upshot is that if one were a sincere modalist - something like the view that @AbdulAlhazred is (possibly, but probably not) espousing - then one couldn't compare TTRPGs at all. Each could only be judged precisely on its own terms. But then Daggerheart probably couldn't exist as a game design.

Again, I think I claim to be less a 'modalist' in the sense of "there are specific enumerable modes of play and all play must fall into one" as I am a believer in the discreteness of game architectures. While Dungeon World clothes itself in some of the genre conceits of B/X, it is a completely different game, and there's no 'continuum' along which they fall, they are like different branches of the RPG tree.

 

[clearstream]

I'm pushing against your 'landscape' concept, which is describing, mathematically, a continuum of possible game elements, which implies they can simply be juxtaposed and you could then assign a 'coordinate' in your landscape to each one like it has X amount of A, Y amount of B, etc. It is much more accurate to portray games instead as being like, say, watches. Sure, there are MANY arrangements which could function, but only specific discrete arrangements of gears will make a watch, all the other random assortments of gears which happen to mesh, or variations in the size of the different gears, leads to non-functional or misfunctional outcomes.

I understand that, and even if we describe individual watches mechanically, we can still readily describe a watch-dimensional space that maps the properties and meta-properties of watches-as-mechanisms each as a dimension.

Now, RPGing being a primarily aesthetic exercise involving a lot of creativity, I will caveat that to a degree. Many games could 'work' in some sense, but not produce results that are particularly interesting. In many cases the definition of 'works' cannot be agreed upon and we can only say 'works for some, not others', etc.

I kind of agree. It's very much in the nature of play that individual tastes matter inordinately to what particular works will appeal to one. Part of the point of my modes description, however, was also to suggest that tastes observably cluster around works that themselves, are neighbouring (share observable similarities).

Writing this, I feel like one barrier to understanding is that folk feel compelled to make apple/pear comparisons. X is delightfully apple-ish compared to Ys degenerate lack of appleness and indeed, pear-ishness. It seems better to me at least to say something like - games X, Y, Z are neighbours that we choose to label "Q". Features I find delightful about Q are such and such, which contributes to what I experience as apple-ishness (the sum is greater than the parts.)

Compatible with that are of course neighbourhoods that are pear-ish, and individuals who like apples some days, and pears another. (Or even, apples alternating with pears on the same day. And other such outlandish heresies.)

 

[clearstream]

Again, I think I claim to be less a 'modalist' in the sense of "there are specific enumerable modes of play and all play must fall into one" as I am a believer in the discreteness of game architectures. While Dungeon World clothes itself in some of the genre conceits of B/X, it is a completely different game, and there's no 'continuum' along which they fall, they are like different branches of the RPG tree.

Were there no continuum, it would not be possible to recognise DW as similar to B/X. There'd be no such continuum to compare along.

My position is probably best considered "compatibilist". I believe modalists are right when they say such-and-such features are important, and the sum is greater than the parts. And I believe hybridists are right when they notice and say they enjoy those features in part, degree or at times in other games. To me, both are reasonable and tenable.