There are no narrativist games. There are games which support, more or less, a narrativist agenda.

Like that, Elliot?

Quote from: Elliot WilenUgh.

You're stepping into a minefield, Jim.

I know, Elliot - I appreciate your concern. However, I anticipate jargony responses like droog's.

I'm trying to draw out the real distinctions and, if i can't get a committment to a distinction, point out that there's no distinction.  It's a herculean task - with which I will likely become bored and give up for the next butterfly that floats by.

Actually, droog's answer is completely lucid, compared to the inevitable followup on "what is narrativism?"

I think it's easier to just cut straight to the chase and look at the things that put a game in the "narrativist" genre.

Quotea game is Nar if it has non-task(combat)-oriented attributes that reward a character?

Nah, too general.

QuoteOr is it just explaining the character's goals and then rewarding them for chasing them?

That's a type of Nar design, but you can easily get tangled up over defining "reward". Also, it's not enough to define the character's goals; to be properly Nar, they'd need to be goals of interest to the player. And then you need to ask whether it's enough to chase the goals or if the goals need to be "challenged" in some sense.

QuoteOr is it that attributes other than strictly physical ones can influence the task-oriented rolls?

Nah, just giving somebody hero points or whatever won't do the trick.

I think the best way to identify a Nar game (in the eyes of people who believe in GNS), even if it doesn't flow directly from the theory, is to look at how the mechanics interact with the GMing advice/rules. Basically, if the GM is told to either design scenarios or improvise in play, in such a manner that the player's mechanical resources will allow him, nay empower him, to engage some "plot-like" problem which the player has defined in relation to the character, then the game is Narrativist-facilitating.

So TRoS is Nar because the GM is told (in one paragraph) to look at the PCs' Spiritual Attributes (and other characteristics such as faults) and design scenarios around them. That means the players will be able to "do stuff of interest to them" in the scenarios since PCs are powerful when it comes to stuff that concerns their SAs.

The missing link in this analysis (unless I'm overlooking something in the text) is that "designing scenarios to the PCs' SAs" doesn't necessarily mean confronting them with "hard choices", which is a common gloss of Nar. So either TRoS can be played equally well to more than one CA, or Nar really just means that the players get a strong say in writing the adventure--rather than angsty questions of moral import.

Quote from: Elliot WilenSo TRoS is Nar because the GM is told (in one paragraph) to look at the PCs' Spiritual Attributes (and other characteristics such as faults) and design scenarios around them. That means the players will be able to "do stuff of interest to them" in the scenarios since PCs are powerful when it comes to stuff that concerns their SAs.

The missing link in this analysis (unless I'm overlooking something in the text) is that "designing scenarios to the PCs' SAs" doesn't necessarily mean confronting them with "hard choices", which is a common gloss of Nar. So either TRoS can be played equally well to more than one CA, or Nar really just means that the players get a strong say in writing the adventure--rather than angsty questions of moral import.

It also says to look at the player's Flaws. There's a sample adventure where PCs are press-ganged onto a boat. The game's really pretty traditional (and I mean that in a good way).

The Nar-facilitating-part comes in that *if* the GM keys on the SA's, and they appear in a mechanically dominant way during the game, and that leads to the player making a thematic statement absent GM-railroading then the SA's are "facilitating Nar play" by making the PC more effective in that context.

Hero and GURPS do this too with disads if the GM uses them in the same way. The character doesn't become more effective when he's saving his DNPC--he's always a little more effective because he has a DNPC--but the negative application of SA's (the fact that they don't help if you aren't playing to them) doesn't facilitate Nar-play.

And, really, look at the SA's ... Destiny? and Luck? (IIRC--don't have the book handy). They're not all Narrativist goodness.

Now, none of this means that TRoS is a bad game. IMO, it's a very good one. It also doesn't mean (per-se) that GNS dialog is all bunk (that is, this bit of analysis in and of itself shouldn't be taken as an indictment of the dialog as a whole). What it does mean, though, is that the exacting, painstaking analysis of the text that gets applied to games that aren't as well received (Vampire up first ... but also GURPS) gets glossed over when it comes to a game that people like.

That's something that should be acknowledged when looking at the "analysis part" of GNS. At least some (perhaps most) of what passes for system-analysis with regard to CA-Facilitation is pretty questionable (IMO/IME).

-Marco

QuoteLots of people like to say that the Riddle of Steel is a Narrativist game with Simulationist elements.

No they don't.  

Quote from: WarthurWell, true; I suppose I should have said "highly realistic by the standards of tabletop RPGs".

That's still a stretch.  Just because they've added in a degree of complexity and various ways of defining what an attack is.  I have yet to see how that's making the game more realistic.  It's more simy perhaps and clunky definitely but the end result isn't any more realistic.  The combat system is no more realistic then most other games it's just more defined.  If anything it's a very realistic system if you want to model an RPG off of a video game.  I'm not saying it can't be fun and it is in certain situations where you want to run lots of 1 on 1 duel style combats.