Quote from: Manzanaro;882062Does this kind of technique strike you as out of place or unacceptable in a simulation oriented game? Or put slightly differently, would you find it broke immersion in some way?

Its pretty common. You hit a downtime moment and the DM asks the group what they want to do during the span of time "off duty" as it were between sessions. Someone might want to do research, someone else might just kick back and party, another may restock supplies.

Example from the group I am playing in with Kefra and Jannet. When we last got back into town we had some time off as I needed to do some research a new spell and commune with the entity that my warlock gets powers from. Jannet's half-orc was checking connections around town as to some things we encountered out in the swamp. And Kefra spent the whole time in animal form spying on random and not-so-random people just because thats what she does. We all detailed what we wanted to do and then closed the session for the week. Next session we found out what happened, if anything.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;882074Well, if you are going to introduce language, people will be voting with their opinions on whether it is helpful. Particularly when you move from 'scene' to 'scene framing' (which is a thing in discussions about RPGs and usually something that you see on sites devoted to narrative styles of play). Again, you are the one choosing to focus on the linguistic side of this discussion. I am happy to find points where we agree and focus on that, but I am going to throw in my two cents when I find the language doesn't quite fit how I conceive of play. You can't force people to adopt the language you want to use.

In the case of Scene I think it is particularly important because I find that word actually does shape the behavior of players and GMs (much more so than story). I've definitely noticed players try to hit dramatic beats more if you talk about scenes in games (and I have done that in the past).

Keep in mind, most gamers understand casual use of the word story. But Narrative and Scene have more of a buzzword effect because they do mean something in these discussions. Narrative mechanics are a thing. Scene Framing is a thing. This is a site focused on immersion that generally isn't into story focused RPGs. So you are going to be met with some resistance and suspicion if you focus on those two words.

Like 'story' has less connotations? Narrative is the word that fits. An accounting of events. I think 95% of why people have problems with it is due to Edward's misuse of the word.

And scene framing is entirely valid to my mind, and any other way of talking about it is much more cumbersome. Scene framing may not have much bearing in a dungeon crawl, or any other situation where you are tracking time continuously, but there are many other premises for games that involve a lot of time skipping and deciding where and where not to focus.

Quote from: Omega;882078Its pretty common. You hit a downtime moment and the DM asks the group what they want to do during the span of time "off duty" as it were between sessions. Someone might want to do research, someone else might just kick back and party, another may restock supplies.

Example from the group I am playing in with Kefra and Jannet. When we last got back into town we had some time off as I needed to do some research a new spell and commune with the entity that my warlock gets powers from. Jannet's half-orc was checking connections around town as to some things we encountered out in the swamp. And Kefra spent the whole time in animal form spying on random and not-so-random people just because thats what she does. We all detailed what we wanted to do and then closed the session for the week. Next session we found out what happened, if anything.

Yeah. The only difference is I would probably actually play that stuff out, in a trimmed fashion.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;882048I just see it more as events unfolding there at the table. My experience as a player and a GM isn't one where I cam consciously narrating stuff, it is one where I am engaged with what is going on. As a player I don't narrate, I announce what I attempt to do and/or I speak as my character speaks. As a GM, I try to provide the environment that occurs in, and I try to establish outcomes of such attempts based on plausibility and dice rolls. Someone from the outside looking in might see narrative I suppose. But I don't and I would find to disruptive for me to think in those terms.

Exactly.
 

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;882053I just re-read the OP (I was responding to the ongoing debate in the last couple of pages rather than the first post).

I am a little unclear on what you are after.

Me too. It's why I keep asking for clarification. It's also why I suggested that it is a bit futile to discuss techniques until we know if we are in agreement about the intent or goal of using those techniques.

As you said in another post, the type of language I use as a GM trying to clearly and quickly convey the situation or outcome of events to the players is different than the type of language I use as a player to convey to the GM (and my fellow players) what my PC is saying, doing, or attempting, which is different still from the type of language I use as a raconteur telling a story about what happened last session, and this is different again from the type of language I use as an author writing up the events of the last session or series of sessions.
To point out a few obvious differences,

• When I describe the situation as a GM I use present tense and often second person ("Your swing cuts off the Trollkin's left arm;" "You smell the musty aroma of damp soil and at the end of the long, narrow passage you see a flicker of what looks like torchlight"). Typically I will have events proceed in some order either of turns, rounds, initiative ranks, etc. that follows from the game aspects of the rules and that is intended to keep the sequence of events and opportunity to act clear to the players.

• When I play my PC I use present tense, first person and I am often presenting information in a focused turn-by-turn or round-by-round sequence of events. I may say "I try to hit the Trollkin with the sling" which makes it clear I am attempting an action or I may use a more emotive (and wishful) statement like "I kill the Trollkin who hit Elaine with a slingstone" even though everyone understands that is what I want my PC to do not necessarily what my PC does. The system/GM will tell me whether I achieve my desire.

• When I tell a story after the end of the session as a raconteur I use past tense and either third person or (if story is imagined as being told by a PC or NPC) I will use first person if appropriate.

• When I write a story after the session as an author I use third person, limited omniscient. I use literary techniques to enhance the story and I add detail to the scene to convey emotional content or to try to justify or explain the choices that characters made and to put them in context. I will frequently elide, edit, or merge actions and I may change the order of actions to tell a more entertaining story rather than to convey the exact round-by-round and initiative rank-by-initiative rank sequence of events that occurred in play.

I get the sense Manzanaro that you don't have the exact same set of goals that I have for the communication that occurs for some of those roles and that rather than seeing the language as being intentionally and necessarily different for each role that you want to use some author language as the GM. But I could be wrong, as I said, I still don't know what your aim is.

 

Quote from: Manzanaro;882036...stuff that relates to the simple initial premise like, "I find that empathizing with the protagonists helps build a more emotionally resonant narrative and here are some ways I have found to help establish that" or " I find that even seemingly nonclimactic failures on the part of the PCs can be compelling and here are some approaches that have worked for me" or any of an unlimited number of approaches that might be taken to my initial premise.

Well we are maybe starting to get somewhere. Is your goal is to get "a more emotionally resonant narrative"?

If it is, can you unpack or explain what you mean by an emotionally resonant narrative?

Here is the thing. I do not have a single set of ideal narrative characteristics, and tone may vary considerably even within a single session.

Trust me, if I were to try to even say, here are some examples of narrative characteristics that belong in every game, what I would get is people shouting that they did not like those things and I should stop telling them how to play. And that actually is understandable, because there is no universal ideal that holds true in every imaginable narrative.

But still I did list some things off the top of my head several pages back...

Bren, did you see the questions I asked YOU a few posts back? I asked those questions with the intent of using your answers to try and provide some clarity as to the kind of things I am talking about.

Here is another. Are there particular narrative characteristics in books or movies that you tend to like?

Do YOU like stories that you feel some sort of emotional stake in, for instance? Or is pure action enough to keep you invested?

Quote from: Manzanaro;882087Yeah. The only difference is I would probably actually play that stuff out, in a trimmed fashion.

That is usually the followup when the session resumes. We act on anything we learned during the downtime, or head off into town to talk to NPCs more directly before resuming the adventuring stuff.

Following up the previous example: The warlock gained some otherwoldly insight and is close to developing a new spell. The druidess followed the warlock around. Said warlock being totally oblivious to this. And the half orc learned that yes an adventuring group was missing and yes another adventuring group reported putting down some hobgoblins. Then we wandered town for a while following leads. And we headed over to the local temple to let them know that we found the missing adventurers they sent out. And gave them a proper burial and the location in case they wanted to retrieve and revive if there was time left. We restocked supplies, which was more an excuse to try and garner info on one of the other adventuring groups from the merchants , and updated our patron on the progress of our mission.

Someone else might want to RP out the downtime half and skip over the shopping and socializing.

Manzanaro, I think some problems you have here are:

1) You are so vague as to what you're after that people don't have sufficient basis for giving answers.

2) The demographic at this site is heavily weighted to people who don't come to an RPG looking for a story.  Most of us come looking to enjoy the experience of being able to do stuff we don't get to do in real life and take on another persona (to varying degrees for varying tastes in role-playing). Just that!

It's a playground in which we choose to do whatever interests us. It goes however it goes due to a mix of our decisions and some probability factors (modeling the host of imponderables that keep life from being perfectly predictable).  We explore the environment, experiment with things to see what happens, pursue whatever objectives seem like fun.

3) To the extent that we use "narrative techniques" they come naturally as part of the process of play, not presenting problems requiring a lot of pedantic musing.  We've got to have challenges, the challenges should make some sense in the larger context, we apply inference -- no big deal.

The #1 thing for a player is to have an interesting character.  The #1 thing for a GM is to have interesting non-player characters.  Given adequately fleshed out motivations and personalities, action and reaction tend to flow pretty easily.

4) You keep harping on jargon that is at least obscurantist and in this neighborhood appears as tendentious.  Try dropping that and saying what you mean in plain, specific English.

Quote from: Manzanaro;882027What constitutes a good narrative for you? Outside of the context of RPGs?

As I said. It depends on context and purpose. I want and expect something very different when I read a short story than when someone tells me about a stressful incident in their day in the hope of a sympathetic ear.

QuoteHow about the narrative that emerged from John Wick's Temple of Horrors scenario in that other thread? Would you consider that a good narrative? More interestingly, COULD it have been a good narrative even with the same underlying simulated events?

As a narrative it sucked. In large part because so many of his "anecdotes" were either counter factual to the actual time period or implausible to the point of total disbelief. Taken together he gave us a half-assed, made up story where Wick is first the poor victim and last the discordian anti-hero. His tale is whiny, implausible, and it wasn't even funny. On the plus side, it did save me from any further desire to send John Wick $40. So there is that in its favor.

The only way the same underlying events might have made a half-way entertaining anecdote would be for John to have cast himself in the role of buffoon rather than either victim or hero. A self-deprecating tale of how and why John Wick as a player thought that jumping into the demon's mouth was the best of all possible plans in the Tomb of Horrors based on some ludicrously bizarre misinterpretation by him of clues and some colossally convoluted over thinking of events that allowed him to persuade his fellow player to follow him into the mouth. That would at least have had a chance at being funny.

Quote from: Manzanaro;882097Bren, did you see the questions I asked YOU a few posts back? I asked those questions with the intent of using your answers to try and provide some clarity as to the kind of things I am talking about.

I'm not sure how helpful the answers will have been.

QuoteHere is another. Are there particular narrative characteristics in books or movies that you tend to like?

Like anything it depends. A lot. I expect something different from different types of media and different genres. Acting and actors matter a lot in film. Two different actors reciting the same exact lines will result in different, possibly completely different audience experiences. And each of those experiences can be totally different than the experience of reading the script oneself. There is nothing comparable to actors in books. The words on the page are all the author has to work with.

QuoteDo YOU like stories that you feel some sort of emotional stake in, for instance? Or is pure action enough to keep you invested?

Some emotional connection in fiction is often good. But "emotional stake" or connection is so vague a concept as to be open to multiple, contradictory meanings. So I don't know how helpful that is to say. Certainly pure action alone is never sufficient. Far too often pure action results in the sort of ludicrous action for action's sake stunts we see in Fury Road. But a greater emotional stake in the characters or outcome wouldn't make those idiotic stunts suddenly make sense.

So some plausibility (in the context of the setting and genre) to the action, events, and characters is necessary. But I don't see plausibility as a result of narrative language it is far more the result of a decent plot.

Narrative isn't exactly obscure jargon. I'd think anybody with a 6th grade education would probably he able to decipher it.

And is there, like, a particular sentence that you can point at as not understanding? Because I have been reiterating the living shit out of things at various people's requests, including multiple concrete examples of the kind of the things I have been talking about since post one.

And frankly there have been people who have understood me just fine and spoken in the spirit of the thread. They just get a bit drowned out by the vocal minority shouting me down for not sharing their exact opinion.

Quote from: Manzanaro;882118Narrative isn't exactly obscure jargon. I'd think anybody with a 6th grade education would probably he able to decipher it.

Apparently not you, since you have proven unable to translate your intended meaning into other words.  Either that, or you are obstinately refusing to do so, either of which makes your blaming of others for the semantic quibble untenable.

Bren, as far as the Wick thing goes. I'm not talking about the meta narrative of Wick talking about it afterwards; I'm talking about the (supposed) internal narrative of the session: adventuring party goes into deathtrap dungeon, climbs into a demon mouth thing and all die. I actually agree with you that the whole thing is BS and in fact was the 1st one to point iut the suspicion, but that isn't the point here. The point is whether or not you would have found the narrative satisfactory as a player, and if not, whether there is anything he could have done to improve it.

As far as the emotional stakes/investment thing? That just means do you like stories that summon up emotion in you somehow.

And plot isn't a narrative structure??

Quote from: Phillip;882119Apparently not you, since you have proven unable to translate your intended meaning into other words.  Either that, or you are obstinately refusing to do so, either of which makes your blaming of others for the semantic quibble untenable.

Jesus fucking Christ dude. I've fucking translated it a fucking dozen times. Point me to a sentence you don't understand.

Quote from: Manzanaro;882118Narrative isn't exactly obscure jargon. I'd think anybody with a 6th grade education would probably he able to decipher it.

I'm not certain who you intended to direct this towards.

Narrative has multiple definitions and connotations. Which often leads to equivocation where one definition is used to show that people are speaking, i.e. narrating, during play and another definition is used to imply that play is about telling a story. Which leads to confusion. Which leads to anger. Which leads to hate. Which leads to the Dark Side...or something like that.

QuoteAnd frankly there have been people who have understood me just fine and spoken in the spirit of the thread. They just get a bit drowned out by the vocal minority shouting me down for not sharing their exact opinion.

I'm still trying to understand what you are looking for that isn't already there in your gaming.

Quote from: Bren;882122I'm not certain who you intended to direct this towards.

Narrative has multiple definitions and connotations. Which often leads to equivocation where one definition is used to show that people are speaking, i.e. narrating, during play and another definition is used to imply that play is about telling a story. Which leads to confusion. Which leads to anger. Which leads to hate. Which leads to the Dark Side...or something like that.

I'm still trying to understand what you are looking for that isn't already there in your gaming.

And I'm still trying to understand what YOU are looking for. I was looking for a discussion of... Wait this is all in my first post. You didn't understand even my first post? Why are you even engaging me in this conversation? Seriously.

Also speaking as equaling narrative is new to me. Maybe you are thinking of dialogue?

Quote from: Manzanaro;882120The point is whether or not you would have found the narrative satisfactory as a player, and if not, whether there is anything he could have done to improve it.

What narrative are you talking about here?

• The DM description that we don't really have?
• The player description of what they are doing and why they are doing it that we don't have?
• The story one tells after the fact about a TPK caused by the players being young and stupid and the DM being a 12-year old dick?

Different narratives result in different answers.

Let's look at them in turn.

• The DM should clearly describe what is present and what occurs. We are missing the description of how the sphere of annihilation operated. From context, I suspect that Wick was a dick who didn't provide any useful feedback like items disintegrating part way as soon as they enter the sphere's event horizon. But we don't know that since he doesn't tell us what he really said to his players.
• I'm curious WTF the players thought they were doing. Why they thought that after the first guy disappeared and didn't reappear following him without further investigation was a good plan? Why no one teleported out? Why no one checked the mouth with a pole in the first place? But we don't have a narration of what the players actually said to examine.
• A TPK of young, dumb D&D players by a dick DM running a tough module he didn't understand sounds unexceptional, but not implausible. But it's not particularly interesting to hear about.

QuoteAs far as the emotional stakes/investment thing? That just means do you like stories that summon up emotion in you somehow.

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. It depends on the emotions, how they are evoked, their intensity, and what I was wanting in recreation at the time. If I'm in the mood for escapist fair I don't want to watch Schindler's List or a documentary about the Holocaust. If I want escapist action fare, I don't want the romantic emotionalism of the Jose Ferrer version of Cyrano de Bergerac even though it is one of my favorite films.