I feel this is often a mistake I see people, or some people make, is when they mistake an 'abstracted' game from a 'narrative' game. Even specifically by games themselves.

Abstraction governs the amount of things that the players/gm need to decide. Do we count every gun? Every bullet? Every cloth to clean the chambers for maintenance, and every drop of cleaning fluid?

Every game has some degree of abstraction. No game can be 100% simulationist.

Narrativism governs things player characters (or at times the gamemaster) get control over, or things the system does that generally tend to push the game towards somesort of narrativistic fullfillment. Maybe there are rules that say your character can't die without doing something cool first. Or you can spend a thingy-point to change some element of the world.

Without being a 100% boardgame, I would argue every game has a degree of narrativism in it as well. Even if its as basic as Hit Points.

I recently experienced the Mistborne TTG, and despite self-describing itself as narritivistic, its basically just extremly abstracted. Beyond the spirit score for changing details (which is a build thing you have to choose, the GM sets the difficulty for and can just always reject), its an extremly un-narrativistic game. Its extremly punitive with its dice results (with multiple degrees of critical failure), and the GM has basically the same level of control over elements as say D&D desite things like resources being a player attribute.

The Star Wars FFG game is also hilarious because its supposed to be a narrativistic game, but in practice is so granular in its narrativism that it turns around into just high abstraction.

Running out of ammo is a result of narrative dice, but can be counteracted by buying extra ammo.....Which means its an abstracted mechanic in place of a  narrativistic one.

Thing is. Narration does not a storygame make.

As I've pointed out many a time. D&D from the very inception has storytelling/narration elements as a key element.

It is not till the incessant cult of "Storygaming" that this got twisted completely out of shape to the point that terms like story, plot, narration even can end up as being seen as negative things due to just how abused the terms became.

And you have a few loons here who are the exact opposite and try to claim there was never ever ever never any storytelling in RPGs.

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on November 08, 2022, 05:09:31 PM
The Star Wars FFG game is also hilarious because its supposed to be a narrativistic game, but in practice is so granular in its narrativism that it turns around into just high abstraction.

Running out of ammo is a result of narrative dice, but can be counteracted by buying extra ammo.....Which means its an abstracted mechanic in place of a  narrativistic one.

FFG's Star Wars relies heavily on this too. Sure you can play it straight up. But you may miss out on some nuances from not using the system as intended.

As for the ammo thing. I think that is a bad example. You roll and it says you ran out of ammo. You can not just have the ammo magically appear. But if the rolls favor you can do tricks like finding a spare clip in a pocket that you forgot. Or grabbing one off an emeny body. Or someone else tossing you a clip. And so on.

Your ammo might be abstracted. But how you counter running out is narrative.

Whereas in D&D if you run out of arrows you can not normally just narrate more to appear. But. You can say your character is recovering any still intact arrows that were shot as that is in several of the D&D systems. Example in 5e you can recover 50% of any spent arrows. But you have to actually say so and it be possible.

The two used right mesh together perfectly.

Quote from: Omega on November 09, 2022, 02:59:11 AM
Thing is. Narration does not a storygame make.

As I've pointed out many a time. D&D from the very inception has storytelling/narration elements as a key element.

It is not till the incessant cult of "Storygaming" that this got twisted completely out of shape to the point that terms like story, plot, narration even can end up as being seen as negative things due to just how abused the terms became.

And you have a few loons here who are the exact opposite and try to claim there was never ever ever never any storytelling in RPGs.

Do those loons not get the RP part of RPG?

Eh, its the sort of pushback that was inevitable when the storygamers were on all out attack mode for a while. Especially with some of the fruitcake claims over on BGG and even here. They twisted co-opted the term RPG so out of shape their definition really was "Everything on Earth"

What I personally associate with "narrative" games are dissociative mechanics. That is, mechanics where the player becomes dissociated from the player character by thinking and acting in a way opposite to the PC's motives. For example: deliberately turning a simple failure into a critical failure because it grants extra XP even though the PC wouldn't desire this and there's no diegetic way this would grant XP.

I personally prefer more abstracted mechanics because I perceive them as requiring less time overall, particularly in combat.

Quote from: Omega on November 09, 2022, 02:59:11 AM
Thing is. Narration does not a storygame make.

As I've pointed out many a time. D&D from the very inception has storytelling/narration elements as a key element.

It is not till the incessant cult of "Storygaming" that this got twisted completely out of shape to the point that terms like story, plot, narration even can end up as being seen as negative things due to just how abused the terms became.

And you have a few loons here who are the exact opposite and try to claim there was never ever ever never any storytelling in RPGs.

Im not one way or another. Its just commentary on my end.

I suppose it depends on motivation. If you abstract something like ammunition or encumbrance because no one ever tracks it anyway, and you regard it as an unnecessary impediment to game flow, then that is (if we are using G/S/N theory) a gamist mechanic. If you're abstracting it because in whatever genre of fiction you are emulating, the heroes never run out of ammunition, that's more narrativist.