Tactical and Narrative Role-Playing Games

[Cluedrew]

So over the years of hanging around the forum I have crafted my own organization system for different role-playing systems. It isn't all encompassing but it does cover an important high level concept. It is the scale from tactical to narrative role-playing games. But to explain what it means, I'm going to have to take a step back.

Just to get us started, I'm going to do the impossible and define role-playing games. At least it would be impossible if I was trying to be very precise about it, really this is supposed to be a framing device for the rest of this thread and not a perfect general definition.

So the definition is: A role-playing game is a game that has both a mechanical layer and a fiction layer, the players have access to both and the layers interact with each other.

To go over that in more words; I'm saying it is a game because that glosses over all the things we all roughly know that I don't want to go into detail about, and I'm not going to. So that leaves us with the layers and interaction.

The mechanical layer is the hard rules about stats, rolling dice and the groups of outcome like "success" or "failure". The fiction layer is the words, the story about the setting, the personalities of the characters and the many details the rules do not capture. There are other layers, like the "what is happening in real life" layer, but they show up in most games and I have nothing in particular to say about them. Interaction between the two means that they affect each other, each can have moments where it decides what is happening.

With the definition done, I can now explain what this organization of role-playing games is all about: Which of these two layers does the system focus on? A tactical role-playing game puts the mechanical layer at the center of its design, while a narrative role-playing game does the same with the narrative layer.

Despite the rather binary description, the groups aren't quite that clean. The "what to focus on" decision has to be made many times over a rules system so the whole system can land anyone on a broad scale. So you can break it down and apply the comparison on pieces of a system.

This comparison is on the structural of the rules. Player (including a GM) can have a different focus than the system itself. This is a mismatch, but if it works, it works.

What this difference looks like depends on where we are in the rules. The best example I have of a single point of comparison is in the resolution system. Consider the phrase "fiction first", which I guess is the opposite of "mechanics first", although I just made that phrase up. Generally, fiction first systems recommend that you decide what you are doing in fiction and then fit the – usually fairly flexible – rules to that situation. Hence, mechanics first systems generally have you pick a mechanical option, which then dedicates some fiction and you can fill in some extra flavour.

That is the big example, but there are others. No long explanations this time, but a few others include: having (or not) a special tactical mini-game to dig into (usually combat), measuring distances in concrete (ft, m) vs. abstract (near, far) units, having enough overlapping options to support optimization vs. spreading things out more (not that I have ever found a system you can't optimize a little) and a focus on player skill vs. character skill. There are others. There are also some things - like PC/NPCs using different rules - that are associated with one end of the scale; but perhaps not for a structural reason.

As this explanation has already gotten long enough I'm wondering if there is anything I can cut*, I'm going to wrap this up. The tactical/narrative scale has been my main way of organizing things within the role-playing game for quite a while now (well, that an setting), and I have been trying to hammer out a good description of it for quite a while too, and I hope I have finally succeeded.

Thoughts?

* I did, this is after one round of that.

[Telok]

You may want to consider clarifying the statement "like PC/NPCs using different rules" since some people use it to describe one method of monster creation in D&D 3.p. and will assume that's what you're talking about.

[Yora]

Well, yes...

But what kind of utility or application do we get from this observation?

[Batcathat]

So the definition is: A role-playing game is a game that has both a mechanical layer and a fiction layer, the players have access to both and the layers interact with each other.

I'm not sure this includes all games. What about games that are purely freeform without any mechanics at all? (Though I suppose it might depend on how we define mechanics, even freeform games usually have a GM that can arbitrate conflicts).

[Vahnavoi]

You are wasting a lot of words to get at a simple concept: rule priority.

As in: if a game makes two (or more) different statements about a thing, which takes precedence?

You have correctly identified games can be grouped by which kind of rules they prioritize, but whether these groups fall on the scale you propose is dubious. It's more likely it's a multidimensional space, of which typical gamer juxtapositions only manage to describe a glimpse. Consider there are at least 8 different aesthetics of games that are widely acknowledged (https://www.google.com/amp/s/gamedevelopertips.com/mechanics-dynamics-aesthetics-game-design-theory-behind-games/amp/) and you can rank them in priority in 8! different ways.

Other criticisms include failure to define roleplaying games. First of all, defining a roleplaying game is not impossible. It's trivial: a roleplaying game is a rule-based exercise where a player assumes viewpoint of a character in a staged situation and decides what to do, how, and why.

The existence of separate layers of gameplay is a valid observation, but it's not a definition, certainly not of roleplaying games. Nearly all game types have tactics and strategies particular to them, and several others have a fictional layer too that comes about as result of playing. Consider a card game where players deal cards from their hand to finish each other's sentences in order to construct a story. There is a clear mechanical layer (how the cards are dealt, when a player's turn is etc.), clear strategic and tactical layers (players have to reason what kind of a story they want and in which order to deal their cards to get their desired result) and a clear fictional layer (the story that's being created). But few would confuse this for a roleplaying game because the players never assume roles, never make decisions from the viewpoint of any character within the story.

[Cluedrew]

To Tolak: I'll clarify that I'm only talking about NPCs that could be PCs but aren't if someone is confused about it. I've given up trying to head off every misunderstanding, especially since I have had to repeat them directly at people even if they are in the opening post. Also that post feels big enough already.

To Yora: To communicate ideas about different types of role-playing games. Same as most descriptions of role-playing games, or having the term "role-playing game" to begin with.

To Batcathat: I said it is impossible to create a perfect definition and I meant it. But if we want to apply this framework to free-form role-playing, then free-form is so heavily focused on the narrative side the mechanics side has disappeared. And whether that means free-form is still a role-playing game is kind of besides the point here, we can discuss it using the same terms and get takeaways like: If you usually prefer tactical systems you are less likely to find what you are looking for in free-form.

[Satinavian]

I would avoid the name "narrative". That is usually reserved for games that consider themself most with story and drama. Those are often more concerned with gnre conventions, pacing, tension arc ect than the fiction of what happens in the game. If one of your categories is about the fiction, name it after that.

[Quertus]

So, ignoring the specific wording, for example taking this as a description of an RPG rather than a definition… hmmm… I disagree that “level of abstraction” (such as precise distances vs “near” and “far” equate to “rules first” vs “fiction first”. That is, I think that you can have precisely defined vague distances, and clear “rules first” interaction with those vague distances.

To me, “fiction first” is… “who cares about specific stats, this is a Kryptonite elemental punching Superman!”.

But I feel I’m missing the forest for the trees.

[HidesHisEyes]

I don’t think a spectrum fully encompasses all the varieties of roleplaying games there are - people seem to have largely turned against the “simulationist / gamist / narrativist” model at this point and that’s got three poles. And I’m not sure if “tactical” is what I’d put at the far end of your spectrum. I can think of games that are both very narrative-focused and very tactical, if I’m just using the general definition of tactical. Ironsworn jumps to mind.

But I think it’s a useful way of thinking about RPGs, yeah, it captures something I would probably mention if I were describing a game to someone, eg to see if they wanted to play it.

But aside from this and from genre, setting and premise, I might also talk about
Procedural vs freeform
Specific vs generic
Diegetic vs metagame-focused
And good old gamist vs narrativist vs simulationist (which I still think is a perfectly good model).

It may be hard to define RPGs but I honestly think that’s nothing next to how hard it is to categorise them.

EDIT: oh as a side note, I didn’t include fiction first vs mechanics first because I think all RPGs are really fiction first. That’s part of my own definition of RPG. You can put the mechanics really close to the front - “kryptonite elemental makes an attack roll against superman with a +100 bonus” instead of “kryptonite elemental punches superman, obviously superman is screwed, he’s out of action, let’s roll to see if he even survives” - but they can’t be at the front because there has to be some fiction… well, first… for the mechanics to mean anything at all.

[Cluedrew]

To Satinavian: Yeah, "narrative" is not a perfect word but there is only so much I can do to stop people from jumping to conclusions. Still, if you have a better word for it I'll hear the suggestion.

To Quertus: Hmm... maybe that is asymmetric, in that a narrative system might be wasting its time with concrete units but a tactical system can use either. Or maybe I was off with that example. But the forest and the trees could also work as a metaphor to explain how it is not about any single choice, rather the accumulation of them across the entire system. You can still be within a birch forest even if you are staring at an oak tree if every other tree is birch. (Maybe those weren't the best trees for that metaphor.)

To HidesHisEyes: I think you have hit the type of description I am going for, it isn't supposed to be all encompassing but is something worth mentioning about a system when figuring out if someone would enjoy it. I don't know much about Ironsworn but, kind of like "narrative" above, I was just getting words that captured some of the feel of that end of the scale. I think it came from the fact that tactical systems tend to have tactical combat mini-games.

While making this system, I did wonder if I was remaking the GNS system (which did not deserve to have the weird slander campaign slapped onto it, but that is another story). I eventually convinced myself I am probably not because there is no "simulation layer" to build out the third point of the triangle. That would also be the fiction layer. I suppose you could try to split the layer into some in/out of would story considerations pair. But even if you did that, I don't know if that would result in the changes to rules I am talking about.

Well... I mean D&D (any edition) is not "fiction first" as I described the idea in the opening post. And arguing that isn't a role-playing game is... a tough sell. What exactly do you mean by "really fiction first"?

[Tanarii]

Thoughts?

I think there are quite a few games with narrative rules, and that throws a wrench in thinking about fiction first or rules first.

It also throws a wrench in the idea of if it's even still a Roleplaying Game, because many such games heavy in these rules change the focus. Instead of playing a character in a fictional environment, you're (at least partially) playing a story about a (or some number of) character(s) in the fictional environment. In some extreme cases, a player may even be occasionally playing the story of what are technically supposed to be other player's characters. At a certain point, I'd argue these games have crossed the line from a Roleplaying Game to a Storytelling Game.

[Satinavian]

While making this system, I did wonder if I was remaking the GNS system (which did not deserve to have the weird slander campaign slapped onto it, but that is another story). I eventually convinced myself I am probably not because there is no "simulation layer" to build out the third point of the triangle. That would also be the fiction layer. I suppose you could try to split the layer into some in/out of would story considerations pair. But even if you did that, I don't know if that would result in the changes to rules I am talking about.
Isn't your "narrative" basically what GNS once meant as SIM instead of what it meant as NAR? Except that you add how rules-light the system is for some reason ?

[Vahnavoi]

@Cluedrew: you are retreading some of the same ground as GNS, but it's worth noting that most people remember only the most superficial elements of GNS. (Namely, that it dealt with gamism, narrativism and simulationism.)

So it's worth it to reiterate some more specific claims of GNS. Most importantly, it didn't really deal with gamism, narrativism and simulationism as dimensions of game design, it treated them as (creative) agendas (which is why it calls them -isms). And it posited that in order for a game to be coherent, it has to pick one and stick to it. A game mixing agendas is incoherent. By GNS standards, all major RPGs, D&D especially, are incoherent and should be frustrating to play as a result.

In non-insane... sorry, non-GNS terms, this is just the issue rules priority I explained earlier. But rules priority doesn't actually prohibit mixing and matching game design elements - one only has to pick and choose what to prioritize when different rules are in conflict. So a game can have both detailed mechanical rules about single combat and very loose rules based on real conversation for social issues, serving two different aesthetics of gameplay at different times, and there's nothing incoherent about that.

Another thing about GNS is that only narrativism was well-explained, because towards the end GNS started being a thing from drama gamers to drama gamers. Narrativism didn't cover every type of narrative or fiction, it was mostly centered around drama and moral dilemmas. Gamism and simulationism were comparatively ill-defined and ill-separated. So when you distinquish your own idea by stating you only have two legs, not three, I'm sorry to say, that's almost a distinction without a difference. GNS only had three legs on paper.

I reiterate that the truth of the matter likely is that there are significantly more dimensions of game design than two or three - again, at least 8 aesthetics of gameplay are widely recognized - so while your observations are correct, the theoretical scale you're trying to construct will likely fail.

[NichG]

I guess my suggestion would be, rather than trying to construct (another) ontology of games, focus on the idea of priority as an important thing to establish when specifying a game.

That is to say, I haven't seen very many RPGs say explicitly 'for this section of the rules, the rules as stated are determinative of what makes sense in the fiction' and 'but for this other section of the rules, their purpose is guidance rather than determination and the fiction holds priority should these rules come into conflict with the concepts of the setting or vagaries of how the specific situation is imagined.'

Rules that establish sense are different than rules which are trying to model sense, after all.

[Vahnavoi]

That is to say, I haven't seen very many RPGs say explicitly 'for this section of the rules, the rules as stated are determinative of what makes sense in the fiction' and 'but for this other section of the rules, their purpose is guidance rather than determination and the fiction holds priority should these rules come into conflict with the concepts of the setting or vagaries of how the specific situation is imagined.'


Ironic, considering in 1st edition AD&D books Gygax does this more than once. The relevant concepts have been around for over 40 years but rulebooks somehow struggle to mention them.

[HidesHisEyes]

Well... I mean D&D (any edition) is not "fiction first" as I described the idea in the opening post. And arguing that isn't a role-playing game is... a tough sell. What exactly do you mean by "really fiction first"?

Oh don’t get me wrong, I know what people usually mean by the distinction, and I don’t have a huge problem with it (and I wouldn’t claim that D&D isn’t a roleplaying game, of course.) But my conceptual nitpick is that, strictly speaking, all RPGs have to be fiction first in the sense that you have to establish fiction before you can engage mechanics, otherwise you wouldn’t know which mechanics to engage or what they mean. And you can put the mechanics very early in the process of resolving actions, like the moment a player says “I search the room” they make a check, as opposed to asking them to describe where and how they search. But in both cases we need to start by imagining the character in the fiction, searching a room.

[Tanarii]

While making this system, I did wonder if I was remaking the GNS system (which did not deserve to have the weird slander campaign slapped onto it, but that is another story).
GNS deserved every bit of criticism it had leveled at it.

[Cluedrew]

Well, the thread is picking up and I'm hitting my rule of three, so I'm going to have to come back to some of these posts. (Also I'm short on time so I'm sticking to points I have an immediate response to.)


At a certain point, I'd argue these games have crossed the line from a Roleplaying Game to a Storytelling Game.Yes, but at a certain point, going the other direction, we have crossed the line from role-playing game to war game. And we might even be able to leave the role-playing game genre without touching the scale, because my definition was not meant to be complete, just highlight one aspect of the genre, with is the interaction between mechanics and fiction.


Isn't your "narrative" basically what GNS once meant as SIM instead of what it meant as NAR? Except that you add how rules-light the system is for some reason ?For the first part, I managed to convince myself that this was something different from GNS but if you think this is just me chatting about two-thirds of it... I'm going to need an explanation about what I missed.

For the second part, I don't think rules-weight factors into this definition. At the very least it wasn't anything on purpose, where did I say that? I definitely see there being a correlation, for various design reasons, but I didn't meant to make it a requirement.


Oh don’t get me wrong, I know what people usually mean by the distinction, and I don’t have a huge problem with it [...] strictly speaking, all RPGs have to be fiction first in the sense that you have to establish fiction before you can engage mechanics, otherwise you wouldn’t know which mechanics to engage or what they mean.Maybe I'm misreading this, but I think you have something different "first" because you start checking earlier. Instead of starting at the player's/character's decision about what to next, you start all the way back at the establishing of the situation that is to be resolved. Does that sound right?

[Tanarii]

Yes, but at a certain point, going the other direction, we have crossed the line from role-playing game to war game. And we might even be able to leave the role-playing game genre without touching the scale, because my definition was not meant to be complete, just highlight one aspect of the genre, with is the interaction between mechanics and fiction.
It's possible. To cross that point, you have to stop making decisions for a character in the fantasy environment. And start making them for a board game pieces instead. That means not thinking of what your character would do, but what your piece would do.

Battle mats make this easier in combat IMO, and is one reason I don't like them.

Regardless, in general combat makes this easier, which is why some people erroneously try to divide phases of a game into "roleplaying" and "combat". It's also why some people instinctively dislike game structures outside of combat, they mistakenly associate rules with a decrease in character focused decision making.

[Vahnavoi]

Yes, but at a certain point, going the other direction, we have crossed the line from role-playing game to war game. And we might even be able to leave the role-playing game genre without touching the scale, because my definition was not meant to be complete, just highlight one aspect of the genre, with is the interaction between mechanics and fiction.

The distinction between wargames and roleplaying games really does not go where people think it does.

To wit: wargames are games concerned with simulating warfare. Doing this with explicit mathematical algorithms is just one design paradigm within wargames. The great grand-daddy of modern wargames, Kriegsspiel (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel), was revised not just once, but several times to rely less on algorithmic rules and more on adjucation by a human umpire based on their real expertise. This eventually culminated in Free Kriegsspiel, essentially, freeform game master adjucated wargaming, where players express their plans to the umpire in spoken natural language and the umpire returns the next state of game based on their own judgment, with little or no reference to abstract game mechanics.

The reasons for this change? The original algorithmic rules were deemed too slow and unwieldy to play with and often produced unrealistic results.

That's right, the entire discussion of game master adjucation versus abstract mechanics was had by serious military people over a century before modern tabletop roleplaying games, and close to two centuries before now. I'm not entirely sure if Gygax and Arneson played Kriegsspiel and Free Kriegsspiel specifically, but it should be obvious the concept of umpire from Kriegsspiel was the precedent for a roleplaying game referee or dungeon master.

It's possible to argue wargames heavy with explicit algorithmic rules are more common than freeform wargames now, helped in part by cheap computing devices. But that's a trend within the genre, not definition of it. It still stands there are wargames as far from, say, Games Workshop BS, as play-by-post freeform roleplaying is from D&D.

[kyoryu]

Any time a taxonomy discussion comes up, I'm reminded of one of the Malcolm Gladwell books where he talks about, of all things, spaghetti sauces.

The big takeaway there is that a lot of predictions were wrong about what people liked, and there really wasn't a high level division between things.

But if you charted out various factors that you could use to describe sauces, you'd find that there were clumps where a bunch of things with similar traits ended up.

And when it comes to RPGs, I think similar is true. High level splits just aren't useful - but what is useful is looking at the individual traits that a game might have, and identifying clusters. That doesn't mean that any game exists within one of those clusters (some won't) or that the clusters have sharp edges (they don't) or that other clusters can't form (they can), or that any single trait identifies something as being in a cluster (it doesn't).

I've talked about the three interaction patterns common in RPGs (and, to be clear, it's not hte only possible ones, just the ones I've identified):

Type 1:
GM: "This is the situation"
Player: "I do this."
GM: "This is the new situation"

Type 2:
Player 1: "I move my piece in accordance with the rules."
Player 2: "I move my piece in accordance with the rules."
Player 3: "I move my piece in accordance with the rules."

Type 3:
Player 1: "This happens."
Player 2: "And then this happens."
Player 3: "And then this happens."

"Traditional" games are usually some blend of Type 1 and 2 (with the type 2 stuff often being in the tactical combat minigame). Some push more into Type 1 stuff by trying to formalize as much as possible - at the extreme end, you get a culture that insists that GM judgement is inherently bad and should be minimized, and everything should be a matter of rules, to the greatest extent possible. Put another way, "I prefer Type 2 to Type 1".

"Narrative" games have a number of traits, in most cases.

1. They tend to run "fiction first", as noted. This means that, in general, specific widget interaction is avoided. Things like Power Attack where you choose your bonus/penalty generally don't work with this. It also means that the entirety of the game situation is not intended to be codified in game widgets, but things in the shared understanding can also matter.
2. They tend to heavily focus on Type 1 interaction, with varying amounts of Type 3 interactions. A lot of players of narrative games love Type 3 stuff, and will often emphasize it in their games, regardless of how much the games do themselves.
3. They tend to cut out the "tactical minigame" aspect of games, running combat more-or-less like anything else would be run.

Those seem to be the core, but there's a number of other ones I could get into. But I do think that identifying common traits of "clusters" (I often think of it as "tags, not categories") is a more useful way of looking at the problem than trying to make strict top-level divisions.

[Tanarii]

1. They tend to run "fiction first", as noted. This means that, in general, specific widget interaction is avoided. Things like Power Attack where you choose your bonus/penalty generally don't work with this. It also means that the entirety of the game situation is not intended to be codified in game widgets, but things in the shared understanding can also matter.


I'm not really sure this holds tru though. Take AW, which goes on and on about "fiction first". It's full of widgets.

What it seems to mean, at least within its take, is: "determine the possible resolution/widgets that apply from the fiction, and determine possible outcomes from the fiction as filtered through the resolution/widgets results."

The interesting part is this is close to what D&D 5e says to do for ability checks. (Wether or not it's run that way is a different matter.) It's also identical to what Angry DM advises.

The difference is both of those don't try to cover it up and disguise it and make it out as something special with discredited post-Forge philosophy.

-------

I was looking back at one of our old discussions on GNS, and I found a comment I made on ways to play and resolve PC actions:
"Causal: players describe what they attempt do, then GM determines how to resolve based on likely outcomes (possibly using dice), and describes resolution. Attempting actions causes likely outcomes.

Narrative: players describe what they attempt do, then GM determines how to resolve based on necessary narrative outcomes* (possibly using dice), and describes resolution. Attempting actions causes narratively necessary outcomes."
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?544556-Striking-the-middle-ground-between-narrativist-and-gamist

[Quertus]

EDIT: oh as a side note, I didn’t include fiction first vs mechanics first because I think all RPGs are really fiction first. That’s part of my own definition of RPG. You can put the mechanics really close to the front - “kryptonite elemental makes an attack roll against superman with a +100 bonus” instead of “kryptonite elemental punches superman, obviously superman is screwed, he’s out of action, let’s roll to see if he even survives” - but they can’t be at the front because there has to be some fiction… well, first… for the mechanics to mean anything at all.


But my conceptual nitpick is that, strictly speaking, all RPGs have to be fiction first in the sense that you have to establish fiction before you can engage mechanics, otherwise you wouldn’t know which mechanics to engage or what they mean. And you can put the mechanics very early in the process of resolving actions, like the moment a player says “I search the room” they make a check, as opposed to asking them to describe where and how they search. But in both cases we need to start by imagining the character in the fiction, searching a room.

I mean, you *can* start with mechanics, like a point buy, and develop a character or setting based on what you divine from the math. And there are systems where you can start from the mechanics “computer programming? I default to my ‘claws’ skill” and try to figure out what fiction could support those mechanics. Heck, “describing combat” is a classic example of starting with the mechanics and moving to the fiction.

That said, I would claim that it is a prerequisite of Roleplaying to start at the fiction, and work towards the mechanics.


To Quertus: Hmm... maybe that is asymmetric, in that a narrative system might be wasting its time with concrete units but a tactical system can use either. Or maybe I was off with that example. But the forest and the trees could also work as a metaphor to explain how it is not about any single choice, rather the accumulation of them across the entire system. You can still be within a birch forest even if you are staring at an oak tree if every other tree is birch. (Maybe those weren't the best trees for that metaphor.)

Yes, I agree that it is asymmetric. Further,



I guess my suggestion would be, rather than trying to construct (another) ontology of games, focus on the idea of priority as an important thing to establish when specifying a game.

I wonder whether this isn’t best framed as a subset of a different discussion, as one factor to consider when designing or adjudicating games.

That said, “level of specificity”, and especially “level of specificity of distance” is a real oddball. Usually, IME, regardless of whether the system measures / cares about “143.27 meters” or “3 areas”, what my players want is “about the length of a football field”, “<points> about half the distance from here to that tree” and “well within the range of your sniper rifle”, “you can’t cast fireball that far”, “you can only charge that far if you activate your speed boost”.

So IME it is neither the mechanics nor the fiction, but the players that have primacy wrt the communication of distances.

Then there’s the issue of “storage” and “conversion”. With a battle map, “storage” of location is automatic. However, when you move to theater of mind, in what terms is the location data stored, and how does one convert that to game mechanics? Answers vary.


Rules that establish sense are different than rules which are trying to model sense, after all.

You’ve lost me. Is this important enough to understand to be worth giving an example of what you mean?

[BRC]

I'm not sure this includes all games. What about games that are purely freeform without any mechanics at all? (Though I suppose it might depend on how we define mechanics, even freeform games usually have a GM that can arbitrate conflicts).

I would say that freeform roleplay DOES have mechanics, and that they are shared with improvisational theater: Yes, And.

If we are doing a freeform RP, and I declare that my character makes themselves a sandwich, it is generally against the rules for you to declare that my character did not make themselves a sandwich. Without that mechanic in place, it's not a freeform roleplaying game, it's just two people telling stories at each other.



I would actually say that "Yes, And" is a mechanic underlying RPGs, or cooperative storytelling, in general.

Now, as for "Fiction first" vs "Mechanics first", I don't find that a very useful split, because part of an RPG, for me anyway, is that it must be "Fiction-First".


The question that comes to mind is, if you are in a situation where, narratively, your character could try something, but the rules don't provide a way to resolve that, can you attempt that thing?

I think of the game Heroquest. Heroquest is not dissimilar to D&D, there's even a game master. Heroquest has furniture, like tables, but there is no rule for climbing on a table. Therefore, tables are impassible barriers that you must walk around. Heroquest, despite having basically identical narrative trappings to D&D, is not an RPG because you can't climb over the tables.


D&D doesn't have a "Climb over Table" rule, so if you say "I climb over the table", the DM is obliged to figure out how to resolve that.


The difference is true, but I don't think it's especially insightful.

[NichG]

I wonder whether this isn’t best framed as a subset of a different discussion, as one factor to consider when designing or adjudicating games.

That said, “level of specificity”, and especially “level of specificity of distance” is a real oddball. Usually, IME, regardless of whether the system measures / cares about “143.27 meters” or “3 areas”, what my players want is “about the length of a football field”, “<points> about half the distance from here to that tree” and “well within the range of your sniper rifle”, “you can’t cast fireball that far”, “you can only charge that far if you activate your speed boost”.

So IME it is neither the mechanics nor the fiction, but the players that have primacy wrt the communication of distances.

Then there’s the issue of “storage” and “conversion”. With a battle map, “storage” of location is automatic. However, when you move to theater of mind, in what terms is the location data stored, and how does one convert that to game mechanics? Answers vary.

You’ve lost me. Is this important enough to understand to be worth giving an example of what you mean?

So for example, 'vampires need to drink blood - a vampire that goes without blood for more than 1 day per decade of its existence enters a state of frenzy, in which it loses control of its actions and attempts to violently acquire blood from anyone it can' is pretty clearly implicitly a rule whose purpose is to establish the fiction. This rule defines something about what a vampire is, how their hunger works, etc. Correct usage of this rule would be for example having characters in the world be aware that e.g. they can make a vampire go crazy by starving them, about how long it would take, etc.

Now lets say that rule is followed by 'A vampire in frenzy moves and tries to make a grapple attempt against the nearest living target each round'. This could be a rule whose purpose is to establish the fiction by saying 'what is frenzy actually?'. But it's more likely IMO that this rule (implicitly) is trying to give a way to simplify how to play a vampire that is in frenzy. If the purpose of this rule is to model the sort of sense of the fiction, then that means this rule should have a lower priority than other things from the fiction in determining what happens. Furthermore, drawing conclusions by assuming that this rule is always true would not be called for.

For example, a literal interpretation of that rule might mean that if you had a frenzying vampire it can be kited back and forth by people taking turns being 'the closest to the vampire' and by doing so force the vampire to waste time running back and forth. But a better interpretation according to the fiction of 'the vampire is hungry and is controlled by their hunger' might be that the vampire just picks one and bee-lines towards them. Or, lets say someone is 10ft away but behind a 5ft thick stone wall, and someone else is 20ft away but exposed. Or even just you have a sleeping human victim 40ft away, but there happens to be a rat 35ft away in the other direction that is also technically a living victim.

If the rule on frenzy is there to establish fiction, then these sorts of kiting strategies should work against a frenzying vampire and that should in principle be a known fact about vampires that they're vulnerable to that kind of manipulation. If the rule is however there to provide a simplified model of the fictional world, then when its clear according to the fiction 'this behavior doesn't make sense', then the rule should be ignored.

Furthermore, if the purpose of the rule is to establish fiction but the result that it establishes is nonsensical, then it is a bad rule. But if the purpose of the rule is to provide a simplified model of the fiction and sometimes gives nonsensical results, it is not necessarily a bad rule at all, as long as it is clear that the rule is there to be used for convenience rather than as physics. It would only be a bad rule if most of the time it has to be discarded.

Another example would be a rule like 'when someone wants to invest in a business, roll X dice to determine the return'. If that rule is taken to be there to establish fiction, then its saying 'businesses in this world don't actually have causal factors that determine their success or failure - its purely random and all businesses have the same risk'. If the rule is there to provide a simplified model of fiction, then it does not imply 'businesses are this way' but rather it implies 'feel free to simplify the underlying factors that could be fictionally-relevant into this random process when those factors haven't been established or don't really matter'.

[kyoryu]

I'm not really sure this holds tru though. Take AW, which goes on and on about "fiction first". It's full of widgets.

What it seems to mean, at least within its take, is: "determine the possible resolution/widgets that apply from the fiction, and determine possible outcomes from the fiction as filtered through the resolution/widgets results."

The interesting part is this is close to what D&D 5e says to do for ability checks. (Wether or not it's run that way is a different matter.) It's also identical to what Angry DM advises.

Yes, I would say that both of those qualify as fiction-first. Fiction-first is heavily correlated with "Type 1" interactions, and is as old as roleplaying, regardless of the language used.

(Also, you'll note that I am as critical of Forge/GNS as anyone, to the point of recommending people use GDS rather than GNS).


I was looking back at one of our old discussions on GNS, and I found a comment I made on ways to play and resolve PC actions:
"Causal: players describe what they attempt do, then GM determines how to resolve based on likely outcomes (possibly using dice), and describes resolution. Attempting actions causes likely outcomes.

Narrative: players describe what they attempt do, then GM determines how to resolve based on necessary narrative outcomes* (possibly using dice), and describes resolution. Attempting actions causes narratively necessary outcomes."
https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?544556-Striking-the-middle-ground-between-narrativist-and-gamist

As someone that enjoys both narrative and "traditional" games, and has a strong background in very traditional gaming, I completely disagree with that characterization of narrative games (in much the same way that I disagree with virtually everything that Ron Edwards said about "simulationism" - he completely missed the point and the mark)

In the games I've played in, run, had run by people that have worked at companies that made "narrative" games, and so on, and so forth, worrying about "necessary narrative outcomes" never really seemed to be a thing. The things that have stood out:

1. There's a huge emphasis on not railroading, and letting things play out. This is directly opposite to some definitions of what is "narratively necessary".
2. There's a lot more willingness to accept player input on things, though this can vary greatly from table to table
3. Much, much less emphasis on combat, and much more emphasis on the non-combat aspects of the game
4. Much more emphasis on the characters, as opposed to the characters being levers to interact with the world with. In most cases, the game/plot/story revolves around the characters in such a way that if you had different characters in the game, it would be markedly different. It's often about their conflicts with each other or with NPCs, rather than them overcoming a series of challenge (which is, to be honest, more of a "traditional" than a "classic" mode of play, if you look at the "cultures of play" article).
5. There's a lot more emphasis on the things described in the world having an effect on what can/can't be done.
6. There's usually a lot less gameplay revolving around "figuring out how to get the most bonuses."

[Tanarii]

1. There's a huge emphasis on not railroading, and letting things play out. This is directly opposite to some definitions of what is "narratively necessary".
2. There's a lot more willingness to accept player input on things, though this can vary greatly from table to table
3. Much, much less emphasis on combat, and much more emphasis on the non-combat aspects of the game
4. Much more emphasis on the characters, as opposed to the characters being levers to interact with the world with. In most cases, the game/plot/story revolves around the characters in such a way that if you had different characters in the game, it would be markedly different. It's often about their conflicts with each other or with NPCs, rather than them overcoming a series of challenge (which is, to be honest, more of a "traditional" than a "classic" mode of play, if you look at the "cultures of play" article).
5. There's a lot more emphasis on the things described in the world having an effect on what can/can't be done.
6. There's usually a lot less gameplay revolving around "figuring out how to get the most bonuses."
Nothing in this list stands out as "narrative" to me except possibly #2, and only then if that means there are narrative mechanics to allow players to play the story, rather than just play their character. In other words, they can affect events in the world to come out how they want them to due to some underlying rationale about how they think they should play out, rather than have their character take an action and the GM resolve due to cause and effect.

Example of a narrative mechanic to play the story: Blades in the Darks heist scene ability to retroactively tell a story about something that has previously happened, establishing the fact in current time.

The rest of your list reads like stuff that can apply to any kind of roleplaying game.

---------

Otoh I was describing/contrasting causal resolution (cause and effect) vs narrative resolution (IMO a spectrum from Rule of Cool to Railroading) on the GMs part. Nothing to do with how the player plays making it a narrative game.

Edit:

(Also, you'll note that I am as critical of Forge/GNS as anyone, to the point of recommending people use GDS rather than GNS).Ya I was reminded when I was scanning the previous thread. :smallsmile:

[Vahnavoi]

@Tanarii: Don't use "narrative" when what you mean is "genre conceit" or "trope logic" and much of the disagreement goes away. :smallwink:

In more detail: there's more than one style of storytelling and there are vast practical differences between games emphasising different style.

For a practical example, take two horror games. Type A horror game is all about emulating genre conceits of non-game horror fiction. Characters all adhere to established tropes and the plot follows footsteps of a story the players have already seen elsewhere. People who know the tropes inside out might be able to predict most of the game from the outset, but go along anyway because that is the point. Nobody really expects to be horrified.

Type B horror game is all about making players feel the horror. Pre-existing genre conceits are only used insofar as they make the players uncomfortable. The characters and the plot are new and personal to the degree such is possible. Trope knowledge does not give any great advantage to predicting the game, because re-enacting or making a good example of the genre isn't the point. Players make decisions based on how much horror they think they can handle.

A player of mine once voiced the difference while playing LotFP scenario Death Love Doom: "This game is more realistic than a movie. We don't have to do the stupid thing."

[Tanarii]

@Tanarii: Don't use "narrative" when what you mean is "genre conceit" or "trope logic" and much of the disagreement goes away. :smallwink:Nothing I'm writing about has anything to do with trope logic or genre conceit, unless the GM/player is using that when as their underlying thread (plot or theme) when making decisions about how the narrative should play out, instead of a cause and effect based on player making decisions about their characters actions and GM resolving base on logic effects.

If they are using that as their underlying thread, then sure, it is a case of using narrative process to enforce the genre conceit or trope logic. If they are using a different underlying thread, then it's not, but still a narrative process instead of a causal one.

[NichG]

This is the problem of reductive ontologies. Assigning a name to a tradition of play doesn't mean that every distinction between that tradition and others will be explained by that particular word and it's associations.

[Vahnavoi]

@Tanarii: what thing other than tropes and genre conceit are you imagining that determine "narrative necessity"?

[Jay R]

Games that have “both a mechanical layer and a fiction layer”, in which “the players have access to both and the layers interact with each other” include all of the following:

Any miniatures wargame
Risk
Monopoly
Clue
The Game of Life
Battleship
Candy Land
Grand Theft Auto
Car Wars
Mario Brothers
Mystery Date
Minecraft
Farmville
Settlers of Catan
Civilization, or any other simulation computer game
Rail Baron, Ticket to Ride, or any other railroad game

This definition is too broad.

[Cluedrew]

(I often think of it as "tags, not categories")I like that framing. You can convert one to the other but it gets some of the ideas across better. I may also have to do a lot of reframing. In addition to people having issues with the particular words (maybe I'll find better ones), the structure could also use a rework. Something that seems to have flown under the radar is not only is it one descriptive term/tag among many but you can apply this tag differently to different parts of a system. Now a system's resolution mechanic and character creation system probably will not fall on completely different ends of the scale, but they may not be exactly the same. The most extreme example I can think of is Lancer, which is very purposefully fiction focused generally, but mechanics focused in combat (relative to each other).

PS. What is GDS?


Games that have "both a mechanical layer and a fiction layer", in which "the players have access to both and the layers interact with each other" include all of the following:None of those examples give you access to the fiction layer. I certainly can't narrate how Colonel Mustard's military experience means [whatever] and have it mean anything in the game of Clue.

Even some of the more narrative examples on that list, which I guess would be Grand Theft Auto and... maybe Mystery Date, I don't know that one. They definitely have a narrative layer, but generally only give access to it through some pre-set mechanical mappings.

Now there may still be some games that slip through that, but again I said up front it is not a perfect definition, mostly just a framing device for the rest of the discussion. (Still it isn't that bad.)

[Tanarii]

PS. What is GDS?

Game Drama Simulation.

The common criticism is the assumption that by moving towards one of them, you must move away from the others.

[Quertus]

So for example, 'vampires need to drink blood - a vampire that goes without blood for more than 1 day per decade of its existence enters a state of frenzy, in which it loses control of its actions and attempts to violently acquire blood from anyone it can' is pretty clearly implicitly a rule whose purpose is to establish the fiction. This rule defines something about what a vampire is, how their hunger works, etc. Correct usage of this rule would be for example having characters in the world be aware that e.g. they can make a vampire go crazy by starving them, about how long it would take, etc.

Now lets say that rule is followed by 'A vampire in frenzy moves and tries to make a grapple attempt against the nearest living target each round'. This could be a rule whose purpose is to establish the fiction by saying 'what is frenzy actually?'. But it's more likely IMO that this rule (implicitly) is trying to give a way to simplify how to play a vampire that is in frenzy. If the purpose of this rule is to model the sort of sense of the fiction, then that means this rule should have a lower priority than other things from the fiction in determining what happens. Furthermore, drawing conclusions by assuming that this rule is always true would not be called for.

For example, a literal interpretation of that rule might mean that if you had a frenzying vampire it can be kited back and forth by people taking turns being 'the closest to the vampire' and by doing so force the vampire to waste time running back and forth. But a better interpretation according to the fiction of 'the vampire is hungry and is controlled by their hunger' might be that the vampire just picks one and bee-lines towards them. Or, lets say someone is 10ft away but behind a 5ft thick stone wall, and someone else is 20ft away but exposed. Or even just you have a sleeping human victim 40ft away, but there happens to be a rat 35ft away in the other direction that is also technically a living victim.

If the rule on frenzy is there to establish fiction, then these sorts of kiting strategies should work against a frenzying vampire and that should in principle be a known fact about vampires that they're vulnerable to that kind of manipulation. If the rule is however there to provide a simplified model of the fictional world, then when its clear according to the fiction 'this behavior doesn't make sense', then the rule should be ignored.

Furthermore, if the purpose of the rule is to establish fiction but the result that it establishes is nonsensical, then it is a bad rule. But if the purpose of the rule is to provide a simplified model of the fiction and sometimes gives nonsensical results, it is not necessarily a bad rule at all, as long as it is clear that the rule is there to be used for convenience rather than as physics. It would only be a bad rule if most of the time it has to be discarded.

Another example would be a rule like 'when someone wants to invest in a business, roll X dice to determine the return'. If that rule is taken to be there to establish fiction, then its saying 'businesses in this world don't actually have causal factors that determine their success or failure - its purely random and all businesses have the same risk'. If the rule is there to provide a simplified model of fiction, then it does not imply 'businesses are this way' but rather it implies 'feel free to simplify the underlying factors that could be fictionally-relevant into this random process when those factors haven't been established or don't really matter'.

I would incorrectly call those “bad rules”; in reality, I should call them “poorly communicated rules”. That is, IMO, any rule that isn’t meant to be followed, any rule that… eh, that’s too hard to write it that way. Instead… The vampire frenzy rule would be better stated, “this usually results in the vampire stacking the nearest living target”


Yes, I would say that both of those qualify as fiction-first. Fiction-first is heavily correlated with "Type 1" interactions, and is as old as roleplaying, regardless of the language used.

(Also, you'll note that I am as critical of Forge/GNS as anyone, to the point of recommending people use GDS rather than GNS).



As someone that enjoys both narrative and "traditional" games, and has a strong background in very traditional gaming, I completely disagree with that characterization of narrative games (in much the same way that I disagree with virtually everything that Ron Edwards said about "simulationism" - he completely missed the point and the mark)

In the games I've played in, run, had run by people that have worked at companies that made "narrative" games, and so on, and so forth, worrying about "necessary narrative outcomes" never really seemed to be a thing. The things that have stood out:

1. There's a huge emphasis on not railroading, and letting things play out. This is directly opposite to some definitions of what is "narratively necessary".
2. There's a lot more willingness to accept player input on things, though this can vary greatly from table to table
3. Much, much less emphasis on combat, and much more emphasis on the non-combat aspects of the game
4. Much more emphasis on the characters, as opposed to the characters being levers to interact with the world with. In most cases, the game/plot/story revolves around the characters in such a way that if you had different characters in the game, it would be markedly different. It's often about their conflicts with each other or with NPCs, rather than them overcoming a series of challenge (which is, to be honest, more of a "traditional" than a "classic" mode of play, if you look at the "cultures of play" article).
5. There's a lot more emphasis on the things described in the world having an effect on what can/can't be done.
6. There's usually a lot less gameplay revolving around "figuring out how to get the most bonuses."

Wow. That… sounds almost like someone listed out my gaming properties. Don’t railroad, the character (especially the character of the character) is what’s important) different characters would produce different results,


Game Drama Simulation.

The common criticism is the assumption that by moving towards one of them, you must move away from the others.

I’ll bite - why is GDS considered good, and GNS bad? I at least understand Gamist, Narrative, Simulation well enough to misuse them for my own ends, but I don’t really get GDS.

[Tanarii]

I’ll bite - why is GDS considered good, and GNS bad? I at least understand Gamist, Narrative, Simulation well enough to misuse them for my own ends, but I don’t really get GDS.
Gamism Narrativism Simulationism (technically)

Because the definitions of each within the model is tied up with Ron Edwards, the Forge, and their inherent bias for their particular version of what Narrativisim means. The definitions often don't align with common meanings or assumptions about meanings of the terms. And that's leaving out other criticisms of the folks involved.

Other than that, I don't know what GDS especially provides that's beneficial in its own right. I've never dug into it enough.

I was one of those who made assumptions about GNS and what the terms meant and argued in threads based on that, until several forum posters pointed out the actualities of the theories and the bias behind them, and I went and did some research. I haven't gone back to look up the Threefold Model (GDS) in detail after being so thoroughly disillusioned by GNS (and disappointed in myself for my uniformed assumptions).

[Quertus]

Gamism Narrativism Simulationism (technically)

Because the definitions of each within the model is tied up with Ron Edwards, the Forge, and their inherent bias for their particular version of what Narrativisim means. The definitions often don't align with common meanings or assumptions about meanings of the terms. And that's leaving out other criticisms of the folks involved.

Other than that, I don't know what GDS especially provides that's beneficial in its own right. I've never dug into it enough.

I was one of those who made assumptions about GNS and what the terms meant and argued in threads based on that, until several forum posters pointed out the actualities of the theories and the bias behind them, and I went and did some research. I haven't gone back to look up the Threefold Model (GDS) in detail after being so thoroughly disillusioned by GNS (and disappointed in myself for my uniformed assumptions).

Oh, yeah, I completely know that I’m not using the terms as GNS defined them (or wording/writing them the same way); I just find those particular words “as reasonably defined” to be very useful. Thus, my “abusing them for my own (nefarious) purposes” (or whatever I said) comment.

So… you can only say that GDS is better in that it doesn’t have a history of being terrible? Faint praise, but at least it’s something.

[Vahnavoi]

GDS was one of precedessors to GNS and even less developed, unless someone went and developed it further behind my back.

In practice, Drama was "games focused on character relationship and players acting character dialogue", Simulation was "games focused on mathematical representation of physical acts" and Game was "anything that isn't the other two". I'm fairly sure this comic (https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/William_Shakespeare) says more about the mindset behind the theory than the actual theory.

[kyoryu]

Wow. That… sounds almost like someone listed out my gaming properties. Don’t railroad, the character (especially the character of the character) is what’s important) different characters would produce different results,

In many ways, it's very similar. I don't run Fate much differently than I've run GURPS for decades. A couple other notable differences:

1. Usually narrativist games don't worry about turns as being specific amounts of time
2. Usually there's more of an emphasis to present information more similar to a story than a simulation. That's kind of a nebulous concept.
3. There is often more willingness to let players declare that they did things in the past so long as they don't contradict what is already known. "Of course I called them on the way to the meet" or something like that. Note that this (see point 2) reflects how things often play out in TV shows/etc. Even the bit about FitD flashbacks is a deliberate emulation of what we often see in heist movies, especially ones like Ocean's Eleven
4. There is often a resolution step after dice rolling but before the final resolution. In Fate, it's where you invoke. In PbtA games, it's often a choice given to the player. This is normally not presented as "retconning" but as a series of events in order. For instance, a result to avoid damage in Dungeon World might prompt the GM to give the player the option of either taking the damage, or losing something. For instance, "yeah, it looks like it's gonna be hard to dodge that, he's got you dead to rights. You can either take the glow or throw yourself to the side - but if you throw yourself to the side, you're going to break one of your potions."
5. There is much less aversion to "out-of-character" decisions, although most narrative games frame most of their decisions as in-character. Still, for some, it's a hard stop. I'd also argue that there's more of these in traditional games than people realize.
6. While most "traditional" games mix up Type 1 and Type 2 interactions, generally speaking narrative games focus heavily on Type 1 interactions and sprinkle in some Type 3.

I think #4 is one of the biggest things that people stumble on - it's a fundamental change to the typical resolution sequence, and as such causes GMs to often present it poorly, and to break players out of their flow state.

For instance, in Fate you can "invoke" to get a bonus on an action. So we could present "missing a parry" in a couple of ways.

GM: "Okay, the orc hits you by one, you need to absorb that stress."
Player: "I don't want to, I invoke Orc Hunter."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

In addition to being very mechanics heavy, this is also a complete retcon, and that usually feels pretty jarring.

GM: "Okay, you try to parry, but it looks like you're just not fast enough..."
Player: "I'm an Orc Hunter, I know this move. I'm fast enough to just slip under the blade."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

This is good presentation of this type of situation.

The other issue is the "what's in the box?" question. In a traditional game, if you open a box, you ask the GM what's in the box and they tell you. There's a culture around narrative games that emphasizes turning this back on the players - to the extent that sometimes it becomes the central activity.

While this is at least a subculture around these games, it's less often emphasized in the games themselves - AW emphasizes it for the first session, but not after. Fate doesn't really emphasize it at all outside of Declarations (which are limited). People that like this style of play often push that it should be done all the time, to the point of making other assertions (you should always hand out lots of Fate Points, etc.). While this is a valid style of play, it's not one that is heavily prescribed by any of the games. This style of game can be very, very different from traditional games, and is personally something I don't enjoy.


I’ll bite - why is GDS considered good, and GNS bad? I at least understand Gamist, Narrative, Simulation well enough to misuse them for my own ends, but I don’t really get GDS.

Here's a good resource on GDS from one of the authors:
https://darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/theory/threefold/

Basically, GDS has its baggage too, and has a lot of criticism leveled at it. I do think that it at least attempts to be more neutral in its presentation, but critically what it means by the terms is more aligned with what people mean when they say them.

It also has a lot less baggage.

I found a good quote on another forum (that I will not link here), that sums it up well, I think.


But the crucial thing is that it comes from a place of trying to understand each other, and it doesn't give one person's voice a particular prominence. Conversely, GNS was a) mostly developed by Ron Edwards - yes, he would revise his Big Model as a result of conversations on the Forge, but the theory was still built out of a bunch of Ron essays and b) mostly developed with an eye to promoting Ron's (very narrowly defined) narrativism.

And that's really one of my core critiques of GNS theory - it clearly is aimed at promoting a specific type of game, and completely misunderstands others and lumps them together inappropriately to keep its threefold top-level division. But, then again, that's really my criticism of any kind of top-level division like that in the first place, right? And that's why when I talk about my three interaction types (see above) I always make effort to point out that those are just the ones I've seen, and I do not claim that they are all-encompassing (and also the fact that most games include more than one of them).

So, yeah. I prefer GDS because:

1. The terms better match what people mean when they say them.
2. It has a lot less baggage, and from my POV, came from a better intellectual place.


GDS was one of precedessors to GNS and even less developed, unless someone went and developed it further behind my back.

In practice, Drama was "games focused on character relationship and players acting character dialogue", Simulation was "games focused on mathematical representation of physical acts" and Game was "anything that isn't the other two". I'm fairly sure this comic (https://existentialcomics.com/philosopher/William_Shakespeare) says more about the mindset behind the theory than the actual theory.

I think Drama was really about story being a primary goal, however people defined that. So DragonLance was heavily based around Drama.

Game is usually aimed at the game being challenging and fun at a mechanical level. Or, to quote the page I listed above:

These were termed "Drama" (or Story), "Simulation" (or World), and "Game" (or Challenge).

[Telok]

Game...
P1: "I move three squares over, use the Slaughter Everything move for <rolls> 22 attack and 35 damage, then..."
Dm: "The orc spends a reaction to use Mirror Damage, how's that attack against your AC?"
P2: "Thats a level 9 move, these guys aren't the usual level 4 mooks."

Simulation...
P1: "Dude, they're giant ants. We'll come back in a couple days with a wagon of barrels of oil, pour it all down the hole and torch it. If that doesn't work we'll try poison. Then, maybe, if that fails, we'll go crawl through the tunnels getting acid sprayed in our faces."
P2; "Hey, if we get a giant magnifying glass... Stop looking at me like that."

Drama...
P1: "I hate orcs. They killed my family. They ate my dog. They make bad impressionist art. All orcs must die!"
Dm: "Ok, twenty minutes later you're staring at the bruning ruins of the orc village. They're all dead."
P2: "Marty, don't you realize.... you've become the orc!"
P1: "Nooooooooooo!!!!"

[Tanarii]

5. There is much less aversion to "out-of-character" decisions, although most narrative games frame most of their decisions as in-character. Still, for some, it's a hard stop. I'd also argue that there's more of these in traditional games than people realize.
Whereas I'd say willingness to make out-of-character "story" level decisions about the world is a required component for it to actually be a narrative resolution game.

[kyoryu]

Whereas I'd say willingness to make out-of-character "story" level decisions about the world is a required component for it to actually be a narrative resolution game.

It'd be useful to get more concrete on what you mean by that. There's a lot of qualifying words there, and a lot of things that I could see fitting in that description or not.

But, either way, one of the premier "narrative" games doesn't do that (again, outside of the deliberately world-building first session), so if that's your definition, it excludes (by rule, not culture) one of the major games with that descriptor.

Do you like narrative games? I often find that descriptions of things by people that don't care for them vary significantly from those that do.

[Xervous]

It'd be useful to get more concrete on what you mean by that. There's a lot of qualifying words there, and a lot of things that I could see fitting in that description or not.

But, either way, one of the premier "narrative" games doesn't do that (again, outside of the deliberately world-building first session), so if that's your definition, it excludes (by rule, not culture) one of the major games with that descriptor.

Do you like narrative games? I often find that descriptions of things by people that don't care for them vary significantly from those that do.

Which game is this specifically? I’ll take a blind guess on Vampire.

[kyoryu]

Which game is this specifically? I’ll take a blind guess on Vampire.

Apocalypse World.

Outside of the session zero stuff, there's really not anything that's very directly related. I mean, there may be at most one or two advanced moves for certain playbooks, but like 95% of the game past the first session is very direct-character stuff.

Again, there's a lot of culture around AW that suggests that when a player asks "what's in the box?" the right answer is "you tell me." But there's not much in the game or the examples of play.

[Quertus]

Apocalypse World.

Outside of the session zero stuff, there's really not anything that's very directly related. I mean, there may be at most one or two advanced moves for certain playbooks, but like 95% of the game past the first session is very direct-character stuff.

Again, there's a lot of culture around AW that suggests that when a player asks "what's in the box?" the right answer is "you tell me." But there's not much in the game or the examples of play.

Hmmm… that doesn’t sound like it contradicts “the player has to be willing to answer such questions” to me.

This is an interesting wrinkle for me, because answering such questions kills Exploration, my greatest source of fun. Anything where the answer isn’t known ahead of time, where things aren’t built from first principles up using game physics, aren’t worth my time to think or care about.

So… I’m not unwilling, but… there’d better be a sufficiently meaty portion of the content where the GM is unwilling to ask, otherwise I’ll just tune out, and play my playing piece in accordance with the rules.

[Thrudd]

Preliminary apology for incoherent rambling, I just have thoughts. Sorry, forum

Thinking about RPG styles and how to categorize them vis a vis tactics and narrative: Both the mechanics and the "how to play" advice in any given game will encourage the adoption of various stances/attitudes toward playing the game. If it's well designed, the rules will mesh with the role playing stances the designers intend. Sometimes, they write one thing about how the game should be played, but the mechanics actually don't specifically enforce or assist that. Different mechanics within the same game can encourage more than one stance for players at different times.

Possible player stances in a typical RPG (no particular order):
1.) Character: "If I were the character, what would I do/think?" or "What would my character do based on the fictional scenario?"
2.) Story: "What do I think would make a good story?" or "What do I want to happen to this character?"
2a.)Genre: "What would this type of character do in a story of this genre?"
2a1.)Cool: "What would be a cool/iconic thing to happen in this scenario?"
3.) Game: "What are the moves I can make in this game?" or "How do I get points/advance in this game?"
3a.) Strategy/Tactics: "What is the best move to make given the rules and numbers?"

The typical stance expected for players in most games, I think, is Character first. Obviously, the existence of mathematical rules and character advancement will always encourage the adoption of a Game stance to some extent, as well. The existence of a tactical combat mini-game encourages this to a greater degree. There are sometimes one or two mechanics that will allow a Story stance in limited situations. Meta-game resources can encourage either game-stance thinking, story-stance thinking, or both. Most of the time, story-stance rules for players is limited to the character creation process where you choose things like archetype, background and story hooks- but some players find themselves thinking in that stance during play anyway, at least part of the time. A select few games have actual mechanics that place some form of Story-stance at the forefront of actual play. Regardless of what the rules imply and play advice says, some players will focus in on one stance above the others based on their own preferences and understanding of what the RPG is supposed to be (that may not be drawn from the actual text of the game).

Possible GM stances/decision making considerations (no particular order):
1.)Cause and Effect: "What makes sense according to the fictional reality?" or "What would the NPCs do/think in this situation?"
2.)Story: "What do I want to happen for narrative/dramatic purposes?"
2a.) Genre: "What makes sense for a story of this genre?"
3.)Rules: "What do the rules/mechanics say happens?"
4.)Fun: "Will this slow/stall the game?" or "Will the players like this/think it's fun/cool?"
4a.)Challenge "Is this an appropriate challenge/task for the players?"

Obviously, GMs must adopt a Story stance to some extent, at least during the design process if not in actual play. Games with rules for a lot of specific fictional scenarios, math, and tactical mini games will encourage or require the GM have a Rules stance during a good portion of play time, and any game where the PCs are in real danger will require a consideration of Challenge, as well. Cause and Effect stance seems like common sense most of the time, and some games might fail to advise GMs to specifically adopt this stance during design or play, but they probably ought to. Most games have some element of Genre consideration involved, some have much more specific focus on it than others (like PbtA, Feng Shui, off the top of my head). The GM's attitude and interpretation of results, except in a select few games, relies more on the written advice of the designers than the actual mechanics of the game, since they are usually considered to also be arbiters of the rules with power to override them. Just as with players, GMs often have their own preference and interpretation of what the RPG is supposed to be regardless of (and sometimes contrary to) what is actually written in the text.

How to categorize any given game might require a survey of that game's various mechanics, analyzing what stance they encourage. Does the mechanic apply to the fiction in real-time, or does it allow/create retcons? Does it represent something a character is actually doing, or give the player the ability to place something into or declare something about the fictional situation? Does a rule say exactly what happens in the fiction, or does the die result require broad interpretation? Also figuring out how much play time is expected to be dedicated to different elements of play, like engaging with mechanical rules and tactical combat vs in-character socializing and narrating interaction with the fictional world. If a game has detailed combat rules but very light rules for non-combat scenarios, yet a significant amount of actual play time is spent outside of combat, category might be difficult. Another consideration may also be how much leeway GMs are encouraged to take with the rules, how many rules there are for specific fictional scenarios, and how much interpretation is required by the GM or players to convert mechanical results into fictional narrative.

I think trying to put most games in these definitive categories is difficult or impossible for these reasons. We can definitively say that a given game has components that encourage one type of play or another, and existence of an essential component that is disliked might discourage someone from wanting to play that game. Some games give such leeway to GMs that some components can be ignored or minimized, meaning the actual play experience can be significantly divergent from one table to another, this isn't only the case with D&D. A well designed game knows what stance it wants the players to adopt and makes rules that will mesh their Game-stance thinking with either Character stance or Story stance. If Rules/Tactics considerations are in opposition to both Character and Story, such that players stop considering the fiction in favor of making optimal tactical choices, the design of the game could use some work (or it isn't an RPG).

[Tanarii]

It'd be useful to get more concrete on what you mean by that. There's a lot of qualifying words there, and a lot of things that I could see fitting in that description or not.
I mean that if there's no narrative resolution of any kind, I think it has mislabeled itself. Narrative resolution being the ability to control the "story" in some way, often in terms of controlling the world in a way that matches the underlying thread of plot, as opposed to just declaring your characters actions and expecting causal resolution.

Some games that call themselves narrative games put it entirely on the GM to resolve things that way. Others give players some control. Apocalypse World is definitely one that does both. The MC picks things from a list, but they're supposed to chose something that sounds interesting / drives the "story" forward by introducing new challenges. That's an underlying thread of plot right there. The players often get a choice between fail or succeed at a cost, which is a narrative mechanic decision.


Do you like narrative games? I often find that descriptions of things by people that don't care for them vary significantly from those that do.Depends what the driving factors of the designers were. I'm definitely not fond of what I see as a lot of pointless elitism / one-true-wayism that accompanies some of them in their "how to do it right" explanations. But I do like the presentation in Blades in the Dark. AW has some thought provoking resolution, but the accompanying moralizing is a turn-off. Hardly surprising, considering the designer was firmly rooted in the Forge.

[kyoryu]

Hmmm… that doesn’t sound like it contradicts “the player has to be willing to answer such questions” to me.

This is an interesting wrinkle for me, because answering such questions kills Exploration, my greatest source of fun. Anything where the answer isn’t known ahead of time, where things aren’t built from first principles up using game physics, aren’t worth my time to think or care about.

So… I’m not unwilling, but… there’d better be a sufficiently meaty portion of the content where the GM is unwilling to ask, otherwise I’ll just tune out, and play my playing piece in accordance with the rules.

It's culture, though, not rules. The rules don't require that.

If a GM wants to ask "okay, you tell me what's in the box" they can. They can do it in D&D, too. Now, it's more likely that you'll find a GM doing that if you're playing AW than D&D, but it's not something that the rules requires.

[Vahnavoi]

@Thrudd: Far more important than trying to classify mechanics based on which stance they encourage, is the realization that you can cycle through all stances for each decision point of a game.

[Thrudd]

@Thrudd: Far more important than trying to classify mechanics based on which stance they encourage, is the realization that you can cycle through all stances for each decision point of a game.

Yes, for sure. There's almost always a "is there a game move for this?" question along with other considerations. You can look at a rule and determine whether it assumes the player be in character stance or story stance, however. "What would my character do right now?" can't really be answered by "expend a fate point and an ally appears from my character's backstory to help me at a key moment". So a game with those types of mechanics are going to place their players in story stance sometimes; the more of them there are, the more you might say the game is "story focused". But I agree...the point is, it isn't necessarily important or useful to categorize existing games this way. It might be more useful for designing a game; to be aware of what sort of stance your rules will encourage in the players, tailor that to what you want your game focused on, and ensure your play and GM advice is in-line with what your mechanics actually support.

[Cluedrew]

I've been mulling things over and I think might restructure this a bit. Still working on it, but one I'm playing with the terms of "fiction focused" and "mechanics focused". Also I want to break it down by some aspects as opposed to the over all "try to label the entire system" view which I think is more of an averaging thing than an inherent property of the system itself. Anyways, here are some thought about what a shift in focus means on various aspects of a system:
Character Creation: Every system has some mechanical base to fill in some numbers (some exceptions may apply). On the mechanics side, there is generally only more mechanical options which opens up a lot of room for optimization. On the fiction side, there are systems that actually give you character prompts above and beyond what the mechanical options represent.
Resolution System: This was my big example in the first post, also kyoryu talked a bit about how narrative systems add a decision step after the roll which is true.
So that list is actually a bit shorter than I thought. I feel like there are more over, and I have been thinking over some stuff about how it they model equipment as an example, but that is still coming. I think there are more useful examples but I haven't quite worked them out yet. This is why I haven't been posting in the thread I started.

[Vahnavoi]

Yes, for sure. There's almost always a "is there a game move for this?" question along with other considerations.

Anything you're allowed to do in a game is a game move. The only time it doesn't make sense to ask this is if you already know you aren't allowed to do anything.

The corollary to that is that in truth, all of the other stances are subset of "game stance" - once it's clear to players that the point of the game is to play a role or to create a story, "what is my game move?" returns questions like "what would my character do?" and "what would be a good story?" because deciding what to do as a character is how you advance in the game and doing so well is how you reach the game's goals.


You can look at a rule and determine whether it assumes the player be in character stance or story stance, however. "What would my character do right now?" can't really be answered by "expend a fate point and an ally appears from my character's backstory to help me at a key moment". So a game with those types of mechanics are going to place their players in story stance sometimes; the more of them there are, the more you might say the game is "story focused". But I agree...the point is, it isn't necessarily important or useful to categorize existing games this way. It might be more useful for designing a game; to be aware of what sort of stance your rules will encourage in the players, tailor that to what you want your game focused on, and ensure your play and GM advice is in-line with what your mechanics actually support.

The reason why the question cannot be answered that way is because the resource is too abstract to tell us what action spending it would represent. If you posit the characters believe in fate-like divine favor, then the conflict goes away because "expend a fate point so an ally appears" becomes synonymous with "I pray for help". Building a bridge between the abstract and the concrete is not hard; there's a point where the only thing stopping a person is that they don't want to.

The easiest, most direct way to encourage a player to take a stance is to explain the stances and tell a player to ask the related questions at each decision point. The player cycling through the stances is how they can choose what to focus on and how to synthesize the various answers. Classifying mechanics is putting cart before the horse, because, more often than not, what stance you are using influences how you use the mechanics more than the mechanics influence the stance you are using. Cycling through the stances, like in the above example, often reveals multiple stances point to the same direction or suggest complementary (rather than conflicting) actions. The questions can directly lead to each other, serving as part of single decision-making process, rather than replacing each other.

[kyoryu]

One of the keys of narrative games is also that usually the rules are not sufficient to run the game on its own. Though, really, this is a rephrasing of "Narrative games often don't have Type 2 interactions".

And, yes, narrative games, by their rules, run very much like traditional games in non-combat situations, the vast majority of the time.

Things like "oh, and an ally shows up" can happen in some games, but it is almost always limited in usage, and never just a "get out of jail free" card.

Though, to be fair, a lot of narrative game players like to emphasize the "oh, what do you find in the box?" bits.

[Vahnavoi]

As usual I find the focus on incomplete rules to be a red herring. It is normal for all kinds of games outside computer games and abstract strategy games to be incomplete, from children's games to aforementioned freeform wargames to physical sports. Really, talking about rules running anything is misleading - players run the rules, referees run the rules, computers run the rules. Rules themselves never run anything.

[Tanarii]

As usual I find the focus on incomplete rules to be a red herring.
Same. Narrative resolution and narrative tools have been used in many games.

Although they don't necessarily line up with games that advertise themselves as storytelling games.

To me it's about: Do you play your character, or do you play the story / world? Or what balance between the two.

Causal vs narrative. Not tactical vs narrative.

[kyoryu]

Same. Narrative resolution and narrative tools have been used in many games.

Although they don't necessarily line up with games that advertise themselves as storytelling games.

To me it's about: Do you play your character, or do you play the story / world? Or what balance between the two.

Causal vs narrative. Not tactical vs narrative.

In most cases, the "narrative" games I've played you're "playing your character" 90%+ of the time.

It's really storygames (Fiasco, Microscope, etc.) where you're not.

[Tanarii]

In most cases, the "narrative" games I've played you're "playing your character" 90%+ of the time.

It's really storygames (Fiasco, Microscope, etc.) where you're not.
Apocalypse Word specifically and many PbtA in general
Fate


I can't recall if Burning Wheel / Torchbearer do, but it wouldn't surprise me since it's Luke Crane.

[Cluedrew]

I've played some Powered by the Apocalypse games and I've found they push me out of character about as much as D&D does. In different directions than D&D does mind you, and so some people might notice it more, but it is still there.

Oh good, the battle mat comes out. Now suddenly I've got a birds eye view of things around a corner and a lot of groups would expect me to take that into account. Leads to the same question, to you play your character or the tactical mini-game. (And no, playing a tactical mini-game with a unit that has the abilities as your character is not playing your character. They can be mixed together, but in the same way that playing the character and the story can be.)

[Tanarii]

I'm not talking about being "pushed out of character". I'm talking about making decisions for things other than your character's (attempted) actions.

Specifically you get to decide on any middle roll if you fail or succeed at a price. That's not a decision for what your character is doing. It's a decision for what happens to your character as a result of prior decision about what they are doing.

[Vahnavoi]

As with the fate point example, this abstract "fail or succeed at a price" choice would be easy to reconcile with concrete actions - there's no shortage of ways and situations where direct action by a person determines a result. F.ex. choose to pick open a lock ---> find out lock is more complex than thought --- > give up OR take double the time to finish the task. It's been a while but I dimly recall the list of usual prices for success follow this model.

[Cluedrew]

I'm not talking about being "pushed out of character". I'm talking about making decisions for things other than your character's (attempted) actions.Then let me reframe my point: Making decisions a character makes but not from the character's perspective is no more role-playing then making a decision about the character that is not their decision. Which is to say they are not. However, I think both can be part of the role-playing experience, either through merging them (as mentioned by Vahnavoi) or just accepting that you don't spend every moment in the role-playing "stance". Which I know people are OK with in general. I've seen it happen on the tactical side plenty.

Or to put it shortly: What you say is true, but I don't think it has any more significance to a system's status as a role-playing game than fact D&D combat uses a battle mat.

[Easy e]

Really, talking about rules running anything is misleading - players run the rules, referees run the rules, computers run the rules. Rules themselves never run anything.

This is a key point and an excellent observation.

Rules by themselves do nothing, and really are nothing more than guidelines of play in ALL games. I mean, look at all the "variants" of Chess that are out there. Rules can be changes, modified, interpreted, and implemented by the players as they see fit. Rules are just a starting point for collaboration on playing a game.

As for Narrative vs Tactical, nothing gets this board so excited and worked up as labeling things and putting them in boxes! :)

[Thrudd]

This is a key point and an excellent observation.

Rules by themselves do nothing, and really are nothing more than guidelines of play in ALL games. I mean, look at all the "variants" of Chess that are out there. Rules can be changes, modified, interpreted, and implemented by the players as they see fit. Rules are just a starting point for collaboration on playing a game.

As for Narrative vs Tactical, nothing gets this board so excited and worked up as labeling things and putting them in boxes! :)

That's true, game rules are invented by people. But the rules you choose to use have a lot to do with the experience of playing the game, so they're important. The fact that you can change them if you don't like them doesn't mean you don't need to think about the rules. It's still useful to talk about what effect a rule will have on the playing of the game when you're interested in designing and modifying games.

Beyond specific rules, it's also useful to think about what you actually want the game to be, like what it's purpose and goal are. That's sort of the idea of labeling things and coming up with categories - it's to figure out what it is, exactly, that you want, in more specific terms, so you can design rules that actually create the game experience you want. It's worth addressing people's expectations for what an RPG is/should be vs the experience that is actually created by following the rules of any given game. If your expectation for the game is not matched by the experience that follows from the rules, it's time to modify things, right? But what needs to change, and how can you change it to get what you want? That is the point of this sort of discussion, imo.

Maybe what people get hung up on is the idea that each RPG is primarily one thing, that labeling and thinking about categories of things might put people into a mindset that the one thing they prefer is the only thing the game should do.

[kyoryu]

Apocalypse Word specifically and many PbtA in general
Fate


I can't recall if Burning Wheel / Torchbearer do, but it wouldn't surprise me since it's Luke Crane.

You can play about 90% of Fate in-character. AW, specifically is probably closer to 99%. There's really only a couple of things (that are specific to certain playbooks) that are really, really mandatorially OOC decisions.


I'm not talking about being "pushed out of character". I'm talking about making decisions for things other than your character's (attempted) actions.

Specifically you get to decide on any middle roll if you fail or succeed at a price. That's not a decision for what your character is doing. It's a decision for what happens to your character as a result of prior decision about what they are doing.

This is exactly the thing I was talking about earlier, and it's more a matter of process and framing than it is anything else.

A lot of traditional games use the "shot arrow" model of task resolution - the PC does stuff and can impact, and then at some point, they "release the arrow" and then there's no input. This works decently for arrows, but most tasks are a lot longer in duration and a lot more interactive. And usually there's decision points in the middle, and that's where those things are supposed to happen.

My example from earlier:

Framed poorly:

GM: "Okay, the orc hits you by one, you need to absorb that stress."
Player: "I don't want to, I invoke Orc Hunter."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

Framed better:

GM: "Okay, you try to parry, but it looks like you're just not fast enough..."
Player: "I'm an Orc Hunter, I know this move. I'm fast enough to just slip under the blade."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

I totally agree - the first one would bug the heck out of me. It's also not how I run the game, and it's not how anyone I know runs it.

It should never be a retcon. The choice of "failure, or success at a cost" can almost always be framed as in-character.

[weerebellie]

The best thing about gaming setups is that you can customize them according to your demand and need. You are the CEO of your gaming setup, and only you have the right to change anything you want. The RGB lights, power, specifications. It all depends on the user and his budget.

[Satinavian]

You can play about 90% of Fate in-character. AW, specifically is probably closer to 99%. There's really only a couple of things (that are specific to certain playbooks) that are really, really mandatorially OOC decisions.



This is exactly the thing I was talking about earlier, and it's more a matter of process and framing than it is anything else.

A lot of traditional games use the "shot arrow" model of task resolution - the PC does stuff and can impact, and then at some point, they "release the arrow" and then there's no input. This works decently for arrows, but most tasks are a lot longer in duration and a lot more interactive. And usually there's decision points in the middle, and that's where those things are supposed to happen.

My example from earlier:

Framed poorly:

GM: "Okay, the orc hits you by one, you need to absorb that stress."
Player: "I don't want to, I invoke Orc Hunter."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

Framed better:

GM: "Okay, you try to parry, but it looks like you're just not fast enough..."
Player: "I'm an Orc Hunter, I know this move. I'm fast enough to just slip under the blade."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

I totally agree - the first one would bug the heck out of me. It's also not how I run the game, and it's not how anyone I know runs it.

It should never be a retcon. The choice of "failure, or success at a cost" can almost always be framed as in-character.
But how is that in any way different from using Edge/karma pool in SR, which generally is regarded as traditional game ?

[kyoryu]

But how is that in any way different from using Edge/karma pool in SR, which generally is regarded as traditional game ?

I'm not sure it is. Lots of traditional systems have things that are every bit as player-facing as anything in any narrative game. (Again, storygames are a different, well, story).

To be clear, there are differences. But as a fan of both types of games, and someone that came to "narrative" games late in the game, I don't find the descriptions of what's so awful about them to particularly ring true.

That "step after the roll" I think is the issue. But I don't necessarily believe that it's out of character, becuase it doesn't have to be. I think the bigger problem is it's just not how traditional games work, and when people expect things to go one way and then there's another, it can slam them out of flow state.

[Tanarii]

Cluedrew I took another look at your OP, it almost reads like an expansion on 'Crunch vs Fluff' philosophy. Was that your intent?

[Cluedrew]

To Tanarii: No, I didn't think about that while making this. That being said the mechanics layer and the fiction layer do probably mean similar things as crunch and fluff. Although "crunch and fluff" are definitely names that were created by someone on the mechanical end of the spectrum.

[Tanarii]

Not only that, crunch and fluff folks generally don't recognize a spectrum. To them it's usually a divide, a rule must be a rule, or else it's not. They have real problems with things like roleplaying rules, rules that directly limit or modify, decisions for the player based on the characters personality. Or define said personality.

[kyoryu]

To Tanarii: No, I didn't think about that while making this. That being said the mechanics layer and the fiction layer do probably mean similar things as crunch and fluff. Although "crunch and fluff" are definitely names that were created by someone on the mechanical end of the spectrum.

"fiction" layer is "the stuff we're imagining and saying". "Mechanics" layer is "the stuff on the sheets and on the map".

One of the things I often use is "can you run this game reasonably using only the mechanics with no input from the fiction?"

For most versions of D&D combat, you can. AW, Fate, and even D&D skills fail pretty hard at that.

Another thing I look at as a differentiator is "is it reasonable that things that don't have a mechanical representation can limit or modify things in some way?" For instance, in a Fate game, someone defended against a ghoul-like creature by grabbing it - but ghouls cause paralysis on touch. So the defense failed, and instead he got some partial paralysis instead. That wasn't a mechanical rule - the rule is "defend against an attack". However, the description of what he actually did mattered and overrode the base mechanics layer. Or, to put it differently, the mechanics only get used in a situation where the fiction indicates that they should be.

Note that a lot of "broken" things in D&D skills, especially in the 3.x era, come from scenarios where people ignore the fiction layer as irrelevant. See: Diplomancers. A trivial solution for the Diplomancer problem is "you can't just trigger Diplomancy as a skill. You have to be in a situation where diplomancy is already occurring, and two parties have come together to negotiate." I mean, that's not a complete solution, to be sure, but it's at least a start.

[Quertus]

4.)Fun: "Will this slow/stall the game?" or "Will the players like this/think it's fun/cool?"
4a.)Challenge "Is this an appropriate challenge/task for the players?"

These can be (and IMO 4 should be) player stances, as well.


Character Creation: Every system has some mechanical base to fill in some numbers (some exceptions may apply). On the mechanics side, there is generally only more mechanical options which opens up a lot of room for optimization. On the fiction side, there are systems that actually give you character prompts above and beyond what the mechanical options represent.

Character creation is interesting, because it’s one area where most RPGs involve a default 0 roleplaying.

I mean, sure, I could build a 20th level Wizard who picked spells that “looked pretty” (color spray, the “Prismatic” line, probably some summons) and took… Sense Shifting (is that the 3e metamagic feat, or the 2e metamagic spell?).

But, IME, most systems default to 0 RP in character creation.


I've played some Powered by the Apocalypse games and I've found they push me out of character about as much as D&D does. In different directions than D&D does mind you, and so some people might notice it more, but it is still there.

Oh good, the battle mat comes out. Now suddenly I've got a birds eye view of things around a corner and a lot of groups would expect me to take that into account. Leads to the same question, to you play your character or the tactical mini-game. (And no, playing a tactical mini-game with a unit that has the abilities as your character is not playing your character. They can be mixed together, but in the same way that playing the character and the story can be.)

Providing the Player with information that the Character doesn’t have is bad form wrt anyone who cares about Roleplaying. So putting minis on the map for things that are around the corner, that the PCs should be unaware of? That’s the point where your example has something to “push me out of character“, not when “the battle mat comes out”. Just FYI.


I'm not talking about being "pushed out of character". I'm talking about making decisions for things other than your character's (attempted) actions.

Specifically you get to decide on any middle roll if you fail or succeed at a price. That's not a decision for what your character is doing. It's a decision for what happens to your character as a result of prior decision about what they are doing.

I disagree? I try to retrieve the letter, but realize that the fire is hotter than I thought. I can choose to take the burn, and salvage what I can of the letter, or not take the burn, and fail to retrieve the letter.

That… sounds perfectly like the real world (TM) to me.

So, if your GM has the Blatancy Adept merit, and you can’t tell the difference between the choices they offer you, and the choices you make irl, then they’re doing it right.


Framed poorly:

GM: "Okay, the orc hits you by one, you need to absorb that stress."
Player: "I don't want to, I invoke Orc Hunter."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

Framed better:

GM: "Okay, you try to parry, but it looks like you're just not fast enough..."
Player: "I'm an Orc Hunter, I know this move. I'm fast enough to just slip under the blade."
GM: "Okay, the orc didn't hit you."

I totally agree - the first one would bug the heck out of me. It's also not how I run the game, and it's not how anyone I know runs it.

It should never be a retcon. The choice of "failure, or success at a cost" can almost always be framed as in-character.

Eh, someone can swing a (padded) sword at me irl, and I can kinda judge “how good” of a hit it will be, and choose my reaction accordingly. So, although you see it as a retcon, I don’t have a problem translating “he hit you by one” “ok, I use foo to avoid the hit” as a linear timeline.

(It probably helps that I’m used to “I Lightning Bolt your Kurd Ape for 3; it dies.” “In response, I Giant Growth my Kurd Ape.” And other such poor wording.)


Not only that, crunch and fluff folks generally don't recognize a spectrum. To them it's usually a divide, a rule must be a rule, or else it's not. They have real problems with things like roleplaying rules, rules that directly limit or modify, decisions for the player based on the characters personality. Or define said personality.

I must be a crunch/fluff guy (a Crunchy Fluffist?) then. :smallbiggrin:

Rules should state very clearly their scope; abstractions intended to be overruled should be worded like “this usually results in the vampire attacking the nearest living target” (was that from this thread?). The fluff and the crunch should match; if they don’t, one or both should be fixed.


One of the things I often use is "can you run this game reasonably using only the mechanics with no input from the fiction?"

For most versions of D&D combat, you can. AW, Fate, and even D&D skills fail pretty hard at that.


Another thing I look at as a differentiator is "is it reasonable that things that don't have a mechanical representation can limit or modify things in some way?" For instance, in a Fate game, someone defended against a ghoul-like creature by grabbing it - but ghouls cause paralysis on touch. So the defense failed, and instead he got some partial paralysis instead. That wasn't a mechanical rule - the rule is "defend against an attack". However, the description of what he actually did mattered and overrode the base mechanics layer. Or, to put it differently, the mechanics only get used in a situation where the fiction indicates that they should be.

I’m… definitely of the mindset that… being able to run the game entirely “inside the box” is a good thing. As is the existence of an “outside the box”.

The ghoul is… not a good example of what I mean by that, but it is a good example of what I would consider “incomplete rules” if the game didn’t define what happens when you initiate contact with the ghoul rather than vice versa.


Note that a lot of "broken" things in D&D skills, especially in the 3.x era, come from scenarios where people ignore the fiction layer as irrelevant. See: Diplomancers. A trivial solution for the Diplomancer problem is "you can't just trigger Diplomancy as a skill. You have to be in a situation where diplomancy is already occurring, and two parties have come together to negotiate." I mean, that's not a complete solution, to be sure, but it's at least a start.

Um… that “fix” to Diplomacy utterly destroys the point of Diplomacy, as inferred from the “Reaction Roll” / Reaction Adjustment” rules it replaces.

The orcs / adventurers coming to kill you, and you yelling “don’t shoot!” / “let’s talk!” / some longer speech that somehow not only fits into 6 seconds but happens before anyone pulls the trigger? Resolving whether they’re willing to negotiate (and with what “attitude”) or just run you through is probably the primary kind of scenario that it’s supposed to be for.

“Yousa no tinken yousa greater den da Gungans? Mesa like dis. Maybe wesa... bein' friends.”

That was where the Diplomacy roll was, to set the initial attitude of the talks. (EDIT: the talks themselves are a (completely undefined) tactical minigame.)

[Vahnavoi]

Regarding "crunch" and "fluff" - those are inexact terms that in practical use typically conflate a number of different things such as:

1) format of the rules - namely if they are mathematical-logical or other game jargon ("crunch") versus natural language ("fluff")
2) how easy it is to change the rules - typically with the assumption that "crunch" is hard and "fluff" is easy.
3) rule priority - typically with the assumption that "crunch" has priority over "fluff"

In truth these have little to do with each other. A game rule is any statement about the game that is enforced as true for it - this does not care about format or how easy it is to imagine an alternate ruling. Priority can be given to natural language statements just as well as other kinds, when you're making rules for actual humans to use and interprete. So in the example of defending against a ghoul, there isn't any problem saying that the natural language statements "touching a ghoul causes paralysis" and "I grab the ghoul to defend myself" take priority over abstract die roll (or whatever) of "defend against an attack". Indeed, there wouldn't be any problem denying the abstract mechanic if the player's specific action is "I grab the ghoul", because you don't need the abstract rule for anything in this equation.

For contrast, if the player's specific action was "I invoke defend against an attack" and the die roll (or whatever) had priority over the player's natural language description, a sane game master would annul the description of grabbing the ghoul, saying "no, you can't grab the ghoul - that would cause your defense to fail, and we already determined you successfully defended yourself. You dodge the ghoul instead". It's worth noting that in this version, "touching ghouls causes paralysis" is still enforced as true, it is a game rule that the other rules aren't allowed to contradict.

[Quertus]

Regarding "crunch" and "fluff" - those are inexact terms that in practical use typically conflate a number of different things such as:

1) format of the rules - namely if they are mathematical-logical or other game jargon ("crunch") versus natural language ("fluff")
2) how easy it is to change the rules - typically with the assumption that "crunch" is hard and "fluff" is easy.
3) rule priority - typically with the assumption that "crunch" has priority over "fluff"

In truth these have little to do with each other. A game rule is any statement about the game that is enforced as true for it - this does not care about format or how easy it is to imagine an alternate ruling. Priority can be given to natural language statements just as well as other kinds, when you're making rules for actual humans to use and interprete. So in the example of defending against a ghoul, there isn't any problem saying that the natural language statements "touching a ghoul causes paralysis" and "I grab the ghoul to defend myself" take priority over abstract die roll (or whatever) of "defend against an attack". Indeed, there wouldn't be any problem denying the abstract mechanic if the player's specific action is "I grab the ghoul", because you don't need the abstract rule for anything in this equation.

For contrast, if the player's specific action was "I invoke defend against an attack" and the die roll (or whatever) had priority over the player's natural language description, a sane game master would annul the description of grabbing the ghoul, saying "no, you can't grab the ghoul - that would cause your defense to fail, and we already determined you successfully defended yourself. You dodge the ghoul instead". It's worth noting that in this version, "touching ghouls causes paralysis" is still enforced as true, it is a game rule that the other rules aren't allowed to contradict.

My personal problem with the ghoul isn’t about priority, but ambiguity. For example, if I can get paralyzed by touching a ghoul, can I get healed by grappling a Paladin? The “rule” is missing the underlying logic, the underlying mechanics. It would not be unreasonable for that question to be answered differently at different tables. Whereas “the ghoul is surrounded by a phlebotomist field, causing living matter it touches to become paralyzed” or “the ghoul can empower its strikes with a phlebotomist effect, causing living creatures it touches to become paralyzed” (hopefully) lack that ambiguity.

EDIT: “rule of cool” says that a ghoul attacking or grappling a Paladin should be hilarious!

[Vahnavoi]

"Touching a ghoul causes paralysis" and "I grab the ghoul" are not particularly ambiguous statements, logic and context of natural language provide very straight-forward meaning. For contrast, the abstract "defend against attack" is extremely ambiguous and needs interpreting to tell how a character actually achieves the effect suggested by the rule.

There is no connection to grappling with paladins. Nothing is missing from the ghoul situation that would ever logically lead to the musing about grappling paladins, and the actual context for paladins is that laying of hands requires intentional effort on part of the paladin.

What would get at the point you wanted to discuss without being a blatant non-sequitur, would be to ask if a person still gets paralyzed if they touch a ghoul with a stick, or if they are wearing heavy protective clothing. These kind of details are indeed left unestablished in the example, but this does not mean there would be ambiguity about them in a real game. F.ex., everyone might be able to gather from context that only skin-on-skin contact fulfills the clause of "touching a ghoul". However it goes, settling priority also settles ambiguity. Ambiguity is only a problem when the different interpretations are contradictory and there is no process for deciding which to follow.

[gbaji]

I think the ghoul scenario works either way. You just have to play it out based on what type of game you've chosen to play. I'm not familiar with the specifics of that creature in that game system, but if the rules merely say that a successful touch attack by the ghoul causes the drain, then that's all the causes the drain. Presumably, somewhere in the rules, it says what happens if someone make an unarmed attack against the ghoul (touches the ghoul). If that drains them, then that drains them and maybe they should rethink that action.


By sheer game mechanics, the player is taking a defensive action. If he succeeds, he is not hit by the ghoul and doesn't suffer the drain effect. We don't care what the actual method of defense is. He was neither hit by the ghouls touch (didn't suffer a touch attack from the ghoul), nor hit the ghoul with his own hands (didn't make a touch attack himself on the ghoul), so he doesn't suffer anything.

Narratively, the character is describing exactly how he is defending himself from the ghoul. This is where it does depend on how the ghoul's life draining effect is described. If touching the ghoul also causes the drain, and the player specifies that "I'm going to grab the ghoul by the shoulders and redirect him to my side so his attack misses", then yes, he's chosen to touch the ghoul and suffers whatever effect that would normally cause if you walked up to a ghoul and touched it.

Assuming you and your players agreed to this narrative rules methodology, then that's what the player chose to do. I might have him make some sort of knowledge check to realize that touching the ghoul in this manner would be a bad idea and maybe he will instead describe himself rolling to the side while avoiding any contact with the ghoul as his defensive action instead. You get the same benefits of narrative play, while also avoiding "gotcha" rules lawyering.

I tend towards a middle of the road approach. if a player wants to just roll the dice in combat, that's fine. If he wants to describe exactly what he's doing with that action, and it makes sense, is clever, and takes advantage of the situation or terrain or whatever, then I'll allow it. I have found, however, that some players will attempt to use narrative descriptions to do things beyond what the rules allow and will do it every time to gain advantage. You have to find a way to balance that and not let players steamroll over you.

Finding the right balance between "it makes sense that this should work", and "but the rules say X" is tricky, and there is no 100% right answer. It's going to very much depend on the playstyle of the players at the table, what they expect out of the game, and how much flexibility they are looking for in terms of interaction and resolution of actions.

And for the record, I'm also not a fan of post action decisions in gaming. Just my alignment on that, I guess. I prefer to have the NPCs have specific actions they are taking (usually fairly simplistic), the PCs decide what they are doing, then we roll dice to determine the results. Part of the "game" here is the players determining what skills/abilities/powers/items/spells/whatever they think will be needed ahead of time and deciding when to use them well. It becomes part of resource management over the course of an adventure (or day, or whatever time frame), and makes things more challenging. Allowing them to use abilities (especially limited use ones) selectively, after the fact, and only when they know they will be needed, eliminates that resource management part of the game.

Some people love that, since it allows them to be the most effective they can be and can certainly up the fun level. Others dislike having what they may view as an "easymode" style of play. Each table can be different on this.

[Tanarii]

There's definitely an apparent philosophical difference between:
1) roll first, then describe the results
2) describe the action first, then roll

Really though, they're both just 2 steps of:
Describe the intended action (intent & approach), decide on appropriate resolution method (roll, fiat, etc), determine the in-world results based on resolution (outcomes & consequences).

What get skipped a lot is the first tends to gloss over actually determining intent & approach, and the latter often skips thinking about reasonable outcomes & consequences.

So you end up with:
1) people rolling to persuade then inventing a reason they succeeded or failed by modifying the argument/delivery method
2) others making an rock solid argument that should either result in unhappy cooperation with long term consequences vs enthusiastic cooperation failing entirely because of a botched roll.

[Vahnavoi]

Characterizing that as a philosophical difference is silly - it is that too, but in this context it's entirely uninformative - when it's straightforward difference in processing order of game moves. However, in both of your examples, rule priority is the same. The awkwardness you describe happening in case 2) is a result of descriptions being processed first, but the die roll having priority over description. This frequently leads to a need on a referee's part to annul some or part of the description.

The same thing would happen if you had a combat engine where you roll a dice for damage first and for to-hit second; you end up knowing the damage value before knowing whether it applies. A sane person would question why things are done in this order. I'll give a cookie to anyone who figures out a good reason.

Meanwhile, in a game where descriptions have priority rather than being simply being done first, if the player makes a good case for X, the situation is already resolved and the die is never rolled.

1) is not interesting to talk about because it is just bog-standard use of abstract mechanics.

[Satinavian]

The more i read it,the less i think those new categories are useful.

Everyone seems to understand it in different ways, so it doesn't help communication at all. The distinction must be made much clearer and without involving lots of different aspects that sometimes come together but often don't.


And that is even before we get into how this new distinction is meant to be used and to what benefit.

[Tanarii]

Characterizing that as a philosophical difference is silly - it is that too, but in this context it's entirely uninformative - when it's straightforward difference in processing order of game moves.
No, it's not. It's just skipping steps, in both cases.

Edit: sorry for my tone. Rereading it, it may look like I was claiming there was a philosophical difference. My point was it's merely apparent. So yes, characterizing it as philosophic is a little bit silly, when what it's really doing it skipping steps, or misapplying them due to bad assumptions.

[kyoryu]

There's definitely an apparent philosophical difference between:
1) roll first, then describe the results
2) describe the action first, then roll

While I think this is a reasonable top-level differentiation, there's also a lot of subtleties.

For #1, in many cases, the description is unnecessary. Few or no decisions are impacted by it. Anything that "matters" in the game is represented in some kind of mechanical way, and the descriptions are utterly irrelevant.

For #2, in many cases the rules are insufficient to really determine what's happening without the context of the stuff we imagine - and in many cases, the description of the action can impact what is or is not rolled.

There's some fuzziness - some will claim that #2 is really just a matter of having insufficient rules . Some will argue that in #1, you can retcon what happened to match the results.

I don't find either of these really super compelling. Retconning what happened to match results isn't the same thing at all, and any system that captured enough to really capture everything that might happen "in the fiction" (stuff we imagine/say) would be so overweight as to be unplayable.

This is all tangential to rulings over rules, as well.

As a concrete example, there's only four actions in Fate. Create Advantage is one that is used to effectively try to get a leg up on someone. But if you just say "I Create Advantage with Physique!" that's not enough to rule what happens - what's the advantage? How could the person defend against it, if they can? How difficult is it?

However, if I say "I rush into them and knock them over" then that answers all of the questions we had - you might defend by dodging, which would be the Athletics skill. If you're successful, the opponent would be knocked over, and if not, maybe you fall on the ground instead.

And maybe that's part of the key - the imagined action can provide context/info to the mechanical one. Again, someone might argue that's an insufficient mechanical system, but I don't think a mechanical system is going to be developed in any time that can manage the factors that the human imagination can.

I talk about the interactions types above, and that's also somewhat adjacent. Fiction first interactions tend towards type 1 (note that in type 1 the rules are p;rimarily handled by the GM), while mechanics first systems tend towards Type 2 - if the mechanics are complete enough, a GM isn't necessary and/or becomes primarily another participant with the exception of scenario design.


The more i read it,the less i think those new categories are useful.

Everyone seems to understand it in different ways, so it doesn't help communication at all. The distinction must be made much clearer and without involving lots of different aspects that sometimes come together but often don't.

Fundamentally in many cases it's a human communication issue - people don't understand the things that they haven't been exposed to, and often try to "prove" what they've been exposed rather than asking questions when people say things that don't fit in their experience.

I find it's usually best when people say something that just makes no sense at all to presume that they know something or have had an experience that I haven't had, and to genuinely ask about it with real curiosity. Most people do not do that. And so a lot of these discussions end up with people talking past each other, as they're each speaking from their own experience.

A great example - I used to think narrative systems were "roll to see how you win." Someone on this very forum talked about a DFRPG/Fate game where the various characters got absolutely battered. This piqued my interest and made me start looking at various narrative games, and now they're some (some!) of my favorites. Because they said something that countered my beliefs/perceptions, I had the curiosity to look further into it and discover a different style of playing that has enriched all of my gaming, narrative and traditional alike.

(as an aside, "presume people are smart and reasonable" is also something I apply when GMing, so when people declare nonsensical actions, I assume they're smart people and the only reason they'd declare something nonsensical is a gap in our understanding of how things work. And I've found that this is almost always correct. Presuming reasonableness goes a long way.)

[Cluedrew]

Not only that, crunch and fluff folks generally don't recognize a spectrum. [...] They have real problems with things like roleplaying rules, [...].And if we break it down everything down far enough I think that might be true. But "resolution system" is far to big, even "Carpentry: 5k2" is too big. Because what you can do with carpentry is usually defined in the fiction layer while the meaning of 5k2 is a mechanics thing. But I used "similar" for several reasons. The main one is crunch and fluff seem to have grown out of a "rules and flavor" divide in other genres, like wargames, CRPGs or card games. And if you approach it with that perspective, you are going to get into trouble.

For instance, there are "fiction rules", that is rules of play that only exist on the fiction layer. For instance, you cannot use "Carpentry: 5k2" to wield a sword into battle against a dragon. Even if (in a hypothetical system) you could mechanically role 5k2 and compare the result with the dragon's defense, that is not carpentry. I think this is also one of the reasons (there are others) that role-playing rules are disliked, people aren't used to dealing with fiction rules in anything but the broadest strokes.


"fiction" layer is "the stuff we're imagining and saying". "Mechanics" layer is "the stuff on the sheets and on the map".

One of the things I often use is "can you run this game reasonably using only the mechanics with no input from the fiction?"

For most versions of D&D combat, you can. AW, Fate, and even D&D skills fail pretty hard at that.That is a good description of the two layers. And the question also seems good, but I am a bit confused about what it actually represents. I get the feeling it is a way to answer a bigger question, but I don't know what that bigger question is.


Character creation is interesting, because it’s one area where most RPGs involve a default 0 roleplaying.That is my favorite example to show why you don't have to be role-playing every moment of a role-playing game; there may be an exception in life-path systems. Still, I think we can agree that it, role-playing, should be one of the pillars of the experience.


Providing the Player with information that the Character doesn’t have is bad form wrt anyone who cares about Roleplaying. So putting minis on the map for things that are around the corner, that the PCs should be unaware of? That’s the point where your example has something to "push me out of character", not when "the battle mat comes out". Just FYI.Point of clarification, I did not mean to say that the battle mat itself is the thing itself that does the push, but it creates so many situations where it will happen that, if the battle mat comes out, the chance of me staying in character is effectively zero. Besides that example and other instances where there is an information mismatch, there is how the information (turns where I have time to think, so I'm never detracted and miss something) and the fact culturally the expectations when the battle mat is out is different.

[gbaji]

While I think this is a reasonable top-level differentiation, there's also a lot of subtleties.

For #1, in many cases, the description is unnecessary. Few or no decisions are impacted by it. Anything that "matters" in the game is represented in some kind of mechanical way, and the descriptions are utterly irrelevant.

For #2, in many cases the rules are insufficient to really determine what's happening without the context of the stuff we imagine - and in many cases, the description of the action can impact what is or is not rolled.

There's some fuzziness - some will claim that #2 is really just a matter of having insufficient rules . Some will argue that in #1, you can retcon what happened to match the results.


Not to speak for Tanari, but those options were followed with a statement that what is skipped is that in #2, you aren't actually declaring the result and then rolling, but declaring the "intent", then rolling, then determining the outcome based on the intent of the action and the die roll.

Both methods work depending on the game system and style. You can absolutely just choose a skill to use, roll it, and then based on the roll decide what you were actually able to pull off in the given situation and can lead to a great degree of creativity from the players (also kinda expects is though). This tends to work best in more player driven games.

The second method tends to work better in a more refereed game, where the player states what he's attempting to do, the GM tells the player what skill/ability/whatever to use to try to do that thing, the player maybe looks at his sheet and realizes he sucks at that and maybe decides something else might work better or decides to go for it, rolls the dice and hopes for the best. The GM then takes the die roll, applies whatever bonuses or minuses he determined applied, and the tells the player the result.

But again, that approach always means you are "attempting" something. You start with that and move forward.

And that's not to say you *can't* have a player driven system which uses the intent->skill determination->roll->outcome methodology. It's just that #1 tends to be a simplification of said process over time. You can just skip that first step, pick a skill to apply to a situation, roll, and then decide that the outcome is going to be based on that roll. The GM driven component requires the first step (statement of intent) because the GM needs to keep the player honest. Players may tend towards changing what they were trying to do based on the roll of the die, so as to minimize failure effects and maximize success effects. Those also tend away from narrative and towards the tactical as well.

[Tanarii]

For instance, there are "fiction rules", that is rules of play that only exist on the fiction layer. For instance, you cannot use "Carpentry: 5k2" to wield a sword into battle against a dragon. Even if (in a hypothetical system) you could mechanically role 5k2 and compare the result with the dragon's defense, that is not carpentry. I think this is also one of the reasons (there are others) that role-playing rules are disliked, people aren't used to dealing with fiction rules in anything but the broadest strokes.
Interestingly, in Free League's Forbidden Lands, human characters have an ability to spend metacurency to use any skill they want in place of another skill, so long as the player can explain how it works in the fiction.


Not to speak for Tanari, but those options were followed with a statement that what is skipped is that in #2, you aren't actually declaring the result and then rolling, but declaring the "intent", then rolling, then determining the outcome based on the intent of the action and the die roll.Yes, that's certainly how it should happen. Players do have a tendency to declare their action as if it's a done deal though. :smallyuk:

But specific my example that they're both incomplete parts of the same full process, I did mean player declares intended action, then a pass/fail isn't taken to its logical conclusion of what a 'fail' actually is, and what as 'pass' actually is. Often the assumption is that given the intent and approach, pass = intent achieved as the outcome without appropriate consequences, and fail = fails in the worst possible outcome/consequences way.

In systems like AW that have a pass, pass with cost or fail (player choice), or fail with cost, the line gets even blurrier. And if the MC were to for example ignore the oft repeated advice that everything should relate to the fiction, some of the meanings of "pass", "fail" and "at a cost" could be very weird. Although one thing AW does very well is define these things specifically in player Moves and more generally/broadly in terms of the MC's moves.