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

[clearstream]

This is nothing to do with "modalism".

@FrogReaver made the assertion I've quoted. I express scepticism about it, not on a prior grounds but because I've played both RPGs and have thought a lot about the differences between them.

Here are two main ones:

*In RM melee resolution, attack and defence are determined, round-by-round, from the same pool; whereas in RQ, attack and parry are separate skills which are rolled independently;

*In RM PC build, a player determines how to allocate their build points from level to level; whereas in RQ, skill development is randomly determined based on skill use.

The latter difference permits a RM player to send signals via their PC build. The former difference permits a RM player to adjust the stakes of melee via round-by-round decision-making.

Neither difference is one of degree.

The same sort of comparison could be done between RQ and Pendragon, too. Like, it would be relatively trivial to put RQ onto a d20 rather than d% chassis, with some loss of granularity and a few tweaks around the edges being required. But the presence of Trait and Passion rolls is a tremendous change, whether these are rated on d20 or d%.

RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha has Passions. Although intriguingly something like Passions first appear on the NPC record form for Griffin Mountain, (c) 1981 in the edition I am looking at, and thus four years before Pendragon was published.

I'm finding it hard to parse out your meaning. Did you mean that adding Passions to the main text of RQ is a tremendous change? It can be, depending on how a group use them.

You and @FrogReaver are making these claims about possibility, but neither of you has presented anything in the neighbourhood of a possibility proof. It's just assertion, as best I can tell.

The many, many game texts riffing off one another and drifting are themselves proof.

I don't expect to convince you and (on this score) nothing you've said has convinced me: hence agreeing to disagree as I said up thread.

And?

A book can have advice for how to this thing, or how to do that thing. This does not, on its own, show that it is possible to do the two things at once, or that the two things lie on some continuum. Like, the instructions for my stereo system tell me how to pick up and play radio broadcasts, and how to connect it to a CD player. But I can't use it to listen to CDs and the radio at the same time.

It's unsurprising that a RPG rulebook hoping to sell to a variety of people will have advice that suggests the game can be played in multiple ways, to pursue different aesthetic goals. It's also unsurprising that it may even tend to blur the differences between those goals.

But I don't know what is supposed to follow from that.

What follows is a prediction that we'll see more and more hybridisation from here on out, as features that collectively form what folk label "narrativism" are experimented with and found to have utility to other modes of play.

Relating to @Arilyn's post such games will be narratavistic without being "narrativist", as that labels a specific set of features that must all be present, including those sited in a culture of play. Due to that latter, narrativistic games will be amenable to drift to "narrativism". Daggerheart may prove to be an example.

 

[pemerton]

About 1 minute in.

He says "The term "Hey, GNS" is moronic. And annoying."

He's not labelling his analysis as moronic. He's talking about a certain way it's taken up. He goes on to elaborate: he is critical of the association of GNS with techniques rather than goals of play (as we see eg from @FrogReaver upthread, and also to some extent @Crimson Longinus); of the assumption that "the big model" is a model of the totality of RPG possibility, when in fact it is a general model of the structure and process of RPG play in any given moment of play - that is, an abstract description of what must be happening if RPGing is to be occurring, with an analysis of the various components. And GNS is a description of the aesthetic aim of that process.

 

[FrogReaver]

He says "The term "Hey, GNS" is moronic. And annoying."

He's not labelling his analysis as moronic. He's talking about a certain way it's taken up. He goes on to elaborate: he is critical of the association of GNS with techniques rather than goals of play (as we see eg from @FrogReaver upthread, and also to some extent @Crimson Longinus); of the assumption that "the big model" is a model of the totality of RPG possibility, when in fact it is a general model of the structure and process of RPG play in any given moment of play - that is, an abstract description of what must be happening if RPGing is to be occurring, with an analysis of the various components. And GNS is a description of the aesthetic aim of that process.

Been traveling so a bit behind on the thread but this seems easy enough to comment on.

if GNS is about goals of play and the N describes play with the goal of narrativist play, then it seems contradictory to assert that:

‘it is a general model of the structure and process of RPG play in any given moment of play’

Goals of play does not equal structure and process of RPG play in any given moment. This is probably what most of my confusion stems from.

 

[clearstream]

He says "The term "Hey, GNS" is moronic. And annoying."

From 0:58
"I will suggest that uh the term "Hey GNS" is moronic and that it is a short-lived transition in the development of ideas it just happened to be the time when light was being shown on that dialogue, and that's the form in which it escaped at least the term in which it escaped off to the wild"

I wrote

To be fair, Edwards in a recent interview said that

"gns is moronic and that it is a short-lived transition in the development of ideas it just happened to be the time when light was being shown on that dialogue right and that's the form in which it escaped at least the term in which it escaped off to the wild"

And if I recall correctly went on later in the interview to repeat his earlier assertion that simulationism doesn't exist... meaning at most we have gamism and narrativism to work with, if we want to adhere to the isms. GN?

I pointed out that

Baker has said in reference to GNS that

"But, of course, RPGs aren't three games either. Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves."

So I would say that today, it's quite respectable to say that gamism, narrativism and simulationism are "artificial categories" that folk are unfortunately "cramming games into".

So no, I didn't take it that Edwards was labelling his analysis as moronic. Nothing I know about Edwards - and nothing I heard in that interview, unfortunately - would suggest he's particularly big on retractions.

 

[clearstream]

if GNS is about goals of play and the N describes play with the goal of narrativist play, then it seems contradictory to assert that:

GN

S no longer exists as an aesthetic aim of play.

 

[FrogReaver]

GN

S no longer exists as an aesthetic aim of play.

Still catching up a bit, is the suggestion here that simulationsim isnt a valid goal of llay?

 

[clearstream]

Still catching up a bit, is the suggestion here that simulationsim isnt a valid goal of llay?

Edwards describes it as only appearing to be a separate aesthetic aim either because some folk have such low standards that their play exhibits no meaningful aesthetic aims, or because of bad design and implementation choices frustrating proto-narrativists who figured they must be simulationists on that account. Another explanation he offers seems to amount to ascribing social handicaps to some folk, who then end up looking like simulationists because they're focused on the imagined material.

It's all mildly repellent, but in my view it's also unimportant. Edwards' work and essay on narrativism was groundbreaking, and the critical parts are not dependent on the three-fold for their validity.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

All possible three dimensional coordinates form a continuum too. Though, I couldn’t begin to tell you how I’d begin to place them on one or on what continuum they exist on other than describing it as the continuum of all possible three dimensional coordinates.

*For theee dimensional coordinates I suppose it would be to take a linear combination of continuums for each dimension. So x,y,z. And since each dimension forms a continuum then the linear combination forms one too.

If this holds then one could do similar for our possible … carnivores set as well.

I don't think this is a good analogy. So, how about TV sets? Is there a continuum between my 1995 Sony CRT NTSC TV and my modern 4K Sony Bravia LED TV? I don't think so! Sure, at some level they are engineered to solve some of the same problems and perform analogous functions, but the technology is very different. Each one has some microelectronics in it, even perhaps some identical, or nearly identical, logic chips. Probably knowing all about how the CRT set works will give me some insight into the LED set's functionality. Certainly at an external user interface level the newer set is designed to adhere to some basic conventions, like how the power switch is labeled, and they probably even share a common electrical cord. They're still very different beasts and suited to slightly different tasks. You can't interpolate between them, at all!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In a sense, we're all forced to be modalists when describing what actually exists right now in the domain. Because local physical reality does not (and cannot) contain every feasible instance along the continuum.

Example: In our local solar system, we have a few planets. It would be mistaken to imagine that these are the only possible planets, and that across the vastness of the visible Universe there are no similar-but-not-perfectly-similar along with obviously-different planets. And were it to turn out that the Universe were infinite, then every possible planet would perforce be instantiated, thus reifying the continuum... although this is a tremendous digression!

Another example: Compare Daggerheart with say Monster of the Week and D&D. I have noticed mechanics and principles seen in each of those games appearing in Daggerheart. Advantage and Disadvantage is an obvious one from D&D, but also the classes. But then WRT classes one sees progression tracks not so far from MotW. And so on. Or consider the Rulings Over Rules principle of Daggerheart... that many read into text in the D&D core books. Which is immediately followed by "Player Principles" that include "Play to Find Out What Happens".

I personally find value in using topologies to picture conceptual spaces. I first started considering it when I read a paper (that I cannot recall title or author of now) on engaging the visuo-spatial component of generalized intelligence to grasp and solve complex problems. Specifically by finding ways to render the problem space topologically. I find that heatmaps are similarly helpful. I've noticed that some folk are let's say "visual-thinkers", and this works for them. I wouldn't expect it to work for everyone.

Yeah, I don't want to completely dismiss the idea that games borrow from each other and that there are similarities in rules, genre, intended process of play, and potentially many other areas. What I'm saying is that, sure, draw a line around certain games and call that a 'family of RPGs' but I look at games as more like engineered things where only certain combinations of parameters really work. While it is possible to apply cladistic ideas here, we should be careful because there aren't any restrictions on the ways games can influence each other or borrow from each other. Some such borrowings and whatnot will work well, others probably not so well, but I think a better mathematical model than a continuous space (avoiding technical math here) would be something like a directed graph. Now, you can then evaluate the games and kind of position them near or far based on how you perceive their play, or your play of them, to be similar or different. That won't produce a neat graph though where all the things you like are both clustered in 'preference space' AND fall on the same part of the graph! I mean, OK, the two may even correspond a reasonable amount due to a 'school effect' (IE people who participated in the Forge and developed games based on or influenced by AW, so a lot of Narrativist preference space may also cluster close to AW on the 'got bits from' graph).

But I want to keep reinforcing this, even within a play style preference, like Narrativist, there are just things that have no intermediates. I don't see how you can take PbtA and mix it with 4e and get something halfway in between. I mean, I went through this exercise, trust me, and it just doesn't really work. HoML has some ideas that reflect experiences with PbtA and such, but it is still pretty much built around a 4e-like chasis, you just can't mush together moves and skill challenges! There's no halfway point between those!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

So while it is presumably true that bats and humans have some common ancestor, and that octopuses and humans have some far more remote common ancestor, I don't think it is true that there is some imaginary intermediate stage between humans and bats that is ecologically or biochemically possible; nor between humans and octopuses.

Right. While my evolutionary biology education is probably only a tiny bit better than yours (I had to take college-level biology at least, and have a good working knowledge of basic biochemistry) I am fairly confident you are correct. Humans and Octopi must have shared a common ancestor something like 600 million years ago, at a stage when animals resembled worms (Ur Bilateria, the first animals with bilateral symmetry).

It would be best to look at evolution from that point as basically a tree. Once two branches split, they go in different directions and over deep time become VERY different. The accumulated adaptations on each line of development are organized in different ways, arise out of different underlying parts of the biological machinery, etc.

For example, Octopi have very large neurons, an adaptation for noise reduction, whereas Humans (Chordates in general I believe) have myelin insulated neurons which work somewhat differently and are much smaller, an adaptation which is also present for noise reduction. Same problem, 2 different solutions, and each solution leads to further differences. Humans have a single large brain filled with densely packed neurons. Octopi have distributed brains, a completely different architecture. There's no intermediate form that is possible. Even where we share traits in our nervous systems, basic neuronal biochemistry is pretty similar, each system has tweaked these basic ancestral traits and optimized them in different ways. While Octopi might have a form of dopamine, for example, it wouldn't work right in humans!