On Tue, Apr 11, 2006 at 03:19:57PM -0500, Carl D Cravens wrote: >Hm. The negotiated story-telling takes power away from the GM and >puts it in the hands of the players. And in doing so, it takes away >the GMs ability to _surprise_ the players. I think that that's where the narrativist tendency started to declare itself as separate, pre-Forge - in that removal of GM control. Remember Whimsy Cards? (See http://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/systemdesign/cards/whimsycards.html if not.) As far as I could see, the point of those was to give the _players_ the ability to surprise the _GM_, not just (as had always been possible) by saying "my character does X unexpected thing", but by having an explicit (even if still GM-mediated) input to the environment not necessarily tied to the individual PC. In effect, they were a way of letting the player say "we're feeling a bit overpowered, we could use some help here" or "this seems too straightforward, let's have some complications". There's the germ of a good idea there. I think it's a rare game these days where the GM doesn't allow any sort of player input into the narrative. But for me at least it has to be fairly quick and simple to continue suspension of disbelief; a player says something like "maybe I'll run into one of my old pirate drinking buddies" or "I hope we don't get pulled by the cops", something in-genre and _in-game_ that gives me a hint as to what he wants to happen. If we have to step outside the game, to become authors explicitly, that breaks it for me. That surprise is certainly a part of why I like dice, too. Even in a system with fudge points*, I know that when I send my character into a fight he _may_ just lose... and it helps to keep me suitably on edge, because that's what the character knows too. * including actual Fudge points of course, but also Possibilities, Luck points, whatever limited resource gets you a temporary exemption from the normal rules of the game. >I think that's what killed _Dogs In the Vineyard_ for me... I didn't >find the process to have any elements of surprise in it. (That and it >turned roleplaying into a stilted, mechanical give-and-take.) I haven't played it but I've looked over the shoulders of people who were. It seemed to me like training wheels - this is the sort of story _that will happen_, but once you get used to a story happening you want to go on to make up your own that go in different directions. I agree with what you've said here, but I also think that immersion is important. If the mechanics get in the way, they throw me out of immersion; the difference between forgeite-narrativist and traditional games is that in traditional games the mechanics are there to cover the stuff that you can't do directly (e.g. combat), while in the f-n games they're supposed to cover every sort of conflict. Remember those arguments in the late 80s about interpersonal skills - how much should you reward a glib player vs a skilled character? With hindsight I see that as another foreshadowing of the f-n school of thought, because an f-n advocate's answer would be "the character's skill is the only thing that matters". One could even say that f-n advocates are really not narrativists at all but _simulationists_ - except that the process they're trying to simulate is not any sort of reality, but rather the mechanical basis of genre fiction. -- Roger, gaming grognard Lots of role-playing stuff: http://tekeli.li/ ---------------------------------------------------------------- GAMERS Home Page: http://www.phoenyx.net/gamers/
