The incredible lightness of narrative gameplay

I am a table-top roleplaying game (TTRRPG) OG (Original Gamer). I started in 1976 with the first release of what is accepted as the very first release of the first sold roleplaying game. TSR’s original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D).

I played US 80s RPGs heavily in the 80s and 90s. With that comes some baggage. There were certain assumptions that applied to all of those games. OD&D evolved from miniatures-based wargames, which were all tactical simulations of one thing or another. 80s roleplay gaming often dispensed with miniatures and was played as an imaginative exercise that came to be called “Theatre of the Mind” but the tactical decisions were still very much front and center in gameplay. It all hinged around rules that dictated what was possible and how it affected a combat situation.

Most of the games back then were lucky to have national distribution. International distribution was almost unheard-of. In this vacuum, other continents developed their own roleplay games, often with a different focus.

A school of play developed in Europe of a game with very little in the way of tactical choices, but richness in storytelling instead. These came to be known as narrative games and they eventually crossed to our side of the pond, just as our games crossed to theirs. They are having a bit of a renaissance right now in the US. I cannot really understand a game without playing it and tinkering with it, so that’s what I have been doing for the last year or so.

I still have trouble with purely narrative games. I find them so loose in structure and rules that I have a hard time wrapping my hands around them. The two big strains in narrative games I’ve encountered in the US are ones based on the Powered by the Apocalypse rules (PbtA) and the FATE rules. Ive had trouble with both.

Powered by the Apocalypse games are highly “opinionated”. Each PbtA game has a single theme of interest, and all the rules are there to drive development of that theme. As an example, the game Masks, is really a double entendre. It is ostensibly about teenage super-heroes, but most of the rules really are about societal roles and how others see us. The game Monster Hearts is about teenage struggles with sex and romance. In particular, how dysfunctional approaches to these important human subjects play out.

A lot of people like these games, and I am not going to throw shade on them, except to say this doesn’t usually work for me. I am a method actor. My joy in playing an RPG or writing fiction is concentrated in the area of deep empathy. I enjoy seeing the world from my character’s point of view and responding to it from their history and personality. Although I always start my characters with some “hooks” that others might call themes, those often fade into other desires and goals over play time. In the process, the character grows from a sketch to a deeply felt other personality. With their monomaniacal focus, PbtA games usually don’t fit my play style or provide what I am looking for in the experience.

FATE, on the other hand, suffer some from not being about anything at all. Characters are created by giving them “aspects” which are descriptions of a few words each. When a character tries to do something, aspects that apply are counted up and added to a simple dice roll. This gives the player a great deal of flexibility in defining the character, but very little structure as to how they interact with their environment. That all has to come from the Gamemaster, sometimes in consultation with the player. But its still a pretty heavy burden. That the structure is so loose is both a blessing and a curse. It’s sort of like being given a bunch of tools and being told “go build a bicycle” as compared to picking out pre created parts for a bicycle. In the end, I miss the structure of rules that lay out what is and isn’t possible not just in character creation but during gameplay.

All of this comes from my perspective as a traditional roleplay gamer. I am still trying to fit the way I play the game. Recently, however, I experienced a seismic shift in my thinking.

I am trying to both play and run games of City of Mist. City of Mist is interesting as it has an over-all arching theme but on a very high level. eg High Fantasy, Cyberpunk, etc. In this way it is like old school games.

For the specifics, it uses a system similar to fate. Tags (which are just like FATE aspects) define character traits, environment of action, and so on. Tags are not just thought up at character creation, however. Instead, there is a process of defining individual character themes and creating tags that go with them.

For me, that’s enough structure that I don’t feel lost.

All narrative games stress the importance of the Gamemaster asking questions rather than giving answers and going to the dice when an answer is required. Gameplay is more of a discussion and negotiation of what is true, rather than just a response to it. All of the games I have mentioned stress this, but my lightbulb moment was in the game I was running, where I just let go of the reigns and let the players tell me what was happening. All of a sudden, the game flowed like it should.

The job of a Gamemaster in a narrative game is less narration, which shifts to the players, and more organizing, facilitating and sanity checking. This is not to say that the GM doesn’t still maintain the environment and the events that are not player driven, but it is no longer the primary focus of the game.

Narrative games at their core are so different, so opposite of tactical war games that I have trouble calling them roleplaying games. Yes, the roleplay is very much still there, but most of the other old school assumptions are violently shattered.

Narrative games to me really seem like a whole new (to me) and interesting category of game to explore.