Drama and Narrativism

[Ian Charvill]

Following various gubbins over on Sean's fourth mode thread and the glossary thread this could maybe do with the thread of its own.  My position here can be summed up in two statements and the second is reliant on the first being true, so lets get that one out of the way first.

Narrativism is the only GNS mode that will reliably produce a narrative like a stage play is a narrative

Now, if the case is that gamism* can reliably produce a stage-play type narrative then my second point is moot.

My second point:

"dramatic narrative" can be used to mean "narrative like a stage play" without much of a stretch

The second point seems to be one getting all the debate, which is literally semantics, the first part is more important.

[because, placing all my cards on the table, if the first one is true then people getting their feathers ruffled by "narrativism is the only mode that will reliably produce a dramatic narrative" are getting their feathers ruffled by the theory not the phrasing]

* or equally simulationism, natch

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Reliable is a little funny here. I don't know about reliable, but narrativism is the creative agenda where the agenda is to produce a story in the literary sense, what you are calling a stage-play like narrative and what I have been simply calling story lately. I don't think it reliable, per se, but it is more likely to have this result than the other two agendas which do not place the story high on their value charts, at least not in play.

[Sean]

I tend to look at all this pretty viscerally.

Players with a gamist CA are getting their primary enjoyment from the session out of Step on Up; players with a simulationist CA are getting their primary enjoyment out of exploration of the game's setting, history, causal patterns, and the like; players with a narrativist CA are getting their primary enjoyment out of moments of emotional and moral stimulation.

(As a complete tangent, I'm really, really interested in light of some recent experiences with a home-brewed system whether the constant emphasis on something very like Turnin' (see Gamism essay) in the Dying Earth RPG (which is obviously a Narrativism-facilitating design) is functional or not, or if functionality varies from group to group, and what makes it work or fail to work in different cases. I can see this being either incredibly fun or a hassle (does it turn out to be Gam in a supporting mode to Nar or does the Gam break the Nar?) and I'm really curious to actually try the game now so I can see. If anyone has thoughts on this feel free to start another thread on the subject.)

So now with narrative. The engine of all narrative is moral or emotional engagement. Sometimes, as with sportswriting, this is a very particular kind of emotional engagment (glory, honor, Step on Up), or as with a travelogue or writeup of a science experiment, the emotional engagement of the travel writer's experience is attenuated so that the details of the setting or causality can be brought to the foreground.

Your wife comes home from work. "How was your day, honey?" She tells you the story of her day. You care because it's her story. A few times a year the story of her day is actually a Story: a really interesting connected sequence of morally and emotionally engaging events that had a point. The rest of the time, it's just a sequence of relatively disconnected events: not a Story, but still the story of her day. Occasionally the moral and emotional character of the decisions she was making gets swamped because some sort of status or hierarchical competition was going on in the workplace, and then the story takes on a different tone, and it takes some work to get back to the moral and emotional issues outside of that status competition at all.

If you focus on those kinds of moments in play you've got little stories all the time and the building blocks with which good players may eventually work together to build good stories. (Or the older style, where one player makes his story for the rest and they can get the joys of being a spectator, which RPGs arguably don't deliver as well as books and movies on this dimension.)

On the other hand, if you want always to know what's in the next hex, or what the ecology of the rust monster is, or the standard armor insigniae of the Legion of the Sweet Singers of Nakome, you're fact-collecting. "Yeah, whatever, the NPCs are getting disgruntled now that we've been in the wilderness and fomenting rebellion. Geez, GM, why do you have to bug me with this shit? Can't I just feed them and figure out where the source of this river is already?"

And then: "Dude! I scored the crit, I got dibs on the treasure!" "As soon as I make ninth level, I'll be able to learn Cone of Cold, and then we'll be able to take out that fire dragon on level 7....finally!"

I enjoy all of these things at different times, and so I suspect do many of you, though I tend to revert to Nar before too long in most situations unless I make a conscious effort to do otherwise.

It's true that with all three sets of priorities a sequence of events will occur in shared imaginary space, and such a sequence also has some title to the term 'story' considered in abstraction. And people can recount all three types of 'story' (here understood as recounting of what happened in play) to one another with a tremor of rapt intensity in their voice.

But I still tend to think (a) if you're setting out to make a story, even a 'little s' story (a sequence of morally or emotionally engaging moments without much greater coherence), you obviously want to prioritize the first of these, and (b) that many people reflexively prioritize the first of these without necessarily knowing what they want in terms of story at all, and that (c) a substantial subset of people of type (b) are going to get more happiness out of their gaming if they are provided with techniques that give them agency to try to assemble the little-s story moments into a big-S Story together as a group, then they will if they just grapple with one immediately morally or emotionally engaging thing after another.