Question: Which techniques support which CA?

[komradebob]

Okay, even after having read many threads and essays on GNS theory, the whole thing remains kind of hazy to my understanding. I'd like to jump ahead a little and ask folks here a question about techniques ( and rules/mechanics) that support each CA.

Basically, as I understand it, a "Narrativist Game" is a sort of shorthand, meaning something like " A game which provides system supporting a narrativist creative agenda, and which does not actively support a gamist or simulationist agenda ( which would encourage incorency)."

OKay- so what are some techniques that:
1) support each agenda, and to what degree.

I understand that some techniques/rules may be outside of any given agenda, or may support more than one equally well. Still, perhaps there are general tendencies.

2) What are some techniques that tend to clash heavily with a given CA?

I recognize that the question is very broad, but any opinions are appreciated. Points to already existing threads that hash out some of these techniques are also appreciated. Finally, if this post indicates a really severe misunderstanding of any of the terms, please let me know.

Thanks,
Bob

[lumpley]

Hey Bob.

Any Technique can work for any CA if and only if it's properly supported by its fellow Techniques.

Choosing a particular Technique, like this:
My game shall have a Fortune in the Middle resolution roll, using 4d8 and the phrase "if you don't like your roll, here's what you can do..."

Means that you then have to ask yourself this question:
What Techniques must I conjunct with this, in order to provoke Narrativist play?

Or whichever you're going for.

No particular Technique has CA significance.  The mass of your techniques, taken together, does.

If you read my post about the Elements of Exploration in Narrativist design, you'll see what (I think) a Narrativist ruleset has to do:

After setup, what a game's rules do is control how you resolve one situation into the next. If you're designing a Narrativist game, what you need are rules that create a) rising conflict b) across a moral line c) between fit characters d) according to the authorship of the players. Every new situation should be a step upward in that conflict, toward a climax and resolution. Your rules need to provoke the players, collaboratively, into escalating the conflict, until it can't escalate no more.

So if you have any combination of Techniques that provokes the players into collaboratively creating and escalating a moral conflict, you have rules that support Narrativist play.  If you have an individual rule that undermines the collaboration or the conflict, that rule clashes with Narrativist play, in the context of your particular ruleset.

You see why a list of Techniques and which CAs they go with isn't really possible.

-Vincent

[Alan]

Or to put it another way, Techniques are like the gears, belts, punches, and motors of a machine.  Arrange them one way, they produce one results; another arrangment produces another result.  It's the arrangement and relationship of the different Techniques that supports a Creative Agenda.

We might divide the clusters of techniques into four inter-rlated sub-units in the "machine" of an RPG system:

- Setting / Background
- Character Creation
- Resolution
- Reward Mechanics

[lumpley]

Exact-o-lutely!

We might go further:
- Character Creation
--> Effectiveness
--> Resources
--> Positioning

- Resolution
--> IIEE
--> Resolution
--> Outcome / Consequence

- Reward
--> What's rewarded?
--> Rewarded with what?

Each of which might or might not be further subdivided, as for instance Resolution into combat and noncombat, if your game does it that way.

Did you have "Setting / Background" in mind as a kind of, y'know, mechanic, like creating tenets and setting stuff in Universalis, or did you just mean the game's setting and background?  Because the former is a very interesting and wide open domain for design (and worthy of its own thread).

The point being, and to stay sort of on topic for Bob's thread: all those bits and sub-bits of your game's rules have to work together to bring about play of a particular CA.

-Vincent