The Broadening of the Horizons

[kushinagi]

Hullo hullo,

Maybe I'm bored, maybe I'm glutton to punish myself, but for whatever reason, I've taken interest in Indie Game Design. I toyed with the idea before, but never seriously, and unfortunately, even my experience in the roleplaying field is somewhat limited.

During some research on this site, I've discovered my tastes to be in Narrativism, but I come to a halt on mechanics. I've played the diceless Marvel RPG, and have a whee bit of experience with that. Unfortunately, I wasn't too big of a fan of "stones of energy" and all the other headaches that make the GM's job harder. On the other hand, random dice, whereas I lack too much experience in (But I am hosting a D20 Star Wars game, so I will have some experience soon), seem to make roleplaying 'optional,' which seems to detract from the ideal of Narrativism.

What I am asking is are there any good examples of Narrativist rpgs (Preferebly free, as I don't neccessary plan on running them) as to I can research their mechanics? I'll do searching myself, but I'd like any help that can be offered in examples.

Also, I apologize if this post is unfitting for this forum, and I also apologize for any ignorance I may be showing. As I said, I'm not very experienced, and I plan to do this RPG maybe not as a time waster, but just something to devote some spare hours to, as I hate boredom so very much.

[TonyLB]

I recommend a quick look through the Actual Play forum.  It has examples of several recent and popular games, most of which help to facilitate a Narrativist agenda in play.

I particularly recommend recent threads on Primetime Adventures, because folks are quite open to talking about how they felt during playing the game.  That sort of information will help you to know if the mechanisms they're discussing are likely to "click" with the sort of thing you actually want to do.  If you see a section that you say "Oh wow, yeah!  That's something I want to do in-game," then I'd look into how the rules facilitated that... possibly even ask people directly, in-thread.

As for free games, I can direct you straight to the trimmed-down free version of Capes, Capes Lite.  You can also look at the un-pretty version of Shadows of Yesterday online for free.

[Eric Provost]

Well, unfortunately no free one's come to mind.  At least, none that show off the virtues of dice+narrativism.  I'm sure there out there.

On the other hand, I'd like to recomend the two not-free games of Trollbabe and Dogs in the Vineyard.  Both are great examples of how well dice and narrativism go together.  There are plenty of other games out there too, but those are the two that I'm familiar with.

But, for the easiest way to see how well the two go together, you don't need to go any further than Vincent's mini-sample conflict resolution system he posted recently on his Anyway page.  I'm pretty sure that site is still down atm for hardware problems, so I'll do the example a bit of grave injustice by paraphrasing it here.

First, consider what's at stake.  Let's say that your character wants to talk a king into giving him a title and land.  So, what's at stake is Do You Get the Title?  Then, consider what the danger might be.  Something -bad- that might happen just from attempting to get those stakes.  Like, the king's son might become jealous.  And maybe, a rivial courter might decide to slip a little poison into the king's wine and you'd be blamed for it.  So now, we roll three d6s.  One for the stakes, and two others because we came up with two possible bad things.  We'll roll 'em all at once and then we'll assing them, after rolling, to the stakes and each of the bad things.  If the stakes die comes up 1 or 2, then you loose your stakes.  3 or 4 means that the stakes haven't been decided yet.  You'll have to roll again.  5 or 6 means that you've achieved your stakes.  Now, for the bad stuff, a high die means that you avoided the bad stuff, and a low die means that you suffer the bad stuff.   So now, if you roll a mixed batch of dice, some high, some low, you have to decide if it's worth assigning a high die to the stakes when it means a low die to the bad stuff.  Bang!  Narrativism.  

-Eric

[kushinagi]

First of all, thanks for no one saying "Maybe Indie-Games isn't your thing..." or bashing me for being here with said lack of experience. Kinda wasn't expecting such a warm reaction... thanks again.

I recommend a quick look through the Actual Play forum.  It has examples of several recent and popular games, most of which help to facilitate a Narrativist agenda in play.

I looked into it briefly, including two Prime Time Adventures posts. I didn't get indepth, but it's like 1 am... I'll look more into it at a more awake time. Thanks for all your help tho, so far been nothing but helpful!

And Technocrat, I read through your example, and it sounds interesting, and I'll have to keep it in mind. It's an interesting concept, to say the least.

And I appreciate anyone else willing to help. The idea of coming up with gameplay mechanics seems really hard... but I'm not the type to come up with something that's me and throw D20 Modern/Future/Fantasy rules on it...