True or False: four Simulationists who meet for the first time at a convention are likely to have a mutually satisfying game, because they share the same goals?

True or False: four Narrativists who meet for the first time at a convention are likely to have a mutually satisfying game, because they share the same goals?

Okay...they're rhetorical questions. I ask them because although I think it's obvious to people that the range of preferences across Simulationists precludes assurance that a random group won't have conflicting styles and priorities, I think people make the assumption that somehow Narrativists are more uniform in their preferences. It isn't true.

And thinking about our group's current Whispering Vault game is making me more aware of just how not true it is. In looking back on the very first session, I can point to only one instance when I asserted myself strongly. The Guardian was in the form of a towering cliff when the stalkers confronted it. I stepped forward, literally and figuratively, and narrated my plant character Root addressing the Guardian: "Why do you always block our way, Guardian? We've done this confrontation a thousand times. It is getting old."

"I don't know you," said the Guardian.

And then I described Root, looking very tree-like and non-anthropomorphic at the top of the cliff, having translocated there, and the motion of the sun and moon and stars cycling through the sky, click, click, click, as a thousand years passed in minutes. I described my roots getting deeper and deeper into and further across the surface of the rock as the days and nights passed. The scene ended with the other stalkers passing through the resulting gap in the cliff, under the gnarled, rooty arch of my character spanning the path above them, and the Guardian saying, "I remember you."

It was fun. But it exemplifies something I've noticed about the few other times during the game that I took it upon myself to do things with Root: I'm partial to conflict resolution. With the Guardian, I was resolving a conflict. Whispering Vault's combat system has task resolution mechanics. And playing through the combat sequences in our two game sessions has pretty much just been going through the motions for me.

And when I think about it, my partiality toward conflict resolution shows in my design for The World, the Flesh, and the Devil...and in the way I ran The Pool. Compare the way I ran The Pool to the way Blake's group played it. Blake's game was clearly Narrativist, but characterized by having a greater degree of task resolution in the mix.

Do four Narrativists who just met for the first time have high assurance they'll have a mutually satisfying game?

I think The Pool works for different groups of Narrativists because it doesn't clearly specify in its text the level (conflict or task) at which the resolution system is supposed to operate. I guess what I'm trying to say is that just because different groups of Narrativists have had good experiences with The Pool (or another game) doesn't mean that those gamers are similar enough in their preferences that they'd necessarily have satisfying games together, that there wouldn't be heated disagreements, any more than you could say the same thing about different groups of Simulationists.

So maybe this is a question about Drift, except it's Drift within a G, N or S preference, rather than between them. If I played The Pool with Blake and his players, and we had disputes, and not much fun as a result, would it be because I'm an asshole? Are there ways of handling the social contract up front that would enable Blake to pre-empt potential disputes? Or should Narrativist game designers handle a greater amount of Drift internal to Narrativism through their game mechanics? Trollbabe takes this tactic in relation to conflict/task resolution with an impressive mechanic for negotiating whether the scale of resolution will be conflict by conflict, event by event, or action by action. I think it's fantastic. By having an explicit mechanic, it handles the potential dispute over preferences so the social contract doesn't have to.

Does it seem like I'm making a big deal over this conflict/task resolution preference? I don't think so. I think there's a whole range of preferences across Narrativists for how a story is made. Another presonal preference that Whispering Vault has brought to the forefront for me is that I want a game that if it doesn't encourage, at least doesn't discourage player-side prep. Whispering Vault's episodic structure, where the characters float in limbo-land until being called forth totally blind into a situation they've never experienced before, disconnected in time and space from the situations of prior gameplay, with a cast of NPC's they've never interacted with before, puts quite a whammy on player-side prep.

Are there other preferences internal to Narrativism that could be handled by social contract or game mechanics? Help me out on this one. I'm sure there are.

Paul

Y'know, I been toying with asking a very similar question.

Ron often talks specifically about different types of play within each of the GNS modes (and even, at times, details some of them). What I was thinking of was the possibility of delineating a bunch of them. Is that possible? Would it start with anecdotes? Let me do a little searching, and I'll dig up 'what has gone before.'

See you then.

Fang Langford

Hey Fang,

I'm thinking we can have a pretty good discussion with a less than comprehensive survey of anecdotes. How about a teaser of what you've got so far?

Paul

Paul Czege wrote: I'm thinking we can have a pretty good discussion with a less than comprehensive survey of anecdotes. How about a teaser of what you've got so far?