So, all these recent threads have really been great, but they're very deep, and awfully technical. Last night I was thinking about all this, and a new way of communicating Narrativism ocurred to me. So, this thread is the emotional counterpart to all the logical discussion that's been going on. Those threads were about what Narrativism *is.* This thread is about what Narrativism *means.*

Ron, I'm especially interested in what you think of this, because the presentation is somewhat different from what we normally see here.

Narrativism is about setting up a specific kind of choice for the characters to face. Call them urgent choices. For one reason or another, an urgent choice can't just be waved away or ignored. Because of the situation or the character or *something* in the context of the shared reality, the choice must be resolved one way or another. It won't just go away. The characters can't just laugh it off.

*This* is what addressing premise is really about! To imagine situation in such a way that the urgent choice is presented. To imagine character in such a way that the decision must be made.

It's a given that the urgent choice must be resolved - this is definitional. But, the actual in-game decision that the character makes is not the focus. The players will be interested in the meta-level meaning no matter what. The important is the urgent choice itself. As long as Exploring [1] urgent choices is the point of play, the game is Narrativism.

[1] Remember, Exploration = "creation via shared imagination."

Doesn't matter when this happens, either. Premise can be addressed during any stage of the game.

Now a little theory snippet... The obvious thing here is that urgent choices can crop up more or less frequently during all play. The mere existence of an urgent choice isn't really enough to say that play is Narrativist, because the urgent choice might just be an accidental by-product of something else.

Like I said before, it's Narrativism when the urgent choice is the *point.* How can we, as observers, distinguish between the accidental and the intentional? By observing an instance of play, as outlined in my other post. When a player sets up the urgent choice *at the expense* of some other play mode, then we can recognize a Narrativist decision.

We might have to wait a long time before we find one of these identifiable prioritizations - that's why the length of "instance of play" is vague. But we only have to find *one* such prioritization to identify Narrtivism. (And of course, the same can be said of Simulationism and Gamism.) And that's why hybrid play and drifting works - different modes of play can be recognizeably prioritized during the *same game.*

I think that sounds pretty much right, but I'd a couple of addendums.

1) The choice must be equally viable in either direction. i.e. it can't be a "non choice"

2) The choice has to be something meaningful, not just urgent. Having 5 seconds to choose to attack the guy with the bow vs attack the guy with the sword is probably not meaningful. Although it could be if one is addressing themes of the "practical expedience" of the bow vs. the "traditional notions of honor" of a man to man fight.

So the choice has to be urgent (as in unavoidable). It has to carry thematic oomph. And EITHER choice has to say something.

Hi there,

By the most amazing coincidence, I have just drafted that portion of the Narrativism essay which says, "Everyone seems to have to work how to say this out for himself or herself."

[By "everyone," I usually mean a person who's been involved in role-playing for a long time. Other people get it bang-on in seconds, or rather, already have it without need for clarification. That's another issue.]

I get these emails all the time. "Ron! I figured out Narrativism! It's [insert material very much like Nathan's above, but with examples and phrasing that just work for that person]! Is that it?"

Right, I say. You got it. And I think, yet again, didn't I say this about a zillion times? By now, though, I know that I did say it a zillion times, but also that that's not the point. The point is that this person said it, this time.

So, Nathan, "Right. You got it." Ralph's addendum is great too.

Best,
Ron

Hehe Ron, I know I got it, I got it like 18 months ago or something. It just came to me last night that expressing it in terms of "here's what we actually do to get Narrativism" might be more meaningful to some people than explaining it in terms of literary / Exploratory constructs.

Hi Nathan,

Excellent. Now let's see how it works.

My proves-point-to-self addendum to your post is, I prefer "emotionally grabby" rather than "urgent."

See? Everyone needs his own words. That's what I'd like visitors to the thread to try to do.

Best,
Ron

Hehehe, emotionally grabby, I like that.

Now for the secret behind the scenes origin of this thread... other night in #indierpgs we were talking about stuff, and all the recent Narrativism threads came up. Obvious paraphrasing follows. :)

Lxndr (I think it was, mighta been Mr. Moth) said he'd never really "got" Narrativism, because of your insistence that "moral and ethical" be part of the definition of "premise."

I said it wasn't that big of a deal, that "premise" was just a fancy way of breaking down conflict.

He didn't buy that, because he said not all conflicts are moral or ethical in nature.

I said sure they are, because conflicts are about the choices people make and why they make them. If nobody cares about it, there's nothing to fight over. Even standard "man vs. nature" types work this way, because nature has to be personified in some way before the real humans will care about it.

So that got me thinking, the real Narrativist zinger for me is that the thematic decision points exist - it's not so much actually making the decisions as it is creating the choices. Maybe if I explained it in those terms it might help make things clearer. And there you have it. :)

It's a given that the urgent choice must be resolved - this is definitional. But, the actual in-game decision that the character makes is not the focus. The players will be interested in the meta-level meaning no matter what. The important is the urgent choice itself. As long as Exploring [1] urgent choices is the point of play, the game is Narrativism.

Ron Edwards wrote:
See? Everyone needs his own words. That's what I'd like visitors to the thread to try to do.

Hi John,

Welcome!

See, to me, that is stating it in your own words - finding your own examples is part of that.

C'mon, someone else do it. This is very valuable.

Best,
Ron

Ian Charvill wrote:

It's a given that the urgent choice must be resolved - this is definitional. But, the actual in-game decision that the character makes is not the focus. The players will be interested in the meta-level meaning no matter what. The important is the urgent choice itself. As long as Exploring [1] urgent choices is the point of play, the game is Narrativism.

Here I draw a blank - but I may just not be getting your phrasing. I presume you're saying the choice must be urgent for the players but not necessarily for the character (I think that when you get congruence between urgent for the characters and urgent for the players, this is exactly the point where sim and narrativism get awfully hard to tell apart).

Hi Ian,

I suggest trying it in your own words. Really, it is the only way.

Best,
Ron

Narrativism seems to me about being jazzed that you get to be the one who make the moral decisions, who gets to engage with the moral questions. In concrete terms, this seems to require heavy player authorship - either by author stance play or by front-loading the character with sufficient potential for moral issues to arise.

My understanding of narrativism is haunted by a sense of missing part of the puzzle. My core understanding is that the people at the table will be engaging with the moral elements of imagined play as the people at the table. But then things blur when I think about certain types of play that I feel in my bones are simulationist.

For me it doesn't matter how laden with theme and moral issues a simulationist game is, you only break into narrativism when what you feel as a person takes precedence over the established continuities of the imagined space (what my character would feel, what would be right for the genre).

Hi Ian,

Slam-dunk, as I see it. I guess I don't see the hollow or empty part at all, especially given your final paragraph.

If your "missing piece" is referring to Simulationist play that includes Theme, then yeah, there's tons of that available.

Best,
Ron

The curious, slippery thing about all this is in the nuances.

I agree with every word in Paganini's very first post on this thread - both as a characterization of Narrativism and as a characterization of what I am usually going for in GMing.

And yet I still draw a blank with the 'moral/ethical' talk. Partly this is terminological, I suspect - when I read things Ron says about Vance he apparently sees definitions of Humanity present, Premise, and all this stuff, whereas I view Vance as a more or less amoral writer, and purposefully so. (And this is part of why I love his work so much.) And yet substantively I suspect that disagreements between Ron and I about what Vance was actually trying to communicate in his fiction would be minimal - but he would use the word 'moral' or 'ethical' to talk about those kinds of conflicts, and I wouldn't.

This might have something to do with my inclination towards moral realism. On the other hand, I suspect that Martin Luther was a moral realist as well, and he had the following to say: that no man was an atheist, and that if you wanted to know what god a man worshipped you had simply to look at how he acted and what he valued in life. This tradition of judging a person's values as always inherently ethical goes back to Socrates, and come to think of it, I find this identity persuasive on a number of levels. So I will now cede the point, retract the rest of the last two paragraphs, and leave these electrons floating around the Forge in case others are struggling with similar errors. In that sense, at least, Narrativist play must always address moral or ethical issues.

Calithena, forgive me for adding to the thread when you've confessed yourself satisfied, but a possible helpful paraphrase popped into my head when I read your message, and the thread is about helpful paraphrases...

perhaps "moral/ethical" here can be paraphrased as "dealing with what Really Matters"?

I can see Vance as amoral in a sense (his *characters* are, indeed, gleefully amoral, and the narrator certainly never passes judgement on anything), but he does indeed write about Big Questions about what Really Matters, and his characters are always making decisions about those things (perhaps making decisions all that much more freely because they don't imagine themselves to be bound by any scruples).

Like, does it Really Matter if you are living among wretches in a mud hut if you imagine yourself (because of magic Cusps) to be living among princelings in a paradise? (That was the first Vancian theme that came to mind...) That sort of thing.

Hi, Ejh. I'll respond to this once just because I misspoke in my previous post, but this is really on to a new topic - Vance's fiction and the Dying Earth stories in particular - and since the Forge has no 'Off Topic' section (intentionally from what I can tell) I think we won't be able to continue the discussion to its bitter end.

First of all, Vance himself (qua author) does have an ethos, and it's one that's projected fairly consistently across most of his stories (most of which I have read). It's rather like the ethos of Odysseus, viewed through a lens consisting of twentieth century America (fast receding), science fiction and fantasy, and P.G. Wodehouse.

The only thing that causes problems is that when one talks about Vance's fiction that includes the Cugel stories, and those are different. They're IMO a hard case for the 'Egri school' of fiction no less than for Narrativist play, unless I'm just being obtuse - and the fact that Ron has suggested that DERPG is a kind of complicated case of Narrativism seems to support at least some kind of acknowledgement of that claim.

The Cugel stories and Vance's other fiction do actually contain very many value judgments, including a negative one on the very hut-dwelling contemplators of the Overworld you mention in your post. But the Cugel stories do not pass judgment on Cugel and indeed suggest that everyone in the Dying Earth is either amoral or a rube. That's part of the joy of that setting (not Vance's work more generally, however).

However, what I'm calling 'amorality' in the Cugel stories is actually a form of morality according to the Socratic conception - self-interest informs all decision-making, without any sort of veil or compromise. So again, the stories are driven by certain kinds of conflict - will indolence, arrogance, rakishness, sloth, or pettifoggery prevail? As well as the narrative conventions, themselves involving certain kinds of conflict, Ron observed in a thread where we discussed this previously, etc.

I'm really tempted to say that the glory of the Cugel stories just is the glory of being a Dickweed Protagonist, at a high and stylish level that leaves the less sophisticated and less clever dickweeds in the dust.

But now I'm outside the thread, and I'll stop, and won't discuss Vance here any longer. Let me just say that when I wrote 'Vance' in my previous post I should have written 'Vance in the Cugel stories', and that in those stories a slightly different ethos is at play than in most of Vance's other fiction. Though there are plenty of "NPCs" in Vance's other books that fit the Cugel mold, because Vance has a certain view of human nature more generally that informs his work as well. OK, enough.

Great post to start the thread, Paganini!

Hi all,

I'm not sure if "passing a moral judgement" is vital for Narrativism. I haven't read any Vance, but I've read a lot of Shakespeare and from his texts, I have no idea if Shakespeare was a very moral man or a fantastic story teller who knew how to grab his audience by the throat with moral issues.

And that, for me, is the key. What matters is the *exploration* of the moral issues -- Which Shakespeare does in spades.

(That all said, I must say this: I'm beginning to see how referencing fiction can really gum up the works of understanding these RPG modes because the game modes are really quite unique kinds of experiences. The examples of fiction, while sometimes relevant in illustrating an idea, often cloud what the actual event of *playing* Sim or Nar RPG mode is like. I'm starting to discipl;ine myself away from such references, because my head gets filled with the experience of reading a novel or seeing a movie -- and that experience has nothing at all to do in a concrete and blunt way, with the experience of playing Nar or Sim.)

Referring to the experience of play, Ian wrote:

"Narrativism seems to me about being jazzed that you get to be the one who make the moral decisions, who gets to engage with the moral questions. In concrete terms, this seems to require heavy player authorship - either by author stance play or by front-loading the character with sufficient potential for moral issues to arise."

I would add to this, the enjoyment of seeing how other people are exploring the Premise at the table. Because everyone has a character (or characters), and each person is playing from a different point of view (either from his or her actgual point of view, or simply, to provide thematic counterpuncture, purposefully exploring the Premise in ways no one else at the table is exploring it), it's possible for me to see the Premise explored in ways I would never thought of exploring it. (In fact, I truly think that by definition, a GM and two players will definitely provide exploration of Premise that will surprise each other.)

This to me is a major component of Nar play -- and it produces those "leaning in" moment I keep referencing. By exploring a single Premise, and then discovering all the permutations possible in responding to the Premise, I find myself surprised moment to moment. This in turn feeds my next choice for for my PC in ways I might not have thought of had I not seen the player of a PC in another scene do something uncanny with the premise.

Best,
Christopher

Hello,

The judgment issue should be confined to the persons experiencing the Premise emotionally. The notion of what an author intends to convey by providing fictional material is I think a horrible gaping abyss to be avoided at all cost.

The fact that all members of the role-playing group can be considered audience* in these terms is what we should focus on for Narrativist play.

Best,
Ron

* This has absolutely nothing to do with Stance.

All right, I'll play along. I've had to think hard about my own "I get it" wording, because it's different from how I portray Narrativism and other creative agendas when I write about them. (IOW, I've been doing a lot of filtering and translation back and forth.)

At the time I was absorbing GNS, I was also very interested in transactional models, and thought that there might be benefits to combining the two. Didn't really get very far with that. Nothing new seems to be added to GNS by incoporating a transactional perspective. The space is already covered.

But the effort had one lasting effect on my "my-own-words" for Narrativism (and other Creative Agendas). Which is that I think of the totality of a participant's behavior in play (in character and out of character) as a form of expression -- speech, if you will.

Creative Agenda asks, what is the participant speaking (expressing himself) about, through play?

If it's primarily about the participant's own capabilities, it's Gamism.

If it's primarily about the shared imagined space itself, it's Simulationism.

If it's primarily about a Premise question of emotional or moral import, it's Narrativism.

The difference between asking, "how is a player behaving?" and "what is the player's Creative Agenda?" is similar to the difference between asking "what is (a speaker) saying" and "what is (the speaker) talking about?" The first has to be interpreted in context to determine the second.

Coherence/incoherence: Think of a conversation. If two people are talking about the same thing but saying different things about it, you've got discourse (as long as they're also listening to each other). If two people are talking about different things, you've got noise, even if they appear to be agreeing about what they're saying.

Instances of play: If you want to interpret what someone's talking about, it's not enough to focus on a word here and there, or a sentence or two. A full expression of an idea can take time -- perhaps a paragraph, perhaps a novel. Analogously, the instance of play is an amount of play sufficient for participants to clearly express themselves.

It makes it all seem very simple, to me.

- Walt

edit: Oh, and "address" as in "address Premise" then just means "to express one's thoughts about through play."

Yeah. O.K. What was it for me?

Shortly after System Does Matter appeared at GO, we were debating it rather vigorously. Ron appeared at that time to be saying that every player played to one primary CA (then they were called "goals") rather consistently; I insisted that, as far as I could see, I played to all of them. This probably was debated for a while, up through the When the Rubber Meets the Road post, and immediately after that I pointed out that those tests put me gamist, simulationist, and narrativist (whether those are valid tests is now doubtful, but at the time they seemed to fit). So I again said that I played to all three goals.

Ron's response was, but not all at once.

That was it. I got it. He was absolutely right--I would shift between trying to win, exploring the world, and addressing moral issues all the time, but I was clearly shifting.

Looking back at those games, what happened when I shifted?

• Sometimes, such as when Bob and I were the only players, he shifted with me, and we tackled whatever came as a team that worked together. Similarly, I would follow his lead when he shifted to something else. It was all fun, and whatever we did next was fine with both of us.• In other groups, I tended to be a dominant player--if I shifted what the game was about, everyone followed me. By then I had a decade on everyone else, so there was a tendency for people, even referees, to see what I did as "the right way to play" (particularly as most of them learned to play by playing at my table). They didn't necessarily want to go everywhere I went, but they always followed my lead when I was a player.• I think in many cases if I drifted the game somewhere they didn't like, a good chunk of the group just dropped out for a bit--watched, or refilled their sodas and opened more snacks, or wandered to the other end of the room to talk about other parts of the game or something.

It has only been within the past few years that I've been in any games in which I wasn't either the referee or the party leader, so I tend to play pretty aggressively in terms of setting the tone of what was happening; even looking at a few of the recent games where I wasn't in one of those two positions, I tended to be in the forefront of what was happening. In one case, I played "the cavalier who didn't realize he wasn't the party leader just because they let him walk in front", technically always taking his cues from the hobbit thief whom everyone was actually following--but here, the grand sweeping dynamic personality of that character tended to set a lot of tone there. Later, I was playing a young female Wizard, and constantly giving everyone advice on what we should do, or asking them what we should do, or otherwise pushing the players through character interaction to move forward and do something.

It's not always so; in the last Gamma World group we started a couple years back my characters were both rather quiet background characters; but I think the players largely looked to me for some sort of help creating cohesion and moving the game forward (novice referee and all teenagers in the group other than me). But in the main when I drift I take everyone with me or leave them behind.

That's probably a bit incoherent, but most of the players have stayed with me over the years so it hasn't been too bad.

Anyway, that was the thing that made it clear to me: that although I played to all three agendae, it was always one at a time.

--M. J. Young