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                             Narrativism: Story Now

   by Ron Edwards <[8]sorcerer@sorcerer-rpg.com>
   Copyright 2003 Adept Press

   Acknowledgments are due to Mike Holmes, Ralph Mazza, Christopher Kubasik,
   Jesse Burneko, Paul Czege, Clinton R. Nixon, Vincent Baker, Seth Ben-Ezra,
   M. J. Young, Chris Chinn, Pete Darby, Gordon C. Landis, Walt Freitag, and
   Matt Snyder for comments on the first draft of this essay. All mistakes or
   misattributions should be considered my responsibility.

   This is the third of three essays building upon the topics addressed in
   "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory"
   ([9]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/). The previous two essays were
   "Simulationism: The Right to Dream"
   ([10]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/), and "Gamism: Step On Up"
   ([11]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/). This series' purposes are to
   clarify the original essay and to develop and incorporate insights from
   discussions at the Forge.

   This one is about Narrativist play, which is simultaneously the least and
   most problematic of the Creative Agendas I've described. It's incredibly
   easy in application, and the most difficult for discussion. I think that
   this difficulty lies mainly in some of the peculiarities of
   role-player/gamer culture, entrenched in the history of the hobby, rather
   than any particular logical or cognitive hitches in the mode of play
   itself.

   In the first two essays, I began presenting an overall model of
   role-playing, but piecemeal and in stumbling verbal form. As of this
   writing, I've finished that model, and it is included here as well. It's a
   bit out of place, being more of a capstone or umbrella to the three essays
   rather than an intrinsic piece of the Narrativist one. More complete
   discussions about it may also be found in "The whole model - this is it"
   ([12]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8655).

History of the term

   The Threefold Model for role-playing included the term Dramatism, as
   presented by John Kim at his Threefold Model
   ([13]http://www.darkshire.net/~jhkim/rpg/theory/) webpage. When I learned
   about the Threefold, I'd already been thinking about stuff I'd later call
   Currency and also about Jonathan Tweet's discussion of resolution
   presented in Everway. The basic notion of the Threefold impressed me: it
   was time to talk about goals and priorities independently of everything
   else, then to see whether everything else flowed to and from them. This
   was at the time that Sorcerer was making its small way into commerce, so
   the mailing list was the place for our first discussions; most of them are
   archived at the Sorcerer website ([14]http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com).

   At this point, since "Drama" as a resolution category in Tweet's schema
   and "Dramatism" as a goals-category in the Threefold referred to two
   different things, I decided that the names were confusing. Going by which
   set of ideas was first presented (Tweet's), I changed Dramatism to
   Narrativism. This terminological change was limited to discussions on the
   Sorcerer mailing list and later at the Gaming Outpost.

   However, our use of the terms and ideas on the Sorcerer mailing list took
   on its own character almost immediately, such that in my first essay
   "System Does Matter" ([15]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/11/), "story"
   was already its own distinct, process-oriented term.

   The biggest change in my thinking about role-playing is represented in the
   essay "GNS and other matters of role-playing theory"
   ([16]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), in which the concept of
   Exploration becomes the underlying foundation for the three modes or goals
   of play. This new picture was startling: (1) potential story elements were
   now considered present for all three modes play, and (2)Narrativism now
   appeared to be a mirror image or twin sibling of Gamism, counter to older
   impressions shared by me and anyone else who ever wrote about role-playing
   that Gamism was the odd man out.

   I've tried to emphasize this new outlook throughout these three supportive
   essays. Whereas I think most people think of Gamism with (or synonymous
   with) its Hard Core variant over in one ballpark, with Simulationism
   containing an internal "story" variant in another ballpark, my concepts
   are radically different. I hope to make this picture, and its
   implications, entirely clear in this essay.

The foundation: Exploration and more

   Here's the big ol' model for role-playing that the previous two essays
   sort of fumbled at. Notice that "rules" are absent; I now consider "rules"
   simply to mean text, which may be about anything you find in the model.
   The brackets are very important: if B relates to A as [A[B]], then B is
   considered a part, application, version, or expression of A.

   [Social Contract]. Social Contract encompasses everything else about
   role-playing. If these people happen to be role-playing together, then
   Social Contract crucially includes "Let's play this game." This crucial
   element is what's further subdivided throughout the rest of this model.

   [Social Contract [Exploration]]. Exploration means "shared imaginings."
   The sharing has to be explicit and agreed upon, usually through the spoken
   word although any form of communication counts. The imaginings have to be
   the subject that is shared, which is why me reading aloud to my wife does
   not constitute Exploration. We are independently imagining based on the
   spoken word, but neither she nor I is telling the other what we imagine
   from that point. Exploration means that such communication is occurring.

   The five elements of Exploration are interdependent: Character + Setting
   make Situation, System permits Situation to "move," and Color affects all
   the others. This concept applies only to the imaginary causes among the
   elements; the real people's actual priority or cause among these things,
   in social and creative terms, varies widely. See my essay "GNS and other
   matters of role-playing theory"
   ([17]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/) for more about these elements.

   [Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda]]]. Creative Agenda is the
   blanket term for people's demonstrated goals and desired feedback during
   play. In the past, I called it "GNS." Since all of this is enclosed in
   Social Contract, GNS-stuff is not only "what I want" but also "what I want
   from role-playing with this group of people." Since Exploration
   necessarily includes System, that means, as soon as we start talking about
   Creative Agenda, real play has begun.

   On paper, I draw this term as an arrow, because this "step" or "level" in
   my model shifts out of the abstract and solidly into this group, playing
   this game, this way, at this time. The model instantly ceases to be a
   broad overview and becomes a diagnostic or description of a real
   play-experience among real people. Unless you are thinking of such a case,
   you will be left flailing at this point in the discussion.

   [Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques]]]]. The
   panoply of Techniques being employed over time either satisfy or fail to
   satisfy one or more Creative Agendas. Techniques include IIEE,
   Drama/Karma/Fortune, search time & handling time, narration apportioning,
   reward system, points of contact, character components, scene framing,
   currency among the character components, and much more. Each of these
   terms represents a range of potential play-methods. I consider the two
   most important Techniques to be reward system and IIEE (see glossary).

   Techniques may be thought of as directly expressing the more abstract
   concept of System (way up in Exploration), except that System doesn't
   exist all by itself - it's fully integrated with the other components of
   Exploration. But if you keep that in mind, then yes, the arrow represented
   by Creative Agenda can indeed be "shot" from the bow of System.

   Techniques do not map 1:1 to Creative Agenda, but combinations of
   Techniques do support or obstruct Creative Agendas.

   [Social Contract [Exploration [Creative Agenda --> [Techniques
   [Ephemera]]]]]. Ephemera refers to the smallest-scale interactions and
   activities of role-playing: anything that gets factored into or is
   expressed by play in the space of a few seconds. As with every level/box
   so far, fairly extensive combinations of Ephemera express or apply to one
   or more Techniques. They are the internal anatomy, if you will, of
   Techniques and hence (conceptualizing upward) of System.

   Ephemera include individual Stances, in-character vs. out-of-character
   diction and dialogue, referring to texts, sound effects, taking or
   referring to notes, kibitzing, laughing, praise or disapproval, showing
   pictures, and anything similar.

   Understanding any Creative Agenda, in this case Narrativism, means
   examining its potential roles and expressions in the whole model.
   Narrativism's little code phrase for that purpose is "Story Now."

  Story

   Long ago, I concluded that "story" as a role-playing term was standing in
   for several different processes and goals, some of which were
   incompatible. Here's the terms-breakdown I'll be using from now on.

   All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go
   ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where
   they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the
   "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little
   something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a
   certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript
   has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.

   Let's say that the following transcript, which also happens to be a story,
   arose from one or more sessions of role-playing.

   Lord Gyrax rules over a realm in which a big dragon has begun to ravage
   the countryside. The lord prepares himself to deal with it, perhaps trying
   to settle some internal strife among his followers or allies. He also
   meets this beautiful, mysterious woman named Javenne who aids him at
   times, and they develop a romance. Then he learns that she and the dragon
   are one and the same, as she's been cursed to become a dragon periodically
   in a kind of Ladyhawke situation, and he must decide whether to kill her.
   Meanwhile, she struggles to control the curse, using her dragon-powers to
   quell an uprising in the realm led by a traitorous ally. Eventually he
   goes to the Underworld instead and confronts the god who cursed her, and
   trades his youth to the god to lift the curse. He returns, and the curse
   is detached from her, but still rampaging around as a dragon. So they slay
   the dragon together, and return as a couple, still united although he's
   now all old, to his home.

   The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a
   story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during
   the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether
   people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination
   of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The
   mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based
   issue.

Story Now

   Story Now requires that at least one engaging issue or problematic feature
   of human existence be addressed in the process of role-playing. "Address"
   means:

     * Establishing the issue's Explorative expressions in the game-world,
       "fixing" them into imaginary place.

     * Developing the issue as a source of continued conflict, perhaps
       changing any number of things about it, such as which side is being
       taken by a given character, or providing more depth to why the
       antagonistic side of the issue exists at all.

     * Resolving the issue through the decisions of the players of the
       protagonists, as well as various features and constraints of the
       circumstances.

   Can it really be that easy? Yes, Narrativism is that easy. The Now refers
   to the people, during actual play, focusing their imagination to create
   those emotional moments of decision-making and action, and paying
   attention to one another as they do it. To do that, they relate to "the
   story" very much as authors do for novels, as playwrights do for plays,
   and screenwriters do for film at the creative moment or moments. Think of
   the Now as meaning, "in the moment," or "engaged in doing it," in terms of
   input and emotional feedback among one another. The Now also means "get to
   it," in which "it" refers to any Explorative element or combination of
   elements that increases the enjoyment of that issue I'm talking about.

   There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have
   such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole
   point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). Story Now has a
   great deal in common with Step On Up, particularly in the social
   expectation to contribute, but in this case the real people's attention is
   directed toward one another's insights toward the issue, rather than
   toward strategy and guts.

Say it yourself

   I receive a lot of emails like this one from Landon Darkwood:

   I think I may have had a revelation.

   ... In your Simulationism essay, you have this: "'Story,' in this context,
   refers to the sequence of events that provide a payoff in terms of
   recognizing and enjoying the genre during play."

   Is this the key to distinguishing the [Narrativist vs. Simulationist] play
   modes? My intepretation of this statement is that in Simulationist gaming,
   a long and complex story might come about and be part of play, but only
   for the express purpose of bringing about all the appropriate genre
   elements in the game as part of the internal consistency of the Dream.
   i.e., a Sim game Colored with elements from Chinese wuxia movies might
   have a multilayered story involving class conflict, people being trapped
   by their social position, repressed romance, heavy action, a sorcerer and
   his eunuch henchmen - but these are all trappings of the genre. So, their
   inclusion in the game, part and parcel as they are to the Dream, isn't
   Narrativist because no one is creating a theme that isn't already there.
   In other words, it's just played out as the Situation part of the
   Exploration; because the Dream calls for it, there just so happens to be a
   kind of intricacy involved.

   In Narrativism, by contrast, the major source of themes are the ones that
   are brought to the table by the players / GM (if there is one) regardless
   of the genre or setting used. So, to sum up, themes in Nar play are
   created by the participants and that's the point; themes in Sim play are
   already present in the Dream, reinforced by the play, and kind of a
   by-product.

   Am I on this now?

   "In a word," I replied, "Yes."

   Narrativism has a single definition, but it's difficult to articulate for
   people grappling with muddled RPG terminology. As far as I was concerned,
   not only had I presented what Landon said in "GNS and other matters of
   role-playing theory" ([18]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), I'd
   repeated it dozens of times in forum discussions. In fact, I'd said it in
   the message to Landon that immediately preceded this reply. But he had to
   say it himself, with his own use of words like "just" and "genre." I am
   now convinced, after many such exchanges, that an "experienced"
   role-player comes to this conclusion only by working it out in his or her
   own terms and examples.

  Premise

   How is this done, actually, in play? It relies on the concept of something
   called Premise and its relationship to an emergent theme.

   I already snuck Premise past you: it's that "problematic issue" I
   mentioned. I've taken the term from The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos
   Egri. In reading what follows, bear in mind that he is discussing the
   process of writing, not an existing playscript or a performance:

   ... every good premise is composed of three parts, each of which is
   essential to a good play. Let us examine "frugality equals waste." The
   first part of this premise suggest character - a frugal character. The
   second part, "leads to," suggests conflict, and the third part, "waste,"
   suggests the end of the play. ...

   A good premise is a thumbnail synopsis of your play. [examples follow,
   including "Egotism leads to loss of friends." - RE]

   ... What is wrong, then? What is missing?

   The author's conviction is missing. Until he takes sides, there is no
   play. Does egotism lead to loss of friends? Which side will you take? We,
   the readers or spectators of your play, do not necessarily agree with your
   convictions. Through your play you must therefore prove to us the validity
   of your contention.

   A protagonist is not "some guy," but rather "the guy who thinks THIS, and
   does something accordingly when he encounters adversity." Stories are not
   created by running some kind of linear-cause program, but rather are
   brutally judgmental statements upon the THIS, as an idea or a way of
   being. That judgment is enacted or exemplified in the resolution of the
   conflict, and a conviction that is proved to us (as Egri says),constitutes
   theme. Even if we (the audience) disagree with it, we at least must have
   been moved to do so at an emotional level.

   I think that any reliable means of story-writing, in any medium, conforms
   to Egri's principles. They may seem simplistic: the burning passion of the
   protagonist directly expresses a burning passion of the author's, who uses
   the plot as a polemic to demonstrate it. However, "Why Johnny shouldn't
   smoke dope" is only the starting point. More nuanced, ambiguous, and
   insightful applications arise insofar as more nuanced, ambiguous, and
   insightful authors and audiences are involved.

   I said earlier that any role-playing can produce a story, and that's so.
   But Narrativist role-playing is defined by the people involved placing
   their direct creative attention toward Premise and toward birthing its
   child, theme. It sounds simple, and in many ways it is. The real variable
   is the emotional connection that everyone at the table makes when a
   player-character does something. If that emotional connection is
   identifiable as a Premise, and if that connection is nurtured and
   developed through the real-people interactions, then Narrativist play is
   under way. Some nuances:

     * "Character does something" can mean foreshadowing, flashback, and
       anything in between. It can mean the character is just thinkin' about
       it, or it can mean the character flat-out does it. As long as the
       fictional character is brought into the perceptions and possible
       emotional responses of the other people at the table, then it counts.

     * It doesn't matter whether the character fictionally "meant" to do the
       action, premeditated it, or acted on-the-spot.

     * In stories (unlike real life), the character's immediate environment
       is kind of a weird sidekick, who sometimes acts in the character's
       favor and sometimes against him or her. "Character does something"
       often includes this sidekick's behavior.

     * "Identifiable" means assessing how the players treat one another
       during the process, socially.

   From my essay "GNS and related matters of role-playing theory"
   ([19]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/):

   Narrativist Premises focus on producing Theme via events during play.
   Theme is defined as a value-judgment or point that may be inferred from
   the in-game events. My thoughts on Narrativist Premise are derived from
   the book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, specifically his
   emphasis on the questions that arise from human conundrums and passions of
   all sorts.

     * Is the life of a friend worth the safety of a community?

     * Does love and marriage override one's loyalty to a political cause?

     * And many, many more - the full range of literature, myth, and stories
       of all sorts.

   Narrativist Premises vary regarding their origins: character-driven
   Premise vs. setting-driven Premise, for instance. They also vary a great
   deal in terms of unpredictable "shifts" of events during play. The key to
   Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that
   engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is
   produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by
   pre-planning.

     * A possible Narrativist development of the "vampire" initial Premise,
       with a strong character emphasis, might be, Is it right to sustain
       one's immortality by killing others? When might the justification
       break down?

     * Another, with a strong setting emphasis, might be, Vampires are
       divided between ruthlessly exploiting and lovingly nurturing living
       people, and which side are you on?

   I'm still saying the same thing. But now, I've returned to my earlier
   usage; it's the only meaning for the term "Premise" in my model.

   That bit about moral and ethical content is merely one of those
   personalized clincher-phrasings that some people find helpful. It helps to
   distinguish a Premise from "my guy fought a dragon, so that's a conflict,
   so that's a Premise" thinking. However, if these terms bug you, then say,
   "problematic human issue" instead.

   Egri presents his Premises as flat statements, and I state them as
   questions. Using the question form isn't changing anything about what Egri
   is saying. Premise must pose a question to the real people, creator and
   audience alike. The fictional character's belief in something like
   "Freedom is worth any price" is already an implicit question: "Is it
   really? Even when [insert Situation]?" Otherwise it will fail to engage
   anyone.

   Egri's statement-construction is very useful for the single author faced
   with a blank sheet of paper, with the goal at hand being a finished
   script. The audience will see the play, not the process of creation.
   However, in the role-playing medium, not only are there multiple authors,
   but the audience is also composed of these same authors, and their
   appreciation of the material occurs simultaneously with the significant
   creative decisions. Therefore, the Premise's imaginary resolution is up
   for grabs among the group in role-playing, just as it is up for grabs
   within the author's own head before the play reaches final draft. In the
   latter case, the jump to "the point" is swift and hopefully certain; in
   the former case, the new medium, it is anything but. I phrase it as a
   question for role-playing, to indicate that everyone involved has his or
   her fair crack at it as one of the authors.

   From Robin Laws' essay "The Literary Edge," published in Over the Edge
   (Atlas Games, 1992):

   OTE is, among other things, an attempt to further the development of
   role-playing as art. GMs will find it fruitful to approach decisions as an
   artist creating a collaborative work with players. The idea of
   collaboration is important: the GM is not a "storyteller" with the players
   as audience, but merely a "first among equals" given responsibility for
   the smooth progress of the developing story.

   ... The GM is not a movie director, able to order actors to interpret a
   script a given way. Instead, he should be seeking ways to challenge PCs,
   to use plot development to highlight aspects of their character, in hopes
   of being challenged in return.

   ... For years, role-players have been simulating fictional narratives the
   way wargamers recreate historical military engagements. They've been
   making spontaneous, democratized art for their own consumption, even if
   they haven't seen it in those terms. Making the artistry conscious is a
   liberating act, making it easier to emulate the classic tales that inspire
   us. Have fun with it, and enjoy your special role in aesthetic history -
   it's not everybody who gets to be a pioneer in the development of a new
   art form.

   Egri's Premise, meet role-playing. Oh, I can quibble ... instead of the
   word "conscious," I prefer "mindful," and I think that "emulate the
   classic tales" is a bit simplistic, but never mind. The point is, if you
   want a Narrativist Manifesto from one of the great minds of role-playing,
   then there you go.

   Here's a bit more about that theme business. Think of it as the conclusive
   "uh!" that may accompany the climax and resolution of a story. It's
   uttered by the playwright as he hits a certain key or scribes a certain
   sentence, by the audience members at a certain point as they view the
   play, and by role-players in both capacities during the session, often
   simultaneously.

   From the discussion of themes in the chapter "The Art of Storytelling" in
   Demon's Lair: the "God" Guide (Lasalion Games, 2002):

   The theme is the idea that you wish to explore in the story. It brings
   unity to the story and is explored throughout the story by the actions of
   the players and the main characters. Even the obstacle or conflict that
   forms the plot usually resonates with the theme. It is the thread that
   ties everything together and usually teaches the players something.

   Substitute Premise for theme, and theme for the "something," and that's
   just about right. I especially like the implied causality: (1) the actions
   of the players (2) teach the players something, which becomes non-circular
   when play actually addresses Premise. Unfortunately, few other features of
   Demon's Lair, including the example which follows the above text, are
   consistent with this point, and most are wildly at odds with it.

   More insights about theme are available in Chris Chinn's article "The
   power of myth" in Daedalus #1, in which the word "theme" may be
   substituted for "myth" throughout.

  The other way: pastiche

   What happens when you want a story but don't want to play with Story Now?
   Then the story becomes a feature of Exploration with the process of play
   being devoted to how to make it happen as expected. The participation of
   more than one person in the process is usually a matter of providing
   improvisational additions to be filtered through the primary
   story-person's judgment, or of providing extensive Color to the story.
   Under these circumstances, the typical result is pastiche: a story which
   recapitulates an already-existing story's theme, with many explicit
   references to that story.

   Is pastiche necessarily bad and evil? No. Is non-pastiche necessarily
   incredibly good? No.

   Here's a little dialogue between me and one of the first-draft readers of
   this essay:

   Jesse: Now we come to a point of personal confusion. Pastiche. I still
   don't get it, in any medium. If the Situation involves "...class conflict,
   people being trapped by their social position, repressed romance..." and
   the GM lets the players resolve it anyway they like, then how is that not
   Narrativist?

   Me: It is Narrativist. What you're describing is not pastiche, or more
   clearly, it typically does not produce pastiche. The key is the "resolve
   it any way they like" part.

   Jesse: Similarly if I'm writing a story and I make a check-list of items I
   feel like I "need" to include to tell the "kind of" story I want to tell,
   and I have a character experience and resolve those things, then how have
   I not written a new story?

   Me: You have. What you're missing is that pastiche does not do this at all
   - instead, it references existing works in order to re-invoke what they,
   originally, provided for the reader/viewer, rather than doing it on its
   own. Die Hard is an outstanding movie. Passenger 57 stinks on ice. Why?
   Because Passenger 57 is only enjoyable if it reminds you, successfully, of
   Die Hard. Same goes for Broken Arrow, Con Air, and a slew of similar
   films. [Disclosure: I do enjoy many of these films, on the basis of the
   "reminder" alone. - RE]

   And it's not a matter of "who does it first." Die Hard works because it
   nails its Premise, with the explosions and one-liners all being supportive
   of that goal. The other movies fail to provide Premise of their own,
   merely using the explosions and one-liners to remind you of Die Hard, and
   by (putative) extension, tapping into Die Hard's Premise through
   association alone.

   Jesse: I guess I'm having trouble resolving a couple of things. Either I
   can't imagine the items listed above being included in the absence of
   Premise or I'm too stuck on the idea that there's nothing new under the
   sun. I mean how many romantic comedies are written off the premise, "true
   love can only be found by putting aside petty differences." Are you saying
   that 90% of romantic comedies are just pastiche? And if you are saying
   that, then aren't you putting kind of a tall order up if for something to
   be Narrativist it has to say something totally unique that no one has ever
   said before?

   Huh, I just noticed that I did shift focus from repetition of elements
   that express a Premise to repetition of Premise itself, so maybe that has
   something to do with my confusion.

   Me: Yes, it does. With any luck my text above has helped. It's not the
   "new-ness" of the Premise or theme, it's its presence and power in the
   particular story. Pastiche has no such presence or power, just reminders
   of them in other stories through common motifs. Many romantic comedies are
   indeed pastiche (some of them quite clever), but a certain number of them
   are not - and whether they say the same thing as, say, Gentlemen Prefer
   Blondes or The Devil and Miss Jones is irrelevant. The point is whether
   they as self-contained stories actually do say it, or anything at all.

   Jesse: I'm just still a little confused between Narrativism and
   Simulationism where the Situation has a lot of ethical/moral problems
   embedded in it and the GM uses no Force techniques to produce a specific
   outcome. I don't understand how Premise-expressing elements can be
   included and players not be considered addressing a Premise when they
   can't resolve the Situation without doing so.

   Me: There is no such Simulationism. You're confused between Narrativism
   and Narrativism, looking for a difference when there isn't any.

   My final point for this issue is that creating pastiche is primarily a
   form of fandom, pure homage to an existing body of work. Most High Concept
   Simulationist play gravitates toward it, and some game texts are
   explicitly about nothing else.

Issues on the table

   I submit that playing in the Narrativist mode is just as intuitive and
   instantly understood by most people as Gamist play. Not everyone agrees.

  Two sources of resistance and confusion

   The most difficult aspect of writing this essay is the presence of two
   distinct problematic audiences, neither of which I realized existed when I
   first wrote System Does Matter ([20]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1).
   - Role-players who greatly value the story quality of their transcripts,
   but don't play Narrativist to make them. It's often painful for them to
   be, as they see it, relegated to Simulationist play (usually Exploration
   of Situation). "We create stories too, dammit!" - Role-players who play
   Narrativist already, but who think what I'm describing must be harder or
   more abstract than it is. Since they can identify Exploration of Character
   and Situation in their play preferences, they think they must be playing
   Simulationist. "That's Narrativist? But we do that, using a plain old
   well-known role-playing game - it can't be Narrativist!"

   The first problem these audiences pose for me is that any point, example,
   or clarification I make that's specific to one of them is automatically
   misleading for the other.

   The second problem is that, when I say Not Narrativist to the first, and
   when the second mistakenly says Not Narrativist to me, then Narrativism as
   a label gets misconstrued as "how Ron himself plays."

   I can't afford giving special consideration to these outlooks in this
   essay. Otherwise I'd have to write three separate essays, two of them
   piece-by-piece dismantling the respective bugaboos, and one "everyone else
   essay." I've decided to reserve the customized discussions for the on-line
   forums.

  What it ain't

   The following misunderstandings only arise from exposure to the
   role-playing subculture, as distinct from the activity. I'll have more to
   say about that later in the essay.

    1. The so-called Storyteller rules-set is not especially, nor even
       partly, facilitative toward Narrativist play. Furthermore, I have
       observed only a decided minority of White Wolf play that can be called
       Narrativist, usually involving considerable rules-Drift.

   2 (related). Adhering to published metaplot which is intended to surprise
   and involve players in tandem with their characters, or any similar
   one-hand-on-rudder for the crucial story decisions, will not facilitate
   Narrativist play.

    1. The number of textual rules involved, as well as how much the rules
       must be consulted during play, are irrelevant. "Narrativist? Must be
       rules-light!" is just one of those little humps to get over.

    2. Focusing on single Techniques to define Narrativism will not yield
       understanding. For instance, Drama resolution is not in and of itself
       Narrativist. Nor are the common use of improvisation, trading of
       narration, and overt Director stance, in and of themselves,
       Narrativist play.

    3. Issues of "consciousness" in terms of Premise are collectively a
       complete red herring. People daily address Premise without
       self-reflecting, both as audience and authors. There's no special need
       to say to one another, "This is the Premise" in order to be playing
       Narrativist. Laws' term "conscious" and my "mindful" only refer to the
       attention to and social reinforcement of the process - not to
       self-analytical or abstract discussion about the content.

    4. Narrativist play doesn't force a "separation" from the imaginative
       commitment to the role-playing. As the whole medium of Creative Agenda
       is Exploration, you don't have to diminish Exploration at all during
       Narrativist play. It is instead focused and heightened as the
       mechanism for addressing Premise.

    5. Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables.
       The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point,
       not whether the point is deep.

Fundamental Techniques

  People's creative roles: what you do

   Narrativist play makes special use of the general role-playing principle
   that the participants are simultaneously authors and audience. The common
   metaphor of improvisational jazz applies quite well, better than any other
   medium-comparison. "Entertainment," in role-playing in general and in
   Narrativist play especially, does not flow from playwright to script to
   production team to audience. Instead, the shared-imagining act = the
   shared-performance act = the entertainment = the audience feedback.

   Role-playing texts are consistently very confusing about how conflicts and
   resolutions are established in play, especially in games whose mechanics
   and some features of their instructions suggest Narrativist play. "Prep
   and plan carefully! But story never goes as planned, so be ready to change
   and improvise!" What's that supposed to mean, from a Narrativist
   perspective?

   I grappled with this in my own work - from the chapter "Fantastic
   Adventure" in Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron Edwards):

   The doctrine for Sorcerer & Sword relies ... on the following idea: -
   Playing this game, for all concerned, means creating stories about one or
   more heroic protagonists. - The player produces the protagonist's
   decisions and thus directly creates the story. - The GM makes it possible
   for such play to occur, and therefore has great power over events in the
   game world. However, he or she does not determine the protagonists'
   actions, and must fully respond to those actions when they do occur.

   Therefore, the GM cannot be considered "the narrator" or "the storyteller"
   in any way, shape, or form. Such an entity exists as the outcome of the
   GM-player interface and continuing creativity. His or her arbitrative role
   in game events, as well as most of the Director power over time and space,
   do remain. But the purpose of that role is inspiring and facilitating, not
   dictating.

   That text is specific to Sorcerer, so it needs expanding into what the
   term "GM" means in the first place, and how the answer is subordinate to
   Creative Agenda - and in fact, is nothing more nor less than a Techniques
   question for role-playing in general.

   I suggest that considering "the GM" to be either (a) necessarily one
   person or (b) a specific and universally-consistent role is badly mistaken
   - we are really talking about a set of potential behaviors (roles, tasks,
   whatever) which may be independently centralized within or distributed
   across a group of people. Here are some of those GM behaviors, roles, and
   tasks: - rules-applier and interpreter, as in "referee" - in-game-world
   time manager - changer of scenes - color provider - ensurer of protagonist
   screen time - regulator of pacing (in real time) - authority over what
   information can be acted upon by which characters - authority over
   internal plausibility - "where the buck stops" in terms of establishing
   the Explorative content - social manager of who gets to speak when

   A given role-playing experience must have these things - there is no such
   thing as "GM-less" play. But which of these require(s) enforcing varies
   greatly, as does whether they are concentrated into a particular person,
   and as does whether that person is openly acknowledged as such. What
   matters for Narrativist play, however, isn't any specific point in the
   diversity-matrix of these variables - it's about what the person (or
   persons) currently in the GM-role is responsible for.

   From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1997, author is Christian Aldridge):

   Narrative Tools

   ... The whole premise of role-playing is the freedom the players have to
   take their characters in whatever direction they want. It is important to
   maintain this free will, and not lead the players with a heavy hand down a
   course only the narrator controls. Though the narrator may tell a good
   story, it loses the rich creative spirit of role-playing if the players
   have little say in what happens.

   Putting aside the synecdoche ("the whole premise," etc), two key features
   show up in this passage as well as in the whole of the Maelstrom game
   text. (1) No mention is made whatever of seeming to grant player control -
   it's real freedom he's talking about. (2) The freedom is specifically over
   what the character thinks is right and decides to do: the goal he or she
   brings into the current imaginary situation. The GM ("narrator" in this
   case) cannot wield any authority over what the characters are supposed to
   want, which therefore extends to a similar lack of authority over how any
   conflict during play is supposed to turn out.

   From Christopher Kubasik's Interactive Toolkit series of essays (1995,
   originally published in White Wolf Inphobia #50-53):

   So, what are the differences between roleplaying games and Story
   Entertainments? Let's start with roleplaying's GM (referee, Storyteller,
   or whatever). This is usually the person who works out the plot, the world
   and everything that isn't the players'. To a greater or lesser degree, she
   is above the other players in importance, depending on the group's
   temperament. In a Story Entertainment, she is just another player.
   Distinctly different, but no more and no less than any other player. The
   terms GM and referee fail to convey this spirit of equality. The term
   Storyteller suggests that the players are passive listeners of her tale.
   So here's another term for this participant - one that invokes the spirit
   of Story Entertainment - Fifth Business.

   Fifth Business is a term that originates from European opera companies. A
   character from Robertson Davies' novel, ... Fifth Business, describes the
   term this way:

   "You cannot make a plot work without another man, and he is usually a
   baritone, and he is called in the profession Fifth Business. You must have
   a Fifth Business because he is the one who knows the secret of the hero's
   birth, or comes to the assistance of the heroine when she thinks all is
   lost, or keeps the hermitess in her cell, or may even be the cause of
   someone's death, if that is part of the plot. The prima donna and the
   tenor, the contralto and the basso, get all the best music and do all the
   spectacular things, but you cannot manage the plot without the Fifth
   Business!"

   This certainly sounds like the GM, but it also makes it clear that he's
   part of the show, not the show itself.

   Let's call the players Leads. They're not players in the GM's game.
   They're participants in a story. The Fifth Business has a lot more work to
   do than do the Leads, changing costumes and shaping the story while it's
   in progress. But the Leads are equal to the Fifth Business. The Leads must
   react to the characters, incidents, and information that the Fifth
   Business offers, just as players must react to what the GM offers in a
   roleplaying game. But the Fifth Business must always be on his toes and
   react to what the Leads offer.

   ... The Fifth Business can't decide what the plot is going to be and then
   run the players through it like mice in a maze. The Leads determine the
   direction of the story when they create their characters ... What do the
   characters want? What are their goals? The story is about their attempt to
   gain those goals. The Fifth Business creates obstacles to those goals.

   [From Part 3, "Character, character, character"]

   As the designer of the character you shouldn't simply depend on the Fifth
   Business ... to provide you with trouble. You should look for trouble for
   your character. ...

   Moreover, you know best of all what kind of problems you want for your
   character. ... in a story entertainment you're not the passive passenger
   in the gamemaster's roller coaster. You are a co-creator with Fifth
   Business and the other players of a story.

   [From Part 4, "Running Story Entertainments"]

   Listen to the players, keep in mind the idea of obstacles, mix up volatile
   characters and objects, and remember you don't have to know where you're
   going. No roleplaying game ever follows the "path" of the story anyway, so
   a story entertainment just dismisses the whole notion of adventure. Rather
   than become frustrated when the characters don't do what they're supposed
   to, let them lead the story with their Characters' Goals.

   It all comes down to this: a "player" in a Narrativist role-playing
   context necessarily makes the thematic choices for a given
   player-character. Even if this role switches around from person to person
   (as in Universalis), it's always sacrosanct in the moment of decision.
   "GMing," then, for this sort of play, is all about facilitating another
   person's ability to do this.

Protagonism

   In all role-playing, the player-character is the lens of the Creative
   Agenda at work. That's right, I said all role-playing.

     * Simulationist = the character "fits" - its setting, capabilities,
       outcomes, behavior patterns, and so on, all reinforce the Dream for
       everyone.

     * Gamist = the character is a direct opportunity for player-strategy.
       Its construction doesn't hamstring the player (except with agreed-upon
       handicaps) and permits him or her to Step On Up.

     * Narrativist = the character's predicament is how Premise is seen/felt
       in full, and what he does, and what happens is how a theme is
       realized.

   By definition, a character faces "relevant stress" for the Creative
   Agenda. The term used most often for that is "adversity," and it is
   required in all three modes of play. Without it, there is no Situation.
   Without Situation, there's no role-playing, just sitting around and
   diddling. You can tell when this happens: everyone stops paying attention
   to one another, and quite likely the one person talking is only paying
   attention to himself or herself. Adversity, which may come from any
   participant during play, is the key.

   Now we run into a conceptual tangle. In literary terms, if there's a
   story, there's one or more protagonists. Since story can arise from any
   sort of role-playing, then protagonism of the relevant character comes
   with that, part and parcel. However, "protagonism" at the Forge as
   discussed most frequently by Paul Czege, tends to focus on very specific
   processes of play: those which prompt Premise-addressing interest in a
   given character among all of the real-person participants; in other words,
   a specifically Narrativist process.

   That's a real terminological conundrum. I shudder at the thought of
   co-opting the term "protagonist" into anything besides the fictional
   context of a story, regardless of how it was produced. However, I also
   want to preserve Paul's point that people may establish emotional,
   relatively high-stakes connections to other people's player-characters.
   But neither are restricted to Narrativist play.

   Fortunately, for discussing Narrativist play by itself, the two things are
   one and the same. Which means I shall happily relegate debate about the
   term in a larger (all of role-playing) sense to the forums and neatly
   dodge it for purposes of the essay.

   So let's talk about Narrativist protagonism and how it's established,
   starting with the adversity. From Sorcerer (Adept Press, 2001, author is
   Ron Edwards):

   GET TO THE BANGS!

   Bangs are those moments when the characters realize they have a problem
   right now and have to get moving to deal with it. It can be as simple as a
   hellacious demon crashing through the skylight and attacking the
   characters or as subtle as the voice of the long-dead murder victim
   answering when they call the number they found in the new murder victim's
   pockets.

   But that needed clarifying, so from Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001,
   author is Ron Edwards):

   Driving with Bangs ... how is the poor GM able to assure any happenings
   when he or she is no longer the primary author?

   ... It is the GM's job to present and, for lack of a better word, drive
   Bangs, in the sense of driving a nail or driving something home. In
   narrative terms, Bangs tend to come as one of the following: [list follows
   with details; to summarize: crisis to crisis, twist to twist, link to
   link, locale to locale - RE]

   Ultimately, all of these elements provided by the GM are the same thing: a
   means for moving from decision to decision on the part of the players.
   Bangs are always about player-character responses.

   This is why Bangs are not represented by many of the fight scenes or clues
   in traditional role-playing. Throwing mad hyenas at the player-characters
   is not a Bang if the only result of the fight is to wander into the next
   room. Nor is a clue a Bang at all if all it does is show where the next
   clue may be found. A real Bang gives the player options and requires his
   or her decision about how to handle it, which in turn reveals and develops
   the player-character as a hero.

   In Sex & Sorcery (2003), I presented some further terms to represent
   multiple-person input and some other nuances into the Bang concept: Bobs,
   Weavings, Crosses, and Openings; all are listed in the glossary following
   this essay.

   Aside from a lack of adversity, the other issue regarding protagonism is
   the problem of de-protagonizing, a term coined by Paul Czege.
   Deprotagonizing literally means to deprive a person of the means to
   express one of the bulleted points above (depending on the Creative Agenda
   at hand; Paul is usually discussing Narrativist play). There are dozens of
   ways to do that, and all of them are grounds for instant breaking of the
   Social Contract for that play-experience. No one accepts deprotagonization
   willingly; those bulleted points are heartfelt priorities at the very core
   of Creative Agenda. As a minor but thought-provoking point, character
   death is not deprotagonizing if it satisfies the Creative Agenda for that
   person and group.

   Nearly all of the dysfunctional issues described later in the essay
   concern deprotagonizing in the context of Narrativist play, which is best
   defined as Force: the final authority that any person who is not playing a
   particular player-character has over decisions and actions made by that
   player-character. This is distinct from information that the GM imparts or
   chooses not to impart to play; I'm talking about the protagonists'
   decisions and actions. In Narrativist play, using Force by definition
   disrupts the Creative Agenda.

   Force techniques include IIEE manipulation, fudged/ignored rolls,
   perception management, clue moving, scene framing as a form of reducing
   options, directions as to character's actions using voiced and unvoiced
   signals, modifying features of various NPCs during play, and authority
   over using textual rules. The Golden Rule of White Wolf games is, in
   application, a mandate for Force.

   Force Techniques often include permitting pseudo-decisions, which we can
   discuss at the Forge if necessary. Also, Force Techniques do vary in how
   flexible a scene's outcome is permitted to be. Some GMs (to use the
   classic single-GM context) might do anything up to actually picking up
   your dice for you in order for you to talk to "that guy," or he might let
   the characters miss the clue, either 'porting it to another character or
   letting its absence go ahead and affect the outcome.

System - "it does matter" all over again

   Remember the System "bow" which shoots the Creative Agenda arrow? It must
   be an active tool. The Explorative Situation must change with verve -
   anything that introduces ebbs, flows, and unpredictable elements into the
   real-person decision-making process. That's what System does, whether it's
   composed entirely of dialogue or relies on pages and pages of probability
   charts. How does it do it? Through the combinations of Techniques being
   employed.

   I'll focus on one bit of System: resolution. I'll break it up into
   Techniques regarding what exactly is being resolved. For Narrativist play,
   the key is to focus on conflicts rather than tasks. A conflict statement
   is, "I'm trying to kill him," or, "I'm trying to humiliate him," whereas a
   task statement is, "I swing my sword at him." (It doesn't matter, by the
   way, how much in-game time and space are involved; conflict resolution can
   be "very small" and task resolution can be "very big." We can discuss this
   more on-line.) I submit that trying to resolve conflicts by hoping that
   the accumulated successful tasks will turn out to be about what you want,
   is an unreliable and unsatisfying way to role-play when developing
   Narrativist protagonism.

   How does this relate to game mechanics? I'll take the most-common example
   of Fortune systems. The big distinction I want to make is between
   Fortune-in-the-Middle and the more commonly-understood Fortune-at-the-End.
   For the record, I think both go back to the very beginning of
   role-playing; I didn't invent anything by naming them.

   Fortune-at-the-End: all variables, descriptions, and in-game actions are
   known, accounted for, and fixed before the Fortune system is brought into
   action. It acts as a "closer" of whatever deal was struck that called for
   resolution. A "miss" in such a system indicates, literally, a miss. The
   announced blow was attempted, which is to say, it was also perceived to
   have had a chance to hit by the character, was aimed, and was put into
   motion. It just didn't connect at the last micro-second.

   Fortune-in-the-Middle: the Fortune system is brought in partway through
   figuring out "what happens," to the extent that specific actions may be
   left completely unknown until after we see how they worked out. Let's say
   a character with a sword attacks some guy with a spear. The point is to
   announce the character's basic approach and intent, and then to roll. A
   missed roll in this situation tells us the goal failed. Now the group is
   open to discussing just how it happened from the beginning of the action
   being initiated. Usually, instead of the typical description that you
   "swing and miss," because the "swing" was assumed to be in action before
   the dice could be rolled at all, the narration now can be anything from
   "the guy holds you off from striking range with the spearpoint" to "your
   swing is dead-on but you slip a bit." Or it could be a plain vanilla miss
   because the guy's better than you. The point is that the narration of what
   happens "reaches back" to the initation of the action, not just the
   action's final micro-second.

   There's a whole spectrum of extreme connect/disconnect between conflict
   and task. At one end, the task does fail, but the goal fails too, perhaps
   with a nuance or two. The other end is much wider in interpretative scope:
   we know the character's goal (killing some guy) doesn't happen, but with
   those in place, narration takes over to provide all the events involved.
   Applying different judgments along this spectrum, for different parts of
   play, is a big deal in games like Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Sorcerer, and
   HeroQuest. In Sorcerer, failing a dice roll means failing the goal, almost
   always due to failing at the task; in Dust Devils, certain card outcomes
   dictate that you fail at the goal, but whether the task failed or
   succeeded within that context is entirely up for grabs and determined by
   that scene's designated narrator. HeroQuest and Trollbabe permit the group
   to customize between these extremes as they see fit for that scene.

   Fortune-in-the-Middle as the basis for resolving conflict facilitates
   Narrativist play in a number of ways.

     * It preserves the desired image of player-characters specific to the
       moment. Given a failed roll, they don't have to look like incompetent
       goofs; conversely, if you want your guy to suffer the effects of cruel
       fate, or just not be good enough, you can do that too.

     * It permits tension to be managed from conflict to conflict and from
       scene to scene. So a "roll to hit" in Scene A is the same as in Scene
       B in terms of whether the target takes damage, but it's not the same
       in terms of the acting character's motions, intentions, and experience
       of the action.

     * It retains the key role of constraint on in-game events. The dice (or
       whatever) are collaborators, acting as a springboard for what happens
       in tandem with the real-people statements.

   Not all versions of this principle are alike. Some of them involve
   scene-scale resolution (Story Engine), some involve narration-trading
   (Dust Devils), some are heavily integrated with tactics (The Riddle of
   Steel), and some of them require role-playing "bits" to justify
   incorporating system features (The Dying Earth).

   Some Fortune-in-the-Middle applications give opportunities for tweaking
   after the roll: usually, spending points of some kind after the dice have
   hit the table to alter the effects. Some games have this feature and some
   don't; Forge jargon calls such things "FitM with teeth" because such a
   system forces the group to acknowledge that the dice do not "finish" the
   job of resolution.

   Does Fortune-in-the-Middle define Narrativism? No, nor does it even
   facilitate it in isolation. It's merely a strong component of many
   Narrativist-facilitating combinations of Techniques; I've left its
   potential integration with reward and behavioral mechanics out of this
   discussion.

   Is there such a thing as Fortune-at-the-beginning? Playtesting so far
   indicates that it's not very satisfying for Narrativist play; see
   discussions at the Forge of Human Wreckage and The World the Flesh and the
   Devil.

   Is Fortune the only resolution method for conflict resolution? The answer
   is emphatically no. The two main alternatives are apparently Karma +
   Resource management, which I consider to be underdeveloped at this point,
   and highly-structured Drama, which may be investigated through Puppetland,
   Soap, and to a lesser extent Universalis.

  The game world

   Since Exploration is best understood as a medium and tool in Narrativist
   play, rather than a product itself, the role of "in game reality" needs
   some review - not so much about who has authority over it (the usual
   concern in Simulationist play), but what the heck it is. The answer is,
   it's a medium and tool for addressing Premise, and nothing more at all.

   From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1994, author is Christian Aldridge):

   Literal vs. Conceptual

   A good way to run the Hubris Engine is to use "scene ideas" to convey the
   scene, instead of literalisms. ... focus on the intent behind the scene
   and not on how big or how far things might be. If the difficulty of the
   task at hand (such as jumping across a chasm in a cave) is explained in
   terms of difficulty, it doesn't matter how far across the actual chasm
   spans. In a movie, for instance, the camera zooms or pans to emphasize the
   danger or emotional reaction to the scene, and in so doing it manipulates
   the real distance of a chasm to suit the mood or "feel" of the moment. It
   is then no longer about how far across the character has to jump, but how
   hard the feat is for the character. ... If the players enjoy the challenge
   of figuring out how high and far someone can jump, they should be allowed
   the pleasure of doing so - as long as it doesn't interfere with the
   narrative flow and enjoyment of the game.

   The scene should be presented therefore in terms relative to the
   character's abilities ... Players who want to climb onto your coffee table
   and jump across your living room to prove that their character could jump
   over the chasm have probably missed the whole point of the story.

   The "doesn't interfere" matches to my "prioritization." The "narrative
   flow and enjoyment" matches to addressing Premise. The "whole point of the
   story" and "intent behind the scene" are Premise itself, expressed in this
   scene as a Bang. More topically, I can think of no better text to explain
   the vast difference between playing the games RuneQuest and HeroQuest.

  Stance

   A lot of mental sweat has been shed to try to link Stances with modes and
   goals of play. I think most of that discussion was misguided by an overly
   1:1 approach. In my big model as currently constructed, only combinations
   of Ephemera comprise a Technique, so we're not talking about one Stance in
   a given moment, but the distribution of Stances through multiple character
   actions, decisions, and scenes. And that's only one Technique, which is
   not enough to dictate or identify Creative Agenda.

   Bearing all that in mind, Author Stance may be considered the default for
   Narrativist play only in the sense that it needs to be in there somewhere.
   Narrativist play doesn't have to be exclusively in this Stance, nor does
   it even have to be employed more often than the others. The only
   requirement is that it be present in a significant way. Narrativist play
   is very much like Gamist play in this regard, and for the same reason: the
   player of a given character takes social and aesthetic responsibility for
   what that character does.

  Narration the non-issue

   Before going on, I'll take a quick break to discuss "narration," which is
   no more and no less than saying what happens in the imaginary events. I
   want to distinguish saying what happens (narrating) from establishing what
   happens (currently a non-named concept), because they are often confused.
   I'm taking the

   I'll break it down.

     * Narration is not a Drama mechanic unless it is literally the means of
       resolution.

     * Narration is in practice shared among members of a role-playing group
       and far less centralized than most people think.

   The only concern about narration per se is that its relationship to
   establishing-what-happens must be clear. That entails that how things are
   established is itself clear: is it ad-lib? is the GM where the buck stops?
   is it traded about, organized in any way? or what? Those are good
   questions, but once they're established, narration is a no-brainer.

   Game texts are typically astonishingly bad at explaining this issue.
   Positive exceptions for Narrativist-leaning games include Soap, The Pool,
   and Universalis, and other recent games like InSpectres, Otherkind, Dust
   Devils, Trollbabe, and Donjon, which all distribute narration around the
   group as a means of distributing who establishes what.

Historical diversity of Narrativist play

   Narrativist play-procedures are pretty scattered in terms of actual game
   books. I suggest that titles and texts are really just rustles in the
   bushes, such that one has to infer the actual play that either informed
   them or might have proceeded from them. For most of what follows, I've
   spoken with game designers and many, many play-groups about these issues.

   I think that Narrativist play goes back to the beginning of role-playing.
   Yes, a "non-Narrativism" shroud descended over role-playing design and
   publishing, but I think that dates from the mid-late 1980s. In other
   words, the "Narrativist revolution" of 2000-2003 is not an innovation, but
   a return to a lost art.

   Looking at earlier games from a Techniques perspective, a shift to
   Narrativist play within the larger Gamist context is apparent in some
   Tunnels & Trolls, as discusssed in "Gamism: Step On Up". I also recommend
   reading and playing Marvel Super Heroes, reviewing the entire Strike Force
   text in light of the 1st and 2nd editions of Champions being used by that
   group, reviewing the extensive documentation of Champions play presented
   in the APA-zine The Clobberin Times', and giving Toon, Ghostbusters, and
   James Bond a try. I am not saying "These are Narrativist games," but
   rather, evidence supports the claim that these rules-sets supported some
   Narrativist play back then.

   I do not think that the strong minority trend beginning in the very late
   1980s toward Drama-heavy role-playing represented by Amber, Theatrix, and
   The Window was especially Narrativist in application, although that mode
   of play was probably found in some groups playing these games. This trend
   is better understood in combination with games like Fudge and Risus, and
   most especially in terms of the Mind's Eye Theatre approach to LARPs.

   During the early 1990s, however, a certain approach to numbers and Fortune
   became apparent across a number of games: Prince Valiant, Over the Edge
   (especially in light of Laws' essay), Castle Falkenstein, Everway,
   Maelstrom/Story Engine, Zero, and The Whispering Vault. Later, similar
   games include Sorcerer, Orkworld, and The Riddle of Steel. All of these
   texts demonstrate an internal struggle to articulate means of addressing
   Premise, littered with trip-ups based on assumptions of GM-power and the
   utter lack of precedent in explaining the whole idea. Some of them slammed
   toward Simulationist texts upon second-edition revision and via
   supplements, probably to make it "more like an RPG."

   The internet revealed something vastly more startling: in-your-nose
   Narrativist designs like Ghost Light, Soap, InSpectres, and The Pool, as
   well as their Gamist cousin Elfs. These games' influence was vast at the
   Forge, including but not limited to Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Otherkind,
   Paladin, Violence Future, My Life with Master, and Universalis, along with
   further Gamist cousins like Donjon. The internet also revealed active
   play-communities that had previously been invisible to store-centered
   commerce, including Marvel Super Heroes among others.

   Since the historical trends are so textually diffuse, I think that this
   section will do better to focus on procedural diversity, small point by
   small point. Each point presents a separate and independent spectrum of
   variation. As always, game titles are used only to refer to the actual
   play that they best seem to facilitate.

Basic diversity of Narrativist play

  Making it up in play vs. setting it up beforehand

   A lot of people have mistakenly interpreted the word "Narrativist" for
   "making it up as we go." Neither this nor anything like it is definitional
   for Narrativist play, but it is indeed an important issue for role-playing
   of any kind. So it's not a bad idea simply to ask, for a given group or
   session, when and how is the Explorative context (setting, situation,
   whatever) established?

     * High improvisation during play: e.g., Universalis, InSpectres, Extreme
       Vengeance

     * Rock steady based on preparation - Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein,
       HeroQuest, Sorcerer

     * In between - Trollbabe, The Pool, Dust Devils, My Life with Master

   Many people get unnecessarily hung up on this issue ... playing
   Universalis is not "more Narrativist" than playing Orkworld, for instance.
   Also, this issue is not at all correlated with centralizing vs.
   distributing the various GM-tasks discussed previously.

  Where little Premises come from

   Given that Explorative content for Narrativist play exists to provide meat
   for addressing a Premise, it shouldn't be surprising that differing
   starting points for the process can be found depending on what kind of
   details and efforts are involved in preparing for play.

   Just as in Gamist play, the big gorilla of the five Explorative elements
   is Situation. What I'm contrasting here is which elements begin detailed
   enough to yield Situation relatively quickly during play, as opposed to
   which ones can be "relaxed" in terms of detail and depth at the start, to
   be developed later.

     * Character-based Premise: Characters begin play with at least one
       significant Premise-based decision in their backgrounds.

     * Setting-based Premise: External adversity swarms upon the characters
       based on unavoidable, often large-scale elements of the overall
       setting.

     * Situation-based Premise: The immediate conflict at hand is already
       under way and rich with Premise; fill in Character goals and Setting
       justification as needed during play.

   I suggest that it's useful to reduce the pre-play effort on the other
   elements involved. Loading too many of them with Premise prior to play
   yields a messy and unworkable play-situation in Narrativist terms, in
   which characters' drives and external adversity are too full to develop
   off of or to reinforce one another. More discussion and debate about this
   issue may be taken up at the Forge.

   Character-based Premise is the easiest to implement, and unsurprisingly it
   reflects Egri's ideas in full. Games whose design relies on this approach
   include Zero, Sorcerer, Dust Devils, and The Riddle of Steel, among many
   others. I think this form of Premise-building is probably the most common
   form of Drifting to Narrativist play. From the "Campaigning" chapter and
   "The Developing Campaign" section in Strike Force (Hero Games, 1988,
   author is Aaron Allston):

   THE "CHARACTER STORY"

   One thing that each Champions GM needs to learn to do is to spot,
   carefully nurture, and eventually play out the "Character Story."

   Each player-character has a Story above and beyond the ordinary adventures
   encountered during the course of the campaign. This Character Story
   usually involves the resolution of the most important desires of the
   character.

   Phosphene - Discovery of and Acceptance by Family. Raised by a single
   parent and knowing of no other relatives, Phos started his career cynical
   and alone. Learning that he had a family, the enigmatic Brood, he
   discovered that he had a tremendous need to become one of them. Eventually
   he met all his surviving relatives and earned the affection of most of
   them. Now married and a family man himself, his personal story is
   resolved.

   Lorelei - Growth into Womanhood. In the course of her years of playing,
   Lorelei grew from a 15-year-old innocent into a mature woman and team
   leader; the most important elements of transition (other than the years
   involved) were her romance with Commodore and her eventual rescue of and
   reunion with her father.

   Take a look at your own character - or at all the PCs if you're the GM -
   and try to root out the Character Story of each one. [examples follow -
   RE] In short, try to figure out what element of the character's
   background, relations, or psychology make him interesting but will
   eventually make him (or his player) frustrated and unhappy if not
   ultimately resolved. That's the Character Story.

   An interesting qualifier shows up in the final paragraph of this section:

   Of course, no campaign lasts long enough for every Character Story to be
   discovered and exploited ...

   ... which I think is a bizarre statement, possibly related to the idea
   (which I remember all too well) that Champions players should all
   cooperate to preserve the group regardless of their differing goals during
   play.

   The final section in this chapter indicates, I think the key point - which
   is only presented parenthetically in the earlier text (above - "or his
   player").

   LISTENING TO YOUR PLAYERS

   Always listen to your players' discussion of the ongoing adventure.
   They'll constantly be analyzing, theorizing, and commenting on the
   adventure. Often, their discussion will give you even better ideas than
   those you've been implementing.

   Also, pay attention to the recurring phrase, "It might be neat if ..." The
   player who is saying this, whether he realizes it or not, is expressing a
   desire about a future storyline or character development. Usually it's
   easy to accomodate him, and gives him a more personal interest in that
   specific plotline.

   I consider this important because it acknowledges that the developing
   Premise is best recognized by the people who play the protagonists.

   Setting-based Premise is a bit more developmental, usually involving
   "someone else's problem" or an overriding external adversity of some kind
   - zombie attack being perhaps the most basic example. It might actually be
   a bit better for introducing Simulationist-by-habit players to Narrativist
   play, as they can start with sketchy characters and grow into addressing a
   pretty-well-defined Premise over time. From HeroQuest (Issaries Inc, 2003,
   primary text author is Greg Stafford):

   Make Your Own Part

   All heroes are extraordinary and destined for some fame in the world of
   Glorantha. This is guaranteed, since they are individually guided by a
   higher power: you, the player.

   Your heroes will have the chance to be involved in the great events of the
   Hero Wars, such as [several colorful examples - RE]. Such events are not
   only for the super-powerful; they require the participation of your hero
   at whatever level of power he has achieved.

   [just past halfway through the book - RE]

   Drama

   Drama in Glorantha often comes from the conflict between what is and what
   ought to be. Living up to expectations of cult behavior, for instance, is
   meant to be difficult and limiting. After all, religious requirements are
   not human ideals. [Wow! Talk about an Egri Premise! - RE] The intensity of
   the plot comes from the hero trying to fulfil these expectations while
   living with the everyday temptations and complications of life: a cow is
   missing, some of your clan died in a raid, your children are ominously
   ill, or neighbors are poaching the hunting lands. Add to this the
   imperative of the Hero Wars, where some things will happen no matter what
   the heroes do, and the heroes have to make difficult choices about what to
   do and who [sic] to aid.

   [and near the end - RE]

   Politics, Always Politics

   Glorantha may be a world of magic and myth, but there are some human
   constants that remain, not the least of which is politics. [examples
   follow of politics both as rivalries and means to social authority and
   respect - RE]

   The Hero Wars are breaking upon Glorantha. On the one hand, they are
   throwing old alliances into question, tearing established communities
   apart, and raising new dilemmas for leaders and led alike. But they are
   also creating new and unexpected communities, as rivals are forced into
   partnership by new threats or novel opportunities.

   I don't think I've ever seen a more challenging Premise in a role-playing
   text than "religious requirements are not human ideals." That is HeroQuest
   in a nutshell, and there is no avoiding it during play. A character may
   begin as just another goat-herder, but he isn't going to stay that way.
   Other games with similar origins of Premise include Castle Falkenstein and
   My Life with Master, in which the Master is, for all intents and purposes,
   the setting.

   Situation-based Premise is perhaps the easiest to manage as GM, as
   player-characters are well-defined and shallow, and the setting is vague
   although potentially quite colorful. The Premise has little to do with
   either in the long-term; it's localized to a given moment of conflict.
   Play often proceeds from one small-scale conflict to another,
   episodically. Good examples of games based on this idea include Prince
   Valiant, The Dying Earth, and InSpectres. From The Dying Earth (2001,
   Pelgrane Press, authors are Robin Laws, John Snead, and Peter Freeman):

   Many Dying Earth stories revolve around a closed community, which may be
   either a small settlement or an isolated workplace. In its isolation, it
   has developed its own highly-structured, sometimes legalistic, always
   peculiar rules. Without outside influence, and with the stout enforcement
   of its codes, the group has survived for a long time. When the protagonist
   arrives, the locals try to enforce the rules on him, assimilating him into
   their bizarre system. Instead, the hero ... takes action which utterly
   disrupts the delicately-balanced harmony of the community. ... the
   community, the basis of its rules destroyed, collapses.

   [now for play]

   When creating an adventure, dream up a bizarre rule or activity on which a
   community's existence depends. Figure out at least one way in which the
   PCs could wreak havoc on the community by disrupting the activity or
   subverting the rule.

   Then create a reason for the PCs to do so ... [actually, the entire
   character creation process for this game takes care of this detail - RE]

   The point is that the Situation doesn't have any particular role or
   importance to the Setting, either in terms of where it comes from or what
   happens later. The setting can be quite vague and might even just be a
   gray haze that characters are presumed to have travelled through in order
   to have encountered this new Situation.

   This type of Premise does carry some risks: (1) the possibility of a
   certain repetition from event to event, but probably nothing that you
   wouldn't find in other situation-first narrative media, which is to say
   serial fiction of any kind; (2) the heightened possibility of producing
   pastiche; and (3) the heightened possibility of shifting to Gamist play.

Deep diversity

  Who gets the GM jobs

   Earlier, I listed some of the various roles and tasks usually associated
   with the term "GM." As I said, the question is not whether there is a GM
   (there is always one or more for any scene during play), but rather how
   the GMing tasks are distributed. The potential range of diversity is
   staggering. The most important variables include: - Which of these roles
   are most important to be formalized for this game - Whether the roles are
   centralized in one person - The concept of "the buck" - in the event that
   different people suggest different things, who says what goes

   In the interest of space and keeping the complexity of these sections
   limited, I'll only provide examples for the centralization-issue. -
   Centralized: The Riddle of Steel, Sorcerer, Orkworld, Castle Falkenstein,
   HeroQuest, The Dying Earth - Widely distributed: Universalis, Soap - In
   between: Trollbabe, The Pool, InSpectres, Dust Devils, Violence Future

  Story structure

   Classically, a story has the following structure: (a) introduce character
   and situation, (b) introduce conflict, (c) rising conflict, (d) climax,
   and (e) resolution, of which (a, b, d) are the key pieces. Most stories
   indeed follow this model regardless of their chronological presentation,
   point-of-view, or any other details. There's usually no particular worry
   that Narrativist play will fail to produce a story (of whatever quality),
   without any overt effort to force it. However, it is also at least
   possible for overall story structure to be part of System.

   Sorcerer presented the Kicker Technique, which is to say, a
   player-authored Bang included in character creation, giving the GM
   responsibility to make it central to play. It may be considered the
   precise opposite of the "character hook" concept presented in many
   adventure scenarios and role-playing games.

   Some recent games feature the Endgame concept: a status for a character
   (and sometimes all characters) that signals "Now is really Now," and it's
   time for Premise to become theme without dilly-dallying. I suppose it can
   first be seen in Soap and Puppetland based on these games' explicit
   real-time constraints, but it's also embedded in the Guts/Coincidence
   mechanics in Extreme Vengeance, the "Schism" version of Humanity in
   Sorcerer, and the Insight mechanics in The Riddle of Steel. It's most
   explicitly present in Violence Future and My Life with Master.

   A similar structural issue is to decide how much Premise-addressing
   (story, if you will) has already occurred before in-play decision-making
   begins. At one extreme, you have "Blood Opera," which is to say, several
   characters already engaged in serious committed effort to do
   something-or-other, usually contradictory. Such play, regardless of how
   many sessions are involved, tends to end up with several dead protagonists
   and plenty of tragedy due to conflicting obligations and/or
   misunderstandings; it's quite cathartic. Typically it's more satisfying
   when all of the participants are enlisted in scenario preparation. At the
   other extreme, you have play in which the Premise is introduced very
   slowly and piecemeal, through a variety of scenes and events.

   Here are some interesting trends which crop up along this spectrum:

     * When the character's judgmental and active presence is established and
       already in action as play begins, that beginning point is usually the
       crisis-point for the story in general. Playing Legends of Alyria,
       Prince Valiant, My Life with Master, and Soap tends toward this end;
       all of them carry a slight danger of "over before they begin," but
       they are also the most reliable for immediate Premise-consensus.

     * When the Situation is well-established prior to play and essentially
       independent of the player-characters, then how they encounter it and
       become enlisted in its hassles is up for grabs, including when they
       arrive. The protagonists usually play a catalytic role toward everyone
       and everything else. Playing Everway, The Dying Earth, InSpectres,
       Orkworld, The Whispering Vault, and Trollbabe is a lot like this.

     * When the Situation must slowly develop into Premise, play is
       necessarily extended into multiple sessions. Playing Sorcerer,
       HeroQuest, Dust Devils, Violence Future, and Over the Edge often
       proceeds in this fashion, to the extent that the first couple of
       sessions resemble the first sections of a classical novel rather than
       a movie or play, and they tend not to show off all of their most
       satisfying features during single-session demonstration play.

   Not all game designs must fall onto this spectrum explicitly, although
   play does - I leave the different ways to place playing The Pool,
   Universalis, and The Riddle of Steel onto the spectrum as an exercise for
   the reader (hint: there are three answers, one for each game).

   Finally, another subtle enforcer of story structure is the range of
   possible focus, or specification, for player-characters' abilities. It
   doesn't surprise me that many Narrativist-facilitating game designs don't
   distinguish very much among player-characters' abilities (Sorcerer, The
   Dying Earth, and My Life with Master characters are all pretty much alike
   within each game, mechanically); when they are so distinguished, however,
   the differences tend to lock down the range of the potential Premise(s)
   during play.

   So the most constrained story-structure game design would include Endgame
   mechanics, an almost-over Situation, and strongly-distinguished abilties
   (and hence story-roles) among the protagonists; interestingly, I can think
   of no RPG design which features all three.

  Resolution and reward mechanics

   For Narrativist play, character creation may be considered the first step
   in or the chassis for the reward and character-change systems. It differs
   from the similar principle in Gamism in that personal strategy is not an
   issue, but rather personal emotional agenda about the Premise. What's
   interesting is that when play includes a focused reward system in
   Narrativist terms, its numbers and effects are always integrated directly
   into the event-resolution system.

   One whole category of play, however, does not provide any special
   connection between the two and usually doesn't include much of a reward
   system at all. Earlier games of this sort include The Window (partly),
   Theatrix, Over the Edge, Castle Falkenstein, The World the Flesh and the
   Devil, and possibly Puppetland. I think Soap, InSpectres, and Universalis
   represent a development in this category of stronger IIEE-structure, as
   well as providing a very abstract resolution + reward mechanic, but
   retaining the Drama emphasis for resolution. These games also feature
   pronounced GM-sharing as distinct from the earlier ones.

   The other category includes very strong reward mechanics design based on
   character decisions, with resolution based on Fortune in the Middle in
   order to preserve Author Stance during those decisions. Example games
   include Prince Valiant, The Whispering Vault, Zero, The Pool, Sorcerer,
   Dust Devils, Trollbabe, Legends of Alyria, My Life with Master, HeroQuest,
   and Orkworld, as well as The Riddle of Steel in a cunning fashion.

   A recent development in both categories is to bring relationships into the
   game mechanics to a very high degree, as in HeroQuest, Trollbabe, and My
   Life with Master. Earlier versions of this idea may be seen in Albedo,
   Lace & Steel, and Pendragon, but its primarily-Narrativist application is
   recent and very significant.

  Character behavior mechanics

   This topic is potentially rather a sore point among role-players, unless
   they have experienced play which shows the diverse strong points along the
   entire spectrum. It concerns how limited characters' behavior may be.

   At one end of this spectrum, there's nothing of the kind: just contextual
   material that prompts the issues and perhaps a character descriptor here
   or there. The primary engine for Narrativist play is purely personal
   fascination with the issues at hand and with working them out. Castle
   Falkenstein, The Whispering Vault, and Over the Edge are good examples.

   Moving just a little over, characters' behavioral descriptors are
   required, but they don't have any special role in determining what the
   character does - except for providing secondary bonuses to some resolution
   events, as in The Pool and HeroQuest.

   Moving well toward the other end of the spectrum, specific behaviors have
   generalized consequence mechanics. Sorcerer, Trollbabe, Dust Devils, The
   Riddle of Steel, and Orkworld are all examples - the characters have free
   will regarding what to do, but immediate mechanics provide significant
   effects.

   Far at the other end of the spectrum, behavior is heavily structured, for
   either or both character-creation and scenario-play. This kind of game
   often entails playing "against yourself" for the character, and the GM is
   potentially semi-adversarial, even ruthless, playing both external and
   internal adversity. Examples include Wuthering Heights, Extreme Vengeance,
   Violence Future, My Life with Master, Le Mon Mouri, InSpectres, Otherkind,
   and The Dying Earth. "Schism", "Urge", and other sorcerer/demon
   combination versions of Sorcerer effectively shift the game's play into
   this category.

  Procedural diversity: thematic content

   Given that theme arises during Narrativist play, what does it look like,
   and how limited or well-defined is it? This breaks down into three
   independent issues, all of which are pretty subtle and deserve more
   discussion.

    1. The potential for personal risk and disclosure among the real people
       involved.

          * High risk play is best represented by playing Sorcerer, Le Mon
            Mouri, InSpectres, Zero, or Violence Future. You're putting your
            ego on the line with this stuff, as genre conventions cannot help
            you; the other people in play are going to learn a lot about who
            you are.

          * Low risk play is best represented by playing Castle Falkenstein,
            Wuthering Heights, The Dying Earth, or Prince Valiant. These
            games are, for lack of a better word, "lighter" or perhaps more
            whimsical - they do raise issues and may include extreme content,
            but play-decisions tend to be less self-revealing.

    2. The depth and profundity of the resulting themes. Counter to my lousy
       phrasing in GNS and related matters of role-playing theory
       ([21]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/), "literary merit" of a
       theme is irrelevant. Themes are indeed important, and I suggest that
       two broad categories are available: cathartic vs. deconstructive, with
       the former splitting up into happy-ending, sad-ending, and ambiguous.
       A related point concerns the range of the possible themes for a given
       play-instance, from narrow to broad. I'll forego providing game
       examples as the depth and range of theme rely very greatly on the
       given play-group's use of the game.

    3. The humorous content. This is, in many ways, a red herring. I consider
       "funny" always to be a secondary phenomenon, perhaps modifying theme,
       or modifying something else entirely. For GNS or other theory
       purposes, you have to look at the something else and discuss that
       first. Still, there are a couple of points worth mentioning for
       role-playing.

          * Is play itself funny, or is the topic of play funny? This is a
            very complex issue, fully analogous to the endless discussions of
            fear and suspense in horror role-playing.

          * Is the humor acting to bring participants' emotions closer to the
            Premise, or to distance them?

GNS crossover issues

   I suggest that historically, two basic Creative Agendas have been
   perceived for role-playing: 1. Gamist, with the sub-set of Hard Core
   Gamism; 2. Simulationist, with a sub-set of
   Simulationist-becomes-Narrativist.

   Oh, I know, people never used the GNS terms for this purpose. But this is
   how newcomers to the theory often read the terms, indicating their current
   understanding, and those readings are fully consistent with the
   explanations of play found in hundreds of game texts. I consider this
   dichotomy, sub-sets and all, to be badly mistaken, but before I get to
   that, let's take a look at its cultural results.

   Over time, as I see it, many practitioners and designers correctly
   realized they were playing and promoting
   Simulationist-becomes-"Narrativist," in quotes. Those quotes mean,
   producing stories mainly through front-loading or post-editing, not
   through protagonist decision-making as run by the players. They mean
   focusing on story as product as opposed to Narrativist play. Reactions to
   this latter insight have varied widely, and they include:

     * Abandon the perceived overall mode (Simulationism) entirely for Gamist
       pastures;

     * Embrace the Simulationism and drop any pretense at story-creation
       through play, such that story is at most an epiphenomenon to the
       Exploration, usually of Setting;

     * Embrace the quotes in the "Narrativist" with verve, putting as much
       effort and sophistication toward metaplot and GM-driven-story as
       possible;

     * Give up role-playing in disgust with the inability to produce
       Narrativist play without the quotes;

     * Mute down any particular Creative Agenda, making sure to provide a
       little Gamist candy, in the interests of group harmony;

     * Drop the quotes around the "Narrativist," which means abandoning
       Simulationism as a starting point and turning to explicit Narrativism.

   My construction of the modes of play is extremely different. As I see it,
   one starts with [Exploration]. Now, either prioritize the intensity of
   imagining some specific content as the agenda of play, which gives you
   [E[Simulationism]], or develop the Exploration into a further-derived
   agenda, which gives the choice of [E[Narrativism]] or [E[Gamism]].

  Gamism and Narrativism

   As I've tried to show at various points so far, Gamist and Narrativist
   play are near-absolute social and structural equivalents, sharing the same
   range for most Techniques save those involving reward systems. They differ
   primarily in terms of the actual aesthetic payoff - what's appreciated
   socially and aesthetically. That difference is extremely marked. Happily,
   therefore very little if any chance exists for these modes of play to come
   into conflict with one another - a group simply goes one way or the other.

   From the Introduction section of The Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game
   (Marvel Entertainment Group, 2003, "Direct Edition," authors not credited,
   editor is Mark D. Beazley):

   Style of Play

   You can play Marvel in a variety of styles, based on whatever you're
   interested in. Most roleplaying games tend to fall somewhere between two
   styles of play that we call "Clobberin' Time" and "Power and
   Responsibility." And for one-on-one play, there's always "Brawling," a
   style unique to this game.

   Power and Responsibility

   ... players spend a great deal of time on things like character
   development, morality, thoughts and goals ... They care about the other
   people in their lives, like girlfriends or boyfriends, aunts, sidekicks,
   and non-Super Hero friends. ... there's more to this style of play than
   busting things up.

   Clobberin' Time

   ... players don't spend much time on their characters' lifestyles. They
   concentrate on action and plenty of it.

   Together, the players and the GamesMaster decide what style of game they
   want to play. There is nothing more frustrating than a GamesMaster who
   runs a "Power and Responsibility" style game for a bunch of "Clobberin'
   Times" players. ...

   Brawling

   ... allows players to answer age-old questions: who would win in a fight,
   the Thing or the Hulk? [further examples] ... two players can sit down
   with their characters and fight against each other without needing a
   GamesMaster.

   I can always quibble. I think the above text adheres a little too closely
   to the mistaken dichotomies presented earlier, with the concomitant red
   herring of combat vs. no combat. But it's flawless in terms of caring
   together about what's up, and about socially constructing and reinforcing
   what's up. And the key point for me is that the same game system is usable
   alternatively for Narrativist or Gamist (or Hard Core Gamist) play, rather
   than simultaneously. Also, the text includes very little mention of or
   attention to Simulationist play per se. Enjoying "being a Marvel hero" in
   this game is not Simulationist at all, but merely the foundational
   Explorative expectation for either of the two focused options.

   Whether the Gamist and Narrativist modes may be played "congruently" is
   controversial (see Congruence in the glossary). I remain skeptical.

  The grim epiphany: Narrativism and Simulationism

   This section supercedes the section "El Dorado and Drift" in my essay
   "Simulationism: the Right to Dream"
   ([22]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/).

   I'll begin by identifying a very common misconception: that if enjoyable
   Exploration is identifiable during play, then play must be Simulationist
   or at least partly so. This is profoundly mistaken: if you address
   Premise, it's Narrativist play. Period. If the Exploration involved, no
   matter how intensive, hones and focuses that addressing-Premise process,
   then that Exploration is still Narrativist, not Simulationist.

   That's why Feng Shui and Hong Kong Action Theater are hard-core,
   no-ambiguity Simulationist-facilitating games including their explicit
   homage to specific cinematic stories, and that's why The Dying Earth
   facilitates Narrativist play, because its Situations are loaded with the
   requirement for satirical, judgmental input on the part of the players.

   "El Dorado" was coined by Paul Czege to indicate the impossibility of a
   1:1 Simulationist:Narrativist blend, although the term was appropriated by
   others for the blend itself, as a desirable goal. I think some people who
   claim to desire such a goal in play are simply looking for Narrativism
   with a very strong Explorative chassis, and that the goal is not elusive
   at all. Such "Vanilla Narrativism" is very easy and straightforward. The
   key to finding it is to stop reinforcing Simulationist approaches to play.
   Many role-players, identified by Jesse Burneko as
   "Simulationist-by-habit," exhaust themselves by seeking El Dorado, racing
   ever faster and farther, when all they have to do is stop running, turn
   around, and find Vanilla Narrativism right in their grasp.

   However, what about subordinate hybrids? Simulationist play works as an
   underpinning to Narrativist play, insofar as bits or sub-scenes of play
   can shift into extensive set-up or reinforcers for upcoming Bang-oriented
   moments. It differs from the Explorative chassis for Narrativist play,
   even an extensive one, in that one really has to stop addressing Premise
   and focus on in-game causality per se. Such scenes or details can take on
   an interest of their own, as with the many pages describing military
   hardware in a Tom Clancy novel. It's a bit risky, as one can attract
   (e.g.) hardware-nuts who care very little for Premise as well as
   Premise-nuts who get bored by one too many hardware-pages, and end up
   pleasing neither enough to attract them further.

   Historically, this approach has been poorly implemented in role-playing
   texts, which swing into Simulationist phrasing extremely easily, for the
   reasons I describe in "Simulationism: the Right to Dream". You cannot get
   emergent Narrativist play specifically through putting more and more
   effort into perfecting the Simulationism (which requires that the
   Narrativism cease), no matter how "genre-faithful" or "character-faithful"
   it may be. I consider most efforts in this direction to become reasonably
   successful High-Concept Simulationism with a strong slant toward
   Situation, mainly useful for enjoyable pastiche but not particularly for
   Narrativist play at all.

   The key issue is System. Narrativist play is best understood as a powerful
   integration and feedback between character creation and the reward system,
   however they may work, in that the former is merely the first step of the
   latter in terms of addressing Premise. Whereas the usual effect in
   High-Concept Simulationist play is to "fix" player-characters
   appropriately into the Situation for purposes of affirming the
   story-as-conceived, especially in terms of varying effectiveness at
   specific task-categories, and reward systems in these games are usually
   diminished and delayed to the point of absence. Games which stumbled over
   this issue include Fading Suns and Legend of the Five Rings, both of which
   require extensive Drifting to achieve even halting Narrativist play
   despite considerable thematic content.

   The more successful primarily-Narrativist, secondarily-Simulationist
   hybrid designs include Obsidian, to some extent, possibly Continuum if I'm
   reading it right, and The Riddle of Steel as the current shining light; I
   also call attention to Robots & Rapiers, currently in development.

   How about the reverse? Can Narrativist play underlie and reinforce a
   primarily Simulationist approach? I consider this to be a very interesting
   question, because it's not like Gamism in this regard at all. What happens
   when Premise is addressed sporadically, or develops so slowly that the
   majority of play is like those hardware-pages? Whether this is "slow
   Narrativism" or "S-N-S" or just plain dysfunctional play is a matter of
   specific instances, I think. But I do want to stress that it's not the
   "N/S blend" as commonly construed, which is to say, both priorities firing
   as equal pals.

Dysfunctional Narrativist play

  GNS incompatibility

   It is very easy to spot players who are disinclined toward Narrativist
   play, but nevertheless want a story to be produced, in a group that favors
   Narrativist-oriented play. They write up rich and intense characters on
   paper, but in play, they're paralyzed. They can posture towards one
   another, and they can defend against attack, and they can spot clues, beat
   up mooks, and band together against a common threat like nobody's
   business, but only on the basis of GM cues. In an otherwise Narrativist
   group, they are black hole voids for addressing Premise, and typically
   they don't continue playing with that group for long.

   More subtle and more likely to be sustained are Narrativist-oriented
   participants in largely non-Narrativist games. They practice "stealth"
   play to get what they want, usually through making suggestions to the
   authority in the group, often practicing a lot of trade-off negotiation. A
   skilled stealther can sometimes become a significant co-GM as long as he
   or she doesn't call attention to the influence. Stealthers tend to do a
   lot of waiting.

   Less happily, such a player in a game with a strong
   Simulationist/Situation bent is in big trouble and vice versa, especially
   when the group is committed to Illusionist Techniques. Illusionism is a
   widespread technique of play and arguably, textually, the most supported
   approach to the hobby, as testified most recently by the publication
   Secrets of Game-mastering (2002, Atlas Games). It relies on Force, as
   defined earlier in the essay. GMing with lots of covert Force is called
   Illusionism. I call that the Black Curtain; if the Curtain is drawn, then
   the players aren't immediately clued in about the presence and extent of
   the Force itself.

   Force (Illusionist or not) isn't necessarily dyfunctional: it works well
   when the GM's main role is to make sure that the transcript ends up being
   a story, with little pressure or expectation for the players to do so
   beyond accepting the GM's Techniques. I think that a shared "agreement to
   be deceived" is typically involved, i.e., the players agree not to look
   behind the Black Curtain. I suggest that people who like Illusionist play
   are very good at establishing and abiding by their tolerable degree of
   Force, and Secrets of Gamemastering seems to bear that out as the
   perceived main issue of satisfactory role-playing per se.

   Producing a story via Force Techniques means that play must shift fully to
   Simulationist play. "Story" becomes Explored Situation, the character
   "works" insofar as he or she fits in, and the player's enjoyment arises
   from contributing to that fitting-in. However, for the Narrativist player,
   the issue is not the Curtain at all, but the Force. Force-based Techniques
   are pure poison for Narrativist play and vice versa. The GM (or a person
   currently in that role) can provide substantial input, notably adversity
   and Weaving, but not specific protagonist decisions and actions; that is
   the very essence of deprotagonizing Narrativist play.

   Get just one Story Now player into an Illusionist group, and the game
   becomes a battlefield for control and story creation. I consider this to
   be one of the worst instances of high-level GNS incompatibility, because
   it typically doesn't resolve itself through a clean parting of the ways.
   As long as the people involved buy into the false notion that Narrativist
   play is a subset of the Simulationist aesthetic, then the war will not
   end, as they wave their "integrity of the story" flags at one another in
   the mistaken belief that they share aesthetic goals.

   It all becomes much clearer when the Gamism-Narrativism similarity is
   acknowledged. No one in their right mind permits a fully-committed Gamist
   into a Simulationist-Situation role-playing group, and the same goes for
   fully-committed Narrativist participants, for the same reasons.

  Ouija-board role-playing

   Here's another outcome for the faulty Simulationist-makes-Narrativism
   approach. Actually, it's the same phenomenon as
   Simulationism-makes-Gamism, which I discussed in "Gamism: Step On Up"
   ([23]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/) as "the bitterest role-player
   in the world." I consider the Narrativist version to be the "most deluded
   role-player in the world."

   How do Ouija boards work? People sit around a board with letters and
   numbers on it, all touching a legged planchette that can slide around on
   the board. They pretend that spectral forces are moving the planchette
   around to spell messages. What's happening is that, at any given moment,
   someone is guiding the planchette, and the point is to make sure that the
   planchette always appears to everyone else to be moving under its own
   power.

   Taking this idea to role-playing, the deluded notion is that Simulationist
   play will yield Story Now play without any specific attention on anyone's
   part to do so. The primary issue is to maintain the facade that "No one
   guides the planchette!" The participants must be devoted to the notion
   that stories don't need authors; they emerge from some ineffable
   confluence of Exploration per se. It's kind of a weird Illusionism
   perpetrated on one another, with everyone putting enormous value on
   maintaining the Black Curtain between them and everyone else. Typically,
   groups who play this way have been together for a very long time.

   My call is, you get what you play for. Can you address Premise this way?
   Sure, on the monkeys-might-fly-out-my-butt principle. But the key to
   un-premeditated artistry of this sort (cutup fiction, splatter painting,
   cinema verite) is to know what to throw out, and role-playing does not
   include that option, at least not very easily. Participants in Ouija-board
   play do so through selective remembering. I have observed many such
   role-players to refer to hours of unequivocally bored and contentious play
   as "awesome!" given a week or two for mental editing.

   What I see from such groups is the following:

     * They use a highly customized house-version of a given rules-set,
       usually AD&D, BRP, or an early edition of Champions; many of the
       customized details are unrecorded.

     * They employ a personalized set of subtle cues and expectations that
       arise out of their long-term friendships and habits of play.

     * The satisfaction-moments are rare to the extent of being perhaps a
       yearly event. "Nothing happened tonight" is typical, but the group
       believes that you don't legitimately get the cherished moments any
       other way. Such moments are treasured and carefully repeated among
       them.

     * Rarely, another person participates and (horrors!) actually overtly
       moves the planchette, or discusses how it's being moved. That person
       is instantly ejected, with cries of "powergamer!" and "pushy bastard!"

     * They're socially isolated from other role-players, as their play is so
       arcane and impenetrable that no one else can easily participate. If
       they go to cons, they go together, stay together, and leave together.
       One of them buys a new game that "looks good," and they rarely if ever
       try it, always rejecting it when they do.

     * They're socially isolated not only from gamers, but from everyone,
       insofar as their hobby is concerned. Forget social context; it's just
       these guys, aging, playing their tweaked versions of the game they
       discovered in high school, reminiscing about that one awesome time
       when character X did that awesome thing.

   Ouija-board groups vary in terms of how much fun they have, and I'll leave
   further discussion of the phenomenon to the forums.

  Minor issues within Narrativist play

   The first minor issue is not really a big deal - simply, not everyone is
   necessarily a whiz at addressing Premise even when they try. If they were,
   we'd see a hell of a lot more great novels, comics, movies, and plays than
   we do. Signs of "hack Narrativism" include backing off from unexpected
   opportunities to address Premise or consistently swinging play into parody
   versions of the issues involved. I don't see any particular reason to
   bemoan or criticize this bit of dysfunction; all art forms have their
   Sunday practitioners.

   The second is a recent phenomenon: the "do it right" purists, often
   recently made aware of GNS or other theories, who then get on their fellow
   participants' cases during play to accord with some theoretical ideal.
   It's usually accompanied by the fallacy of focusing on one or more
   Techniques as the "real" Narrativism.

   The third was mentioned earlier, based on the tendency for pre-game
   preparation to develop Situation so far along the process of addressing
   Premise, that the participants' input during play essentially delivers
   only the final moments. I call such play "96%-ing," which can be
   functional, but it tends to play safe to a degree that undercuts the
   process.

   The fourth is maintaining privacy among the participants about what's
   important to each one, whether about one's own character or the characters
   of others. Such play might be thought of as keeping Premise personal and
   close to the vest. That privacy may detract from others' enjoyment,
   although see Ouija-board role-playing below for some further thoughts.

   The final minor problem is to resolve play-Situations rapidly and without
   developing them much beyond the initial preparatory circumstances: "over
   before it begins." This typically occurs when people are so floored by the
   possibility of actually addressing a Premise through play, that they hare
   off to do so before some RPG god notices and intervenes to stop them.
   Usually, this sort of play is a short-lived phase as the group builds
   trust with one another.

  Bad apple Narrativists

   All of this section concerns Narrativist play which is practically
   guaranteed to be dysfunctional. It's really one thing, but it comes in two
   versions depending on whether the person in question is acting as GM.

   The non-GM version is the Prima Donna, a devoted Premise-addresser - but
   what he can't do is share. If a given scene is not about the issue that he
   cares about, he disrupts things until it is. If his character is present
   in a scene, then he'll demand center stage until forcibly stopped. He
   understands protagonism, but won't permit anyone else to have it.
   Essentially, he's the equivalent of the Hard Core Gamist, but with a
   significant difference: only one person can do it successfully; it can't
   even spread through the group. Prima Donnas are obnoxious, selfish, and
   pushy. Their typical fate is to be removed from a group or to become its
   GM (often to the present GM's consternation), in which latter case to
   become a Typhoid Mary.

   What's a Typhoid Mary? Well may you ask. It's a would-be Narrativist GM
   who uses tons of Force upon the player-characters. He introduces the
   Premise and is emotionally invested in how the players are supposed to
   address it, to the extent that he makes their characters' significant
   decisions for them. Effectively, this means the other people are present
   only to praise and reflect the GM's ego. Play amounts to "we tell the
   story, but I'm writing it" - he continually demands that the players
   appreciate his Narrativist aesthetic, but suppresses the same aesthetic in
   their behavior. He prioritizes and insists upon Premise-addressing input
   yet makes it subject to his approval.

   Such play is appallingly unrewarding and is rightly labeled railroading.
   To sustain it, the Typhoid Mary must exert primary dominance over all
   aspects of the Social Contract, which is usually not possible among
   adults. I can think of no more effective means of ensuring that other
   people never role-play again, than encountering a Typhoid Mary. Also,
   unsurprisingly, get one Narrativist player with a spine in that game, and
   it's root hog or die, the worst Force-vs.-Narrativist duel possible - such
   conflicts have been known to disrupt romances, friendships, and even jobs
   and marriages.

Narrativist game design

   One reason I presented the big model of role-playing in this essay is to
   say, game texts are no more nor less than recommendations, manuals, and
   inspirational materials for play. For such texts to be effective, they
   need to be clear and inspiring for all the levels in the model. I think
   that Social Contract always comes first. Most especially for Narrativist
   play, which has been textually marginalized throughout the hobby's
   history, the game-rules' focus must expand to social and procedural
   behavior at the table, not merely the Techniques subsets of scene and
   conflict resolution.

  What to do

   I wrote a pretty sketchy little game in the early 1990s called "BSL," or
   Bullshit-Less. You know what my friends said? "You can't read this like
   you read a game book. To enjoy it, you'd have to play!" Much to my
   surprise, that was a stone-wall stopping point for them. I had a terrible
   time coming up with what they'd need to know in order to make that step
   easily and quickly. I think that whatever a role-player is best at is the
   last thing on earth that occurs to him or her to write about, and
   Narrativist-oriented authors are especially in a jam, as they lack
   precedents and examples.

   Looking over the diversity I listed earlier, I realize that an effective
   manual or teaching text was Terra Incognita for Narrativist play until
   very recently. Sorcerer, for example, was not written as a teaching text
   for a general role-playing audience, although its supplements were. Now,
   however, we have InSpectres, Dust Devils, My Life with Master, the three
   Sorcerer supplements, Universalis, Trollbabe, Legends of Alyria,
   HeroQuest, and more, all representing individual attempts. (I will leave
   the very interesting question of why Everway failed in this regard to
   future discussions.)

   So, the goal is to work through the big model, probably from the top down.
   For a Narrativist-oriented game, the touchpoint throughout should always
   be, what's the Premise? I think stating it right out in front of everybody
   is the best way to go, or a version which is easily customized further. An
   alternative might be to inspire the Premise through
   Exploration-discussion, but it's risky - doing that usually works only for
   Situation-based Premise games, like The Dying Earth.

   Let's look at that diversity again. Where does Premise come from? How much
   do you have to work with, and how much improvisation is involved during
   play itself? Is the story underway yet, and how close are the
   decision/crisis points? Where's the spin in the System? Dice? Others'
   input? Any negotiation/trading? IIEE must be dead bang center with what
   you're driving at; does the reward system feed back into protagonism?
   Prompt Endgame? Shift GMing roles? Or what? What does actual play look
   like, in terms of Ephemera-combinations clustering to create and/or
   support Techniques?

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
              Basic     Source of  GM Jobs:      Story       Resolution    Behavior    Thematic Content*:
              Content:  Premise    Distribution  Structure:  and Reward:   Mechanics:  Risk factor;
              Improv               among         Endings,    See spectrum  See         depth; humor
              vs. rock             participants  e.g.        in essay      spectrum
              steady                                                       in essay
    Sorcerer  Steady    Character  Spread in     Encouraged  Connected:    Middle      High risk High
                                   prep,         by reward   Short term                depth Occasional
                                   centralized   system      bonuses                   humor
                                   in play                   Destiny and
                                                             goals in
                                                             Sorc & Sword
        TROS  Steady    Character  Centralized   Varies by   Connected:    Middle      Potential/variable
                                                 prep        Spiritual                 risk Mild to
                                                             Attributes                medium depth
                                                                                       Low/absent humor
 Universalis  Improv    Varies     Fully spread  Varies by   Fully         Mild to     Varies by group in
                                   out           prep        identical     none        all three
                                                             (coins)
        MLWM  In        Setting    Mostly        Fixed       Connected:    Extreme     High risk Fixed
              between              centralized   endgame     Net                       medium depth Humor
                                                             consequences              as defense
                                                             = Epilogue
   HeroQuest  Steady    Setting    Centralized   None        Fully         Mild to     Medium risk
                                                             identical     middle      Extreme depth Mild
                                                                                       but inescapable
                                                                                       humor
         The  Steady    Situation  Centralized   Fixed       Almost no     Mild to     High risk
  Whispering                                     conflict    connection    none        Medium-low depth
       Vault                                                                           Low/absent humor
    The Pool  In        Varies     Mostly        Varies by   Fully         Mild to     Low risk, usually
              between              centralized   prep        identical     none        Mild if any depth
                                                             (dice)                    Humor varies by
                                                                                       group
  InSpectres  Improv    Situation  Partly        Fixed       Extremely     Middle to   High risk
                                   centralized,  conflict    connected:    strong      Medium/fixed depth
                                   with                      Stress and                High humor
                                   specific                  resources
                                   non-GM input
                                   moments
      Castle  Steady    Setting    Centralized   None        Almost no     Mild to     Low risk
 Falkenstein                                                 connection    none        Low/variable depth
                                                                                       Occasional humor
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

     * Yes, this column is highly personal. Please feel free to fill it in
       with your own assessments based on your play-experiences.

  Some food for thought: constraints

   A whole critique of the role of constraint in creativity is probably
   beyond my powers, but I can't over-emphasize how important it's been in my
   experiences of design, preparation, and satisfaction in any creative
   endeavor. For role-playing, I think a designer should consider constraints
   to be his or her most important ally: elements which, once established,
   remain fixed and actively inform a whole suite of possibilities for the
   future. Whether they concern Currency (e.g. Universalis), outcomes of
   resolution (e.g. Sorcerer, The Riddle of Steel), character creation
   options, behavioral choices, Setting, or whatever, strikes me as the
   primary issue for designing games of any kind, and Narrativist goals need
   them desperately.

   I foresee a whole slew of threads discussing the difference between
   "restraint" and "constraint," so here I'll only bring up how effective
   Paul Czege's decision to constrain Setting is for My Life with Master.
   Once you know "about 1805, central Europe, isolated village," the doors
   are thrown open to bring maximum creativity to bear on the key issues of
   the game. For whatever reason, I think that this aspect of the game text
   makes the rest, especially the tricky wide-open parts like "More Than
   Human," much easier. By comparison, the designs of Dust Devils and
   Sorcerer are currently a bit hampered by their wide-open settings, which I
   now think require a little too much group-based customizing. Or, at the
   opposite extreme, Trollbabe does provide the Setting constraint, but it's
   so subculturally focused (you get it or you don't) as to limit access to
   the game. My Life with Master provides not only the focus, but also a
   topic which raises the same issues for practically anyone who encounters
   it. Furthermore, as Paul says, if someone wants to change the setting,
   they'll do it - but they're able to do so all the better because the
   textual setting made sense to them.

  Pitfalls of Narrativist game design

   1. The Timid Virgin. The reasonably successful Narrativist-leaning GM is
   writing a game, and suddenly experiences a loss of nerve - he visualizes
   all those other players out there who obviously don't play in this
   fashion. One result is a kind of "but-but" motorboat effect scattered
   through the generally Simulationist-reading text: admonishments to keep
   non-GM participants from screwing up the apparently-Narrativist goals,
   usually by pleading, scolding, or imposing sudden and apparently
   out-of-place limits on the players' authority to provide input. Good
   examples include Little Fears, The Burning Wheel, Fvlminata, and The Dying
   Earth.

   Another sort of Timid Virgin effect is a full spin toward Force Techniques
   in isolated spots, which is less schizoid in terms of the reading
   experience, but perhaps more confusing in the long run. Sorcerer, Everway,
   Zero, Prince Valiant, and The Whispering Vault all have this bi-polar
   problem, which I think characterizes many early-to-mid-90s game texts.

   2. Karaoke. This is a serious problem that arises from the need to sell
   thick books rather than to teach and develop powerful role-playing. Let's
   say you have a game that consists of some Premise-heavy characters and a
   few notes about Situation, and through play, the group generates a
   hellacious cool Setting as well as theme(s) regarding those characters.
   Then, publishing your great game, you present that very setting and theme
   in the text, in detail.

   From Over the Edge (Atlas Games, 1994; author is Jonathan Tweet):

   How to Use the Setting

   When I first played OTE, it was on about ten minutes' notice. I had some
   notes on major background conspiracies, a few images of various scenes,
   and a primitive version of the current mechanics. No map, no descriptions
   of businesses, people, places, or any of the other useful tidbits that are
   crammed into the previous two chapters. [He ain't kidding, and actually
   it's the previous four chapters, 152 pages total, in the second edition -
   RE] Naturally I winged it.

   That night were born Total Taxi, Giovanni's Cab's [sic], Cesar's Hotel,
   and Sad Mary's, all now landmarks in the Edge. Things just happened. I
   faked it. Since there's nothing that couldn't happen, anything I dreamt up
   was OK.

   Now, however, you have a background explaining who, what, where, and when.
   You're in a completely different situation from where I was back on that
   first manic evening.

   [The rest of the section concerns converting the reader-GM's in-play
   mistakes about the canonical setting into opportunities, as well as
   altering it to taste; the suggestion that he may instead put himself
   directly into Tweet's improvisational shoes at the outset is, to my eyes,
   vividly absent - RE]

   [several pages later] Could vs. Should

   ... The first time I played OTE, I had a few pages of notes on the
   background and nothing on the specifics. I made it all up on the spot. Not
   having anything written as a guide (or crutch), I let my imagination
   loose. You have the mixed blessing of having many pages of background
   prepared for you. If you use the information in this book as a springboard
   for your own wild dreams, then it is a blessing. If you limit yourself to
   what I've dreamed up, it's a curse.

   All I see, I'm afraid, is the curse. The isolated phrases "mixed blessing"
   and "(or crutch)" don't hold a lot of water compared to the preceding 152
   extraordinarily detailed pages of canonical setting. I'm not saying that
   improvisation is better or more Narrativist than non-improvisational play.
   I am saying, however, that if playing this particular game worked so
   wonderfully to free the participants into wildly successful brainstorming
   during play ... and since the players were a core source during this
   event, as evident in the game's Dedication and in various examples of play
   ... then why present the results of the play-experience as the material
   for another person's experience?

   3. Metaplot. From Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron
   Edwards):

   Metaplot. The solution most offered by role-playing games is a
   supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which
   are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and
   expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions.
   These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as
   well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved
   in these conflicts.

   Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is
   antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably,
   it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for
   play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the
   authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group
   in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than
   creative musicians.

   Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially
   Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D'2, beginning with
   the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are
   perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they 'define
   role-playing with strong Setting.

   However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history
   necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best
   example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history
   in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical
   world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane
   new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the
   process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this
   metaplot?

   Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters;
   they only provide context for them. The players know all about the
   upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say)
   a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended
   to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only
   through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a
   crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide
   theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest,
   there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys
   and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme
   through their characters' decisions during those events.

   In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest
   following the full-disclosure lead of HeroQuest and abandoning the
   metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.

   4. Sole reliance on deepening and detailing any aspects of Exploration is
   misguided. The vast majority of attempted Narrativist design is a hunt for
   the perfect Simulationist design that will ostensibly permit the
   Narrativist play to emerge, leading to abashedness at best. It's often
   combined with mistaking an effectiveness-improvement mechanic for a reward
   system - at this point, the game text simply facilitates High-Concept
   Simulationist play, and the Narrativist goal is left to Social Contract
   alone. Various publishing practices, especially a long string of scenario
   and setting supplememnts, provide the coffin nails.

   5. Going "no system," especially for IIEE aspects of play, combines the
   undermining aspects of both of the above two approaches, especially when
   the author idealizes story as a product rather than Narrativist play as a
   process. Don't forget, all role-playing has a system; turning it over to
   "oh, just decide and have fun" merely makes the system crappy and prone to
   bullying.

   Frankly, un-structured Drama turns out to be ill-suited to Narrativist
   play. It's clear why people turn to it so consistently; years of suffering
   through task-resolution systems that fail to resolve conflict, with the
   attendant Simulationist creep of rules-revisions during the 1980s, is
   enough to put any aspirant Narrativist off of "rules" and "systems."

   The Window (latest version 1997, author is Scott Lininger) makes a brave
   attempt at this approach to play:

   You see, after trying what seems like a million different systems during
   our own series of roleplaying games (perhaps you've seen this, too), we
   slowly realized that no matter what rules we were using, the interaction
   between the characters essentially ran the same. No matter what rules we
   were using, the combat always moved along with the same ultimate effects:
   it was just a question of how long it took to get there. Even the
   character creation worked in the same way, or at least was visualized in
   the same way.

   As it was, our style had become more important to us than the system. We
   spent many times the creative energy developing the world and our
   characters than we did figuring up percentages, regardless of the genre we
   chose. It wasn't the individual stats and skills that made us love our
   characters, rather it was their actions and their personalities and how
   they fit into the overall story.

   The only time we really noticed which rules were being used was when they
   somehow got in the way, as they inevitably did! That was the seed. We
   decided that it was time for a system that would stay in the background...
   be invisible as a pane of glass...

   There are plenty of explicit Narrativist goals stated in The Window,
   especially its Third Precept:

   This is a big idea, though a simple one. It starts with the realization
   that the actors and the Storyteller are all cooperating toward the same
   goal: If everyone takes equal responsibility for the quality of the story
   then all will benefit when it really starts working.

   There are times when a good actor will let go of their own ego and let the
   story take precedence over their character. There are times when a good
   Storyteller will allow the actors to narrate scenes. The days of rival
   camps delineated by a GM screen are over. Though obviously the
   Storyteller's vision is what creates the seeds of roleplaying, nothing
   much will grow without the actors' input. An open, out of character dialog
   about the direction of the story should be maintained so that the
   Storyteller knows what's working and what's not.

   Strive for originality in all things. Your characters, their actions, and
   their contribution to the narrative are totally up to you to decide, and
   the essence of roleplaying is a creative one. Don't allow yourself to fall
   back on stereotypes, and remember that what you create when you sit down
   to roleplay is totally unique to you and your group of friends. The story
   you mutually envision should be your own.

   The Window includes a dice-rolling mechanic, but most of its resolution is
   handled through Drama, with or without the rolls. Unfortunately, the
   unstructured-Drama system of the game is anything but invisible - it must
   be redefined and "referenced" at every moment of play. Contrary to popular
   belief, it demonstrates the highest Points of Contact of any sort of
   role-playing. Furthermore, it's the one mode of attempted Narrativist play
   which fails to prioritize or organize protagonism. It mistakenly asssumes
   that narration yields Narrativism, and that constraints on narration are
   necessarily restraints on Narrativist play.

   What's the problem with this? Why am I being so harshly critical? It all
   goes back to Force - if establishing the IIEE circumstances is under one
   person's control, without reference to any System features, then scenes'
   outcomes become the province of that person. Which in turn means that the
   decisions and actions of player-characters are now details of this one
   person's decisions. Narrativist de-protagonism is the near-inevitable
   result.

   6. Fleeing to Social Contract to solve everything. Some designers,
   enthralled by the idea that input does not have to be restricted to or
   filtered through a central person, rely on the hope that everyone feels
   like contributing extra-protagonist content at any given moment.
   Unfortunately, this creates a "dead ball" effect in which one must create,
   on the spot, both adversity and its resolution from whole cloth. People
   apparently prefer a fair amount of context and constraint in order to
   provide input instead.

   A related tendency is to rely on restraint, stating or implying that "good
   players wouldn't do that!" I suggest two alternative approaches: (1) that
   System provide "rebound" or consequences to make the variety of choices
   interesting, and (2) stating explict Creative Agenda expectations up
   front.

   The biggest pitfall of all, though, needs a section of its own.

  The Impossible Thing Before Breakfast

   All right, here we go. This section represents a different angle of attack
   for me - I'm not discussing System or mechanics design at all, just the
   "how to role-play" texts. Some of the following games have, in my view,
   very focused Creative Agenda content in contrast to these sections; other
   games, not listed or discussed, are comparatively muddled in procedural
   terms but have crystal-clear "how-to" sections. So this is entirely about
   the "how-to" text, nothing else.

   From Space: 1889 (1988, GDW Inc, author is Frank Chadwick):

   Each adventure is a story, and the player characters are its heroes, but
   with an important distinction: Their actions are not determined by an
   author, but rather by the players themselves.

   [From the chapter "The Referee"]

   ... it is a good idea to conduct as many of the event resolution die rolls
   as possible yourself and then announce the results. This makes the game
   seem less mechanical to the players and enables you [to] add a secret die
   roll modifier here or there to make things come out right without anyone
   being the wiser. [Elsewhere in the text it is specified that this section
   applies to critical events for the story - RE]

   From Traveller (1996, Imperium Games Inc., authors are Marc Miller, Lester
   Smith, Tony Lee)

   The Players

   Like a novel author or an actor in a drama, each player in a role-playing
   game creates a persona, or character, to portray in the game ... the
   player responds to the situation of the adventure as it unfolds, deciding
   what the character would say or do in that situation. They don't just
   watch the character, they choose the character's options.

   The Referee

   Management of the game is performed by a special player known as the
   referee. ... Like the director of a movie, the referee judges what can and
   cannot be accomplished in a particular scene.

   From Tsyk (1996, Propaganda Publishing, author is Serge Stelmack):

   Number Two: The personas are the property of the players.

   Tsyk is not about players versus the GM. It is about the cooperative
   weaving of a tale that everybody can enjoy. It does not make sense to use
   the powers of gamemastery to try and dominate the personas, or to be
   spiteful over their successes in the game.

   Though it is the job of the GM to guide the characters through the
   adventure, it is always the decisions of the players that dictate the
   actions of the personas.

   From Agone (2001, Multisim Publishing, authors include Sebatian Celerin,
   Mathieu Gaborin, Stephane Marsan, Frederic Weil, and others):

   ADVICE TO THE EG

   The role of the Eminence Grise is crucial. He is the balance-keeper of the
   game. He must prepare - and often create from scratch - thrilling plots
   and describe the settings and their inhabitants ... In short, he enables
   the players to live a good heroic-fantasy adventure. He must create a tale
   in which the players' characters have the lead roles, in which they can,
   through their actions, bring the story to one end or another.

   In our world, the EG would be called a director or storyteller. Indeed, he
   is simultaneously writer, director, and actor in a play or movie, which
   improvises itself as hours of gameplay fly by.

   From Undiscovered (2001, Eilfin Publishing, authors include Adam D.
   Theriault, Antonio da Rosa, Philip Theriault):

   Guiding Your Adventures

   Let the players control their own fate. Although it is your story, you
   must follow the whims of the characters. It is, after all, their lives
   they are playing out. The characters must have the freedom to choose their
   own fates, not just do what the AG tells them to do. It is your job,
   however, to guide the characters through the story you have created.

   What could any of this be saying? How is Entity A creating the tale,
   guiding characters through the adventure, judging what can be accomplished
   in a scene, making things come out right, and "your story" to be
   reconciled with Entity B being "like a novel author," determining
   characters' actions, bringing a story to an end, and having the lead
   roles? As plain explanation, all such text is unmitigated nonsense. It's
   such nonsense, that personalized readings that themselves make sense are
   often projected onto it, as what the authors "must obviously" have meant.
   Two such projections include:

    1. Players of the protagonists always provide those characters'
       decisions, especially climactic ones that drive the resolving scenes;
       the GM-role is there to provide relevant adversity for everyone else,
       e.g. managing scene framing, Bangs, and pacing.

    2. The GM has the story decisions, i.e., wields substantial Force.
       "Story" isn't coming from player decisions at all and may be
       considered, itself, a piece of Explorative-material input from the GM.
       Everyone else is providing color and material through
       pseudo-decisions.

   Both of these are perfectly reasonable approaches to play. Don't mistake
   your solution as justification for Impossible Thing game text. If a person
   is stuck in the rhetoric of The Impossible Thing, he tends to seize his
   personal solution and embrace it like a life-raft, rejecting any
   examination of the Thing itself.

   No one is safe, apparently. From Maelstrom (Hubris Games, 1994, author is
   Christian Aldridge):

   What happens in a game

   Characters will have goals they want to attain, and obstacles to overcome.
   The story that the narrator creates will provide the setting and the plot.
   In that plot the characters might stumble into adventure accidentally, or
   become embroiled in international espionage, or choose to seek out fame
   and fortune as tomb-robbers or pirates. The important point is that the
   players author the tale through the actions of their characters.

   Gaaaahh! Right there in a book studded with some of the finest applied
   Narrativist techniques known to role-playing, there it squats, pulsing!
   Based on the rest of the text as well as my discussions with Aldridge, I
   know the first "provide the story" in this excerpt indicates adversity;
   the second ("author the tale") indicates Narrativist protagonism. But
   without that distinction in mind, reading such explanations is agonizing;
   one can see the author filling in phrases he is accustomed to seeing in
   role-playing texts, then, clearly realizing he's written something he
   didn't mean, correcting himself mid-paragraph, resulting in a
   contradictory hash.

   As discussed earlier, the issue hinges on the super-big red herring called
   "the plot, the story." It can mean so many things: - the NPCs' plan to do
   something, which is irrelevant in GNS terms, as that's merely in-game
   adversity, a staple of any role-playing. - given the definite article and
   given a pre-player-decision context, it's absolutely anathema to
   Narrativist play. - stripped of that article and given a purely post-play
   context, it means nothing more than story, and is irrelevant for prep for
   Narrativist play.

   It's also easy to get distracted by the word "GM." A person may have a
   mental tautology going between "GM" and "power," with a corresponding
   death-grip on his or her perceived responsibility to perform and
   entertain. Once the term is understood to be a set of independent roles
   which may be distributed differently across the participants, then the
   whole thing becomes a lot easier.

   As far as game design and text is concerned, The Impossible Thing is easy
   to avoid. All you have to do is be up-front about where and how those
   GM-roles are distributed. If you're doing a solid Simulationist game with
   a strong story emphasis via Force, say so and don't bleat about "players
   control their characters' decisions" (see Call of Cthulhu and
   Arrowflight). If you're doing a solid Narrativist game, keep Force out of
   it entirely (see Dust Devils, InSpectres, and My Life with Master).

The hard question

   I suggest that both Gamist and Narrativist priorities are clear and
   automatic, with easy-to-see parallels in other activities and apparently
   founded upon a lot of hardwiring in the human mind (or "psyche" or
   "spirit" or whatever you want to call it). Whereas I think Simulationist
   priorities must be trained - it is highly derived play, based mainly on
   canonical fandom and focus on pastiche, and requires a great deal of
   contextualized knowledge and stern social reinforcement. This training is
   characterized by teaching people not to do what they're inclined to. No
   one needs to learn how to role-play, but most do need to learn to play
   Simulationist, by stifling their Gamist and/or Narrativist proclivities.
   Such training is often quite harsh and may involve rewards and punishments
   such as whether the person is "worthy" to be friends with the group
   members.

   If the typical role-playing preferences among humans are Gamist and
   Narrativist, then play based on these modes should be easy to pick up,
   easy to spread, and easy to sell, and I think it is all three. However,
   since the typical role-playing text and typical training is Simulationist,
   the net effect is to bump the majority of interested people away from the
   hobby after first contact, and to consolidate the Simulationist primacy in
   all evident features of the hobby, as opposed to the potential ones. This
   is one of several reasons why the hobby remains decidedly fringe.

   So the first question is, how about you? Are you Simulationist-by-habit,
   which is to say, well-trained to this mode by the first group you
   encountered? If so, is that what you really want? If so, then excellent.
   But! If not, if you'd rather be addressing Premise, then you have a lot of
   habits to break - perhaps even those which, in your mind, originally
   defined the activity.

   The second, larger question is much like the Gamist one: why role-play for
   this purpose? Why this venue, and not some more widely-recognized medium
   like writing comics or novels or screenplays? Addressing Premise can be
   done in dozens, perhaps hundreds, of artistic media. To play Narrativist,
   you must be seizing role-playing, seeing some essential feature in the
   medium itself, which demands that Premise be addressed in this way for you
   and not another. What is that feature? If you can't see one, then maybe,
   just maybe, you are slumming in this hobby because you're afraid you can't
   hack it in a commercial artistic environment. Maybe you even hang with a
   primarily-Simulationist group, with the minimal levels of satisfaction to
   be gained among them, because it's safe there.

   But let's say you do answer that question, and hold your head up as a
   Narrativist role-playing practitioner, addresser of Premise. Fine - now
   you have to ask yourself whether you can handle artistic rejection. That's
   right, no one might be interested in you. This is exactly what all
   aspiring directors, screenwriters, novelists, and other practitioners of
   narrative artistry face. In which case, you'll have to decide whether it's
   because your worthy vision is unappreciated and should seek new
   collaborators, or because your vision is simply lacking. It's not an easy
   thing to deal with.

   But let's say that's all resolved too, and you are holding the brass ring:
   successful and fulfilling Narrativist play with a great bunch of fellow
   participants, fine and exciting content from your and the others' work,
   and the sense of worthy artistry. Now for the final conundrum: what will
   you sacrifice to sustain it? Maybe your spouse is tired of the time you
   spend on this; maybe you and a fellow group member get a little too close;
   maybe you decide your art would be even better if your best friend's sorry
   ass was no longer gumming up the group's work. Can you make those sorts of
   choices? Can you live with the results?

   Good luck with it. No one ever claimed that balls-to-the-wall artists were
   necessarily easy to live with.

Glossary

   The following terms continue the lists at the end of the essays
   "Simulationism: the Right to Dream"
   ([24]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/) and "Gamism: Step On Up"
   ([25]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/21/), which themselves are
   additions to the definitions given in "GNS and other matters of
   role-playing theory" ([26]http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/1/). Which is
   a polite way of saying go look at all of them, for now. A complete
   glossary is under way.

   Bangs

           Introducing events into the game which make a
           thematically-significant or at least evocative choice necessary
           for a player. The term is taken from the rules of Sorcerer.

   Black Curtain

           My term for the techniques a GM may employ to keep his use of
           Force hidden from the other participants in the game, such that
           they are at least somewhat under the impression that their
           characters' significant decisions are under their control. See
           Illusionism.

   Blood Opera

           Play in which character generation focuses on potentially
           irreconcilable differences among at least some of the characters,
           and in which scenario generation is designed to put as much
           pressure on these differences (and therefore on unexpected
           alliances as possible). Notable for high mortality rates among
           characters, in the manner of Reservoir Dogs. The term was coined
           by Ralph Mazza, Jake Norwood, and myself after playing an
           especially masochistic session of The Riddle of Steel during
           Origins 2003.

   Bob (from Sex & Sorcery)

           Withholding response or otherwise mandating a "rest" in the
           Premise-addressing action of play.

   Conflict resolution

           A technique in which the resolution mechanisms of play focus on
           conflicts of interest, rather than on the component tasks within
           that conflict. When using this technique, inanimate objects are
           conceived to have "interests" at odds with the character, if
           necessary. Contrast with Task resolution.

   Congruence

           Term coined by Walt Freitag to describe the theoretical
           possibility of simultaneous play of different Creative Agendas
           which, although fulfilling very different needs for their
           employers, are also mutually supportive between those employers.
           The existence of sustained congruence remains controversial.

   Cross (from Sex & Sorcery)

           Introducing effects from previous scenes into current scenes,
           although the scenes do not contain the same protagonists.

   Deprotagonize (Paul Czege)

           To limit or devalue another person's opportunity to establish
           their character as a protagonist during Narrativist play. Note
           that this is specific to Paul's use of Protagonism strictly in the
           limited Narrativist context.

   Egri, Lajos

           the author of The Art of Dramatic Writing (1946); see Premise.

   El Dorado

           Coined by Paul Czege, a term for the unrealizable ideal of
           consistently addressing Premise through explicitly Simulationist
           play.

   Force

           Originally called "GM-oomph" (Ron Edwards), then "GM-Force" (Mike
           Holmes) - Control over the protagonist characters'
           thematically-significant decisions by anyone who is not the
           character's player. The Force is an especially good term for this
           phenomenon, due to (1) its sense of imposed mandate and
           strength-in-control (not just input), and (2) its parodic Star
           Wars connotation - whatever you want the plot to be, "use the
           Force!"

   Ouija-board role-playing

           Coined by me in this essay, a form of Illusionism practiced among
           all the participants upon one another to conceal both Step On Up
           and Story Now priorities from one another.

   Pastiche

           An artistic production which relies on invoking pre-existing
           productions' features for its primary effect; at worst, a simple
           imitation, but at best, potentially a strong secondary commentator
           on the original text. Often associated with "fanfic" or other
           forms of homage.

   Premise (adapted from Egri)

           A generalizable, problematic aspect of human interactions. Early
           in the process of creating or experiencing a story, a Premise is
           best understood as a proposition or perhaps an ideological
           challenge to the world represented by the protagonist's passions.
           Later in the process, resolving the conflicts of the story
           transforms Premise into a theme - a judgmental statement about how
           to act, behave, or believe.

   Prima Donna

           A Narrativist player who engages in Premise-addressing, but will
           not share screen time or Premise-significant decision-making time
           with other participants. An extremely dysfunctional subset of
           Narrativist play.

   Protagonism

           A problematic term with two possible meanings. (A) A
           characteristic of the main characters of stories, regardless of
           who produced the stories in whatever way. (2) A characteristic set
           of behaviors among people during role-playing, associated with
           Narrativist play, with a necessary equivalent in Gamist play and
           possible and Simulationist play.

   Railroading

           Control of a player-character's decisions by the GM, or
           opportunities for decisions, in any way which breaks the Social
           Contract for that group, in the eyes of the character's player.

   Simulationist-by-habit (Jesse Burneko)

           A form of synecdoche which defines "role-playing" according to
           certain historically-widespread Simulationist approaches to play."
           The system's job is to provide the physics of the game-world" is a
           good example.

   Story

           an imaginary series of events which includes at least one
           protagonist, at least one conflict, and events which may be
           construed as a resolution of the conflict.

   Story Now

           a mode, or Creative Agenda, in which Premise is addressed through
           play. The epiphenomenal outcome for the transcript is almost
           always a story.

   Task resolution

           a technique in which the resolution mechanisms of play focus on
           within-game cause, in linear in-game time, in terms of whether the
           acting character is competent to perform a task. Contrast with
           Conflict resolution.

   Transcript

           an account of the imaginary events of play without reference to
           any role-playing procedures. A transcript may or may not be a
           story.

   Transition (coined by Fang Langford)

           Changing from one Creative Agenda to another through the course of
           play using rules designed to make that process easy.

   Typhoid Mary

           A GM who employs Force in the interests of "a better story,"
           usually identifiable as addressing Premise; however, in doing so,
           the GM automatically de-protagonizes Narrativist players and
           therefore undercuts his or her own priorities of play, as well as
           being perceived as a railroader by the players. An extremely
           dysfunctional subset of Narrativist play.

   Vanilla Narrativism: Narrativist play without notable use of the following
   techniques

           Director Stance, atypical distribution of GM tasks, verbalizing
           the Premise in abstract terms, overt rules concerning narration,
           and improvised additions to the setting or situations. People who
           typically play in this fashion often fail to recognize themselves
           as Narrativists.

   Weave (from Sex & Sorcery)

           A GM technique of bringing NPC activities closer to the
           player-characters and to introduce multiple responses among NPC
           and player-character actions.

   --------------------------------------------------------------------------

   Last updated 29-Jan-2004 09:56:35 CDT

   The Forge created and administrated by [27]Clinton R. Nixon and [28]Ron
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   All articles, reviews, and posts on this site are copyright their
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