What's with all the hate against narrative focused games? I mean...

You haven't seen Pundit's rants about how the story game "swine" are trying to take over and destroy the hobby with their shitty books pretending to be games.

Yes, I know it's contradictory that they would take over the industry with a shitty product. He doesn't seem to care as long as he can keep nursing his persecution conspiracy complex.

That stands and falls entirely with the skillof your GM. Mine is pretty badass with this stuff so I'm one of the lucky few.

Except Dark Souls is fantasy. Fantasy with gothic and lovecraftian aesthetics baked in, but fantasy all the same; what with the whole HERO WHO SAVES THE WORLD FROM THE EVER-RETURNING DARKNESS plotline and all.

>lovecraftian aesthetics
So it's a meme game, good to know.

>hero
>saves the world
>from the darkness
Somebody never played Dark Souls, I see.

People hated that shit on Veeky Forums before Dark Souls was a thing.

That is one way to look at Frampt's ending, yes. You DO save the world heroically, if only for a period a time.
The other ending is pretty much "fuck this shit and become Übermensch", which can be translated into "generic Evil ending".

Because 'narrative focused' is often used to thinly veil a garbage ruleset.

You can have a narrative based game with decent rules. But 'narrative' is being used as an excuse to defend a shitty game. Thats the problem.

>The other ending is pretty much "fuck the gods and become Übermensch along with the rest of humanity", which can be translated into "best ending".
FTFY

Because N-G-S is a heavily flawed theory

TheRPGPundit and Zak S. decided to pile their legion of autists upon any game their god emperors declared "swine games" or narrative mechanics that supposedly are a part of an SJW conspiracy to destroy the tabletop genre.

In reality, the kiddos are just buttmad that some folks got their college degrees and want to play something more than murderhobos swinging their swords around.

whitehall-paraindustries.blogspot.com/2009/09/flaws-of-gns-part-i-appeal.html?m=1

that the thing I never understood with dark soul, if you let the flame fade, doesn't everyone become hollow and "live" in a state of perpetual night were everything eventually die and decay? how is that a win?

>why is there hate about [subject] on the internet?

Narrative-driven games are great, OP.

I find it hilarious because Zak S is always going on about expressing setting through rules. That is precisely what a narrative game should be doing, rules for developing narrative.

No, the point of RPGs is to WIN. To feel supreme ecstasy knowing that the GM did everything he could to kill your character, but that you were so smart and so powerful that he was powerless before you.
Easy mode is for babies, so you must demand of your GM that every session is ultra-hardcore "gritty" session and have a 99% chance of killing your character. At the same the GM must never let your character die, because that means he's incompetent and jealous of you. He should present a Real Challenge(tm) that you happen to always win, which is totally different from letting you win.

Narrative games are simple and place everyone on even ground, so there's no way to prove that you're more awesome than all the scrubs. Which means the game is LYING, and letting the scrubs CHEAT by PRETENDING they can do as much as you.
And then there's this stupid "detachment" stuff. In a REAL game when the GM says "Knarf Bloodreaper kills the dragon", he means "Frank kills the dragon". Why the fuck would I care that Knarf killed a dragon if I'm not Knarf?

I know too many guys like this.

And maybe if Zak S. got himself an education beyond what he picks up trying to into the game design community, he'd understand the inherent irony of his rhetoric.

I don't know, I think he's been very clear on why he doesn't like what the indie scene produces.

'Narrative' is a word that could mean absolutely anything to anyone. You could construe any RPG to be a narrative game.

Mostly just a fringe group that are afraid to perform their characters. Lots of people who roleplay prefer the "boardgame" approach where they run their characters but don't perform them as improvisational theater. But a small number of people are phobic to the point that they freak out, and hate even when others do it because autism. That small group generates most of the hate.

Also in the 90s VtM was very big, and some vampire players turned into insufferable dicks about much collaborative storytelling. So there's also some lingering butt hurt from that.

this

This.

>Dark Souls isn't fantasy??

This is no forum for old men.

there was a pretty cool theory going around that Dark Souls 2-3 happen no matter what ending you pick in the preceeding game.

If you pick fire, then there is another age of light before it fades again towards darkness. If you pick darkness there is an age of darkness, that lasts until something sparks another flame, which in time fades.

Basically, the struggle will never end, what you accomplish is your own moment of defiance. It's a little nietzschian in that way

/thread

>people prefer gamist approaches because Dark Souls.

What?

>RPGs to make a collaborative story with some friends
No

I don't know if there's a hate movement against narrative focused games, but I particularly don't like them. It's too meta and at the end, if I want to write a story with my friends, I just go and write a story with my friends. Three entities tell the story in a RPG game: the players, the DM and the dice.

>Also in the 90s VtM was very big, and some vampire players turned into insufferable dicks about much collaborative storytelling.

Which is hilarious, since oWoD was a crunchy superhero game with a bunch of stuff in the books about "muh story" that wasn't in any way backed up by the rules.
Hell, the rules were often diametrically opposed to the kind of story each game was supposed to tell.

that depends on how you want to tell the story, and how much you want it to be about a story.

You can go towards the warhammer quest decent style, where the characters don't have much decision making agency as to what problems to solve, they're character is only in how they solve the presented problems, and might be pretty restricted in what they can do to solve those problems.

You can get a more standard D&D, CoC, etc game where the GM basically controls the entire setting, and the PCs can only control their characters actions, and the intereaction between those two is determined by the dice.

Then you can get a more cooperative narrative, where the players have more ability to declare things about the setting, and the GM can declare things about the PCs (the good versions of these games have a refusal mechanic built in of course). The dice might determine the actions within this cooperative story/setting, or who is allowed to make those declarations.

This can go as far as games like Houses of the Blooded, where the GM can sit back and let the players develop the full story for a considerable amount of time.

I like them, and I'd like more of those ideas in traditional systems in a way that improves the game, but too much of it is constrained improv trash that just isn't conductive to fun.

In spite of wanting some bits crossing over into the more traditional games, narrativists need to fuck off when they decry those games working as intended while they can't even do basic statistics. I like the coherent systematic ecosystems, but the minutiae are often crap or just not there at all.

Or further, in games like Fiasco, where there isn't a GM at all.

true, but fiasco is fairly limited by the constraints of the game itself, which kinda stands in for the GM.

To give an example of who HotB gives the players control, when a player rolls to see if they know something about a NPC, their success don't indicated what the GM (or referee as he's called) tells the player about the NPC.
Rather it determines how much the PLAYER can say about the NPC, the GM will fill in gaps after.

To give an example

A player says their intent is "To learn the NPCs personality" by asking questions of others.
The GM says "roll elk" (the name had great stat names). Modifies come in, and the player has a pool of 6 dice. He decides to roll 4 to make success likely, and has 2 'wagers'

He succeeds and has 'privilage' ie he can say 'yes' or 'no' to the question of if the intent succeeds, and 2 wagers, so two ANDS (or in some cases BUTS or similiar things).
The player chooses YES. He learns something.
AND that the NPC is greedy
And that he is lecherous.
The GM might though in an extra bit of info because the 'yes' didn't provide much on it's own.

Or the player chooses NO. He finds nothing about the NPC personality
BECAUSE the NPC is newly arrived in the area
BUT he learns that the NPC is an agent of Duke so and so.

If NPC has been spreading lies about himself it might be an opposed roll, with both players getting a pool and wagers.
Even the loser of the opposed role gets to keep half his wagers (round up) if he still gets a basic success.

So you could get
GM wins: but still chooses yes
As winner he gets first wager adding the first thing the Player finds out
The player gets his wager AND
The GM responds with a second and.

As the drama ramps up so do the dice pools, so you can get 6+ total wagers.

Well to be honest I enjoy narrative games.

I just have a tendency to dislike some of the people who play them.

I may not be the person you are addressing though.

This sounds silly. I'm sorry but why? What's the point? Is it better if we create the story instead of unveiling it? Why is having control over the story better than reacting to world around you created by another player, the GM? There's no sense of wonder in that. There's no G in those RPGs.

I can have fun with games like that once in a while, but are there people that only play narrative rpgs?

The Dark Souls players I know only play freeform and rules light rpgs.
So... I don't get what you are saying?

I didn't understand it either.

It lessens the responsibility of the gm for giving the players what they want or giving them advantages to what they can leverage without all the winking and nudging. Then you go back and play it. I'm not even that user and I can appreciate mechanizing preexisting social games that already exist in the context of that style of play.

While it has some snags, I actually prefer a more collaborative game that doesn't go all the way into roundrobin storytelling. I'm not even especially fond of the depths of narrative games as opposed to most of the community, but yeah, there are tons of people who don't touch crunchy crawly shit.

not better, different.
And HotB is an extreme example, but there is a lot of reacting to the world, because one player will create and the other will respond. GM sets the stage, the play develops off of everyone more like an improve traup, but with a basic mechanic structure to give it a bit more support than a true free form game. It's less 'gamist' than some, but still very much a game.

Because some people enjoy the game aspect of role-playing games and the best way of expressing that on the internet is disliking systems that downplay that aspect.

I get bored with those games pretty fast. That's why I rank them as 'worse', I guess.

Yeah, but when you separate GM and players and set rules straight to your world, it's more immersive than just sitting around and talk consensus. Have you ever battled a dragon in D&D? Or fought anything to the death in GURPS? It takes time and effort to kill that dragon and you get really nervous fighting in GURPS because you can die for your bad decisions really fast. I don't want the dragon to drop just because I said so and no-one else said otherwise.

I don't have as much fun with those types of rpgs.

you're confusing free-form with Narrative mechanics in RPGS.
Freeform you might just kill the dragon if no one says otherwise. DnD you can only use what the rules and GM have set up to kill the dragon.

Narrative you might say "I roll to see if there is rock ledge I can use to drop onto the dragon from above". Unless the GM really didn't want there to be that rock ledge, rolling will make that rock ledge.

Narrative games are mostly much less tactical combat heavy than RPGs, but again you can go the other direction and go full Descent where there is no making up a clever solution outside of the rules. It's a matter of what you want out of the game.

I guess so, but I still think 'gamist' systems are more exciting.

That could be true for you, and that's fine. Just understand that's not a universal truth but something that speaks to you personally.

It's like saying 'spicy food is better tasting'.

Angry grognards trying to divide 'storygames' from 'Real RPG's' rather than acknowledging they're all variants on the same idea.

You can blame TheRPGPundit and Zak Smith for a lot of the popularity this nonsense has been getting recently. Particularly because both of them were brought on as consultants for D&D 5e.

In the end I think OP is wrong. There's no hate train going for the narrative systems. I heard some people talking here about reddit, but that place is full of 'tards trying to draw attention to themselves. Treat them like the Illithid and give them no mind.

Who the fuck is Zak Smith?

Also

Why are you guys visiting Reddit?

There is a lot of hate for them, here and elsewhere. It doesn't really mean much because tabletop and autism and all, but there is a certain pseudointellectual contingent in the narrative camp stirring shit up in the same way autistic girls in college and on the internet are attacking men. Most of it is misconstrued and not really an attack, the rest is just retards and assholes, but they are taken seriously by people with money and power and the traditionalists don't want their shit fucked with.

Then that shit haven't reached me at all. I see some smack-talk, but persecution? Haven't seen it yet.

My perspective is that it feels silly to have rules for something as freeform as role-playing. For a lot of folks, crunch enforces stuff that improv and collaboration can't--the element of chance does mean something.

I feel odd that it's so often expressed as 'rules for roleplaying'.

Much more often the implementation is rules that support roleplaying. Mechanics and effects which make your characters personality, intent and choices matter more than they would otherwise. In any system, you can describe your character working harder because of an idea they believe in, but personally I like systems which have that kind of thing give you a form of bonus.

Aside from Zak. S and Pundit, narrative players sometimes get super smug and go on about how adult and mature their games are and that any traditional game is obsolete now.
It's 90's oWoD II: electric boogaloo pretty much.

Narrativist games have been a thing since the late 80's and early 90's. Most of the big names in the genre came out over a decade ago. I wish the forge wars would end already.

The biggest battle line I've seen though is between narrativist players and simulationist sandbox players who like improv. Metagame mechanics most violently repel folks who have built an entire playstyle about chasing immersion. As well, taking about how traditional games are railroads and players don't have agency is going to come off as blatantly untrue to players that are playin to see what happens. Narrative types as well get mad when they come up against someone who aggressively insists that story and roleplaying aren't the same thing and that story is bad for roleplaying.

Honestly OP, has it right.

Like I love Fate, but I get why other people don't like it. It requires metagaming as a basic component of character creation, and really only works if everyone at the table is a writer (or at least has a writer's mindset).

I don't get how something like action dice or other mechanical benefits for playing out your actions repulses folks who want immersion.
>a story is bad for roleplaying
???

>It requires metagaming as a basic component of character creation
Name me one (1) that does not.
If there's a ruleset governing statistics or competencies, then it's metagaming as you have to think like a person building a character rather than as a character.

He means more in atmosphere, with corruption, overlapping worlds, and madness being major themes of the game.

This

>Stop thinking Veeky Forums speaks for anyone. Veeky Forums doesn't even speak for itself most of the time.
Also this.

I agree with your sentiment but you are exaggerating the bar for entry to an extreme. If you have ever watched a movie and though man "I wish the ending was X instead" you are ready for narrative games.

Fate isn't just parsing out numbers as abstractions of skills and abilities though, ya goof.

You actually write down your character's backstory, competencies, personality, foibles, strengths, weaknesses, etc. as part of creation. You come up with it yourself, and anticipating what your character will or won't do in any given situation is a critical part of succeeding at the game.

A "Flying Ace" aspect means I know whenever I sit in a cockpit, I can spend a Fate point and get a bonus to my rolls on top of the high modifier I received when I determined my skills.

>character's backstory, competencies, personality, foibles, strengths, weaknesses, etc. as part of creation
You...don't do this with characters normally?

Story has three or four meanings in rpg's. A lot of these folks got into the game when story and railroading were used synonymously. oWoD games used similar rhetoric but the modules were often 90's railroads with dmpcs and all. There's also the suspicion that if the gm starts doing things for meta reasons or to create drama, then they're going to start stamping on player agency. It's the whole neutral judge thing, a gm expresses their creativity by making situation but shouldn't try to influence the results and just play "what would happen based on player actions"
The thing about metagame mechanics is that it requires thinking from a player perspective and making decisions from that perspective. There are ways to make it make sense in the game fiction but making sense in the fiction is a different thing as the initial decision is still made from a player rather than character perspective.

Pretty much. "It would be good for the story" or "It would be cool to happen." is a different motivation for decision making than "I'm a character in a fictional world, what do I do?"

I pointed out those two camps because they're round opposite of each other when it comes to preferred systems and motivations behind roleplay.

>Ron Edwards
>game design community

And if I'm playing GURPS I can spend points to have all the skills related to being a Flying Ace that I would want, and I never run out of fate points to fuel them. I just have them always on.

Of course different fate systems switch up skills. Some are only aspects, others have a skill list and aspects, one has an attribute system and aspects...

What really drives me up the wall is the systems that give you basic abilities that in any other system would be always on, but in the fate ruleset, cost a FP to activate. If I'm playing a super strong bruiser, I don't want to spend a FP every scene I want to he super strong, or even worse, for every action I want to be super strong on. I just want the strength to be on by default.

That kind of thing bugs me.

Wulin is really the only narrative heavy game I like, I think it does it beautifully

I really do want to agree with you but I came to that conclusion from personal experience.

When I ran with my old group, we were all writers, or at the least were very good at thinking critically about what we watched and read. When I moved and roped in some other friends to play a Fate game, they seemed unable to understand the basic idea behind Aspects and Troubles. At risk of sounding snobby, they rarely read, and weren't the best at looking at media with a critical eye.

They were the types who think "I'm good at everything" is a valid Aspect.

I do, but not everyone does. Because most games don't make those elements a part of the actual character creation rules.

You don't need to specify your paladin is an alcoholic or your rogue has daddy issues when rolling up a D&D character.

You should pay with other people more. The truth to that is surprising. For you at least.

You do but in mechanics-focused games you have to back that shit up by spending points and they could be nice flavor but ultimately useless in-game. I mean, I could stat Strawberry Shortcake and have to burn points just so she can play her guitar competently, effectively punishing me for a minor detail.

I dislike having any rolls in muh RP, even shit like diplomacy/charm or intimidation rolls sorta takes you outta it. I get their purpose but while having combat rolls allow the fights to play out fairly having all sorts of "social abilities" and things of that sort just suck me out of it.

Rivers and lakes are just as arbitrary. Not a complaint, just the fate dynamic is part of a greater system just like those are.

Sounds like a group problem. There's only been maybe 5 out of the hundreds of different players I've met who didn't show up with a strongly defined personality and backstory to the table (even if the backstory was a short one), and fewer still who didn't write out further personality and backstory details in play.

I understand that the real purpose of an aspect isn't to say that this is the entirety of your backstory, but instead, the important part. Daddy Issues as a negative aspect signals the GM you want that to come up often and hamper your character often, and that's cool! I like elements that help the GM know what parts of your backstory you most want to come up/fuck with you. Like a complication someone grabs in mutants and masterminds; a player grabs a paparazzi trouble and I know he wants to do some plot lines about the troubles with fame and being a public figure!

But if you need aspects to shove a player into writing a character with actual personality and depth, it's a player problem, not a game problem, and a good group will solve that faster than a system gimmick

There's also the laughs at/fears system for your martial arts, the loresheets, the way complications/wounds/etc work. Role play around the problem or eat a mechanical penalty is a fun way to encourage folks to think of interesting solutions.

I know you don't have to but I've never run a game where people give zero consideration to characterization.

I've been playing with various people people for about fifteen years.

If it's not a dramatic event with no chance of penalty for failure, what DM in their right mind would make you roll to belt out a campfire tune?

Sounds like you're playing with really dictatorial Fate GMs, honestly. I feel you could just take a stunt which gives you a flat bonus to Fighting with your fists or some shit like that. Stunts don't cost FP to use unless they're really overpowered. At least not in any Fate game I've played.

Never said it's not a group problem. In fact, my entire point was the nature of Fate means it's really susceptible to that kind of group problem. If you can't think creatively about your character and their personality, you're gonna have a hard time playing a system where their personality is a mechanic.

Because you're completely right.

What about rules that facilitate it? Assigning a sort of social currency to beneficial circumstances. GMs aren't perfect and having it become a sort of game give you both the explicit system to leverage in your actions and his rulings.

This isn't true! I shitpost about the things I like and compliment the things I hate.

>If it's not a dramatic event with no chance of penalty for failure, what DM in their right mind would make you roll to belt out a campfire tune?
"but u dnt huv skilpoints in it" DMs, which is a surprising amount of them.

To put my example into game terms, I could describe Strawberry as being a skilled guitarist in a FATE bio and that by virtue would let her play guitar without anyone arguing. It would be my call if I was to make it a skill or an aspect, if I don't then it wont win me any guitar battles or turn into a bard in the middle of a fight.

A game with skills and such on the other hand, I would have to invest in it to play something other than the James Bond theme (this is easy as fuck to play in case you don't know) by RAW.

I dislike having game currency for something that isn't also an in-setting resource. Though things like per day powers bug me as well so I'm a bit extreme on that point. Managing a currency for social skills makes my characters abilities swing around depending on how I as a player choose to use resources that don't exist in the game world.
It's a matter of different motivations for playing though.

>I know you don't have to but I've never run a game where people give zero consideration to characterization.

It's a hard reality sometimes. Barring one player, my last group couldn't really grasp how to play dynamic characters. They were just superficial expies of some film/tv character they liked. Which I don't normally object to, but when it amounts to little more than a stat sheet who occasionally quotes Inara Serra or the bad guy from Avatar it gets a little old.

Then, in an unrelated note, they all became obsessed with the BDSM scene and trans culture, so I dropped the group.

Youre describing fate in reverse. You eat mechanical penalties to roleplay through problems. I agree that wushu is better about it in this specific situation, but it doesn't work as well outside of wuxia. I prefer wulin as a game, but don't hate the way fate handles the same thing most of the time. I do see why other people do though.

Not every narrative focused game is very meta abuot it. Not even most, I'd say. FATE is, byt Heroquest or Savage Worlds not so much for it to be an issue.
On the other hand people tell that crunchy games do not impede narrative side, but... they do. Players have limited attention, session has limited time. The more resources you put into crunching, the less you have remaining for the narrative. Also being focused strongly on one aspect is more effective than trying to multitask.
I think he meant that kids now think that DS is ALL fantasy, or at least very representative to the genre while it's not. And gameplay ha little relation to the genre, but kids still make the conjunction.

>A game with skills and such on the other hand, I would have to invest in it to play something other than the James Bond theme (this is easy as fuck to play in case you don't know) by RAW.
RAW, for the vast majority of games written in the last almost 20 years, is that if there's no chance of penalty or significant failure or drama then there's no point to rolling anything.

>Savage Worlds not so much for it to be an issue.

Savage Worlds is slowly becoming my system of choice after playing so many Fate games. While I enjoy Fate, I miss some of the "gamier" aspects and I feel SW does a good job marrying crunch and narrative.

Of course, it still has a host of obnoxious mechanical issues but that's neither here nor there.

I meant it as an in game resource. For example, if you have a noble to leverage, you can use that in with the local gangs, or your standing in a holy order works for you in a vague mechanical sense. The way I run it is that you have to play it out well, but anything relevant you can call in your favor adds significantly to it beyond how you do. You can shit up your speech all you want if you have an army outside the door. Bluffing is a bit more complicated and we haven't quite hammered that out.

I like old school dungeon crawl RPGs (OSR stuff), and I like narrative games like Misspent Youth where your entire character sheet doesn't even have numbers on it and dice rolls just determine in broad terms "things move in the direction of this character's goals" which the players describe. They're distinct things, and I like both.

What I don't like are big, clunky systems a la D&D 3.5.

Link to a video? Sounds entertaining even though I don't agree.

>RAW, for the vast majority of games written in the last almost 20 years, is that if there's no chance of penalty or significant failure or drama then there's no point to rolling anything.
This is basically true for the original D&D too.

People hate narrative games? H-have I fallen out of the loop in like a day?

Oh yeah, that makes sense and is a good way to incentivize getting npc allies.

>I mean, isn't the point of RPGs to make a collaborative story with some friends?

No, it's to play a game with friends where you basically set your own win conditions. Where narrative focused games fail is in that they are barely games at all.

It's also worth mentioning that the poster child for narrative RPGs is Dungeon World, which manages to be ineffective at its stated purpose and also have TWO HUNDRED pages of rules and guidelines despite attempting to be beginner friendly, and yet combat is still mostly just fiat.

Yeah, it came up when I was working on this diplomatic clusterfuck of a game with philosophical implications because I play with overeducated assholes and I made it so 'questing' had an immaterial benefit. You can add anything to any situation as long as it's relevant. Saved a blacksmith's daughter? That might seriously help you haggle. Or you can call favors, but you lose them. It works well, but is a bookkeeping nightmare.

The problem I have with narrative-based games is the fact that mostly, the universe matters less than the metagame.

I prefer playing very crunchy games, and build the narratives out of the problems created by the crunch. But that's my opinion.

If a rule is clunky and unhelpful I can choose on the spot to ignore it.

If I find that I need a rule to resolve a certain peculiar situation and none exisrs, I cannot conjure it from the air.

Dungeon World is absolutely not GM fiat, unless you distill the definition of GM fiat to be so broad that it's useless.