Narrative Systems

What are your favourite narrative systems Veeky Forums?

Am looking at the Burning Wheel right now - any comments.

FAE. It's nowhere near perfect, but it tickles me in all the right ways.

FAE is substantially different from FATE right? I've looked at FATE but never really gotten into it.

Not substantially, no. It basically drops the not-so-short list of skills in favour of six "approaches", which describe how effective your character is at doing things in a certain way, as opposed to how effective they are at doing certain, specific things. A few other parts of the game are also slightly simplified and/or streamlined, such as stress and (optionally) stunts, but it's still pretty much the same game in the grand scheme of things.

>What are your favourite narrative systems Veeky Forums?
By "narrative" you mean... systems that focus on narrative/roleplaying rather than detailed rules and power-gaming?

Yes. Though there are some rules heavy systems that focus on roleplaying - burning wheel for example is quite crunchy but the mechanics are around creating an interesting story.

Dogs in the Vineyard.

The One Ring is pretty fucking tight and manages to capture the tone of the books very well. Mechanics exist to serve the narrative, not their own ends etc.

Got a link to all the pdfs if you're interested, user (assuming you're into Lord of the Rings)

Love that system.
Me and my Fellowship are kicking ass up and down the Riddermark these days.

Bloody excellent, user. I'm currently planning a short intro campaign for a few friends of mine set in Breeland; starting off with a good low-stakes adventure to ease them into the system. Might go for something Riddermark later on!

Definitely into lotr - I'll have a look for the pdfs later, I'm sure I can find them myself, though a link would be appreciated. Can you buy dead tree versions? I really like having physical books to flick thru.

I'm actually looking into narrative RPGs for the first time. Tried to start out with 7th sea but I can't really make heads or tails of most of it, probably due to 99% of my experience coming from highly technical systems.

Any chance you could hook me up with at least the core rules to look at?

Here you go my anons. And yeah I'm almost 100% you can get physical books of em.

mega dot nz slash #F!tbpzXJLY!h2QSWJuAGFau0TWXEPFHyA

Link should have all the pdfs, including the ones released this year, and a bunch of maps, sheets and a bunch of really neat homebrew stuff I haven't had a proper look at yet.

You rock. Thanks a lot!

No problemo, user. The Valar sent me to this Middle-Board for a reason.

I feel compelled to say that focusing on the narrative/roleplay is more about the DM and players than the actual system.

Though I've been playing FATE for the first time this year and its a really different experience (coming from someone who used to play only D&D). In terms of narrative and fantasy, its far from anything I have ever played... on the same session a lot of stuff happens, we go to a lot of places, etc. I have been in the group for only one arc and we have already had several epic wars, traveled through and explored different planes, discovered evil plots, etc. All of that in a handful number of sessions. I'm very impressed how the DM is able to move so quickly, and I feel the system do play a role in that. Tomorrow is out last session for this arc, and maybe my last session on the group...

I have to pick a system myself for a campaign I'm starting next week, and I still haven't made up my mind. At the same time I like to focus on narrative/roleplaying, I find the combat system for D&D 4e fucking awesome.

4e can do narrative games; don't let anyone tell you otherwise. It's just that the rules themselves don't really support it as well as other games.

>Ran three sessions of DitV
>My players really leaned into the whole thing.
>We found the resolution mechanic was a fun game in itself
>Two towns full of sex, shit talking, eschewing responsibility, bad religion and heavy, weird weather
>They're all too fucking busy with grad school now
What a ride while it happened though.

Heroquest 2 is my favorite "pure narrative" RPG. I also enjoy OtE/WaRP and games like Microscope/Kingdom, Risus, etc.

Never liked Fate. For me it sits in the most uncomfortable wishy-washy territory possible.

It's basically GURPS/D6/Mythras or HQ2/OtE/Risus (in order from most used to least used) for me a significant portion of the time these days, depending on my desires and the campaign type I'm running.

any of the PBTA games, especially the better designed ones. Each of them has a specific genre or type of story its about; Monster Hearts is YA teen angst mixed with body horror, Masks is a Teen Titans or Justice League-esque story of young super heros, etc.

Pendragon if you're looking for Arthurian myths & legends.

We’ve worker through a lot of the older content and are already sort of big names up in Wilderland, so we just headed south.