A Narrativist Design Family Chart

[Chris Chinn]

Ron Edwards has a pretty neat discussion in a thread about his initial attempts at Narrativist play, which, leads to an interesting post about current indie games: www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php?topic=32336.msg289713#msg289713

There's a great chart of design families here:
adept-press.com/wordpress/wp-content/media/History_of_Narrativist_Design.pdf

Chris

[devp]

Interesting chart, and I think Ron is right in his concern that people will take the wrong message from the chart (hey i almost did by reading it to tldr'ing it like a fool).

I think there's something neat bout those two branches: (a) identify with your character and throw yourself upon the gears, vs (b) shared narration and things evolve from there. You can share techniques, but I do think there's a real difference in what gaming mindset you're in. There was a flurry of increased narrational control in the earlier Narr games, and then I think more people have recognized the power of constraining yourself to the scope of your own character.

[Chris Chinn]

I think Narration Trading got used a lot w/o thought, and now kinda suffers being passe, though there's a lot more room to explore with it.

For example, all the directed question/"Pick 2" kind of stuff in AW is a very focused method of Narration Trading.

What's pretty interesting in that discussion is the idea of rules as something that will take you someplace vs. rules that exist for you to find a someplace.

Chris