Theory and Practice Response
So a few responses to my last post prompted me to clarify some comments I made.
I never read in any posts that narrativist games were relatively new or that narrativist gms had to tell A STORY. Those were the impressions I was left with after reading a number of posts and I cannot recall the exact posts or what comments gave me that feeling. It was my opinion and not based on any bloggers' posts.
I'm also not against narrativist games. I think narrativist is a term better used for gameplay. Any game can be run as narrativist. I think it's a cool approach and I'll play in it.
What I was railing about was gms (and players) who try to shoehorn their players into a story that is not engaging others or inclusive. True narrativist gameplay comes about when everyone collaborates on a story as Chris Kubasik pointed out to me (thanks Chris and thanks Jeffro for reposting my blog and still circling me after a long dry spell.)
Narrativist practices are as old as RPGs in my opinion. We are talking old school. Is it narrativist to fudge some rolls and avoid a total party kill to keep a campaign going? Whenever a gm rolled for a random encounter and then said "Flumph? Screw that! I'm substituting ogres!" to keep the story moving or inject some excitement, that was narrative. Of course some gms just went with ogres to be bastards.
I never read in any posts that narrativist games were relatively new or that narrativist gms had to tell A STORY. Those were the impressions I was left with after reading a number of posts and I cannot recall the exact posts or what comments gave me that feeling. It was my opinion and not based on any bloggers' posts.
I'm also not against narrativist games. I think narrativist is a term better used for gameplay. Any game can be run as narrativist. I think it's a cool approach and I'll play in it.
What I was railing about was gms (and players) who try to shoehorn their players into a story that is not engaging others or inclusive. True narrativist gameplay comes about when everyone collaborates on a story as Chris Kubasik pointed out to me (thanks Chris and thanks Jeffro for reposting my blog and still circling me after a long dry spell.)
Narrativist practices are as old as RPGs in my opinion. We are talking old school. Is it narrativist to fudge some rolls and avoid a total party kill to keep a campaign going? Whenever a gm rolled for a random encounter and then said "Flumph? Screw that! I'm substituting ogres!" to keep the story moving or inject some excitement, that was narrative. Of course some gms just went with ogres to be bastards.
Comments
Post a Comment