Re: Re: Narrativism, again.

From: Alex Ferguson <abf_at_...>
Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 19:08:59 +0100 (BST)

This isn't especially a rules topic, I know, and in fact one that doesn't even much interest me, except in either case, in so far as people use "that's narrative, that's not" as debating tactic in what's a "good" or a "correct" rule or rules interpretation in HW "because it's a narrative game".

> > Again, I don't see how that's a "useful" definition. Nor is it
> > an applicable one to HW, which in several places is
> > clearly "modelling
> > the world", in greater or lesser degree. (It also seems a curiously
> > irregular word formation if "narrative" means "pertaining to
> > characters". You'd think it'd have something to do with, well,
> > the narrative...)
>
> And, can you have a narrative without characters?

Of course not. But equally, you can't have a narrative without a story, or without a setting, and your "definition" ignores those.

> This game is intended to address story structure directly, to embed
> the mechanics in the narrative (character driven) structure rather
> than just in an abstract model of a world in which the characters
> move about. That is what distinguishes it from systems primarily
> modelling a worlds cause-and-effect from a simulationist angle.

I don't think this is how people use the term as a rule. (If there's an "as a rule" that describes consistently how any majority of people use it.)

By your definition, the ultimate "Narritivist" game would be HKAT!, rather than HW (or Champions), despite being chock-filled with rules elements of the sort I've seen freely derided as "simulationist" in other such threads.

> Because, I started to ask if you were running the game in real-time,
> essentially simulating the life experience of the characters, or in a
> dramatic structure with explicit episodes. It might be that if you
> are using the constant time structure, you are trying to adjust
> wealth to reflect the current cash value of a character and not
> seeing the reset-to-default effect; this was the point about the
> BatCar.

As I've said before, 'wealth', by any model, has played very little in either of the two HW games I've run.

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