What's the process, in D&D, for a PC hoping to meet a friend or ally - and having a chance of doing so - but also having a chance of an enemy turning up instead to rain on their parade?
There isn't one. This is the sort of acausal process I identified earlier, and it is rare in D&D. So narrativism requires or at least benefits from such acausality? It is fine if it does, but can we just admit it?
What's the process, in D&D, for having a king's guards turf a PC out of the castle into the moat that doesn't have a real chance, and likelihood, of escalating into a deadly conflict?
I mean this again seems that we need to take the scope of what's possible outside ot that which the PCs can actually decide. Like the chracters can certainly decide not to resist, in which case serious violence seems significantly unlikely, but making some sort of meat decision that we will have a physical confrontation, where there is no possibility of violence seems like a differnt thing. So does narrativism require or benefit from this sort of author stance instead of character level decision making?
What's the process, in D&D, for a PC attempting to shame a NPC into taking some action, and having the redound upon them, so that they are the one who has to carry the weight of embarrassment?
The social rules from DMG might be a good starting point for this. Granted, they're pretty simple so some extrapolation is required. In any case, it would seem to me to fall in the purview of the persuasion skill to manipulate an another person in this manner.
What's the process, in D&D, for a PC to persuade a skeleton lord to give up their guardianship of their forlorn forest, and instead convert from heathenism and have the bones of them and their followers placed in the PCs reliquary?
Again, social rules could cover this.
What's the process, in D&D, for two characters to argue about whether or not one will mend the armour of the other, with the outcome of the argument not just being chosen by one or other controlling participant, and with the outcome being binding at the table?
Social rules could cover this too, but at least I wouldn't want to. I don't want them to be binding to PCs and this is the sort of situation that is best handled via pure roleplay. At the point we are determining the actions of the characters via rules having players in the first place starts to seem superfluous. We are more in the territory of randomised story generation.
The above examples are intended to provide some illustrations. If all that can be staked and resolved, without the outcome just being GM fiat, is PC death, then it is hard to address other thematic concerns.
Yeah, there definitely were some concrete examples! But I am not sure what you exactly mean with this staking thing. I feel that in trad game players can stake all sort of things, what is at stake is just usually implied via fictional positioning instead of having a meta discussion about it. Though of course it is sometimes fro the GM to ask "What you're trying to accomplish by this" if things are unclear.
As there has been a lot of talk that references staking, I think it might be good idea to elaborate on bit what exactly we mean by that.
If resolution processes are highly technical and mostly involve mathematical decision-making and optimisation without those decisions and processes generating thematically meaningful fiction - ie if they closely resemble AD&D hp-attrition combat - then it is hard to address other thematic concerns.
Yeah, sure. That's why I generally do not like terribly crunchy mechanics. D&D is already a bit too much for my liking, though the out of combat skill+dice vs DC is pretty much my ideal RPG base system structure.
If the outcomes of declared actions will be decided by the GM primarily by reference to and extrapolation from their idea of the fiction, and if they main way for the players to learn what that is is via low-stakes action declarations that "poke" at the fiction to prompt the GM to reveal it in ways that don't hose the PCs, then it is hard to make high-stakes thematic concerns a regular focus of play.
Whilst low stakes poking certainly is something that happens, it is not all that happens. You of course still can have high stakes situations, but like I said, they're established more via fictional positioning rather than meta discussion.
The two are intimately bound up. For instance, a principle that says "be a fan of the PCs" is not very useful if the main procedure actually available for scene-framing is for the players to declare that their PCs enter a building (or similar complex) mapped and keyed by the GM, to then declare that their PCs enter certain rooms or open certain doors, with the GM then telling the players what they see and who they encounter by reference to the key.
Well, "be fan" is just hella vague and IIRC the actual description is pretty vague too. Also that of course is not the only framing structure available in trad games.
A GM move like "announce badness" is not very workable if there is no process that tells the GM when to do it or not do it, and if there is no process whereby the players can have their PCs reliably respond to the announced badness.
Well, I think in more trad setup "announcing badness" relies on temporal, spatial and causal cues. And sure, those necessarily do not result most thematically appropriate timing, but then again, I'm not sure that randomisation via dice rolls does either. And of course the PCs can respond to badness, it is just that there is no one size fits all solution. Different badnesses require different response.
Here's a concrete example
that Edwards gives:
The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).
He labels this "simulationism overriding narrativism". What he means by that is that a faithful application of the mechanics - where the goal of the mechanics is to model time and space and to permit extrapolation of events from that modelling, without any regard to emotional or thematic considerations - can and likely will result in outcomes that undermine a focus on premise and theme. If you're using this sort of resolution engine, then "announcing badness" does not contribute to rising action: it just taunts the players!
To elaborate further on the previous paragraph: I have more than once seen the complaint that, in a game like AW or BitD or BW, a player can
make things worse off by declaring an action, because if the action fails then the GM doesn't just say "nothing happens" but rather narrates some adverse consequence. This orientation is precisely a response to the sort of example just given - ie the GM's announcing of badness is just taunting, because the resolution engine does not in any way guarantee the players an actual meaningful capacity to influence that badness or the threatened outcome - it all just depends on how the GM has made decisions about time and space, and how those all combine to deliver a yes or no answer.
So I totally see how getting bogged down to simulationistic considerations can damage thematic ones. Perfectly fair. But the player always needing to be able to response badness seems more like gamist consideration rather than narrative one. Bad thing happened and you could do nothing about it is a perfectly fine narrative, it just means that the narrative we are dealing with here is the fallout of the event rather than preventing the event.
Here's Vincent Baker's basic theory of
how to get narrativist RPGing:
After setup, what a game's rules do is control how you resolve one situation into the next. If you're designing a Narrativist game, what you need are rules that create a) rising conflict b) across a moral line c) between fit characters d) according to the authorship of the players. Every new situation should be a step upward in that conflict, toward a climax and resolution. Your rules need to provoke the players, collaboratively, into escalating the conflict, until it can't escalate no more.
When looking at typical nar mechanics I totally see how they result Baker's (a) rising conflict. The rest are more about the fiction surrounding the mechanics though, and I obviously do not think that such fiction can only be connected to these kind of mechanics.
