Figuring out my dislike of Narrativist indie games

I've been thinking about indie games lately, somewhat frustrated with the fact that really innovative settings are coming wrapped up with a philosophy of system that I don't care for. Not a terrible deal, because I tend to adapt nearly every setting I use to Fudge anyway.

But my mind was kind of wandering over the subject while I was brushing my teeth this morning, and it occurred to me why I think I don't care for Narrativistic, stakes-based conflict resolution.

Most Narrativistic conflict resolution goes something like this… you decide to engage in conflict, and you decide how you'd like the conflict to end. Then you roll dice / play cards. Generally, the winner narrates how his choice of stakes comes to be.

In most games, winning the conflict is about deciding who gets to narrate. Now, I've said before, I don't want to tell stories about my character, I want to experience the story that my character is a part of. And this is where I think this form of conflict resolution falls down for me…

Lack of input and decision-making. Once you enter into conflict, the choice is made… there's no realizing that things have gone bad and pulling out / fleeing / negotiating a truce. You've decided from the beginning that there are more-or-less two possible outcomes… and only two. Some games do allow at least some way to "give," but that often they don't because the whole conflict is resolved in a single atomic action, a single roll of the dice. (In computing, an "atomic action" is something that essentially happens as an uninterruptable whole. Once an atomic action begins, nothing else can happen until it finishes.)

Sometimes you have a certain amount of choice, but it tends to be very meta-game choice… not character choice, but player choice. Such as deciding whether to play your high card now, or save it for later. Sometimes you might get to make meaningful in-character choices, but those seem rare.

At its most basic, many Narrativistic systems are entirely about which player has narrative control of the scene, and often that control is not really based on anything important about your character. In Primetime Adventures, narrative power is based more on whether it's "your turn to shine" in the game. (Who has the most screen presence for that episode.) There's some influence from "do I have traits which would play into this scene," but the mechanics aren't really about "can the character succeed "as much as they are "whose scene is this, and which player most deserves to have narrative control."

Even before Narrativism came onto the scene, various groups had talked about speeding up combat by boiling minor, or even major, combats down to a single roll, taking into account abilities on both sides, plans, environment, etc. Basically trying to take all the parameters and feed them into a single decision point, instead of lots of little decision points. And many of us had trouble with this back then… that a single decision point just didn't feel right, at least for the important combats. The thing which we played the game for was being skipped over.

And I'm not talking about tactical boardgame decision making… I'm talking about interacting with the world through the conduit of our characters. And I think that, by boiling conflict down to a single resolution point, and creating conflict mechanics for things that have traditionally been managed purely by roleplaying, one removes a great deal of the interaction with the world, and the player's input actually mattering to the outcome.

Long before The Forge, there has been a debate over mechanics for social conflict. Do I roleplay it, or can I just roll my Fasttalk skill? If you're going to make me roleplay it, but it's my Fasttalk skill that matters, why do I need to bother to roleplay it… why can't I just roll? If my roleplaying does matter, am I being penalized for being poor at what my character is supposed to be good? You don't make me get up and swing a sword to see how well my character does. Personally, I give players a bonus for making the effort.

It's gone back and forth for a long time. But I feel like many Narrativistic games have taken that to an extreme… that it just really doesn't matter what I say, or even do, the dice are going to decide what happens, regardless of my input.

There are other reasons I don't like the Narrative style. But I think this is one of the core reasons… that in some games, my input to the story through my character is meaningless to the outcomes. If my character overcame great obstacles and won great rewards, it was because I was given, more or less arbitrarily, the privilege of narrating his story that way. And that's just not my thing.