I kind of know where modern OSR games come from, but what about narrative games? What’s their origin story? Are they a recent thing or is there a D&D narrative RPG equivalent?
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If by "narrative game" you mean Gygax-Arneson style RPGs (GM and players, open-ended narrative, task resolution system, no winners or losers, randomisers) then there is no patient zero, they evolved over the 80s with good work from Stafford, Costikyan and others. If you mean games that broke (1/?)
away from the D&D paradigm then there's a clear origin point: Hogshead Publishing's New Style line (1998-2001) released five titles. In order:
The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen: GMless, plays in under an hour, one-page rules, rules-light story-heavy, swaps dice and pencils for (2/?)
money and fine wine. Origins Award-nominated, still in print.
Puppetland/PowerKill by John Tynes. Puppetland had been published before, but Power Kill is the first meta-RPG, bolting on to other games with a prologue and epilogue session
Pantheon & Other RPGs by Robin Laws. A precursor to the (3/?)
Drama System that powers Hillfolk, this is GM-less single-session trope-heavy competitive roleplay. Rules and five backgrounds in one 24-page book.
Violence by Greg Costikyan, a satire on D&D-style play: room-clearance treasure-grabbing adventures in modern-day New York. Playable, but don't. (4/?)
De Profundis by Michal Oracz. The first epistolatory/journalling RPG, originally published in Polish. No mechanics as such, just structure. A work of genius: the entire book is its own example of play.
Predating this (1994/5) was Interactive Fantasy, a journal of storytelling systems that (5/?)
Yeah, people say, "such and such a game was so influential" and then you find it sold 350 copies. We did 4500-5000 print copies of the first edition of Munchausen.
Most things don't have as clear a lineage as the OSR! I think the easiest way to frame the story in a similar way is that the modern storygames movement emerged out of critiques (see: the Forge) of Vampire and similar games in the 90s. It might not be literally true but it's useful.
The way I frame it is: In TTRPGs Greg Stafford & Chaosium laid the foundations for modern indies, and innovative design from the 1980s-90s was then described and theorized at the Forge, right as the mainstream TTRPG industry tanked at the end of the 90s.
Marc Miller's Traveller (GDW 1977) is RIGHT on the heels of Stafford/Chaosium (1975). However, Traveller was about building story tools to empower GMs, and Stafford/Chaosium was more about the fundamental tropes to be found in narrative play. GDW led us to simulationism, Chaosium to narrativism.
I'll have to give it some thought, but the zines and conventions around 1975 were all abuzz with their response to D&D, especially with how narratively thin it was. We can horserace Stafford and Miller about who arrived at narrative TTRPGs sooner, I guess?
Greg Stafford claimed repeatedly that he conceptualised WB&RM as interactive fiction in board wargame format. For example: "I was an artist with a drive to publish this 'do-it-yourself' novel that I had made ... Not just a novel, but a fantasy epic".
Oh nice, I'll def listen to this one. I read Pendragon ages ago and played a couple of sessions pre-pandemic. Whereas it felt extremely crunchy it felt a bit story-gamy
I'm catching up with the thread and I feel definitions are so fuzzy, narrative games R confused with non-stat-powered/story games?
Tunnels and Trolls (Ken St. Andre, 1975) broke the fourth wall and repudiated most D&D truisms. Mind blowing at the time. I see it as a predecessor for sure.
The other game I always talk about in this context in Bunnies & Burrows (1976, Dennis Sustaire and Scott Robinson) that was not only innovative in its own right but demonstrated very cogently that you could make and publish a TTRPG about whatever excited you.
It is a hidden root of german TTRPG because it is what the creators of The Dark Eye played. While translating D&D. Then tasked to create a D&D competitor they took inspiration from Tunnels & Trolls. Which lead to a rather simulationist play culture in the end.
The joke was always that whatever cool narrative mechanic you thought of for your game, Greg Stafford had already thought of it many years earlier and had implemented it in a game you hadn't tried yet.
Forge was an interesting time, I like to revisit it as more of a think-tank rather than a social community because the norms and expectations of communication are a little stifling and regimented, but a lot of important discussions happened in the mix (alongside some noise).
Am I crazy that I think Burning Wheel should be part of the narrative game lineage? I'm thinking that there is emergent story, shared GM responsibilities, rewards for playing to characteristics and drives. After V:tM, Amber Diceless etc, but before Dogs in the Vineyard/Apocalypse World/FitD.
Not crazy at all, BW was created in an storygames environment while using trad simulationist *language*—the big addition was its focus over player-driven flags, & its mix of karma/drama points economy.
The question is "what was patient zero for narrative driven StoryGames type things" isn't really answerable because the definition of what's an RPG and what's a StoryGame aren't form enough to really point to anything and say "here's the start of that".
I'm not suggesting that RPG and Storygames are mutually exclusive btw. But by my definition not all Storygames are RPGs and that's fine. Some absolutely are and that's also fine.
There were a lot of games through the years with some of the key ideas implemented.
Prince Valiant gets talked about a lot, but nobody actually played it when it came out and was considered a commercial failure.
Ghostbusters predates that by a couple of years and fared better.
But those aren't exhaustive.
Ultimately if you're looking for "how did we end up with modern StoryGames" then inescapably you end up at The Forge where a bunch of people wanting to break out of the Trad RPG mindset hothoused a bunch of design ideas and philosophies and created a bunch of games.
That first wave of games from there in the early 2000s was exciting, but it wasn't really until later in that decade that StoryGames as we know them now started to make a significant impact on the RPG scene in general.
Arguably Apocalypse World was the big breakout hit that got those design ideas on the map, although its predecessor Dogs in the Vineyard got some eyes on it before then.
Ultimately what The Forge did was it got a bunch of people to discuss and agree that if you want a game to be about creating Story, maybe having rules which help you create Story rather than ones which tell you how many metres someone can jump is good?
Yes it is. ;) Flash Gordon and the Warriors of Mongo (1977)
The big impact of the Forge I think was both popularising a certain type of storygame and providing a community space for those designers and we still see that influence on a lot of more modern storygames.
Mad Libs was first published in 1958.
People were playing Exquisite Corpse as a storytelling game a hundred years ago.
Revelations About my Friends is dated 1912, but that's just a funky way to play the older Consequences game from the 19th century using a book with holes in the pages.
This is absolutely fabulous.
I love how lots of these games are explicitly a) ways to pass time when you get bored at parties or in evenings in general, and b) ways for teenagers to gossip about matters of love. Some things never change !
That's fair, but I think we can safely separate "storygames" in the wide sense from "storygames as springing from RPGs". A bit like we can separate "RPG" from "games which involve roleplaying" (even if I'm one of the "Korns invented RPGs not Gygax/Arneson" people).
To find the origin find the place of energy where creators were influencing and inspiring each other. Between 2001 and 2005 or so, people in the Forge scene were creating and playing and giving awards to and inspiring each other with games like InSpectres, My Life with Master, Primetime...
...Adventures, The Pool, SOAP, The Shadow of Yesterday, Dogs In the Vineyard, Breaking the Ice, Steal Away Jordan, and others.
There was prior art, like the New Style games, and Theatrix, and Everway, and people played them and took mechanical and procedural inspirations from them, but...
... they weren't the source of the energy. There was the boiling pot of theory also in the Forge scene, but neither was it the source of inspiration or energy. And there were later games with bigger influence, like Apocalypse World, but it's not the origin either.
The first game from TSR to have strong narrative elements was the FASERIP Marvel Super Heroes from 1983.
The easiest way for a character to get Karma (XP/bennies) was to engage in narrative play like going on dates, making good on a mundane commitment, etc.
It wasn’t played that way at a lot of tables though.
People tended to focus on the parts of comic books they liked, and that was not often the struggle to maintain a life along side their hero responsibilities.
Building on that, "Worlds in Peril" (Powered-by-the-Apocalypse supers game) has the "Fit In" move: to recover from Conditions/injuries, your hero must do something in their "normal" life. (And on a roll of 7-9 on that move, the GM ("Editor-In-Chief") throws in a complication...)
The Rocky and Bullwinkle Role-Playing Party Game was the Velvet Underground of TTRPGs. Not many people played it, but everyone that did went onto design a game.
You can probably track some to "parody" games like Toon, Paranoia, & Teenagers from Outer Space - games that obviously weren't "epic adventure" systems, but instead built around "hang out with your friends and have fun telling each other stupid stories."
World of Darkness games built on that (minus the silly), where the emotional resonance was obviously supposed to be just as important as the system mechanics.
People started looking for systems that supported "story/emotions first" gaming. (…followed by endless arguments about what that meant.)
Oh I didn't think of it like this but that's fair. I played Toon a bit and GMed Paranoia a lot, and despite the latter being having a trad system we leaned a lot into story-focused-fuck-around-mode, the purpose of our sessions was to laugh!
I should play it again btw
It's such a fly in amber snapshot of the diversity of games that were around way back when by 100s small indie writers. He was running the list long before that so it predates the forge.
So while the forge was the birth of indie rpg *publishing* as in commercial book publishing and selling in the era predating or at the birth of POD. The were many many people independently writing and sharing RPGs for decades before this free or I assume as zines. Just not selling books commercially
Reading the thread I’m quite surprised to see PbtA and other games coming up as ‘narrative’ games when they seemed to be much closer to traditional RPGs than story games (such as, say, Fiasco or Grey Ranks)
Could you clarify what’s in your mind when you say “narrative games”? I think that helps?
I think one path of story games from the Forge led ultimately into something that resembled LARPs more than TTPRGs; the other path took the more traditional route.
Yeah, you get that Storygame thing where you're focused on not-quite freeform storytelling and the rules are all narrative facing. Primetime Adventures, Polaris, Fiasco etc. Some are RPGs, others don't meet my definition.
And then the games with similar structures of play to Trad RPG games. This all seems to be called "Narrative RPGs" nowadays which is better than "Modern Trad" which was what it got called a decade or so ago.
PbtA, FitD, Cortex, Fate etc.
But YMMV etc etc.
Thanks for that - I think that is similar to the kind of mapping that I have in my head - if I were to balance it on one thing, story games, to me, focus on 'setting scenes and telling what happens in that scene'.
Narrative games might be what I'd consider fiction-first trad RPGs - like listed
A LOT of this is super vibes based as well. I don't think there's a hard border you cross where something stops being a Narrative RPG and becomes a Story Game for example.
It's more a rough geographic location (near the old church or just off the High Street) rather than a postcode or GPS boundary.
Trying to do a bit of reading about Prince Valiant, I can see that it is subtitled 'the story-telling game' but that seems more like a marketing push for easy entry into RPGs!
Is there something in the rules that is more concrete about it's definition?
I wonder if the ones you would class as 'resembling LARPS' are the ones like Grey Ranks, Ten Candles, A Cool and Lonely Courage, where the focus is on setting scenes and RP in that scene?
Yes, alongside things like Montsegur 1244, and Archipelago. I think Jason's work walks a line between TTRPG and LARP. I believe he might have said as much at one point (but can't recall).
Hey I agree 100%, I don't understand why games that are not based on stats are often classified as narrative By narrative games I intend games those purpose is the collective creation of a story not the accomplishment of the character's objectives I still need to catch up with the thread though!
I think you have to go back to the early 90s to see the origins of StoryGames.
Over The Edge ('93) had players defined only the things about their character which made them stand out, positive and negative traits, a few pieces of history.
EveryWay ('97?) had players define their PCs but interpreting art cards. Task resolution was determined first but what made sense (karma), or else by what is best for the story (drama) or finally by a draw tom it's own take on tarot (fate). Something like that anyway.
Trek fan fiction. A lot of star trek larping/shared worldbuilding of the 70s via zines. That's the ursatz story game DND equivalent.
But if you mean like games with rules, besides the Dallas rpg and other IP rpgs of the 90s, we have to look at the Forge Era for the birth of "modern" story games.
a lot of story games are inheretors of the World of Darkness "tradition", but often are splits from the base game. One could go back to Call of Cthulhu- the main figure is that "death" is not a true bad ending as having someone else ("madness") take over your story.
Then you have stuff like Cyberpunk 2020 which presented the Story of a unified world and setting wherein the players were not going to upset; Ravenloft, Darksun, Planescape. Storygames have these load-bearing structural keys to the setting such that the story-as-written can be published towards.
Love or hate Ron Edwards I see Sorcerer as the starting point for the modern narrative tradition, not the first by any means but probably the focal point that stuff like Apocalypse World emerged from.
Tomorrow I'm going to start the process of giving away Shadows of Yesterday and Emily Care Boss's Breaking the Ice, along with a good number of other cool games from back in the day. They'll go to the most generous donor to @ppfa.bsky.social.
I'd say it began in the early 90s with designers like Mark Rein-Hagen and Jonathan Tweet. Games like Ars Magica, Vampire, Over the Edge, Castle Falkenstein, and Everway shifted the emphasis from mechanics to narrative. We also had an influx of 'universal' systems as well.
I'd start pre-D&D with the ways some games of Diplomacy were played, and before that I'd go into the SF&F scene, which leads back to storytelling parlour games which leads back...
Diplomacy is also interesting when looking at how changing the wider context in which a game is played (communication round the table versus communication through mail/fanzines) seems to change the game itself.
It's always been like this I guess, in science and creative fields: someone shows up and claims owning/discovering/inventing something that's part of a continuity.
I had known about Gondal (though couldn't have told you the name) but not about Glass Town; TY for shouting these out! Definitely want to pick up the compilations of these now.
That said, the modern "Story Game" boom started at Sorcerer. Hogshead and others made interesting titles, but without same indie attitude which The Forge fostered. From my perspective as someone playing every game I could at that point I could feel the difference.
Before Sorcerer there were (many and often excellent) experiments that were very much part of the mainstream. After Sorcerer you can see a distinct movement emerge. It’s positively Devonian in terms of fossil record.
I think there are a few roots.
Greg Stafford has been mentioned and rightfully so.
I think a trying to emulate books, TV series and film is a root of narrative design. People realised it felt more like the medium they were going for if it became less procedural. Liscenced games play a role here.
It started with stuff like Star Trek and Dallas. Star Trek was iterated a lot in the late 70s and early 80s. Episodic structures of narratives, the dynamic of playing for the story and an arc was emphasised by the goal of these games.
We can put the big wave of Chaosium games in there as well.
Greg Stafford created Glorantha with a lot of cultural narratives in mind, that found resonance in Runequest.
Call of Cthulhu, King Arthur Pendragon, Stormbringer, Prince Valiant all were emulating another medium.
I disagree about BRP (even as Pendragon, it's still quite "trad"), but the work Chaosium did for West End Games on the Ghostbusters RPG is a good start for the early "story games."
That was Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen, wasn't it? Bill Slaviscek used it as the basis of D6 Star Wars.
Yeah they are trad by todays standards but established narrative dynamics of play and started to reflect them in the rules. Roots but not the fruit of the tree yet, if we want to stay in metaphor. Or "they clearly wanted to be narrative and hadn't exactly figured out how to design it yet".
Ghostbusters was Greg Stafford, Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis.
D6 Star Wars for sure is another step in the liscenced games as narrative games journey that is worth mentioning.
And they created mechanics to fit the dynamics of play this demanded.
I see the World of Darkness, started by Vampire: The Masquerade in the 90s as another pillar of narrative TTRPG. It clearly used language rooted in narration: Storyteller and Scene for example.
Vampire was a sucess in selling narrative games as a concept and something to aspire to to a bigger audience, some would say growing the TTRPG market by attracting new people.
By establishing a clear language, creating player facing materials and establishing a metaplot it made narrative cool.
And also profitable. Engaged players enjoying the story of a franchise are a good thing to have. This also establishes VTM as a baseline for what a narrative game is. Even if it is pretty traditional by a lot of standards.
I would argue for Vampire as a cornerstone of simulationist games as well.
This is the historically accurate take. There was a lot of early experimentation (mostly 80s, some 90s though the bulk of 90s design was a regression to what we now call "trad" design). Usenet groups were ground zero for lots of discussions and that transitioned over to the Forge (and other forums).
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The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen: GMless, plays in under an hour, one-page rules, rules-light story-heavy, swaps dice and pencils for (2/?)
Puppetland/PowerKill by John Tynes. Puppetland had been published before, but Power Kill is the first meta-RPG, bolting on to other games with a prologue and epilogue session
Pantheon & Other RPGs by Robin Laws. A precursor to the (3/?)
Violence by Greg Costikyan, a satire on D&D-style play: room-clearance treasure-grabbing adventures in modern-day New York. Playable, but don't. (4/?)
Predating this (1994/5) was Interactive Fantasy, a journal of storytelling systems that (5/?)
(6/?)
The most story game system without a doubt IMO is DramaSystem / Hillfolk.
https://axthetable.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/the-origin-of-the-term-story-games/
I'm catching up with the thread and I feel definitions are so fuzzy, narrative games R confused with non-stat-powered/story games?
http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forge/index.php
Prince Valiant gets talked about a lot, but nobody actually played it when it came out and was considered a commercial failure.
Ghostbusters predates that by a couple of years and fared better.
Ultimately if you're looking for "how did we end up with modern StoryGames" then inescapably you end up at The Forge where a bunch of people wanting to break out of the Trad RPG mindset hothoused a bunch of design ideas and philosophies and created a bunch of games.
The big impact of the Forge I think was both popularising a certain type of storygame and providing a community space for those designers and we still see that influence on a lot of more modern storygames.
People were playing Exquisite Corpse as a storytelling game a hundred years ago.
Revelations About my Friends is dated 1912, but that's just a funky way to play the older Consequences game from the 19th century using a book with holes in the pages.
I love how lots of these games are explicitly a) ways to pass time when you get bored at parties or in evenings in general, and b) ways for teenagers to gossip about matters of love. Some things never change !
There was prior art, like the New Style games, and Theatrix, and Everway, and people played them and took mechanical and procedural inspirations from them, but...
The easiest way for a character to get Karma (XP/bennies) was to engage in narrative play like going on dates, making good on a mundane commitment, etc.
People tended to focus on the parts of comic books they liked, and that was not often the struggle to maintain a life along side their hero responsibilities.
I wonder how many people dug into the mechanics that supported the broader stories?
People started looking for systems that supported "story/emotions first" gaming. (…followed by endless arguments about what that meant.)
I should play it again btw
https://www.darkshire.net/jhkim/rpg/freerpgs/
It's such a fly in amber snapshot of the diversity of games that were around way back when by 100s small indie writers. He was running the list long before that so it predates the forge.
Could you clarify what’s in your mind when you say “narrative games”? I think that helps?
At some point story/narrative become mess useful.
PbtA, FitD, Cortex, Fate etc.
But YMMV etc etc.
Narrative games might be what I'd consider fiction-first trad RPGs - like listed
It's more a rough geographic location (near the old church or just off the High Street) rather than a postcode or GPS boundary.
#QuestWorlds (new version of Hero Wars/HeroQuest) uses that term and definition, as I think it’s clearer than other terms for what we are doing.
Is there something in the rules that is more concrete about it's definition?
Over The Edge ('93) had players defined only the things about their character which made them stand out, positive and negative traits, a few pieces of history.
I'm sure there were other in the 90s too, but those are the ones I remember.
https://bsky.app/profile/jonathantweet.bsky.social/post/3lfgsdpjjo226
As well as The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen some of the other New Style games range
I'd also throw in Sorcerer (Ron Edwards 2001) - please ignore my review in Valkyrie from back in the day
But if you mean like games with rules, besides the Dallas rpg and other IP rpgs of the 90s, we have to look at the Forge Era for the birth of "modern" story games.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Bond_007_(role-playing_game)
Gregor Hutton kinda started the 2 stats game with 3:16.
Emily Care Boss witn lyric games, which eventually lead to solo games.
Prince Valiant already got a shout out, also see Pendragon and maybe even CofC.
How about Toon? Indiana Jones? Buck Rogers Adventure game? Everway? Etc
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_Town
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gondal_(fictional_country)
https://playingattheworld.blogspot.com/2021/02/western-gunfight-1970-first-rpg.html
Plenty more at
https://wobbupalooza.neocities.org/
At best one influence is prominent while others are more discreet.
Creators can even be unaware of some of them.
Oh no actually I played it online, PBP
Were Diplomacy IRL LARP like sessions a thing in the UK as well?
Greg Stafford has been mentioned and rightfully so.
I think a trying to emulate books, TV series and film is a root of narrative design. People realised it felt more like the medium they were going for if it became less procedural. Liscenced games play a role here.
Greg Stafford created Glorantha with a lot of cultural narratives in mind, that found resonance in Runequest.
Call of Cthulhu, King Arthur Pendragon, Stormbringer, Prince Valiant all were emulating another medium.
That was Greg Stafford and Sandy Petersen, wasn't it? Bill Slaviscek used it as the basis of D6 Star Wars.
D6 Star Wars for sure is another step in the liscenced games as narrative games journey that is worth mentioning.
I see the World of Darkness, started by Vampire: The Masquerade in the 90s as another pillar of narrative TTRPG. It clearly used language rooted in narration: Storyteller and Scene for example.
By establishing a clear language, creating player facing materials and establishing a metaplot it made narrative cool.
I would argue for Vampire as a cornerstone of simulationist games as well.
Then start theory discussion on rec-games-frp-advocacy.
Continue much of the same discussion on the Forge, adding in a huge heap of DIY that meant more games, really fast.
Explode the DIY everywhere, touched by that flavour.
He produced https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Extraordinary_Adventures_of_Baron_Munchausen back in 1998, which is in that vein.