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Why the detest of Narrative?


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So, I'm very much a Narrative player.  I run regular Narrative events (or at least did in the before times) and enjoy gaming for the sake of creating fun stories.  However, I think whatever might be perceived as "detest" for Narrative play/players is kind of our own fault.  Far too often in discussions of Narrative play, I see things devolve into bashing players for being too competitive.  Narrative players swap tips about how to get their overly competitive friends to play "fluffy", "casual", or "narrative" lists, or make worse gameplay decisions for the sake of the narrative (I don't need any help playing badly, I can do it all on my own, but I don't think they appreciate the "help").  So, I think detest may come from seeing "Narrative" as a bludgeon used to attack them for being too competitive rather than a way to have fun gaming and telling stories together.

On a more positive note, if you want to find more Narrative stuff, check out the Tabletop Campaign Repository which collects homemade campaign packs, homebrew rules, and the like, the "Age of Sigmar Narrative Play" facebook group, Animosity Campaigns which is running a global Narrative campaign at this very moment, and NEON (Narrative Event Organizer's Network) which has discussions of how to play Narrative, how to run Narrative events, and more!  There are a lot of great things going on in the Narrative community and it is better supported by GW and the Warhammer community at large than basically any time ever before.

Edited by Nacnudllah
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Narrative gaming in Warhammer seems to have followed a V-shaped path throughout its history.  In the early years of Warhammer the game was very Narrative focused.  Early 40k and Fantasy resembled traditional RPG's complete with a GM.  The games weren't streamlined at all but attempted to be a much more in depth representation of a small skirmish.

As the years went by the games became more streamlined with an emphasis on playing larger games. Much of the highly nuanced gameplay was stripped away in favor of larger armies, objective based gameplay, and tournament style games.  This was the low point of Narrative gaming.  Running a Narrative event meant writing a paragraph of "fluff" to go with your tournament.  (By the way, there's a reason the word "fluff" is used.  "Fluff" is light, soft, and worthless; it doesn't matter and can be safely ignored.)

Then AoS launched, GW chopped off its entire competitive Fantasy community in one go, and everyone lost their minds. When the smoke of the burning armies cleared there was left a small group of players; a group that enjoyed the free-form, creative style of game play GW was pushing with AoS.  These people were a minority of the old player base to be sure but they thrived within the sandbox that was AoS 1.0. 

Seriously check out a Tabletop Gamer's Diary.  He played through each Battleplan in the Realmgate Wars to recreate the narrative of the first year of AoS.  Its incredible and one of my favorite things ever from AoS 1.0!  

A Tabletop Gamer's Diary: https://ttgamingdiary.wordpress.com/category/miniatures/age-of-sigmar/the-realmgate-wars/
 
These crazy men and women started running small Narrative gaming sessions with their friends at local stores. They created comp systems to run tournaments again and began draw back some of the disaffected masses whose rage was even now cooling like the scorched core of Mallus.  After the release of the first General's Handbook and GW solidifying the idea of Open, Narrative, and Matched game styles, AoS in all its forms exploded in popularity! 

To get an idea of how much people enjoy Narrative gaming, take a look at the overwhelmingly positive response to the Anvil of Apotheosis.  Creating a little personalized hero to play in your games is highly Narrative.  Fears that the customized heroes would be overpowered in Matched Play seem unfounded.  If anything the custom heroes are mostly worse than their points equivalent counterparts in the battletomes.  I'm fairly confident that was intentional on GW's part by the way. 

This is all to say that I think Narrative gaming is healthier now than its ever been. For all the reasons stated by others above, Narrative gaming is probably not the most popular style of gaming; it likely never will be because of the effort, time, and creativity required to run a truly in-depth Narrative experience.  Its just harder to do than playing a quick Matched Play game.  That doesn't mean Narrative is unhealthy or dying by any means.  Check out this stuff if you're looking for some Narrative ideas or groups.
 

NEON:  https://wearetheneon.com/


Animosity II: https://animositycampaigns.com/

Vince and Tom talk Narrative gaming:  

 





 

Edited by Kamose
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I absolutely agree that there is a false dichotomy between playing narratively, and playing competitively. Using points doesn't make your game not be narrative, and just because you are playing a narrative game doesn't mean that you have to make bad decisions or play to lose.

I often see people saying that to play a narrative game, you need to "play worse" and not aim to win. However I dispute that. Roleplaying your general shouldn't mean making bad choices, or doing things that you wouldn't do in a matched play game, at least not necessarily. It means making decisions based on the information which they have, or their preconceptions about what the enemy can and will do. Does that mean that from time to time you might make a decision which isn't the tactically sound one? Sure. But most of the time its just a case of putting yourself in a different mindset about why you are employing the tactics that you are.

I'm in the odd position where I'm not 100% sure I actually enjoy playing the game anymore. I've never had much of a head for rules, and tactics, and find that games tend to start out fun, but get dull by turn two. I thus can't really imagine myself engaging with a competitive, matched play style, because I can't really see the point in just playing the game for the sake of playing a fun game. The game just isn't fun enough for that to be worth hours of my Saturday afternoon.

I do though, want to engage with the story of the AoS world. And let me little toy soldiers have adventures, fight battles and get into trouble. I dream of being able to play a campaign where the battles are more about the strategic scale war, than the tactical scale battle. I don't want to show up at a store or a tournament and select a random battleplan, with ill defined objectives, and then spend hours pushing plastic pieces around a largely uninteresting board to see who wins.

Rather I want to play out the rise and fall of my kingdom, watch as my armies explore and settle, build cities, and an empire. I want to see how they fare when they are beset from all sides by undead, beastmen, sylvaneth and worse! I want to feel anxiety when my home city comes under siege, and make tough choices like whether to abandon outlying hamlet, or commit my forces to its defence at the cost of some other part of the kingdom. I want to wander, when all seems lost, whether my freeguild guys should convert to chaos and get some daemonic assistance.

That way, the tactical scale gameplay will be more engaging, because there will be more at stake than just who wins a game.

Unfortunately there seem to be very few people out there who want to play that sort of campaign.

Edited by EccentricCircle
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I mean, also, narrative games are just harder to do. You have to have someone, or someones, writing a narrative, and that takes effort. They have to be passionate and infuse that passion into others, and that's difficult. GW doesn't always supply the tools. And even when they do, that doesn't mean someone is going to use them in a compelling way.

 

Like, I enjoy the new crusade campaign tools they created for 40k (and hope that will become part of AoS in time too), but my interest in it will go no where if there's no one to write a compelling story behind the system, a reason to do the fighting. Just running the campaign with no hook, and I may as well just play an escalation league.

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3 hours ago, Fairbanks said:

Honestly, it’s just that “Narrative Gamers” show zero empathy and sometimes spite to “Competitive Gamers” when the latter complains about a lack of balance between armies.

Haha can I just  jokingly escalate this argument by saying. It’s just that ‘competitive gamers’ show no empathy to ‘narrative gamers’ by creating an arbitrary dividing line.

It’s a shame that you experience it like this. Because I understand and respect that this is your experience but that’s down to individuals and not a group.

but from my experience this holds no truth. ‘Why the detest of narrative’ was the question. Because ‘narrative gamers’ don’t empathise with ‘competitive gamers’ when they complain. That’s not the answer (maybe very locally, but again that seems more down to individuals) 

Edited by Kramer
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On 8/20/2020 at 7:18 AM, Nacnudllah said:

So, I'm very much a Narrative player.  I run regular Narrative events (or at least did in the before times) and enjoy gaming for the sake of creating fun stories.  However, I think whatever might be perceived as "detest" for Narrative play/players is kind of our own fault.  Far too often in discussions of Narrative play, I see things devolve into bashing players for being too competitive.  Narrative players swap tips about how to get their overly competitive friends to play "fluffy", "casual", or "narrative" lists, or make worse gameplay decisions for the sake of the narrative (I don't need any help playing badly, I can do it all on my own, but I don't think they appreciate the "help").  So, I think detest may come from seeing "Narrative" as a bludgeon used to attack them for being too competitive rather than a way to have fun gaming and telling stories together.

On a more positive note, if you want to find more Narrative stuff, check out the Tabletop Campaign Repository which collects homemade campaign packs, homebrew rules, and the like, the "Age of Sigmar Narrative Play" facebook group, Animosity Campaigns which is running a global Narrative campaign at this very moment, and NEON (Narrative Event Organizer's Network) which has discussions of how to play Narrative, how to run Narrative events, and more!  There are a lot of great things going on in the Narrative community and it is better supported by GW and the Warhammer community at large than basically any time ever before.

This also goes along with a fundamental misunderstanding of competitive play that a lot of players who aren't competitively minded seem to have: Competitive play IS narrative.

The difference between what we call competitive play and what we call narrative play comes in two places. 1. Is that narrative play doesn't really have the capacity to accept landslide losses the way competitive play does. A competitive player gets destroyed they tend to change their list and the way they play and work to fix their mistakes(though plenty of blaming stuff for being OP or UP still happens) whereas narrative players tend to discount those results and work to change the GAME(whether through modifying rules or handicapping factions/players) to prevent similar blowouts. This means that you often get less feel bads but at the same time you're essentially wearing kids gloves which is both detrimental to the experience of the superior player, as well as allowing individuals to blame systemic imbalances for personal failure even more readily than players already do. It's sort of like not keeping score in little league.

2. The interesting part of the narrative for a competitive player is almost entirely what happens DURING the game. The interesting part for the narrative player tends to lean towards things that happen before and after the game. Narrative players find a lot of their drama and tension in the way the result of a game impacts the greater design space they've built for themselves. Competitive players find ALL of their drama and tension in moment to moment gameplay.

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I disagree with all the narrative vs competitive antagonism. As with most things, it serves for a close minded white/black explanation, a shortcuts to a simple conclusion that doesn't really work if you think a bit more in depth.

Because... what is narrative in wargames? Is it opposed to the so-perceived competitive approach? These are not separate entities, they complement each other.  It is perfectly possible to play a complex campaign with loads of fluff to give a narrative framework all whilst using netlists for competitive games. It is also possible to play a game with no narrative background per se  yet introducing thematic elements through custom scenarios, home-rules, etc.... It is also possible to assist to a tournament, with all the official rules, rigidity and share of netlisters, bringing a fluffy list revolving around your general's epic saga. All these are just a few examples where you clearly have narrative and competitive elements mixed. Narrative games vary wildly depending on the person and the objective. Same thing can be said about competitive games.

Where do you draw the line between both? It really is not clear. There a many many thousands of wargaming players around the globe with different approaches to the hobby. So is there an authority who decides which camp you belong to? Some ten commandments to blindly follow if you want to belong to one group or the other? I don't get it when some posters say "narrative players do X" or "competitive players are Y".

As for online presence, I think it boils down to simple interest to engage in conversations and debates in general. To quote myself from a previous topic:

For wargaming in general, I think narrative sections will always be in the shadow of the "official" way of doing things (unless it's historicals). Your average creative player/collector will often be found in his man-cave, garage or small gaming group, paying little attention to online toy soldier opinions as the topics discussed will rarely add value. On the contrary, I think it is quite obvious that people interested in crunching numbers, netlisting and chasing the meta will want to engage in endless discussions over the internet, as it offers a way wider public and immediate responses, enriching their particular interest in discussing numbers. Such access is more complicated IRL so turning towards the online world makes it easier, as with many other topics and hobbies.

YMMV as many, if not most, wargamers are somewhere in between (that's the whole point of this post!), but comparing the sheer number of posts per section across multiple wargaming forums seems to make this explanation quite reasonable.

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On 8/23/2020 at 5:33 AM, Fairbanks said:

Honestly, it’s just that “Narrative Gamers” show zero empathy and sometimes spite to “Competitive Gamers” when the latter complains about a lack of balance between armies.

Ouch, that's a tad harsh!

I actually think that it's more there is a growing apathy towards certain discussions when they come up repeatedly.  The lack of balance topic is one that comes along pretty much every time there's a new rules based release.  I believe what happens is that people look at the rules before having played a game and panic because they think they think this new release will roll over their army.   Quite often, a couple of months later the panic has completely died down because the new release wasn't as bad as everyone thought - however what has happened is you've got a scenario of "the boy who cried wolf".  I think the apathy towards this is nothing to do with if you're a narrative or competitive gamer, nor is it specifically competitive gamers who panic.

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To be honest I'm not finding hostility towards Narrative play on the forum, just frustration that sometimes GW hides behind Narrative Play when rules go awry.

I can empathise with that, but I do like narrative play because battles have never been balanced throughout the course of history. Balance to me is not an issue - its the fun of playing. Sure I might go into a game expecting my butt to get kicked, but that doesn't diminish the pleasure of the hobby, regardless whether that's narrative or matched play.

If there is any tension, I think its the frustration that narrative players can be apathetic about imbalanced rules-writing because it doesn't effect them so much. But for very competitive players, wonky rules really does. That's a tension that will never go away, alas.

And in almost every other competition you will find examples of imbalance in the rules that affect competitors  whose primary reason to play is to win, but doesnt effect,  so much, those who are there purely for the joy of playing. 

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56 minutes ago, Mcthew said:

f there is any tension, I think its the frustration that narrative players can be apathetic about imbalanced rules-writing because it doesn't effect them so much. But for very competitive players, wonky rules really does. That's a tension that will never go away, alas.

Absolutely true. Although I do hope that the way the rules are ‘split’ now does help accept the other point of view more. 
while at the same time I wonder if by trying to divide it, you get more ‘dismissive’ responses in the vein of: ‘doesn’t matter to me, I only play X’ 

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