# Narrative vs. Competitive - The Truth tags: #thoughts , #thoughts/rule-of-carnage , #game/wargame/five-leagues , #game/wargame/five-parsecs , #game/rpg/5150-new-beginnings I had to write a fairly extended comment in response to a recent [**Rule of Carnage**](https://www.youtube.com/@RuleofCarnage) video, thus: ![](https://youtu.be/M1Fh9Wa3S5U) I think you've confused multiple things which are indeed antithetical with mechanical constructs. Let me give an obvious but necessary example: AD&D. Yes, Advanced [[Dungeons and Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons]]. That edition. You can go to any gaming convention and find one table where play is all about the narrative, all about the story, all about the fiction, with the mechanics being just an adjunct to help resolve disputes about what things are likely to happen next… Right next to a group playing the exact same set of rules, counting out their movement obsessively on a grid, remembering the difference between casting Fireball indoors and outdoors, specifically taking an active adversarial position between the GM and the players, and literally being a competition for highest standing, longest survival, most turns survived in the killer dungeon… … And it's exactly the same set of mechanics. But those are not even close to being the same games. Not only that, those two games can't occur on the same table. They can't happen at the same time. That's impossible. It's not even a fantasy. Those two sets of players are playing literally different games with the same set of mechanics. So the narrative in the competitive are really not compatible in terms of play – and it has relatively little to do with classic, traditional game design. Now when we talk about more modern game designs both in terms of RPGs and wargames (the gray zone between becoming ever more complicated), there are tools to start looking at in terms of the mechanics to differentiate what mode of play is best enabled with those sets of mechanics. One of the key elements is where does the narrative fiction of the shared imaginative space fall relative to mechanical resolution? Is the fiction first, with the mechanics coming along to mechanically describe what we have already largely created between us? Or does the fiction follow, with the mechanics resolving a conflict and then us constructing fiction to explain what the dice have decided? The second biggest thing to look at is, to the degree the mechanics are intended to simulate SOMETHING, is that thing the physical processes of the setting/world and thus making "the story" purely a post hoc construction of retelling of events, or is the thing that the mechanics simulate the process of story, resolving conflicts of vision and creation, with the physics of the setting literally becoming post hoc fiction describing the story elements? Those are the big deals. Those are the big conflicts which can't really be resolved simultaneously. In the growing field of GMless/co-op RPG/wargames, like most of the [[Two-Hour Wargames]] lines or [[Five Parsecs from Home]]/[[Five Leagues from the Borderlands]], there is a lot of fiction first structure in what is usually thought of as a very physics simulationist a genre of game, and I'm here for it. ## 2023-11-05 10:12 Oooh, a reply and my counter-reply … > I'm not really sure I follow, you seem to be suggesting that if a given group makes a single thing a priority that suggests that no two things can ever co-exist, which doesn't seem to hold true to me. Certainly you can have a group that ignores competition in favor of collaborative story telling and one that ignore narrative while being very adversarial, but that in no way rules out the possibility of a group being interested in both narrative and competition. The choice on both of those previous tables to leave off either competition or narrative is just that, a choice. I'm saying that they are exclusionary pursuits. Because they are exclusionary pursuits, they tend to have mechanical systems which promote one form of play over the other, but that is not inherent to the mechanics themselves by necessity. I do not believe that you can see a group which is simultaneously interested in narrative and competition because those things are oppositional. If you are there for the competition, you are prioritizing the ability to compete and in order to have a fair/just/balanced competition, story can only come after. You may have a great narrative which comes as a result of having the competition but it's a post hoc construction. If you are there for the narrative – it's almost impossible not to have much of a competitive event unless it's determined that the story itself is about "a competition." It might be more succinct to say that your experiential options are considerably more limited if you are intending to play for competition than if you are playing for story. If you really, really want to strongly emphasize both then you can only tell stories about competitions. Which is pretty limiting. There are wonderful games which manage to ride that line pretty tight. [[Eternal Contenders|Eternal Contenders]] is a fantastic game which is all about hypercompetitive behavior in a strongly narrative environment – but it's worth noting that strongly narrative environment is probably best envisioned as a fighting game tournament. That's the story. That makes playing competitively in that context very easy. You aren't going to be using **Eternal Contenders** to play out stories about young demigods granting wishes to children, unless those wishes are to get kicked in the face. I can force the north face of two magnets close to one another and sometimes that serves the purpose of the machine – but they don't want to be there and I have to spend a lot of effort making that happen. The same with competitive versus narrative players. ## 2023-11-05 15:02 > That one thing is a priority over another does not mean that the two are oppositional though. I can want for my meal to be both delicious and nutritious, and I can prioritize one over the other, but it does not follow that the two are therefore in opposition, a great chef can create a meal that is both. Oppositional elements are things like light and dark, I cannot make something both lighter and darker at the same time, I can make something more competitive and more narrative at the same time because the two are on totally different axis. Certainly, the two can be made to coincide, I can make it that anything you choose which is green is cold, it doesn't mean that greenness and coldness are related. If the two were oppositional it would follow that every narrative choice would be competitively poor, and that simply isn't the case, and since the two aren't oppositional, its simply a factor of game design to make it such that all narrative choices are competitive ones. Not only is it possible, its good game design, since players can then be guided by the narrative into how to play the game. Just because I can slam two sides of a magnet together doesn't mean that they are NOT oppositional. They don't want to be together. They do not naturally occur together. In order to make them happen at the same time you have to force them together. And we can see that; it's an observable fact not just in local hobby pockets but across multiple industries. A focus on narrative play is actively oppositional to competitive play across an extremely broad spectrum of modes of play. You can continue to assert that we don't see the facts before our eyes but – that doesn't mean those facts cease to be. Oppositional elements are not necessarily spectral. They are things that resist one another, that oppose the presence of one another. They aren't necessarily linear. You can make a magnet with multiple north faces. It's difficult, it's complicated, it's hard, because nothing in the natural world wants to do that – but you can if you invest enough effort but more often than not you're going to fail. Often horribly. I literally gave multiple examples of games in which narrativism and competitive play somewhat juxtapose – but I also pointed out that in order to do so you have to literally constrain the space of gameplay to points which are much, much narrower than white opportunity. I can make things do what they don't want to do. I can make people play in ways they aren't really interested in playing. I can design mechanics which attempt to emphasize modes of play which are largely incompatible. I might even be successful at doing so. But it's not the way to bet. And just because you pull it off once doesn't make it "good game design." All it says is that game design was good; as a general practice it's absolutely crap game design because you are attempting to do something that doesn't really have a high probability of working, with goals which are mutually repulsive, for an audience who very likely doesn't want that. It's worth pointing out the last is incredibly important. The competitive game community doesn't want games which generate heavy amount of narrative, for the most part. The narrative heavy game community doesn't want competitive games, for the most part. That's why games which tend to try and shove those things together have niche audiences. They are enthusiastic audiences. They are driven audiences. They are audiences who can't get what they want much of anywhere else – but they aren't large audiences. It's a little bit disingenuous not to observe and acknowledge that fact. Narrativism and competitive architectures are not generally compatible mechanically or culturally. If you go to a 40k tournament and tell everyone upfront that you were going to be making all of your decisions based on pure role-playing and you aren't really trying to win – 90% of the people there are going to look at you askance and not really want to play with you because they don't want narrative, they want competition. It's very simple.