Further thoughts on fiction-first TTRPGs that have solidified recently:
- To reiterate, a major difference is the 'locus of simulation'. Are you simulating the world and its people, or simulating a fiction about that world? This is striking in the genre-focused games of Powered by the Apocalypse, in particular.
- D&D(-alikes) often don't include tools or guidance within the game that make its GMs and players grapple with pacing or other narrative concepts which more readily create compelling fiction. (Not that it never engages with those things or tries to showcase them, but they're at best tangential, or more focused on the macro level of storytelling than narrower scenes and beats.)
- This doesn't matter so much if you're playing D&D* with people who bring those skills in from elsewhere.
- For this and other reasons, D&D* tends to lend itself to a 'contiguous time by default' mode of play, where you're mostly dramatising everything ('Okay, so you weave your way through the town's streets looking for an armour shop.'), and the GM exerting more of a directorial role over the flow of the narrative can sometimes feel like a failure state (emphasis on 'feel', because it's not).
- One of those other reasons (and this came up in conversation with a friend recently; forgive me -- I forget who) is probably down to D&D*'s history -- dungeon crawls and battle maps, where time happens necessarily slowly to give the players the opportunity to declare checking for traps, sneaking down corridors, etc., where the player is trying to simulate their character's actions as closely as possible -- and failure to, say, look for traps in one particular room can lead to a 'gotcha'. Pulling agency back from the players -- a narratively interesting and necessary tool -- becomes an incidental weapon in that environment.
- The same is true more obviously of combat -- D&D* has us dramatise essentially everything, moment-by-moment, because that is inherent in its combat system, which forms a significant part of the game (both present and historical).
- This makes the idea of 'hard framing' or even just using dramatic framing techniques as narrative tools, feel incongruous if you've come into TTRPGs through a D&D* mode (certainly speaking for myself).
- But good narrative really demands use of tools like this -- thinking about framing, where the action is, etc. -- otherwise you end up with a higher proportion of dead time.
- You do wrest some agency away from the players by doing this BUT player agency is not an unalloyed good. Different games and tables will benefit from different approaches to it, and most players I know would trade 'always on' agency for more of their limited at-table time to be spent on the good stuff.
- Fiction-first games build this tool into the system and surface them as explicit elements of play. Some are better at teaching this than others.
- Even if you prefer D&D-style games for other reasons (on balance, I think I still do), understanding the affordances of your system and what tools you can import from elsewhere can transform your play experience.
- One thing I love about D&D* is precisely the possibility of architecture in game-planning that runs against the affordances of an average fiction-first game which prioritises shared authorship over a hard underlying reality.