Month: February 2023

I’ve often thought there are as many different ways to play as there are gaming groups. Through a combination of different personalities, who is chosen to be the gamemaster, and the game system, a vector sum is created that embodies the overall play style.

These styles seem to be located along a spectrum from Objective-Based games to Narrative-Based games. I don’t think any game can exist at the extreme ends of the spectrum. No game is purely Objective-Based or Narrative-Based and will always contain some amount of it’s opposite.

Also, I’m not saying one style of play is better than another, they are just different. I’m interested to see if there is anything that can be done to adjust the play style of a particular group and game system to give the players a different experience.

The Objective-Based play style tends to have a lot in common with video games. The story is almost like a game level, with a clear objective and problems to solve, all building up to an end-of-level boss. You are playing to win and are constantly reacting to the challenges presented by the gamemaster. The game can tend towards the adversarial, and the gamemaster holds most of the narrative control. It is the player’s job to overcome what is in front of them. This can be seen most easily in many published adventures, if you skip to the final few pages you can see everything leads to a single, almost inevitable climax.

The Narrative-Based play style tends to have more in common with a novel or play. Each character (player and non-player) has a motivation for a goal they want to accomplish. The story emerges from how these different things interact. Each player has some form of narrative control. The gamemaster is just another player with the exception that they control every character that doesn’t belong to a player. There is no explicit ending that is being pursued and everyone plays to see what happens. Published adventures can fail here. You can set up a situation, but the outcome is driven by the characters. Where the Objective-Based game can be adversarial, the Narrative-Based game is much more collaborative.

The only way a player can directly affect what is happening in the game world is through the character they create.

In an Objective-Based game the players generally leverage the rules to build a strong character with no weaknesses that is capable of mitigating anything negative that comes their way. This makes sense in an adversarial game with a clear objective. Your character needs to be built for the job at hand and must react to anything the gamemaster throws at you.

In a Narrative-Based game the players construct a character with attributes that help insert them into the world. These could be in the form of weaknesses, flaws, desires, or relationships. Your character is created so that the game world can influence them just as much as they can influence the game world.

Put simply, the Objective-Based character is heading towards a destination, whereas the Narrative-Based character is on a journey.

I have a few ideas on ways to push a game along the spectrum from one end to the other. My plan is to investigate each of them in different articles. I also plan to run an experiment on each one to see how successful my ideas have been. I’ll try and include the rules of the experiment, then update my findings in a later article.