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Originally Posted by L.J.Steele
Anyone have advice in introducing players mostly familiar with GURPS and DnD to more narrative Powered by the Apocalypse games?
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I haven't tried any of them, but I've read the one about teenage superheroes. My feeling is that Mark and his companions in gaming got hung up because they were expecting a roleplaying game, and PbtA is simply not a roleplaying game as we here know them. I suppose it might be capable of being fun if you came to it with no expectations, just as playing Sparkle Kitty can be fun (I don't say this sarcastically; C and I have played several rounds of that with friends and quite liked it). But you need to view it as sui generis.
And specifically, PbtA does not give you freedom to say that your character does X, and leave it to the GM to decide what happens, as has been the case in RPGs since the days of Arneson. Rather, you choose one of a list of fewer than a dozen options, and say that your character does that. That's not what I call "narrative powered"; picking items from a menu isn't what I call "narrative."
There seems to be a growing tendency for people to talk about "narrative" games when they mean games where the rules directly specify that you must narrate X, or Y, or Z, rather than specifying how you create a character and letter you make up something to narrate about your creation. It's more a gamist approach to narrative than a narrativist approach.