Quote:
Originally Posted by Stormcrow
If you accept whswhs's definition of narrative — and I think it's overly broad, covering anything you can possibly say with words — then you must accept that "I go to the store. I trip a robber. He bashes his head and is arrested. The end." is just as much a narrative as a complex, structured plot with interleaved characters, heroic archetypes, and what have you.
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No, it does not cover "anything you can possibly say with words." Nothing in this paragraph can reasonably be called "narrative."
A narrative involves statements that form a chronological sequence, not just in that the reader or hearer must encounter them in some order (for one thing, any set of statements can be read in a variety of orders, or, if heard, can be recited in a different order). Those statements describe a series of events. The events must be causally interconnected; if not, what you have isn't a single narrative, but multiple narrative. In a literary narrative (as opposed to, say, a description of the sequence of events that make up a cycle in a V8 internal combustion engine, or the detonation of a hydrogen bomb), a significant part of the causation is agent causation. It's not mandatary for the agents to be humans, but they must be entities that human beings can imagine taking the viewpoint of.
I'm sure there are other constraints, but I think that those apply to the kind of narrative that goes into RPGs, and that they do exclude many, many sets of statements.