Narrativism in GURPS

[whswhs]

I am not able to talk about narrativism in GURPS, because I have read Forge material on GNS, and I have not been able to get even a general sense of what any of the three key terms means. Gamism doesn't have much to do with my concept of "game," narrativism has almost nothing to do with my understanding of narrative, and simulationism is radically in conflict with my understanding of the proper methods of simulation. So I don't think I can contribute productively to a discussion in those terms.

More concretely, you seem to be asking for a way to get interesting narrative elements to emerge from an rpg by providing game rules that generate such elements. That seems really odd to me. If anything, I would call it a "gamist" attempt to simulate "narrativism" without actually engaging in narration, by coming up with rules that substitute for the narrative art.

What do I mean by the narrative art? Well, take my just ended supers campaign. One of the players created her character with an Enemy of equal but different powers: Nemesis, her character, was a woman who had been granted strength and combat skill by Ares (the gifts of Achilles) and commanded to wage war against a man who was granted intelligence and strategy by Athene (the gifts of Odysseus) until one of them won. Well, I brought him in as a hidden mover of a series of attacks on her superteam—but eventually I had him decide that if the team could defeat high-end supers, they had a shot at defeating gods. So he and the whole team went to Olympus and defeated Ares and Athene in battle. And just as they fell, I had the titan Prometheus come through and call on Zeus to surrender his throne to his successors: Not a new generation of gods, but mortals of godlike power, as Prometheus had long ago prophesied.

Now, the whole storyline emerged from things that were on Nemesis's character sheet. She had bought Aegis as an Enemy; she had bought the gods as a power source; she even had her character under a curse from Aphrodite for her rejection of love. But turning them into a meaningful story meant my taking a theme that the player had given me, and coming up with incidents that suited it . . . and that's what I think of as "narrative." You get it not from rules, but from going away and thinking about the PCs and the game until things pop up from your subconscious.

That's not to say that there aren't useful rules for letting players shape the narrative a bit more. I admire greatly, for example, the use of drama points in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and of FUDGE points in FUDGE. I'm just not sure whether I'd call them narrativist. . . .

Bill Stoddard