Bob,
Thanks for joining into the thread. Your use of the term did lead to me starting this thread.
One, rigid kriegspiel, emphasizes fixed turns, fixed movement, voluminous tables, algorithms that are known and only the inputs vary, many legalistic pages of rules and highly constrained results-often attritional. It is very procedural and “rigid” in its construct.
The other emphasizes open ended, with varying turns, variable movement, general mechanisms that avoid or minimize tables, fewer algorithms, a higher degree of surprise and unpredictability, and a far greater emphasis on the story of a battle as it unfolds-especially its human rather than mathematical factors.
These characteristics are pretty general, most games contain large chucks of both lists if not all of both lists except for perhaps the subjective characterizations. People will have varying opinions of what constitutes “few enough charts” or “lots of charts”. Some will feel a game’s rules are too “legalistic” while others will say those rules are just well outlined. I would posit that: All games have a procedure. I presume this overlap is natural and not in conflict with what you are attempting to describe but it also keeps me from knowing just what you mean and being able to clearly discern between the two types. Maybe we could try working through an example?
You describe cards as excellent for this purpose of narrative gaming but the characteristics of cards you mention can also be replicated with a list and dice. Two very clear examples I think are:
1) In college a popular drinking game is to write a bunch of different actions down on a list and label them Ace, King, Queen, Jack, 10-2. Someone draws a card, the event that follows is whatever corresponds on the list. That could be made slightly simpler by distributing the list among the cards with a marker.
2) Many people are aware of “romance dice” where a pair of D6s have their numbers replaced with actions and body parts. Roll the two dice and do what they say.
I picked these two examples because they are exceptionally simplistic and straight forward. Also because you can easily swap the use of cards and dice between them without changing anything about the game play or outcome so it “neutralizes” the question of if cards or dice really play any roll in the question of “process vs narrative”.
Would you consider either of these to be process or narrative based games?
Cheers,
The Bandit
