Here's where I stuff my page drafts and occasional troping rambles. Warning: This is a hard hat zone!
Had a weird dream last night someone was stalking me and vandalizing pages I'd worked on...
Had another weird dream that giant insect kaiju from space with powers of decay were attacking Earth's major metropolitan centers, with London and Stockholm specifically called out...
Testing edit reasons now.
N💧pe, N💧pe
"Idk what country 🏳️⚧️ is but yugioh must be pretty popular over there" -this tweet
PS: All my unlaunched work drafts are Up for Grabs if anyone wants to use them. Here, have some links so you can find this via the "Related" option: Poinie's Poin,
A board game in which the player progresses through a defined story as they play.
Many board games do not have stories. Either they are totally abstract collections of rules, such as checkers or backgammon, or they have a thematic a Framing Device used to help the player understand the mechanics of the game, such as Clue/Cluedo. And while there are many Tabletop Games with overarching plots set within the universe of the game, such as Dungeons & Dragons or Magic: The Gathering having tie-in novels, the player does not generally play through the stories of those novels when they play the game.
In a Narrative Board Game, however, the game has a plot, and the act of playing the game takes the players through the story the developers have crafted. Some games have multiple different scenarios the player can play through, with each one having slightly different rules and setup, to give the player several possible experiences. Others string a series of smaller games together into a larger campaign, with the outcome of one game potentially affecting the next. There are several ways board games can tell a story:
- The game makes heavy use of Flavor Text, both to set the scene and to contextualize what the players are doing. Many narrative games open with a few paragraphs describing the setting of the game and the players' overall goal. Similarly, the actions a player takes in the real world might have text describing what effect those actions have in the game: A player might just be rolling a six-sided die and trying to get a 4 or higher, but according to the game, they're trying to pick a booby-trapped lock. Many narrative games have either large companion books the players read from, similar to a Gamebook, or apps that serve the same purpose.
- The game has points where the players are required to make a choice or pass some kind of test, with the gameplay diverging depending on their choice. For example, in a detective game, the players might have to choose whether or not to accept a favor from a mobster. Accepting the favor might make the game easier right away, but harder when he comes to collect on the favor later on. Similarly, if the player fails to pick that booby-trapped lock, a bomb might go off and the door might collapse, forcing the player to use another method to progress.
- The game has Multiple Endings depending on how the player(s) did. If the players fail, there may be multiple different failure states depending on how they failed; there might be one ending for all characters dying vs. another ending for making a lot of obviously bad choices. Similarly, there may be a Golden Ending for players who do an exceptionally good job, which usually means passing very difficult tests or overcoming other especially hard challenges.
This style of game is an evolutionary offshoot of classic Tabletop RPGs. Many such tabletop role-playing games included pre-made scenarios for the players to enjoy, but still needed a Game Master to control them, both to make choices about the direction of the campaign and to improvise if the players went Off the Rails. In narrative games, the "Game Master" is usually the game itself, providing the player(s) with a restricted number of choices (so they must stay within the confines of the story) while still providing varying paths for the players to explore. Narrative games can be used to give players the "feel" of a classic Tabletop RPG without the complicated rules, extended setup times, or need to have one player sit out to GM—or just to create an especially immersive experience.
Note: This is intended as a Supertrope that will later include subtropes for Legacy Game and Campaign Game. If the examples list looks a little bare right now, it's because I'm reserving some entries that better fit in either of those categories. If/when this launches, Maths Angelic Version and I intend to template those two up right away and launch them quickly, then add the standard supertrope disclaimer of "please check these two tropes to see if it better fits there before adding it here" disclaimer.
Examples: [currently just a list of titles because this is a draft for collabing with MAV, will fill these out once we like the look of the description draft]
- Arkham Horror games
- Detective: City of Angels
- Waste Knights
- Sleeping Gods
- Shards of Infinity expansion
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A word or short phrase in a Tabletop Game used to represent a shared mechanic between multiple game pieces.
In Tabletop Games, it is very common for the game pieces used in each game have some kind of ability. In Collectible Card Games, the appeal of building your own deck comes from choosing the units with the abilities you like best out of all the many cards available and putting them together. War Games have a similar focus on building an army based on the units whose abilities you like best, except they're units or figures instead of cards. In Tabletop Roleplaying Games, you build your character using the skills you like. In boxed hobby games, meanwhile, choosing the game pieces with the best abilities while in the heat of the game itself is often a major part of the strategy, as is using the in-built abilities of your character or faction at the best time.
In these games, it is not uncommon for more than one game piece per game to share the same ability, especially if they're part of the same faction or group. Because text space in tabletop games can be limited—and rules can be very complicated—designers often condense the most common abilities into Keyword Abilities.
A Keyword Ability is a single word or short phrase (usually not more than two words long) that represents the exact same mechanic every time it appears on a unit. Or, more technically, it's a short word or phrase that stands in for a longer, more complicated block of rules, the full text of which is referenced in the manual—sort of a fancy footnote, if you will. (That said, some units may also have "reminder text" that gives a brief explanation of the keyword's rules, typically on common units or gamepieces that newer players are likely to interact with.) Keyword Abilities allow game designers to add depth to a game by putting more rules on individual game pieces without adding much more text to them. For enfranchised players, keyword abilities can help them quickly understand new or unfamiliar units at a glance, as they can quickly convey several rules at once without needing to be read closely. And, if a Keyword Ability is named well, it can even help a new player get an idea about what a game piece does and how it works before they even open the manual.
The name of a Keyword Ability—the keyword itself—is usually something short that thematically ties into what the ability does. For example, an ability that prevents a unit from being attacked or blocked by anything without the same ability might be flavored as the units flying above the battlefield, and thus be called Flight or Airborne. Similarly, a unit that cannot attack, and only defend, might have an ability called Defensive or Stationary. It behooves the game designer to make these names as evocative as possible, in order to help players intuit what an ability does even without referencing the manual.
Some units may not posses Keyword Abilities themselves, but instead bestow them upon units you control. For example, in a car-racing game, some units might have an ability called "Nitrous" that allows them to temporarily move faster than normal. A designer, then, could potentially develop a "Chopshop Mechanic" unit that grants all a player's cars the "Nitrous" ability.
For complicated tabletop games with a lot of units available, usage of this trope is downright crucial in order to help develop a range of units that each have distinct roles and strategic potential without overwhelming their cards/bases/reference sheets/what have you with text. However, using too many keyword abilities—or choosing names that don't intuitively describe their abilities—can lead to units becoming confusing to read or understand, as the players will need to spend a lot of time referencing the manual in order to understand what such units do. Good game design, then, is often about creating just enough keyword mechanics to help flesh units out, without creating so many that the unit turns into an endless list of glossary entries to check.
Compare Vanilla Unit, for game pieces that have no abilities. These two tropes can sometimes combine into "French Vanilla Units," a Fan Speak term for units that only have keyword abilities.
