In this post I am going to talk about narrative gaming, 40K narrative gaming and the Texas Games Con Narrative event. I want to tie this together so that we can get a common understanding of what narrative gaming is.

A narrative is an accounting of connected events, in narrative 40K gaming it is presented in sequence of games. Wow that is dry, let me illustrate.

“The greatest of the Champions of Chaos, Abaddon the Despoiler, launches an all-out attack by the Forces of Chaos upon the Fortress World of Cadia and the strategic Cadian Gate, the route by which the servants of the Ruinous Powers may once more strike towards sacred Terra. The Traitor Legions pour forth from the Eye of Terror, emptying a hundred Daemon Worlds and bursting into realspace in hitherto unforeseen numbers.” Codex Eye of Terror

Some of you will recognize this as the 13th Black Crusade which was the setting for the Eye of Terror Campaign Games Workshop’s ran worldwide in 2003. The idea was that the games would connect together and the outcome would affect the 40K universe. The campaign was meant to be very narrative. The execution lost most of that due to scale. Scale is one of the keys to narrative gaming.

Big events like the 13th Black Crusade are way out of scale for a single 40K game. Even the most key battles are too epic to fit on a 40K or even Apoc table. However, good narrative gaming can portray key moments in a battle, for example the battle for the breach in a key fortification. This part of the battle can swing the battle in a new direction. A couple of these can be decisive to the outcome of a battle. The key to making the game matter in the wider story is to play those key moments.

For the Texas Games Con Narrative event we are using Aaron Dembski-Bowden’s book Betrayer as the setting. To portray the whole story would take millions of 30K games and the outcome would never be in doubt. You would lose those clutch moments that make 40K fun. When he wrote the book he focused on the important parts, because that is what good story telling is all about. Narrative gaming is the same. Find the key moments and play those. For example, in the book the Ultramarines funnel the World Eaters into a kill zone. The battle for Armatura was already lost, but if they could kill enough of Angron’s forces maybe they can hold them back from the rest of the 500 worlds. That is why we are picking this part of the battle to put on the table.

As Paul Murphy says “We play a game where the improbable happens all the time.” It is those moments when a falling back guardsman snap fires a missile launcher and knocks a Helldrake out of the sky. These heroic moments are just as important to the story as the epic setting. This is what good military histories are all about and the same can be true of narrative 40K. This improbable can feed back into the game to connect this game to other games.

Choosing how to connect game together is fluid process that requires cooperation between players. Unlike competitive gaming where you want all factors to be even, in narrative gaming you want events to affect other events. This can be as simple as players agreeing on the result, such as the guardsman being promoted to an IC in the next game. This gives one of the players an advantage but that is part of narrative gaming. Things don’t have to be even as long as they are fun for all players.

Narrative gaming is not competitive however the game matters. 40K is a game where you keep score, so everyone wants to win. In a garage game winning is bragging rights between you and you’re friends. In GT it is bragging rights between you and the world. In narrative gaming the awesome improbable things are more important that the score and that is where bragging rights come from. Winning in narrative is doing awesome stuff and telling the cool story. If there is 1 in 100 chance to win this challenge, in a narrative game that those odds are too good not to take. That is what makes narrative different.

The Texas Games Con Narrative event has always been casual in that we don’t give out prizes for scoring victory points. The competitive part of the event is in small parts of the game that may not even affect the outcome. For example, a character winning a lopsided challenge say an IG sergeant vs. a chaos lord become the target for the chaos lord’s remaining forces. Making that kind of choice as a player is how you ‘win’ in narrative gaming.

Narrative gaming isn’t about Apoc or Campaigning, although that can be a big part of it and you can play Apoc or a campaign without a narrative. Narrative is about the story on the table and finding the fun in what is happening. While all the changes to 40K are making things chaos in the rest of 40K, this is the best time ever to start playing narrative games.

I would be interested in hearing your thoughts and ideas,
-Dan