[Rant] Narrative Isn't Casual

At its root, this is a problem of sloppy logic and lazy dichotomies. The juxtaposition of "competitive" to "casual" has been a problem for decades - I was frothing about it on House of Paincakes when that was still a going concern, in 2013 or whenever it was. I used to get turnt about this as a needless division in the player base, an us-and-them attitude that created conflict for the sake of having it, but that was wrong. Now I get turnt about it because it doesn't make sense. It's logically unsound. It's a nonsense. 

"Competitive" is a mode of play, a type of game - any game in which one or more players win and one or more players lose is fundamentally a competition. The opposite of "competitive" is "cooperative", a game in which players win or lose together, collectively: see also Pandemic, or the default assumption for most TTRPGs. Key point: all 40K is competitive, that's how the game operates, stop pretending otherwise.

 "Casual" is an attitude, an approach to playing games. It says that the outcome of the game in hard rules terms is less important than the social event, the outcome in soft experiential terms. "It doesn't matter if I win or lose, as long as we're all having a good time." "I don't care enough to argue about this." "Whatever man it's just toy soldiers." The opposite of "casual" is "tryhard" - an attitude which says winning games is the point of playing them, and we came here to play, so let's play. Key point: player attitudes are somewhere between casual and tryhard, and matching attitudes is key to enjoying the play.

Most of the conflict that exists in the player base for any wargame comes down to a lack of awareness of attitude, and a muddling of that issue with the fundamental operations of gameplay - but that's not today's rant. 

Today's rant is about a knock-on effect of that muddling. Once you get the false, stupid, nonsense, incorrect idea that "competitive" is the opposite of "casual" into your head, you are prone to other false, stupid, nonsense ideas. You look at "competitive play", you see that the context of that is "tournaments and leagues", and you immediately look for another "opposite" to map onto "casual" as part of a false dichotomy. And you reach for "narrative," as a mode of play and interest in playing that's often in tension with the pure expression of game rules, and you decide that "narrative" and "casual" are the same thing.

Even the GW developers have been guilty of this in the past. When sixth edition 40K arrived, coming out swinging against the leafblowers and whateverwings and las/plas is the best combo and all that noise from when I started blogging, it featured the words "Forge The Narrative!" so often that it became risible, memetic, the subject of mockery. 

I was intrigued, as a narrative player, as someone who likes games as stories and doesn't like the bland repetition and symmetrical aesthetic of optimal pure game play. I came to dislike it, to the point where sixth was the last edition I played, and I'll tell you for why - because "Forge the Narrative!" seemed to mean "randomise everything, right down to what the terrain does!" 

It peaked at the d6 roll for determining your Warlord Trait - in other words, roll a d6 to tell you Your Dude's personality, at the start of every game. What the hell? What kind of storytelling is that? What kind of half-assed "the showrunner's on coke and we've got a toy commercial to finish" rubbish is it going to turn out when your main character doesn't have consistent behaviours and motivations week to week?

The truth is, narrative play has tryhards. The narrative tryhard may or may not be any good at the game: hell, they may be playing to lose if they're running NPC mooks. (I tend to end up in this jobber role at narrative events, because I'm not a very good player and I tend to roll hordes of faceless undead anyway.) But they care.

In narrative play, you can care more, or you can care less, about the narrative you are trying to forge. And if you care more, you are trying to curate an experience and a story here, and that means you need the kind of knobs and levers that "competitive" play has, the choices, the agency over what happens in the game.  

I don't like having my characters' personality reestablished for every game. I don't like the story distorted by charts full of lolrandom gibberish that can make or break a game. (I don't think 40K had anything as egregious as the River of Light from WFB eighth edition, otherwise known as the "fuck you, Undead" button, but that's from the same general "lolrandom everything" period in GW's manic depressive development cycle, and it's what made me ragequit WFB years before the End Times made flouncing all popular.)

Random missions, traits, skills and injuries are for casual players, that is players with a casual attitude, as opposed to a tryhard attitude. They are not a sensible de facto for narrative play as a whole. 

As someone who cares about consistency and continuity and things hanging together in a way that makes some sort of sense, I want to pick things like Battle Honours and Battle Scars that reflect what happened in the Crusade game we just played, and my sense of the personality and role of My Dudes. I want rules that harmonise to create a character who can do things and be badass, not skills that don't work together and upgrades that don't matter because if that unit's in melee something's already gone wrong.

I don't want or need total control - Necromunda is great precisely because your badass gang champion can still get set on fire, run around like a headless chicken, set two of her mates on fire and then plunge to certain doom off a walkway and still survive because the wound roll for the drop came up a 1. That's awesome. But that's not dictating whether or not she gets to be a functional badass in the first place.

What it comes down to is "you can tell me how much damage I take, but you can't tell me how I feel about it. My character is My Dude and I get to decide what kind of person they are." Just... extrapolate that to an army scale.

Narrative play really needs a GM, but the pure rules are expected to fill in that role in the social contract (cf. Warhammer For Adults, manifesto thereof, read it and know it to be true), and players with compatible ideas can self-GM to an extent. Functional Crusade play often lends itself to "well, I'm not gonna put your bonus Agenda in a corner, because that doesn't change who wins or loses, it's just being a dick for no reason," or "hey, do you want to Mark for Greatness one of my units? who do you think was the most badass?" anyway. 

But that's neither here nor there - the point is that Games Workshop rules have, since the Nineties, assumed that narrative play means campaigns with RPG elements, chiefly experience points and levelling up, and that for those rules to work without a GM, there needs to be randomisation. Once you have enough XP to level up, roll on a chart to see what skill you get. If your unit is destroyed in battle, roll on a chart to see what happens to them.

In recent years the Studio has started to treat this persistent brain mange. Warlord Traits became an "oh, just pick one" rule before I came back in mid ninth edition. Crusade explicitly says "you can pick or you can roll" for Honours and Scars. The control is there, if you want it.

If you're a tryhard who rejects the Stormwind Fallacy and still wants to play a character who works in the rules, or you know what Battle Scar makes sense in the context of exactly how your Chaos Lord got squished, you have the option to choose. If you're a casual and you don't really care for any of that, great, do your damn thing, live your truth and let the dice fall where they may. I like having the option - if I can't choose, I roll, and life goes on. I'm not super mad about that. But if I want to choose, I don't want to be given shit about "the Coward's Path" from the same people who say "Casual At All Costs is the worst attitude held by the worst people in wargaming." Your take is unsound. Your theories appall me, your heresies outrage me, you never answer letters and I don't like your ties. You know who you are.

Well, I certainly feel better for that. Do read this with your tongue somewhat in your cheek, and comment in the same spirit. None of this is worth getting genuinely cross over, which is exactly why I'm having a little vent about it now, when I would have been writing a battle report, if my opponent hadn't tapped out citing "being extremely knackered." As usual, Those Who Blog Much Game Not, and like all bitter non-gamers, when I don't get to play I get Big Mad on the Internet instead.