My brain is still churning from this morning's awesome #SundayAMSwords game.

My brain is still churning from this morning's awesome #SundayAMSwords game. Here are some notes I jotted down about Swords works, I think:

Narrative Gravity
Many other RPGs use narrative constraint as a way to focus player creativity. If you give players a blank paper, they freeze. If you draw a box and tell them to stay inside the lines, they will go up with amazing energy.

Swords isn’t quite like that. The best parts of the game work with narrative gravity: the property of certain fictional bits to draw other fictional bits to them, and to evoke more fictional bits.

The Thunder is a good example. A scene without Thunder, or with a very weak Thunder will often fall flat. Narrative gravity is that potential for story development that a good Thunder has. But, some scenes will take on a life of their own and the Thunder is largely forgotten. That’s because something else is exerting narrative gravity in the scene. There’s something else that people want to talk about, and that’s fine. There is no specific piece of Swords that needs to have the most narrative gravity, as long as something in the scene has it. A lot of the rules are set up so that there will always be one or more sources of narrative gravity, without prescribing which source needs to prevail at any given time.

Narrative constraint in other games is like a crucible, focusing all the creative energy inward to generate heat. Narrative constraint in Swords is like the boundaries of a playing field. It just serves to prevent creative energy from exceeding the range of the narrative gravity.