
Narrows: online storytelling system - ingve
https://emanchado.github.io/narrows/
======
sudosteph
It's a cool idea! I've been toying around with some Interactive Fiction tech,
was thinking about making a collaborative story-telling experience, except
using slack as the base platform. Was thinking you could use Amazon Lex +
slack bots as interactive NPCs, and channels (and private channels) to
represent locations. I hadn't considered how the GM would work, but I'll read
into how they're doing it here.

I don't have time to actually build this though, or the patience to even read
most IF so I'm sure I would lose steam quickly, but it would be a cool project
(which anyone reading this is welcome to run with).

~~~
throwanem
I've actually done something like this, a couple of times, on a much more ad-
hoc basis, writing interactive fiction one response at a time in collaboration
with another guy who wrote commands like you would to an Inform parser.

It was fun to play and received a degree of general acclaim, but it was also a
lot of work! If I were building tooling in support of a similar game, the
first thing I'd write would be a bot that'd observe and correlate directional
moves, "look"/"examine" commands, and the like, with their responses - and,
when a previously visited location or a previously examined object were
encountered again, give the author the option of reissuing the previous
response, with or without prior editing. Such a bot could also be preloaded
with responses to commands likely to be issued during a game.

Inventory management, and object management in general, would be another high-
payoff automation target. Remembering what's where, both on the map and in the
player's inventory, is a drag and severely error-prone; a bot tracking TAKE,
DROP, and like commands, or even just able to be told by the author of object
status changes (or both!), will both save a lot of time, and greatly improve
the flow.

In my experience, it's easier for players to remain involved and engaged, and
the game to remain enjoyable, when responses come quickly - although I'm not
too sure this isn't an artifact of my having played these games in a public
Slack channel, which necessarily has a certain performative aspect about it.
Games with a smaller audience, or no audience at all beyond those actually
playing, might not have such concerns. In any case, having a bot that's seen
what came before and can reproduce it without manual effort, but also gives
the author a chance to modify those responses where necessary, saves a lot of
work that could be better spent on imagining and describing a compelling
story, and would thus I think be a good place to start.

How to scale the game to multiple players, I have no idea - for classic
interactive fiction, that'd more or less mean multiple games running in
parallel, so the model doesn't really fit. For something more like a
multiplayer RPG, I'm not even sure where I'd start.

(One other note - unless there's a very compelling reason otherwise, I'd lean
by default to an open source offering like Mattermost or Rocket.chat over
Slack for this. On the one hand, Slack's pricing model and rolling archive on
the free tier lack appeal; on the other, some of the tooling we're talking
about might well be more effectively built as part of the platform than as
user scripts or as bots interacting with webhooks. I've used Slack, and it is
very good! But another similar platform might be better for this use case.)

------
Aeolun
I tried installing this on a $5 DO box, but I ran into so many errors that I
gave up after an hour.

Why is anything nodejs based always so godawfully horrible to install. Why do
I need to compile a thousand libraries?

~~~
emanchado
Care to submit an issue to GitHub? I'm a bit surprised that you would run into
many errors, _if_ you really have Node >= 4 and npm >= 4.

~~~
Aeolun
The main issue is that I cannot compile one of the libraries node needs
without more than 512MB RAM, not your fault, and not really something I can
submit a ticket to your repo for. It's just a fault in the mechanics of
NPM/whatever library was used.

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esfandia
I always liked this idea of a "ruleless, diceless RPG". I was always too lazy
to read the RPG manuals, I didn't necessarily like the Tolkien universe, and I
never liked randomness in battle outcomes. So the only way you could get me to
be the gamemaster was to just let me create my own universe and let me decide
on the outcome without resorting to dice. Usually plain common sense is
enough: if you decide to attack a fully armed soldier barehanded, well you
just die.

~~~
throwanem
Rules and dice exist because inventing a compelling collaborative story is
_hard_. They let you concentrate your effort on the parts that really count,
and handwave past the parts that don't with a decent mix of low effort,
reasonable verisimilitude, and a chance, if you want one, for something to
happen that puts a new twist in the story.

~~~
sbergot
Agreed. It also introduces an element of surprise. And also gives you a source
of narra "constrains" while you are playing. This tends to help everyone come
up with interesting ideas. I lean toward games like dungeon world
([http://dungeon-
world.com/downloads/Dungeon_World_Play_Sheets...](http://dungeon-
world.com/downloads/Dungeon_World_Play_Sheets.pdf)) that provide a set of
lightweight rules and teach how to keep the flow of the adventure so that
everyone has fun.

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disposedtrolley
That's so awesome! Glad to see there's still people working on interactive
fiction. Some of the best times I've had were spent playing IF games like
Jigsaw with friends.

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howderek
When I was 13, I remember setting up a forummotion account for this exact
purpose. I know that many others have done the same. Very cool to see
dedicated software for this purpose!

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trynewideas
I need some time (maybe this weekend) to toy with this, but I'm curious if op
or anyone who's stood it up with real folks is willing to compare it to the
interactive fiction game/toy Storium
([https://storium.com/](https://storium.com/)). On first blush it looks very
much like the early versions of it without the more gamey point/token/card
mechanics.

~~~
emanchado
Hey! Author here :-)

I did know Storium! It's very similar indeed but I decided to write my own
because it didn't quite fit my vision.

1) I have an _intense_ hate for challenge-based RPGs, and I hate when players
have to do math or focus on calculating if they have enough points of whatever
nonsense to reach some target.

2) I didn't want players to write part of the story text themselves because I
wanted all that text to have a single voice/style. NARROWS has a way to
"export" a narration as a kind of novel, and it reads more or less like a
normal short story.

3) I wanted it to feel as immersive as possible, and have as little UI (for
the readers) as possible. Having an audio track and a background image for
every chapter was important to me. It might be a petty thing, but as I had
decided to write my own anyway...

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soneca
Loved the idea, but I would prefer if it was a ready-to-use web product. Not
something I have to install myself, complete with a db and server. Even a
desktop app would be better.

~~~
emanchado
Yeah, I understand that. I wrote it mostly for myself and although I was
planning on sharing the code all along, from the start I realised that most
people wouldn't be able to, or wouldn't bother, to install it.

I have actually been thinking of buying some domain and having a public
installation that anyone can use (I'd have to change some things, like add a
"Forgot password" feature and such)... but I'd have to pay for it myself, and
it might become a maintenance burden. So I dunno.

------
nebabyte
Novel one-to-many and many-to-many interactions - text and otherwise - are
always a fun thought exercise.

They all seem in that halcyon realm of "Next big thing just waiting to be
made".

~~~
pmoriarty
If you're in to that sort of thing, you probably already know of a game called
Exquisite Corpse,[1] and maybe a group called Oulipo.[2] If not, check them
out.

They both predate the Internet and personal computers, but are still very
interesting, creative, and inspiring.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse)

[2] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo)

