How This Game Works

Narrative Advanced has no dice, no stats, and no numbers anywhere. Nothing is rolled, nothing is added up, and there is no hidden score deciding whether you get what you wanted. You say what your character does, and what happens next comes out of the story itself.

Three things settle every outcome that matters.

• How good your character is at that sort of thing. That is a Feat, and every Feat sits somewhere on a five step ladder from Unranked to Master.
• How they go about it. A clever approach from someone barely trained can beat a careless one from an expert.
• What is going on around them. Wounded, rushed, outnumbered, or helped by a friend all change what is possible.

The GM weighs those three and answers one of four ways. Yes, it works. Yes, but it works and costs you something. No, but it fails and leaves you something useful. No, it fails and the trouble moves closer. There is no fifth answer, and there is no roll hiding behind any of them.

What a turn looks like

You write what your character says and does. The GM writes what the world does back. That is the entire loop.

Behind it, the game keeps files on the people you meet, the places you go, the things you pick up, and the promises you make. You never have to maintain any of it. It just means a favor you owe in your first hour is still owed in your twentieth, and the person you owe it to remembers your name.

What you never have to do

You will not track hit points, spend points, work out a bonus, or ask what your chances are. If your character gets hurt, their file says wounded, and the story treats them as wounded until something heals it. If your character is brilliant on horseback, the story treats them that way until they run into something faster.

Everything a character is good at is written in plain words, and plain words are the whole system.

Where to go next

Chapter two builds your character. Chapter three covers Feats and the tier ladder, which is the one piece of machinery in the game. Chapter four covers how the GM decides what happens. The chapters after that cover growing, what you carry, work and money, who travels with you, and what the game remembers about all of it.