Archetypes
When you have narrative advantage, you can change the fiction so that it works to your advantage. This means you get to wrest control from your GM for a moment and become the narrator of the adventure. This empowers you to introduce facts about the world within the context your narrative advantage was granted. What you narrate is always subject to the GM's approval, because the GM may know hidden facts about the world that you, as a player, do not.
Different game mechanics in OSR+ may grant you narrative advantage: when you spend story points or fate points, for example, you're given broad license to narrate. When you roll high enough on success checks, you may be awarded player advantage, which is another way of saying narrative advantage to distinguish from the GM narrating in your favor (GM advantage).
Narrative advantage is always temporary and constrained by a particular context. When you receive narrative advantage from a success check, your narration is restrained by the fictional circumstances of the check. Or, when you spend a story point to create narrative advantage, what you narrate has to relate to what's happening in the fiction right now.
Guidelines for Narrative Advantage
create New facts, not Conclusions
When you create narrative advantage, you're establishing new facts about the fiction, not what happens as a result of those facts. If the enemy hordes are incoming and you use narrative advantage to establish that there are brittle hinges on the door, whether a roll is necessary to break through the door or what that roll may be is entirely up to the GM.
Create lasting Impact
When you create narrative advantage, you establish something true (and therefore permanent) about the fiction. If you establish that the door is brittle, then it remains brittle after you narrate that to be the case.
Create Immediate Effect
Narrative advantage is always about the present moment, constrained to the circumstances of what granted it. You can use narrative advantage to explain that you'd earlier swiped a hairpin off your jailor's ponytail in order to pick your handcuffs in the present, but this past fact you've introduced has to do with the present moment: escaping your bonds.
Create Continuity
You can't use narrative advantage to contradict what we already know to be true (such as the GM's past pronouncements about the fiction). You can reveal new facts that might substantially re-imagine what we know to be true about the situation (with the GM's discretion), however: if the GM established that there are burglars breaking into the family safe, you might narrate that one of the burglars is doing so out of desperation rather than malice, to make diplomacy more palatable for the scenario.
Create Opportunity, not Certainty
When you create narrative advantage, you don't dictate what mechanics the GM may use to adjudicate what happens as a result of what you introduced in the fiction, nor can you obviate the need for a roll. That decision-making power about what mechanics are used and when are always reserved to the GM.
Types of Narrative Advantage
While the sky's the limit as far as generating ideas go with narrative advantage, typically their use boils down to a handful of broad categories:
Alter the Scene
The most common use of narrative advantage: add something to the scene. Crowd of guards in the ballroom? A chandelier hangs over them that you can swing across or drop onto them to escape.
Alter the Lore
Add to (or re-interpret) what's known about the world to take advantage in the moment. You're surrounded by bandits, but you declare that one of them is your cousin.
Create a Flashback
Establish that something was done in the past to set up for this moment. Did the badguys spot you during the heist? You flashback to when you set up a diversion that conveniently gets you out of the spotlight.
ENhance Your Equipment
Create supply out of nothing or enhance equipment to do things it ordinarily can't do.
Recover Miraculously
Tap into some hitherto unknown reserve of willpower or divine grace to recover HP or MP (or some other limited in game resource)—typically 1d6, in the form of a consumable—or shed a major peril like a poison or disease.
Enhance a Spell or Ability
Creatively extend the area of effect, targets, range, or other impact of a spell or ability so that it can do something outside its capabilities.
Make the Impossible, Possible
Sometimes the rules don't allow for some action to be possible given the context; in this way, narrative advantage can break the rules. Examples include taking the initiative when you don't have it, targeting someone with a spell that you can't see, or attempting an impossible called shot.
Examples of Narrative Advantage
| Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Create a Flashback | When the party is trapped in an inescapable room by the BBEG, clever Nim Quacryn Nercabora flashes back to an earlier scene when he coordinated in secret with the rebel teamsters to cut the power to the building at this exact moment, enabling the party to break free. |
| Create a Flashback | The party shows up just as the Queen is about to be hanged, but the Queen's daughter flashes back to the year she spent undercover among the prison guard, day by day weakening the gallows frame so that when her mother drops, the scaffold breaks! |
| Enhance Your Equipment | Outnumbered by denim-clad Clockwerk cowboys, Cheyenne reaches into her satchel to produce a jam tin grenade with her last consumable supply. |
| Enhance Your Equipment | In a desperate attempt to keep the Crashlanders from taking control of the God Train, the Ashcat activates the self-destruct button on her armored suit while standing beside the engine core. |
| Make the Impossible, Possible | When there's too many bombs for the party to diffuse in the single round they have left, each party member spends narrative advantage to coordinate their efforts in the seconds they have left. |
| Make the Impossible, Possible | With the airship full of suicidal terrorists barreling toward the city center, Rainier takes an impossible shot with his rifle to blow up the lodestone buried deep within the bow. |
| Recover Miraculously | When the princess is on death's door from a fatal attack, psychic Barbara Keladon transfers HP from their beefier Tarth fighter to bring the princess back into the action. |
| Recover Miraculously | Down on her luck and out of grit, Martha Cannary downs some liquid courage to muster the strength to go on. She recovers 1d6 MP, which re-charges her steam-powered armor. |
| Alter the Lore | Nyn's sister and nemesis Elektra wields a powerful artifact that has turned the tides of battle against the party, but Nyn remembers the arcane runes on its surface when they were growing up together... Elektra must have stolen the shield from the High People treasury, which Nyn knows all too well! |
| Alter the Lore | After a failed negotiation with the cruel king, the party is facing execution... except the bard knows a song that will thaw the king's heart; that of his dearly departed wife, which was played at their wedding ceremony. |
| Alter the Scene | The Changeling assassins, unable to shapeshift thanks to an earlier encounter with itching powder, find themselves about to be spotted by paladins during their infiltration of the Queen's headquarters. But Zed finds a dumbwaiter in the hallway and they make a dive for it! |
| Alter the Scene | The BBEG executes several NPCs before getting to the PC whom he has captured: he points a pistol to their head and pulls the trigger, but the weapon is out of bullets, which gives the PC a chance to grab the weapon and break free. |
| Enhance a Spell or Ability | After Captain Veena is kidnapped by ghouls outside the town of Glenluce, psychic Barbara Keladon reaches deep down using the spell Mind Reading to determine if her mind is still nearby. |
| Enhance a Spell or Ability | When the destructive power of the Great Divinity is about to be unleashed and kill everyone in the room, the Channeler Dmitri uses his kit ability to direct its energies through himself, risking total annihilation! |
Dungeons & Flagons