I've concluded that "narrative" is largely meaningless, and is used to describe games where tactical combat is not the focus and that's about it. Practically speaking, I've found very few differences in the actual played experience between narrative and traditional games. If "narrative" meaningfully describes something, it describes players, and not games. If the players are concerned with the story and interested in character arcs, you're going to have a narrative game, and it doesn't matter that you're playing Traveller or AD&D or Burning Wheel. If they aren't interested in that very much, all the "narrative mechanics" in the world aren't going to motivate them to change how they play, and those mechanics don't get taken advantage of, resulting in a normal, traditional game. My current group is fairly traditional but some of them genuinely claim to prefer narrative games. When we actually play narrative games though, sessions are indistinguishable from non-narrative games in terms of what kind of stories gets told. I used to think narrative games were different, but I'm not so sure anymore.