Play styles (creative agendas) and artistic/literary movements

[Autumnal]

I’m actually not trolling with this: after reading more of the people Ligotti cites as influences and inspirations, and reading about them, I’m really comfortable with the idea of weird tales as a last hurrah for the Decadents as well as the Romantics, with some modernism getting in smuggled in the back way.

 

[Blue Orange]

I’m actually not trolling with this: after reading more of the people Ligotti cites as influences and inspirations, and reading about them, I’m really comfortable with the idea of weird tales as a last hurrah for the Decadents as well as the Romantics, with some modernism getting in smuggled in the back way.

Maybe more of a rediscovery--the movement was gone by then. But you don't have to be looking back at the recent past--the Renaissance was going for styles that were a thousand years old, after all.

 

[Malmuria]

In the thread Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs, I made a comment that Simulationism might better be called Naturalism or Realism, after the literary and artistic movements. Contrasted with these, of course, is Romanticism (among others). The fit is by no means precise, but I wonder how many people look at their role-playing in these terms, or, if you're inclined to go read up on those and other artistic movements (references aplenty in those Wikipedia articles!), what you think about how those relate to your play.

In terms of 'types' of fiction, I think TTRPGs most easily convincingly do what we might call "genre fiction." This extends beyond just dnd's appendix N stuff; Jason Cordova often talks about how leaning into tropes can often be successful in getting everyone at the table on the same page. To that end, being able to say that X game is gothic horror or teenage superhero or dystopian noir is more helpful than saying that Y game is realist or romantic or modernist.

 

[pemerton]

A lot about these various artistic and literary movements are about aesthetic and philosophic values held by the artists in their various Sitz im Leben. These exact artistic movements may not have direct correlaries with specific TTRPG circles, but this is not to say that there aren't similar currents of artistic movements within the wider hobby that reflect similar aesthetic and philosophic values of their respective communities.

That's fair. But I think we probably should start by looking for the currents, then seeing what is distinctive about them.

The most obvious - thought perhaps so obvious it's actually misleading - would be the current associated with wargaming. So much of RPGing seems, at least on the surface, to be explicable or analysable by reference to that.

 

[Blue Orange]

That's fair. But I think we probably should start by looking for the currents, then seeing what is distinctive about them.

The most obvious - thought perhaps so obvious it's actually misleading - would be the current associated with wargaming. So much of RPGing seems, at least on the surface, to be explicable or analysable by reference to that.

Right, and the major counter-current to that is storytelling--Vampire's moody visuals, movie, book, and song quotes, Powered by the Apocalypse's holds and ratings of the bond each character has with each other, FATE's use of descriptions where other games would use hard stats with a number, and so on.

 

[pemerton]

@Blue Orange

I notice in both your posts that you contrast other RPGs with D&D.

I think that, when trying to follow @Aldarc's post and look for currents in RPGing, we have to start with an eye to currents within D&D as much as currents in response to it. The "Hickman Revolution" again might be so obvious it's misleading, but I think there are clear discernable differences within D&D.

Years ago now I made a couple of posts contrasting two early British D&D figures - Lewis Pulsipher and Roger Musson - although focusing more on technique per se than its aesthetic implications.

 

[chaochou]

Years ago now I made a couple of posts contrasting two early British D&D figures - Lewis Pulsipher and Roger Musson - although focusing more on technique per se than its aesthetic implications.

It may be worth noting - as part of the contrast - that while Pulsipher was a regular commentator on D&D he was mainly a boardgame designer, whose most notable designs were Games Workshop's Valley of the Four Winds and the Avalon Hill mini-classic Britannia.

 

[JAMUMU]

I think an argument might be made that games such as Call of Cthulhu, Delta Green and Blades in the Dark are Naturalistic, in that the outcome of extended play is deterministic on the narrative level and on the mechanical level. Eventually you're going to fail, and fail badly. And the systems are going to "help" you get to that fatalistic end-point.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I don't think they pair off to any of the traditional movements very well, because those were characterized by philosophies that were more specific to their time-- but I think the Elusive Shifts makes some great cases for identifying the movements historically that we do have. In some cases, you could make interesting comparisons with the movements in film and literature they emulate though.

 

[Aldarc]

In the thread Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs, I made a comment that Simulationism might better be called Naturalism or Realism, after the literary and artistic movements. Contrasted with these, of course, is Romanticism (among others). The fit is by no means precise, but I wonder how many people look at their role-playing in these terms, or, if you're inclined to go read up on those and other artistic movements (references aplenty in those Wikipedia articles!), what you think about how those relate to your play.

In some respects, I do wonder if this is just reinventing or reimagining the Six Cultures of Play.

I kinda wish that these six cultures actually did create their own versions of "Principia Apocrypha" that elucidated their play principles a little more concretely. I would, for example, love to read someone (not WotC) trying to explain the play principles and philosophy that informs traditional or neo-traditional play. Though I do think here that, at least in GNS terms, different traditional/neo-traditional games lean into different spheres of G-N-S and those aren't necessarily as easily clustered as OSR.