The-Magic-Sword
Small Ball Archmage
The Term Neo-Trad is being used as described in the Six Cultures of Play article.
So, to launch this discussion I want to talk a little bit about how I started Roleplaying, and that'll ground my perspective and why it might differ from those of other people.
The year was ~2004 and I was ~10 years old, I had discovered the magic of the internet via websites like Gamewinners and had (younger than was allowed) begun using forums. Many of those forums had roleplaying boards where just like starting a normal thread here on enworld you would start an "RP" (literally 'Roleplay' as a noun, no game) as a thread and other people could join in and play entirely by post, here's a quick example of what play in an RP might look like, place each break in its own post by that user and imagine it playing out whenever people feel like throughout their day, or sometimes quickly at night:
User A: Jackie was leaning up against the castle wall with a book in his hand, occasionally glancing up to check who was walking by. He had a large and volumous mustache, a breastplate emblazoned with the colors of House Tolumane, and a sword hung at his side.
User B: Marissa pauses in her stroll through the gardens seeing Jackie, after catching his eye, she raises her hand in greeting "Hello Jackie!" she says "I'm on my way to the Garden to talk to Samuel about that spell he was working on, would you like to accompany me?"
User A: "Sure!" Jackie moves to accompany Marissa, he lifts his arm as if to offer it to her, but then shrugs weakly and looks off to the side instead, rubbing the arm with his other hand.
User B: Marissa smiles sadly and she wonders if things between them would ever be the same again. The two of them walk for a minute or two in the Gardens until they spot Samuel and she calls out to him as they approach.
User C: Samuel is on his hands and knees, with a pair of Garden sheers, trimming the roses bushes, as the two of them approach he...
And so forth, the rules are more like discussion etiquette (e.g. no bullying, no taking control of someone else's character) than game mechanics. This style of roleplaying was (and I believe still is) quite popular on fandom messageboards, such as Nintendo's Nsider Forums, Gaia Online's Forums, and a few were running around with more elaborate setups, such as Serebii.net which played host to the Fizzy Bubbles Game, which is notable for using GMs who were tied off to various zones and one-on-one'd players who were having adventures in the zones they attended to. I did this for five years before starting in on my first TTRPG. Now, despite not having conflict resolution mechanics, these RPs absolutely had fight scenes, even PVP-- and there were a few ways that was handled:
1. Participants were simply held to an honor system and other participants, particularly an RPs in-group, would come to a consensus about what was reasonable and what wasn't, resulting in someone having to concede.
2. Especially high powered participants would essentially turn fights into logic puzzles, you had to out-frame the situation in such a way that the other participant couldn't find a way out of it, and get what should be a finishing attack in, which again would have to be litigated by the other participants.
3. Results would simply be premeditated for desirable story beats, with the participants basically putting on a show for the other participants to be an audience for.
4. In at least one more competitive setting I experienced, the winner wasn't the winner in the fiction, instead the forum utilized judges who would step in to ref the match, and their main job was to decide who roleplayed the fight better-- literally the quality of their writing and pronounce a winner independently of if that person was knocked or whatever in the fiction. The emphasis here was on people who wanted to do fights independent of a larger narrative, whole RPs dedicated to this were called Militaries, and they were kinda like gangs of nerd roleplayers fighting for fun and turf.
Now, none of these were really satisfactory to my mind, and this seemed like a common sentiment, because they were all essentially dependent on the honor system and fiat, and the one that wasn't was essentially completely divorced from any simulation of the fiction that it takes place in. But outside of fighting, the roleplaying ecosystem was actually quite lovely, we did relationships, story arcs, action sequences, comedy, mysteries without any actual need for mechanics. Instead individual people would take point in 'leading the story' by introducing elements that the other characters would react to, prompt each other in ways that seemed interesting. Sometimes the RPs had strong plots, sometimes they didn't, character was the single biggest factor of these stories, particularly if they didn't have a strong ingroup who were driving a deeper narrative for the other players to react to. As a result, the stories were really about group dynamics. The participants, I would later learn, were mostly teenagers at that time, even fewer years older than me than I had assumed in those days of aggressive anonymity.
When I started playing DND, after a somewhat weak attempt by a friend to run a game at lunch in High School to introduce us to it using 3.5, I actually ended up purchasing the 4e rulebook before I knew what editions were and decided to jump straight into the deep end of GMing because I immediately recognized that roleplaying, as well as the language of fantasy fiction, was something I was well versed in and more prepared for. This is where we get to the point: I never had the problem a lot of people had with 4e not being conducive to roleplaying, my games in 4e were absolutely lush with roleplaying. We just did it, and whenever we needed to play out a fight, or even pick a lock or whatever, we turned to the ruleset-- we reverse engineered powers to figure out what our characters could do in the fictional space (my swordmage, could in fact, teleport every six seconds, and did so frequently).
The key I think, was that my background had primed me to not use mechanics to anchor my roleplay, and instead the system fit neatly to emulate physical space and conflict and answer the question of "should my character be able to do the thing." But it also needs to be said that despite a lack of mechanics that explicitly support roleplaying, my games were very much about roleplaying.
I'm not sure they were necessarily worse for that reality either which I know is one of the canonical answers to statement, instead it feels like it taught me a key lesson, that mechanics don't always need to provide a game with focus, but instead they need to step in to support the areas of the game that need the most support, when doing them without support creates friction. In that sense DND 4e's combat rules fit neatly into applying a ludic lens to fight resolution, and allowing us to demonstrate our character's elaborate powersets, while still allowing us to perform roleplaying in a way that was very natural to us (being me, and mostly people I taught how to roleplay.)
I think that this fits in well with the description of Neo-Trad play, because that leaves the character arc and the desires of the participants as the base driver of narrative action (because at least in my case, games that step into the business of producing narrative structure or dramatic spirals are easy to trip over) while using game mechanics not necessarily to define what the game is about, but instead to structure things that are hard to actually structure by hand-- in other words a game can be about roleplaying, while the rules for roleplaying are negative space. 4e seems to have been designed around this principle because the DMG of that era is famous for containing extremely interesting advice for everything from party-setting collaboration to vignettes, character arcs, pre-existing relationships, and so on. In this context, the game part is an aid to RP (though fun in it's own right, and I don't think that's as major a dichotomy as some might suggest) but the RP happens independently of the game you're doing it in, with concerns like theming or ludic texture being bigger concerns than whether the game delivers a particular kind of narrative in it's own right.
I think another key is that Neo-Trad play is deeply interested in character in the same way my message board RP days were, and is more centered on the ability for the participants to step into a thematic context and live out the identity of the character, than to have an extremely strong plot-- you don't need a game that produces heist fiction (thinking of Blades in the Dark) so much as you need a game where you can create a character who is a thief and lets them exist in that kind of thematic space, even if she doesn't actually pull of heists as often. In some ways, playing to find out becomes disruptive-- the events the game produces could very well ruin the character you were trying to spend time with and embody! This is why Neo-Trad emphasizes player empowerment over system or GM, because the focus is on removing obstacles that might stand in the way of realizing the story one wants to tell with a given character, with story notably taking on the aspect of a line or ray, rather than a line segment-- players CAN pursue dramatic, life changing events, but they can also play characters that are more static, where inhabiting their headspace is an expressive fantasy, rather than a novelty seeking one. The negative space is useful in this context, because it allows the game to come to the table still pregnant with the possibility of doing either or neither or both, whereas a game with less negative space in those areas enforces itself on the participants unless they simply opt out entirely.
There's a lot of thoughts here, and I realize the post isn't as focused as perhaps it could have been, but I wanted to explore this idea as its been continuing to percolate in my head.
So, to launch this discussion I want to talk a little bit about how I started Roleplaying, and that'll ground my perspective and why it might differ from those of other people.
The year was ~2004 and I was ~10 years old, I had discovered the magic of the internet via websites like Gamewinners and had (younger than was allowed) begun using forums. Many of those forums had roleplaying boards where just like starting a normal thread here on enworld you would start an "RP" (literally 'Roleplay' as a noun, no game) as a thread and other people could join in and play entirely by post, here's a quick example of what play in an RP might look like, place each break in its own post by that user and imagine it playing out whenever people feel like throughout their day, or sometimes quickly at night:
User A: Jackie was leaning up against the castle wall with a book in his hand, occasionally glancing up to check who was walking by. He had a large and volumous mustache, a breastplate emblazoned with the colors of House Tolumane, and a sword hung at his side.
User B: Marissa pauses in her stroll through the gardens seeing Jackie, after catching his eye, she raises her hand in greeting "Hello Jackie!" she says "I'm on my way to the Garden to talk to Samuel about that spell he was working on, would you like to accompany me?"
User A: "Sure!" Jackie moves to accompany Marissa, he lifts his arm as if to offer it to her, but then shrugs weakly and looks off to the side instead, rubbing the arm with his other hand.
User B: Marissa smiles sadly and she wonders if things between them would ever be the same again. The two of them walk for a minute or two in the Gardens until they spot Samuel and she calls out to him as they approach.
User C: Samuel is on his hands and knees, with a pair of Garden sheers, trimming the roses bushes, as the two of them approach he...
And so forth, the rules are more like discussion etiquette (e.g. no bullying, no taking control of someone else's character) than game mechanics. This style of roleplaying was (and I believe still is) quite popular on fandom messageboards, such as Nintendo's Nsider Forums, Gaia Online's Forums, and a few were running around with more elaborate setups, such as Serebii.net which played host to the Fizzy Bubbles Game, which is notable for using GMs who were tied off to various zones and one-on-one'd players who were having adventures in the zones they attended to. I did this for five years before starting in on my first TTRPG. Now, despite not having conflict resolution mechanics, these RPs absolutely had fight scenes, even PVP-- and there were a few ways that was handled:
1. Participants were simply held to an honor system and other participants, particularly an RPs in-group, would come to a consensus about what was reasonable and what wasn't, resulting in someone having to concede.
2. Especially high powered participants would essentially turn fights into logic puzzles, you had to out-frame the situation in such a way that the other participant couldn't find a way out of it, and get what should be a finishing attack in, which again would have to be litigated by the other participants.
3. Results would simply be premeditated for desirable story beats, with the participants basically putting on a show for the other participants to be an audience for.
4. In at least one more competitive setting I experienced, the winner wasn't the winner in the fiction, instead the forum utilized judges who would step in to ref the match, and their main job was to decide who roleplayed the fight better-- literally the quality of their writing and pronounce a winner independently of if that person was knocked or whatever in the fiction. The emphasis here was on people who wanted to do fights independent of a larger narrative, whole RPs dedicated to this were called Militaries, and they were kinda like gangs of nerd roleplayers fighting for fun and turf.
Now, none of these were really satisfactory to my mind, and this seemed like a common sentiment, because they were all essentially dependent on the honor system and fiat, and the one that wasn't was essentially completely divorced from any simulation of the fiction that it takes place in. But outside of fighting, the roleplaying ecosystem was actually quite lovely, we did relationships, story arcs, action sequences, comedy, mysteries without any actual need for mechanics. Instead individual people would take point in 'leading the story' by introducing elements that the other characters would react to, prompt each other in ways that seemed interesting. Sometimes the RPs had strong plots, sometimes they didn't, character was the single biggest factor of these stories, particularly if they didn't have a strong ingroup who were driving a deeper narrative for the other players to react to. As a result, the stories were really about group dynamics. The participants, I would later learn, were mostly teenagers at that time, even fewer years older than me than I had assumed in those days of aggressive anonymity.
When I started playing DND, after a somewhat weak attempt by a friend to run a game at lunch in High School to introduce us to it using 3.5, I actually ended up purchasing the 4e rulebook before I knew what editions were and decided to jump straight into the deep end of GMing because I immediately recognized that roleplaying, as well as the language of fantasy fiction, was something I was well versed in and more prepared for. This is where we get to the point: I never had the problem a lot of people had with 4e not being conducive to roleplaying, my games in 4e were absolutely lush with roleplaying. We just did it, and whenever we needed to play out a fight, or even pick a lock or whatever, we turned to the ruleset-- we reverse engineered powers to figure out what our characters could do in the fictional space (my swordmage, could in fact, teleport every six seconds, and did so frequently).
The key I think, was that my background had primed me to not use mechanics to anchor my roleplay, and instead the system fit neatly to emulate physical space and conflict and answer the question of "should my character be able to do the thing." But it also needs to be said that despite a lack of mechanics that explicitly support roleplaying, my games were very much about roleplaying.
I'm not sure they were necessarily worse for that reality either which I know is one of the canonical answers to statement, instead it feels like it taught me a key lesson, that mechanics don't always need to provide a game with focus, but instead they need to step in to support the areas of the game that need the most support, when doing them without support creates friction. In that sense DND 4e's combat rules fit neatly into applying a ludic lens to fight resolution, and allowing us to demonstrate our character's elaborate powersets, while still allowing us to perform roleplaying in a way that was very natural to us (being me, and mostly people I taught how to roleplay.)
I think that this fits in well with the description of Neo-Trad play, because that leaves the character arc and the desires of the participants as the base driver of narrative action (because at least in my case, games that step into the business of producing narrative structure or dramatic spirals are easy to trip over) while using game mechanics not necessarily to define what the game is about, but instead to structure things that are hard to actually structure by hand-- in other words a game can be about roleplaying, while the rules for roleplaying are negative space. 4e seems to have been designed around this principle because the DMG of that era is famous for containing extremely interesting advice for everything from party-setting collaboration to vignettes, character arcs, pre-existing relationships, and so on. In this context, the game part is an aid to RP (though fun in it's own right, and I don't think that's as major a dichotomy as some might suggest) but the RP happens independently of the game you're doing it in, with concerns like theming or ludic texture being bigger concerns than whether the game delivers a particular kind of narrative in it's own right.
I think another key is that Neo-Trad play is deeply interested in character in the same way my message board RP days were, and is more centered on the ability for the participants to step into a thematic context and live out the identity of the character, than to have an extremely strong plot-- you don't need a game that produces heist fiction (thinking of Blades in the Dark) so much as you need a game where you can create a character who is a thief and lets them exist in that kind of thematic space, even if she doesn't actually pull of heists as often. In some ways, playing to find out becomes disruptive-- the events the game produces could very well ruin the character you were trying to spend time with and embody! This is why Neo-Trad emphasizes player empowerment over system or GM, because the focus is on removing obstacles that might stand in the way of realizing the story one wants to tell with a given character, with story notably taking on the aspect of a line or ray, rather than a line segment-- players CAN pursue dramatic, life changing events, but they can also play characters that are more static, where inhabiting their headspace is an expressive fantasy, rather than a novelty seeking one. The negative space is useful in this context, because it allows the game to come to the table still pregnant with the possibility of doing either or neither or both, whereas a game with less negative space in those areas enforces itself on the participants unless they simply opt out entirely.
There's a lot of thoughts here, and I realize the post isn't as focused as perhaps it could have been, but I wanted to explore this idea as its been continuing to percolate in my head.
