What Games do you think are Neotrad?

[clearstream]

An example is provided here:

As a sentient embodiment of the minor utility spell Mage Hand, Mr. Callum is an incredibly skilled restaurant proprietor who is dedicated to his craft, but he exists without a lot of other aspects to his personality. That does not, as you might imagine, leave a lot of room for personal introspection. And yet that’s just what Ishii’s character, Ame, demanded of this tamori over a beautifully rendered lemon tart. . . .​

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“Do you have any taboos as a spirit that you must abide by?” she asked. Meaning, are there supernatural restrictions on your behavior — like crossing a threshold or eating mortal food — such as those that apply to spirits like Eursulon, who are similarly magical in essence.​

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Mr. Callum paused. “Am I a spirit?” he asked, while I imagined a puzzled look locked suddenly into place on his ghostly face. Realizing that she had transgressed with Mr. Callum, potentially planting the seeds of existential dread inside the humble baker/spell, she backpedaled. First came the heartfelt apology, and then the Insight check to see if there’s another way out of this corner she’s talked herself into. Ishii rolls a 24, and Mulligan takes that as his excuse to crack off a doozy.​

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“Talking to Mr. Callum in this way,” he continued, “you realize you’re a creature of the deep end of the pool and you are constantly starting deep conversations in a way that, to lots of people, will be really distressing. Your glib invitation for this tamori to have a panic attack/existential crisis is because there is no part of the universe you don’t feel interested in looking at. And that, suddenly, you realize is an immense gift. It’s a superpower. You’re tough, and your heart is strong, and there’s lots and lots of people who will never want to join you there.”​

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The encounter, such as it is, leaves Ishii the player breathless. “That [Insight check] was for my character,” she mumbled, clearly feeling the blow personally (though with good humor). Returning to her character, Ame, it’s clear that she too was wounded by that dose of Insight, wounded more deeply than if she’d taken a blow from a goblin’s sword. Just as Mr. Callum began to reflect on his own reason for being, so did Ame. The way that she is emotionally damaged in this moment seems to extend into the rest of the episode, which finds her uneasy, on edge, and downright reckless from start to finish. In the truest sense, that singular roll colors every one of the momentous actions that follow — actions that literally change the course of the entire campaign.​

Are we somewhat on the same page about these matters?

I too, took note of that example. @thefutilist is the group following the 5e rules for Insight here?

 

[thefutilist]

Are we somewhat on the same page about these matters?

Yeah, A Forge term that was used a lot (and one you may remember) was ‘reading the tea leaves’. The GM is free to utilise whatever bits of the system they want as a suggestion and there is a social expectation that it will color the narration. There’s also some sense in which the use of a roll legitimatizes the GM’s narration, just in a really fuzzy way. The example you linked was actually a really good display of how nuanced this can get.

 

[thefutilist]

I too, took note of that example. @thefutilist is the group following the 5e rules for Insight here?

The question doesn’t really make sense to me except within the context I’ve previously framed. So my answer would be yes.

 

[clearstream]

The question doesn’t really make sense to me except within the context I’ve previously framed. So my answer would be yes.

I hope you'll indulge a couple more questions!

One is, what evidence is there that Härenstam was pursuing what you outline when he coined the label "neotrad"?
And is "OC" to your mind always mapped to an "STS" playstyle? Forming essentially a sub-style within it.

 

[Manbearcat]

One criticism I've heard about BitD is that players can use stress to pick-and-choose the sort of consequences their characters suffer, preventing the resolution system from offering decisive outcomes. I'm yet to play BitD, so I can't comment on how accurate this is. I think it's an example of how the specifics of a system in play are more important than how people choose to categorise it.

@darkbard already gave you an excellent, full answer, but I'm going to answer this in a way that is a commentary on the thread's premise + how Tier 4/5 Blades in the Dark play diverges from Tier 0-3 (and especially 0-2).

Why Tier 0-3 Blades in the Dark is one of the only few successful Gamist/Narrativist systems:

* (When the game is run well/correctly and played well/correctly...drop this preamble in for all of these) The decision-spaces a player navigates is persistently consequential and persistently intricate in its engagement at both the tactical and strategic layers where lines of play evaluated and selected are trivially evaluated for skillfulness (employment of system, examining and managing connected risk profiles, managing precious resources, playing the fiction, and creative/lateral thinking that involves the integration of both of all of those simultaneously).

* The bulk of play features you, as a player, persistently saying something both chunky and consequential about your character, your connection to Friends/Rivals/Vice Purveyor/Crew/Crew Ally & Enemy Factions & Contact/Duskvol/Deathlands/Supernatural Entities. There are consistently pivotal moments of character evolution (which often features dissolution in some shape/form) where you're prioritizing one of tactical, strategic, thematic/premise-based over the other in which you have to make a sacrifice due to the inherent tradeoffs and incentives baked into the game engine.

Why Tier 4/5 Blades in the Dark suddenly falls down in those Gamist/Narrativist aspects and veers Neotrad:

* Scale just fundamentally breaks the game at these Tiers of play. The volume of Cohorts/Gangs/Experts (including your access to Allies' Scale) under your control is staggering. The game engine just can't handle it. At the same time, the same volume arrayed against you via your Enemies does the same work but in the opposite direction.

* Powerful Sorcerers or high Magnitude supernatural entities (see Lord Scurlock) add their Scale to their Tier? I mean...what does that even mean in the fiction? Its basically a numerical patch to make someone like The Emperor completely untacklable; (Tier 6 + Scale 6 = 12 total Magnitude...its impossible to, within system, get the Position : Effect matrix to anything that isn't You're Dead : No Effect).

* Action Dots + Resistance Dots + Special Armor access + all the various add-ons/multipliers (on multiple axes) just overwhelm the system. At Tier 4/5, if you're tackling anything that isn't just absurdly devastating (with ridiculous fiction that is hard to even array the imagined space with such that you're generating the intimate and compelling decision-spaces of Tier 0-3), you're basically mapping your preferred PC/Crew conception & arc onto play. Your ability to resolve situations/obstacles becomes effectively stakes-free fiat. Stakes-free fiat = player-side railroading even if every aspect of the rest of the system forbids it. You're no longer Going Boldly Into Danger and Embracing the Scoundrel's Life. You're overwhelmingly just generating your preferred fiction and gamestate.

 

[thefutilist]

I hope you'll indulge a couple more questions!

One is, what evidence is there that Härenstam was pursuing what you outline when he coined the label "neotrad"?
And is "OC" to your mind always mapped to an "STS" playstyle? Forming essentially a sub-style within it.

The neo-trad question: I don’t want to get into that because it’s a lot of work to properly answer the question. To short cut the whole thing.

Yesterday’s Memories Today – Adept Play

Jesse had some issues but basically played Blade Runner as Narrativist. If you want to be lenient then Härenstam is just making Narrativist games. If you don’t want to be lenient then you’d have to contrast Apocalypse World, Mutant year zero and Underworld and analyse how their expected play styles are different, or if they are.

Or if you don’t want to buy underworld then just read:

How Do You Create Story?

That may sound massively tangential to the question you asked but I think it’s complicated.

The O.C question: When I run a Narrativist game, I always do a preamble. ‘Play your character like a human being, don’t hold on tightly to who they are because events may change them, don’t have an arc in mind, just play responsively to find out who your character becomes.’

If you’re doing that, then you’re doing Narrativism* (although if you’re doing it while the Gm is doing sts you may have big issues), if you’re not doing that then you’re probably doing OC play.

* yeah yeah it’s always more complicated.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

No. See my other responses. As much as I use Brennan as a punching bag, he’s selling himself short, he could adjudicate combat totally free-form, if he wanted to.

For ease of communication I’m going to call the general style the ‘storyteller style’ (sts for short).

So the fundamental, design, problem of sts is that it’s hijacked a design that wasn’t built for it’s purpose. I think this led to a whole ton of cognitive dissonance and post-hoc apologia. Amongst designers, because system didn’t matter, it, well, didn’t matter. You threw whatever together because that’s how it’s done.

Think for a moment about how crazy that is. I was serious above when I mentioned Vampire telling you not to use the rules. You find the same thing in 2e, 3.5 e, 5e, not to the same extent as Vampire but still, it’s absolutely crazy. It’s only defended because ‘that’s how it’s done’. Or you get smart people and smart people are amazing at post-hoc rationalising and so they’ll write pages about negative space, bricolage, Chestertons fence and so on. This obviously isn’t a phenomenon confined to rpg’s, it’s just a thing humans do.

So a rational designer, one who wants the parts of the system to be intentional, to have function, has a bit of problem.

But let’s rewind a moment. I think there have been innovations in the STS. So the first thing you’d want to do, is make them concrete in the text. A lot of the neo-trad principles are born from this. So in terms of teaching a GM, there can be better or worse texts.

For instance Brennan mentions the water slide, what we used to call Roads to Rome.


Ignore what he says about being a player, he doesn’t have the first clue as to what he’s talking about, when we get to the GM advice though. It’s good advice (for the STS).

What about resolution mechanics though? When people think of system, this is often what they think of. We’ve already established they’re, at most, suggestions. Which puts us in a weird place. Why keep them at all? Or why not replace them with something that does have function?

Because neo-trad design is still basically bound by tradition. You can make the rules functional for the play style by basically reinterpreting them as improv prompts, you can even get rid of rule zero by doing that (In my home system that’s what I did).

I don’t think there’s any deeper design ethos though. It’s more like, here’s a neat widget that adds color and also isn’t a totally new way of doing things.

EDIT: I'm vastly underselling 'color adding improv prompt' and if you were seriously developing a design ethos for the sts, I think you'd start there.

So I think a big recurring theme here is that

Think for a moment about how crazy that is. I was serious above when I mentioned Vampire telling you not to use the rules. You find the same thing in 2e, 3.5 e, 5e, not to the same extent as Vampire but still, it’s absolutely crazy. It’s only defended because ‘that’s how it’s done’. Or you get smart people and smart people are amazing at post-hoc rationalising and so they’ll write pages about negative space, bricolage, Chestertons fence and so on. This obviously isn’t a phenomenon confined to rpg’s, it’s just a thing humans do.

So a rational designer, one who wants the parts of the system to be intentional, to have function, has a bit of problem.

Aside from the implicitly insulting tone, and dismissive mien, and regardless of how VTM in the particular presented it, the reality is that play groups tend to want to use the rules-- just not all the rules, and the unused rules aren't the same between play groups.

For a VTM related example-- my group plays Vampire the Requiem 2e, I've seen people talk about not liking and not using the investigation system as presented in the base Chronicles gameline (and to be clear, its not presented in the VTR book) but my group really enjoys it, on the flipside I know people who swear on the group beats rule that later gamelines made default, but I wouldn't use that for this game since the individualized progression and lack of balance is part of the fun. Within this context the relationship of OC and systems is pretty self-evident, is that the systems are toolboxes, and you use the tools that you feel are useful to your ends.

That said, to be clear, I think this is a tough sale for you, because the games you now prefer were built on the premise that closed rule systems are more coherent and more functional. Its part of their central ethos, their core aesthetic values, its arguably (Edwards does so for example) the single thing that defines the movement-- I might as well be explaining Post-Modernist art to a Modernist while they tell me that the things Modernism does is supposed to be the point of a piece of art, or if you prefer, Romanticism to a Modernist while they explain that Modernism fixes the problems of Romanticism.

I also wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Brennan's self-assessment of his limitations, or his comfort level in handling that part of the game, having handled that part of the game improvisationally for years before getting into TTRPGs, I'd never seen anyone do it especially well, at least not if any degree of 'Step On Up' in Forge terms, is to be present.

 

[gorice]

I am once again compelled to sully this thread with my pedantry. Apologies in advance.

Thank you for the link. The blog post summarised for me something that also came through in a very good post on OC here on Enworld (barring the mislabelling, obviously.) If you have not as yet, it's worth reading the OP from that post. I gained from it a strong sense of a group finding utility in a system based on their original ideas. A question that description of OC prompted for me is - how does one intentionally design for it? The blog you linked puts it rather pithily that

speaking overall the displayed belief of this cohort is that System Doesn't Matter, in the sense of the original essay.​

(Emphasis mine.) That chimed with the sense I get from passionate OC play, i.e. that groups seek game texts with utility to them. Which can be in ways tangential to design intent (one could even say design intent is unimportant, to such groups.) The post I linked described it as appreciating what wasn't there: the negative space. Again from the blog you linked, discussing what new players might have learned from watching streams

A GM is supposed to know that you really just make em roll Something, Anything, and if they roll high they do it and if they roll low they don't. (This is the only rule that actually exists in many/most of the most popular streams.)​

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OC seems very clearly to be about what players do: a playstyle. It's much harder to say exactly how it is about what designers do: neotrad design is not guaranteed to supply utility - the desired negative space - for any given OC group. Rather I would say that the neotrad trend in design better centers players and positions GM within the ambit of the rules, which has a happy marriage with OC without being identical to it. OC adds something.

I think the author of that blog (which I found interesting and insightful!) has a serious misunderstanding of what the 'system' in 'system matters' means. System means the system in use, and includes things like authorities (who says what about what) and resolution. So, 'players control their characters, DM controls the rest; if they roll high they do it; if they don't they don't' is actually a system.

Importantly, it's much more functional than what passes for system in a lot of trad play. The DM calling for constant rerolls until they get the outcome they want isn't a functional resolution system, it's illusionism -- pretending that there's one system, when the real system is DM fiat. So, the kids are alright, I guess?

Yesn't, in the sense that you are completely correct about it being very common, and those people playing in (something approaching) that style, its largely been conflated with trad until recently, and largely rejected by the Story Now movement (which does raise some Chomskyish concerns for me about the semiotics Forge deploys and its utility in producing non-Forge outcomes, I see that language as being very particular to the values of that movement.) You can see a lot of this in recent controversy about Brennan Lee Mulligan's comments about needing game rules because he can't intuit the flight of an arrow in the same way he can intuit a conversation.

Edit: To back up the potentially controversial statement a little, to my mind, this little FAQ statement in the simulationist essay recently being discussed, is a fairly offhand rejection of what I regard as Negative Space:

"Another serious problem is the ideal of "transparency," especially as applied to the High Concept approach. I cannot help but be blunt: System is experientially inescapable. One cannot make Character, Setting, Situation, and Color "go" without it. Drama-driven systems are just as System as any other, for instance. (See the Transparency entry in the Glossary.)

Really to remove System requires that anything and everything that happens during play be mediated solely through the Social Contract, without any formalized method even to do that. I think that such play would be awfully difficult, requiring so much negotiation regarding how to play per unit of play as to be hopeless. (Again, I am not discussing well-organized systems based mainly on Drama, which are perfectly wonderful and not subject to these criticisms.)"

In line with what I wrote above: I think this is based on a misunderstanding of 'system'. Whatever is being used at the table is the system. What Edwards is saying here is, if you have to negotiate every single outcome, or rewrite the system each time you want to resolve something, the game grinds to a halt and stops being a fun. That doesn't necessarily exclude the possibility of particular forms of negotiation, because...

I think what's very interesting in discussing Neo-trad utilizing this language, is that OC/Neotrad (without commentary on their separation) can be understood as the position that play-mediated-through-social-contract IS the core form of play at work in the TTRPG. I think, this cause and effect chain isn't represented historically in the wargame roots of the game (though its probably represented historically in the roots of wargames) but is represented in the personal story of play in adopting system for purpose.

It's important to remember that for Edwards, social contract is prior to and encompasses all play of any sort. That's the whole point of the 'big model' --- the system is in some sense agreed-upon, and potentially subject to negotiation and alteration.

 

[thefutilist]

So I think a big recurring theme here is that

Aside from the implicitly insulting tone, and dismissive mien, and regardless of how VTM in the particular presented it, the reality is that play groups tend to want to use the rules-- just not all the rules, and the unused rules aren't the same between play groups.

For a VTM related example-- my group plays Vampire the Requiem 2e, I've seen people talk about not liking and not using the investigation system as presented in the base Chronicles gameline (and to be clear, its not presented in the VTR book) but my group really enjoys it, on the flipside I know people who swear on the group beats rule that later gamelines made default, but I wouldn't use that for this game since the individualized progression and lack of balance is part of the fun. Within this context the relationship of OC and systems is pretty self-evident, is that the systems are toolboxes, and you use the tools that you feel are useful to your ends.

That said, to be clear, I think this is a tough sale for you, because the games you now prefer were built on the premise that closed rule systems are more coherent and more functional. Its part of their central ethos, their core aesthetic values, its arguably (Edwards does so for example) the single thing that defines the movement-- I might as well be explaining Post-Modernist art to a Modernist while they tell me that the things Modernism does is supposed to be the point of a piece of art, or if you prefer, Romanticism to a Modernist while they explain that Modernism fixes the problems of Romanticism.

I also wouldn't be so quick to dismiss Brennan's self-assessment of his limitations, or his comfort level in handling that part of the game, having handled that part of the game improvisationally for years before getting into TTRPGs, I'd never seen anyone do it especially well, at least not if any degree of 'Step On Up' in Forge terms, is to be present.

I think you’re focussed on the wrong things, a lot of what you’re talking about is down stream to the issue of sts v narr.

You’re pretty earnest so I’ll try and be honest and upfront.

When I was playing sts I found my relationship with the GM was they were the entertainer rather than a fellow participant in seeing how the story unfolded. This was maybe one of the bigger factors in getting me to abandon it.

For a GM to actually be a participant they need ways of disinvesting themselves. There’s actually two really simple ways that get you pretty much to Narrativism, structurally, without much work at all.

One: As a GM just play the NPC’s as you would play a player character.

Two: Don’t fudge the dice.

For a player to disinvest themselves they need to, and I quote myself ‘play the character as a human being and be responsive to the unfolding situation in terms of how it changes the character. Don’t plan out arcs or anything, discover them.’

Putting aside all theory, all talk of specific rules, do you see how that changes the creative relationship?

Everything else, for me, is subordinate to that.

 

[Pedantic]

When I was playing sts I found my relationship with the GM was they were the entertainer rather than a fellow participant in seeing how the story unfolded. This was maybe one of the bigger factors in getting me to abandon it.

There's a bunch of excluded middle ground there, but I personally prefer a conception as "GM as toymaker." That, and you can simple make it a principle (to borrow the language) that the GM-as-worldbuilder and GM-as-animator-of-NPCs should be held separately in the GM's mind. I have no idea where you'd get the resources from, but it would be an interesting design to actually separate those roles into multiple people. I've seen some experiments with rotating NPC duties amongst players, but that basically just moves it from "get two people with an interest in GMing" to "get 5 people with an interest in GMing" and that isn't really any better.

For a GM to actually be a participant they need ways of disinvesting themselves. There’s actually two really simple ways that get you pretty much to Narrativism, structurally, without much work at all.

One: As a GM just play the NPC’s as you would play a player character.

Two: Don’t fudge the dice.

These are so normative, as like, general rules of solid GMing, that I feel they must be inadequate to your point. I do these things, and I'd put the rational down to maintaining a knowable and consistent board state. I would describe failure to do them in terms of "cheating," and no one has ever accused me of Narrativist leanings.

For a player to disinvest themselves they need to, and I quote myself ‘play the character as a human being and be responsive to the unfolding situation in terms of how it changes the character. Don’t plan out arcs or anything, discover them.’

This is the bit that's always so alien. It doesn't align with my subjective experience of my own humanity (change is a gradual process that you can only parse in retrospect), and is a baffling thing to be interested in hyper focusing your resolution around...that, and I don't know that it's in tension with OC play except in scale. If you simple move the conflict up from the level of resolution and give it some time to breathe, you can get the same narrative results. My experience of Story Now games has always been wondering if they'll stop for a moment so I can play the game for a bit.