There's a non-trivial bifurcation in the hobby between people for whom certain sorts of activities are walled of as the player decision/gameplay element, and those for whom it can legitimately be approached (at least in part) with mechanics and in-character traits. There's not much bridge to cross there because it turns heavily on how much importance one places on certain elements (and, in my overly trite way of sometimes putting it, whether you place more emphasis on the first or second word in "role playing").
a lot of this discussion is incredibly white room and detached from actual experience. To what extent would people know or care about their criticisms of non-traditional games in actual play? A lot of this involves no actual firsthand knowledge or experience with non-traditional play. So for people who have experience with non-traditional games, a number of posters sound kinda ridiculous
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I think that it says a lot about the person when they assume that players would try to break or win the game if they had the sort of agency that exists in these non-traditional games. It either reflects a negative view of players or how they themselves would approach the game. But if that were the case, then why are these games not being broken or won by said player agency?
when it came time to figuring out how to navigate through the dungeon, the common expectation is that the player would use their own ability to solve problems and come up with ideas. There were, I'm certain, exceptions where even in the early days you had a player say "Torag stands there dumbfounded because his INT is a 6" or similar.
"Traditional" often seems to be used to mean
what was regarded as canonical c 1990 ie when the trends of the 1980s had fully crystallised as
the dominant way to approach RPGing. It's a superficially descriptive word that gets wielded as a normative weapon.
It's absolutely correct that - in (say) AD&D played in the way Gyagx describes at the end of his PBH - figuring out how to navigate the dungeon was something to be done by the player. But around the same time (copyright date of 1980) we have the Traveller modules Annic Nova and Shadows (which together make up Double Adventure 1), which have elements of the GM narration gated behind PC mental stats. Here's an instance, from p 16 of Shadows:
Beneath the panels are a series of eight pie shaped compartments. . . . Number 3 contains a set of twelve grippies - small clamp-tools of strange form and design. Intelligence of B+ [=11+] will see that they can be used to create foot and hand holds on the knobby cable . . .
The instance I've just quoted is particularly striking, but there are other examples. Eg, on the same page we have this:
The walls of the chamber are covered with a large array of bar dials . . . Careful search (throw 9+; DM +1 per person with education above 9) will show that the instruments and controls are divided into three basic groups . . .
Now I don't know what was going through Marc Miller's mind when he wrote these up, but think about the implications:
* If this establishes a norm for RPGing, then - in comparison - a player in a Gygaxian game who
just works things out via his/her own inference from the GM's description is adopting "narrative stance" with respect to his/her PC's knowledge and intellectual ability;
* If this is how RPGing is meant to work,
how dependent are the players on the GM telling them what their PCs conceive as possible?
* If you are going to manage exploration of the setting by the PCs in this sort of way,
where is player agency going to manifest? (Not in PC build to ensure sufficient INT or EDU - PC build in this system is by random generation.)
I'm in a position to quote these bits of Classic Traveller minutiae because I'm currently running a campaign in the system, and on Sunday just passed
ran a session using (an adaptation of) Shadows. This phase of the campaign follows on immediately from our play of (an adaptation of)
Annic Nova. I don't know how those modules played out for their original players. To me they seem like they would have been incredibly boring GM narration-fests, but maybe I'm missing something or maybe those at whom they were aimed had quite different tastes from me. Maybe some of those original players ignored the bits I've quoted (and the others like them) and ran them closer to (say) ToH - but I don't know how satisfactory this would have been either: in Shadows, for instance, there only pay-off from "beating" the "dungeon" is to be able to fly your starship away from the place without being blasted by an auto-defence laser.
The effect of this stuff in our game is to reinforce an existing tendency: exploration is very much a means and not an end; and the area of play where player agency manifests itself is not in
discovering architectural and design details about lost alien places. All that really becomes something much closer to extended scene-framing: setting the stage for the real action of play, which is about relationships to and alliances with other actors who also care about these places, and also about learning and exploiting the psionic potentialities of these places. I don't know how "traditional" or "non-traditional" this is, but it's a natural fall-out of the play of a system and its modules from the late 70s/early 80s.
In our play of Traveller we also take it as a given that a player's action declarations and broader play of a character should, in general terms, conform to that character's INT stat. If the goal of play was to
work things out this would be a significant burden on player agency. But as its not, its not.
Sure, Blades can easily focus on the heist and the action can drown out the horror, but I think trying a cult crew might really explore the horror of the setting. I certainly think Blades is far more into the horror envelope than, say, Ravenloft.
