Not a Conspiracy Theory: Moving Toward Better Criticism in RPGs

[Staffan]

For my part, I generally consider any game that make consistent, moderate or stronger use of "tags", "qualities", "aspects" or similar rules for descriptive phrases to be a non-trad game in my estimation. It's why I consider Star Trek Adventures to be such, despite many traditional leanings in its ruleset.

That's a fairly narrow view of "trad". I would consider Star Trek to be mostly trad, even if the GM's power is somewhat contained and the PCs somewhat narratively empowered via the Momentum/Threat economy. It's still fundamentally a matter of a "GM describes situation, PC examines or tries to resolve it, GM determines outcome and/or calls for a roll to do so, repeat" game loop. I'd classify Star Trek Adventures as "trad with some narrative flourishes."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

For my part, I generally consider any game that makes consistent, moderate or stronger use of "tags", "qualities", "aspects" or similar rules for descriptive phrases to be a non-trad game in my estimation. It's why I consider Star Trek Adventures to be such, despite many traditional leanings in its ruleset.

Edit: adding heavy use of metacurrency to the system just makes my feeling in this matter stronger.

Eh, I'm not one to think that meta-currency is that heavy a determinant in and of itself. So, for instance, 4e has HS and AP, neither of which precisely maps onto anything specific in-world, and both can (to a limited degree in specific situations) be 'spent' in various ways. Yet I don't think these particularly make 4e 'non-trad', nor in fact do its keywords, though they are certainly a form of 'tag'. Now, I think 4e IS, in some formulations of play non-trad, but that's because of how it is run in a format where the process of play and roles of the GM and players are non-trad!

Of course, there may be games where the non-traditionalism is heavily centered on the use of tags/aspects/beliefs/etc. and those things, or currencies like BWs persona and fate provide essential elements of support for that. I just don't think the two are inextricably linked.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Eh, I'm not one to think that meta-currency is that heavy a determinant in and of itself. So, for instance, 4e has HS and AP, neither of which precisely maps onto anything specific in-world, and both can (to a limited degree in specific situations) be 'spent' in various ways. Yet I don't think these particularly make 4e 'non-trad', nor in fact do its keywords, though they are certainly a form of 'tag'. Now, I think 4e IS, in some formulations of play non-trad, but that's because of how it is run in a format where the process of play and roles of the GM and players are non-trad!

Of course, there may be games where the non-traditionalism is heavily centered on the use of tags/aspects/beliefs/etc. and those things, or currencies like BWs persona and fate provide essential elements of support for that. I just don't think the two are inextricably linked.

To be fair, I'm not providing a universal definition here, rather my own. I accept that it may be narrower than others. Degree of player-side narrative control is my major criteria in determining where a game falls on the trad - not-trad scale. Anything beyond "what my PC thinks and does" is a nudge away from my personal comfort zone.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To be fair, I'm not providing a universal definition here, rather my own. I accept that it may be narrower than others. Degree of player-side narrative control is my major criteria in determining where a game falls on the trad - not-trad scale. Anything beyond "what my PC thinks and does" is a nudge away from my personal comfort zone.

Sure. I personally tend to think the differences are less in terms of who invented some fiction as opposed to what the overall process of invention is and what it addresses. Like, in Dungeon World there's not really any explicit path by which a PLAYER would say "X is a fact in this game's fiction." A GM who plays the game as intended will certainly ask the players about fiction and use that to establish facts, and player action declarations can sometimes effectively 'play to the fiction' in such a way as to make something come about. In terms of hard and fast facts though, aside from what appears on the PC's character sheet the player isn't directly authoring that. The fiction does however come about as a CONSEQUENCE of play, not preceding play, and a lot of it is centered around PCs. OTOH, Fronts operate in DW pretty much detached from the PCs, they represent more "the world at large" which goes on about its 'stuff' without regard to mere PCs (though they often throw in to change fate).

 

[niklinna]

Because for the 5e-only player/GM (or 1e, or 2e, for all that), of which there are a great many, it obviates the need to learn a whole new system. (side effect: it also obviates the need to buy or otherwise acquire said new system)

And I'm not suggesting 5e itself (as in, the root game) has to change to suit any given set of preferences; rather, those with said preferences can change 5e through houserule, kitbash, social contract, and trial-and-error to suit those preferences, and due to its I-can-only-assume-intentional vagueness of design the system can handle it. Learning and adopting tweaks to a known system is light-years easier than learning a new one from scratch.

This is prone to a whole host of problems, not least of which is Ship of Theseus syndrome. People have enough trouble confusing various editions of D&D with their small to large differences. You go changing the periphery of the root game (whatever that is), people are going to have more confusion rather than less compared to systems they know from the get-go are distinct (although as we've seen time and again there's always baggage moving from system to system).

It's also a lot of work to kitbash. If you want an original magic system, you have to come up with it pretty much from scratch, except it has to work with the existing mechanisms of hit points, saving throws, etc. etc. Or is D&D's magic system part of the root game? If so, then D&D will never, ever fit my set of preferences.

If you want to have formalized faction relationships, you have to make that up.

If you want to do combat in any way other than round-by-round, turn-by-turn, hp-ablative hit-or-whiff mechanics...well I guess that is clearly part of the root game, so I guess that's out of consideration.

If you want to go even broader and do conflict rather than task resolution, or actions with complications/consequences rather than success/whiff, you have to mutate the core d20 mechanic almost beyond recognition.

If you want characters that aren't defined by strict classes and levels, again, is that part of the root game or not? What even constitutes the root game of 5e?

Now, there is a lot in 5e that can be tailored and customized to fit different allocations of authority in setting & narration, genre trappings, and the like, but the root game (such as I'd expect many to agree on) remains one of success/whiff task resolution, a heavy mechanical focus on round-by-round ablative combat, and pretty fixed classes...whose abilities are heavily focused on round-by-round ablative combat and whose advancement is pretty regimented. And there's a big, wide world of other game styles than that which no amount of kitbashing around the periphery of that root will get you to.

 

[niklinna]

Eh, I'm not one to think that meta-currency is that heavy a determinant in and of itself. So, for instance, 4e has HS and AP, neither of which precisely maps onto anything specific in-world, and both can (to a limited degree in specific situations) be 'spent' in various ways. Yet I don't think these particularly make 4e 'non-trad', nor in fact do its keywords, though they are certainly a form of 'tag'. Now, I think 4e IS, in some formulations of play non-trad, but that's because of how it is run in a format where the process of play and roles of the GM and players are non-trad!

Of course, there may be games where the non-traditionalism is heavily centered on the use of tags/aspects/beliefs/etc. and those things, or currencies like BWs persona and fate provide essential elements of support for that. I just don't think the two are inextricably linked.

What's HS and AP? It's been long enough since I played 4e I don't remember the acronyms.

 

[Staffan]

What's HS and AP? It's been long enough since I played 4e I don't remember the acronyms.

Healing surges and Action Points, I would guess.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Strong disagree on the change 5e point; often it doesn't even take that much to get 5e where you want it to be meet one's preferences, and even if it does, the GM is in all likelihood doing most of that work.

If your players don't want to learn a non-5e system, you can't make them. "Fixing" 5e is the better option in that case.

I will mostly agree on the financial bit. That's a hurdle that can usually be stepped over, one way or another.

Having now mostly got over my cold and the attitude I was getting with it, I want to step back in long enough to comment on this.

To hack any D&D derivative into something that fit my and most of my player's preferences would be an immensely more complex endeavor than I think you're picturing. And by the time I did that, a group of players learning what I did would be doing essentially as much work as learning a whole new system.

I think your concept of "preferences" is far narrower than many people would apply here; after all, a pretty large number of early RPGs were, effectively, hacking OD&D or AD&D until it did what they needed, and those were often pretty far afield.

 

[Pedantic]

So it seems to me that perhaps you're expressing a discomfort with stochastic models of play (and TTRPGs where the consequence space is such) and a related preference with/comfort for deterministic models of play? If so, does this express itself in the rest of your gaming interests (outside of TTRPGs...like maybe you don't like PvP in CRPGs or maybe you prefer certain ball sports to others)? If it doesn't express itself in the rests of your gaming interests, why do you think it is that it specifically expresses itself in TTRPGs (what is "the secret sauce" there)?

The single game I've put the most time into is Netrunner, and it's the best example I can think of for that kind of play in the board game space. Outside of some unusual situations, the victory condition in that game is managing to look at between 3-5 agenda cards from your opponent's deck. Your opponent is obligated to include somewhere between 7-21 of them, most likely 9-11. You can choose to look at the top card of their deck, a random card from their hand, every card they've secretly discarded, or a specific card they've laid facedown on the table. All the other cards are used to play out an elaborate negotiation of the costs & consequences to take any of those actions, with most information kept secret until the moment it's brought to bear. As the game progresses, you're consistently weighing where you think you're mostly likely to see one of those cards, and the likeliest (and worst possible) consequences of any given action.

Outside of that, I do have a general preference for games with low randomness, however. I play a lot of Splotter games, infamous for not having any random elements past setup and as few there as they can justify, and lately a lot of 18XX games. Those are highly interactive and routinely produce novel board states that need to be thought through, but do not involve any random resolution.

I don't necessarily think you're looking in the right space though. It's not the consequences of any given action that's the unsettling bit, it's the uncertainty of the scope of the game, and the inability to make any plans. It's not clear how to string 3 actions together to drag the game state into the position you want it, if by the time you completed those 3 actions the game state you wanted at the beginning might not be relevant anymore.

 

[FrogReaver]

It's not that the lens of D&D, or "trad" principles, or narrative style games, or "simulationism", or "story now", or whatever else is privileged, it's a function of perspective.

I played D&D 3+3.5 from 2001 through 2008, Star Wars Saga Edition from 2009-2010, and Pathfinder 1e from 2010 through 2011. If you want to say that 5e is so radically different from the 3.x product line as to have a completely different set of play styles and play loops, I mean . . . I guess, sure, if you say so.

If I have 7 different lenses through which to make observations, and someone else has exactly one (the trad D&D 5e lens), how much should I trust that the single-lens observer has a full view of the contours of the landscape?

I'm not trying to exclude those whose sole lens is through trad D&D play. But it's not an insult to the individual with only one observational lens to say, "You're missing about 5 lenses from your tool bag that will make observations significantly more clear than continuing to turn the one lens you have around at 15 different angles."

One perspective might be that in this post you are now privileging whoever uses the most lenses- as if more lenses gets us closer to 'the truth', whereas in criticism a lens is not about 'the truth' but simply about a perspective. In either event, whether it's the lens itself or the person using the lens, the argument you present is one for privileging your position.

I'd also note that there are infinite lenses and asserting that 5e fans use just one is a mistake. They use multiple - albeit not the same ones you typically highlight. It's just their lenses/perspectives get dismissed (your post here is a great example of that in action). Going back to the perspective of respect, such dismissal and privileging of your perspectives is not a sign of respect toward them.