Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[pemerton]

Frankly I think 'trad' is mostly just "what happens when the PCs start to interact with less easily defined parts of the world" in classic D&D. It became a thing, more and more, of its own perhaps at a certain point, but most games of the early '80s were basically "its a dungeon crawl, and then we went to the town, and we tried to role play."

I think there's a difference between "arguing about what the board state should be" and "determining what the board state is"

I've quoted @AbdulAlhazred but could just as well have quoted old posts of mine. As soon as the fiction becomes even moderately rich in its content, the difference between "what is" and "what should be" starts to collapse.

 

[niklinna]

I find your characterization of dishonesty here interesting. Personally, I think this is an underappreciated issues with granular high-crunch games. When you have a long list of specific skills and a player happens to be some kind of authority on one of the skills their character has, I really don't think it's dishonest to really drill down in terms of action declaration. Now, we need some caveats here I think - so porting real-life expertise over to action declaration is, IMO, fine but depending on intention. If the intention is to add evocative detail and possibly add some mechanical benefit then I have no issues. That said, there is a certain kind of player who does indeed want to paint the GM into a corner using some version of the notion that if I explain in enough detail I shouldn't have to role. The second version is not good.

Explaining so you don't have to roll is the whole thrust of Torchbearer's Good Idea rule. You achieve whatever goal you wanted without rolling (that is, without risk), but you also don't get any of the side effects of rolling: no ticking the Grind, no twists, but also no XP.

 

[pemerton]

Explaining so you don't have to roll is the whole thrust of Torchbearer's Good Idea rule. You achieve whatever goal you wanted without rolling (that is, without risk), but you also don't get any of the side effects of rolling: no ticking the Grind, no twists, but also no XP.

Because of the features/consequences of "good ideas" in Torchbearer, I really find it more of a pacing/framing device - a way of eliding some action and cutting to other action - than a gamist device.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find your characterization of dishonesty here interesting.

"Dishonest" might have not been the right term. "Manipulative, and at least potentially malignantly so" is probably better.

Personally, I think this is an underappreciated issues with granular high-crunch games. When you have a long list of specific skills and a player happens to be some kind of authority on one of the skills their character has, I really don't think it's dishonest to really drill down in terms of action declaration. Now, we need some caveats here I think - so porting real-life expertise over to action declaration is, IMO, fine but depending on intention. If the intention is to add evocative detail and possibly add some mechanical benefit then I have no issues. That said, there is a certain kind of player who does indeed want to paint the GM into a corner using some version of the notion that if I explain in enough detail I shouldn't have to role. The second version is not good.

As I said, I don't think asking enough questions to be able to engage properly with the matter at hand is a problem; its probably a necessity in many cases and desirable in most. Its the closest thing you can do to a lot of a combat tactics in games that (as is common) don't put enough mechanical weight in other elements of the game. Progressively steering it over into a situation where you don't have to roll (as you say) or push the situation over to where your character can address it (especially at the expense of the other players/characters) not so much.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, there are multiple posters on these boards who take the view that players should be aspiring to declare actions that require no roll. In that context, it's harder for me to agree with you that the second version is not good.

In a situation where that's an accepted approach, I won't call it malignant. I don't find it particularly desirable--if I wanted to do that, I wouldn't be bothering with roleplaying with mechanics (and while that absolutely has some virtues, I can tell some stories about its downsides, too), but if everyone is playing "the same game" its not malignant. Often, however, someone is using it to, essentially "play a different game from everyone else" and to their own benefit, and there I do.

Now for my part, as I posted upthread, this approach to play is generally not one that enthuses me, but I tend to sidestep the whole issue by using less granular resolution systems.

The last time I remember this at my table . . .
. . . was in a Classic Traveller game. The PCs wanted to use their ship's triple laser turret to "drill" through several kilometres of ice.

As a group, we (ie the players and I) Googled up some info about lasers drilling through ice, and did our best to extrapolate to the bigger, more powerful lasers of the "far future"!

I certainly have no interest in doing this sort of thing in an adversarial fashion! A session or two later in the same game, I described some feature of an alien scientific installation (the one buried under the ice) and one of the players, who is a pretty experienced electrical/IT engineer, shook his head and maybe face-palmed for a moment, but he let it pass.

To make it clear, this latter is absolutely not what I'm objecting to.

 

[niklinna]

Because of the features/consequences of "good ideas" in Torchbearer, I really find it more of a pacing/framing device - a way of eliding some action and cutting to other action - than a gamist device.

That makes eminent sense to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between crunch and how players represent their characters (as well as what crunch actually means in terms of design goals and resolution). In the TTRPG sphere we have character sheets running from index card-sized to sheets that are four or more pages long. If we want to parse what 'crunch' means in terms of characters we have two main axis - first we have what I'll call breadth, which appears as long lists of skills, spells, gear, or whatever - but in all cases the (I'll assume) goal is to institute a certain level of coverage in terms of what the character can do mechanically speaking. The premise there is that increased crunch, so more skills or whatever, has the specific (but not solitary) goal of making more granular the number of mechanical button the player can press to alter the game state. In terms of modern of Sci-Fi settings this makes a lot of sense, so don't take this as a criticism.

It also does to concretely model distinction without the player having to "die for their art" to do it. This can seem pretty trivial to people who don't care about it, and there's absolutely no requirement that someone do care about it (at least to any given degree), but it can very much matter to some people at least some of the time.


This is why various games lumping and splitting choices in terms of things like attributes and skills vary so much. Things like whether the skill is "Guns" or "Rifles, Shotguns, SMGs and Pistols" can serve different masters, as can things like whether it's "Constitution" or "Durability, Health and Endurance". There are also compromise positions (where its "Guns" but "Pistols" can be a specialization you take that gives some specific benefit when using that class of weapon.

The second axis is depth, which I'll identify as specific mechanics and subsytems designed to model/represent/handle/whatever certain specific actions. The low hanging fruit here is combat, which often gets far more mechanical attention than other things. To take Mythras for example, you have a bunch of special actions designed to make combat more granular and controllable for the player. Some might blanche at my assertion that granular equals player control, but I think it is a supportable position. If we take some thing like Free Kriegspiel as one end of the TTRPG spectrum, and with something in a crunch-drenched BRP game at the other end, I think this idea becomes pretty uncontroversial. The more skills, the more mechanics, the more specific buttons a payer can push to effect diegetic change the more specific control the player has. Why more specific control? Because that granularity takes some parts of the adjudication process out of the hands of the GM. A specific example might be the notional difference between adjudicating a roll vs a generic 'knowledge' skill in some sort of OSR game versus the cornucopia of academic skills present in a game like CoC. In the first instance the GM has rather a lot of latitude about what the PC might or might not know, but which becomes more fixed as the range of skills gets more and more specific. This isn't a value judgment, nor even something I'm completely sure of, but it makes enough sense for me to toss it out here and let people pull at the flaky bits.

I tend to concur. It also does one other things; like a lot of mechanics it much more specifically sets people on the same page. This is one of those things I think is often shrugged off as handled properly by in-play communication, but I think that ignores that that either requires a very high bandwidth of communication (i.e. the player asking the GM things with sufficient frequency that many people would find it annoying over time on either end of the exchange) and that often you're making decisions far earlier in the process that it turns on than when the actual choice of resolution comes up (its much easier to expect that you can do something with finding a source for a black-market item when you have a high skill Streetwise than if you're going to depend on an uncertain character trait when it rolls around).

I have more to say, but I suspect I'll start to ramble, so I'll stop here and let people stress test the idea above (if they feel like it).

I'm also on record as saying that the problem with the distinction between combat and noncombat actions is the opposite of what many people will say; not that combat is too detailed and narrow in how its handled, but that other things are too broad and indistinct.

That said, there's handling issues both in terms of time and processing involved with all of this, so I understand why people don't always want to do it to the degree I find satisfactory. I just wish more people would understand there's genuine value in doing so to some of us, we're not just wanting complexity for its own sake.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think it is more that with more defined mechanics stuff gets taken out of DM adjudication and placed into more system defined results rather than directly to increased player control. Players can refer to the rules for defined results, but they can only control stuff within the defined confines of the mechanics which often includes a random dice element.

In B/X D&D having a crappy detect traps skill mechanic is often not really more player control than interrogating the DM about the scene the characters are in and trying to figure stuff out without mechanics. Narratively using a 10 foot pole is often better at detecting pit traps as the party explores.

But it does. This may sound trite, but its important; having a crappy detect traps tells the player not to try and use that method. I don't think its a particularly good approach, but it still leaves less of it to a guessing game.

 

[The Shadow]

Then that seems fine. It seems like a skillful play to frame your actions in such a way that it reveals information the GM should otherwise want to keep hidden. That’s only a problem if one assumes players must only react to what they are given instead of proactively seeking out what they want.

Personally, I would rather play with less or no hidden information. There is still a space (if not a need) for creative framing by the players, but it avoids any tendencies to want to protect and preserve the hidden board state.

Obviously, neither of those approaches are appropriate in all styles of play, but that’s true of most approaches. There’s a tendency in RPG discussions to claim certain types of play as innately dysfunctional because it conflicts with trad play, but I don’t think that’s fair or right.

Perhaps there are groups where this would be considered functional and acceptable. More power to them. But I will never play with someone who considers it okay to manipulate other players to get what they want. I would consider that actively unfriendly, not 'skillful'.

 

[kenada]

Perhaps there are groups where this would be considered functional and acceptable. More power to them. But I will never play with someone who considers it okay to manipulate other players to get what they want. I would consider that actively unfriendly, not 'skillful'.

I think we’re talking past each other. I’m referring to “playing the GM”. An example of that might be a very intricately described setup with the intent to invoke the Rustic Hospitality feature of Folk Hero background in 5e in a way that constrains the DM from negating or preventing it from realizing its full benefit.

The bit about also manipulating the other players is something separate from that. It doesn’t follow that “playing the GM” necessarily involves manipulating the other players. You can manipulate the GM for the party’s benefit (see above)! What’s being assumed is everyone just wants to experience the story, and some jerk is screwing it up by pursuing an agenda at odds with it.

In one sense, I agree with that. If we’re supposed to be observing a trad agenda or neotrad or whatever, everyone should be respecting that. It’s bad when someone plays in a way that disrupts the game, but those ways of playing are almost never categorically bad. However, it’s the disruption that’s bad. That’s as much true whether it’s “doing what my character would do” in a trad game as it is when one expects the GM to provide all the story in a Story Now game.