Update: Let's Talk about Chronicles of Darkness (for this post anyway) and how I think it's a really great Neo-Trad Game.
Lately to kill time on the ol'library desk I've been reading my PDFs for the my Chronicles of Darkness gamelines, for the uninitiated, its the second edition of White Wolf's early 2000s reboot of ye olde Vampire: The Masquerade, Werwolf: The Apocalypse, etc that trades the strong impositions of the 'metaplot' for a sandboxier tool oriented approach, it features a world that old players describe as an 'uncanny valley' rendition of that original World of Darkness setting, in contrast to the 'current' (scare quotes connotate a complicated publication history, COFD is fading but is actually still releasing kickstarter stuff and promised books, with paradox having let it linger on for a time alongside it's V5 reboot of the original VtM, out of a sense of gratitude toward Onyx Path) reboot of the game which uses the original setting but simply focuses things in on street level vamps, another contrast is that COFD is fully interoperable between game lines, in other words crossovers between Vampire and the other game lines just work, though the game fully expects differing levels of strength between characters (heck, even within gamelines you can play something like a Vampire while another player plays their Ghoul, which are essentially vamp blood addicted humans, in other words, they present power differential as a feature.)
The reason this game is so interesting in regards to this thread, is because the more I'm reading, the more it feels like an ideal sort of neo-trad gaming experience. Every player has aspirations for their character (they can be the character's own goals, or things the character would never want but that the player wants to roleplay with them , like losing someone important to them) and these aspirations provide beats as their dealt with which add up to experiences, which are spent to improve the character's stats in lieu of conventional leveling-- te story teller is also directed to treat them as a guide to what to put into the game. Another way to get beats is for the player to choose to make a normal die rolled failure 'dramatic' (which normally just happens if you do badly enough) and deal with the consequences of that, and to provoke negative long term conditions and resolve them. In other words, the character advances most efficiently when the player is scheming about what they themselves want their character to go through (and these aspirations can change session to session, allowing the player to respond to the current story.)
The game also features an interesting set of compromises between player empowerment and systemic direction-- in some ways the game makes the player play to find out, for instance characters in Vampire: The Requiem have to track their humanity stat, experience breakpoints outside of their control, and can gain descriptive conditions like detached or paranoid from play events where the player finds out what their character goes through-- including from dice rolls that force them to lose control while feeding, but I'm finding there are intentional ways to mitigate and manipulate that system.
One 'Oath' from a splat book sees invictus covenant adjacent characters no longer have to feed (a primary mechanic for enforcing the personal horror of Vampire: The Reqiuem) though at a pretty significant resource cost, and characters who grow strong enough to gain more uncomfortable feeding requirements can always sleep it off to lose their direct power stat (Blood Potency) back down to comfier levels. Even the 'lose control by feeding mechanic' can be forced away (or at least made extremely unlikely?) if the player judiciously employs their willpower points for that purpose, the cost is that your character is more powerful when they don't play it safe in those ways.
Similarly, touchstones in Requiem allow players to develop characters and ideas across the course of the story to ground their humanity-- simultaneously determining who the story should sometimes put the crosshairs on, but these touchstones are also ways Vampires can shore up their humanity as it starts falling, they can be replaced, and you have multiple of them. Elders in the Thousand Years of Night supplement even get the benefit of 'faded' touchstones, which are essentially just memories that ground them, and are much harder to take away.
So while the game systems introduces a lot of temptation to allow for reckless descents, and wants to focus on personal horror, it's actual systems are designed in such a way as to compromise with players who would mitigate these elements, which allows player a fine degree of control over the direction they want to go in-- further in tandem with it's basic progression. Similarly the setting is built in a similar way as 4e's points of light setting is: the books introduce a lot of worldbuilding elements, factions, powers, adversaries and even history that will come up in play to flesh out the gamespace, but provide a litany of possible explanations that the Storyteller determines for their own iteration of the setting (many of these explanations introduce crossover potential between the gamelines, or let you hone in on the single gameline you're playing.)
Speaking of crossover, that's a big point in favor of it's neo-tradness as well, each individual gameline is meant to be played as it's own game with it's own focus and mechanic loops and enough variety to have wildly different kinds of, for example, vampires, but the interoperable mechanics and guidance in the books allows you to break with those tightly focused experiences and run games in which the denizens of one gameline hang out with a friend from another, or all the players are playing radically different things-- Carthian Movement Ventrue Socialite Vampires can mix it up with Mastigos Mages, and Necropolitan Geists if you desire in a completely intermixed Contagion Chronicle style romp (a default model for big crossovers), or a player can play a Mage operating in the territory of a werewolf pack which in turn adopts another player playing a changeling in a protective role as they run from their true fae kidnappers, while the Werewolf elements anchor the game. The elements that enable this can even run to the intricate, with the Dhampir (Half Vampires that can intentionally be created by proper kindred, humans with vampire parents and powers in other words) for example being a smoother fit for some stories than a proper vampire would be.
Speaking of intricacy, that in and of itself is yet another major neo-trad element, the books ooze character defining elements that players can mix and match to make their 'OC' special, everything from the major factions every gameline has, to noodlier distinctions exist to help players define their character without even leaving the single sphere of a gameline. Interestingly, this is where that recurring coexistence between the desire for expression and the desire to power game is well represented, all of these distinctions have mechanical widgets attached, an invitation to power game-- though I will note that it seems it's never particularly hard to take a bunch of dexterity and firearm skill dots, pick up a shotgun, and just objectively be good at fighting either, a bit of a salve on the somewhat intentionally lopsided levels of power the game can feature differently in various scopes that a sufficiently skilled person with a gun can wreak a lot of havoc, and notably, that takes place using the stats of the 'normal human' you always make before applying the template that makes you into something else, which is also the basic creation process in the core COFD book, which itself presents a game experience about normal people stumbling into the supernatural, and can therefore even seque mechanically into one of the other game lines (or not.)
Anyway, I'm table saturated right now with Pathfinder and Lancer, and an upcoming DND-at-the-library program, but I'm really looking forward to exploring this whole system with my players, and embracing some of these neotrad elements, since they provide a good guide i think to the idea of self-plotting a character arc while still leaving room for some trad grounding and story-nowish dramatic spiral if the group likes.
