A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[Pedantic]

More softly, it also throws off the alchemy for some players-- they feel like they didn't explore if they're participating in it being generated, they want it to be part of a vision so that someone's curating it, and they want to push their problem solving ability to the fringe without concern for 'holding back' by not using narrative authority over the world around their character.

I think this is key, though I think the distinction is quite subtle. My take is that most players still fundamentally want a gameplay element; they want a goal that requires they strive for success and risks failure, and they want to advance tactics/strategy to get there. I don't think they generally want direct control over the stakes, but they do want those stakes to be controlled. Ideally, the mechanics (and meta-mechanics, like strong Session Zero expectation setting), should avoid the need for scene by scene negotiation of what can happen, because the things that are undesirable have already been set outside the game/GM's purview.

 

[clearstream]

I believe referee is merely a holdover from a time when people did not yet have a proper name for gamemasters and helped themselves with the next best thing that was somewhat familiar.

RPGs grew out of mini-games within wargames. And in wargames, you often do have an actual referee. Two players, or two teams of players are playing against each other, controlling all the units that are in the game. And the game can have an actual referee who is not participating in the play at all and not controlling any of the units, but simply making neutral, disinterested judgement calls on whether the moves that the players want to make are within the rules of the game.
Once the Special Agent Doing Spying And Sabotage minigame appeared, it was logical to have the decisions what these special agent units would learn or could accomplish made by the same person who was also refereeing the battles. At that point, the role was no longer "just the referee", but still primarily the referee. And once people were doing special mission play without the battles, the role no longer included any refereeing. But as these games where played by people who mostly had been playing wargames, and been calling the people who set up the battlefield and make judgement calls referees for decades, many still continued calling them referees. Out of habit.

But a gamemaster running an RPG is not doing any refereeing. A GM is an active participant in the play. Continuing the use of the term referee in discussions about RPGs is misleading, and I would even go as far as to say factually wrong.

Do you feel GMs could/should have game goals that they pursue?

 

[Thomas Shey]

So what, a game isn’t required.

I'll note discontinuing a game isn't exactly a strong motivation for most players to pull that trigger unless they find the dominance of the GM absolutely intolerable. If it was, you'd see less people playing with bad GMs in the first place.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Given the most popular game in the world is a rulings game, I don't think I need any particularly extraordinary evidence.

And I don't see that fact being particularly relevant to your point. A rulings game can still have awfully tight borders.

An open-ended border (eg what the DM is willing to allow) isn't really a border, because we can't make generalizations about what a generic GM would or wouldn't allow, as thats to the individuals taste, so the most minimal generalization we can derive is that players could theoretically do anything, which isn't much of a distinction.

Particularly when the actual point is that the perception is the issue, not whether or not its literally true.

And I still don't think you've supported whether that's the literal perception in the majority in any way.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The muddling is because there’s an inherent conflict of interest between being both an adjudicator and a player (of the world, opposition, etc). There are traditional ways of addressing it, but I think there’s design space to explore different ones as well. It’s something I’ve touched on a few times here as a motivation for exploring systematic approaches in my homebrew system (often inspired by indie games, hence my comments in post #91).

Yeah, I think that's fair. I'd certainly argue that a lot of GM failure-states come from those conflicts.

 

[Thomas Shey]

More softly, it also throws off the alchemy for some players-- they feel like they didn't explore if they're participating in it being generated, they want it to be part of a vision so that someone's curating it, and they want to push their problem solving ability to the fringe without concern for 'holding back' by not using narrative authority over the world around their character.

And the inverse is, of course, also true; if you've got a GM who is doing heavy curation, for some players it can feel like excessive constraint of their ability to add setting elements around the penumbra of their character to no obvious necessity. You can even get both feelings from the same player at different times.

 

[FrogReaver]

I believe referee is merely a holdover from a time when people did not yet have a proper name for gamemasters and helped themselves with the next best thing that was somewhat familiar.

RPGs grew out of mini-games within wargames. And in wargames, you often do have an actual referee. Two players, or two teams of players are playing against each other, controlling all the units that are in the game. And the game can have an actual referee who is not participating in the play at all and not controlling any of the units, but simply making neutral, disinterested judgement calls on whether the moves that the players want to make are within the rules of the game.
Once the Special Agent Doing Spying And Sabotage minigame appeared, it was logical to have the decisions what these special agent units would learn or could accomplish made by the same person who was also refereeing the battles. At that point, the role was no longer "just the referee", but still primarily the referee. And once people were doing special mission play without the battles, the role no longer included any refereeing. But as these games where played by people who mostly had been playing wargames, and been calling the people who set up the battlefield and make judgement calls referees for decades, many still continued calling them referees. Out of habit.

But a gamemaster running an RPG is not doing any refereeing. A GM is an active participant in the play. Continuing the use of the term referee in discussions about RPGs is misleading, and I would even go as far as to say factually wrong.

IMO. One can say it’s not a referee if it does these other things, even if it also does the things a referee is supposed to do.

Or one can say nothing prevents a referee from doing other things in the game as well.

I don’t really think it matters. At the end of the day the GM has some referee like responsibilities and authority. Likewise he’s also more than a traditional sports referee.

IMO saying he’s a referee doesn’t muddy anything unless it’s meant as ‘only a referee’ - which is something I don’t think anyone means or has ever meant.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree that it's a bit too simple to draw the line at "GM is a player" and call that the bright border that defines or guides this as a school of design. I, for example, would contend there's an important difference between the GM playing the opposition, and the GM creating the world and that how one divides those responsibilities between participants has a more significant impact on play than the whole question of adjudication. You can muddle all three of those together (and one could argue that happens most often in the wild), but that's not contingent.

Yeah, there's no automatic reason those three positions couldn't exist in three separate people other than some practical ones (i.e. that while there are people who enjoy the world-creation and people who enjoy then NPC-operation, I doubt there's many people who actively enjoy just the referee end, and of course the first two could easily feel a conflict in how the other is handling their end).

And adjudication isn't particularly clear either; when we discuss the GM as a referee, do we mean they'll be the final authority to resolve unclear rules, or do we mean they'll be designing rules in real time? If they are designing rules, does that authority extend only to places not covered by existing rules, or does it include continuous review of established rules to some other outside metric?

Well, on the most literal cases its only the former, but of course some of the second is a practical necessity for somebody. There's even less reason for them to have to be the only standard-bearer for system review than other elements, though, even if that's desirable.

Personally, I think I think what @clearstream is driving towards may be more about the guiding questions that lead to the design. Those narrative and indie game influences he identifies are not positioned as they are in their source materials; the driving question of the design is not "who has the authority to say what happens next?" That's sidestepped or often explicitly still assigned to the GM, and it isn't boiled down to that question, instead still referencing all those other roles the GM has. You're still playing the opposition, making choices for them that are separate from the PC's actions, and still creating a setting, but additional rules exist to influence what the GM should create, or to limit the opposition's palette of actions.

The question is more "does the GM need unlimited authority over the rules, the setting and the opposition?" and having decided the answer is no, the next question becomes "what is the effect of setting different limitations on that authority?" I don't think it's really worth getting caught up in the mechanism underlying that limitation; quickly you get to the constitution of a game itself and you start having to justify the rules for how a knight moves, which is a separate, not particularly germane discussion.

If you take it as a given that if you tell the GM they must, for example, respect something like a death flag from a player, and can only make choices for the opposition that will result in the player's death when it's indicated, then you end up in a "trad, but" space, which I think is what's being called for, with the design question ultimately being "but what, and why?"

Good summary, I think.

 

[Thomas Shey]

What I think it's most about is removal of the primacy of GM as the main storyteller. And that the GM is not above the rules. For many people, these aren't desired, and so they resist even the ideas, whether they desire a type of play for which these ideas are suitable or not.

The GM must remain supreme!

I'm not even sold they particularly have to be connected. There's no reason you can't have a game where rules adjudication is done heavily collectively, but there's very sharp limit of the ability for players to intervene in story-space except through their character actions, or one where the rules are pretty much exclusively in the GM's control but there are tools and expectations for players to be able to add and modify story and setting elements on a potentially fairly large and ongoing scale.

 

[Thomas Shey]

IMO. One can say it’s not a referee if it does these other things, even if it also does the things a referee is supposed to do.

Or one can say nothing prevents a referee from doing other things in the game as well.

I don’t really think it matters. At the end of the day the GM has some referee like responsibilities and authority. Likewise he’s also more than a traditional sports referee.

IMO saying he’s a referee doesn’t muddy anything unless it’s meant as ‘only a referee’ - which is something I don’t think anyone means or has ever meant.

I think for a lot of people "referee" has a connotation of neutrality that isn't entirely what's going on in most games, and as such, maybe should be avoided.