A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[tetrasodium]

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.

There is a catch for the GM there though. If one or more players at the table want author level control over their character's story the inevitable result is that the GM must say hellno or start doing heavy bookkeeping and curation of those elements far beyond what would normally be needed for a more traditional campaign and because the player(s) retain that level of control it becomes an immediate and obvious excessive constraint on the gm's ability to add anything as scandalous as adventure hooks not first subjected to an N-way pitch meeting to hash out any possible details needed to build next session's adventure. Once the gm has gone through that meeting they can take the resulting bargaining notes to rework the adventure as needed. Even if a gm goes through all of those hoops the players are under no obligation to accept the resulting story elements & the GM is then left tracking even more stuff on top of tracking what is and is not accepted.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There is a catch for the GM there though. If one or more players at the table want author level control over their character's story the inevitable result is that the GM must say hellno or start doing heavy bookkeeping and curation of those elements far beyond what would normally be needed for a more traditional campaign and because the player(s) retain that level of control it becomes an immediate and obvious excessive constraint on the gm's ability to add anything as scandalous as adventure hooks not first subjected to an N-way pitch meeting to hash out any possible details needed to build next session's adventure. Once the gm has gone through that meeting they can take the resulting bargaining notes to rework the adventure as needed. Even if a gm goes through all of those hoops the players are under no obligation to accept the resulting story elements & the GM is then left tracking even more stuff on top of tracking what is and is not accepted.

I really don't think this is necessarily true. If you have players with a reasonable sense of context and campaign scope, they're perfectly capable of managing their own add-ons with occasional GM intervention. As I've noted, this is done all the time inside superhero games and I've never seen it cause excessive extra work.

This is one of those cases where it seems to suggest that players seem somehow to intrinsically lack a sense of proportion that GMs are automatically assumed to possess, and it, at most charitable, says more about the specific players a person has encountered than about any generic case involving them.

 

[tetrasodium]

I really don't think this is necessarily true. If you have players with a reasonable sense of context and campaign scope, they're perfectly capable of managing their own add-ons with occasional GM intervention. As I've noted, this is done all the time inside superhero games and I've never seen it cause excessive extra work.

This is one of those cases where it seems to suggest that players seem somehow to intrinsically lack a sense of proportion that GMs are automatically assumed to possess, and it, at most charitable, says more about the specific players a person has encountered than about any generic case involving them.

Has the definition of neotrad changed again? Superhero games don't need to change the role of the GM and start giving gm level control to players. IME from my experience with games like the old 2d10 marvel thing and more recent stuff like icons standard trad style works reasonably well

 

[Emberashh]

There is a catch for the GM there though. If one or more players at the table want author level control over their character's story the inevitable result is that the GM must say hellno or start doing heavy bookkeeping and curation of those elements far beyond what would normally be needed for a more traditional campaign and because the player(s) retain that level of control it becomes an immediate and obvious excessive constraint on the gm's ability to add anything as scandalous as adventure hooks not first subjected to an N-way pitch meeting to hash out any possible details needed to build next session's adventure. Once the gm has gone through that meeting they can take the resulting bargaining notes to rework the adventure as needed. Even if a gm goes through all of those hoops the players are under no obligation to accept the resulting story elements & the GM is then left tracking even more stuff on top of tracking what is and is not accepted.

So much stress over this whole storytelling shtick and people wonder why I say the hobby is over obsessed with doing so.

These games become a lot less stressful when you let that go and just play to play.

Virtually every RPG, even your narrative games, as a consequence, loses much of the storytelling oomph when you do, but that just kind of reveals just how disproportionate the effort that these games ask of their players is to what the game actually adds to the equation.

 

[dragoner]

A lot of players are passive, and don't care about the whole story, they are along for the ride.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There is a catch for the GM there though. If one or more players at the table want author level control over their character's story the inevitable result is that the GM must say hellno or start doing heavy bookkeeping and curation of those elements far beyond what would normally be needed for a more traditional campaign and because the player(s) retain that level of control it becomes an immediate and obvious excessive constraint on the gm's ability to add anything as scandalous as adventure hooks not first subjected to an N-way pitch meeting to hash out any possible details needed to build next session's adventure. Once the gm has gone through that meeting they can take the resulting bargaining notes to rework the adventure as needed. Even if a gm goes through all of those hoops the players are under no obligation to accept the resulting story elements & the GM is then left tracking even more stuff on top of tracking what is and is not accepted.

This isn’t really a problem when a game is specific about what’s expected of the participants, or absent specificity from the text, that the group sets these expectations prior to play.

I don’t think anyone’s saying that any given game should some kind of mix of folks with different agendas.

This is one of those cases where it seems to suggest that players seem somehow to intrinsically lack a sense of proportion that GMs are automatically assumed to possess, and it, at most charitable, says more about the specific players a person has encountered than about any generic case involving them.

There seems to be a lot of assumption along those lines in many conversations. That the GM is a font of imagination and creativity, and players lack that.

That may be true occasionally, but I think anyone who’s interested in neotrad type play would be pretty invested in things.

Has the definition of neotrad changed again? Superhero games don't need to change the role of the GM and start giving gm level control to players. IME from my experience with games like the old 2d10 marvel thing and more recent stuff like icons standard trad style works reasonably well

The old Marvel game from TSR? I wouldn’t define that as trad, really, though it predates these categorizations. But the use of Karma allows players to determine a lot without approval from the GM. If they spend the Karma, the thing they’re trying happens… whether that’s a Power Stunt or turning a Miss into a Hit or a Hit into a Bullseye.

Very much not a trad element.

A lot of players are passive, and don't care about the whole story, they are along for the ride.

I wouldn’t expect such players to be all that interested in play that’s meant to focus on their ideas, then. Neotrad and other types of play require players to come with ideas and excitement for play.

 

[pemerton]

Would it be right then to say that by your lights games such as Forbidden Lands, Apocalypse World and Torchbearer 2 that expressly call GM a player, must be using the term as a synonym of "participant" as GM is never a player?

From Torchbearer

What are your thoughts on game text like that? See also my post #41.

That question - Why can't GM as referee just follow the rules? - is one I had in mind while writing. One could picture a sort of "constitution" binding the lawmaker (GM), and indeed you see that in some game texts. For example in PbtA texts, "always say what the rules demand". Such "constitutional" rules can selectively curtail GM powers, without making them a player. One catch is of course the regress: if I need not follow rules, what makes me follow rules about rules? If I can interpret and formulate rules, what makes me interpret the rules in the way designer envisioned, or prevents me formulating an out? One can make appeal to the power of social contracts and other norms, but @overgeeked at least evinces doubt as to their efficacy (i.e. that a referee is in practical cases still required to ensure that players uphold the rules, implying that social contracts and other norms cannot always be relied on.)

Another consideration is that perhaps players should be defined as those who both follow rules of play and pursue goals playfully. Suits' comments among others would justify this. GM as referee then may be one who follows rules but does not pursue goals playfully. The rules GM follows being presumably the ones considered ideal for helping players do both of those things. Design moves such as the AW text may be read in this light, too.

One could then assume that text such as in Forbidden Lands - "The final player is the Gamemaster" - is simply a mistake... a synonym for "participant". This may also cast doubt on what is meant in AW by - "Choose one player to be the Master of Ceremonies."

Some thoughts.

First, I think that when a game like Agon 2e talks about the strife player, or Torchbearer says that one of the players is the game master, nothing particularly technical is meant. These are telling the prospective audience for the game that when you and your friends sit down to play this game, one of you does <this thing> while everyone else does <this other thing>.

Second, in Apocalypse World Vincent Baker calls out the MC role as a special case of the GM role: there are many ways to GM a RPG in general, but in AW there is one particular way to do it, which is MCing. MCing obviously - as a metaphor - calls back to Edwards's reference to the GM as "bass player" and Kubasik's description of the GM as the "fifth business". These are all pointing to the GM playing a coordination/guiding/pacing function, but not a storytelling function.

Third, in Burning Wheel the rulebook's description of the role of the GM also emphasises that coordination/guiding/pacing function, and stresses that that function is intimately connected to the GM's special relationship to the fiction - in particular the GM is the participant who has the authority (under the right circumstances) to change the fiction without that being mediated by the actions of a character the GM is playing. That is, the GM can close a scene, open a new scene, introduce some new adversity, etc, all by sheer stipulation (when the game rules permit such stipulations to be made).

Fourth, and at slightly greater length:

Classic D&D describes itself as a wargame, with a referee. This is not entirely inapt. As in (some) wargaming, the referee conceives of a scenario - in the case of D&D, the dungeon. As in (some) wargaming, the GM applies the rules and adjudicates the fiction. As in (some) wargaming, the referee's adjudication of the fiction includes the determination of consequences: in a wargame, the referee's scenario might include an area of terrain sown with land mines, and when a player has one of their units enter that area, the referee then applies the consequences of the mines; so analogously, in a dungeon the referee might specify that a particular square includes a pit trap, and when a player has their character enter that square the referee adjudicates the consequences of triggering the trap.

The referee, when performing these moments of adjudication of the fiction, is playing a game in Suits' sense. They are using lusory means (the rules, and also the shared fiction that those rules permit them to refer to). The rules are partially stated, and partially strongly implied - eg the GM is not at liberty simply to remap and rekey the dungeon during the course of play. Any such changes must be consequent on actual fictional events that occur in play (eg the PCs kill a room inhabitant, or a door gets broken down, or whatever).

The referee also has a lusory goal (along the lines of portray the scenario elements, especially the hidden elements, as a realistic threat). But obviously their role is quite different from that of the players in the strict sense; and so is their relationship to the means.

(The idea that the referee can change any rule at will is (in my view) often greatly exaggerated. For instance, the Moldvay Basic GMing advice, which can be seen as a type of "state of the art" for the classic referee approach, talks about using dice rolls (percentage checks, stat checks, etc) as aids and guides to adjudicating the fiction. When Gygax, in his DMG, says that the GM can modify saving throw numbers and consequences, he is also talking about adjudicating the fiction - eg being chest-deep in water gives big bonuses against fire, but increases vulnerability to lightning. This is not about the GM being unconstrained by rules; it is about the GM being subject to a rule that requires them to adjudicate the fiction, and the game designer offering various heuristics and dice roll methods for performing that task.)

Another thing the classic D&D referee does, in adjudicating the fiction, is to open scenes. Basically, in a dungeon a scene opens in three main ways: the players open a door; the GM rolls a 1 on the wandering monster die; or the players move to a place in a corridor that prompts the GM to tell them something interesting about their surroundings (the PCs trigger a trap, or spot a door, or whatever). In the classic texts this is not described using the language of scenes, but we can see how that language can be retrofitted onto what the referee is doing. In the cases I've described, the opening of a scene is in many ways like the triggering of a trap: a discrete events occurs in the fiction of the exploration of the dungeon, and as a result the GM - in adjudicating that fiction - frames a new scene. But it doesn't take very much for the framing of a scene to be much more creative and less "adjudicative" than these examples. Eg any action that takes place in a town; or even if the players decide to camp in a deserted dungeon room, and the GM has to make a decision outside the usual exploration turns framework as to whether the PCs are disturbed in the next eight hours.

There are other things the classic referee does, which go beyond the opening of scenes, or the adjudication of fiction in the style of a wargame referee. Eg if the players decide to talk to the Orcs, and the Orcs (based on, say, a reaction roll) decide to talk back, the GM has to decide what the Orcs say. This has very little in common with adjudicating the entry of a unit of troops into a minefield, or with the triggering of a trap by inadvertently tripping a wire. It is much more "active", creative and so on.

And so, fifthly, this is in my view where we can see some of the move from "trad" to "neo-trad", including how it describes the referee/GM role. In "trad" play, both in D&D but also in many other RPGs, the fictional scope of play goes well beyond dungeon exploration, and the GM's role in opening scenes, and in making decisions about the fiction, comes to have very little in common with the adjudication of immediate triggers in some fictional terrain, like a minefield or a tripwire of turning a corner and seeing a door in the wall. The fiction is routinely far more complicated then the sorts of examples that Gygax and Moldvay provide, where it can easily be adjudicated by simple dice-roll methods.

The "trad" RPGs cope with this change in the character and complexity of the fiction by punting it all to the GM to just make decisions about. (We see the beginnings of this in Gygax's DMG, where he talks about changes the GM might make to the dungeon map-and-key between PC incursions.) This is where the idea of GM as "storyteller" gets its oomph from.

The "neo-trad" RPGs have the benefit of 30-odd years of design since Hickman started doing his thing. They do not confine their resolution rules to a combination of map-and-key plus wargame-appropriate dice roll heuristics. Therefore, and together with other RPGs like Torchbearer and Apocalypse World and Agon, they do not simply punt everything that cannot be resolved using the Gygax/Moldvay toolkit to the GM. They use methods that hadn't yet been invented in Moldvay's day - methods that are not generally based around dice roll heuristics, but rather around conceptions of "stakes" and "flags" and "conflict resolution" - to guide the GM/referee/ MC/"fifth business" in making decisions about how to open scenes, how to adjudicate the fiction and determine consequences, etc.

And in my view, this is the reason for sometimes using terms other than GM/referee, or for stressing that the GM is a player; this is simply to mark the contrast with "trad" approaches. Because - for reasons to do with RPG culture - the "trad" approach remains so predominant, a game which self-consciously departs from it will typically want to make that clear in some fashion. And the nomenclature of "player" with its implication of "bound by rules" is a way of doing that, of making the particular methods used by the game to guide the referee salient to new users of the rulebook.

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.

This speaks directly to my final paragraph above: the continuing predominance of the "trad" approach.

Ultimately this is @clearstream's thread; but I think it would be a more profitable thread if, rather than debating the semantics of the word "referee" or the possibility and merits of non-classic-D&D rules to govern the referee, it actually focused on clearstream's manifesto.

As I've asked upthread, how does one reconcile the post-Moldvay techniques with the idea that the GM is, ultimately, "in charge" of preparing a story-oriented scenario and then presenting that to the players. Is GUMSHOE still state of the art for this? Or are there other approaches. I don't know the Year Zero engine at all, and so would be interested in hearing what new methods and approaches it might bring to this issue.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

One consideration of Neotrad Design I thought about reading @pemerton above, is that 4e does contain an awful lot of advice for player engagement in collaborative worldbuilding and such, much of which is further intertwined with it's conception of backstory-driven campaigns, and leaves the door open without demanding that players be able to sometimes add details (intentionally or otherwise) to the world based on things they blurt out. One could say that the presence of those tools, provided they remain tools, and not mandatory components of the procedure, could be endemic to neotrad design-- (dovetailing with OC in that players can elect to, or not use those tools, to pull the game in their preferred direction, with the GM taking on an editorial role to keep things coherent.)

 

[kenada]

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.

My assumption is a fairly traditional delegation of responsibilities (with GM being responsible for scenario, world, opposition, etc). As soon as one starts tinkering with those things, the assumption doesn’t really hold up very well, but that’s presumably the point.

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?

In an RPG context, I’m using “referee” in the historical sense: as a party (ostensibly neutral) responsible for determining how a situation is resolved. It may involve applying rules, it may involve making rulings, or it may involve applying judgement independent of rules.

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.

I find the idea of answering questions to tell me which mechanics I should be using pretty strange. It feels exactly backwards compared to established methodologies (e.g., MDA has you start from aesthetics, figure out and model dynamics, then decide on mechanics). A set of patterns and the problems they solve (plus commentary, citations, and examples) would be more useful. That’s essentially how I came to use conflict resolution in my homebrew system (being familiar with Baker’s writings on it and having played games using it, I had an idea of how it worked and how it could be applied, though how I’ve implemented it is different from both AW and BitD).

Another thing I fear from the question-driven approach, aside from being at risk of going out of date quickly and falling behind the state of the art, is that the questions could lead you in the wrong direction. There are some aspects of my homebrew system that may seem anachronistic compared to what indie games are doing. I handle time (and money) concretely. I have crunchy-ish combat. If I plug that into a questionnaire and get, “you should follow an OSR pattern,” that’s the wrong answer. I’m starting from there, and that doesn’t do what I want. (Otherwise, what’s the point? I could play one of the games that already exist and save myself a lot of effort.)

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?"

It seems like the “why” should already be known at this point.

 

[tetrasodium]

This isn’t really a problem when a game is specific about what’s expected of the participants, or absent specificity from the text, that the group sets these expectations prior to play.

Agreed. But "neotrad" historically seems to be a thing that implies through omission of details that it can fit into any game. Also with that bold bit you hit on the important bit these threads keep skipping over to focus on how it impacts the gm's role.

I don’t think anyone’s saying that any given game should some kind of mix of folks with different agendas.



There seems to be a lot of assumption along those lines in many conversations. That the GM is a font of imagination and creativity, and players lack that.

That may be true occasionally, but I think anyone who’s interested in neotrad type play would be pretty invested in things.

Perhaps my tendency to point such players to the six cultures blog post before having an (often final) talk but IME it's the "omg I'm totally vindicated, someone else is in the wrong" bastion of true roleplayers from the roleplay vrs rollplay debates of old.

The old Marvel game from TSR? I wouldn’t define that as trad, really, though it predates these categorizations. But the use of Karma allows players to determine a lot without approval from the GM. If they spend the Karma, the thing they’re trying happens… whether that’s a Power Stunt or turning a Miss into a Hit or a Hit into a Bullseye.

Very much not a trad element.

Yes that one. I forgpt but have also played/run necessary evil &some other supers game similar to icons too but all of them tend to work fine with a very traditional style approach to background and story time... "These things are happening>how do you react given your sheet". Players can work in fluff and even story through actions but fanfiction is a thing they can write away from the table with no expectations of anyone else at the table caring what they wrote.

I wouldn’t expect such players to be all that interested in play that’s meant to focus on their ideas, then. Neotrad and other types of play require players to come with ideas and excitement for play.

Agreed, that need for players to come to the table with ideas makes the focus on how the GM needs to change rather than that kind of stuff questionable in the extreme.