A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[kenada]

Here I will just observe that a BA and software engineer are operating at a layer of design above what I'm considering. They are soliciting requirements and designing the solution.

I think you are answering engineering questions, while the ones I'm asking are ludological. You're asking "how can I make an omelette", I'm asking "how does our conception and choice of chef relate to our food choices?"

Thank you for your patience! It feels like we're asking dissimilar questions.

I’ve rearranged things a bit because these seem related, but I think we are too. I view game design as fundamentally about engineering. You are creating something with a purpose (for play). There are a lot of ideas about how to do that well (and to understand how well you are doing it), which I think is where your interests lie, but once you sit down to make something, it’s all about applying those ideas to make something fun.

When I see a design manifesto, I see it in that context. It reads like it’s going to be a document or methodology that will prescribe a particular approach to making games. Per the particular exchange I was having with @Pedantic in post #189, we were discussing the idea of its providing a set of questions to help you understand which design to use. I have two issues with that:

1. It feels like coming at the problem backwards. We want the GM to have this amount of authority or the players to have that, or we want to use this kind of resolution process. You should already know what you are designing by the time you get there. It’s like devising a bunch of dice mechanics and then trying to figure out what RPG you just made.
2. It feels rigid. My litmus test is anything that would have told me to design something other than what I am doing is wrong, and I fear it would do that. “Neotrad” is often associated with OC play, so if the questions are biased around that, one may get pointed in the wrong direction. The mechanics incorporated in the manifesto are actually broadly applicable.

Well, MDA formally can't describe TTRPG design, but some later frameworks in the same family possibly can.

What about tabletop RPGs makes them incompatible with the framework proposed in the MDA paper? You’re not going to get the exact same sort of discourse, but that’s not really the point.

Ask agile how it feels about dependencies extending outside the putatively multidisciplinary team? That silence is analogous to MDA-family of frameworks silence on audience as author.

Works perfectly fine. I’ve been on projects that had to work cross-functionally with teams that had other responsibilities, their own processes and schedules. We delivered. You identify that dependency, and you work with it the best you can. One of the important aspects of agile is communication. You are constantly communicating, which helps you understand where things are and when a blocker risks causing problems.

There’s a lot of agile-industrial complex BS out there. They want to sell you on consultants or tools or silver bullets, and it’s almost all garbage. The actual agile manifesto is pretty succinct, and it works, but you need to believe in it and embody it. I really enjoyed Joy Inc by Rich Sheridan because it talks about agile in practice using actual teams as his consultancy and how they worked effectively.

How does one ensure that the story emerges from play? What does each participant need to be doing or not doing, for that to be true?

That comes down to the specifics of the model. As I noted, I haven’t actually devised dynamics and aesthetics models for my homebrew system. It’s something this thread has got me considering, but I haven’t done it. I think you’d need to define what is meant about an emergent story and how that would be “measured”. My intuition is it won’t look like a traditional narrative, but I don’t think you can get that without curation.

An emergent story might be the product of taking a sequence of events and recounting it in a more traditional structure. Maybe something like a story machine. If people could see fit to do replays or tales like Dwarf Fortress, I’d call that a major success. That’s not truly needed. If they just recount to each other the various fun things that happened like they’re talking about some other story, that’s enough success.

Another analogy might be to ask - what is the impact of the chosen technology on the games that can be made. If your chosen format has consequences for the way your mechanics will translate to dynamics and thus aesthetics, you cannot design those away. Your intended aesthetic will not play as intended (or your intentions were formed within the envelope of those consequences.)

The easiest way to answer that question is to try it and see how it goes. The purpose of creating dynamics and aesthetics models is to have a way to evaluate how your design worked. Maybe using technology works great, or maybe it’s horrible, or maybe it’s neutral. No amount of thinking about it beats just going out and doing it.

EDIT As an aside, it's imagination as mechanics that separates them! Look at Baker's diagrams. What happens in the clouds?

The clouds are the fiction. The boxes are mechanics. If imagination is a mechanic, it would be a box not in the clouds.

That aside, to see how the questions raised could matter to you as a designer, think how your design would be played under varying GMing assumptions. What changes? What design moves might some assumptions open up that other assumptions would shut down. How will aesthetics change as a result?

I have a few answers for that.

The first is (and one people may not like): don’t do that. The fun police aren’t going to confiscate your dice, but the game is intended to be played as written. Otherwise, all you’ve got is 2d6+mods in a fantasy milieu, which is nothing exciting. There are plenty of games out there, and people should play those that do what they want.

In a more practical sense, I’d like to include a commentary explaining the hows and whys of why things are designed the way they are. If you want to hack the system, that should help give you an understanding when making changes. In the text itself, I want to address certain points that can result in potential misplays.

Once you’ve settled on what you want to create, you have to respect the scope of what you are creating. Other ways of playing or other aesthetics are out of scope, so they should not be a factor. If you don’t respect that, then you put your project at risk. It would also make me question why even have a process at that point.

 

[pemerton]

I mentioned MDA to sidestep questions of my own design experience, though I have worked as a BA and currently work as a software engineer. In a sense, aesthetics are your requirements and dynamics your acceptance criteria, so it seems analogous to practices I have used professionally for quite a while.

<snip>

I don’t see anything about tabletop RPGs that makes them incompatible with an approach like MDA. It’s just that’s not how they’re usually discussed.

<snip>

An aesthetic in MDA is essentially a type of fun. It’s not about what the mechanics feel like or how they manifest — that’s dynamics. From my perspective, I’m starting from the fun I want to capture (“what is this game about?”), and then I’m answering how I want that to manifest.

For example, I could¹ describe my homebrew system as an exploration-oriented sandbox game. In terms of aesthetics, that’s stuff like challenge, discovery, fantasy, expression, fellowship, narrative. Notably, I exclude submission and sensation. I’m not going for experiential, immersive, or curated play. It may or may not work, but I consider supporting those things as non-goals.

The first order dynamics model involves the referee and the players. These are the participants. The referee operates according to certain procedures, and the players engage with the game in certain ways. The referee can exercise discretion (what I will probably refer to as arbitration), but how and where that is done is handled procedurally. If the players win in a conflict, that victory must be respected. There is a “story”, but it must emerge from play rather than being curated by the referee. That’s why discretion is handled via procedure. And so on (for combat, zoom, framing, etc).

From there, I can start picking out actual mechanics: how I operationalize skill checks and their results, how combat works, the various procedures that are followed in play. In a way, System Does Matter is my sanity check. (Yes, I think there is some RPG theory that can be used to reconcile MDA with tabletop RPGs. I also find Baker helpful as well as some of the discussions about things like authority.) Do the mechanics support my outlook (the aesthetics)? Are they appropriate (supporting my dynamics)? If yes, then I’m on the right track. If not, I have work to do. Of course, you actually have to play the system.

<snip>

I would put the way you describe “imagination” and the way it is used by participants at the table in the dynamics category because there are different ways we can operationalize it. I think the inclusion of “imagination” in its dynamics is what separates tabletop RPGs from adventure board games like Middara and video game RPGs. (Note: From a design perspective. It’s possible some dynamics could be optional depending on the game, and that may even be a design goal.)

---

1: “Could” does a lot of work here. I’m not approaching it quite this formally, but some of the dynamics are things I have thought about.

I know nothing about software engineering, nor about video game design. And know very little about video game play. I have read a tiny bit about MDA online, but didn't find it easy to follow. (Probably as a result of the gaps in my knowledge that I just set out.)

One account of "types of fun" in the RPG context is GNS. Leaving aside the details of whether GNS captures the relevant types, and how much sub-categorisation is needed (eg purist-for-system vs high concept sim; push-your-luck vs deploy your wits gamism; character-based vs setting-based narrativism; etc), is there any correlation or resembence between what GNS is getting at, and the "aesthetics" of MDA?

One account of the relationship between game elements (both mechanics and imagination) and "feel" is Baker's discussion of currency rules: these are the rules/system (which may be mechanical, or less formal, or both) that determine how changes in one game element (eg the depletion of a resource, or the deployment of some component of effectiveness, such as an attack roll or skill check) generates a change elsewhere (eg depletion of hit points, or becoming the friend of a NPC). Baker points out that if the currency rules aren't doing the right job, then the game will produce the wrong fiction/"feel" - eg the upshot, in play, will be that the ostensibly Conan-esque barbarian gets played not as bold, brash and heroic but as cautious, even cowardly, like a unit in a modern-day wargame. Is this one manifestation of what MDA calls "dynamics"?

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I'm not actually sold it would be any more frequent, it just would have more process for addressing it. Bluntly, the only reason I think you don't hear about it with the conventional approach more is so many players are told to, essentially, suck it up.

Which is part of the appeal, in a way, it gives someone the right to move on, on behalf of the whole-- if I start narrating and literally ignore someone's input, there's nothing they can do about it.

Process tends to be the bugbear, because its nonspecific-- the group could vote, the gold standard of group conflict resolution, but in my experience that tends to end with the same player undermining democracy in favor of "thats great for you guys, but im gonna do my thing" because democracy itself operates only by consent-- losing a vote just means a shift to hardline autonomy and other people shifting over to try and people please.

 

[Emberashh]

It feels like coming at the problem backwards.

This is a pretty perfect distillation of why I've basically written off rpg discourse as worthless, insofar as providing insights for design is concerned.

My intuition is it won’t look like a traditional narrative, but I don’t think you can get that without curation.

This is correct. The point of an emergent story is that the story is being made through play. The story itself cannot be told until after its happened. Its a pretty important distinction.

But ultimately, game mechanics are inherently story machines. Even something as rudimentary and simplistic as rock/paper/scissors is generating a story that could be retold, and it even resembles simplistic, traditional narratives to boot.

This is why, when it comes to game writing, the ideal is finding the sort of story that you couldn't make work in any other medium. The inherent nature of game mechanics actually gives game writers a leg up on that; the requirement of at least one player already provides for this.

The key is leveraging the systems of the game to serve some sort of compelling experience, and the holy grail of sorts is finding a way to create a systemic game world that, simply through the act of play, allows traditional narrative structures to emerge on their own.

The Nemesis system of the Shadow of Mordor/War games is an example of such a thing, tuned for the specific revenge and nemesis type narratives its named for.

Now, video games are only barely getting started on this, as only recently did the technology to cleanly generate voiced dialogue on the fly become viable, and it'll take a while before we see a game that really takes advantage of it.

But in tabletop land, we've long since had the technology given we can rely on people doing improv. Its just a matter of designing the system and getting it well oiled.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which is part of the appeal, in a way, it gives someone the right to move on, on behalf of the whole-- if I start narrating and literally ignore someone's input, there's nothing they can do about it.

Process tends to be the bugbear, because its nonspecific-- the group could vote, the gold standard of group conflict resolution, but in my experience that tends to end with the same player undermining democracy in favor of "thats great for you guys, but im gonna do my thing" because democracy itself operates only by consent-- losing a vote just means a shift to hardline autonomy and other people shifting over to try and people please.

There's a perfectly valid counter to that: the group going "Just because you want to do that doesn't mean you get to ruin it for the rest of us." That can end being a tyranny of the majority situation, but I'm hard pressed to see that as any worse than "Put up with it because the GM says so."

 

[kenada]

One account of "types of fun" in the RPG context is GNS. Leaving aside the details of whether GNS captures the relevant types, and how much sub-categorisation is needed (eg purist-for-system vs high concept sim; push-your-luck vs deploy your wits gamism; character-based vs setting-based narrativism; etc), is there any correlation or resembence between what GNS is getting at, and the "aesthetics" of MDA?

GNS could be a source of aesthetics and dynamics. For example, there isn’t an aesthetic that really captures the nature of Story Now. You would need to supplement it with dynamics that correspond to PC protagonism (and other elements of SN depending on the nature of what you want such as whether it’s setting-centric or not).

One account of the relationship between game elements (both mechanics and imagination) and "feel" is Baker's discussion of currency rules: these are the rules/system (which may be mechanical, or less formal, or both) that determine how changes in one game element (eg the depletion of a resource, or the deployment of some component of effectiveness, such as an attack roll or skill check) generates a change elsewhere (eg depletion of hit points, or becoming the friend of a NPC). Baker points out that if the currency rules aren't doing the right job, then the game will produce the wrong fiction/"feel" - eg the upshot, in play, will be that the ostensibly Conan-esque barbarian gets played not as bold, brash and heroic but as cautious, even cowardly, like a unit in a modern-day wargame. Is this one manifestation of what MDA calls "dynamics"?

I think that would be dynamics. The paper describes dynamics as the “run-time behavior of mechanics”, but that’s a very digital-centric definition. I’ve been using “in play” as a substitute when discussing tabletop RPGs (though it arguably also applies to board games).

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

There's a perfectly valid counter to that: the group going "Just because you want to do that doesn't mean you get to ruin it for the rest of us." That can end being a tyranny of the majority situation, but I'm hard pressed to see that as any worse than "Put up with it because the GM says so."

Largely, from experience, more points of failure, the group has to retain their consensus in the face of a possible escalation of conflict. Some people will do damn near anything to avert conflict, including a sudden pivot to a full appeasement strategy.

The GM role has a useful culture around it that both permits and encourages them to feel valid putting their foot down, and the conception of game ownership further irons out the temptation to mediate the conflict with appeasement for social reasons because the other participants aren't possible vectors of attack once they've given their input.

 

[tetrasodium]

Which is part of the appeal, in a way, it gives someone the right to move on, on behalf of the whole-- if I start narrating and literally ignore someone's input, there's nothing they can do about it.

Process tends to be the bugbear, because its nonspecific-- the group could vote, the gold standard of group conflict resolution, but in my experience that tends to end with the same player undermining democracy in favor of "thats great for you guys, but im gonna do my thing" because democracy itself operates only by consent-- losing a vote just means a shift to hardline autonomy and other people shifting over to try and people please.

That is generally my experience as well. The other players don't want to step up as fun police because nobody wants to be the bad guy and the GM gets cornered into choosing between either option 1 of just accepting it every time or option2 of putting their foot down & coming off as the bad guy even when it's the player being unreasonable.

This is a pretty perfect distillation of why I've basically written off rpg discourse as worthless, insofar as providing insights for design is concerned.



This is correct. The point of an emergent story is that the story is being made through play. The story itself cannot be told until after its happened. Its a pretty important distinction.

But ultimately, game mechanics are inherently story machines. Even something as rudimentary and simplistic as rock/paper/scissors is generating a story that could be retold, and it even resembles simplistic, traditional narratives to boot.

This is why, when it comes to game writing, the ideal is finding the sort of story that you couldn't make work in any other medium. The inherent nature of game mechanics actually gives game writers a leg up on that; the requirement of at least one player already provides for this.

The key is leveraging the systems of the game to serve some sort of compelling experience, and the holy grail of sorts is finding a way to create a systemic game world that, simply through the act of play, allows traditional narrative structures to emerge on their own.

The Nemesis system of the Shadow of Mordor/War games is an example of such a thing, tuned for the specific revenge and nemesis type narratives its named for.

Now, video games are only barely getting started on this, as only recently did the technology to cleanly generate voiced dialogue on the fly become viable, and it'll take a while before we see a game that really takes advantage of it.

But in tabletop land, we've long since had the technology given we can rely on people doing improv. Its just a matter of designing the system and getting it well oiled.

It was going about things backwards because it's trying to set the story's result before the play. A player shouldn't be thinking "how can I make an omelette" because that is the final successful result & they now need to work backwards from that to the current state of play. Instead the player should be thinking something like "I need to make breakfast" & then looking at their character sheet to see what that they have eggs cheese onions & mushrooms. Seeing that they can be thinking "given the time constraints imposed by existing fiction, what breakfast can I start making with eggs cheese onions & mushrooms". If they decide omelette the success or failure of that attempt & resulting story is a efort with the result generally left undetermined until the dice or some other mechanic.

Thre earlier example may have used an omelette, but we see this same kind of backwards authorship all the time from players. It's the difference between a frequently seen style of narration where you have Alice say something like "I'm going to charge up to here and yell [whatever] while I bring my sword around to attack this orc" [dice clatter]->resolution vrs something like Bob doing the same action in every way but narrating it like this "I'm going to charge up to here & tear open this orc's chest with a grin as he screams"[dice clatter]->resolution. Alice is only telling the part of the story she has control over & avoiding any lines where dice or the GM decide the outcome, Bob is charging right past that line & authoring the result of things yet to be determined.

 

[kenada]

This is a pretty perfect distillation of why I've basically written off rpg discourse as worthless, insofar as providing insights for design is concerned.

Alas, quite a bit of discourse is of poor quality. However, I think I feel less down than you regarding RPG theory. There’s some poor stuff (particularly anything overly concerned with taxonomies), but I think there’s some that can be useful or provide insight, especially when they are reconciled with other theories.

This is correct. The point of an emergent story is that the story is being made through play. The story itself cannot be told until after its happened. Its a pretty important distinction.

But ultimately, game mechanics are inherently story machines. Even something as rudimentary and simplistic as rock/paper/scissors is generating a story that could be retold, and it even resembles simplistic, traditional narratives to boot.

This is why, when it comes to game writing, the ideal is finding the sort of story that you couldn't make work in any other medium. The inherent nature of game mechanics actually gives game writers a leg up on that; the requirement of at least one player already provides for this.

The key is leveraging the systems of the game to serve some sort of compelling experience, and the holy grail of sorts is finding a way to create a systemic game world that, simply through the act of play, allows traditional narrative structures to emerge on their own.

The Nemesis system of the Shadow of Mordor/War games is an example of such a thing, tuned for the specific revenge and nemesis type narratives its named for.

Now, video games are only barely getting started on this, as only recently did the technology to cleanly generate voiced dialogue on the fly become viable, and it'll take a while before we see a game that really takes advantage of it.

But in tabletop land, we've long since had the technology given we can rely on people doing improv. Its just a matter of designing the system and getting it well oiled.

For my goals, I’m not trying to have something emerge that looks like a traditional narrative emerge. It may be possible to turn a particular sequence of events into something that looks like one, but it’s not a dynamic I’m trying to create per se. What I do want (and have seen) is for players to treat the events that have happened as something real. From there, you can get war stories, party mythos, etc.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Largely, from experience, more points of failure, the group has to retain their consensus in the face of a possible escalation of conflict. Some people will do damn near anything to avert conflict, including a sudden pivot to a full appeasement strategy.

And again, this is worse than the same behavior when confronted with a GM making what seems bad decisions in...? Because you'll see people claim no one succumbs to the power of the GM in similar situations.

That's the issue here: it seems to me that virtually ever objection to group consensus can also be aimed at GM authority, other than the usual tradeoffs between group decision and central authority, and they're just that--tradeoffs.

The GM role has a useful culture around it that both permits and encourages them to feel valid putting their foot down, and the conception of game ownership further irons out the temptation to mediate the conflict with appeasement for social reasons because the other participants aren't possible vectors of attack once they've given their input.

And does so by discouraging people from confronting anything but the most extreme errors of judgment and bias. Hard for me to, again, see that's a virtuous tradeoff.