A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Which, as usual, assumes the player is somehow more likely to be unreasonable than the GM.

 

[tetrasodium]

Which, as usual, assumes the player is somehow more likely to be unreasonable than the GM.

ahem.... Even if for discussion we say that there is no statistically significant difference if you look only at players or only at GM's. If a hypothetical N% of d&d players+GMs exhibit that behavior... it's still going to be vastly more likely that a player is the one doinf it at any given table because

Spoiler: The obvious reason

Players notably outnumber their gm nearly 100% of the time at any given table

Just getting it to 50/50 odds you would need to make the GM subset multiple times more likely than the player subset simply because of that

 

[Thomas Shey]

ahem.... Even if for discussion we say that there is no statistically significant difference if you look only at players or only at GM's. If a hypothetical N% of d&d players+GMs exhibit that behavior... it's still going to be vastly more likely that a player is the one doinf it at any given table because

And I'd find that relevant if a single player had as much influence as the GM in most games. One player being sticky is far less of a problem than the GM being so, unless he's so dominant he can push around most of the room. In which case he's liable to be a problem no matter what.

 

[pemerton]

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).

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.

The only RPGing I know of that sets out to create a story in the sense of something like a book or film is GM-driven high concept sim (DL remains the poster-child; Dead Gods is my go to 2nd ed AD&D example; lots of adventure modules also clearly aspire to this).

The essence of "story now" is not that play will look much like a story in that sense; it's that play will have theme generated by the participants in play, in something like the way that a novel or film has theme. The significance of theme over (say) expedience is what marks the contrast with gamism; that it is generated by the participants in play (including via player protagonism) rather than injected via system and/or GM prep is what contrasts with sim.

 

[clearstream]

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.

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.


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.


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.


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.



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.

I will leave some of your specific questions to a separate post, in order to focus on some interesting aspects of our discussion. First to set in place that I've no essential disagreement with MDA, but neither was it intended by its authors to be a resting place. In general it has been valuable to practical design (in particular to my mind, by suggesting attention to the intended experiential consequences prior to crafting mechanics.) Recollect that, as summarised by Frank Lantz in his critique of MDA

Mechanics is used to refer to the parts of the game that the designer has direct control over, aesthetics refers to the qualities of player experience that the game ultimately generates, and in between, linking the two, are the dynamics of the game in action – the behavior of the game’s different parts interacting with each other and the player while the game is being played.

As Lantz observes

Emphasizing this indirectness between what the designer puts into the game and the final result of the player’s experience can be very useful because one of the most challenging things about game design is how complex and surprising a game’s behavior can be. It’s easy to add some element to a game expecting one result and then watch something totally different emerge once the game is set in motion and begins to unfold unpredictably through time and space. MDA offers a way of thinking about this challenge – it develops models that help illustrate all the different kinds of qualities of player experience you might want to generate, the different kinds of dynamics that might produce those experiential qualities, and the types of mechanics that are likely to lead to those dynamics

I'm going to use the word "experience" rather than aesthetics going forward, for the reasons cited by among others Wolfgang Walk and Jesper Juul. The "aesthetics" grasped by MDA is not the art style, graphics, narrative tone - things designers do have control over - it is the experience of play - sensation, discovery, challenge, etc.

But even more problematic is the term “mechanics”. Again, MDA wants to use this word broadly to refer to all of the stuff that the designer has control over – not just the rules of the game but the materials as well, the recipe and the ingredients. Marc sometimes uses the example of a boardgame: the mechanics are all the contents of the box – the rule book, board, and pieces; the dynamics are all the actions of the game and players as it’s being played

There in a nutshell is why I think MDA is confounded by TTRPG, and why we have to do some organizational design (of the group formed for play) to achieve the promises of neotrad. You put it that

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

Baker described that

The cloud means the game's fictional stuff; the cubes mean its real-world stuff. If you can point to it on the table, pick it up and hand it to someone, erase it from a character sheet, it goes in the cubes. If you can't, if it exists only in your imagination and conversation, it goes in the cloud.

When I make a move purely in fiction - "I take position on the crest of the hill", "I'm taking the bullets out of five chambers, spinning the cylinder and grinning like a maniac" - that changes my fictional positioning without reversion to cubes. Everyone nods and updates their drafts of our shared imaginative space accordingly. My revolver now has only one bullet loaded. I'm up there on that hill gazing out over the forest. Folk can see that I'm deranged. Stuff has happened, stuff that is productive of experience. I can in play even take on the role of designer, asserting so-called mechanics (narrative, world facts, scenes), to shape the experience. If time permits, listen to the Beneath Ash and Snow, Forbidden Lands actual play podcast by The Lollygaggers. In hours of play, I've observed a decent standard of OSR-ish sandbox play. And I'm left with the question - did the mechanics lead to experiences that in any powerful sense paid off on the potential aspirations of a neotrad design project? The answer's a strong no, from what I've observed so far.

I've said in the past that play is process not product. And I've said that game-as-artifact is a tool for play, not the play itself. MDA agrees with this point of view - mechanics inform experience, but aren't experience, which emerges from the player systematically engaging with the mechanics. From Lantz again

the major problems have to do with the lack of clarity around the terms on either end of the equation – “aesthetics” and “mechanics”.

Multiple commentators observe irresolvable ambiguity around where graphical and textual elements should sit. When developing a videogame, designers can write documents, prepare user stories in a tool like Jira, develop wireframes in a tool like figma, script directly in something like Lua, configure using for example Unreal blueprints or the ubiquitous json pile, iterate with engineers on functional code, with artists on graphical assets, and writers on narrative (which surely give rise directly, without the intermediary of dynamics, to experience!) They exert far from absolute, but a very workable level of direct control over mechanics and dynamics.

The analogy with agile and dependencies is that sure, we can revert to - folk can talk about it - to locally extend our framework to solve our problem. And as you alluded to, that can lead to formally extended versions of the framework that include the thing - like dependency mapping in SAFE. But agile out of the box is silent on dependencies! It's a straight up fact that it's effortful to finesse dependencies given the ideals of iterative incremental development. Finessing dependencies is one of relatively few edges waterfall has over agile (while introducing a bunch of other problems, obviously.)

So getting back to my - in a nutshell: due to the technology (processing in wetware, if you like), the game designer doesn't have the control they'd need to see their chosen mechanics "are likely to lead to" the intended dynamics and thus the desired experiences. The participant who most powerfully controls that in traditional modes of play, is GM. Hence, the prescription is - start there. Do your organization design so that the technology instantiated for the time being by the folk around the table gives affordance matching your intentions. Baker shows how this is done in the AW game text. MDA contains nothing about said organization design.

 

[tetrasodium]

And I'd find that relevant if a single player had as much influence as the GM in most games. One player being sticky is far less of a problem than the GM being so, unless he's so dominant he can push around most of the room. In which case he's liable to be a problem no matter what.

It's this extreme consumerist* attitude from self proclaimed "roleplayers" and their defenders that make me more inclined to simply boot them fast before I need to prove that the GM is not the cause of their unreasonable behavior

*See 163

 

[clearstream]

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.

Thank you for stating the core question so succinctly. I've put forward a prescription (in the form of a manifesto) that takes notice of language often used and observes that - by simply taking said language sincerely we could find an answer.

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.

I agree, and really it's not about those semantics. I like the efficiency of counting GM as player, but the crucial step isn't that efficiency; it's far more that

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.

Emphasis mine, and it is the latter point that most compels me. To my observation, folk designing games like @kenada are going to have to grasp that nettle. One way is to mark the contrast by stressing that the GM is a player, in the sense @pemerton has outlined. Folk recognise the ideological significance of that design move, as testified to by posts in this thread.

Take the manifesto like this - neotrad game designs ought to reposition GM by demarking them player. At the least, a neotrad game text will contain rules that constrain and compel GM's voice in the ongoing negotiation of play... and GM cannot "rule zero" themselves out of that.

All of the following is relevant

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.

For convenience, this is how I recognise a candidate game text: i) first filter for every game text I understand to fit a traditional mode of play (OSR, sandbox. sim, trad) and then ii) filter for just those that also integrated innovations from indie-games (largely storygames) with a particular concern for how they treated GM powers and centered player authorship. One will find games that ought to be neotrad. Observe them in play (find actual play of such games and observe it.) Where they do not follow the manifesto, the prediction made is that they will not in fact bridge the experiential space between trad and indie as Harenstam hoped. I've given the example of the Beneath Ash and Snow, Forbidden Lands actual play. It's good quality OSRish-sandbox play, but the imported mechanics are not - in the hands of a trad-GM - doing the jobs they were designed for.

What then are the principles of and jobs done by a neotrad-GM, if it is not enough to say they are a "player"?

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I don't think I agree. A single player with an urge to sabotage things can do just as fine a job as a GM, its just that he can't hide under the aegis of the GM to justify it. And the fact some degree of trust in the GM is needed, does not mandate needing it to be unlimited; as I've noted before, I don't find trusting a GM's intentions and trusting their judgment the same thing at all. There's no way to address the former while letting the do what they need to do, but you absolutely can put in constraints on failures of the latter. Its just that some people are completely hostile to the idea.



Again, I think even conventional old-school games can have this happen--in some respects more if there's a hands-off ethic the way some hardcore old school GMs have. Unexpected treachery or Leroy Jenkins-ism can wreck a game right quick.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the issue that I was describing, as well as the tradeoffs.

You have to start by acknowledging that I am not advocating for (or against) a particular model of play or distribution of authority; as I wrote before, all of them come with advantages and disadvantage- that is to say, that they come with tradeoffs. More fundamentally, I think it is best to examine these models of play assuming good faith (and high trust) with all the participants.

Unfortunately, people don't. Instead, people always assume that everyone playing their game is playing in good faith, while everyone playing the other game is playing the least-optimal version. Which makes conversations difficult. It's why you have the endless regress of:

Commenter A: My game runs great! We have a great DM!

Commenter B: Yeah, well I've met a lot of bad DMs. Your game sucks. My game, on the other hand, is awesome!

Commenter A: That's because you don't trust your DM. I've met a lot of bad players, and your game sucks.

Commenter B: How dare you not trust players! Players are awesome, and it's your game that sucks because of bad DMs!

etc.


As I wrote before, games with a more distributed authority model can be great! Depending on the table. Trouble is this ... if you have a "LeRoy Jenkins type" (or any of a number of other types) they can do a lot more damage in a model where you have more distributed authority. Different types of players, even bad players, or low-energy players, can have their disadvantages mitigated somewhat with centralized authority. Not to mention a lot of players simply don't want the authority. There is a reason that not every player can, or wants to, "bring it" every session.

Which is why (IMO) games with distributed authority continue to be great games, but tend to be the minority of the market. There are a lot of games I love that have give a great deal of narrative authority to the players, but I've found that you have to have the right group for them.

Different models work for different groups at different times, and that's a good thing.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

One way is to mark the contrast by stressing that the GM is a player, in the sense @pemerton has outlined. Folk recognise the ideological significance of that design move, as testified to by posts in this thread.

I will reiterate what I stated before- by emphasizing this (and as you acknowledge, and as I have previously stated, this is an intensely ideological statement), you will be attracting some people, and very much signaling to others that they are not welcome to the conversation.

Take that as you will.

 

[Thomas Shey]

It's this extreme consumerist* attitude from self proclaimed "roleplayers" and their defenders that make me more inclined to simply boot them fast before I need to prove that the GM is not the cause of their unreasonable behavior

Again, still not seeing this as more of a problem in a game with decentralized authority than with centralized. Either the group recognizes the problem and is willing to collectively engage with it (at the least by backing the GM) or there's one person who has the problem. Its not like even in a game where decisions are made more collectively that they can compel you to GM if you don't want to; its just that if the whole group is willing to let that go along you have to decide if its a big enough problem to walk just like every other participant normally has to.

So, bluntly, this still comes across as "I don't trust my players to help me address problems as they come up so I have to have all the authority", and yeah, I think that's quite a take.