A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[clearstream]

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.

This is the aim of sandbox play; a traditional mode. That would mean the design work is done for trad design. That's totally fine, of course, and would not need the "prescription" supplied by the manifesto.

 

[clearstream]

It wouldn't get tangled up in whether trad GMplaying is done harm by GMplaying premised on other principles. It doesn't require getting into the weeds of the merits of one form of GMplaying against another form of GMplaying except to the extent that impacts on what is required to achieve effective neotrad game texts.

Not quite

It wouldn't get tangled up in whether trad-GMing is done harm by playing premised on other (asymmetrical) principles. It doesn't require getting into the weeds of the merits of trad-GMing against said playing except to the extent that impacts on what is required to achieve effective neotrad game texts.

Although as I noted in response to @pemerton, I'm not ultimately that concerned about these semantics. As you wittily show, it's easier conversationally if we contrast trad-GMing with neotrad-GMing, and go on to explain the differences. Although I'm torn on that, because just calling GM a player seems to provoke lively thought about them.

After all, if you want clarity in communication, haters gonna hate, but players gonna play.

To my mind, the main thing shown is how entrenched one form of GMing has made itself. So much so that designers that hope to see GMing done by differing premises have had to find ways to signal that this is some other kind of GMing.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

This is the aim of sandbox play; a traditional mode. That would mean the design work is done for trad design. That's totally fine, of course.

You know reading the OP back over:

while "neotrad" design integrates innovations from indie-games (largely storygames) into enduring modes of play such as trad and sim.

Technically, by this definition, applying these techniques to what @kenada is talking about would be Neotrad.

edit: This post initially featured the wrong user, sorry, its early where I am.

 

[clearstream]

Technically, by this definition, applying these techniques to what Snarf is talking about would be Neotrad.

Only if one were to fail to read on to the manifesto.

Or are you referring to my first post only, without giving regard to the second, notwithstanding both are signalled clearly in that post? (And ignoring my prefaced "Without wishing to overcommit on definitions" and the fact that the definition was added at all to help out folk who requested it!)

I mean, holy bad-faith reading, honestly.

 

[kenada]

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

As Lantz observes

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.

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.

I assume you are referring to this article? Lantz isn’t challenging the framework itself. He’s pointing out issues with the terminology and how its usage is confusing. If that’s the only issue with using MDA with tabletop RPGs, then there’s no functional issue with it. I was expecting a different issue to be raised.

From what I’ve seen, the issue with MDA raised with non-digital games is the arrow of perspective (for lack of a better term). MDA has mechanics coming from the designer, resulting in dynamics at runtime, which create aesthetics the player experiences. The player first experiences the aesthetic, then observes the dynamics, and finally operates the mechanics.

MDA posits that players experience the aesthetics (the intended emotions not the visuals of the game), observe the dynamics, then operate the mechanics. Non-digital games confound this because you have to understand the mechanics before you can even start.

In my mind, this criticism is a UX issue. Non-trivial digital games also have this problem. Consider a game that pops up a window when you start telling you which shapes to match. Games with higher levels of complexity may defer telling players how they work until those mechanics come up in play. For example, Cyberpunk 2077 drops you into the game during the opening areas, but once you get to the game proper, it drops you into a tutorial area to tell you explicitly how things like combat and hacking work.

Maybe it’s possible to solve this for board games and tabletop RPGs through better writing and better visual design as part of the on-boarding experience. There’s certainly a lot of bad design in the tabletop RPG space where materials are written for consumption rather than use at the table. Regardless, I don’t think this problem undermines the utility of the MDA framework as a design methodology when it comes to non-digital games.

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.

It’s important to understand my reply in context. You were postulating imagination as mechanics. I pointed out that mechanics properly belong to the boxes —the real world things. That’s what the designer controls. You invoke a mechanic, and it either changes your mechanical position (such as manipulating a currency) or your fictional position (such as taking position on a hill). The designer doesn’t control imagination. It’s not something you can offer, but you can create mechanics to prompt a player to use it. In Baker’s notation, that would be a box with an arrow pointing to the clouds.

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 appreciate the recommendation, but it’s highly unlikely that I’m going to listen to an actual play for this discussion.

My issue with “neotrad” as a design school is I view it as just design. If we look at the design taxonomies outlined by Tomas Härenstam that you translated in post #42, it can be split into two groups: those with “indie” mechanics and those without. The group of those without are all games based on past designs. That’s two flavors of D&D (modern and classic) and BRP-like sim games. Everything else is some flavor of “indie”-influenced game: neotrad, storygame, or co-narrator.

I actually think he’s looking at this the wrong way, and MDA is my tool for showing this. Take the D&D category. He includes Pathfinder in this category. As we know, Paizo redesigned Pathfinder quite significanlly for its second edition. It is mechanically incompatible. Is it still Pathfinder? Yes. I would argue that Pathfinder 2e has almost the same dynamics as Pathfiner 1e. That is how people can recognize it as still Pathfinder and how it can be used to play the same kinds of games. However, there is one exception: combat.

Paizo changed the dynamics of combat from PF1 to PF2. Unlike PF1, the combat mechanics actually do what they are intended to do. Combat is balanced, and the encounter-building works. You cannot build your way to success. You have to fight effectively as a team, leveraging your synergies and teamwork to create advantages you can exploit. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from PF1, and it is unsurprisingly a point of controversy. Those expecting PF2 combat to operate like PF1 combat are in for a rude surprise, and it eliminates (or at least greatly hampers) the ability to optimize a character to overcome challenges.

I would postulate that you can preserve a game’s dynamics while incorporating “indie” mechanics. PF2 has social conflict rules. You can use the VP subsystem to run a social conflict like you would in Blades in the Dark. D&D 4e can do this as a skill challenge. Even D&D 5e has a limited from of social conflict (the social interaction rules on pp. 244–255 of the DMG, which @Manbearcat has written here about using for that). TIBFs and Inspiration are arguably an “indie” mechanic (since it’s kind of like a poor man’s aspects and Fate currency). Don’t forget consequences resolution.

Would people put these games as indie games? No. Thomas himself includes D&D 4e in the D&D category. That’s because these games have the same dynamics (more or less) that they’ve always had. It’s just that the mechanics have changed, and some of those changes incorporate newer tech and design ideas. That is why I view “neotrad” design (as articulated here and by Thomas) as just design. It’s a just the current state of the art.

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

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.

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.

This is getting into the nature of play. How do we enforce that rules are observed? My solution is not to worry about it. I assume people will make a good faith effort to follow the rules and play the game as designed. If they don’t, there is nothing I can do about that. There are no rules that exist above the game I can use to make them play as intended, so I assume good faith and don’t worry otherwise.

(Plus, even video games aren’t immune to being played in unintended ways. Look at how people break games for speed running or mod games to do new things [like new content or randomizers] or develop their own experiences. You can’t tell me the nightclub scene was anticipated by the FFXIV developers.)

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 of 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.

MDA is a framework for thinking about game design. It doesn’t have all the answers, and (as you note at the beginning of your post) it’s not intended to provide them. Just what kind of dynamics you want to manifest from the mechanics you create requires looking at other ideas (theory, practice, etc). That seems perfectly reasonable to me, and it’s why I have mentioned a few time how existing RPG theory can be useful for that.

However, I don’t know what you mean by “organization design”. If you mean to design the game with the GM as the central authority over play, then I disagree pretty strongly. That is one way of doing things, but it’s not the only way. Thomas provides co-narrator games as an example of games that don’t have a GM. There are also solo games that obviously don’t have a GM. Even Apocalypse World constrains the GM in ways that would prevent them from being that kind of authority. Starting from a traditional mode of play also risks creating an iteration on the status quo, which seems not in the spirit of “neotrad design” being used here.

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.)

Communication to manage external dependencies is not an extension of agile. Communication is fundamental:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

Every single one of those items from the agile manifesto is about communication. Need something from a vendor? Communicate. Need something from another team? Communicate. Scope of work bigger than expected? Communicate. That’s not a gap in agile. People over processes.

I’m also not sure where you got that I was alluding to other frameworks. I have little love for stuff like SAFe. These approaches are often traditional ones dressed up in “agile terminology”. They’re peddled by consultants as a way to “go agile”, but these frameworks often conflict with the original manifesto.

This side discussion is getting way off topic, so let’s bring it back on topic. One thing that’s interesting is how you talk about “extending the framework”, but the agile manifesto is not a framework. It’s a set of practices. It’s prescriptive about what you’re supposed to be doing. That’s what a manifesto is. Is a “neotrad design” manifesto expected to be that fluid? (Which wouldn’t help my feeling that such a thing would be of limited use if so.)


table it. However, I would point out one thing that brings it back on topic. If the “agile manifesto” is so functionally meaningless (in that there are a bunch of “agile” practices that don’t really follow it but are marketed under it), then what is the purpose of a “neotrad manifesto”? Is it expected to be treated with similar fluidity?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Or maybe you just keep riding the horse, getting thrown off, and saying, "There is no horse."

As with all such things, not impossible, but the fact other people say it doesn't make it true.

See, this is how you unintentionally show where you are coming from, despite your protestations. Look again at what I wrote- I was pointing out that far more people want to play than to GM- this is a completely unexceptional point. Heck, even a lot of GMs I know prefer playing, but default to GMing because no one else in the group is willing to do it. And somehow, you manage to turn that into ... whatever that statement is.

The problem with this is that GMing has a lot of functions. So the fact they, say, don't want to do game prep or participate in world construction in general doesn't say they don't want to participate in mechanical decisions or other elements. Or vice versa. Assuming because they don't want to be doing the whole package (or perhaps more to the point, want to be able to play without constantly thinking of the big picture) that they don't want any involvement in any part of it that isn't just at the GM's sufferance is a big reach from just the fact they don't want that widely encompassing position known as "GM".

So, yeah, I don't think my position says anything about how many people want to GM. That only makes sense if you have an all-or-nothing view of both the job of the GM and of what I'm saying.

Yeah, we've all had an experience with a bad GM. I think I've acknowledged that. But this was supposed to be a discussion about different models and their tradeoffs. Given your style, it is apparent that is not possible. So you enjoy yourself.

I'm perfectly willing to discuss the tradeoffs. What I'm not going to do is let pass the assumption that the centralized option is clearly the more benign for most groups without qualification, and with the defense making arguments that seem blind to how much of it also applies to that centralized position. If that seems to me making it "not possible" to your view, well, that's your choice.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Only if one were to fail to read on to the manifesto.

Or are you referring to my first post only, without giving regard to the second, notwithstanding both are signalled clearly in that post? (And ignoring the "without wishing to overcommit on definitions" and the fact that the definition was added at all to help out folk who requested it!)

I mean, holy bad-faith reading, honestly.

I think I might be reading you in better faith than you're reading you in, both of the posts at the top of this thread come on very strongly that applying indie techniques to traditional modes of play and goals is the defining feature of Neo-Trad, and what I know of example games (4e for instance) don't really exclude sandbox play, in fact, they largely seem to encourage it by giving the players greater say in what happens next and what the GM will need to follow up on. Whether that's by allowing players to add details to a scene in the DMG 2, following magic item wishlists, letting them write down the quests themselves (thereby framing their own goals), playing rogues reflavored as fire elementals.

I think we might actually be stumbling into the reason OC and Neotrad were conflated in the first place, the mechanics are chiefly used in ways that emphasize a player's ability to partially drive play, which also strongly encourage that play unfold in a way that is more similar to a sandbox when applied to a sim set of game rules, but one which centralizes the PCs because the players gain increased ability to tie themselves into the fiction, when contrasted with OS and Trad sandboxes which either downplay the fiction in favor of impartial-stance simulation, or up-play the fiction with the GM in the driver's seat.

 

[clearstream]

It’s important to understand my reply in context. You were postulating imagination as mechanics. I pointed out that mechanics properly belong to the boxes —the real world things.

In TTRPG, the mechanics dive in and out of the imagination. Imagination is part of them. One can say that what one means by "mechanics" is that they are external real world things and not imagination, and if so one ought to accept that MDA lacks a complete account of the way in which TTRPGs operate.

That’s what the designer controls. You invoke a mechanic, and it either changes your mechanical position (such as manipulating a currency) or your fictional position (such as taking position on a hill). The designer doesn’t control imagination. It’s not something you can offer, but you can create mechanics to prompt a player to use it.

You can, and that points directly to why it is so important to prompt participants accurately.

My issue with “neotrad” as a design school is I view it as just design. If we look at the design taxonomies outlined by Tomas Härenstam that you translated in post #42, it can be split into two groups: those with “indie” mechanics and those without. The group of those without are all games based on past designs. That’s two flavors of D&D (modern and classic) and BRP-like sim games. Everything else is some flavor of “indie”-influenced game: neotrad, storygame, or co-narrator.

I actually think he’s looking at this the wrong way, and MDA is my tool for showing this. Take the D&D category. He includes Pathfinder in this category. As we know, Paizo redesigned Pathfinder quite significanlly for its second edition. It is mechanically incompatible. Is it still Pathfinder? Yes. I would argue that Pathfinder 2e has almost the same dynamics as Pathfiner 1e. That is how people can recognize it as still Pathfinder and how it can be used to play the same kinds of games. However, there is one exception: combat.

Paizo changed the dynamics of combat from PF1 to PF2. Unlike PF1, the combat mechanics actually do what they are intended to do. Combat is balanced, and the encounter-building works. You cannot build your way to success. You have to fight effectively as a team, leveraging your synergies and teamwork to create advantages you can exploit. This is a fundamentally different dynamic from PF1, and it is unsurprisingly a point of controversy. Those expecting PF2 combat to operate like PF1 combat are in for a rude surprise, and it eliminates (or at least greatly hampers) the ability to optimize a character to overcome challenges.

I would postulate that you can preserve a game’s dynamics while incorporating “indie” mechanics. PF2 has social conflict rules. You can use the VP subsystem to run a social conflict like you would in Blades in the Dark. D&D 4e can do this as a skill challenge. Even D&D 5e has a limited from of social conflict (the social interaction rules on pp. 244–255 of the DMG, which @Manbearcat has written here about using for that). TIBFs and Inspiration are arguably an “indie” mechanic (since it’s kind of like a poor man’s aspects and Fate currency). Don’t forget consequences resolution.

Would people put these games as indie games? No. Thomas himself includes D&D 4e in the D&D category. That’s because these games have the same dynamics (more or less) that they’ve always had. It’s just that the mechanics have changed, and some of those changes incorporate newer tech and design ideas. That is why I view “neotrad” design (as articulated here and by Thomas) as just design. It’s a just the current state of the art.

This is a good response as I alluded to in a response to Snarf above. It's certainly worth asking, is "neotrad" simply spatchcocking a few mechanics from indie games into an otherwise traditional TTRPG design? The resultant play will be traditional (as folk who can afford the time to observe actual play will see). Making "neotrad" a synonym of "trad". I'm not aiming to offer a toothless definition!

I put weight in Harenstam's explanation of his OP

...the very purpose of the thread was to protest against the, in my opinion, destructive and unnecessary division into indie and trad. To give suggestions for other ways of looking at things, other categories.

This is getting into the nature of play. How do we enforce that rules are observed? My solution is not to worry about it. I assume people will make a good faith effort to follow the rules and play the game as designed. If they don’t, there is nothing I can do about that. There are no rules that exist above the game I can use to make them play as intended, so I assume good faith and don’t worry otherwise.

Baker invests ample, strongly worded text into enforcing that the rules are observed. Relying I suppose on the principles of respect for and a playfully curious tolerance of a designer's work.

However, I don’t know what you mean by “organization design”. If you mean to design the game with the GM as the central authority over play, then I disagree pretty strongly.

Fortunately, I don't mean that. I mean both asymmetrical roles and equal committment to grasping and upholding the rules.

...what is the purpose of a “neotrad manifesto”? Is it expected to be treated with similar fluidity?

I have in mind that it should be provocative. It should point out the impossibility of the toothless definition of neotrad, and prescribe a solution. It's not a toolkit of design patterns, it's background philosophy for design with purpose.

 

[kenada]

I tend to find it more useful to look at what people care and complain about with different concepts and ideas, as that has tended to reveal the right sort of questions to ask when designing towards those ideas and concepts.

What I find useful are the parts that can be used analytically followed by ideas that can serve as a source of solutions to problems I have, especially if it provides context to explain what particular mechanics are trying to do. As I mentioned in post #211, I’d like to include a commentary with my homebrew system that explains the hows and whys of why it’s designed the way it is. I wish more games did that. People talk about RAI, but we’re really just guessing at what the shadows mean.

 

[Pedantic]

What I find useful are the parts that can be used analytically followed by ideas that can serve as a source of solutions to problems I have, especially if it provides context to explain what particular mechanics are trying to do. As I mentioned in post #211, I’d like to include a commentary with my homebrew system that explains the hows and whys of why it’s designed the way it is. I wish more games did that. People talk about RAI, but we’re really just guessing at what the shadows mean.

This is definitely underrated as a general practice in TTRPGs. Ideally, this is precisely what a resource like the DMG should put a significant amount of its text toward. Personally, I'd love to see it go even further, especially for games that intend to have a toolkit nature, and propose alternate rules with notes about their impact on play.