A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[kenada]

It could be simply that MDA implies too narrow a scope for "stuff designer controls", where DDE uses better language and examples. With MDA I find I cannot fit some phenomena in, and in other cases its not clear whether something is on the M side or A, such as the style of an art asset. Dynamics doesn't apply quite as well to TTRPG - "play" is better (and has been suggested by others for the framework overall.) Once it is read or reframed that way, then I would agree with you that it can say some useful things for TTRPG design. In a nutshell (@pemerton might be interested here)

Design is simply stuff designer can control. That can include rules (both constitutive and regulatory), principles and other exhortations to uphold the desired practice, examples of play, setting description, premade characters, illustrations. The designed layer is game-as-artifact. Think of the other layers as lying atop it. They perhaps couldn't exist without it, but they are not reliably isomorphic to it. We can put the game text here.​

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Play is the engagement with the system by players, activating it. For videogames, "dynamics" is reasonable because you can have systems that run themselves. For TTRPG it can only be thought of in the form of play. That would include any procedures one player carries out even in the absence of others. The play layer lies atop the designed layer. We can include player imagination here, even if as I contend it includes a form of game mechanic, on the assumption that it's compelled or constrained by the design.​

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Experience is entirely on the player side: their feelings, satisfactions, tensions, excitements, frustrations, hopes, learnings and so on. The effect of the game on the player. In MDA and similar frameworks, an attempt is made to classify these into creative motives like challenge, exploration, fellowship, expression. The aim is to move away from generic terms like "fun" which means something different to each player.) Experience subsists in or emerges from the play of the game. Think of it as the top layer: what the game is like to play... its effect on you.​

When I read “runtime”, I’ve been mentally substituting “in play” in place of it. I agree that “runtime” is a notion that doesn’t really make sense for non-digital games, but it’s easy to devise a meaning that works.

The idea is to work out what experience you want to deliver, and then design toward that. Good advice. What's particularly relevant for us is the implicit and crucial notion that designers do not directly control experience. I make a big deal out of that, because one of the more subtle ideas of MDA/DDE/DPE is that a designer can make the experience likely but not certain. So in relation to neotrad I say that they can't make it likely enough unless they explicitly design for what GM does, because otherwise it will default to trad.

Alas, yes. I’m not a fan of the default assumptions of how things work in our hobby because it makes it difficult to do other things in a game. I think it would be beneficial overall if games communicated clearly how they are supposed to work. That would benefit not just other games that wanted to do something different but also the established ones by providing new players what they need to get started and play without having to use external resources. There are obviously challenges to that (e.g., how to effectively on board players without requiring them to read hundreds of pages), but digging into that is way outside the scope of this discussion.

In another thread I independently suggested "neosim", which could feasibly be what Härenstam had in mind. However, I think it is more important to try to understand his motives for posting

IIRC there are five pages of comments, and among those to my reading TH makes it clear that he's not hung up on his taxonomy. I was clear in my OP that I'm using the label "neotrad" to include such enduring modes of play as OSR, sandbox, sim, and trad.

I’m having trouble reconciling this with post #241, which said (regarding sandbox play in my homebrew system), “This is the aim of sandbox play; a traditional mode. That would mean the design work is done for trad design.”

(Emphasis mine.) In AW and DitV Baker does almost exactly the opposite! He doesn't leave it to good faith attempts, he lays out exactly what he expects from the GM. On first read it's kind of astonishing, and refreshing. Here's one pithy example addressed to MC

Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other. It’s not, for instance, your agenda to make the players lose, or to deny them what they want, or to punish them, or to control them, or to get them through your pre-planned storyline (DO NOT pre-plan a storyline, and I’m not naughty word around). It’s not your job to put their characters in double-binds or dead ends, or to yank the rug out from under their feet. Go chasing after any of those, you’ll wind up with a boring game that makes Apocalypse World seem contrived, and you’ll be pre-deciding what happens by yourself, not playing to find out.​

I’m using “good faith play” to mean that you play on its terms.¹ Baker lays out what the MC is supposed to do, but he can’t make you do that because it’s part of the experience that cannot be directly controlled by the designer. Whether you count the MC as a player or another participant, they either agree to engage in their role as prescribed by the game or not. If not, and if the game does not provide for that, then one has left the realm of good faith play.

Utilizing the MDA/DDE/DPE framework, which hopefully I've offered an effective olive branch in regard to, text like the above is design. Baker controlled what he wrote there. What he can't control is precisely what experience player engagement with that piece of text will lead to. But actually his approach is one of redundancy. The design (D) guides to play (P) of the design (D); securing the intended experience (E). So Baker has designed both the game mechanics (like moves), and an agenda and principles for engaging with them. That's not relying on good faith. It's including in the game design exactly how you are positioning GM.

As I noted in post #266, I hadn’t really intended MDA to gain the prominence in this discussion that it did. It was an example of an established framework for design I could reference due to my status as an amateur designer and could relate to other professional experiences I do have. It’s not strictly required for these analyses, though I consider using it (or a derivative) preferable to taking a taxonomical view (which happens far too often in RPG discourse).

When they wanted their design intent to matter, faced with otherwise overpowering default assumptions.

Being explicit about what you want your game to do seems like a pretty good thing to do regardless.

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[1]: Note that I’m using “rules” and “good faith play” fairly broadly. If a game provides for expansive authority to change it or disregard it at runtime or anytime, then doing so would still constitute “good faith play”.

 

[clearstream]

Alas, yes. I’m not a fan of the default assumptions of how things work in our hobby because it makes it difficult to do other things in a game. I think it would be beneficial overall if games communicated clearly how they are supposed to work. That would benefit not just other games that wanted to do something different but also the established ones by providing new players what they need to get started and play without having to use external resources. There are obviously challenges to that (e.g., how to effectively on board players without requiring them to read hundreds of pages), but digging into that is way outside the scope of this discussion.

In that vein, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by (re)describing GMing as anything other than GMing? It is for example unconfusing that a referee referees. In the same vein, a GM GMs. One may then develop a vocabulary around GMing, and if wanted an internal-taxonomy.

I’m having trouble reconciling this with post #241, which said (regarding sandbox play in my homebrew system), “This is the aim of sandbox play; a traditional mode. That would mean the design work is done for trad design.”

I think I see what you mean. The bolded instance of trad should have been something like "-trad" as I intended to refer to the same set of enduring modes of play that I'd characterised as traditional and grouped into the -trad of neotrad. Thereby pointing to the opportunity I perceived to make it a neotrad design. Hardly at all confusing: I'm shocked to learn you had trouble following it.

I’m using “good faith play” to mean that you play on its terms.¹ Baker lays out what the MC is supposed to do, but he can’t make you do that because it’s part of the experience that cannot be directly controlled by the designer. Whether you count the MC as a player or another participant, they either agree to engage in their role as prescribed by the game or not. If not, and if the game does not provide for that, then one has left the realm of good faith play.

That makes better sense to me, now that you've explained it.

[1]: Note that I’m using “rules” and “good faith play” fairly broadly. If a game provides for expansive authority to change it or disregard it at runtime or anytime, then doing so would still constitute “good faith play”.

I would suggest instead that it makes it hard to definitely say what counts as "good faith play".

 

[kenada]

In that vein, I wonder if we do ourselves a disservice by (re)describing GMing as anything other than GMing? It is for example unconfusing that a referee referees. In the same vein, a GM GMs. One may then develop a vocabularly around GMing, and if wanted an internal-taxonomy.

The nature of the GM role is going to vary from game to game. A survey of practices could be useful, especially if it includes discussions of why a particular practice would be used and cases when you’d want to include it. I would not want those to be put into taxonomies.

I think I see what you mean. The bolded instance of trad should have been something like "-trad" as I intended to refer to the same set of enduring modes of play that I'd characterised as traditional and grouped into the -trad of neotrad. Thereby pointing to the opportunity I perceived to make it a neotrad design. Hardly at all confusing: I'm shocked to learn you had trouble following it.

Thanks for the clarification. That makes more sense.

I would suggest instead that it makes it hard to definitely say what counts as "good faith play".

I wanted to make sure my statement was inclusive and could not be construed as disparaging of games that provide the GM with broad authority to make changes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I wasn’t even thinking of anything like that (and if that’s where @Thomas Shey was trying to go in his reply in post #283, then I apologize for my confusion). I was just thinking if your game is trying to be like a John Wick movie, but play navigating from the Continental Hotel street by street until you get to your destination, you should probably just jump straight to the fighting since that’s what everyone is there to do.

I was thinking more in very long duration clocks, where they're telling you if you complete a task (and possibly how far along you got on it, and what prices you paid and side effects you got doing it). Let's say you're in a post-apocalypse setting and are helping a community build fortifications and anti-seige weapons before some raiders arrive; that process isn't going to be exciting in and of itself, but it'll be potentially interesting, and warrants some attention beyond just making a die roll.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The nature of the GM role is going to vary from game to game. A survey of practices could be useful, especially if it includes discusses of why a particular practice would be used and cases when you’d want to include it. I would not want those to be put into taxonomies.

As I noted earlier in the discussion, one of the things that complicates any discussion of some decentralization of GMing elements is that some people just take it as a given its desirable or outright necessary to have about 3-5 different jobs that have historically been bundled together in that role called "GM" and there's really no automatic reason they need to be. Which means you could still leave some of them in the hands of a traditional centralized position while either farming out or spreading around others, but people will tend to automatically assume they have to be in one spot and if you decentralize one you have to decentralize all.

 

[clearstream]

As I noted earlier in the discussion, one of the things that complicates any discussion of some decentralization of GMing elements is that some people just take it as a given its desirable or outright necessary to have about 3-5 different jobs that have historically been bundled together in that role called "GM" and there's really no automatic reason they need to be. Which means you could still leave some of them in the hands of a traditional centralized position while either farming out or spreading around others, but people will tend to automatically assume they have to be in one spot and if you decentralize one you have to decentralize all.

Well, we have notions like the Czege Principle to guide as to functional distributions. So perhaps the form it would take would be - what are the functional distributions? What is available to distribute? Has anyone tried / does it work to use distribution X?

I found for instance that once you challenge the notion the GM will manage the rest of the world (i.e. everything but the PCs), and even following the CP to distribute adversaries and adversities away from player-characters, there are still far more individual elements than one might expect. Who manages friendly forces and allies? Neutral forces and entities? Scene start/end has just been discussed. What about situations? In another thread, I argued that fitting actions/events to rules is another job to do. Along with judging what is impossible (in the absence of a specific rule.) Then consider who manages availability and pricing? Who says what loot is to be found? What terrain? What sorts of settlements and their cultures Who decides if the weather is good? Who owns diegetic knowledge? What about mysteries? Etc. Etc.

One thing one can say for high-GM curation is that on the design side, it's a low cost solution to a vast number of problems / jobs to do. The basic design strategies are - do I write a rule for it? do I give it to a player to govern? what do I do to make sure they know what to count as good faith play?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, we have notions like the Czege Principle to guide as to functional distributions. So perhaps the form it would take would be - what are the functional distributions? What is available to distribute? Has anyone tried / does it work to use distribution X?

I found for instance that once you challenge the notion the GM will manage the rest of the world (i.e. everything but the PCs), and even following the CP to distribute adversaries and adversities away from player-characters, there are still far more individual elements than one might expect. Who manages friendly forces and allies? Neutral forces and entities? Scene start/end has just been discussed. What about situations? In another thread, I argued that fitting actions/events to rules is another job to do. Along with judging what is impossible (in the absence of a specific rule.) Then consider who manages availability and pricing? Who says what loot is to be found? What terrain? What sorts of settlements and their cultures Who decides if the weather is good? Who owns diegetic knowledge? What about mysteries? Etc. Etc.

One thing one can say for high-GM curation is that on the design side, it's a low cost solution to a vast number of problems / jobs to do. The basic design strategies are - do I write a rule for it? do I give it to a player to govern? what do I do to make sure they know what to count as good faith play?

I agree you could split things that finely, but I'm not sure I'd expect to see some of those separated out from each other (whoever individually or collectively was in charge) very often; it'd probably have to require a pretty specific aim to make some of those distinctions.

 

[kenada]

Separating roles has some historical base. I linked one such example in post #191. In practice, it seems that maintaining a split is pretty difficult. That kind of play is not (and presumably was not) typical.

As I noted earlier in the discussion, one of the things that complicates any discussion of some decentralization of GMing elements is that some people just take it as a given its desirable or outright necessary to have about 3-5 different jobs that have historically been bundled together in that role called "GM" and there's really no automatic reason they need to be. Which means you could still leave some of them in the hands of a traditional centralized position while either farming out or spreading around others, but people will tend to automatically assume they have to be in one spot and if you decentralize one you have to decentralize all.

I don’t think what you’re suggesting and what I’d like to see are incompatible. It may be that certain ones tend to go together or can’t be easily separated from a centralized design. The intent is to leave it up to game designers to figure it out. It only takes one to find a novel way of separating them that can move the state of the art forward.

 

[kenada]

Speaking of separation. My homebrew system mostly uses player rolls. I don’t do that in combat, and there’s an open question of how to handle non-combat “attacks” (for lack of a better way to put it). A game like Blades in the Dark makes this part of the scene framing. The GM makes a move, and you have to respond. If the threat is dangerous enough (master-level), you have to resist or take consequences immediately. Well, since I’m already systematizing discretion, maybe I should lean into that?

The process for making a skill check is the player articulates a goal (a change in the status quo, setting stakes). The referee is obligated to foreground consequences. There is some space for obvious consequences, but generally there should be something foregrounded. If none can be, the player gets what they wanted. Otherwise, they roll, and the roll determines what happens. Success? You get what you wanted. Consequences? Can occur alongside success, but they can’t negate the success in any way.

What does leaning into this look like? Replace “referee is obligate to foreground consequences” with “the opposition is obligated to foreground consequences”. That is often going to be the referee (due to the nature of most conflicts being driven by the players), but it’s not always. In two cases: when an NPC is proactively engaging a PC (e.g., Natalia wants to press Dingo being he might know more about who killed her minion), and when players engage each other in PvP.

It sounds good, anyway. I’ll have to try it and see how it goes. It doesn’t come up a lot, so it may be a little while. It would be nice if it actually worked as a solution because it’s just incorporating existing mechanics in a general way. That would be preferable to having special mechanics for this particular situation.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Speaking of separation. My homebrew system mostly uses player rolls. I don’t do that in combat, and there’s an open question of how to handle non-combat “attacks” (for lack of a better way to put it). A game like Blades in the Dark makes this part of the scene framing. The GM makes a move, and you have to respond. If the threat is dangerous enough (master-level), you have to resist or take consequences immediately. Well, since I’m already systematizing discretion, maybe I should lean into that?

The process for making a skill check is the player articulates a goal (a change in the status quo, setting stakes). The referee is obligated to foreground consequences. There is some space for obvious consequences, but generally there should be something foregrounded. If none can be, the player gets what they wanted. Otherwise, they roll, and the roll determines what happens. Success? You get what you wanted. Consequences? Can occur alongside success, but they can’t negate the success in any way.

What does leaning into this look like? Replace “referee is obligate to foreground consequences” with “the opposition is obligated to foreground consequences”. That is often going to be the referee (due to the nature of most conflicts being driven by the players), but it’s not always. In two cases: when an NPC is proactively engaging a PC (e.g., Natalia wants to press Dingo being he might know more about who killed her minion), and when players engage each other in PvP.

It sounds good, anyway. I’ll have to try it and see how it goes. It doesn’t come up a lot, so it may be a little while. It would be nice if it actually worked as a solution because it’s just incorporating existing mechanics in a general way. That would be preferable to having special mechanics for this particular situation.

I'm always in favor of general mechanics. In the current version of HoML everything coming at the PCs elicits a defense, and any dice rolling mechanism can apply to them. So practices can alter the type of check, a defense feat can be utilized, you can invoke the alternate consequences rules to accept an affliction as an alternative to damage, etc.