A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

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But I can see cases where splitting off some of these to players might not be a terrible idea. If you have a principled player, there's no reason he couldn't be the rules administrator too, for example (I suspect I could do that job because I tend to be scrupulous about keeping my powder dry as it were in such things--I had a GM a couple times over the years look startled because I brought up rules corrections to my character's deficit, because I didn't think being fussy about the rules when it helped me but not when it didn't felt ethical) and if a group approaches it such that such a thing is expected (to limit the mentioned above conflicts of interest), I think they could keep the rules administrator's feet to the fire if he slipped, and the very fact he's not considered a general authority figure would make that easier.

This illustrates quite well that the driver of conflicts of interest are the interests. And those can be engineered to avoid conflict. To spell it out using your example

The given player @Thomas Shey (TS) has goals around their character's survival and progress (say).​

​

TS also has a goal to play ethically, which means to them not "being fussy about the rules when it helped me but not when it didn't"​

​

TS is therefore not conflicted when upholding rules, because the second goal is stronger than the first.​

Similarly, a player can be given ownership of arbitrating A just so long as their strongest goals don't lead to conflicts connected with A. One way to secure that by design is to give players strong goals that don't lead to conflicts with A, or expressly exclude goals that would.

To some extent, that's what Baker is doing in that piece I quoted earlier from AW. He is spelling out that it is not GM's goal to do X, Y or Z. On surface that seems to mean just - don't do X. But it also means that seeing doing X isn't a goal of GM, they are unconflicted in cases that would relate to X.

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.​

So if a situation would yank the rug out from under a PC's feet, GM can arbitrate on that without conflict. To put that strongly, the rug very much can be yanked out from under a PC's feet. It's not GM's job to do that. Maybe a rule makes them do it: they follow that rule.

 

[tetrasodium]

I'd advise not to draw constraining, rigid implications from the proposed manifesto. That's not it's purpose. My idea was to publicly declare a north star, without rigid instruction how to get there. I was aiming to be economical and provocative. The former to avoid saying to much, the latter to undermine assumptions. Thus, revised to align with conversation so far -

Neotrad game designs ought to​

Promote the lusory-duality of players​

Shift GM to or toward being on the same footing as players​

Because play is more likely to deliver on the former given the latter​

It wasn't until @pemerton pointed out in their #253 that I realised I'd failed to join the dots all the way to that crucial point about centrality of players (I just assumed everyone had taken note of it.)

The "failures" I perceived were with regard to


And the importance of stating that outright become clearer after I read @Manbearcat's #270 and #274. I don't, incidentally, claim that this is all their should be in a neotrad manifesto, As I said

tl;dr if you're reading it to be rigid, that's not what's intended. It is intended to challenge thinking and influence design in a certain direction.


Reasoning about play is something you'd do as part of TTRPG design anyway. How could you not? That may be organised like this.

Say what you want the experience of play to be. Design the play to enable that experience. Iterate.​

I think you can see at once that this is doing a different job. The manifesto raises questions, without necessarily offering answers. Most of all it says - "have an opinion on this". Whereas this here is rigid instruction for design: do this, and then do this; repeat. On the premise that doing those things in that sequence will organise and ease the process.


Again, I don't (and based on comments in thread I feel confident TH didn't) see them as imposing rigid constraints. Although I absolutely agree with your sense that they can have that effect when imposed with authority or submitted to without challenge. A taxonomy organises the design space, so that the designer can address it methodically. It can, for example, narrow down the number of other games you will want to observe to understand design patterns that will most likely be valuable to your project. It can help you decide which audience you want to address, by seeing what kinds of folk are playing games of similar ilk; and what they care about. Taxonomies are just a tool of game design: rigid to the extent you allow them to be, or force them upon others without considering their take.

I think that it's being overly generous in the extreme to call the dog whistle laden murk a north star. Throughout this and the other threads the neotrad support walks and awfully fine line simultaneously avoiding outright embracing and outright drawing a line too far the sort of live vrs totally choreographed distinction made in 270. If anything the tapdancing around both draws attention to the incongruous focus on the gm role being adjusted rather than the players with ghost written PCs stepping up.

 

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I think that it's being overly generous in the extreme to call the dog whistle laden murk a north star. Throughout this and the other threads the neotrad support walks and awfully fine line simultaneously avoiding outright embracing and outright drawing a line too far the sort of live vrs totally choreographed distinction made in 270. If anything the tapdancing around both draws attention to the incongruous focus on the gm role being adjusted rather than the players with ghost written PCs stepping up.

This reads to me as if my position is taken to be one hostile to traditional modes of play, including in that GM positioning such as that characterised as "DM curation". That ignores my enduring engagement with those modes and arguments concerning the healthy, functional play found in them.

My arguments for neotrad amount to this: the label should have a distinctive meaning. For example, trad and neotrad should not mean the same thing! Given the label ought to have a distinctive meaning - otherwise, why use it at all - what is that distinctive meaning based on what I am seeing in the domain?

I observed a set of game designs sharing features with indie-games and in some cases expressly characterised by their designers as neotrad. Others before me identified some of the traits and goals of those designs, and looking at them, I agreed. Further observing putatively neotrad games being played, I noticed that the traits and goals often amounted to nothing: the group was playing the game as trad. My observations-based intuition was that the facet of play that most shifted a game from -trad to neotrad, was being quashed by defaulting into traditional GMing. That doesn't mean I dislike traditional GMing, it means that I do not see it as consistent with the supposed goals of neotrad.

I then noticed that many of the same games I was looking at either outright denoted GM "player", or included other language to mediate their powers. All in the end I did was advocate that this indeed was right minded (for neotrad) and that those hoping to have success (to those ends, the ends of neotrad) ought to prioritise it.

Your take is off the mark. It is entirely possible to argue that A is good in contexts A', and B is good in contexts B', and in advocating A in A' one is not denigrating B in B'. I am not for example arguing that denoting GM as "player" is always good, always the right choice (and in particular the right choice for traditional modes of play - it's not). Nor am I saying that neotrad is better than -trad, or even that I prefer one over the other. It seems to baffle folk, but I enjoy all modes of RPG. I do not have a favourite. These days, the main question I ask is "Is this going to be a new experience?" when signing up for games. The games I have coming up are Starhold (one-shot) and Dolmenwood (campaign). The last four games I purchased were - RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Legend of the Five Rings (FF edition), Blades in the Dark, and Worlds Without Number reprint (I only have the digital version, currently.)

Something I just realised folk might fail to assume, is that by my lights -trad game designs that include features learned from indie-games, but remain -trad in play, are not neotrad. The inclusion of such features is necessary, but not sufficient. If one likes, this gives us weak and strong definitions of "neotrad". The weak version is any traditional mode game design that includes innovations first seen in indie-games. The strong version fits my manifesto.

I hope this dissolves the concerns you harbour.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I want to restate my advice just above about not drawing constraining, rigid implications from my proposed neotrad manifesto. That's not it's purpose. My idea is to publicly declare a north star, without rigid instruction on how to get there. I am aiming to be economical and provocative. The former to avoid saying to much, the latter to undermine assumptions.

Thus, revised to align with conversation so far, for reexamination and challenge -

Neotrad game designs ought to​

Promote the lusory-duality of players​

Shift GM to or toward being on the same footing as players​

Because play is more likely to deliver on the former given the latter​

No doubt this can be better wordsmitted (suggestions are welcome!) And maybe there are missing terms, such as around scene opening closing per #288 for example. Maybe it isn't obvious enough that shifting GM would entail deprecating rule zero. (Denoting GM "player" makes it more obvious, I think.)

Well, I am not motivated to be particularly critical of other people's ideas about how to approach accomplishing various goals, so I don't have anything particularly negative to say related to the 'manifesto'. I mean, from my personal perspective, while I get what you are stating above and I wouldn't really disagree with it, I'm not sure it brings me too much closer to executing a game design or running a game in a way that would fulfill my vision of 'a neo-trad RPG'.

Going back to a more 'product approach' to things, the first step in a process like this IMHO is to develop a charter and a thesis. That is, what sort of thing, in an abstract sense shorn of any implementation-related baggage, am I trying to accomplish? And then put forward a thesis, a statement as to what might accomplish that. I can see your statement above as being pretty close to being a thesis, its a not there yet, but it suggests one (that being a game with the traits you mention would hypothetically support neo-trad play). I would refine that thesis in the context of an actual project or in terms of figuring out how to run a game of that type a bit more. So, perhaps inject a bit of opinion into your thesis, because it needs to be testable! However, in 'manifesto terms' you don't have to do that, if you see the manifesto as something of a blueprint. In that case I would back up and suggest the form which a specific 'neo-trad project charter' might take, as that will tell people what your manifesto is really ABOUT, and not just what it hypothesizes.

However, next you will, in any real project, need to develop metrics, this is the third layer of project success. What am I trying to accomplish, then how do I believe it might be accomplished, and finally how do I know I've succeeded or failed? Beyond that might be the 'meta-process' such as the kind of things envisaged in various agile methodologies where you put the above inside a refinement loop driven by the metrics, but IMHO that gets into an implementation process layer which you're probably not aiming at.

BUT, now you still have to do the 'real work!' This is the point most people are trying to focus on, things like which actual games, systems, mechanics, principles of play, etc. are going to embody the actual solution which runs at the table. Again, I don't think you NEED to address that at all in a 'manifesto', though if you want it to be more opinionated you could include statements as to what YOU consider might fall inside or outside the limits of a game which plays in accordance with your ideas. Still, the core statements, the 'charter' and 'thesis' templates need to be constraining enough to say these things if its coherent, and that will make your effort more and more niche. I think that's the ultimate downfall of the 'manifesto approach' is that it either evolves into an actual project, or becomes so ideologically limiting that it loses utility.

Which leads me to the ultimate (forgive my wordiness) point, which is that I think something like analysis of the nature and requirements of specific play agendas and how to structure a game in those terms might still be the better overall approach. I mean, GNS for example, actually got someplace. People might not LIKE where it leads, that's simply a matter of taste, but the actual game implementations and play are real things that exist! At worst they are non-hypothetical for sure, so I always find it peculiar that people argue some other approach is 'better'. Sure, maybe, GR is 'better' than Newtonian Mechanics, but Newton still works, and so does GNS and its ilk!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Something I just realised folk might fail to assume, is that by my lights -trad game designs that include features learned from indie-games, but remain -trad in play, are not neotrad. The inclusion of such features is necessary, but not sufficient. If one likes, this gives us weak and strong definitions of "neotrad". The weak version is any traditional mode game design that includes innovations first seen in indie-games. The strong version fits my manifesto.

I wonder though, do you really NEED 'indie mechanics' at all? I mean, as @pemerton has OFTEN pointed out, the 'Forgites' long ago defined 'vanilla narrativism' as the 'ur form' of such play in which there is no mechanical or explicit process/structure/definition related to narrativist play (IE a game of 5e played in a narrativist fashion would meet this criterion pretty well). So, I would have to assume that, in the spirit of the way you have defined it, there most likely would exist also a 'vanilla neo-trad' in which ideas along the lines of your manifesto are upheld in play, again in say 5e D&D.

So, I agree that there's no reason why simply incorporating 'indie-game design elements' into a game stops it from being trad, I think there's no reason to assume a game is 'trad' simply because it lacks specific design features. You can only tell from play. And then I would say you can only speak of systems that do or do not incorporate those elements and to what degree of comprehensiveness, and then finally speculate as to what sorts of actual play styles are aimed for and likely to arise.

 

[clearstream]

Well, I am not motivated to be particularly critical of other people's ideas about how to approach accomplishing various goals, so I don't have anything particularly negative to say related to the 'manifesto'. I mean, from my personal perspective, while I get what you are stating above and I wouldn't really disagree with it, I'm not sure it brings me too much closer to executing a game design or running a game in a way that would fulfill my vision of 'a neo-trad RPG'.

Going back to a more 'product approach' to things, the first step in a process like this IMHO is to develop a charter and a thesis. That is, what sort of thing, in an abstract sense shorn of any implementation-related baggage, am I trying to accomplish? And then put forward a thesis, a statement as to what might accomplish that. I can see your statement above as being pretty close to being a thesis, its a not there yet, but it suggests one (that being a game with the traits you mention would hypothetically support neo-trad play). I would refine that thesis in the context of an actual project or in terms of figuring out how to run a game of that type a bit more. So, perhaps inject a bit of opinion into your thesis, because it needs to be testable! However, in 'manifesto terms' you don't have to do that, if you see the manifesto as something of a blueprint. In that case I would back up and suggest the form which a specific 'neo-trad project charter' might take, as that will tell people what your manifesto is really ABOUT, and not just what it hypothesizes.

However, next you will, in any real project, need to develop metrics, this is the third layer of project success. What am I trying to accomplish, then how do I believe it might be accomplished, and finally how do I know I've succeeded or failed? Beyond that might be the 'meta-process' such as the kind of things envisaged in various agile methodologies where you put the above inside a refinement loop driven by the metrics, but IMHO that gets into an implementation process layer which you're probably not aiming at.

BUT, now you still have to do the 'real work!' This is the point most people are trying to focus on, things like which actual games, systems, mechanics, principles of play, etc. are going to embody the actual solution which runs at the table. Again, I don't think you NEED to address that at all in a 'manifesto', though if you want it to be more opinionated you could include statements as to what YOU consider might fall inside or outside the limits of a game which plays in accordance with your ideas. Still, the core statements, the 'charter' and 'thesis' templates need to be constraining enough to say these things if its coherent, and that will make your effort more and more niche. I think that's the ultimate downfall of the 'manifesto approach' is that it either evolves into an actual project, or becomes so ideologically limiting that it loses utility.

Maybe the simplest thing to say is that the goal of my manifesto is not to serve as practical instructions for game design, but to slap across the face with a glove all those thinking of designing neotrad games. It is not a criticism responsive to a provocation to say that it fails to give practical instruction as to what to do next. So far as I can tell, you've got that covered.

Which leads me to the ultimate (forgive my wordiness) point, which is that I think something like analysis of the nature and requirements of specific play agendas and how to structure a game in those terms might still be the better overall approach. I mean, GNS for example, actually got someplace. People might not LIKE where it leads, that's simply a matter of taste, but the actual game implementations and play are real things that exist! At worst they are non-hypothetical for sure, so I always find it peculiar that people argue some other approach is 'better'. Sure, maybe, GR is 'better' than Newtonian Mechanics, but Newton still works, and so does GNS and its ilk!

I'm uncertain here whether you are taking the arguments to be somehow in conflict. My manifesto is built on top of the theorising around GNS. It confirms that the narrativist comprehension of the lusory-duality isn't exclusively of benefit to storygames. Rather, the lusory-duality is taken to be fundamental to game qua game.

A line of criticism what would be responsive to this could be for example, to say that there is no occupiable ground between traditional modes and narrativist modes. That you cannot have narrativist-sandbox, narrativist-sim, narrativist-OSR, narrativist-trad. Or narrativist-FKR (I'm still undecided about that one!) Or perhaps you could criticise the manifesto by saying that yes, there is such ground, but we do not need to change anything about the traditional strong-GM role to occupy it. (I don't think this is right, but it would certainly be responsive.)

I respect your interest in the practicalities of design, but this is not that thread. Well, other than predicting that you cannot achieve strong-version neotrad unless you heed the manifesto! (It would certainly be responsive to challenge that claim.)

 

[clearstream]

I wonder though, do you really NEED 'indie mechanics' at all? I mean, as @pemerton has OFTEN pointed out, the 'Forgites' long ago defined 'vanilla narrativism' as the 'ur form' of such play in which there is no mechanical or explicit process/structure/definition related to narrativist play (IE a game of 5e played in a narrativist fashion would meet this criterion pretty well). So, I would have to assume that, in the spirit of the way you have defined it, there most likely would exist also a 'vanilla neo-trad' in which ideas along the lines of your manifesto are upheld in play, again in say 5e D&D.

I remember arguing (in some respects inadvisably) years ago for simply leveraging DM-curation to meet narrativist ends (I was thinking in particular of fiction-first, which is related but not the same, but the point stands).

But I will more confidently predict success where a game takes advantage of the design tech. If you think about it, one function of design is to publicise heuristics. So my claim there is rather self-fulfilling. I've said that I am not pursuing the practicalities of design here, but I am trying to say something that matters to design.

If one instead does not include it in the design of games - does not publicise it - then some folk will naturally hit on it, and others won't, and you can't confidently predict which is which.

So, I agree that there's no reason why simply incorporating 'indie-game design elements' into a game stops it from being trad, I think there's no reason to assume a game is 'trad' simply because it lacks specific design features. You can only tell from play. And then I would say you can only speak of systems that do or do not incorporate those elements and to what degree of comprehensiveness, and then finally speculate as to what sorts of actual play styles are aimed for and likely to arise.

I agree, and why not just continue to call those games -trad?

 

[tetrasodium]

This reads to me as if my position is taken to be one hostile to traditional modes of play, including in that GM positioning such as that characterised as "DM curation". That ignores my enduring engagement with those modes and arguments concerning the healthy, functional play found in them.

My arguments for neotrad amount to this: the label should have a distinctive meaning. For example, trad and neotrad should not mean the same thing! Given the label ought to have a distinctive meaning - otherwise, why use it at all - what is that distinctive meaning based on what I am seeing in the domain?

I observed a set of game designs sharing features with indie-games and in some cases expressly characterised by their designers as neotrad. Others before me identified some of the traits and goals of those designs, and looking at them, I agreed. Further observing putatively neotrad games being played, I noticed that the traits and goals often amounted to nothing: the group was playing the game as trad. My observations-based intuition was that the facet of play that most shifted a game from -trad to neotrad, was being quashed by defaulting into traditional GMing. That doesn't mean I dislike traditional GMing, it means that I do not see it as consistent with the supposed goals of neotrad.

I then noticed that many of the same games I was looking at either outright denoted GM "player", or included other language to mediate their powers. All in the end I did was advocate that this indeed was right minded (for neotrad) and that those hoping to have success (to those ends, the ends of neotrad) ought to prioritise it.

Your take is off the mark. It is entirely possible to argue that A is good in contexts A', and B is good in contexts B', and in advocating A in A' one is not denigrating B in B'. I am not for example arguing that denoting GM as "player" is always good, always the right choice (and in particular the right choice for traditional modes of play - it's not). Nor am I saying that neotrad is better than -trad, or even that I prefer one over the other. It seems to baffle folk, but I enjoy all modes of RPG. I do not have a favourite. These days, the main question I ask is "Is this going to be a new experience?" when signing up for games. The games I have coming up are Starhold (one-shot) and Dolmenwood (campaign). The last four games I purchased were - RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, Legend of the Five Rings (FF edition), Blades in the Dark, and Worlds Without Number reprint (I only have the digital version, currently.)

Something I just realised folk might fail to assume, is that by my lights -trad game designs that include features learned from indie-games, but remain -trad in play, are not neotrad. The inclusion of such features is necessary, but not sufficient. If one likes, this gives us weak and strong definitions of "neotrad". The weak version is any traditional mode game design that includes innovations first seen in indie-games. The strong version fits my manifesto.

I hope this dissolves the concerns you harbour.

That's a lot of words to say little more than "maybe it's what 270 says, maybe it's not" and imply negative motivations behind asking for a clear stance on a "play culture" that seems more and more like it exists as little more than a blame shifting shield of dog whistles for poor behavior of a player who believes they have some mandate of rightness in the tired rollplay vrs roleplay thing.

 

[clearstream]

That's a lot of words to say little more than "maybe it's what 270 says, maybe it's not" and imply negative motivations behind asking for a clear stance on a "play culture" that seems more and more like it exists as little more than a blame shifting shield of dog whistles for poor behavior of a player who believes they have some mandate of rightness in the tired rollplay vrs roleplay thing.

Is the part that concerns you in #270 this

where risk/stakes are reduced via the vectors of system and/or table conspiracy. This can mean things like (a) the game is not particularly difficult in terms of attainment of objectives or (b) that the system meta entails the means to ensure high-stakes objective attainment, typically at the forfeiture of low-stakes objective attainment (which might barely rise beyond the realm of color/texture rather than "toothy consequences").

The facets of @Manbearcat's two posts that I agreed strongly with were those making a connection between narrativism and neotrad, which I understand to be to do with the lusory-duality which is fundamental to games and results in ludonarrative rather than by one means or another overlaying traditional narrative onto games. I claim that only through recognising player as simultaneously author and audience can one achieve the new mode of narrative which is ludonarrative. Assumptions about narrative that didn't fully grasp the new medium led for a time to a rift between ludologists and narratologists. While on the other hand, embracing this idea allows development of appropriate new theories (which of course take lessons from broader narratology.)

On the other hand, this take about lowering difficulty... I don't see any convincing argument for it. As one example, the Year Zero Engine includes a push mechanic that can inflict attribute damage on characters. This is a death-spiral mechanic (you push because you need the success, or more successes, but then you become less likely to succeed next time.) I do not observe any lowering of difficulty in the resultant play. Or take the time to observe a lot of 4e play: there's no difference in difficulty between whether the group opts into neotrad or sticks with trad. (Perhaps someone can show rather than theorycraft it? but frankly, the community lacks sufficient, rigorous data on difficulty - or even an agreed construct for difficulty - to validate such a claim!) In the past I've heard folk suggest that storygames produce toothless consequences. Both are wrong.

I see that comment simply as a claim that @Manbearcat is making that has no relevance to my manifesto so isn't necessary to engage with. If it's intended to imply the superiority of some modes of play over others, that's patently rubbish. Is that on track, or is something else in @Manbearcat's post concerning you? (As an aside, you're not taking up with me the words of another poster, are you? Why not take it up with them?)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Maybe the simplest thing to say is that the goal of my manifesto is not to serve as practical instructions for game design, but to slap across the face with a glove all those thinking of designing neotrad games. It is not a criticism responsive to a provocation to say that it fails to give practical instruction as to what to do next. So far as I can tell, you've got that covered.


I'm uncertain here whether you are taking the arguments to be somehow in conflict. My manifesto is built on top of the theorising around GNS. It confirms that the narrativist comprehension of the lusory-duality isn't exclusively of benefit to storygames. Rather, the lusory-duality is taken to be fundamental to game qua game.

A line of criticism what would be responsive to this could be for example, to say that there is no occupiable ground between traditional modes and narrativist modes. That you cannot have narrativist-sandbox, narrativist-sim, narrativist-OSR, narrativist-trad. Or narrativist-FKR (I'm still undecided about that one!) Or perhaps you could criticise the manifesto by saying that yes, there is such ground, but we do not need to change anything about the traditional strong-GM role to occupy it. (I don't think this is right, but it would certainly be responsive.)

I think there could well be a ground that you are outlining in your discussion, in fact I think in GNS terms neo-trad might almost be analyzed as a form of 'simulationist' agenda in which the premise is formed by the players in regard to their characters and related stuff like the milieu they occupy, story arcs, etc. It then becomes interesting in terms of considering the ways in which RE considered sim/nar to be incompatible categories of agendas. You might develop analysis in a way to explain that (and to be fair, I think others have, post-Forge, already done at least some of that, as GNS really isn't all that current in Narrativist thinking these days).

I respect your interest in the practicalities of design, but this is not that thread. Well, other than predicting that you cannot achieve strong-version neotrad unless you heed the manifesto! (It would certainly be responsive to challenge that claim.)

I don't think your ideas, mine, and say Ron Edwards' ideas are necessarily in conflict, that's true. Honestly, do your thing, I read the thread, which actually I don't read a lot of threads anymore, so I don't see it as a waste of time or counterproductive. I do think when I'm looking at actual questions of 'how do I run this' or 'how do I design this' that my conclusions will be more based on testing my thesis etc. than anything else. But maybe a manifesto is not meant to be operational? I don't know, I'm not sure. At a guess I would say the expectation is it provides a pathway to operationalization.

As for challenging your claim... Hmmmm. As I said above, there was a body of thought which would have classified what you are talking about as belonging in the category of 'incoherent designs' or 'incoherent play', but I think we've already moved beyond that, and not being a very good student of modern RPG theory as opposed to practice I don't feel very well-equipped to mount a challenge, nor do I even really think one is needed.