A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[AbdulAlhazred]

What is illuminated is that gamists normally want to engage with play they're interested in skillfully. Of course, they may always engage socially, jocularly, etc, but on the whole if time or ability prevent skillful engagement, they're unlikely to persevere. The same can be said of folk with any motivation.

There is no disagreement on that point. The actual debate was with Pedantic, who's line of argument was another attempt to construe PtFO to mean everything we all do in all RPG play, specifically using it to describe 'finding out' who wins. I argue this is, at best, a bad use for the phrase because gamists are not 'finding out' that, they are MUCH MORE ACCURATELY 'play to win' or at least 'play to demonstrate mastery/excellence'. Honestly, it's not that I'm saying Pedantic or yourself are outright wrong about gamism, just that you're excluding important aspects and emphasizing others to a high degree in order to try to pound the square peg in the round hole. I'd much rather use a more indicative form of descriptions. I won't reiterate them all here, I've posted my shot at describing the most distinct classes of agendas several times already here.

Now, it would perhaps be interesting to have a, separate, discussion of the different elements of gamism and are there styles of play there with different emphases and design/play considerations. I'd assume that is not a topic for this thread.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To the contrary, I aim to render the term as meaningful as possible. If that necessitates reclaiming it, then so be it. Far from being descriptive of nothing, it exactly describes what crucially distinguishes ludonarrative from traditional narrative.

That asserted, there is a live debate around whether games are narrative. My sense is that game scholars have moved to a shared acceptance that at least some games are. The question is whether the concept of narrative is flexible enough to encompass author/audience experiences such as the journey through an action videogame? This is particularly acute for TTRPG, where it is hard not to describe the play in terms of a narrative around the table. IIRC a post-classical narratology venn-diagram places all TTRPG into the narrative side. (That's where I place it, too.)

Even were some games not narrative, playing to find out still describes them, and one can hardly argue that we are content with (or even count as) games that are perfectly deterministic from our perspective! This may be where we must agree to disagree, and each go on with our uses of PtFO.

Lets leave it at this: we each have somewhat different goals (agenda) in terms of what we are trying to accomplish. For my part it is compare and contrast the qualities and processes that differentiate different forms of play and understand how to utilize them. In order to do that I employ distinguishing characteristics, and playing purely to find out 'what happens', that is what narrative will arise out of play where the play is deliberately arranged so as to not prejudice that ahead of time, Narrativist play in GNS terms, is well-described by PtFO, which was invented by its practitioners as a phrase to explain the distinct sort of play that was being aimed at, and as a technique to achieve it.

It is far less useful, to me, to try to find all the possible ways I can reinterpret all the descriptions of things to fit all the other things (kinds of play). I'm going to find descriptions for those which highlight their most core elements and how those are distinct from others so that I can work with those distinctions. I don't even really care much about 'theory' or some sort of intellectual program. I play, I live in the world of RPG play, and a little game design. From that perspective I think you will find that your analysis of PtFO doesn't do us much good to be perfectly honest.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I offer the quote only for additional perspective, making no commitments to sharing the views of the author. It's possible that when they wrote it they were still in the mindset of many designers, awkwardly spatchcocking linear narrative into games. And it's equally possible that today, with further experimentation and observation, they have updated their understanding of narrative to ludonarrative.

Here's another perspective that could be helpful

...postclassical narratology is keenly interested in the part that readers and real-world experiences have to play in the co-poetic functioning of narrative and its narrativity—reconsidering the psychological and emotional iteractions between stories and audiences, and returning to the ancient debate between Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle regarding the status of narrative as mimesis.​

This gets at why I am counting all TTRPG into narrative (as in the ideal, ludonarrative.)

Sure, and I am not casting shade on anyone's academic study program, it's not my business TBH. I'd probably observe that looking at the human interaction/communication part, and the processes of play and how it all fits together is a more appealing approach to me than more abstruse philosophical debates which I am hardly qualified to comment on in the first place (I'll leave that to @pemerton if he's so inclined, lol).

 

[Pedantic]

There is no disagreement on that point. The actual debate was with Pedantic, who's line of argument was another attempt to construe PtFO to mean everything we all do in all RPG play, specifically using it to describe 'finding out' who wins. I argue this is, at best, a bad use for the phrase because gamists are not 'finding out' that, they are MUCH MORE ACCURATELY 'play to win' or at least 'play to demonstrate mastery/excellence'.

Woah, I am in the audience on that line of discussion. At the moment, I'm finding Clearstream's position more cogent, but I don't yet have a stance and certainly don't care to articulate an argument myself. You're absolutely projecting an agenda here.

Honestly, it's not that I'm saying Pedantic or yourself are outright wrong about gamism, just that you're excluding important aspects and emphasizing others to a high degree in order to try to pound the square peg in the round hole. I'd much rather use a more indicative form of descriptions. I won't reiterate them all here, I've posted my shot at describing the most distinct classes of agendas several times already here.

You've basically just asserted the same point that winning is the point, repeatedly, which does not align with my experience of gameplay, even competitive gameplaying, in or out of the TTRPG space, and I've resisted that characterization. Trying to win is a necessary precondition to play a game, but not the point of playing, and focusing on it as the underlying agenda is doing the whole thing a disservice.

 

[kenada]

My instant reaction to this text is to ask how a process, the dynamics of a game system, which is how it actually unfolds as an experience in play, can be an 'antagonist'. I don't even understand this in the most basic categorical sense, it is like talking about square circles.

There’s a discussion in DDE paper towards the end that’s worth reading. It’s similar to the discussion of “games as story machines”.

Then we go on to 'expectations of narratives' and it seems pretty clear that the writer is stuck in a trad mindset! He's talking about designers anticipating and creating, this is STORY BEFORE kind of thinking!

Now, I presume this is an intelligent person writing this, with at least pretensions to some degree of academic ability. So, I have to assume they are attempting to get at something. The last sentence, if I read 'antagonist' as basically 'the designer of the game's process' (which now throws light on the first sentence, he's actually talking about designers, not processes) we're again left with a fairly trad kind of statement.

The “antagonist” are the dynamics that emerge to oppose what DDE calls the “player-subject”. As the paper describes it, narrative emerges from the unique journey the player-subject experiences while playing the game. This is what usually we would call an “emergent story” (a series of events that can be recounted as a story). The paper acknowledges design-in narratives because they are very common in video games, so it would be malpractice not to do so, but he’s not limiting the discussion to static antagonists.

For example, a faction in Blades in the Dark has an agenda and a context in the setting. The GM is not supposed to use factions to tell a story. Factions are a source of problems and trouble for the PCs’ crew. As the players engage with the game, the GM creates clocks to track their progress towards some unwanted outcome for the players. These clocks also serve as a source of obstacles for the players because the players have to make decisions about which scores to pursue, and addressing a clock may require them to make sacrifices or trade-offs they may not otherwise want to make. In the paper’s parlance, factions are an antagonist.

When an implemented design is played, thus creating Dynamics, the design loses its static character​

and becomes at least partly driven by its mechanics: it becomes an agent of its own rules. If the​

designer thinks of this agent as a character, as the Antagonist of the Player-Subject, that perspective​

allows to comprehend the experience of playing a game as a single narrative (Walk, 2016).​

That lines up with my experience with Blades in the Dark. When we talk about our group’s play, we talk about how we dealt with these various problems — antagonists that stood in the way of our crew’s success. They were not scripted to do that. We didn’t say, “okay, there’s going to be this arc where Beaker does this and that with the Silver Nails, and it culminates in a total takeover.” That dynamic was an emergent property of our play as the mechanics were put into motion and resolved according to their rules. The paper is discussing the need to think about how these dynamics will create a satisfying, emergent story. It’s advice to designers about creating a successful design.

As there are certain expectations players have about narratives, good designers will anticipate those​

expectations when creating a narrative experience. If the Antagonist of a narrative does not fulfill​

that role, the narrative will be less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.​

The paper is addressing a general game design audience, but he is also addressing a gap in MDA, which does not incorporate narrative at all. It may be this is more obvious in the tabletop RPG space. Edwards takes it for granted in his Story Now essay that tabletop RPGs will produce a series of events that when compiled into a transcript will (usually) look like a story. (And it’s arguable that a framework aspiring to encompass the whole design process needs to consider this regardless of how obvious it may be.)

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.​

The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.​

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What is illuminated is that gamists normally want to engage with play they're interested in skillfully. Of course, they may always engage socially, jocularly, etc, but on the whole if time or ability prevent skillful engagement, they're unlikely to persevere. The same can be said of folk with any motivation.

I'm sure they do, and all I'm saying is that 'play to find out how skilled you are' is different enough contextually from 'play to find out what narrative arises from the juxtaposition of character, situation, and premise' that the 'PtFO' part is doing much different work there. It's not like they're COMPLETELY different, I agree, but focusing on that common bit isn't super helpful to me when I want to understand how each one works.

Lets think about things like this: Narrativist and Neo-Trad playing styles (to kind of confound two different analytical systems, so lets draw conclusions carefully) are said to share certain procedural and rules/structural elements. This is basically an observation, and I'm not of a mind to contest it, though lets keep an open mind either way. Anyway, the question then becomes whether the character/theme/premise exploration is of the same or different nature in each case. I think we both agree it is different, in at least some degree. So we would want to find descriptors for those differences so we can highlight the different ways in which you would use those shared elements to get these different play experiences.

I think that is what I have been aiming at in past posts about different agendas and trad/neo-trad/narrativist play, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

There’s a discussion in DDE paper towards the end that’s worth reading. It’s similar to the discussion of “games as story machines”.


The “antagonist” are the dynamics that emerge to oppose what DDE calls the “player-subject”. As the paper describes it, narrative emerges from the unique journey the player-subject experiences while playing the game. This is what usually we would call an “emergent story” (a series of events that can be recounted as a story). The paper acknowledges design-in narratives because they are very common in video games, so it would be malpractice not to do so, but he’s not limiting the discussion to static antagonists.

For example, a faction in Blades in the Dark has an agenda and a context in the setting. The GM is not supposed to use factions to tell a story. Factions are a source of problems and trouble for the PCs’ crew. As the players engage with the game, the GM creates clocks to track their progress towards some unwanted outcome for the players. These clocks also serve as a source of obstacles for the players because the players have to make decisions about which scores to pursue, and addressing a clock may require them to make sacrifices or trade-offs they may not otherwise want to make. In the paper’s parlance, factions are an antagonist.

When an implemented design is played, thus creating Dynamics, the design loses its static character​

and becomes at least partly driven by its mechanics: it becomes an agent of its own rules. If the​

designer thinks of this agent as a character, as the Antagonist of the Player-Subject, that perspective​

allows to comprehend the experience of playing a game as a single narrative (Walk, 2016).​

That lines up with my experience with Blades in the Dark. When we talk about our group’s play, we talk about how we dealt with these various problems — antagonists that stood in the way of our crew’s success. They were not scripted to do that. We didn’t say, “okay, there’s going to be this arc where Beaker does this and that with the Silver Nails, and it culminates in a total takeover.” That dynamic was an emergent property of our play as the mechanics were put into motion and resolved according to their rules. The paper is discussing the need to think about how these dynamics will create a satisfying, emergent story. It’s advice to designers about creating a successful design.

As there are certain expectations players have about narratives, good designers will anticipate those​

expectations when creating a narrative experience. If the Antagonist of a narrative does not fulfill​

that role, the narrative will be less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.​

The paper is addressing a general game design audience, but he is also addressing a gap in MDA, which does not incorporate narrative at all. It may be this is more obvious in the tabletop RPG space. Edwards takes it for granted in his Story Now essay that tabletop RPGs will produce a series of events that when compiled into a transcript will (usually) look like a story. (And it’s arguable that a framework aspiring to encompass the whole design process needs to consider this regardless of how obvious it may be.)

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.​

The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.​

Your explication works much better for me, thanks @kenada . So, it seems like we are to equate the 'antagonist' with 'dynamics' then 'dynamics' are not to be understood so much as 'the structure the process takes in play' and more 'the sequence of events depicted in play, and the associated 'clouds and arrows' game state.' Yes, the antagonist, in dramatic terms, must be located there. I think the NATURE of such antagonists would be a significant thing to look at, as it should correlate with agenda.

And yes, I know what RE said on the subject of narrative. I think, however, that a lot of the other stuff that was said in related discussions was about what would be entailed in making play most enjoyable/fulfilling and how did that, in the narrativist case, relate to this transcript and its character. What processes would best suit the different possible approaches to play.

 

[clearstream]

There’s a discussion in DDE paper towards the end that’s worth reading. It’s similar to the discussion of “games as story machines”.


The “antagonist” are the dynamics that emerge to oppose what DDE calls the “player-subject”. As the paper describes it, narrative emerges from the unique journey the player-subject experiences while playing the game. This is what usually we would call an “emergent story” (a series of events that can be recounted as a story). The paper acknowledges design-in narratives because they are very common in video games, so it would be malpractice not to do so, but he’s not limiting the discussion to static antagonists.

For example, a faction in Blades in the Dark has an agenda and a context in the setting. The GM is not supposed to use factions to tell a story. Factions are a source of problems and trouble for the PCs’ crew. As the players engage with the game, the GM creates clocks to track their progress towards some unwanted outcome for the players. These clocks also serve as a source of obstacles for the players because the players have to make decisions about which scores to pursue, and addressing a clock may require them to make sacrifices or trade-offs they may not otherwise want to make. In the paper’s parlance, factions are an antagonist.

When an implemented design is played, thus creating Dynamics, the design loses its static character​

and becomes at least partly driven by its mechanics: it becomes an agent of its own rules. If the​

designer thinks of this agent as a character, as the Antagonist of the Player-Subject, that perspective​

allows to comprehend the experience of playing a game as a single narrative (Walk, 2016).​

That lines up with my experience with Blades in the Dark. When we talk about our group’s play, we talk about how we dealt with these various problems — antagonists that stood in the way of our crew’s success. They were not scripted to do that. We didn’t say, “okay, there’s going to be this arc where Beaker does this and that with the Silver Nails, and it culminates in a total takeover.” That dynamic was an emergent property of our play as the mechanics were put into motion and resolved according to their rules. The paper is discussing the need to think about how these dynamics will create a satisfying, emergent story. It’s advice to designers about creating a successful design.

As there are certain expectations players have about narratives, good designers will anticipate those​

expectations when creating a narrative experience. If the Antagonist of a narrative does not fulfill​

that role, the narrative will be less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.​

The paper is addressing a general game design audience, but he is also addressing a gap in MDA, which does not incorporate narrative at all. It may be this is more obvious in the tabletop RPG space. Edwards takes it for granted in his Story Now essay that tabletop RPGs will produce a series of events that when compiled into a transcript will (usually) look like a story. (And it’s arguable that a framework aspiring to encompass the whole design process needs to consider this regardless of how obvious it may be.)

All role-playing necessarily produces a sequence of imaginary events. Go ahead and role-play, and write down what happened to the characters, where they went, and what they did. I'll call that event-summary the "transcript." But some transcripts have, as Pooh might put it, a "little something," specifically a theme: a judgmental point, perceivable as a certain charge they generate for the listener or reader. If a transcript has one (or rather, if it does that), I'll call it a story.​

The real question: after reading the transcript and recognizing it as a story, what can be said about the Creative Agenda that was involved during the role-playing? The answer is, absolutely nothing. We don't know whether people played it Gamist, Simulationist, or Narrativist, or any combination of the three. A story can be produced through any Creative Agenda. The mere presence of story as the product of role-playing is not a GNS-based issue.​

I felt you were expecting me to mention the absence of narrative from MDA up thread, where I was focused on moves made in the imagination and accepted into the shared fiction.

One story is the embedded story, created by the narrative designer; the other is the emergent story (or narrative journey) created by the sequence of challenges and other sensations emerging from the game dynamics (Grave, 2015). Emergence in games occurs when the rules of the game system define both the challenges and the tools players can use to solve these challenges – without pre-defining solutions. Emergence is thus usually supported by procedural generation or re-combination of game content, rules, and sometimes even whole levels.​

...​

The emergent, unanticipated gameplay of such games creates a unique journey for the Player-Subject; it is only repeatable if someone repeated the exact same sequence of orders to the game system at exactly the same time – and in case of randomly generated procedural contents it may not be repeatable at all. As a result the Player-Subject perceives himself or herself as the hero of this emergent journey, which is inevitably understood as a narrative. Both the embedded story and the player narrative have their dramatic arcs; both have their emotional content and sequence. However, if the two journeys fail to connect, the entire experience suffers from a weak, inconsistent Antagonist and the game will not deliver its full potential to the Player-Subject. Probably both stories will even be perceived as weak if they might have been good stories when viewed separately. The authors think that it is here where most game stories fail. What narrative designers usually lack is not knowledge about storytelling or dramaturgy, but knowledge about the game’s emergent Antagonist.​

Is that the part you are thinking of? Walk, Barrett and Gorlich (the authors) say some very interesting things there, I agree. I like your examples and thoughts on BitD. In TTRPG, system does not exhaustively define the tools players can use, although in most cases it does its best to translate whatever they come up with into something orthodox.

 

[clearstream]

Your explication works much better for me, thanks @kenada .

That should be unsurprising, seeing as I offered no explication

So, it seems like we are to equate the 'antagonist' with 'dynamics' then 'dynamics' are not to be understood so much as 'the structure the process takes in play' and more 'the sequence of events depicted in play, and the associated 'clouds and arrows' game state.' Yes, the antagonist, in dramatic terms, must be located there. I think the NATURE of such antagonists would be a significant thing to look at, as it should correlate with agenda.

I like your notion here that we should be able to discern antagonists (in the sense meant) of differing kinds or natures. Presumably they bear some relation to techniques.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I felt you were expecting me to mention the absence of narrative from MDA up thread, where I was focused on moves made in the imagination and accepted into the shared fiction.

One story is the embedded story, created by the narrative designer; the other is the emergent story (or narrative journey) created by the sequence of challenges and other sensations emerging from the game dynamics (Grave, 2015). Emergence in games occurs when the rules of the game system define both the challenges and the tools players can use to solve these challenges – without pre-defining solutions. Emergence is thus usually supported by procedural generation or re-combination of game content, rules, and sometimes even whole levels.​

...​

The emergent, unanticipated gameplay of such games creates a unique journey for the Player-Subject; it is only repeatable if someone repeated the exact same sequence of orders to the game system at exactly the same time – and in case of randomly generated procedural contents it may not be repeatable at all. As a result the Player-Subject perceives himself or herself as the hero of this emergent journey, which is inevitably understood as a narrative. Both the embedded story and the player narrative have their dramatic arcs; both have their emotional content and sequence. However, if the two journeys fail to connect, the entire experience suffers from a weak, inconsistent Antagonist and the game will not deliver its full potential to the Player-Subject. Probably both stories will even be perceived as weak if they might have been good stories when viewed separately. The authors think that it is here where most game stories fail. What narrative designers usually lack is not knowledge about storytelling or dramaturgy, but knowledge about the game’s emergent Antagonist.​

Is that the part you are thinking of? Walk, Barrett and Gorlich (the authors) say some very interesting things there, I agree. I like your examples and thoughts on BitD. In TTRPG, system does not exhaustively define the tools players can use, although in most cases it does its best to translate whatever they come up with into something orthodox.

Yeah, though I think RE touches on a significant point, that a 'transcript' as he calls it, lacks the full character of a story/narrative without some drama, that is without 'something special' and then he goes on in later discussions of narrativism, and game designs, to demonstrate what techniques and conditions might lead to reliably putting that something in place.

So Walk, Barrett, and Gorlich seem correct enough, in light of @kenada explicating it, but incomplete. That is, in terms of operationalizing it, you have to go something like Edwards where you get "and here's what gets you to the special something that differentiates mere transcript from narrative." I mean, there is also potentially the question of how you would marry preformulated story elements with emergent ones in the context of RPGs. VB's answer to that was "don't preformulate anything" but that MAY not be the only possible answer. IMHO techniques like sandboxes don't achieve it either though, so I'm not sure what would be a successful example. Maybe we could look at, some at least, of neo-trad play as doing that.