A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[clearstream]

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.

Aside from my mandatory resistance to your HO on sandboxes, I feel it's important to bear in mind that RE was focused on dramatic protagonism. Not for example lyricism. We're used to being engaged by conflict, but we can be engaged by journeys, gatherings, and reflection. Most videogame design for that matter is conflict design.

One reason I listed the pairings for neo- above (whether or not we're sold on taxonomies) was to make progress on picturing where in the ideal each couplet will land. What games might best represent each (assuming in each case that there are such games.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Aside from my mandatory resistance to your HO on sandboxes, I feel it's important to bear in mind that RE was focused on dramatic protagonism. Not for example lyricism. We're used to being engaged by conflict, but we can be engaged by journeys, gatherings, and reflection. Most videogame design for that matter is conflict design.

One reason I listed the pairings for neo- above (whether or not we're sold on taxonomies) was to make progress on picturing where in the ideal each couplet will land. What games might best represent each (assuming in each case that there are such games.)

Well.... if you, say, look at 'TV' shows you find that the OVERWHELMING majority of all material is aimed in a dramatic direction. I agree that there are other possible modes though. I mean, "The Good Place" is a beautiful example of a narrative focused primarily on non-dramatic elements. It is worth noting however that it STILL has a significant element of protagonism and a story which evolves partly due to the opposing agendas and natures of the various characters. Still, the major thrust is on explication of philosophical and meta-physical points related to moral concepts.

Honestly, I think it is very consonant with a lot of what RE is talking about, albeit in a very different medium and thus not entirely relevant. I think a lot of RPG play in narrativist style hinges on these sorts of things. Its perfectly possible to consider 'lyrical play' for example in terms of narrativism! Lets look at, for example, The Dying Earth RPG, which is NOT narrativist in form. I think applying narrativist techniques to this sort of whimsical fantasy, where the goal is evoking these feelings of the arbitrary capricious nature of things, etc. is prominent is quite feasible using narrativist techniques. You will need to deploy the proper 'machinery' and correctly formulate the agenda and principles of play, but I could QUITE EASILY see a PbtA which successfully evoked Vance's work. I doubt I'd be clever enough to design it, even with an understanding of PbtA in general, but I think its quite possible and falls within the narrativist wheelhouse.

 

[kenada]

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.

I’ve mostly checked out of this discussion, but it seemed like there was a misunderstanding of what Walk was trying to say in @AbdulAlhazred’s response, so I added some clarifying content.

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?

That’s part of the section from which I quoted, but I didn’t want to cite the whole thing. It didn’t seem really important to the reply I was making when I could summarize it with key quotes. I linked the paper, so an interested reader could review it if they wanted.

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.

I don’t agree with this statement. If a designer chooses to make resolution open-ended or allow for considerable customization, then that should follow from the intended dynamics. Otherwise, it would be impossible to reason about the design of tabletop RPGs (because there would be elements that always fall outside of the framework).

 

[kenada]

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.

The paper is proposing a framework, so that’s not surprising. It’s outside the scope of what it’s proposing to go heavy into application. I’ve said a few times I think there is tabletop RPG theory that can be reconciled with it. For something like mixing static and emergent narratives, I think the way to approach it would be to enumerate just what dynamics you want your game to have, then look at what designs would support it.

The original MDA paper mentions “systematic coherence” in passing but doesn’t really go into it in any detail. The implication is that if a design cannot be constructed to reconcile conflicting dynamics, such a game would (presumably) be lacking “systematic coherence”. I take that to mean that playing can result in experiencing the wrong dynamics, which creates the wrong experiences.

Whether that’s the case in this situation, I don’t know. I presume that such a design is possible, and that it could look different from existing designs. Of course, it may be there are existing designs that provide the desired dynamics, so then obviously it’s possible. I just haven’t done the work. If one wants to call the result “neotrad”, that seems fine as long as it agrees with the common understanding people already have of it. Otherwise, I’d give it a new name or just let people who play those games come up with one (as usually happens in video games).

 

[pemerton]

I agree with you that it was high time to repudiate pre-planned storylines

There must be some misunderstanding, as I don't think it is "high time" to repudiate pre-planned storylines. My post was not about what should be done in RPGing - there are many things that can be done in RPGing, and clearly pre-planned storylines remain very popular (eg Wotc APs). I was pointing out that a particular game text (Apocalypse World) repudiates them; and that the phrase "play to find out" is part of the language in which that repudiation is expressed.

Yes, it is time to find new terminology. Or better yet, to cast the light of PtFO over the whole of roleplaying. Because the implication that those with other creative motives aren't interested in playing to find out denies the validity of their engagment with game. One can immediately see how unreasonable the implied predeterminism is: that they know already everything important to them about how it will go down, and are playing to find out nothing at all.

As I posted, by ignoring what Baker meant by the phrase - that is, he was using to signal a contrast with pre-planned storylines - and by using it to describe all RPGing (including DL? Dead Gods?) - all that is achieved is obfuscation. To what end? Why is Baker not allowed to use clear, plain English words to describe what distinguishes his RPG from many others?

I recently noticed the following by Wolfgang Walk, producer and narrative designer, and one of the authors of DDE (an update to MDA)

If a designer thinks of the dynamics of a game system as the antagonist of the player-subject, that perspective allows the designer to comprehend the whole experience of playing a game as a narrative. Yes, there are certain expectations we have about narratives, and good designers will anticipate those expectations when creating a great narrative experience. If the antagonist of a narrative doesn’t fulfil that role, the narrative will be boring, or at least less interesting than it might have been, and it may even fall apart.​

Walk isn't talking about shooting games or driving games or adventure games, he's talking about all videogames.

<snip>

Game is narrative, albeit a new form of narrative.

I mean, I can also describe tying up my shoelace as a narrative - the untied laces are the antagonist, I as protagonist confront them, the story climaxes with my fingers knotting them, and then there is either a twist (the laces, being old and frayed, or even more unexpectedly, and hence dramatically, being poorly manufactured, snap!) or else a resolution and denouement (the laces are now tied, and my shoe snug around my foot, and I walk out of my house into the street).

Perhaps thinking of video game design through this lens is helpful for designers of those games - I don't know. But using this sort of language to obscure the difference between (on the one hand, say) the role played by Keraptis or the Ogre Mage (whose name I forget - does it start with Q?) in White Plume Mountain; or the role played by the GM's keeping track of the Ogre Mage's hp tally in a combat; and (on the other hand, say) the role played by Megloss or Lareth the Beautiful in my Torchbearer campaign, is utterly unhelpful. It does not help design of RPGs, it does not help GMs with their prep, and it does not help me describe or characterise my play to other RPGers.

Here is another illustration of unhelpfulness: central to narrativist, or "story now", RPGing is that the players choose the antagonists. Vincent Baker emphasises this in DitV: although the GM presents the situation, including the cast of NPCs, it is the players who choose how to respond and hence who choose, inter alia, who it is who is cast in the antagonist role. This sort of player choice is crucial, likewise, to Burning Wheel, to the extent that a good chunk of the PC build rules and the consequence rules (Beliefs, Relationships, Reputations, Affiliations, the Circles mechanic) are dedicated to addressing it. Torchbearer 2e is more equivocal on this than is BW, but I hope my actual play reports of my Torchbearer play illustrate how - as my group plays that game - it resembles Burning Wheel in this respect.

But of course no one, in saying that (say) Burning Wheel has, as a fundamental feature, the players choosing the antagonists, means that the players get to choose the mechanical game system or its dynamics. The proposition about BW is about how certain core elements of the fiction is established structured, not about how the resolution rules operate. Obscuring this fundamental contrast between BW and (say) a CoC module or a DL-ish adventure module, by saying that all RPGs are narratives and by co-opting the label of "antagonism" to describe the relationship of players to mechanics, rather than of players-via-their-PCs to certain other characters in the fiction, seems to me to achieve nothing and to obscure some of the most interesting differences in approaches to RPGing.

The unfortunate implication is that only N wants to focus on things the participants care about. Which is what we (or I at least) want to be just as true of G and S. The words here - "the focus is on the characters, and on things that the participants care about" - are wonderfully descriptive of neotrad play.

I didn't assert or imply an contrast between narrativism/"story now" and neotrad in the post to which you replied. To repost what I said, "The fact that the focus is on the characters, and on things that the participants care about, marks the difference from gamist play." Neotrad play is not gamist. As I already posted, it is high concept sim.

And gamist play is not focused on the characters or things the participants care about in the relevant sense. No one, playing White Plume Mountain, cares about Keraptis or about the giant crayfish in the inverted ziggurat, in the way that Vincent Baker aspires to have players of Apocalypse World care about their PCs, and the NPCs, and the relationships between them all. The crayfish is a means, not an end; Keraptis even more obviously so.

I mean, perhaps there is one person somewhere in the world who read Warlock of Firetop Mountain not with the goal of playing and winning, but simply for the literary pleasure of it, but I'm yet to meet that person. Trying to argue that caring about whether you win or lose the fight with the Orcs is the same as caring about the fates of certain characters; or the same as having a view about the demands of loyalty, which then determines how you declare actions for your character, is in my view ridiculous. It simultaneously purports to elevate that which no one wants to (WoFTM as a work of literature!) and to deny or devalue things that are of great importance (the "problematic features of human existence" that - as Edwards puts it - are at the core of narrativist play).

CODA:
It seems like it might be useful to requote some Edwards, from the above-linked essay and also here:

There cannot be any "the story" during Narrativist play, because to have such a thing (fixed plot or pre-agreed theme) is to remove the whole point: the creative moments of addressing the issue(s). . . .

The key to Narrativist Premises is that they are moral or ethical questions that engage the players' interest. The "answer" to this Premise (Theme) is produced via play and the decisions of the participants, not by pre-planning. . . .

Depth and profundity of the Premise and/or theme are false variables. The key issue is whether participants care enough to produce a point, not whether the point is deep. . . .

In Simulationist play, morality cannot be imposed by the player or, except as the representative of the imagined world, by the GM. Theme is already part of the cosmos; it's not produced by metagame decisions. Morality, when it's involved, is "how it is" in the game-world, and even its shifts occur along defined, engine-driven parameters. The GM and players buy into this framework in order to play at all.

The point is that one can care about and enjoy complex issues, changing protagonists, and themes in both sorts of play, Narrativism and Simulationism. The difference lies in the point and contributions of literal instances of play . . .​

The discussion of religion and morality, and their role in play, found in the DitV rulebook, is practically a hymn to that final paragraph: Baker stresses again and again that the game - neither in its mechanics, nor in the GM's prep - provides no answer to the moral questions that are raised by the framing of the game, and by the GM's operationalisation of that framing in their prep of a town. This is what makes it narrativist. Contrast, say, The Green Knight, in which players have to identify honourable and dishonourable actions in order to preserve or even buff their PCs for the final confrontation. That is what makes The Green Knight simulationist.

What about Agon 2e? Players succeed or fail, in part, on how they please the gods. But this is determined not by reference to GM pre-planning, but by reference to the players' own reading of the GM's "signs of the gods" at the start of each island. This is an "indie" technique. By default - and as I have experienced the play of Agon 2e - it supports narrativist lay. @Manbearcat has recently argued that Agon 2e can support neotrad play, though, because the players - having interpreted the signs of the god - can then make it all come true, due to insufficiently robust mechanical opposition on the Strife (=GM side).

If I was interested in design that tried to incorporate "indie" techniques in the service of "trad" (ie fundamentally simulationist) rather than narrativist RPGing experiences, I would be looking closely at The Green Knight, at a togglable game like Agon 2e, as well as at GUMSHOE, Fate and some of the other more usual suspects. I don't see how it at all advances this inquiry to try and coopt all terminology so as to make it impossible to draw contrasts between different sorts of RPG experiences.

 

[pemerton]

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.

All that is meant, as I see it, is that the player confronts the dynamics as the thing that is in their way to completing/succeeding at the game.

In GNS terms, it is identifying the "narrative" character of gamist play. As I've just posted, I think that, in the context of RPGing, it is not a very compelling metaphor.

 

[pemerton]

There's certainly a sense in which we do EVERYTHING WE DO "to find out SOMETHING" but I hope you can see how it becomes descriptive of nothing when used that way?

I left my house today, looked around me, and even looked both ways before crossing the road. I observed the world to create new knowledge. I'm a scientist!

 

[pemerton]

If I tell you that you can 'join' but you will be marked as losing every game, is yours? I mean, what does 'join' mean at this point? This isn't a type of argument that can fly. Games have rules, if we are not playing BY those rules we are not playing!

So, this is reminding me of some standard moves in analytic philosophy.

"The reason a gamist plays games is to win."

"OK, so suppose we create a record that attributes wins to them, regardless of their play, aren't they getting what they want?"

"No, they don't just want wins to be notched on their belts; they want to win by playing"

"Then why do some gamists cheat?"

. . . <conversation continues, perhaps without ever reaching an agreed resolution>​

I've got no objection to this in principle - doing analytic philosophy is one part of my day job!

But I think we need to recognise that it's not what Edwards and Baker are doing. They are not trying to identify a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for someone, or their RPG play, to count as gamist (or narrativist, or simulationist, or neotrad for that matter).

They are trying to characterise some broad patterns of RPG play that are suggested by observation; and to use that characterisation to provide some guidance in design - at least to point the way to certain possible techniques, identify some relationships between allocations of authority and achieving different sorts of satisfaction, etc.

This method is not philosophical; it falls broadly within what I would call interpretivist social science.

When it comes to gamist RPGing, we make little progress in design and satisfactory play by abstract debates about what counts as winning. The point is that a game which doesn't either expressly establish measurable ways of doing well (eg classic D&D's XP system), or permit such ways to emerge (eg munchkin-ish play of 3E D&D, based around building OP PCs that can roflstomp standard encounters), will not be very satisfactory for gamist play. An example: a typical CoC module played with typical CoC characters.

Of course CoC can be drifted to a game involving body armour, bazookas and blowing up shoggoths (is this Delta Green? I've heard of it but don't know that much about it). Then we get gamist CoC. But it adds nothing to analysis to pretend that this is no different from playing through (say) the Vanishing Conjurer: it's taking the core of the game, allowing a measurable way of doing well to emerge, and then playing to that new thing.

 

[pemerton]

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.

So, in the quote we have metaphor:

If the designer thinks of this agent - ie the dynamics whereby the design loses its static character - as a character, as the antagonist of the player-subject, that perspective allows comprehension of the experience of playing a game as a single narrative.​

In BitD play, we have literalness:

Various faction stood in the way of the crew's success - they were the antagonists to the crew and its members as protagonist and protagonists.​

The move between the metaphorical and the literal is, in my view, not irrelevant to understanding RPGing. In the metaphorical sense, Baker's cubes provide antagonism. But in the literal sense, antagonism in RPGing is located within Baker's clouds. How these are related is important to RPG design and resultant experience - eg does the dragon have the right sort of stats, given the system's game play, both to "feel like" a dragon (ie to give rise to the correct clouds) while also providing sufficient mechanical antagonism (ie to give rise to the correct cubes). A good discussion of this issue, in my view, is BW's Monster Burner.

It's not uncommon to read about RPG experiences where this cloud-cube relationship didn't work. And it's also quite common to read defences of those failures from a sim perspective (eg "occasional or even frequent anti-climax is realistic).

We can't understand any of these real features of RPG design and play and experience, if we just glom over everything with a generic all games produce narrative including antagonism.

 

[pemerton]

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.​

This is very obviously true for story now, and for high-concept sim.

Gamism with the "little something" will flow from how the contests are framed. D&D is quite good at this, especially with a bit of editing: the valiant heroes, despite the trials they face, overcome their adversaries and win the treasure!

It's probably most interesting for purist-for-system. Either the system needs to introduce the "little something" in itself - On (honour) rules from Bushido might be an example - or perhaps the "little something" creeps in via those parts of play that are not governed by system, like GM framing of scenes/adversaries.

Probably the purist-for-system engine least likely to produce a little something would be pawns-and-spreadsheets random-patron plus trader-and-cargo Traveller; which by also, and by no coincidence is, in my view, one of the more boring RPG experiences on offer.