A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[FrogReaver]

Serious Question - why can't we have an rpg that is Simulationist, Gamist and Narrativist? I'm not seeing the hard lines there.

Also, why can't we design an RPG that is Simulationist if approached that way, Gamist if approached that way and Narrativist if approached that way? To me that seems the more natural state for most rpgs.

Or would ine way to better categorize things be -
All games have Simulationist, Gamist and Narrativist elements. So what about any given game is Simulationist? What about the game is Gamist? What about the game is Narrativist? It's the broad themes here that we would then classify games under.

 

[pemerton]

Serious Question - why can't we have an rpg that is Simulationist, Gamist and Narrativist?

Do you mean in what it is designed to support or in what it is capable of supporting, within reasonable tolerances?

In that case, 4e D&D is an example: there is ample actual play testimony on this board as to its support for narrativist play, and gamist play (especially a fairly "light" gamism of "showing off my cleverness in deploying my PC resources in this encounter here-and-now); and in this thread there has been discussion of how, if you dial down the opposition, it might support neo-trad (ie high concept sim).

(No way, no how is 4e D&D going to support purist-for-system simulationism.)

If you mean why can't play be simultaneously gamist, narrativist and simulationist? then my view is the same as Edwards: they're different things to be aiming at, and so to aim at one is therefore not to aim at the other. To put it fairly crudely, gamist play requires subordinating values to expedience; narrativist play requires being proactive about values; and simulationist play is defeated by being proactive about values.

And a particular illustration, focusing on the classic D&D paladin: when the alignment stuff is treated basically as a constraint on the means available to the player, in their pursuit of treasure and hence XP, we have gamist play and the paladin/honour/religion stuff is just a veneer; if the alignment stuff is foregrounded, and the player looks to definitions of alignment and to the GM's guidance to know how to play their PC, we have high concept sim and the player is no longer playing gamist, as they are not playing for the win with the GM as neutral referee; if you want narrativist paladins then the GM has to be taken out of the role of "playing god" and telling the player what honour and goodness demand (see eg DitV), and so there's no sim, and no gamism either given the player's focus is now on what does honour demand of my PC? rather than how can I beat the adventure and get the loot?

why can't we design an RPG that is Simulationist if approached that way, Gamist if approached that way and Narrativist if approached that way? To me that seems the more natural state for most rpgs.

As I posted, 4e D&D is an example. I've mentioned Agon 2e upthread as togglable, too. (I don't think it is very good for gamist play.)

Edwards gives examples of RPGs that toggle between gamism and narrativism: T&T, Champions, and Marvel Super Heroes.

Upthread I mentioned a purist-for-system simulationist approach to Classic Traveller. As I've posted often on these boards, with reference to actual play examples, I also think it requires only a small amount of drifting (and changing the approach to star map creation) to play Classic Traveller in a narrativist style drawing on PbtA techniques.

Or would ine way to better categorize things be -
All games have Simulationist, Gamist and Narrativist elements. So what about any given game is Simulationist? What about the game is Gamist? What about the game is Narrativist? It's the broad themes here that we would then classify games under.

I don't see this as very helpful, at least without some explanation of what is meant by these "elements".

S, G and N are ways of characterising approaches to play by reference to goals and desired experience. The very same elements (eg particular techniques) can support both. Eg The Rolemaster PC build and advancement rules were invented to support very detailed and gritty, purist-for-system, "realistic" PC creation. But I know from experience they can also support narrativist play: I have played a lot of vanilla narrativist Rolemaster, and the PC-build rules allowing players to use their PC skill development to provide "flags" as to the sorts of situations they want their PCs to be confronted by.

Like RM, Burning Wheel uses a very detailed and gritty skill list. So these elements are very similar. But it is intended to support narrativist play, and if the skill list and basic rules for setting obstacles were used, but all the other features that make for narrativist play abandoned, all you would have is a poxy version of RM (because the dice pools would make success against harder-than-average tasks crushingly hard, whereas RM uses linear d% further buffed by open-ended rolls).

I think it makes sense to look at how a given RPG system be used to support a particular creative agenda (S, G or N). But this is about the way various elements - techniques, mechanics, etc - come together, including informal aspects of that (eg informal currency rules or principles, such as those that are needed to make vanilla narrativist RM or PbtA-ish Classic Traveller work).

 

[pemerton]

I've mentioned Agon 2e upthread as togglable, too. (I don't think it is very good for gamist play.)

An extra thought on this: there is a competitive element among the players, both to be the best hero in a conflict; and to control the party's decision-making (either by winning the context of leadership, or by spending a Bond with the leader to have them agree to your advice).

But I'm not sure these are robust enough to be the principal focus of play. But am curious as to any thoughts from @AbdulAlhazred or @Manbearcat.

 

[niklinna]

If you mean why can't play be simultaneously gamist, narrativist and simulationist? then my view is the same as Edwards: they're different things to be aiming at, and so to aim at one is therefore not to aim at the other. To put it fairly crudely, gamist play requires subordinating values to expedience; narrativist play requires being proactive about values; and simulationist play is defeated by being proactive about values.

One thing I found interesting about playing Torchbearer (2) was that it was the first time I felt a game successfully supports—perhaps even demands—working with all three creative agendas. Not simultaneously, in the sense of a single unitary moment or action—but the game at some times calls for being proactive about values, and has mechanics to simulate how you might do that (along with other kinds of simulation), and the mechanics comprise a set of interlocking/interfacing systems that very much call for system mastery—that is, a gamist agenda.I felt that my enjoyment of Torchbearer 2 was very much due to the game demanding all three kinds of play, with a meta level even of how best to weave those three kinds of play together for the most satisfying experience.

Now, there are a lot of kinds of sim, and Torchbearer 2 doesn't hit all of them (that I'm not sure any single game could pull off!). But where it does do sim, it does it in a way I found pretty satisfying.

 

[pemerton]

One thing I found interesting about playing Torchbearer (2) was that it was the first time I felt a game successfully supports—perhaps even demands—working with all three creative agendas. Not simultaneously, in the sense of a single unitary moment or action—but the game at some times calls for being proactive about values, and has mechanics to simulate how you might do that (along with other kinds of simulation), and the mechanics comprise a set of interlocking/interfacing systems that very much call for system mastery—that is, a gamist agenda.I felt that my enjoyment of Torchbearer 2 was very much due to the game demanding all three kinds of play, with a meta level even of how best to weave those three kinds of play together for the most satisfying experience.

Now, there are a lot of kinds of sim, and Torchbearer 2 doesn't hit all of them (that I'm not sure any single game could pull off!). But where it does do sim, it does it in a way I found pretty satisfying.

So as you know, I'm a little bit of a Forge-ite about this stuff, so I'm going to respond to this provocative post from that perspective!

I agree with you that Torchbearer can toggle between gamist and narrativist play, and given your GM I'm not surprised that you had that experience! In my own GMing, the gamist element tends to be downplayed to form something like a "platform of urgency" for the (pretty light) narrativism - that reflects my own predilections, including my difficulties in driving home really hard consequences. (Which makes my gamism fairly soft.)

But I'm going to express doubt about the simulationism. Yes, Torchbearer sometimes has strongly "exploratory" elements - eg in some parts of PC build, and setting obstacles. But I think if, in Torchbearer, that ever becomes the focus of play then someone's foot has come off the accelerator: the GM is not pushing consequences, the grind has dropped away, Beliefs or Goals have been forgotten, etc.

The preceding paragraph is an instance of a thing Edwards does quite a bit in his essays - to distinguish between the importance of "exploration" (what Baker calls the fiction, the clouds, the imagination), which is there in all RPGing; and the making of it the focus as such. For instance:

Obviously the thing to do is to get as clear an understanding of "Exploration" as possible. It's our jargon term for imagining, "dreaming" if you will, about made-up characters in made-up situations. It's central to all role-playing, but in Simulationist play, it's the top priority. . . .

What's fun or good about that? Simulationist play looks awfully strange to those who enjoy lots of metagame and overt social context during play. "You do it just to do it? What the hell is that?"

However, contrary to some accusations, it's not autistic or schizophrenic, being just as social and group-Premise as any other role-playing. The key issues are shared love of the source material and sincerity. Simulationism is sort of like Virtual Reality, but with the emphasis on the "V," because it clearly covers so many subjects. Perhaps it could be called V-Whatever rather than V-Reality. If the Whatever is a fine, cool thing, then it's fun to see fellow players imagine what you are imagining, and vice versa. (By "you" in that sentence, I am referring to anyone at the table, GM or player.) To the dedicated practitioner, such play is sincere to a degree that's lacking in heavy-metagame play, and that sincerity is the quality that I'm focusing on throughout this essay.​

I think this passage describes what @clearstream is getting at with "neo-sim" and by reference to Eero Tuovinen on sim.

But I don't see that Torchbearer can have much of what this passage describes - metagame-free exploration - unless one or more participants have dropped the ball.

 

[Manbearcat]

An extra thought on this: there is a competitive element among the players, both to be the best hero in a conflict; and to control the party's decision-making (either by winning the context of leadership, or by spending a Bond with the leader to have them agree to your advice).

But I'm not sure these are robust enough to be the principal focus of play. But am curious as to any thoughts from @AbdulAlhazred or @Manbearcat.

Your instincts are on-point.

There is one other potential vector for Gamism in Agon; Glory (which, for those who aren't familiar, is basically "hero score"). But, because of the nature of the game-at-large, Glory doesn't "get there." @AbdulAlhazred played excellent, session-in-and-session-out, but he didn't come away with the highest Glory. I think he may have even come in 3rd of the 3 players? But that wasn't because he played worse than the others nor they better than he. It was a combination of (a) the lack of levers for skillful play (therefore not being able to really differentiate yourself in terms of skillfulness of play), (b) circumstance (which, in a game geared toward Gamism, will be overwhelmed by system and player input), and (c) the likely (it definitely materialized in our game) positive feedback loop of Glory attainment > Leadership > PC advancement.

I would say that the minimum requirements for effective (in design) Gamism would be the following:

* Clear goals, clear win/loss cons, as transparent a user interface as possible. When these things are obscured, the integrity of challenge-based play becomes increasingly put under duress. At a certain point, Gamism takes a dirtnap.

* You cannot have Gamism without an intensity of tactical decision-space. In order to achieve that, nearly all decision-points need to be able to be thoroughly weighed and they need to have a consequential weight to them, where both a clearly discernible fault line of "skillful play" and "unskillful play" emerge along with a spectrum of "least to most skillful play." In order to make that happen, system has to work in concert with GM to generate impactful situation-framing and consequence-foregrounding where choices facing players are multivariate from both "course charted/action undertaken" and "resource(s) allocated and deployed (to amplify a line of play, to broaden prospective lines of play, and to mitigate consequences when they manifest)."

* You can have Gamism without an intensity of strategic decision-space, but Gamism is more potent if strategic throughline is both present and potent rather than muted. Basically take the above for tactical and map a throughline to it where longterm play loops have that same quality of decision-space and considerations for those longterm loops (and feedbacks) are integrated with the tactical.

* Sufficient difficulty and (the right kind of) complexity to differentiate various levels of skillfulness in play.

Agon has the first bullet point. However, the second, third, and fourth just aren't present. There just isn't enough "there" there in terms of Gamism necessaries (by design). If the changes we discussed in the other thread were made, I still don't feel like it gets even close to a Gamist engine. It definitely veers more toward Narrativism rather than High Concept Sim (neotrad here) and probably completely so if all of those changes were made (and its trivial to just hack them in).

 

[clearstream]

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).

I would characterise it as difficult, or necessarily incomplete, rather than impossible, because imagined elements fall outside of the framework. This isn't a mystery unique to TTRPG or games, the audience response is always uncertain. Not hopelessly unguessable, but better described in terms of norms and probabilities, with acknowledgement of locally significant outliers.

 

[clearstream]

Why is Baker not allowed to use clear, plain English words to describe what distinguishes his RPG from many others?

Principally, because those words do not describe what distinguishes his RPG from many others. Rather, they emphasise what he wants you to do. In all RPG, when one is genuinely playing one is playing to find out. Neotrad shares Baker's desire that you indeed do that. Repositioning GM and centering players is not done to make players do the prep instead of GM, it's so you can play to find out.

Edwards passionately argued that for the narrativist, the story is not ludically-interesting unless one genuinely plays to find out. The premises are not addressed in the ideal way unless they are addressed through play itself.​

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For the gamist, the winning is not ludically-interesting unless one plays to find out. Mastery is not proven in an the ideal way unless it is proven through play itself.​

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For the simulationist, the subject appreciation is not ludically-interesting unless one plays to find out. Appreciation is not elevated in the ideal way unless it is elevated through play itself.​

Considering all that, I read play to find out less as description, than instruction.

You have to commit yourself to the game’s action’s own internal logic and causality, driven by the players’ characters. You have to open yourself to caring what happens, but when it comes time to say what happens, you have to set what you hope for aside.​

 

[clearstream]

@kenada Related obliquely to my above, your recent posts made me think about the DDE authors' notion of designed-narrative interacting or meshing with emergent-narrative to yield the experience. They echo remarks in a paper by Marie-Laure Ryan discussing games from a narratological perspective. Recollecting that narrative in this case includes a wide range of representations that signify elements of fiction, the parallels in TTRPG would include setting descriptions such as geography, culture, technology (equipment lists, for example), economy (coins, prices), etc., character archetypes, and even mechanics that communicate mundane and metaphysical notions.

In this light, I was contemplating what is actively disclosed in a game like Bushido, and what is ideally settled only through play. A very basic example is the weapons list. Every group I know of actively discloses the weapons list, which signifies a technology, of course, along with parameters that play out in combat mechanics, but even to some extent the cultural and political context. The emergent appreciation is to a small but detectable extent driven by such designed-narratives.

I don't yet know exactly where this leads, but the reason for adding it here is that it is of great interest what is designed and what is settled only in play.

EDIT Note I separated this out from the post above, which it was originally a postscript to.

 

[Emberashh]

You can summarize play to find out with the much less pretentious phrase "stop cheating and trust the game".

Also conveniently removes the allusion to emergent storytelling, which is definitely not what Bakers or Edwards games were conducive towards aside from the obligate improv inherent to them as RPGs.