A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's just not true. I spent years in competitive game communities, I have a weekly 4-6 hour game event, and I have a terrible win rate. We track it and everything, I am demonstrably the worst player by actual win rate. I'm certainly trying to win the weekly 18xx game, but I'm rarely actually doing it. Why do I keep coming back? Why do we keep trying different games with slightly different mechanics? Why am I more excited to play The Great Zimbabwe than Food Chain Magnate, even though the latter I am slightly more likely to win, based on historical context?

This isn't something I'm producing now, for this specific context! I've had this conversation and discussed this precise point with my regular board game group, utterly devoid of a TTRPG context. It doesn't take much introspection to realize the winning is less important than trying to win. I've used the same point to articulate preferences for some board games over others, and used the precise phrase "interesting board states" to general agreement.

[/QUOTE]
Not disputing any of that but you play to try to win and experience victory and defeat as a consequence of your play. It's not an exploratory agenda in any respect, really. That is very, fundamentally, different from what PtFO describes in the context of Narrativist play. Trying to shoehorn the same description on both is ideological, not an exercise in analysis. That's my point.

 

[FrogReaver]

Not disputing any of that but you play to try to win and experience victory and defeat as a consequence of your play. It's not an exploratory agenda in any respect, really. That is very, fundamentally, different from what PtFO describes in the context of Narrativist play. Trying to shoehorn the same description on both is ideological, not an exercise in analysis. That's my point.

I’m sorry, but Narrativist play doesn’t do victory and defeat?!!! What the heck are the dice for?

I’d suggest the bigger error is in the claim that narrativist play doesn’t care about victory and defeat. If it doesn’t then it seems awfully similar to a more complex shared story telling exercise.

 

[pemerton]

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.

GUMSHOE seems to be neotrad, in so far as it uses indie-ish, Robin Laws-designed mechanics to produce a CoC-type experience. It involves prep in a pretty classic fashion.

Fate seems to be a candidate for neotrad: it uses indie-ish mechanics (with compels and a fate point economy and zones and free-descriptor aspects) for a type of high concept sim experience. The prep is done by both GM and players, including the very important choice by players of their PCs' aspects, but (at least based on my reading) play is not quite as "pre-loaded" as GUMSHOE.

Agon 2e, which has been discussed in this thread as a possible neotrad vehicle, has prep for situation only, like DitV and unlike GUMSHOE. And that prep is by the GM, not the players. The players don't get involved until the signs of the gods, and that is play, not prep. But player decision-making about how to reveal their PCs, and the capacity of this decision-making to shape the story is where the neo-trad potential lies. And the actual mechanics of this, in a general fashion, resemble Fate: at crunch-time, the players have enough resources on their side (Bonds, Divine Favour, Pathos) that, by spending them, they can buff their dice pools and hence their action resolution results sufficiently strongly to swamp the risks of consequences; and that reliable swamping of the risks of consequences is what makes it not full-bloodedly narrativist. It's a bit less mechanical than Fate (extra dice is not the same as a guaranteed bonus), and the hoarding of points works a bit differently from Fate (Agon 2e doesn't really have an analogue to accepting low-stakes compels) but the general dynamic is comparable.

The preceding discussion has, hopefully, served two purposes:

*Games which would fall under the neo-trad descriptor vary in way they use prep - it can be very DL/CoC-ish trad; it can be DitV-ish prep for situation; it can be distributed across the players and GM;

*It reminds us that play to find out is intended to contrast with decide what happens in play. The slogan is not closely connected to prep at all, except that one method of deciding, as opposed to discovering, what happens in play is for the GM to make those decisions by reference to their prepared secret backstory.​

To elaborate on the second of the above two points:

A system like Fate, or like the mooted approach to Agon 2e, is not "play to find out" because the player doesn't have to find out - rather, at the moment of crunch they get to decide what happens to their PC. A system like GUMSHOE is not "play to find out" because the GM doesn't have to find out - rather, they simply have to read from their prep to tell the players what the important stuff is that their PCs discover and encounter.

Apocalypse World differs from this: the players can't decide, they have to discover (by rolling the dice at the moment of crunch), and the GM - even when drawing upon their prep (eg fronts) - is discovering, because the prep is related to the consequences of action resolution completely differently from how it is in GUMSHOE. It is a source of fictional elements, but the GM can't actually use it until the GM works out what will be interesting, or an opportunity, or a cost, or a spot - and those are revealed in the moment of play ("story NOW") by the choices that the players make.

And so, to reiterate: Baker uses "play to find out" with a specific meaning, very closely connected to his idea that "The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted". Neo-trad does not embrace it - the whole point of neo-trad is to reject the unwelcome, and rather to provide an experience of the arc as envisaged at the outset. Classic sim does not embrace it - the whole point of sim is to deliver the expected, so that it can be explored and appreciated. And gamism does not embrace it - a gamist player who experiences the unwelcome and unexpected has lost, not won! If it's too unexpected it may even have subverted the whole framework of competition.

 

[pemerton]

I’m sorry, but Narrativist play doesn’t do victory and defeat?!!! What the heck are the dice for?

The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted

 

[FrogReaver]

It’s not impossible, but it’s hard not to see some of those working at cross-purposes at least some of the time. Simulationism (in the old-school RGFA way) sometimes demands anticlimax, for example, which could work against both the game elements being interesting and the dramatic elements being satisfying.

It feel like you are overly boxing in the definitions. Every moment of a game doesn’t need those particular things to be sim or nar or gamist.

 

[FrogReaver]

The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted

Isn’t losing the ultimate unwelcome and unwanted?

 

[niklinna]

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.

To me that sounds like sim is necessarily exclusive of the other two agendas. There were definitely times I was just curious about the world we had going in Torchbearer 2, but the challenge-driven gamist parts and the values-driven narrative parts were part and parcel of that—precisely because the world was cold, harsh, challenging, and character-defining, I found those other facets of the game were a beautiful fit for sim exploration. I really can't pick one of the three agendas as primary overall in my experience of Torchbearer 2 (which also fits my understanding of Ron Edwards's earlier writings on how the agendas should be understood in relation to moments and not whole games or persons).

 

[pemerton]

Isn’t losing the ultimate unwelcome and unwanted?

But people don't play competitively hoping to lose. They play hoping (or at least trying) to win.

The point of the rules, in narrativist play, is to introduce elements and circumstances into the fiction that are compelling to the participants but that the participants would not choose, if playing simply via "writers' room" or what Baker calls "vigorous creative agreement".

As Baker puts it:

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.

If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise.​

(From here, with footnotes elided.)

That is what "playing to find out" means; and I think it's obvious why neo-trad is not this, and why gamism is not this. (Note that Baker does not say that gamist play is not RPGing, with its own purpose for having rules: gamist play is just not his concern.)

 

[Emberashh]

Should be reminded that GNS is more or less defunct, unless we're going with the nebulous intuitive interpretations rather than what was originally described by these terms, in which case it'd be pertinent to establish what people think of the terms in that regards.

Id instead, though, offer up the 3 Clusters:

It becomes pretty apparent why DND in particular is as popular as it is, at least insofar as what its design contributes to that status, as it readily hits on if not excels in all of these areas.

This incidentally also reveals where a lot of pain points can be coming from, given that the Immersion cluster is seemingly polarized from things like challenge and competition. A game that seeks to appeal to players motivated by these disparate elements needs to address the friction that can result between the two.

 

[Campbell]

So, the full context of play to find out is we play to find out what happens. That means everyone at the table (especially the GM) approaches the game with curiosity and does not try to nudge or push the narrative outcome in a specific direction. It's basically the same formulation as Monsterhearts' keep the story feral. There are definitely more traditional models of play I believe count as we play to find out what happens, but certainly not all. GM storytelling or players specifically targeting a character arc they have in mind before play certainly do not, but counting here is not a meaningful judgement. The collaborative storytelling of a typical L5R 5e (one of my favorite games) campaign is specifically not about playing to find out what happens.