A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well now, that depends on if one considers retiring or becoming part of the system to be a victory! I certainly took my character Skewth into any fraught situation in our Blades campaign with his goal of coming out on top relative to his skewed perception of the world (hence his name), and I did everything I could as a player to ensure that.

As with Torchbearer, one of the things I really like about Blades in the Dark is how it makes narrative & gamist agendas work in relay or tandem, again depending on point of view. Now, I do not recall feeling during our campaign that it was particularly heavy on sim (as compared to Torchbearer, and for what should be similar reasons). I find that interesting and might want to put some time in considering why.

Yeah, BitD has less structure to its rules. TB2 embeds pretty much all of what you do in some sort of larger rules structure. You are in 'town phase' or 'on a leg of a journey', or 'adventuring' and there are somewhat different rules (sometimes very different) for each one. BitD has 'info gathering', 'score', and 'downtime', but a lot of what you are doing in those is pretty similar. I mean BitD downtime is more freeform than the other two, but clocks and resources, etc. are all in play in all of them pretty much the same. In TB2 the phases are much more distinct, and then even if you are in a conflict in TB2 the rules for that are considerably more constraining and abstract. So TB2 feels more 'gamist' because there is more 'game' to it, and maybe that also contributes to a 'sim' feel? I don't think either game is very sim though.

But in terms of Skewth wanting to come out on top, I get you, Takeo was trying to survive and achieve his goals too. It was just 'narrative sense' that lead to the whole escalating cycles for our crew. It was no whim either, the game, the situation, the characters, it DREW us into the story, it was truly emergent! I had no idea what would happen, one thing just lead naturally to another, and the game part, all the clocks and wars and turf etc. had a big hand in it. That part definitely has some gamist aspect, but fundamentally I felt it was really there just to turn the screws, to pressurize the situation sort of how threats do in AW.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Issue with that is that the games that adhere to the idea are still bound by the same kinds of storytelling; they just offload it onto the rules system, with may be some allowance for improv to tie all the bits together.

You can't really play a game expecting a story to happen as part of it and not have something or someone doing some storytelling.

In a lot of ways I keep seeing games like this as games that were designed to come off like they're emergent experiences, and are certainly pitched that way, when they're the exact opposite. Outside of the requisite improv (aka roleplaying) that is.

You could not be further off the mark. The play of that Blades game with the Wayward Souls Crew, NOTHING was 'storytelling' in anything like the sense you seem to be implying. The ENTIRE story was fully emergent from start to finish. @Manbearcat ran it, and @niklinna and @kenada played, along with Jon. We all created our characters in isolation (AFAIK, certainly they weren't created as a 'cast' with any 'show' in mind, I guess maybe the other players bounced ideas off each other, but I don't think they did, honestly). I certainly had no idea what others were doing, except they each mentioned playbooks they were looking at and I picked one nobody else had mentioned. I don't think I even had any idea what the crew type was going to be until we started. Same with backstory and whatnot, I just made something up that sounded like it would be fun.

All play was unplanned chaos basically. MBC threw stuff at us that was derived 99.5% from our own choices combined with stock BitD milieu. Frankly you could never produce anything even 1/10th as good as what happens in BitD if you just play the game as it is intended. It is rich in potentiality for 'stuff to go down', and as soon as anything kicks off it starts clocks spinning and puts fiction in motion. But the interactions of the parts, coupled with dice and curveballs like players asking for Devil's Bargain at all kinds of crazy moments, etc. means it cannot be contained to a path. I mean, you'd have to completely mangle play to get a result that was 'told as a story'. Drama arises and the end result IS an interesting tale, but its not something you could curate, at all.

Trust me on this, I've run and played 10's of thousands of hours of RPGs, I know what I'm talking about here.

 

[Emberashh]

We all created our characters in isolation (AFAIK, certainly they weren't created as a 'cast' with any 'show' in mind, I guess maybe the other players bounced ideas off each other, but I don't think they did, honestly). I certainly had no idea what others were doing, except they each mentioned playbooks they were looking at and I picked one nobody else had mentioned.

Yes, thats what roleplaying is. I didn't say RP couldn't result in an emergent story.

I mean, you'd have to completely mangle play to get a result that was 'told as a story'

What do you believe storytelling is?

I'll take from Wikipedia:

Storytelling is the social and cultural activity of sharing stories, sometimes with improvisation, theatrics or embellishment. Every culture has its own stories or narratives, which are shared as a means of entertainment, education, cultural preservation or instilling moral values. Crucial elements of stories and storytelling include plot, characters and narrative point of view. The term "storytelling" can refer specifically to oral storytelling but also broadly to techniques used in other media to unfold or disclose the narrative of a story.

Improvisation is the key word in that definition as it relates to RPGs.

Important to note here too, regarding your stated examples, that presumably your character wasn't a blank automaton. They likely had a name, some amount of personal history, and probably other characteristics.

Thats storytelling.

Blades in the Dark is, as we all know, fundamentally about undeground criminals or otherwise seedy types doing jobs in a vaguely Victorian England setting, noted for having a specific design towards emulating narrative elements of the film Ocean's Eleven.

That is all storytelling. You can't play Blades in the Dark and not fall into any of these elements without fundamentally breaking the game's rules. You're required to tell stories, you cannot just play it.

Clocks in particular are a massive storytelling mechanic, given they aren't actually Clocks but a countdown to a new narrative beat.

And meanwhile, as an RPG, all of these elements are interacting with improv, aka roleplaying, and those mechanics are fundamentally whats allowing whatever emergent story could be said to be happening.

Which makes sense, as thats the entire point of that activity, but that doesn't mean the other part of the game isn't doing any storytelling.

That it does is the entire point; BITD and is progenitor aren't systemic, mechanic driven games, and so they'd have no point being anything further than freeform roleplay if they weren't injecting bespoke storytelling into the roleplay.

Case in point, heres a random screengrab from some sort of blades document I had on my phone:

This under the Action Roll. All results here are fundamentally about storytelling, whether thats you the player doing it or the game doing it for you and expecting you to fill in the rest.

And mind, this isn't being pointed out as a criticism, we just have to be honest about what this is.

This is a variable, dice-based prompt. An unambiguous success grants practically full leeway to the Player, and the remaining results offer prompts to act upon instead to modify the intended action, with additional integrated mechanical triggers to offer up different prompts, revolving around the Position/Effect framework.

You the Player are expected to adhere to Yes,And and act accordingly with these prompts. You the Player are fundamentally telling a story by engaging this.

Its a small microcosm of a story, merely a fleeting moment in a larger narrative, but it is still a story being told. It just might not feel like it because you don't have a choice but to do it, and because it does the heavy lifting. Climbing up and down Position is a decent enough feedback loop, but it isn't fostering emergence, the improv is.

This, as it happens, is why these games collapse completely if you strip away all this assumption of narrative (aka strip away the improv), and thats not really a good thing for a game whose mechanics we want to say are fostering an emergent story. Blades didn't invent improv.

 

[pemerton]

My feeling in that TB2 game we did was more a combination of gamist and narrativist play. The sucker is HARD, if you want to stay alive, you MUST play well, this is a game that has no easy mode! The grind is TRYING TO KILL YOU and it WILL unless you defeat it. Doing that requires careful consideration of exactly where to deploy your inadequate resources, and skillfully building up currency and advancing skills, AND at the same time getting experience (fate/persona) while avoiding excessive conditions (damage). Its ALSO Narrativist in that your character has strong flags, a nature, beliefs, instinct, etc. which both you and the GM can, and will, test and probably change over time in response to outcomes.

Yes, it has a geographical exploration component as well, which feeds the gamist and narrativist parts fictionally (IE by explaining why you are about to die and giving you a chance to test yourself and see what happens). Not that pure exploration is unimportant, but there's basically no politics, history, etc. that is worth much to explore, its all ruins, ice, and nasties. The world never surprises you, it's ugly a brutal from start to finish! Even the TOWN is ugly and brutal, and you can easily die there too!

I don't think my Torchbearer is quite as scarring as @Manbearcat's!

 

[pemerton]

@AbdulAlhazred

You seem to be debating with someone who is invisible to me. But what you say about BitD fits with my own experience of Burning Wheel and Torchbearer. And even Prince Valiant and Classic Traveller.

There is no "telling of a story". There is the introduction of fictional elements and situations, done in accordance with the game's express and implied methodologies. And then things just explode from there.

I mean, no amount of in-advance curation would have got the scene in my Torchbearer campaign in which the NPC Gerda stabs the PC Fea-bella through the heart, thereby not killing Fea-bella (she had the will to live), but rather purging her of the curse that has her lusting for the Elfstone; then the NPC Megloss kills Gerda, incinerating her with the Flames of the Shroud, to take the Elfstone from her (having been promised first pick of the jewels by the PC, as the price of having him join them); then the PC Golin kills Megloss, to avenge the death of his friend Gerda, but not before Megloss almost kills the PC Korvin (who also had the will to live). And then all the PCs, rather sobered, leave Gerda's apartment while the Eflstone lies on the floor, in the pile of ash that once was Gerda, waiting to be found by an unsuspecting visitor . . .
Or the PCs being run out of the Forgotten Temple Complex because Golin got shanghaied into joining the Void Kult, then being pursued by a Troll Haunt through the Troll Fens until they confuse it with a riddle ("Whose keys do I have in my pockets?"), then reaching an alliance with a Dire Wolf from the Moathouse, only to find themselves taken prisoner by the Moathouse bandits, but then forming an alliance with Lareth the Beautiful on the basis that he and Fea-bella are half-siblings.

I think equating this sort of thing to "trad" storytelling-based RPGing, or to the sort of curation characteristic of "neo-trad", is to completely misdescribe it.

 

[niklinna]

You could not be further off the mark. The play of that Blades game with the Wayward Souls Crew, NOTHING was 'storytelling' in anything like the sense you seem to be implying. The ENTIRE story was fully emergent from start to finish. @Manbearcat ran it, and @niklinna and @kenada played, along with Jon. We all created our characters in isolation (AFAIK, certainly they weren't created as a 'cast' with any 'show' in mind, I guess maybe the other players bounced ideas off each other, but I don't think they did, honestly). I certainly had no idea what others were doing, except they each mentioned playbooks they were looking at and I picked one nobody else had mentioned. I don't think I even had any idea what the crew type was going to be until we started. Same with backstory and whatnot, I just made something up that sounded like it would be fun.

All play was unplanned chaos basically. MBC threw stuff at us that was derived 99.5% from our own choices combined with stock BitD milieu. Frankly you could never produce anything even 1/10th as good as what happens in BitD if you just play the game as it is intended. It is rich in potentiality for 'stuff to go down', and as soon as anything kicks off it starts clocks spinning and puts fiction in motion. But the interactions of the parts, coupled with dice and curveballs like players asking for Devil's Bargain at all kinds of crazy moments, etc. means it cannot be contained to a path. I mean, you'd have to completely mangle play to get a result that was 'told as a story'. Drama arises and the end result IS an interesting tale, but its not something you could curate, at all.

Trust me on this, I've run and played 10's of thousands of hours of RPGs, I know what I'm talking about here.

We weren't playing Blades in the Dark as it is intended?

 

[pemerton]

We weren't playing Blades in the Dark as it is intended?

I think the intended parsing is *Frankly you could never produce [by trad means] anything even 1/10th as good as what happens in BitD if you just play the game as it is intended.

 

[niklinna]

My feeling in that TB2 game we did was more a combination of gamist and narrativist play. The sucker is HARD, if you want to stay alive, you MUST play well, this is a game that has no easy mode! The grind is TRYING TO KILL YOU and it WILL unless you defeat it. Doing that requires careful consideration of exactly where to deploy your inadequate resources, and skillfully building up currency and advancing skills, AND at the same time getting experience (fate/persona) while avoiding excessive conditions (damage). Its ALSO Narrativist in that your character has strong flags, a nature, beliefs, instinct, etc. which both you and the GM can, and will, test and probably change over time in response to outcomes.

Yes, it has a geographical exploration component as well, which feeds the gamist and narrativist parts fictionally (IE by explaining why you are about to die and giving you a chance to test yourself and see what happens). Not that pure exploration is unimportant, but there's basically no politics, history, etc. that is worth much to explore, its all ruins, ice, and nasties. The world never surprises you, it's ugly a brutal from start to finish! Even the TOWN is ugly and brutal, and you can easily die there too!

I wasn't talking just about geographical exploration, that was just one example, but of the whole experience of navigating a world that is, as you said, trying to kill you (often including the towns) and you have to make hard decisions all the time, about everything. All the mechanics simulate that quite very well indeed, contributing to that feel—yes I'll use the dirty word, "immersion". At no time did I feel that calculating Obs, or rolling dice, or deciding to swing toward failing a test in order to get a check, broke me out of the pressure of being in that world, because all of those things were putting the pressure on!

 

[pemerton]

I wasn't talking just about geographical exploration, that was just one example, but of the whole experience of navigating a world that is, as you said, trying to kill you (often including the towns) and you have to make hard decisions all the time, about everything. All the mechanics simulate that quite very well indeed, contributing to that feel—yes I'll use the dirty word, "immersion". At no time did I feel that calculating Obs, or rolling dice, or deciding to swing toward failing a test in order to get a check, broke me out of the pressure of being in that world, because all of those things were putting the pressure on!

What you describe here is similar to my experience in playing Burning Wheel. In Edwards's framework I think this is the "exploratory chassis" for gamism (or narrativism).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't know, I don't think dice rolling necessitates a victory / defeat scenario.

To put forward my rough understanding of GNS stuff, based on these threads, and using what is probably an awful analogy, Game of Life:

Game of Life as it stands is very much gamist, with a lot of RNG, but have choices for how long you may go through some segments to try and get best outcome (go to college or straight into work, get married or not), but end of the day it is measured by total dollars as to who wins, and can strive for that and see how well you do, how poorly the dice treat you as such, but there are number of decision points that as you know the game better, you can make a better informed decision to improve your chances.

If take away the winning conditions, instead allow players to go through it with trying to go for a story they want (e.g. want to go through college, have a family, or the like) and see how well they do in achieving their goal (do they graduate?), then it becomes more narrativist it seems, with the spinner etc allowing them to see how they fare, do they get twins or not? etc. Yes more story telling, but allowing the game to drive finding out what happens / how the story occurs as such.

It would need drastic changes to make it simulationist I think, maybe put time bounds on it in, along with life expectancy stuff, potentially more career options with salary changes, certain careers more likely to be made redundant etc, and then spinner used less and more for % sort of chances as required (and maybe spin for various things at start of each turn - chance of redundancy, chance of death, chance of divorce).

Doesn't translate fully to TTRPG to my mind, but illustrates some of the differences I see.

I think your analogy is not bad. The only place I would add something is that in Narrativist TTRPG play there is a premise to be addressed (maybe one or more per PC, but generally there's a kind of overall premise too). This is not 'make an interesting story', its address some question of existence, examine some aspect of life in some what. Like in BitD there's a core "us against the system" sort of thing. Are you really against the system? How serious is that? Will you settle for a comfortable existence? Is your nature as a criminal fundamentally opposed to a happy life? What about your crew, are you loyal? There's lots of questions that can play out, some being overriding themes, others mere momentary observations. That doesn't really exist in the Game of Life. I mean, there's a hint of the question of "is all of life really just a game?" but, as the game is constituted, you never deal with it. I'd think the game might get more interesting if you had choices like "get drunk so you don't have to think about your boring job" or something. Do you have a fling with the secretary? I'm not sure how you would 'drive' those kinds of choices and questions though, which is a lot of what Narrativist RPGs do. Like in BitD you have a Vice, you can't just go straight, you have to deal with that.