A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[AbdulAlhazred]

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



What do you believe storytelling is?

I'll take from Wikipedia:


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:

View attachment 343660

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.

You have no idea what story will arise, and don't control it though, that is the whole point! Nobody is 'breaking a rule' of BitD and hopping on the table to sing a tale of this or that. That's utterly NOT what happens. Maybe you have not played, in fact it sounds like you have definitely not played it. I'd suggest hooking up with some people who do and playing a character, then you would get it. Obviously Narrative IS the central thing, that is FICTION is the central thing that provides structure, and narrative arises out of a juxtaposition of fiction, process, and (at least for BitD) randomization.

 

[loverdrive]

Can someone explain to me, what is being discussed in the last dozen pages and how does it relate to neotrad design?

 

[pemerton]

Can someone explain to me, what is being discussed in the last dozen pages and how does it relate to neotrad design?

Well, there's the bit where most RPGs are G and S and N; and the bit where all RPGing is play to find out; and the bit where BitD and PbtA games are not very good for generating emergent story; and maybe a few other tidbits I've overlooked!

 

[hawkeyefan]

Can someone explain to me, what is being discussed in the last dozen pages and how does it relate to neotrad design?

Nope!

 

[clearstream]

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:

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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.

It is also worth recollecting that Vincent Baker later wrote

Hey, so lots of threads about the Forge's Big Model just now, and my name keeps coming up in them.​

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The Big Model was nifty when it was current. It was fun and useful to me, and I owe it my games from Dogs in the Vineyard to Apocalypse World, but rpg design has left it behind.​

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Among many others, but most particularly, I don't think that the idea of Creative Agendas stands up after all, let alone G, N, and S as its representatives.​

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We used to think that RPGs were one game. In, like, the 90s or whenever. We would say things like "what is the object of a RPG?" as though all RPGs would have the same one.​

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GNS was a real step forward: "RPGs aren't one game, they're THREE!"​

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But, of course, RPGs aren't three games either. Every RPG, like every other kind of game, is its own. You can taxonomize them if you want, but then you're constructing artificial categories and cramming games into them, not learning or finding out something true about the games themselves.​

Just so you know!​

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(Emphasis mine.) This used to be hosted on story games, but that seems to be gone now. GNS moved things forward. There's no reason to suppose that progress has to stop.

 

[clearstream]

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;​

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*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.

What I was aiming to say there was kind of missed by you, which is no doubt on me for not finding better wording. To make another attempt, the goal of repositioning GM and centering players is not just so players can start doing GMing things. That won't fully satisfy the ambition, to see the game played by players as a game.

What Edwards noticed, in a nutshell, was that story was not genuinely being played to find out. It was often being written and disclosed, and crucially, premises were not being resolved in the play of the protagonists. It took strong medicine to fix that. In doing so, to my observation Edwards somewhat wedded ludonarrative to one particular Western dramatic storytelling tradition.

I've several times referenced the narratologist / ludologist rift. Key folk on the ludologist side of this rift were trained in narratology, but they struggled to see a way at the time to consistently preserve game while telling story. Among moves they tried were proposing an implied author, and perhaps in a way that pointed toward a part of the solution. Players are simultaneously authors and audience. Another move was just to say that maybe not all games should count as narrative, but some should... that's the position of post-classical narratology today so far as I understand it. TTRPGs are in the "should" category.

I go a little further and say that games can be ludonarratives at moments and in some dimensions, without being ludonarratives at all moments in all dimensions. What makes the time we spend "playing" count overall as play, is some amount of genuinely ludic process. Play to find out what happens was an important thing to say about storytelling back then. For heavens sake, stop just telling or deciding story, and play it. Fortunately, other facets of play were in better shape. However, when I experience and observe actual play I can also see that they're not in ideal shape.

It could lead to a long digression, but I see "story" as it is generally defined for story games as a sub-category of narrative. Certainly it is a sub-category of fiction. That's driven by "story" being so strongly wedded to the Western dramatic storytelling tradition. In neotrad I see an opportunity to insist that we play to find out our (wide definition) ludonarratives. There is a political aspect to this debate: who can lay claim to what ground? It's a fight, for sure, with ardent defenders of the status quo. The words are too general in their implications to be relaxed about. Although I do respect the arguments of those promoting the "term of art" angle, which seeks to de-escalate the stakes; I'm saying that the stakes can't be de-escalated, nothing could be more fundamental to games than playing to find out what happens.

 

[clearstream]

Even in a system that allows the GM to decide a situation in whatever way, the decision is still about that situation. That is suggestive of certain dynamics. How the audience feels about that is the area of experiences not dynamics.

It feels to me like we're still thinking of different things.

In a videogame, the only moves players can make are via control inputs which will be processed by the game mechanics. As a player, I cannot input a move other than through the designed mechanics.

In TTRPG, I can make moves in my imagination. I can think "Hey self, let's say I run up a nearby hill and I look out, and I see a wide forest... and I turn into a bird" and if the other players accept that, it's now true. Did it go by the designed mechanics? Ideally it was compelled and constrained by them, but they cannot lock me down to running everything through them. Games like Everway or Perfected (or any FKR) will give you the clearest picture of how this can be so.

So that introduces differences in concerns, practice, and possibilities between designing for videogames and designing for TTRPG. These matter.

 

[clearstream]

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.

So I will say that when one is doing collaborative storytelling and deciding what happens without finding out through play, one is not playing game as game. It can still be a satisfying pasttime. However, I believe if you would record those sessions, there would be a high probability of observing moments or elements of gameplay, where only through the play itself do you find out what happens.

As I said above, I respect the de-escalation of stakes by narrowing "play to find out" to being (as @AbdulAlhazred proposed) a term of art. I'm addressing only the escalated meaning.

EDIT I can go even further and cede the argument relating to the term of art. That does not dissolve my concern to make those words available as an instruction for neotrad games.

 

[clearstream]

Can someone explain to me, what is being discussed in the last dozen pages and how does it relate to neotrad design?

I can't speak for others, but for me it is to do with the ambitions for the neotrad shift.

Is playing to find out what happens important in your game - the one you laid out up thread? To the extent it is not, on what basis are you calling that gameplay? It reminds of criticisms you've made about supposed skill and mastery in some games.

 

[clearstream]

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!

I feel like I'm often too lazy using GNS to characterise motivations for play. Baker said in later writing that "I don't think that the idea of Creative Agendas stands up after all, let alone G, N, and S as its representatives."

It seems so easy to me to see some of those other possible representatives. I see what could be designated P for a political agenda, often gender but also decolonisation. I see what could be designated L for lyric, which is poetic. And like you, I see agenda's proving to be compatible with one another given a design with appropriate utility. Speaking of utility, I see game texts with utility for multiple agendas, and multiple blends of agendas. Even within N, I see opportunities for other storytelling traditions, ones that don't prioritise dramatic protagonism.

The designations are helpful in developing and presenting lines of argument - it seems hard to get away from that - but they are also (merely) a construct. The construct is a model of a domain based on limited evidence that has some utility. That's all GNS is, I think.