A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[loverdrive]

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.

It's kind of hard to say.

The way I envision it, the "meat" of the game, the thing the game is taken from the shelf for is combat and realistically, player goals are interchangeable. If the player wanted something else, say, become rich, the end result wouldn't be that much different, just instead of stealing a prototype lazer gun, it would be stealing bags of money from a bank vault.

On the one hand, it's already known what will happen: the game will happen! There will be a fight! On the other, why the fight even happens and what happens as a result is the only thing that actually matters for character expression.

 

[Emberashh]

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.

You don't need to know what the story will be to tell it. Improv is still storytelling.

And fyi, but blindly accusing people of not having played a game is a weak argument predicated on your frustration and inability to convince. I have played Blades and numerous other FITD and PBTA based games. My thoughts on them are not rooted in ignorance and you'd do well to respect that and just bow out if you're not getting anywhere, instead of making false accusations.

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.

Its less that I'm saying it was never useful and more that it isn't now, and that continuing to focus on it is a bit of a waste of time, only providing a trio of narrow pigeonholes to trap discourse in.

 

[kenada]

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.​

​

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.​

​

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.​

​

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.​

​

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

​

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!​

​

(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.

It’s still available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/2019111...com/forums/discussion/20273/the-big-model-rip.

 

[clearstream]

It’s still available via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/2019111...com/forums/discussion/20273/the-big-model-rip.

Thank you for that! I couldn't find it, and I wanted to because there's a lot of value in the comments. Vincent also wrote

You know how you can assign a given rule to Drama, Fortune or Karma, if you want, but it tells you absolutely nothing about how the rule works, or why, and it creates illusory clusters of rules instead of fostering real understanding? And the same thing with FitM vs FatE? And the same thing with Effectiveness, Resource, and Positioning? They're convenient stand-ins for what's actually going on, when what's actually going on defies such simplistic taxonomies?​

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Same thing with GNS.​

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I was developing the idea of technical agenda as the technical component of creative agenda, and the further I developed it, the more patent it became to me that G, N and S were arbitrary, not reflective of real divisions in actual design or actual play. That while you can, if you want, assign a given instance of gameplay to G, N or S more or less consistently, you do so by asserting false similarities and ignoring some true similarities between other instances of gameplay. GNS is a convenient stand-in for what's actually going on.​

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If any of you Big Model theorists want to check my work, I'll be happy to lay it out for you, but it's long and it's technical, and I'll ask you to follow along carefully. Hit me up elsewhere.​

And I've always wondered if someone did hit him up elsewhere, and if that very interesting, long, technical document can be found?

And I should be super clear: it's not that I think that there are hybrid creative agendas, coexisting creative agendas, overlaps, gray areas. It's not that I think that G, N and S aren't adequate. I think that the idea of creative agendas altogether isn't adequate. Gameplay doesn't have a creative agenda. Games aren't designed to support a creative agenda. The idea of creative agendas was useful to me for a while, but it's not anymore.​

(Emphasis mine.) Implying I really ought to break some of my habits!

 

[clearstream]

On the one hand, it's already known what will happen: the game will happen! There will be a fight! On the other, why the fight even happens and what happens as a result is the only thing that actually matters for character expression.

Well, sure! What I contend is that there is some crux lusory-goal welded to why we are playing a game instead of reading a book or watching a movie. So that I can observe play to see if that crux goal is made the subject of game play or decided by means other than game play.

Insofar as your work is a game, lusory-goals are ideally settled in play.

For instance, you'll see it at times in play of a game widely characterised as sim like RuneQuest. The appreciation-of-subject is actively disclosed by GM - sometimes with some light choose-your-own-adventure player decisions - instead of grasping it firmly and settling it in game play.

Mythology is more than old lies and stories, pseudo-scientific explanations for natural phenomena, or hidden secrets of forgotten lore. It is a state of mind and a way of life. It has a sentience and life of its own: a power. RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha lets you experience that state of mind and explore that way of life through the mythic realm of Glorantha.​

Ludically, this should not mean - tell me what that state of mind and mythic realm is like. It should be - enable me to experience it via the play itself. "Play" there implying occupation of the roles of both author and audience. I am being rather purist here, admittedly, but when you are reflecting on what parts of the game text really drive that agenda, and what parts could drive it but don't explain themselves adequately, and what other parts have very little to do with it altogether: now those are really significant questions for design.

 

[kenada]

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.

While video games don’t allow the creation of mechanics on the fly, that doesn’t mean that the resulting dynamics are narrow. Consider Final Fantasy XIV’s nightclub culture. The game’s programming does not have mechanics for setting up clubs per se, but it does support certain dynamics (such as being able to chat with other players, to perform emotes they can see, to buy a house in a public space and customize it) that allow for people to do that anyway. They seem to be popular too if all the spam in city chat is any indication. See also: speedrunners and all the ways they break games, game randomizers, modding culture, etc.

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.

I had FKR in mind when I wrote that. You’re talking about a particular dynamic those games were designed to support.

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

This gets back to what I have been talking about regarding good faith¹ play. I consider it out of scope to accommodate every possible usage. You can make a game resilient to accidental misplay (as Baker has discussed, thanks to @pemerton for the link), but a game is going to be designed to create certain dynamics and to provide certain experiences. If people want to do something else regardless, there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it, and that’s true for any game (though it’s obviously easier with non-digital ones). The way I’d like to address that issue is to include commentary on my design, so if people want to do something else, they can do so with an understanding of how the game was designed to work. If they aren’t even interested in that, then welp.

Otherwise, if we take it as fundamental to tabletop RPGs that play will work this way, then it privileges that kind of play over other types of play, which has negative implications for games that aren’t designed with it in mind. It suggests that there is something wrong with them, or that maybe they’re not even really RPGs. It also calls into question the possibility of your neotrad manifesto. How can one, “Shift GM to or toward a role taken on by a player,” if the design must also support play that doesn’t do that (since the design cannot lock them into running everything according to it)? It would require any neotrad design to be self-defeating or suffer those negative implications. Given that plus the way it interacts with using a design framework, the only reasonable solution is to treat it as out of scope, not to worry about it (even if haters gonna hate), and to be clear about what one’s game is trying to do.

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[1]: Or whatever one wants to call it. I’m using this term because I used it before, but I’m not set on it. I don’t like the negative implication it has about other play, which isn’t bad per se — just out of scope. (Added in an update.)

 

[Emberashh]

While video games don’t allow the creation of mechanics on the fly, that doesn’t mean that the resulting dynamics are narrow. Consider Final Fantasy XIV’s nightclub culture. The game’s programming does not have mechanics for setting up clubs per se, but it does support certain dynamics (such as being able to chat with other players, to perform emotes they can see, to buy a house in a public space and customize it) that allow for people to do that anyway. They seem to be popular too if all the spam in city chat is any indication. See also: speedrunners and all the ways they break games, game randomizers, modding culture, etc.

Its often players doing things like this that result in entirely new genres being born. Theres a pretty clear heritage from DayZ all the way through to Fortnite and then to Tarkov, and surely on to whatever the new hotness is in extraction shooters.

And as it happens, it happens with rpgs too, all the time in fact, given the prevalance of and focus on catering to the specific whims of the playgroup.

 

[kenada]

Its often players doing things like this that result in entirely new genres being born. Theres a pretty clear heritage from DayZ all the way through to Fortnite and then to Tarkov, and surely on to whatever the new hotness is in extraction shooters.

MOBAs (League of Legends, Dota 2; originating in the DotA AllStars mod for Warcraft III) as well as class- and team-based shooters (Overwatch, Team Fortress 2; originating in mods like Team Fortress for Quake) too.

And as it happens, it happens with rpgs too, all the time in fact, given the prevalance of and focus on catering to the specific whims of the playgroup.

Even RPGs started out as something akin to a “mod” for another game (Wesley’s Braunstein) since having players interact directly as their characters wasn’t the originally intended mode of play.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

Well, Clearstream had a thesis which I think is fairly described as 'neo-trad generally consists of trad processes wedded with narrativist mechanical innovations'. I think the general consensus of at least part of the participants is to except that as at least a description of a lot of such games. The discussion then evolved into what seemed like an attempt to obliterate the distinctions between neo-trad and narrativist play by asserting that 'Play to Find Out' is simply a universal in all RPGs and indeed in some renditions all games whatsoever. This has all lead to a rehash of stuff discussed during many other similar attempts to rhetorically reduce narrativism to a nothing, or cast it as a degenerate form in some sense, or simply a fictive type of play which is merely a misinterpretation of something else. Its a rather tired tactic, but this is 2024 EnWorld, so...

 

[FrogReaver]

Well, Clearstream had a thesis which I think is fairly described as 'neo-trad generally consists of trad processes wedded with narrativist mechanical innovations'. I think the general consensus of at least part of the participants is to except that as at least a description of a lot of such games. The discussion then evolved into what seemed like an attempt to obliterate the distinctions between neo-trad and narrativist play by asserting that 'Play to Find Out' is simply a universal in all RPGs and indeed in some renditions all games whatsoever. This has all lead to a rehash of stuff discussed during many other similar attempts to rhetorically reduce narrativism to a nothing, or cast it as a degenerate form in some sense, or simply a fictive type of play which is merely a misinterpretation of something else. Its a rather tired tactic, but this is 2024 EnWorld, so...

The goal isn’t to bash or diminish narrativism, the goal is to accurately describe it. Part of that is by reclaiming terminology that fundamentally applies to other games too. Because when that terminology applies at such a fundamental level to other games then insisting that’s the core difference between narrative games and other games end up being inaccurate and misleading.