A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

[tetrasodium]

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.

Agreed! Play to find out is literally trusting the game & using that game in order to find out what route how well/poor the adventure goes & how it's accomplished rather than trying to marysue it as a player turned author author with "the answer". I think that neotrad might be showing the stripes behind it's real goals there. Knowing that the PCs aren't going to be hunted down & killed to a man in the most efficient way by the bbeg instead of the party achieving victory says nothing about a ttrpg. It says nothing because the later is almost a given due to the nature of ttrpgs & their social contract while the former describes some kind of free for all board or wargame that may or may not have teams.

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

I hate to use the term because it's generally just used to insert a big word, but I think it fits the definition to a T. Those pages have mostly been supercilious redefining & creation of jargon. Deliberate or not, it seems to do little aside from arming players who have poor expectations of what is reasonable wanting to neotrad as a shield with a "you don't understand how deep it is if you can't explain $term1 $term2 $obscureGame etc" sword if the GM or another player at the table tries to push back.

 

[FrogReaver]

A fundamental premise - All games are about playing to find out. Finding out who wins. Finding out how you won or lost - aka playing to find out the game narrative (fictional is not required but not excluded either).

Or maybe the more illustrative question for those still disagreeing would be - what would ‘not playing to find out’ look like?

 

[Emberashh]

A fundamental premise - All games are about playing to find out. Finding out who wins. Finding out how you won or lost - aka playing to find out the game narrative (fictional is not required but not excluded either).

Or maybe the more illustrative question for those still disagreeing would be - what would ‘not playing to find out’ look like?

Probably like not playing a game. Thats pretty much the whole thing behind why I've said in the past that game mechanics inherently tell stories. You can't really escape it.

I recently (surely due in no way to this thread lol) got a hold of Zubeks Elements of Game Design, and I actually really enjoyed a passage he had on games and how they've turned the concept of Agency into an art form, and how that relates to what motivates players to play the various games they're into. Essentially, you're expressing your personality through the games you play.

 

[clearstream]

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.

True, and I'd like here to direct attention to the question - to what ends? Why would "narrativist mechanical innovations" matter to other modes of play?

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.

I can see how this apprehension arises. Up thread I have several times written that storygames are a sub-category of narrativist games. Hopefully, I have spelled out that I see the narrativist comprehension of the player duality (what I've called the lusory-duality) as crucial to ludonarrative, and that in agreement with post-classical narratology I place TTRPG into the narrative overlap of the game/narrative venn diagram. This absolutely preserves the distinct nature of storygames.

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...

In truth I am more placing storygames on a pedastal, by arguing that what those designers figured out - narrativism - matters to all TTRPG. This answers the question asked at the top of this post.

 

[clearstream]

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.

That is a great observation!

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).

I agree with you that it would be "out of scope to accomodate every possible usage." I'm not arguing in favour of that. What I am arguing is that the normal and expected usage of a TTRPG requires intangible mechanics - moves made in imagination. The designer cannot directly design those mechanics (not in the way they can directly design videogame mechanics and mechanics that are interpreted and enacted parsimoniously.)

What the designer must do instead, is design principles and rules that compel and constrain what players are likely to imagine. They seed that imagining with prepared narrative (character playbooks, equipment lists, creature descriptions, places, peoples, and so forth, both in text and illustration.) The power of such seeds is well demonstrated in games such as Ironsworn.

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.

So I am agreeing with others that

In a RPG, imagination is not just something you while playing the game. Shared imagining is the core of the play of the game.

(Emphasis in original.) All I add is to say that this matters to design, and is omitted from MDA; no doubt due to the framework's focus on videogames.

 

[loverdrive]

Probably like not playing a game. Thats pretty much the whole thing behind why I've said in the past that game mechanics inherently tell stories. You can't really escape it.

I think there is a meaningful description between "story as a natural byproduct of things happening in a sequential order" and "story as an interesting narrative that can stand on its own merits, separate from the process of play".

Because, well, not only game mechanics inherently tell stories. Everything inherently produces a story. Not everything produces a story that is worth sharing.

 

[loverdrive]

Wrt to neotrad design: the thing I'm not sure I understand is where neo stops and trad begins.

Is Blades in the Dark with its character-driven narrative and plentiful fiddly bits a neotrad game? Yes? No? What if it had a dedicated combat subsystem? Yes? No?

I'm not stupid. I understand that there probably isn't a clear line, but there must be a sign that signifies "yeah, this totally isn't your mommy's indie rpg, this is neotrad land"

 

[kenada]

I agree with you that it would be "out of scope to accomodate every possible usage." I'm not arguing in favour of that. What I am arguing is that the normal and expected usage of a TTRPG requires intangible mechanics - moves made in imagination. The designer cannot directly design those mechanics (not in the way they can directly design videogame mechanics and mechanics that are interpreted and enacted parsimoniously.)

As I noted in post #400, I’ve been using MDA and DDE interchangeably because DDE positions itself as a reformulation of MDA, but there are things DDE includes beyond what MDA does. As I indicated in post #266, I like DDE more than MDA as far as these frameworks go. I’ve been trying to signal that by shifting my language away from mechanics and aesthetics to design and experiences.

What the designer must do instead, is design principles and rules that compel and constrain what players are likely to imagine. They seed that imagining with prepared narrative (character playbooks, equipment lists, creature descriptions, places, peoples, and so forth, both in text and illustration.) The power of such seeds is well demonstrated in games such as Ironsworn.

What you are describing are processes for changing the game state — algorithms. Given a game state S (consisting of these boxes full of physical things at the table and clouds full of fictional ideas in the minds of the participants), perform these activities to create game state S′, which may involve manipulating things in the boxes or devising new ideas in the clouds (using imagination, naturally). Those seeds you propose are data. They would set an initial state S₀, which the players would then change via application of the processes of play.

DDE expands design to include blueprints (of the setting, its rules, characters, etc) and interface, but I don’t thinks those are strictly necessary to capture this aspect of tabletop RPG play. It just feels more natural to call them design rather than mechanics, especially in non-digital games like tabletop RPGs where “mechanics” already has a particular connotation that does not match with how the MDA framework is using it.

So I am agreeing with others that
(Emphasis in original.) All I add is to say that this matters to design, and is omitted from MDA; no doubt due to the framework's focus on videogames.

I misunderstood and thought you were talking about something else. See above for my attempted reconciliation.

 

[Pedantic]

Wrt to neotrad design: the thing I'm not sure I understand is where neo stops and trad begins.

Is Blades in the Dark with its character-driven narrative and plentiful fiddly bits a neotrad game? Yes? No? What if it had a dedicated combat subsystem? Yes? No?

I'm not stupid. I understand that there probably isn't a clear line, but there must be a sign that signifies "yeah, this totally isn't your mommy's indie rpg, this is neotrad land"

In the 150-300ish post range, I think we got a pretty clear sense that the dividing line comes down to authority over the fiction. Neotrad places some portion of mechanical control that in trad play resides with a GM in the hands of PCs, especially as it relates to their characters, but still places most authority in the GM's hands and may still pursue many of the same ultimate goals of play as trad.

We had some back and forth over whether this can be achieved by classifying the GM as a player (I personally thought that was a bit of a sideshow) and how much/what authority can be moved without shifting past neotrad to something else altogether. A lot of focus came down to using specific techniques to constrain the GM, and how much of that authority was negative, vs. a more overt narrative system. Think things like death flags, that prevent the GM from saying "your character is killed" but do not otherwise constrain the GM's ability to determine what NPCs or the opposition do, or what the world contains. We ran all kinds of places with various levels of myth, and all the usual talking past each other diversions.

In so much as there is a consensus, I think it comes down to games that have the general shape of trad play, but give PCs and/or systems some specific constraints on the GM, usually coming down to protecting/guiding character development.

I offered the summary much earlier of "trad, but..." with the space after the but left open as the design question a "neotrad" game would be articulating a mechanism to solve, and a rationale for why it should be different; "but what, and why?"

 

[Emberashh]

I think there is a meaningful description between "story as a natural byproduct of things happening in a sequential order" and "story as an interesting narrative that can stand on its own merits, separate from the process of play".

Because, well, not only game mechanics inherently tell stories. Everything inherently produces a story. Not everything produces a story that is worth sharing.

Ah, but thats the rub! Game stories are worthy enough to stand on their own as a "new" form of narrative.

New is in quotes because we've been observing the potential for about as long as we started doing competitions in general, we just don't conventionally recognize those narratives in the same way as we do a book or a film.

Borg vs McEnroe. The Miracle on Ice. Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. Game 3 of the 1932 World Series when Babe Ruth called his shot. And so on and so on.

These stories can only exist because of the game and metagame they centered on, and they're just as compelling to follow as any book or film, especially more recent ones as we can now much more readily reconsume them as they were rather than secondhand. Sports fans can, like any other fan of any other medium, get so into the weeds with their mediums jargon that it obscures what they're really there for, but there is a reason why the Highlights is a thing on sports TV, and it isn't just because its just neat to see peak athletes do their thing.

And with streaming, we're seeing this kind of narrative come into its own as video game streamers are some of the most popular entertainment out there. The game being intermixed with the metagame formed by the streamers persona is compelling enough to be entertaining.

And I don't think we even need to wait to see this evolve into something more deliberate as an art; Me, Myself, and Die is basically a prime example of exactly that, where the game and metagame are pursued towards that end.