D&D 5E Help me understand & find the fun in OC/neo-trad play...

[Blue]

Also re: backstories. How do you communicate…politely…to players that only a few relevant bullet points of their backstory are sufficient to play and that reading pages and pages of backstory is not what you signed up for?

You could try politely telling them.

Or realize that they will be sucking up more exposition from you over the course of the game than the length of their backstory is now, and just read it.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Acronyms, in general, are out of control.

Or as we like to say in the Acronmyicists' Guild, OOC. Which is not to be confused with Out of Character OoC, or the sound monkey's make, which is OOK, or the OK Corral, which is OKC, or Oklahoma City, which is also OKC, but said with a bit more of a Texas Panhandle twang as opposed to an Arizona burr. It's all pretty simple really, aka IAPS, really.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

While I 100% agree, it is worth noting that "fun" requires a sense of scale. Things don't need to be instant fun, but they do need to give some kind of clear return sooner rather than later if they're going to claim to be worthwhile.

Turning a character into a duck for "months" is so far removed from that, I can't see any way to make that actually pay off for the demanded cost. A session? Two, perhaps, if it starts in session 1 and ends in session 2? Sure, that's pretty clearly cromulent. But week after week after week for months on end? Nah bro. Might as well have told me not to come to sessions for that long. I expect more respect than that.

It is good to have mysteries. It is good to have unfolding elements, reveals, etc. It is bad to have events so inexplicable and bereft of involvement or entertainment that all I can go on is "trust me bro, it'll be sweet!" You have given me no reason to trust! Trust is not mandatory--trust is earned through demonstrating that it's worthwhile.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Yeah wasn't the point of the thread for people to explain what they enjoy about neo-trad? Somehow many the posts are just about how much neo-trad sucks

As I have said in my first post, while apologizing for whole paragraph of crapping over the definition, it's hard to be positive, when author did such a poor job explaining "op/neotrad" in a way that doesn't crap all over it.

On more positive note, I thought of one important quality of this style of play that got overlooked. To paraphrase words of Brenan Lee Mulligan, if a player comes to you and says "my character is a teenage sleuth" you cannot just say "I don't have anything for him to do, he can naughty word off", you need to work to incorporate that into the campaign. And of course in this style it is understood the player should make character who doesn't go against the campaign pitch, so no witch hunters and magic-hating barbarians in Strixheaven, as I outlined in previous example. Unlike other styles of play, I feel it's much harder to have a character in this style, where you don't know why they're even hanging out with rest of the party.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I am considering this in the context of the current cultural malaise Japan is experiencing. Being a sarariman slaving away for The Company is...not exactly a pleasant experience. There's a reason they have a word for death from overwork (karoshi).

i concede your point but still, the cultural context around a genre or what it is used for does not inherently alter the concepts of the genre itself, even if it is vicariously providing a desirable fantasy.

 

[DEFCON 1]

You could try politely telling them.

Or realize that they will be sucking up more exposition from you over the course of the game than the length of their backstory is now, and just read it.

Yeah, complaining that a player enjoys the game and their character so much that they want to write a couple pages of information and narrative for them and thus "force" you having to read it seems a bit disingenuous.

It kind of belies the complaint of many a DM who get mad that the players won't read the Player's Handbook. Not reading hundreds of pages of an instruction manual a sin, but not reading a couple pages of backstory because you just don't want to is perfectly okay, LOL.

 

[Aldarc]

I've found that I can set up arcs/directions centered around single characters with five or six players, and inside those arcs individual things that need dealt with can attract interest from the other characters. (Also, the players have decided to follow that arc, so they're all interested in that, anyway.) YMMV, of course--this does seem distinctly dependent on the players playing that way.

This is one reason why I like having something akin to Fate Aspects. (Good job, Fabula Ultima!) It's easier for me to create complications or weave arcs when players have "guiding aspects" that work well for setting arcs up because it's simply easier for me to keep track of those things when they are written down. IME, it also helps players keep track of it because it's on their character sheet, and they can even be proactive about those character elements.

 

[FrogReaver]

I mean, the idea of neo-trad is that the GM is no longer an utterly absolute, unquestionable authority. That's what "Rule Zero" cashes out as in trad play: whatever the GM says, goes. Neo-trad opens the possibility that not everything comes from unilateral GM declaration--that there may be rules that bind even the GM. Dungeon World has such rules all over the place, for example, telling me what I must do as GM (even though it's not, properly speaking, neo-trad.)

But there always was and always has been rules that bind the GM.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

But there always was and always has been rules that bind the GM.

Ask around here. There are at least three people I could name (but will not, because I don't think it is appropriate to do so) who will assure you that this is not the case.

 

[FrogReaver]

Ask around here. There are at least three people I could name (but will not, because I don't think it is appropriate to do so) who will assure you that this is not the case.

Then I think you don’t understand them nor me