Will the complexity pendulum swing back?

[Micah Sweet]

I wonder how many people mean narrative mechanics (of one stripe or another) when they say, "modern"?

 

[Agamon]

I wonder how many people mean narrative mechanics (of one stripe or another) when they say, "modern"?

I can't speak for people, but I think it's just newer designs in newer games.

 

[Composer99]

I wonder how many people mean narrative mechanics (of one stripe or another) when they say, "modern"?

I can't speak for people, but I think it's just newer designs in newer games.

To my mind, the turn of the century is suitable demarcation for "modern" in RPGs. Here is what I mean:

Just as, say, musical historians use the year of Johann Sebastian Bach's death as the demarcation between Baroque and Classical periods in European art music, even though it is of course a very fuzzy boundary, we can, say, use the year of publication of 3rd-edition D&D as the demarcation between "pre-modern" and "modern" RPGs, even though that is also a fuzzy boundary.

By that standard, design innovations from the 21st century, or design trends that might have started in the 20th century but came to fruition in the 21st century, would all be "modern". By way of example, I'd be inclined to think the "skill challenge"/"clock" mechanism is an example of a "modern" innovation in design, insofar as it seems to have really caught on in RPGs this century.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That’s probably fair. Meta currencies, things like the Doom pool from Cortex and so on, the escalation dice from 13th Age, are all familiar to me so they didn’t jump out.

Its probably more visible to me because I'm an old fart and remember when I started seeing things like the two you referred to above.

But I’ve never played a PbtA system so that stood out for me personally.

Can see that too, though I think I'd seen degree-of-success-and-failure well before PbtA came along. But still of comparatively recent vintage.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Predictions are difficult,especially when it comes to the feature.
If it is a pendulum, of course it swings back. But is it? I don't know, but I have one argument for it:

RPGs seem to have reached a broader appeal than they used to. If that is true, then games will have trouble becoming crunchy because it's difficult to hit the right spot that appeals too many people. It's more important to appeal to the core aspects of RPGs, which I'd say is "pretending to be [fantasy elves] and telling interesting stories with them". Detailed mechanical resolution might be desired by some, but everyone wants to pretend someone they are not, doing interesting stuff. So it might become more important to substitute appealing things for [fantasy elves] or the type of stories you can tell with your system, then how you resolve it.

Of course,that doesn't make it impossible to make smaller, crunchy games, but you're spending a lot of work to appeal to a smaller audience. Even VTTs don't help - they might make it more feasible to run even difficult resolution systems, but getting the initial buy-in is still hard - and VTT support for a crunchy game is also harder to implement

 

[Umbran]

I wonder how many people mean narrative mechanics (of one stripe or another) when they say, "modern"?

I don't. "Modern" is a question of date, not of mechanical focus.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't. "Modern" is a question of date, not of mechanical focus.

I like to think so.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't. "Modern" is a question of date, not of mechanical focus.

Though I have to note some kinds of mechanical focus don't exist until certain periods. Everything has to be done the first time at some point, and it didn't all happen at once.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Though I have to note some kinds of mechanical focus don't exist until certain periods. Everything has to be done the first time at some point, and it didn't all happen at once.

Yup. The narrative stuff has ramped up sharply since the turn of the century.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yup. The narrative stuff has ramped up sharply since the turn of the century.

I was thinking of a lot of things that aren't narrative material per se, such as metacurrancy that is a way of abstracting things that are still representative, or things like character design generation rather than random-centric character gen (I have a pretty strong sense of when the first of the latter was).