What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

[Thomas Shey]

Well, it's easy to say that you should have a goal when you're designing a mechanic. I tend to say something along these lines frequently on reddit when people ask open-ended questions like, "How do I make initiative interesting in my game?" The first step isn't to come up with a cool gimmick, it's to work out what initiative is actually meant to do in the wider context of the system.

But I also think its very fair to ask if anyone who is actually releasing professionally presented games is doing so without any real cohesive goal, because I, too, struggle to think of anyone who is. I can think of people who have released games that I consider mechanically or conceptually flawed or of no interest to me, but not games that are aimless and just a random assortment of unrelated and purposeless mechanics. Without any specific examples, it sounds like a strawman to me.

How do you view generic systems in this context? Or, as @Campbell referenced upthread, games that have, from lack of a better term, a topic, but don't really seem to have a theme, or at least the mechanics aren't set up to support that theme particularly?

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

I don't think "modern" vs "classic" is a useful division. More useful IMHO is the idea of innovations in game mechanics that have been successful and have gotten copied.

Critical hits and fumbles, popular even though I personally dislike them.
Character Disadvantages
Point-based character builds
Skill-based game systems, and games with a robust skill-subsystem component
"Hero" or "Plot" Points (something else I dislike, but still popular in certain quarters).
Dice pools
Roll high and add your bonus to hit a target number, (vs roll below a target number)

Then there's the concept of highly "crunchy" mechanics, as opposed to non-crunchy minimalist ones. More generally, the idea that different groups have different goals and preferences for their games, and that different mechanics (or lack of mechanics) cater to these differences.

"There are nine-and-sixty ways / Of playing RPGs / And every single one of them is right!" - riffing off Kipling.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm kind of drawing blanks trying to remember a degrees of success system that has, well, consequences or costs associated with it. Degrees of success are mostly either used to tiebreak opposed rolls or add damage on attacks, but not for "yes, but:" kind of resolution.

There are plenty that have degrees of success or failure. Eclipse Phase has both. While they often have combat applications, its pretty rare for the system to end there.

 

[Neonchameleon]

How do you view generic systems in this context? Or, as @Campbell referenced upthread, games that have, from lack of a better term, a topic, but don't really seem to have a theme, or at least the mechanics aren't set up to support that theme particularly?

Most generic games I can think of, like GURPS or Fate, are clear products of a worldview and are because of that actually decently thematic. It's why people used to joke you could play GURPS in any setting but you'd still be playing GURPS.

 

[Thomas Shey]

He was talking about it from the position of designing a game and what he thought was important during that process, so games before they get to market. Without being in the room as something was designed or gaining special knowledge some other way, I'd hesitate to call a published game aimlessly designed. I mean, how would I know? A lot can happen between design and publishing. I can imagine aimless design in the design process, because I've engaged in aimless faffing around in my creative life (not game design) to fruitless ends. But that work usually ends up in the round file. Really, I just thought it was interesting (edit: to me it was interesting) that intentionality was popping up in two separate ends of my RPG reading/listening today.

You start to have serious questions about the purposefulness of design when you see a bunch of independent subsystems for different things where the particular choice of subsystem does not point at any particular reason for the decision in the first place. It at least suggests a lack of care.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm on the side that thinks that OD&D (and Gygax's AD&D, at least up until the end of the PHB and for good chunks of the DMG) had a clear focus and associated intention: namely, skilled-play dungeon-crawling, with map-and-key as the core method for establishing what scenes the GM presents to the participants, and for resolving exploratory actions. What seems not to have been originally anticipated is the degree to which this game infrastructure would be taken up and repurposed for other goals of play.

There are two problems with that:

1. He may have pushed the dungeon pretty hard, but there was also a heavy focus in parts about wilderness play, and it was much more poorly supported;

2. Even within the dungeon play mode, there were design elements that appear pointlessly ad-hoc. Once he'd gone to the D20 for attacks and saving throws, why are there random D6 or percentile resolution scattered about? Its not probabilities; you can get a pretty close resolution to either of those with a D20 most of the time. It comes across as "we needed something to be able to resolve this, so we pulled something out and wrote it down." And this is even true with systems presumably there was some time to think about such as thief skills.

None of this actually suggests thinking through the play-cycle of the game at hand in any at all rigorous way to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most generic games I can think of, like GURPS or Fate, are clear products of a worldview and are because of that actually decently thematic. It's why people used to joke you could play GURPS in any setting but you'd still be playing GURPS.

I agree they have a worldview--as you say, its why you can run the same campaign with GURPS and Hero and get a pretty different play experience--but I'm not sold that's actually a support of theme.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

You start to have serious questions about the purposefulness of design when you see a bunch of independent subsystems for different things where the particular choice of subsystem does not point at any particular reason for the decision in the first place. It at least suggests a lack of care.

That's a good point, and I definitely agree with your last sentence. When I wrote that last night, I was thinking of the difficulty of designing by committee or having external pressure from folks not working on the design to do certain things for reasons outside of what would serve the game (including things for marketing purposes or corporate reasons).

 

[RenleyRenfield]

I think you're overstating things. White Wolf didn't refer to the GM as "the storyteller" for no reason and there is a significant difference between a Trad GM and a referee running a West Marches game. Yes it opened further but there was never one way.

Naw... There is absolutely no functional difference between what WW calls a ST vs what D&D calls a GM. Neither system has mechanics to give players or rules agency over the GM/ST rulings.

PBTA does.

That is a very new and modern concept.

 

[billd91]

I don't know what to tell you man. I'm not exactly an enemy of generic systems (I spent probably half my gaming career running the Hero System with some step-outs to GURPS), but its not exactly hard to tell the difference between that and what, say, Chill 3e is doing.

Basically, knowing the difference between a general purpose tool and a special purpose one just can't seem pretentious to me.

It's not a question of special purpose or general purpose tools here. It's the extremely value-laden comparison of intentional vs aimless or the idea that designing a fun game, even if not designing specific purpose tools, could somehow be "aimless" as if it's someone wandering in the wilderness or lacking intention as if it doesn't have an end goal in mind. The pretense is that somehow one is inherently superior to the other.