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

[Snarf Zagyg]

I don't know...a lot of stuff in TSR D&D was designed to represent a thing in the world, not just to facilitate "fun" for the players. Why bother to discuss history and setting logic at all otherwise? The 1e DMG is full of sim mechanics. And abstraction is a necessary component of any RPG. It's how much abstraction where that has forever been the subject of debate.

shrug If you say so. I've discussed this before, and in other contexts, so it's not worth arguing about. I think people misunderstand what "simulationism" means, and I think that Gygax was at least as interest in the game qua game as he was in creating a fictional world with internally consistent rules.

But I'm not trying to argue with you- I know your game preferences, and if you want to call it (and AD&D) simulationism, that's cool.

 

[Pedantic]

We are spinning the roulette wheel and agreeing to stick to the outcome we can all see on the table.

I feel like we're talking past each other. The GM fudging point is orthogonal to what I'm talking about; the sentence I quoted above homes in on the bit I'm focused on well. The point of play is gambling and enjoying a mutually surprising outcome, not in trying to make the most effective series of decisions to force a specific outcome.

It's obviously a pretty broad phrase, but I think it does similar work both in instructing GMs about what they should or should not do, and in instructing players how to enjoy the resulting play.

 

[thefutilist]

Is the GM also playing to find out, or do they already know?

The GM is playing to find out how it resolves as well. Using the two primary methods the players use.

1) Deciding what their characters do and how they react.

2) Using system when appropriate or mandated to see how something resolves.

It's why I said if you're using GURPS you had to ignore the GM advice on fudging the dice. Although I also think you should probably add a more concrete trigger as to when to roll. When people are in conflict being the standard one.

 

[billd91]

Is the GM also playing to find out, or do they already know?

For anything but a full-on railroad in which the GM decides what the players will do and how the dice will roll, then the GM is pretty much also playing to find out something. That's the ambiguity of the "play to find out" slogan. A GM may have sketched out events that will happen in the future, potential encounters that will be on the PCs' path, but every encounter with the PCs is an encounter with chaos agents because who knows for sure what they'll do when they're in the encounter or whether or not the dice will comply with any particular expectation.

 

[soviet]

I feel like we're talking past each other. The GM fudging point is orthogonal to what I'm talking about; the sentence I quoted above homes in on the bit I'm focused on well. The point of play is gambling and enjoying a mutually surprising outcome, not in trying to make the most effective series of decisions to force a specific outcome.

I'm not sure what decisions you are talking about that are present in one game and not the other.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Would you say though that it's mandatory to have the GM of such a system take a 'no fudging, no thumb on the scale' position? I don't think narrativist play is possible in a game with a GM who has fudge and veto power over resolution.

EDIT: that is to say, a GM that uses such power, or reserves the right to. Words in a book are words in a book.

Yes, I would. I don't see how fudging would be compatible with Baker's advice.

 

[soviet]

The GM is playing to find out how it resolves as well.

Well, note how immediately you have narrowed this from 'what happens' to 'how it resolves'. So a wide variety of possible outcomes and developments has become 'when the players get to the planned conflict, which side will win?'.

Using the two primary methods the players use.

1) Deciding what their characters do and how they react.

2) Using system when appropriate or mandated to see how something resolves.

It's why I said if you're using GURPS you had to ignore the GM advice on fudging the dice. Although I also think you should probably add a more concrete trigger as to when to roll. When people are in conflict being the standard one.

OK I'm with you on the no fudging but doesn't the GM also have a huge amount of content and framing authority that the players lack? Doesn't this make it very difficult for the GM to genuinely watch unexpected things happen in play?

(I don't mean 'oh, the players lost' or 'oh, the players went left not right'. I mean 'the players brought in NPCs that didn't exist beforehand and reframed the whole thing to be a diplomatic dispute about trade sanctions')

 

[soviet]

For anything but a full-on railroad in which the GM decides what the players will do and how the dice will roll, then the GM is pretty much also playing to find out something. That's the ambiguity of the "play to find out" slogan. A GM may have sketched out events that will happen in the future, potential encounters that will be on the PCs' path, but every encounter with the PCs is an encounter with chaos agents because who knows for sure what they'll do when they're in the encounter or whether or not the dice will comply with any particular expectation.

'Play to find out which of two things happen', sounds great.

 

[Pedantic]

I'm not sure what decisions you are talking about that are present in one game and not the other.

I feel like we're on the verge of rehashing the same points all over again. "Play to find out" is a strong signal that you as a player of this game should be looking for enjoyment in surprising outcomes; the bit that is delightful is watching novelty that no player could have anticipated unfold. That joy runs directly counter to manipulating the game state to force an expected outcome to unfold. "What is the outcome of these choices?" vs. "did I make the right choices (or at least a set of right choices) to get what I want?"

Those are incompatible and I read "play to find out" as advising players they should look for the enjoyment of play to be in the former, and not in the latter.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

I think he believed it- but it has to be adjusted for the time period. Given his wargaming roots, he was intimately familiar with all the old battles over "realism/simulationism" within the wargaming community, and Gygax decidedly was in favor of using abstraction, genre trappings, and "fun" (gamist approaches) instead of demanding fidelity to reality.

Oh absolutely. I've played a lot of wargames, and from the perspective of a 70's player of games featuring combat, D&D is nothing like an accurate simulation; certainly it makes a ton of sense to state, to 1970's players, that the goal is not to be as detailed as a wargame. In the 1970's D&D was a modern set of mechanics for games that featured combat.

The title of the book I have in front of me is "Dungeons and Dragons - Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames"

But this thread is, I believe, not looking at all games, but only TTRPGs. So while I am happy to say that compared to wargames in the 70s, D&D was not simulation-focused, I cannot say the same when we compare it to all TTRPGs. Yes, it uses abstraction, genre trappings and has gamist approaches -- I might argue that "hit points" are the most "modern" mechanic, as it's a purely gamist mechanic with minimal connection to realism(*). But the vast majority of the rules are in service of simulation, such as the selection on p13 of vol1 (I picked a paragraph at random) which explains in detail how relatives can inherit character's wealth, if they pay a 10% tax, but that if the original character returns they can recover their possessions, also paying 10%, in which case the player character must revert to being an NPC and start with a loyalty penalty of 0 to -6 ...

It is hard to argue that rules like this are aimed at being fun, or making the game flow easily. They're an attempt at simulation.

(*) Actually, with some more thought, I really do think that