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

[RenleyRenfield]

Good post although I think it somewhat confirms my point that there are loads of different interpretations of what play to find out means. In the bit I snipped you talk of nothing being found out or discovered, only resolved. To me that's the platonic ideal of playing to find out, play to find out how this resolves. Adding stuff and retconning stuff, I'm not massively keen on except in so much as it leads to ways to see how things resolve.

Creating a bunch of characters in conflicts and seeing how the conflicts resolve is one way of creating a story. Particularly good if you're not that interested in twists or reveals, which your version of play to find out seems to have in abundance.

I don't follow you here.

There certainly are a few ways to slice 'play to find out", but several of the posts her are just wrong. Task resolution is not "play to find out"

And again, I will say this over and over - "A GM making up anything they can think of is not 'mechanics', that is what absolutely any game can do, even games with no mechanics or dice or rules whatsoever."

The idea that the rules from the dice roll, have text to tell you, almost like a choose your own adventure, that you did whatever you set out to do and here may be some complications to that - is nothing like a pass/fail result check - because that check inserts nothing into play, it just gives a binary result.

I am going to ignore anything anyone says about what they like or think is good. Absolutely nothing to the point of this conversation.

Play to find out, fail forward, GM limits, are new - its why soooooo many people struggle to understand and incorporate them. They are new, they have not had 40 years to be ingrained into play. It took me like, 3 years of hacking away and blundering through PBTA and other such games to finally see what it worked like because I had a lot to unlearn. It is a totally different approach to gaming.

So yeah, pbta is kinda nutters in some respects. It asks a lot of things new to most people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

PBTA is a "Drama engine". The game moves introduce new features in the game, and add plots when there were none. PBTA has no skills, and considers nothing a 'task'. You are making dice roll in terms of 'overall goal' or 'interacting with a plot.' There is nothing to pass or fail. Instead it is all about "and here is extra stuff to create the story and where it goes next."

While I thought the rest of this post was sound, I'll state flatly that there are moves in Monster of the Week that cause you to pass or fail intended actions. They may well lead to other situations, but that's not exclusive of passing or failing something.

 

[Lanefan]

I'm of the opinion firstly that all classes should have "Adventuring" added to their name; an academic wizard master of portals should have a very different casting profile to an adventuring wizard.

Agreed, though personally I do it the other way round - the "Adventuring" piece is assumed unless "Stay-at-home" is noted.

 

[Deadstop]

I think this is too proscriptive and would seem to suggest that narrativist play isn't possible outside of games specifically built for it. In Apoc World 2e, under Agenda (p 80), Baker says nothing about mechanics or a drama engine; instead it's an admonition against pre-planning the game or situations and being open and responsive to the actions of the characters and "[committing] yourself [as MC] to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality." I think we can do this in games with task resolution -- I have done it in games with task resolution. It's nice to have tech and structures that support it explicitly, but it's not at all mandatory.

Heck, “committing yourself to the game fiction’s own internal logic and causality” is what the old Pure Simulationist GMs from Usenet described themselves as doing, even though the GM is making many of the decisions (though perhaps also leaving some to randomizers). I think (correct me if I’m wrong, Micah) it’s what Micah Sweet prefers in his games that just follow the logic of the setting.

Inserting “story” by the means of the GM/author literally having a plot in mind, though it has extended from Dragonlance through the 90s “storytelling games” to current adventure paths, seems to be the odd man out when it comes to both very different forms of “just follow the fiction” (the older “simulate a world as much as possible” and the newer “tune the mechanics to make dramatic stuff happen, but not necessarily dramatic stuff anyone planned in advance” versions).

 

[Old Fezziwig]

You entirely missed the content of my post.

I said the difference was that PBTA rules mechanics make choices and create new outcomes, new plots, new features in a scene, sometimes in specific, sometimes in vague terms.

GURPS and D&D and other such games absolute do not do that. And "GM can make up whatever they want" isn't a mechanic. Any game and any RPG can do that, so its a non-statement.

I don't disagree with you about the PbtA mechanics, nor do I believe that the GM can make up whatever they want is a mechanic (and I didn't say I believe that), and I do understand the difference between task resolution and conflict resolution.

What I disagree with is what I said I disagreed with -- the idea that specific narrativist mechanics are necessary for us to play to find out what happens or that the presence of task resolution mechanics prevents us from doing so. We can play GURPs or D&D or Harnmaster situationally and in accordance with Baker's advice to "commit [ourselves, as GM] to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality, driven by the players' characters." Apoc World and other PbtA games are designed to support this, but they haven't cornered the market on it.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Heck, “committing yourself to the game fiction’s own internal logic and causality” is what the old Pure Simulationist GMs from Usenet described themselves as doing, even though the GM is making many of the decisions (though perhaps also leaving some to randomizers). I think (correct me if I’m wrong, Micah) it’s what Micah Sweet prefers in his games that just follow the logic of the setting.

Yeah, I don't think that part's necessarily radical, it's the rest of the quote, "driven by the players' characters," that's probably the important part here.

 

[Lanefan]

I would agree with this. I've long been strongly against the idea of class as "vocation" that thousands of NPCs within a setting just happen to share. I've since moved into using class as an explicit diegetic concept, and allowing it to be explored within the fiction has made me much happier about class-based games.

It can be a bit of both.

Look at how real-world people approach their careers. Some people let their professions define them 24 hours a day, others are only their profession during working hours and at other times are something else (e.g. someone's a dentist during the day but when not in the office is a sailor first and foremost).

In an RPG setting, a Monk would be a Monk 24 hours a day - it's a lifestyle as well as a profession. A Fighter, on the other hand, could be a Fighter only while in the field and an amateur stage actor the rest of the time: "Fighter" is just how she makes her living.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

...

What I disagree with is what I said I disagreed with -- the idea that specific narrativist mechanics are necessary for us to play to find out what happens or that the presence of task resolution mechanics prevent us from doing so. We can play GURPs or D&D or Harnmaster situationally and in accordance with Baker's advice to "commit [ourselves, as GM] to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality, driven by the players' characters." Apoc World and other PbtA games are designed to support this, but they haven't cornered the market on it.

No, so again. What you say is what I mean - you are inserting a play style, or a narrative ideal = not a mechanic.

No, D&D and GRUPS absolutely have no mechanics to do what you say.

However, as as aside, I do think principles are a new thing.... and while not a mechanic, they can help discuss intent of new mechanics and backfill good habits into old games, as you pointed out.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Yeah, but the core mechanics had some pretty severe levels of abstraction; that was even obvious to people in the 70's. When the abstraction gets deep enough, its functionally indistinguishable from a gamist decision. I know you get soggy about hit point being brought up, but the combat roll and AC weren't enormously better, nor were saving throws. I know pretty gamist games that are more focused on representation than that.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

While I thought the rest of this post was sound, I'll state flatly that there are moves in Monster of the Week that cause you to pass or fail intended actions. They may well lead to other situations, but that's not exclusive of passing or failing something.

There are no task or skill rolls in MotW. But you did state the purpose of the different in GURS vs PBTA = that second part of your sentence is the important part - the mechanic its self n PBTA ALSO includes what to do next, how, and what extra is added. That second part is the part, its the thing that makes the game mechanics so different than GM fiat. The game it telling us, not the GM.