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

[Micah Sweet]

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.

This is the sort of stuff I'm talking about (although I don't care for your implication that sim and fun are somehow mutually exclusive. I find sim rules extremely gratifying).

 

[payn]

Hmmm. That begs the question what even counts as "simulate"? D&D style hit points never seemed to simulate "reality" to any degree, and you can even question if they very properly similated most fantasy fiction. They were pretty gamist right out the gate.

One of the pitfalls of these discussions is the idea a simulation is total reality with no game, and that a game is all game with no simulation. The truth is a bit of each is in the DNA of any RPG. The simulation is in the abstraction of game elements that are attempting to emulate the genre/theme.

You can say, "what the hell is going on with HP anyway its not sim!" Though, survival sim was a very popular way to play early D&D though mechanics about starving or dying of thirst were never reality based simulation either. It was all abstractions of the condition. D&D has had sim tools, but has always felt like it had one foot out the door of its connection to simulation gaming. That tends to grind the gears of folks that want a leaning in the other direction, which has quite a bit of ways to go since Chainmail days.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

The biggest question often comes to what degree he's playing in a principaled way about what the consequences of those encounters. In other words, to what extent do those introductions of chaos matter? Its easy for a GM to decide most of the time that they don't, or only do so in a very limited degree, and they may not even be deliberately trying to disregard the player impact when they do so.

 

[thefutilist]

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.

@soviet basically the above. Although my interpretation of, Apocalypse World at least, is that it's far more 'vanilla narrativist' than the culture at large interprets it as. In fact it's core mechanics are, ill considered, if you play it in the high improv way that seems to be the usual interpretation. I'm possibly just crazy though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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')

To a point, but not every older style game assumed an extremely tight hand on the reigns there when it comes to players introducing things of that nature. How the introduction would be done would likely be GM adjucated (some sort of skill roll or the equivelent for example) and it'd be unlikely that you'd have things completely out of the blue, but "I'd like to see if we could drag in whatever passes as the local guild masters to see if they really want this to happen" wasn't an automatic out-of-bounds thing in a lot of older games even if (or maybe especially if) the GM hadn't even thought about whether the town had a set of guildmasters.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Notice how much this was a peripheral rule that could end up coming up only irregularly and largely in a downtime context. There were clearly some simulationist concerns in a lot of supporting rules, but the closer you got to the regular playloop of the game, the more they stopped being in that bucket.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Eh, I think it's more nuanced than that. Mostly because the game wasn't ... well, designed in the same way that we think of today. We can point to things that look like they are all about simulationism, and yet ... hit points? Saving throws (I did a really deep dive on those before)? The entire reward loop (level advancement, gold for XP, etc.)?

The majority of the evolution of the rules was not a response to realism, but was part of a response to watching the game unfold- and treated the game as a a game. The push-pull of haste/aging/system shock, for example, is just the evolution of ad hoc balancing of rules.

That's what I think is missing. Well, that and the fact that the whole GDS (later GNS) wasn't supposed to be about games, but about players (what players and GMs prefer), and also because I think people try to set up a dichotomy - D (N) vs. S ... when they forget that there was a lot of people that were playing the G aspect.

That's all right, they tended to forget about us when GDS was being developed, too. (Given the only regular participants that leaned in that way were me, Gleichman, and Szonze).

But it's hard for me to view OD&D and 1e- which was an amalgamation of influences from everywhere and everywhen, which included space ships and alternate planes and Lewis Carroll ... to be seriously concerned with simulationism. But again, not arguing with what people want to call their things! Play what you like and call it what you want.

While legitimate, if someone is going to argue what the modern design paradigm has done is swing away from simulation, at least in D&D they're going to have to convince me for the core game there was that much of it in the first place. I was pretty simulationist in some of my leanings at the time, and the inadequacy of D&D to fulfill that was a good part of what chased me out of it relatively early.

 

[Old Fezziwig]

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

Bloody hell, no one said there'd be math!

Seriously, that hyphen? is fouling up my reading of this sentence. I keep seeing it as an equation.

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

Yeah, I haven't said they do. What I'm saying is that mechanics, while useful and nice to have, are absoutely unnecessary to play to find out what happens.

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.

I think presenting them as such, listing them conspicuously, is newish (Apoc World is my first encounter with them listed so self consciously, and first edition would be in high school now), but Dogs in the Vineyard and Sorcerer (though I'm only familiar with the annotated text, which is probably cheating) and Burning Wheel all have this stuff littered throughout their texts. AD&D 1e has principles (all that "no serious campaign can exist without strict timekeeping" stuff), though towards a different desired end. Pendragon 1e has them in there (some of them quite modern, if you parse them out), thus proving that there is nothing new under the sun that Greg Stafford didn't do first.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Agreed.

Thing is, homebrewers gonna homebrew no matter what design is put in front of them, and there's a whole lot of homebrewers out there. Thus, IMO this is something RPG designers in particular need to keep top-of-mind at all times: how can we keep our shiny new system flexible enough to allow people to tweak it without shattering it in the process.

Either that, or present it with "These are the rules and they shall not be altered" highlighted on every chapter heading; but I'm not sure how much market traction that approach would get. Hell, even Gygax tried that approach for a while and couldn't stick to it.

I think its more a case they have to convey strongly what the game is trying to do, and how the rules support that. At that point, if people ignore than and mess with structures that are loadbearing, shattering is, bluntly, what they should expect. If you try to use a screwdriver as a hammer, you shouldn't be surprised when you break the handle.

 

[Campbell]

"Play to find out" in the way Vincent laid out obviously does not consider how a D&D GM prepares because it's not meant to describe D&D play. It's an admonishment that point of playing/running Apocalypse World is to see how things snowball and not to try to control or limit that snowballing.

It does not really need to be understood in the context of D&D because D&D, especially D&D played with linear adventures does not snowball in the same way.

It's basically saying "Look. This game uses conflict resolution. Occasionally things will get messy and that's the damn point"