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

[pemerton]

This is also the way I see it. Although your view may be more nuanced than mine.

It could also be that there are two camps or approaches to rpgs and we're really talking about what separates them.

I'd like to think that the three hall marks of post-Forge design are:


Intentionality and also therefore

Integration of mechanics to fulfil purpose

A rejection of 'mindless' accretion and tradition.


But it may simply be that I (we) don't buy into certain principles of the other camp. I'm thinking:


Adventure paths, rejected on either aesthetic grounds or on the basis of agency

The idea of sim, rejected on the basis we don't think it makes sense.

Sim rejection is also interesting because you could (and probably do) have groups that identify as sim but the actual techniques used are basically Narrativist. In which case the rejection is far more complicated. The big difference really being that Narrativism with a modern ethos finds game state consequences and disclaiming decision making a fundamental part of conscious design, where it may be intuitive and unconsidered in Narrativism encountered in the wild.

Porting certain approaches back to older games. Such as what you're doing with Traveller. Suggests it's very specific intentional approaches that are legit rather than intentionality itself. I mean Robin Laws approach to good games mastering (for instance) is intentional, it's just one we reject for being stupid.

My view of sim play is mixed. I think the idea of relying on mechanics to specify outcomes of declared actions, by modelling/representing (in some fashion) in-fiction causal processes, is a real aspiration (I did GM Rolemaster near-weekly for about 9 years, and then near-fortnightly for another 10 - hundreds of sessions, and thousands of hours of play). That RM experience also makes me acutely aware of the limitations of this aspiration, and all the ways that it breaks down as soon as the fictional causal inputs become complex in terms of space, time and number of participants. (It's not a coincidence that RM will resolve climbing a typical wall fairly handily, but punts to the GM when it comes to climbing a mountain; or will handle a single negotiation fairly handily, but punts to the GM when it comes to working out what sort of vengeance a wronged faction might wreak upon a group of PCs.)

Another issue with sim is that it (i) consumes time at the table, and (ii) focuses a lot of that time on stuff that is often not inherently exciting. When it is working - and see my previous para for a sketch of some significant limitations - it does disclaim decision-making, but at a fairly high cost. My RM play I regard as vanilla narrativist (in the Forge sense), but with a lot of accreted sim baggage that didn't really serve the narrativist purpose. This is why, having discovered systems like Burning Wheel and Torchbearer that have a high degree of overlap in terms of sim-y PC build and mechanical elements but that don't have the same sorts of punt-to-the-GM-limitations, I would not go back to RM. Even though it does have very colourful table results, especially for crits!

You comment on narrativism "in the wild" is interesting. I've been in two minds about it for the past two decades. On the one hand, I can't imagine that my experience with RM was unique. There are so many RPGers, that surely others have approached play similarly.

On the other hand, though, I've only encountered a tiny handful of people (like, fewer than half-a-dozen) who look at their sim-y play (in RM, or RQ, or HERO, or whatever) and recognise it as vanilla narrativism (or otherwise aspiring to something like that). So whereas, when I encountered Edwards's essays on sim and on narrativism I could see that he was talking about RM (purist-for-system) and had diagnosed some of its limitations (eg his insightful stuff about initiative systems), and in his discussion of narrativism was also talking about something that made sense of my play; I've found that most sim-inclined people reject all of that.

And in discussion, rather than identifying sim design as one way of disclaiming decision-making, they tend to double down on the authority of the GM to decide what happens next and to eschew any idea that consequences of declared actions should have any meaning or significance other than reflecting the GM's view of what "makes sense" in the imagined situation.

 

[dbolack]

Like others, if I had to pick one diagnostic feature, it’d be intentionality. Specific, not just knowing what they intend to happen during play and a result of it, but TELLING PLAYERS ABOUT IT. The second part is where earlier games tending toward modernity are most likely to fall down. After that, I’d put traits thought through for their purpose in this particular game, and player-customizable as much as is suitable (within specific limits like cultural keywords in HeroQuest/QuestWorlds, templates in Star Wars et seq, et very cetera).

My earliest "Oooooooh" moments in this space were Whispering Vault and Feng Shui. I feel like Paranoia and Ghostbusters need to be considered more strongly here as well, but I did not own GB...

 

[pemerton]

In an early post, I suggested that, for me, "modern mechanics" pretty much menat "mechanics not meant to simulate a reality". It is encouraging to see that this aligns well with the text you have highlighted! Some reasoning is for narrative, some for gameplay, some to help everyone participate -- but none is for simulation.

So, really, I am still feeling that, although any broad generalization is well, broad, you could do worse than:

Modern Mechanics are ones not designed to simulate.​

I can see why you say this. But then it seems to pick up T&T. And bits of D&G (eg saving throws and hp, at least as Gygax articulated them in his AD&D rulebooks).

 

[mamba]

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

you explained it better below

Unlike most versions of D&D, the resolution rule is clear for all these action declarations: if a player move is triggered, then the appropriate move is worked through and an outcome generated; otherwise, the GM says what happens next , in accordance with the GMing principles which include the principles about when to make a soft or a hard move.

mostly the bolded part (I am aware of the rest, but that is where the analogy does not work as well)

 

[pemerton]

I'm honestly not sure what people mean when they say 'play to find out what happens', I've seen it used in a load of different ways. Same with Sandbox really, two people can say they run a sandbox but recoil in horror when they learn what the other one means.

To use a previous example. If three characters go and fight six characters at the abandoned water works, then both GURPS and Apocalypse World give us a method of finding out what happens.

It's only the introduction of tech like fudging the dice or suddenly deciding other people show up out of nowhere, that changes 'find out what happens' to the GM forcing the issue.

For me, "play to find out what happens" - if it is to be meaningful - has to include the GM.

So I see any notion of the GM having a pre-determined pathway or storyline or "big reveal" in mind as a departure from "play to find out what happens". You give a couple of examples, but there are many other ways the GM can push things along their pre-determined pathway.

 

[Campbell]

@mamba

Working through those moves as a GM requires a creative process, reasoning about the fiction and making choices about how to move the situation forward. You are actively involved in the resolution process - it just provides some constraints. That's not a state machine where input goes in and output goes out. When I run Masks, Monsterhearts or Apocalypse Keys I'm actively engaging my creative muscles every moment of play as I respond to the prompts from the moves.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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.

The thing about hit points is that getting hit by something sharp or heavy moving fast is, in most ttrpg settings, the single most common event that in the real world would be likely to have long term consequences. Therefore how you take and recover from damage is one of the first two baseline things you need to get right for any sort of simulation. (The only thing as important is baseline success chance for doing things normal people can with little training).

Banging on about hit points in a supposedly real world simulationist game is like banging on about the engine power in what is meant to be a racing car. I don't care if it has an air dam and spoiler and pretty streamlining if it's using an engine out of a motorbike it's not going to be a good racing car.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yea, I’m moved away from that handwavey approach.

“Class” is a transformation of the soul. The character is aware of it, and the supernatural abilities and resilience that classes give are known and understood throughout society.

It’s not cultural or vocational in my D&D games anymore, it’s explicitly a supernatural phenomenon.

Well, you could have them be both: look at Earthdawn.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I do get soggy about hit points, because bringing it up as a counterargument to any desire for simulation in RPGs is very much beating a dead horse. I prefer that, if a game is going to use hp, that they don't use it exclusively. Some kind of stamina mechanic, long-term injury potential, or (preferably) both is needed for me to be happy with it.

My point was that while hit points were the standouts in simulation failure, almost all the combat mechanics did that, they were just a little easier to handwave. In the case of saving throws, it wasn't even obvious what was being represented; it looked pretty nakedly gamist for the most part.

 

[pemerton]

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.

As per my reply to @thefutilist not far upthread, which talks about RM, I think there are limits in that game (and similar games) to how far you can get with committing yourself, as MC/GM, to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality.

I also discovered this with Classic Traveller - and discovered it the hard way, that is, during a session while trying to adjudicate an action. The PCs had left the domed city in their ATV, following their enemies to the latter's base outside the dome. Up to that point I'd been really happy and impressed by the robustness of the resolution rules, especially for a 40 year old game. But now I looked to those rules, and they gave me nothing. The assumption - not clearly spelled out in the rules, but evident in some near-contemporary scenarios - was that I would draw a map and we would then track the PCs' movement on that map. By drawing the map, and making the decision about where the enemy base is, I would thus significantly decide the prospects and likely costs of the PCs getting there. It was terrible! (Both in the moment, and a terrible mechanical framework for a sci-fi RPG that emphasises travelling from world to world.)

I can't remember now what sort of kludge I came up with. Thankfully, once the PCs were at the base and trying to sneak up and assault in in their protective suits, the rules kicked back in - the manoeuvring-in-vacc-suit rules worked terrifically, I was able to use the range-of-encounter rules to construct a rough outline of the base, and when the PCs fled in ATVs while being bombarded from orbit by the enemies' starship, I adapted the small craft evasion rules and they worked terrifically too.

I'm not going to die in a ditch over the rules that worked being conflict rather than task resolution, though I think that would be one feasible analysis. But the contrast between the gap in the on-world travel/exploration rules, and those other rules, was a real one that I felt the impact of in play. Since then we've not done any on-world exploration, and in the fiction this has been handled by the players just having their PCs travel from point A to point B on a world using their (streamlined) starship. Which is a pity, because I find the image of travelling the world in an ATV pretty compelling, but has avoided the problem.

(EDITed for typos.)