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

[Neonchameleon]

I was talking about OD&D. In case that was before your time, all the main classes except for MUs had a one step smaller hit die than in AD&D. So your typical cleric had 7 hit points, and only a fighter expected to have better. Mages and thieves had 5.

And in case you have forgotten all weapons in oD&D did 1d6 damage. So they may have had 7hp but your average second level cleric couldn't be brought down by an orc in one hit back then either. Neither could your average third level magic user. And hit points of characters that survived level 1 skewed high for obvious reasons.

I think people don't realize how stupidly gritty OD&D was at the lower level.

Oh, I agree it was lethal at level 1 (which isn't at all the same thing as gritty; I'd describe it more as clinical). They go by half-remembered events and remember hireling deaths while not including in the stories just how many of the deaths were hirelings. There is a reason oD&D Level 1 inspired the DCC Funnel.

They may have said so in 3e, but I've got to say, it wasn't true.

Oh I agree. It was however the explicit intent.

I'm not qualified to speak of 5e.

5e is more the game 2e was trying to be.

 

[Thomas Shey]

And in case you have forgotten all weapons in oD&D did 1d6 damage.

Not by the time of Greyhawk they didn't. And by the time I came into the hobby, I never saw someone running an OD&D game who wasn't using that (I know they existed, but I can't assume it was common).

Oh, I agree it was lethal at level 1 (which isn't at all the same thing as gritty; I'd describe it more as clinical). They go by half-remembered events and remember hireling deaths while not including in the stories just how many of the deaths were hirelings. There is a reason oD&D Level 1 inspired the DCC Funnel.

No, I think they remember that there were a lot of low level monsters that did enough to one-shot even second and third level characters. It seriously wasn't uncommon with anyone but fighters (and even with them the 3D8 could sometimes be treacherous).

Oh I agree. It was however the explicit intent.

I'd argue it was the PR intent more than the practical. This was obvious to how much they expected 3e to play like 2e and were startled that in the wild it didn't.

5e is more the game 2e was trying to be.

I'll take your word for it.

 

[pemerton]

OSRIC doesn't feel modern to me but Mythic Borderlands does.

Is that meant to be Mythic Bastionlands? If so, and if you have play experience - or other ideas about the game - feel free to post in this thread: Mythic Bastionland - initial impressions, and making a Realm

 

[Neonchameleon]

Not by the time of Greyhawk they didn't. And by the time I came into the hobby, I never saw someone running an OD&D game who wasn't using that (I know they existed, but I can't assume it was common).

So what you are saying is that there was a sliver of time in between the brown box of 1974 and the PHB of 1978 where the presence of a commonly used unbalanced splatbook had raised the lethality beyond what was intended before hit points were raised to compensate.

No, I think they remember that there were a lot of low level monsters that did enough to one-shot even second and third level characters.

So they could deal with the ordinary but not extraordinary. Right.

 

[pemerton]

That's one way to look at it. Another is that he included it to simulate an element of a setting where people regularly got hit with big metal cutty things. That's not quite the same thing as emulating a story. The shared diegetic space in which RPG play unfolds is definitely the setting, not a story. A story also unfolds in a diegetic space but all that really tells us is that the idea of a fictional setting is shared by both RPG play and the novels that originally inspired them. I'm not sure that gets us directly to all the mechanics emulating the story (as opposed to the setting of that story).

Some games, and some groups of players, approach RPGs with the intention that the main goal of play to be the characters interacting with the setting, full stop. This is most usually seen in a subset of OSR play sometimes called world-in-motion and usually associated with a richly keyed hex map. So there's no GM intent involved, no 'kind' of story assumed, just a richly detailed setting and players set loose to trash that setting in whatever way seems like fun at the time. They might trade, they might explore, they might dungeon crawl, they might get involved in politics, they might do whatever. The 'point' of the game is for the players to play a character in the setting, again, full stop.

<snip>

I bring it up because this playstyle is one that will often see reward in multiple systems for all kinds of possible activities.

Upthread, I posted quite a bit about some sorts of approaches to the setting-oriented RPGing that you describe:

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.

<snip>

what will make a game seem non-modern to me is if, as its method of establishing what scenes and stakes the GM presents to the players, it relies either on map-and-key, or the sort of GM-control-over-story that the DL modules exemplify (but that seems to have become almost a norm since).

There is a clear process in classic D&D: the GM maps and keys a dungeon; the movement of the PCs through the dungeon is tracked on the map; what they see/hear/experience is narrated by the GM based on the key, with doors playing an especially important role in this respect. Whether one wants to call those processes of tracking movement on the map and having reference to the key as "mechanics" seems secondary; but they do mean that the outcomes of the players' declared actions are not determined by GM fiat at the moment of resolution.

there is an approach to D&D, or actually a couple of approaches, that do give the GM a lot of freedom to just make up, or stipulate, what happens next. One of those is the GM-as-storyteller, more-or-less in the style of Dragonlance. The other is GM-as-world-mediator, where the players declared actions for their PCs serve as prompts for the GM to reveal and to extrapolate from bits of the "world". But while these seem to be popular approaches, they are only one possible way of approaching RPG play, and they don't even cover the field of D&D play.

Map-and-key is a way of having mechanics - in particular, the mechanics for determining where the PCs go on the map - drive play, but its role in classic D&D means that I don't see it as modern. And the idea that mechanics simply represent stuff to be imagined - with the actual play of the game relying on other (unstated) techniques - is also, for me, a sign that the game is not modern.

RPGs are games. They are played by participants, who - as in any game - make "moves" that cause the game to unfold/develop/change/progress. What is distinctive about most RPGs (and is true of all the ones I've seen mentioned in this thread) is that (i) the principal medium of play is shared imagining, and so the shared fiction matters to resolution; and (ii) most of the participants make their "moves" by saying what a particular character in the shared fiction does, while one of the participants (the GM) makes their moves in a completely different way, by presenting, to the other participants, scenes/situations that involve their PCs.

A game like GURPS has a lot of rules about how to represent, in mechanical terms, the stuff that everyone is imagining together. But - as @thefutilist has pointed out - it has not much to say about how the game participants actually agree on what to imagine, or how the GM is meant to introduce the scenes/situations that the characters find themselves in, develop those scenes (ie work out what happens next), and transition from one to the next.

I can tell you what I took away from your "aimless" comment (and some of the elaboration/discussion it prompted, eg from @Campbell):

A system is aimless, in this sense, if it adds on elements intended to represent this and that component of the fiction - eg encumbrance rules to represent how laden/burdened characters are; ever-more intricate combat rules to represent the tactics and kinetics of small unit, reasonably close quarters, fighting; weather-generation rules; etc, etc - but it does not talk about, or perhaps even really seem to contemplate, how those elements actually get incorporated into the play of a RPG.

The most tell-tale sign, for me, of this sort of "aimlessness" is that the game doesn't talk about how situations are framed or how stakes are established or how outcomes from one moment of resolution feed into or inform subsequent moments of resolution. The game presents itself as an imagined-state-of-affairs-simulator, but doesn't say anything about how a group of people actually go about establishing what to imagine, or how to make it unfold based on the inputs of the various group members. This is all just assumed as "prior knowledge" that the game participants bring with them (probably from their play of mid-80s style D&D).

These posts advance a few theses:

*Rules for representing elements of a shared fiction don't, in themselves, yield a playable RPG;

*There also need to be rules for working out what it is that everyone is supposed to be imagining - rules for framing, and rules for consequences of actions (and these might be related rules);

*Map-and-key is the primordial way of managing framing and (many) consequences - it builds on ideas from "hidden board", refereed wargaming;

*Map-and-key is not the same as "GM as world-mediator" - extrapolation in dungeon-crawling map-and-key is tightly confined, and in many cases governed by rules (eg for dealing with doors; by rules for reactions and morale), whereas the "GM as world-mediator" approach confers upon the GM much more open-ended authority both to frame and to extrapolate as they think "makes sense".​

It doesn't follow that there must be "a story", or concern for "story*, in all RPGing. But the GM who authors their map-and-key is not disclaiming decision-making for the sorts of things that will happen in play: they have set them up. And the GM who engages in "world meditation" play cannot disclaim decision-making by appeals to "what makes sense" when this is their unconstrained judgement about the fiction that they have unilaterally authored and are unilaterally extrapolating.

I don't think, in this post, I'm fully disagreeing with your ( @Fenris-77's) posts that I've quoted. But I'm not fully agreeing, either. A GM who uses the powers of extrapolation to produce something non-story-esque (eg no rising action; no theme; etc) is still making an aesthetic choice. I usually see that choice expressed using terms like "realism" or "verisimilitude" (although a lot of the play that results from this sort of approach doesn't strike me as particularly realistic or verisimilitudinous - it is extremely laden with tropes both from fiction and from received RPGing practice, "the adventuring party" probably being the most obvious in this latter category).

 

[pemerton]

I've always thought that 'class' came back pretty directly to things like Bilbo being a burglar, Aragorn being a ranger, or Conan being a barbarian. The characters in a lot of fantasy fiction fill siloed roles that are in many cases pretty easy to equate to classes. I certainly don't think that's the only reason that D&D used the class mechanic, but I think it's a pretty easily defended part of the picture.

To follow on a bit from my post just upthread, I don't think that these are "siloed roles". I mean, Conan is a ranger (say, Beyond the Black River) and a burglar (say, Tower of the Elephant) and a warrior (in most of REH's stories) all in one might-thewed package! At best I would say that these works of fiction have had a big enough impact that they've established some received tropes or archetypes that people are happy enough to work with.

In the context of D&D, I see "class" - at least originally - as a way of integrating (i) the game-play demands of an asymmetric wargame and (ii) the overlay of fantasy colour. Chainmail already had it - Heroes and Superheroes as one type of unit, Wizards as a different type of unit that is more artillery-esque with a hint also of special forces - and D&D picks it up and runs with it. I find that Gygax's PHB is an especially useful guide to his thinking, and he describes class like this (pp 19):

Character class refers to the profession of the player character. The approach you wish to take to the game, how you believe you can most successfully meet the challenges which it poses, and which role you desire to play are dictated by character class (or multi-class).​

This passage goes on to describe the functions of each class. That is reiterated on p 106 under the heading "Experience", and that later discussion concludes by saying that:

If characters gain treasure by pursuit of their major aims, then they are generally entitled to a full share of earned experience points awarded by the DM.​

This is also one of those places where there is inconsistency between Gygax's PHB and DMG: in the latter book, rather than conformity with the functions/aims of one's class affecting XP directly, rather it affects training time and hence training cost (p 86). But the idea that class is about aim/function/approach to play is still present (with alignment now also factored in):

Consider the natural functions of each class of character. Consider also the professed alignment of each character. Briefly assess the performance of each character after an adventure. Did he or she perform basically in the character of his or her class? Were his or her actions in keeping with his or her professed alignment? Mentally classify the overall performance as:

E - Excellent, few deviations from norm = 1
S- Superior, deviations minimal but noted =2
F - Foir performance, more norm than deviations =3
P- Poor showing with aberrant behavior =4​

Clerics who refuse to help and heal or do not remain faithful to their deity, fighters who hang bock from combat or attempt to steal, or fail to boldly lead, magic-users who seek to engage in melee or ignore magic items they could employ in crucial situations, thieves who boldly engage in frontal attacks or refrain from acquisition of an extra bit of treasure when the opportunity presents itself, "cautious" characters who do not pull their own weight - these are all clear examples of a POOR rating.

Award experience points normally. When each character is given his or her total, also give them an alphabetic rating - E, S, F, or P. When a character's total experience points indicate eligibility for an advancement in level, use the alphabetic assessment to assign equal weight to the behavior of the character during each separate adventure - regardless of how many or how few experience points were gained in each. The resulting total is then divided by the number of entries (adventures) to come up with some number from 1 to 4. This number indicates the number of WEEKS the character must spend in study and/or training before he or she actually gains the benefits of the new level.​

This is not just, or even primarily, class-as-trope. Nor is it class-as-skill-bundle. It's class-as-game-piece-function, creating the context for assessing whether a player plays well or poorly.

The fact that this purpose of class is now basically gone from D&D, but that classes carry on as the core of the PC build mechanics - and that classes are now taken to be tropes in themselves, leading to debates that are in my view silly, like the difference between a cleric and a paladin (in AD&D they're the identical trope) or a nature cleric and a druid (in AD&D there are no true neutral nature clerics) - shows the strength of the original D&D design legacy.

 

[Fenris-77]

Upthread, I posted quite a bit about some sorts of approaches to the setting-oriented RPGing that you describe:

These posts advance a few theses:

*Rules for representing elements of a shared fiction don't, in themselves, yield a playable RPG;​

​

*There also need to be rules for working out what it is that everyone is supposed to be imagining - rules for framing, and rules for consequences of actions (and these might be related rules);​

​

*Map-and-key is the primordial way of managing framing and (many) consequences - it builds on ideas from "hidden board", refereed wargaming;​

​

*Map-and-key is not the same as "GM as world-mediator" - extrapolation in dungeon-crawling map-and-key is tightly confined, and in many cases governed by rules (eg for dealing with doors; by rules for reactions and morale), whereas the "GM as world-mediator" approach confers upon the GM much more open-ended authority both to frame and to extrapolate as they think "makes sense".​

It doesn't follow that there must be "a story", or concern for "story*, in all RPGing. But the GM who authors their map-and-key is not disclaiming decision-making for the sorts of things that will happen in play: they have set them up. And the GM who engages in "world meditation" play cannot disclaim decision-making by appeals to "what makes sense" when this is their unconstrained judgement about the fiction that they have unilaterally authored and are unilaterally extrapolating.

I don't think, in this post, I'm fully disagreeing with your ( @Fenris-77's) posts that I've quoted. But I'm not fully agreeing, either. A GM who uses the powers of extrapolation to produce something non-story-esque (eg no rising action; no theme; etc) is still making an aesthetic choice. I usually see that choice expressed using terms like "realism" or "verisimilitude" (although a lot of the play that results from this sort of approach doesn't strike me as particularly realistic or verisimilitudinous - it is extremely laden with tropes both from fiction and from received RPGing practice, "the adventuring party" probably being the most obvious in this latter category).

I hope you aren't disagreeing with me as there's no declarative statements there to really disagree with. The playstyle I mention exists described as I have by the people who play it (and @Micah Sweet immediately recognized my description). I don't actually completely agree with most of those folks in terms of how they try to frame their playstyle within broader conversations about how RPGs work. I think it has a lot more in common with other playstyles then most of them care to admit. However, in this case I'm not interested in that special pleading but more specifically in the use to a game of that sort for broad mechanical base that cover a lot of ground and aren't narrowed in a bespoke way for a slimmer notion of 'what game are we playing'.

As far as the rest of your reply, I generally agree, for example that RPGs need resolution mechanics and a framework for deciding on the consequences of actions. The term framing is a bit sticky though. Not because it's not useful, but it often gets a bit kludged up in the narrative/not-narrative argument. Setting that aside, I think it's trivially obvious that what GMs do is frame scenes (or encounters, or moments, or whatever one chooses to call them) and allows the players to respond. This is the essence of RPG play, of the conversation that drives recursive alterations of the diegetic frame.

However, I also think that the above is perfectly possible without any reference to specifically narrative terms like rising action. Is that an aesthetic choice? Probably, yeah, I think that sounds correct. What that tells us though is that the options involved in that aesthetic choice aren't fundamental to RPG play, but rather interchangeable.

 

[Fenris-77]

To follow on a bit from my post just upthread, I don't think that these are "siloed roles". I mean, Conan is a ranger (say, Beyond the Black River) and a burglar (say, Tower of the Elephant) and a warrior (in most of REH's stories) all in one might-thewed package! At best I would say that these works of fiction have had a big enough impact that they've established some received tropes or archetypes that people are happy enough to work with.

In the context of D&D, I see "class" - at least originally - as a way of integrating (i) the game-play demands of an asymmetric wargame and (ii) the overlay of fantasy colour. Chainmail already had it - Heroes and Superheroes as one type of unit, Wizards as a different type of unit that is more artillery-esque with a hint also of special forces - and D&D picks it up and runs with it. I find that Gygax's PHB is an especially useful guide to his thinking, and he describes class like this (pp 19):

Character class refers to the profession of the player character. The approach you wish to take to the game, how you believe you can most successfully meet the challenges which it poses, and which role you desire to play are dictated by character class (or multi-class).​

This passage goes on to describe the functions of each class. That is reiterated on p 106 under the heading "Experience", and that later discussion concludes by saying that:

If characters gain treasure by pursuit of their major aims, then they are generally entitled to a full share of earned experience points awarded by the DM.​

This is also one of those places where there is inconsistency between Gygax's PHB and DMG: in the latter book, rather than conformity with the functions/aims of one's class affecting XP directly, rather it affects training time and hence training cost (p 86). But the idea that class is about aim/function/approach to play is still present (with alignment now also factored in):

Consider the natural functions of each class of character. Consider also the professed alignment of each character. Briefly assess the performance of each character after an adventure. Did he or she perform basically in the character of his or her class? Were his or her actions in keeping with his or her professed alignment? Mentally classify the overall performance as:​

​

E - Excellent, few deviations from norm = 1​

S- Superior, deviations minimal but noted =2​

F - Foir performance, more norm than deviations =3​

P- Poor showing with aberrant behavior =4​

​

Clerics who refuse to help and heal or do not remain faithful to their deity, fighters who hang bock from combat or attempt to steal, or fail to boldly lead, magic-users who seek to engage in melee or ignore magic items they could employ in crucial situations, thieves who boldly engage in frontal attacks or refrain from acquisition of an extra bit of treasure when the opportunity presents itself, "cautious" characters who do not pull their own weight - these are all clear examples of a POOR rating.​

​

Award experience points normally. When each character is given his or her total, also give them an alphabetic rating - E, S, F, or P. When a character's total experience points indicate eligibility for an advancement in level, use the alphabetic assessment to assign equal weight to the behavior of the character during each separate adventure - regardless of how many or how few experience points were gained in each. The resulting total is then divided by the number of entries (adventures) to come up with some number from 1 to 4. This number indicates the number of WEEKS the character must spend in study and/or training before he or she actually gains the benefits of the new level.​

This is not just, or even primarily, class-as-trope. Nor is it class-as-skill-bundle. It's class-as-game-piece-function, creating the context for assessing whether a player plays well or poorly.

The fact that this purpose of class is now basically gone from D&D, but that classes carry on as the core of the PC build mechanics - and that classes are now taken to be tropes in themselves, leading to debates that are in my view silly, like the difference between a cleric and a paladin (in AD&D they're the identical trope) or a nature cleric and a druid (in AD&D there are no true neutral nature clerics) - shows the strength of the original D&D design legacy.

I don't think that the 'trope' currently exemplified by classes really existed in the literature at the time in anything like the same way as it would subsequently. So no, not class as trope, but class as reflective of the different characters presented in fantasy fiction. To take ranger as the example, there wasn't a huge depth of rangers of which Aragorn was an exemplar, there was really just Aragorn. So there's no ranger 'trope' in same way at the time that there will be later as more and more fantasy authors include 'rangers' with a wink and guns to JRR.

I don't disagree that class to some extent functions as class-as-game-piece, I think that's quite obviously true. But I would disagree that this is it's primary function because without the framework or example provided by the fictional (and historical) exemplars the game piece is a cypher. There is no recognizable game piece function without the exemplar, at least not one that's recognizable as a D&D class. I think I might use the word synergy to describe the relationship between the mechanical game-piece elements and the skills and evocative dressing that comes from the fictional inspirations. It seems to me that the end product was greater and more engaging than the sum of its parts.

 

[Jahydin]

Just lack of complexity.

For instance, Non-Modern:

Modern:

 

[Fenris-77]

Mork Borg isn't really that modern, it's an OSR game and based very solidly on some very old games and mechanics (older than Harn for sure). Nothing about the character build or core mechanics is new anyway (IMO). The ones that govern the coming apocalypse might be described as new though.

In fairness, we might call it a modern remix, but that's a halfway measure at best IMO. I'll allow that there may be a specific mechanic or two in there that are more modern than I remember, but the system itself it not.

[Edit] I forgot that MB uses entirely player facing rolls, so take everything above with a grain of salt. I've left my post, but I think I'll reread the core mechanics before I say anything else. It's been a hot minute and I think the above undersells MBs innovation.