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

[Umbran]

But didn't the Force aid people that weren't sensitive. Han Solo could definitely have been helped by the force.

"Could have been" is a hypothetical, not in the actual text.

Force points stand in solid contrast with, say, Vampire: the Masquerade's Blood Pool, because in V:tM, a vampire character had to get access to blood in the narrative to add to their Blood Pool.

One does not need to gather a pool of the Force in the Star Wars narrative - it is everywhere, all around you, all the time. The points are a game mechanic, not present in the text.

 

[pemerton]

I was talking more about actual academic investigation into the topic. For example, I searched hermeneutics and games on a couple of popular academic search engines and got a ton of results. My personal view of RPGs is enormously informed by Gadamer's hermeneutics from Truth and Method (and to some extent the post-modern takes on Gadamer, perhaps most alarmingly Derrida). So that said, the value of my adding academic takes on hermeneutic theory as regards RPG play here is somewhat limited (and even counter-productive in a lot of ways). I'm really not trying to transfer the conversation to the academic register.

What I am trying to do is translate my thoughts and ideas about RPG play into more plain language that suits the discussion at hand. My appreciation of the forum here to attempt that can't be oversold - being able to explain myself in more natural language is a litmus test for whether or not I have any friggin' clue what I'm on about.

I don't recall ever having had much trouble following your posts about RPGing. For whatever that's worth!

In my day job I work on language and interpretation - taking ideas from technical philosophy of language, and applying them in the context of legal interpretation. I'm more at home in analytic frameworks (eg Wittgenstein, Davidson, Putnam, Soames, et al) than hermeneutic or post-modern ones (I've supervised undergraduate work on Derrida, but don't believe I've ever cited Derrida in anything I've written). You may have seen me express views about the way fiction is sometimes given explanatory power in discussions of RPGing, and those views are informed by academic approaches to the issue.

The academic work I've read on RPGing was some stuff that was linked on these boards - I remember an edited collection (Routledge, or maybe Palgrave?) and maybe some papers. At least some of this was trying to discuss the technical dynamics of RPG play, and as I posted upthread, I didn't find it very good.

I remember once being at a graduation, and seeing a student having her PhD awarded, in linguistics. The title of her thesis was something like "I rolled a 1 on my saving throw, and now I'm dead!" Catchy, and an interesting issue in co-reference across reality and fiction - though I don't know if that's the lens her thesis was taking, as I never actually tracked it down and read it.

 

[pemerton]

A tangent to the topic, but I am not sure I agree these are GM roles. Maybe in practice for some groups, these are the same people. But with my first regular group, we switched GM duties ,but always played at the same place. Snacks and drinks were brought by everyone to share.

In my current online group, the google meets call and scheduling is handled by one guy. Different people play Foundry host, which is not always the same person as the GM. And we share GM duties, though we don't usually have one active campaign per player (unlike my previous group) but only 2 or 3 active ones with 5 group members.

This is closer to my experience too. I usually GM, but rarely host. Food and drink are brought by everyone. Scheduling is often, but not always, initiated by me.

I don't see this social coordination stuff as overlapping with GMing.

 

[pemerton]

This. I'm always looking for systems that relieve me of as much of the "master" burden as possible. I don't want to make a bunch of adjudication calls; I want the game engine to decide the results as much as possible! I want my focus to be on presenting cool challenges and interesting NPCs, not on being the "referee".

I don't really like the "master" label, in any literal sense. (I'm happy enough with GM as a conventional label - as Vincent Baker puts it in In A Wicked Age, "It’s an artifact of history that in these games the GM’s characters are called NPCs. It’s s similar artifact that calls you the GM, the “game master,” even though that title makes no sense for this game at all.")

But as well as the framing aspects you embrace ("presenting cool challenges and interesting NPCs"), I'm also happy to make adjudication calls, in the sense of deciding, within the parameters of the rules, what happens next. I don't need the system to literally decide the results. But I do want it to set parameters and advise on what my adjudication should look like. (As you know, I regard Burning Wheel as something of a gold standard in this respect.)

 

[soviet]

To a point, sure. Same for things like spell points or slots, and magic in general for all that: it's real in the setting, and the spell slots or points (and the martial powers) are simply different ways abstracting those setting realities into game-useful things. The perceived or real usefulness and quality of said abstraction varies, of course, depending on the user and-or observer at the time; hence many discussions here.

I think the meta/not-meta difference lies in which "direction" it's going: if you're taking an in-setting element and somehow abstracting it, it's not meta (which covers the Force mechanics in SW), but if you're taking an out-of-setting element (it's Joe's birthday today so I'll give his character +1 on every roll tonight) and adding it in then it's meta all day long. Pretty much every mechanic I've ever seen that gives or allows a die re-roll after the result of the first roll is known falls into the latter category.

I don't know which games have metacurrencies based on player birthdays.

If 'calling it something that exists in the gameworld' is all that's required to turn a metacurrency into not a metacurrency then I'm not sure there are any metacurrencies in existence. Surely the characters in the gameworld believe that fate, luck, inspiration, willpower, anger etc are real things?

 

[pemerton]

I hadn't read this when I posted just upthread:

Sure. Weird edge cases are always gonna happen. But I don't want the core gameplay loop to be me constantly making decisions on if the player's action worked or not.

I agree with this. I want the dice (or other system procedure) to tell me whether or not the players' declared actions work. And I'm happy to work with the group to adjudicate any prior credibility-type checks for an action declaration.

But especially when actions fail, I'm happy to be the one working out what that looks like.

EDITed as I read on:

That's not what I meant. The mechanics should be deciding if something worked or not (assuming that the mechanics were required). But in either case the diegetic frame changes based on that player action and it's the GMs job to communicate the success and fail state along with whatever changes accrue. Regardless the exact word we use there is constant call for the GM to interpret results and feed them back into the machine of the conversation.

Yeah, this.

 

[zakael19]

This. I'm always looking for systems that relieve me of as much of the "master" burden as possible. I don't want to make a bunch of adjudication calls; I want the game engine to decide the results as much as possible! I want my focus to be on presenting cool challenges and interesting NPCs, not on being the "referee".

Reflecting after posting in the Draw Steel! thread on this, I think that in a perfect scenario where all my players were masters of rules and read them more then I did, I'd be ok with playing rules heavy games. But I seem to be the only person reading the rules to reference in DS!, and that's just not tenable for me. I dont want to be the "master of rules," it's a censored word miserable duty. I love my PBTAs where each move is a self-contained package of rules so you just read through and do what it says. I love my rules-light games with straight forward procedures where it leans on table-understanding of the fictional situation and clearly articulated priorities (thinking like ItO and similar).

I even love Daggerheart for this, because while it has more rules then some other games, it's trimmed out most of the crunchy combat-related stuff that slows play way down (and somehow I seem to have wound up with at least 1 other rules-master at each of my DH tables).

Like god, I almost wish I had a rules lawyer on my DS! table, they'd be able to look all these complex systems up.

 

[pemerton]

I differentiate between me "making a decision" (specifically, me deciding if an attempt actually passes/fails) and me "narrating the next scene".

Huh. See, as far as I understand how RPG play works those are the same picture. The pass/fail is the input and the changed diegetic state is the output. How you feel about that doesn't really come into it.

Now, if this is describing an actual scene change (so on to a new encounter, to use different words) you'd be more correct. But in terms of the conversation that governs moment to moment RPG play I think you are missing the point.

I think it can be useful to distinguish between establishing consequences of declared actions and framing a (new) scene. Although the borderline is not always clear (and sometimes, even often, it makes sense to describe consequence-narration as reframing a scene), I still think there is a useful difference:

*Framing a scene presents an opportunity and/or a threat;

*Resolving a declared action, and establishing its consequence, realises the opportunity and/or brings home the threat.​

The way I've just put it is especially tuned for narrativist(ish) play, and I'm thinking through my recent session of Mythic Bastionland (which was 100% gamist, in the Big Model lexicon) to see if the above still fits. Probably "obstacle" rather than "threat" works better for that sort of play. But I still think the contrast holds.

I don't want to expend much mental energy getting to the point where we've determined if a character's actions and intent have succeeded or failed. I want to devote my energy to painting the picture of what has changed because of that success or failure.

Basically, I don't want to waste time determining if the PC jumps the ravine. I want to use my imagination telling you what's past the ravine (if you succeed) or what's in the ravine (if you fail).

In this example, the opportunity provided by the ravine is to have a new scene framed on the other side of the ravine (and the threat is that a new scene will be framed in the ravine).

But what about action declarations that aren't aimed at establishing new scenes, but rather other sorts of goals/stakes within a scene?

(As a bit of an aside, and in the context of "modern mechanics", I think the integration of action resolution and scene framing via PC movement - which is such a big deal in so much RPGing - shows the huge footprint of the Gygax/Arneson dungeon exploration game.)

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Could have been" is a hypothetical, not in the actual text.

Force points stand in solid contrast with, say, Vampire: the Masquerade's Blood Pool, because in V:tM, a vampire character had to get access to blood in the narrative to add to their Blood Pool.

One does not need to gather a pool of the Force in the Star Wars narrative - it is everywhere, all around you, all the time. The points are a game mechanic, not present in the text.

But they represent something that is in the text.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't know which games have metacurrencies based on player birthdays.

If 'calling it something that exists in the gameworld' is all that's required to turn a metacurrency into not a metacurrency then I'm not sure there are any metacurrencies in existence. Surely the characters in the gameworld believe that fate, luck, inspiration, willpower, anger etc are real things?

They might, but it's not necessarily about what the characters believe. Plenty of people in Star Wars don't believe the Force exists, but they're wrong.