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

[thefutilist]

This one is interesting, and I think came up in one of your earliest posts I remember reading, and the resulting conversation, where you launched one of your attacks on No Myth!

I think that AW could be clearer in its advice on (i) what prep looks like, (ii) how to use that prep, and (iii) how to combine, and/or prioritise, saying what prep demands and saying what honesty demands. I think that increased clarity could take at least two forms (and there are probably ways of being clearer that I've not thought of!): (a) better examples, in the text, of being constrained by and using prep (in Moves Snowball, there's reference to Isle's family as a threat, but no example of using a threat's countdown clock, for instance); and (b) reorganisation of the text, to combine some of the stuff that is said in the Threats/Fronts chapter into the discussion of agenda and principles.

The book does say not to create any fronts/threats until after the first session. But I think it could be even clearer about why that is - I've found your comparison to In A Wicked Age helpful in understanding this, and think the book could do a better job.

IAWA acts as training wheels in that regard I think. Apocalypse world gets more complex with it though and is like the advanced version of iawa. If you don’t know what you’re looking for then it’s hard to know what to fix in place. Where the threat map doesn’t work, is that it doesn’t show the entangled relationships, which are the most important part of the whole thing.

I don’t really know how you’d teach it well other than saying, go play this other game first. Iawa or fantasy for real or something

Have you ever seen the Hatchet city scenario Vincent wrote for cons? I think having two or three different versions of something like that would be a great help for a lot of people. It’s really just stating what the situation and the cast is but you could show that happening at different levels of scope.

 

[thefutilist]

It also goes to playing to find out - as a GM, when you make this decision about the hardholder, is it veering into the sort of No Myth-based "railroading* that you've worried about in other posts? I think the answer has to be no, as long as the GM makes the decision authentically, and in such a way that it doesn't "box in" or "head off" all the other trajectories that the players have established for their PCs.

Our last conversation about this was interesting. It got me thinking the constraints + authenticity are really the important part in general. Then there has to be an organising principle in play that creates trajectory. That could take the form of minimal myth + mechanics or it could be creating a full myth diegetic situation.

 

[Fenris-77]

If it takes a few years of play to "properly understand and appreciate" a playstyle, that playstyle is not worth it to me. And I was already going in with a negative attitude about PbtA games and their mechanical cousins.

I don't think it takes anything like that long. The real measure of 'work' is probably the GM - how experienced they are with RPGs generally, and to what extent they reflect on their own efforts and regularly make attempts to improve. A GM with experience in many different systems, and who is very self aware in terms of style, skills, and interests, can digest a new play style quite quickly. Moving to a new style is more a work of interpretation than anything else. The GM interprets the new game in light of her previous experience and her understanding of how RPGs 'work'. Here we see the importance of, first, successful reflection by GM the on their practice, and second the success of the game in question in clearly setting out its expectations, goals, and tool box.

We perhaps need to be more nuanced that we currently are when we say 'play styles'. It's not as though we have two play styles, one narrative, and one not, whose games each share a regular, recurring, and most importantly shared set of mechanics and expectations. Those terms are both pretty fuzzy, and the games we apply them to have a huge range of mechanics, systems, and expectations that aren't set neatly into two boxes. Designers have been crossing the streams for many years already and the resulting RPG landscape is simply too complex to admit of binary definition.

I think you can examine a specific game and talk about its influences, its antecedents, and it's expectations, but when it comes to collecting those individual games into groups things get messy round the edges. Not that we can't apply those fuzzy definitions to groups of games, we can, but only with the realization that those definitions rest uneasily and don't perfectly apply to every aspect of every game in the pile the describe.

 

[pemerton]

We perhaps need to be more nuanced that we currently are when we say 'play styles'.

Personally, I think it's a hopeless notion. It's like saying that chess has a different "play style" from backgammon - no, they're just different games with different rules.

I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. Murderous Ghosts is a PbtA game, but as far as play experience is concerned, it has little in common with AW. I mean, 2nd ed AD&D and 4e D&D have more in common mechanically than AW and Murderous Ghosts, but everyone recognises that they're pretty different games! I don't know why "PbtA" gets treated as if it's a meaningful umbrella.

 

[Fenris-77]

Personally, I think it's a hopeless notion. It's like saying that chess has a different "play style" from backgammon - no, they're just different games with different rules.

Narrative and 'traditional' play aren't nearly so far apart as this - they are still approaches to RPG play, not entirely different games. The real issue is that RPGs aren't game like chess that admit of nice clear definitional work. Not that I like those appellations, but I'm still quite happy to say that they are both approaches trying to describe variations of one thing.

I think the zoom, or resolution, that those two terms are trying to work is the real issue - I think the terms much more usefully apply to aspects of games, or to specific mechanics or approaches, than they do to entire games. That higher level of resolution is, IMO, better described by things like genre.

I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. Murderous Ghosts is a PbtA game, but as far as play experience is concerned, it has little in common with AW. I mean, 2nd ed AD&D and 4e D&D have more in common mechanically than AW and Murderous Ghosts, but everyone recognises that they're pretty different games! I don't know why "PbtA" gets treated as if it's a meaningful umbrella.

Because they have a shared mechanical engine? I don't have a problem with the term used that way. That said, it is fuzzy, as I used the term upstream. The term applies due to the shared design origins, but it doesn't apply evenly or in some cases even usefully. Things get messy around the edges. That mess doesn't mean that the term in question isn't useful though - games like MotW and AW and even The Between are all quite obviously related in identifiable ways. The existence of a game with only the faintest vestiges of PbtA design elements (and so no real shared anything) really doesn't change anything one way or the other.

The real issue is that people use the umbrella indiscriminately rather than as useful shorthand to describe common elements and approaches. 'OSR' gets used the same way with the same mess around the edges.

 

[pemerton]

Narrative and 'traditional' play aren't nearly so far apart as this - they are still approaches to RPG play, not entirely different games.

Chess and backgammon have in common the movement of pieces on a board, by two players, with rules for capture, and an attempt to win by reaching an end-state that is pretty tightly defined by the rules.

They're different boardgames, but have more in common with one another than with, say, Seven Wonders.

Playing Keep on the Borderlands using the rules and ethos of classic D&D is like playing Wuthering Heights in so far as both involve a shared fiction, and a GM/player distribution of participant roles for engaging with and changing that shared fiction. But otherwise they're pretty different: the role of prep in one but not the other is probably most striking, but also the way the participants need to think about and carry out their respective GM and player roles.

A game that uses a shared fiction, but isn't a RPG because it doesn't involve action declaration, is A Penny for My Thoughts. The structure of this game means that the shared fiction is gradually built up by making decisions between proffered alternatives, in a manner that also yields rising action and climax/conclusion. I could see an argument that KotB and Wuthering Heights have more in common, as game structures, than either does with A Penny for My Thoughts. But I also think that someone who really enjoys Wuthering Heights might find A Penny for My Thoughts both easier, and more engaging, than KotB.

Overall, I think there is a tendency to talk about RPGs as if they're more similar to one another than various boardgames, card games etc are to one another. Which I tend to think leads to confusion. And acknowledging the variation doesn't imply that some or other shared-fiction-based, first-person-action-declaration-based game is more or less of an RPG than all the others.

 

[zakael19]

I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too.

Tbf, most casual use has it as a shorthand of games whose core mechanical conceits and framework of principles hew relatively close to most of the design elements of AW. 2d6, playbooks, moves, explicit "what we play to find out" writ large, GM and Player Agendas, etc.

It's when you abstract "PBTA" back to "options for a structured conversation" that you get Murderous Ghosts / MF0: Firebrands / super interesting descendants like Wanderhome. Those are far less conventional "RPGs" than AW.

 

[Fenris-77]

Chess and backgammon have in common the movement of pieces on a board, by two players, with rules for capture, and an attempt to win by reaching an end-state that is pretty tightly defined by the rules.

They're different boardgames, but have more in common with one another than with, say, Seven Wonders.

That really isn't enough to imply anything beyond a vague similarity, which isn't enough for our purposes. They are also both very neatly subsumed into the category of board game. As both Wuthering Heights and, say, Human Occupied Landfill are by the term roleplaying game.

Playing Keep on the Borderlands using the rules and ethos of classic D&D is like playing Wuthering Heights in so far as both involve a shared fiction, and a GM/player distribution of participant roles for engaging with and changing that shared fiction. But otherwise they're pretty different: the role of prep in one but not the other is probably most striking, but also the way the participants need to think about and carry out their respective GM and player roles.

A game that uses a shared fiction, but isn't a RPG because it doesn't involve action declaration, is A Penny for My Thoughts. The structure of this game means that the shared fiction is gradually built up by making decisions between proffered alternatives, in a manner that also yields rising action and climax/conclusion. I could see an argument that KotB and Wuthering Heights have more in common, as game structures, than either does with A Penny for My Thoughts. But I also think that someone who really enjoys Wuthering Heights might find A Penny for My Thoughts both easier, and more engaging, than KotB.

This example isn't about roleplaying games generally, but about the shared diegetic space a game inhabits, i.e. the setting. I agree that there is a pretty staggering range of approaches to building that space in RPGs. Shared diegetic spaces are common to many kinds of things, and many kinds of games, but that doesn't make them all roleplaying games.

Overall, I think there is a tendency to talk about RPGs as if they're more similar to one another than various boardgames, card games etc are to one another. Which I tend to think leads to confusion. And acknowledging the variation doesn't imply that some or other shared-fiction-based, first-person-action-declaration-based game is more or less of an RPG than all the others.

The conversation is the heart of RPG play. The players, GM and PC, come to the table with their individual interpretations of the rules and with the mechanics and expectations appropriate to their various roles. The game then proceeds to recursively explore (build, etc) the setting through the back and forth of conversation where the GM describes/frames/explains and the players interpret/react/act and then the GM interprets/adjudicates/changes. Rinse and repeat with the occasional infusion of fortune to keep everyone on their toes. Obviously, this process is variously bound and directed by the nature of the specific system being used, and there is a lot of detail on top of this, but the conversation remains in all cases.

When we talk about narrative play we're really talking about a game/players that supply/enforce/scaffold a certain framework to the conversation, with the framework (dials and buttons, manifestos, directions, whatever) to some extent equating a description of a desired play outcome or experience. OSR play makes the same descriptive claims about a different conversational framework and desired manner of play and outcomes.

I think a lot of RPG theory simply ignores the centrality of the conversation and suffers for it. Roleplaying games are also not just the conversation, which in my general description above could also apply to games of make believe between well-spoken toddlers. But the conversation is at the heart of RPG play with the rest of the rules and expectations shaping play in various ways.

 

[The Firebird]

Narrative and 'traditional' play aren't nearly so far apart as this - they are still approaches to RPG play, not entirely different games.

I can't see the post you are responding to so apologies if I'm missing something. I've been increasingly feeling over the past year or so that narrative and trad games are entirely different games, though.

That's subjective and qualitative and so could be argued about forever. So all I'll say is that there does seem to me to be such a large qualitative difference that people who like one very commonly do not like the other because it breaks core assumptions about what gameplay is and what they want it to achieve.

That seems sufficient to me to draw a hard boundary rather than a soft one. Even if they may both be RPGs, in the way soccer and baseball are both sports.

 

[zakael19]

I can't see the post you are responding to so apologies if I'm missing something. I've been increasingly feeling over the past year or so that narrative and trad games are entirely different games, though.

That's subjective and qualitative and so could be argued about forever. So all I'll say is that there does seem to me to be such a large qualitative difference that people who like one very commonly do not like the other because it breaks core assumptions about what gameplay is and what they want it to achieve.

That seems sufficient to me to draw a hard boundary rather than a soft one. Even if they may both be RPGs, in the way soccer and baseball are both sports.

I think that Daggerheart shows its a lot more fungible then that. Mostly, it's a question of degrees of authority imo. Which is why I think that some degree of collaborative narrative play is a feature of modern games.

Narrativism as defined in a couple different ways is a play style within gaming that highlights themes and characters in a different way and doesn't require a specific ruleset (although those can help).