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

[thefutilist]

I forget if it's in AW or his corpus of writings, but Baker does say that he keeps things simple with NPCs. In AW:BO, he's gotten far more explicit on how you should relate an NPC's drive to a body part so you can make that rapid decision of how they react to events; but I think even over a decade ago he was talking about keeping it short and simple.

If/when I need to think about it more formally I consider all characters as a priority stack. So it would look something like.


Jim Rebel: Part of the Z-force mutants who war against the evil mechnoids.

Don’t get talked down to

Get closer with Katline

Fight the mechnoids

Human stuff in general


It’s a stack because the top priority always comes first but conflicts and circumstance can shift and change the priorities.

So if Katline is talking down to me, then I know that my current priority is ‘don’t get talked down to.’ So he’s not putting up with that.

Although I do try and follow the advice in texts to see how it works out for me. So in AW it would be.

Body part

Threat impulse

Threat moves

(background if it’s written up)


I use the word Material to refer to all the stuff I’m taking into account, so do I have enough Material to make a choice? Is it strong enough? And so on.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Thanks heavens I wasn't trying to frame a definition of games you like then, as I would have failed quite thoroughly.

What type of definition are you trying to make? I don't see anything wrong with looking at how important mechanics designed to steer the narrative of the game as a separate and important metric. I actually think such mechanics matter quite a bit to a lot of people, one way or another.

 

[Fenris-77]

What type of definition are you trying to make? I don't see anything wrong with looking at how important mechanics designed to steer the narrative of the game as a separate and important metric. I actually think such mechanics matter quite a bit to a lot of people, one way or another.

Well, I don't think that narrative mechanics primarily steer the narrative of game so much as they create play outputs of a certain type. Frankly, I think it's a pretty useless term at this point as it has so much baggage, very little of which matches.

What actually steers the narrative of the game, if we even want to talk about what happens at the table as narrative, is the conversation - the describe-act-adjudicate cycle. Mechanics of various sorts, as well as things like AW's principles, act on various bits of the conversation, usually in service of what specifically the designer envisioned the game being 'about'.

Narrativist, to risk using the Forge term, is certainly a specific thing, but it doesn't really capture what people mean when they use the phrase narrative mechanics. Personally, I cordially detest the GNS model and prefer to avoid that lens.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I don't think that narrative mechanics primarly

I think there was supposed to be more to this sentence.

 

[Campbell]

Lots of games get called narrative games for a variety of reasons. The only real unifying principle is that they structured differently than trad games. Night's Black Agents, John Carter of Mars and Apocalypse World have fig all to do with one another. They are prepped differently, they are structured differently, their resolution systems have nothing to do with each other and most importantly their play loops could not be more different.

A failure to acknowledge that and flatten them for purposes of discussion, especially when you have been briefed on the differences feels less and less like ignorance and more and more like a deliberate attempt to confuse and shutdown a discussion of differences because you think they all have cooties.

It's precisely this sort of flattening that leads people to have the wrong idea about how Apocalypse World structure and assume it has anything like FATE points.

In general, I'm just not a fan of categorizing things by what they don't do instead of what they actually do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Yeah. To your point, I think just broadly tarring PbtA games and Storypath (the system used in all the recent Onyx Path games) as "narrative" and figuring that will do the job for you is probably not helpful to any discussion. And that's not even getting to where it puts things like Savage Worlds.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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.

The problem is, this excludeds chocolate-and-peanut-butter people like myself. I'm very much a pretty a trad player and GM, but at the same time I find when I'm playing or running a trad game without certain narrative tools I very much miss them. Yet a lot of hardcore narrative games drop some things that trad games tend to be less likely to (because they aren't considered important) that I'll also be bothered by the lack of.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think there was supposed to be more to this sentence.

There's a whole post there now.

 

[The Firebird]

I'd really question the use of unbridgeable here. I can think of lots of games that mix the two together in very successful ways. I'm talking about design and function here, not what people like or don't like (which is quite a different conversation, and one that isn't relevant here).

I think part of the issue here is that narrative play and traditional play, by which I really mean something like older D&D, don't really play around with the same set of buttons and dials - the design space being played in doesn't really overlap that much. Not in any kind of way that make them mutually exclusive.

I think there is a lack of specificity to the discussion that is making it hard to be precise. When I say 'unbridgeable', I mean there are certain mechanics (or perhaps, norms) of play that are incompatible. For example, "the GM specifies the structure of a location in advance" is incompatible with "the players' rolls specify the structure of a location".

These are just different systems and result in different types of games. This is true even though "The GM specifies some aspects of a location and the players' rolls add details" is also a viable approach.

The problem is, this excludeds chocolate-and-peanut-butter people like myself. I'm very much a pretty a trad player and GM, but at the same time I find when I'm playing or running a trad game without certain narrative tools I very much miss them. Yet a lot of hardcore narrative games drop some things that trad games tend to be less likely to (because they aren't considered important) that I'll also be bothered by the lack of.

Yeah, I don't mean to be prescriptive, i.e., to say all players must be one or the other. Or to say that you can't have blends. Purple is a valid color, right? And so is someone who likes chocolate and peanut butter. But there's still a point to differentiating chocolate and peanut butter.

 

[Fenris-77]

I think there is a lack of specificity to the discussion that is making it hard to be precise. When I say 'unbridgeable', I mean there are certain mechanics (or perhaps, norms) of play that are incompatible. For example, "the GM specifies the structure of a location in advance" is incompatible with "the players' rolls specify the structure of a location".

Oh, yeah, if you mean specific mechanics then sure, there's lots of room for incompatible.

These are just different systems and result in different types of games. This is true even though "The GM specifies some aspects of a location and the players' rolls add details" is also a viable approach.

Yeah, I don't mean to be prescriptive, i.e., to say all players must be one or the other. Or to say that you can't have blends. Purple is a valid color, right? And so is someone who likes chocolate and peanut butter. But there's still a point to differentiating chocolate and peanut butter.

This seems to mostly be about how certain elements of the setting are generated. I'd agree that games often called narrative are probably the most likely to have some portion of authorial control for the setting shifted from the GM either to player-adjacent mechanics or in some fashion to the players themselves. That said, there is an awful lot of space on the spectrum for a whole lot of different degrees and approaches, and that maybe isn't a fact that is captured by calling a game narrative or not. I prefer the term (or better yet a different term, deployed at the mechanic and subsystem level to describe game elements.