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

[Micah Sweet]

A thought occurs to me.

If we play out a series of imaginary events, and recounting those events after the fact constitutes telling a story, doesn't that mean that our play created that story?

Not to my mind. The story is created in the telling/writing/filming/whatever process, because IMO stories need some degree of pointed organization in order to be stories. Your play therefore created the chain of situations that become a story afterwards through the process above.

 

[thefutilist]

Vincent Baker has an interesting blog about the relationship, in Apocalypse World play, between the core activity of "the conversation" - that is, a structured way of generating shared imagining of some people doing some things in circumstances of conflict - and the more technical and mechanical rules that the game offers for generating content for the conversation: it's section 4 of this blog post.

At the end of the discussion in section 4, he observes that:

Deep hacks' is a term we sometimes use for PbtA games that don’t follow Apocalypse World’s template here. . . . the conversations are structured so differently at the core that they require a whole different structure of elaboration and collapse.​

The reason I'm pointing this out is because it reminds us that not all RPGs have the same structure in their play. For instance, if someone wants to play a RPG that is similar to classic dungeon-crawling D&D, I think it would be a mistake to focus on the conversation and its principles as the core, or certainly as the whole of the core. The core, for that sort of RPG, has to include the map-and-key.

I also think that this helps us understand why this sort of RPGing won't, in play, manifest a story: to allude to @soviet's post just upthread, it might produce a travelogue; but a travelogue of the sort that one sees in the examples of play in Gygax's DMG, or Book 3 of OD&D, or Moldvay's example of play in his Basic Rulebook, is not much of a story!

A great many people have difficulty switching between different systems of resolution.

For instance:

You want to escape the guards and you’re doing that by leaping across the roof-tops.

(what happens next and how do we decide)

You fail and the guards catch you (how did we decide?)



Not prepared to fight and take lives, you throw your weapons down and surrender.

(what happens next and how do we decide?)


I throw my weapons down and the guards decide to kill me anyway? Can I roll to run away again?

When shifting between systems you might have to answer all these questions in different ways AND the way they’re presented can vary radically as well.

Before tossing my weapons down, do I the player know they’re going to kill me anyway? How do I get that information?

And on and on.

 

[pemerton]

A great many people have difficulty switching between different systems of resolution.

For instance:

You want to escape the guards and you’re doing that by leaping across the roof-tops.

(what happens next and how do we decide)

You fail and the guards catch you (how did we decide?)



Not prepared to fight and take lives, you throw your weapons down and surrender.

(what happens next and how do we decide?)


I throw my weapons down and the guards decide to kill me anyway? Can I roll to run away again?

When shifting between systems you might have to answer all these questions in different ways AND the way they’re presented can vary radically as well.

Before tossing my weapons down, do I the player know they’re going to kill me anyway? How do I get that information?

And on and on.

A further complication: a lot of RPG rulebooks don't really spell all of this out in detail. They leave it as an exercise for the reader, and/or to be inferred from actual play examples, etc.

 

[Umbran]

when you're telling it afterwards, yes.

Mod note:
There is a whole thread dedicated to story. If you want to talk about that, please take it there, and allow this thread to stay on topic. Thanks.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not when I use it. I'm quite happy to take Suits' definition:

I don't really hold with the notion of "non-Suitsian" games, I just think a lot of people use "game" very loosely to indicate a great many forms of play that are not ultimately games.

A term I've seen applied the the latter are "passtimes".

 

[Pedantic]

A term I've seen applied the the latter are "passtimes".

More relevant to this discussion, I think both storytelling and performance belong largely to that category. RPGs can be games, but they don't have to be, and for a great many purposes people purport to play them, probably don't need to be.

We should be careful, when considering RPGs as games, not to lump all mechanics into supporting gameplay, specifically. I think it's more often the case that RPGs contain one or more small games attached to a broader framework of other playful activities. Very rarely is the whole loop a given RPG claims to support a game, and often when they are, the gameplay is pretty trivial.

 

[Fenris-77]

More relevant to this discussion, I think both storytelling and performance belong largely to that category. RPGs can be games, but they don't have to be, and for a great many purposes people purport to play them, probably don't need to be.

We should be careful, when considering RPGs as games, not to lump all mechanics into supporting gameplay, specifically. I think it's more often the case that RPGs contain one or more small games attached to a broader framework of other playful activities. Very rarely is the whole loop a given RPG claims to support a game, and often when they are, the gameplay is pretty trivial.

Let's spell this out and we'll see if it holds together. "Roleplaying games can be games, but they don't have to be". You see the problem, right? Unless the term 'roleplaying game' is somehow incorrect, then your comment certainly applies to roleplaying, but not obviously to roleplaying game.

If we FKR type games as an exception that causes problems here, I'd be much more likely to say that FKR play isn't a roleplaying game, although it certainly is roleplaying.

I think you'll need to be a lot more specific and detailed about terms like 'support a game' and 'small games attaches to a broader framework' if you want anyone to engage seriously with what seems to be a radically different definition of 'RPG' than anyone else here is using.

 

[Deset Gled]

RPGs can be games, but they don't have to be,

Name fail. Big time name fail.

 

[pemerton]

Upthread, @Pedantic mentioned Suits's account of what is a game:

To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs, using only means permitted by rules, where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means, and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity.​

Even a freeform, mechanics-less RPG fits this account, assuming that it allocates distinct GM(esque) and player(esque) participant roles. Because the most efficient means for generating a fiction about the doings of some protagonists is for someone to tell that story. Achieving that same state of affairs - ie creation of a fiction about the doings of some protagonists - via the distribution of participant roles, and corresponding formal or informal constraints on what, and how, each participant can add to the fiction - is adopting less efficient means. And those means are permitted by the rules (be they formal or informal rules), And the rules are accepted because they make the fun activity of freeform RPGing possible.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

See, a big part of our difference here is that I do not see the core activity of RPGs being collaborative storytelling. Instead I see RPGs as a way to create and experience a consistent imaginary world through the lens of a creature or creatures within it, moderated by mechanics designed to model said world and all the features in it. Hopefully that world is interesting, and features situations that my character can interact with in a fun way, but the setting and the interaction are to me the central activity of RPGs.

Yeah to me too, but but I see that as subset of "collaborative storytelling" as in a some sort of series of interesting event, (thus "a story") is generated by it. I did not mean "collaborative storytelling in limited narrativist sense (only, that is included too.) But in that experience you describe, of the players imagining the characters, inhabiting them, deciding their actions, and the GM generating the world and deciding plausible outcomes of actions and events, the rules are merely an aid, they are not really required, and lot of time they are not used; the player just says what their character does and the GM decides what happens. No mechanics used, yet we are playing a roleplaying game.