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

Fenris-77 said:

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.

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Unless "the conversation" means simply working within a shared fiction, then I don't think I agree with this.

The last time I played classic-esque D&D, it was a session of White Plume Mountain, using my own AD&D variant for the PC building rules. This wasn't a game in which the setting was build through back-and-forth as you describe. There is a pre-authored setting/puzzle: the map and key. The players are trying to solve/beat it. A lot of the GM's narration is revealing bits of the map and key, as prompted by the players' action declarations about moving around and looking around.

I don't think the idea of recursively exploring, or building, the setting is very applicable in a lot of situation-oriented RPGing either, like Prince Valiant or Cthulhu Dark or Wuthering Heights.

Fenris-77 said:

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.

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I'm not sure what you've got in mind here. I mean, I don't talk about "narrative play" - it's a category that I see used, but am never really sure what it means (eg it seems intended to encompass both Fate and Burning Wheel, two RPGs that don't seem to me to have much in common beyond being RPGs).

Fenris-77 said:

I think a lot of RPG theory simply ignores the centrality of the conversation and suffers for it.

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Again, I'm not sure who your target is here.

The main theoretical discussion of RPGing that I'm familiar with is from Ron Edwards and Vincent Baker, and both are very attentive to questions of who is supposed to say what, who is actually saying what, and what is the suite of processes, expectations, etc that are determining who is saying what.

zakael19 said:

Replying to myself here to quote Baker’s take on this which I know a lot of AW old hats don’t like much:

“
PbtA represents an approach to RPG design as broad as any of these [D&D, GURPS, Forge]. Choose two given PbtA games, and you shouldn’t expect them to be any more similar than two point-buy games or two Forge games.

PbtA isn’t a system you can adapt to different genres, like GURPS, d20, Fate, One-Roll Engine. It’s an approach, a framework, a vocabulary for designing new systems that work how you want them to work.”

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This is why, upthread, I posted that "I find the use of "PbtA" as if it were an informative label pretty hopeless too. . . . I don't know why "PbtA" gets treated as if it's a meaningful umbrella."

If someone tells me that a system is PbtA, I don't know if it supports player-driven or GM-driven RPGing; if it relies on extensive prep or is no-myth; if it is "narrativist" (in the old lexicon) or is more about the players solving a puzzle/problem set for them by the GM or is more "neo-trad" (as per the newer lexicon).

PbtA is a design language - as per what you quoted from Vincent Baker - but not a label for how a RPG plays, or the sort of experience it might provide.

(A further complication is that a number of the people who I see using the "PbtA" label seem to have only passing familiarity with Apocalypse World and some of the techniques that it popularised - eg asking questions and building on the answers gets spoken about as if its the same as spending a fate point to declare some fictional fact or other, director-stance style.)

zakael19 said:

Oh that’s a good way of putting it. I’d also say “how openly collaborative is X” because like, Burning Wheel isn’t from what I can see; AW is probably intended to be.

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Burning Wheel assumes that the players and GM will work together establishing setting context, starting situation and unfolding situation. The players have a number of tools for doing this - as part of PC build they have Beliefs, Relationships, Affiliations, their actual lifepath choices, etc; and in play they have Circles and Wises. The GM has their responsibility for managing scenes - framing them and closing them - and more generally introducing complications.

Apocalypse World doesn't have lifepaths, but has playbooks: and these establish setting elements (like hardholds and gangs) and aspects of situation (like gigs). Then there is Hx, and the first session, and in place of Circles and Wises there is the GM's role of asking questions and building on the answers.

They're different suites of techniques. They produce different experiences. Burning Wheel, in setting out "the sacred and most holy role of the players" (p 552 of Gold Revised), says this:


These instructions to players make sense in the context of the game's mechanics: that there are mechanical options and frameworks that need to be deliberately brought into play (like Circles, or complex conflict resolution) and that some of these give the player the power to establish key elements of situation (Circles, Wises) and that all of them give the player the power to establish binding elements of how a situation resolves.

These instructions wouldn't make sense for AW, which doesn't have the same sorts of mechanics, that doesn't give players the same sort of power to shape situation, and that uses "if you do it, you do it" as its core rule for triggering player-side mechanics.

The games are different. That's not to say ideas and approaches learned playing one can't help in playing the other. But when talking about them in a context of analysis/criticism, I think keeping the differences clear is important. And I'm not really sure what it means to try and rank them as more or less "openly collaborative". Does a player seizing control of the direction of play by using Circles, or Wises, or calling for a Duel of Wits (and as a BW player I've done all of those things) count as collaborative or combative? I dunno, but it's how the game is designed to be played.

Fenris-77 said:

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

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I'm not sure if by "older D&D" you mean AD&D 2nd ed, or classic D&D of the KotB/WPM/beat-the-dungeon type play. The reason that I ask is because I often see AD&D 2nd ed (and all the other RPGs that are played in more-or-less the same sort of way, which includes a lot of 5e D&D as best I can tell) described as "trad".

Anyway, I don't think there are "unbridgeable" divides in RPG play or design. I GMed a session of Torchbearer 2e yesterday. The scenario I was using was my adaptation of The Halls of Tizun Thane, from very early White Dwarf: (I know it from Best of White Dwarf Scenarios v1.)

Because it's Torchbearer, the players were counting their rations and worrying about their supply of candles and sacks. Also because it's Torchbearer, the Elves and Dwarf were bickering among one another (prompted by Beliefs and Creeds), and a key moment of the session was when the Dwarf (in pursuit of his goal) leapt onto a high rock, beat his chest, and challenged the nandie-bear to single combat - and then his player rolled a lucky Hunting test, aided by his companions, and so the nandie-bear accepted the challenge.

Is it "classic"? Is it "narrative"? It's Torchbearer!

Fenris-77 said:

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'.

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When you say "steer(s) the narrative", is that intended to mean something different than, say, "drive(s) the fiction" would?

I ask because if they are indeed synonymous the obvious corollary discussion is about "fiction over mechanics" vs "mechanics over fiction"; i.e. which one is subservient to the other.

Fenris-77 said:

I don't see any reason why authorial control mechanics couldn't be a kind of mechanic to discuss. I don't think they define narrativist play though, although they are often associated with it. It's also the case that some games don't reapportion authorial control via mechanics but rather by use of things like GM and Player agendas or lists of responsibilities, and these things do actually speak directly to the nature of the conversation.

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To the bolded: those are mechanics IMO, only at a top level rather than a specific rules level.

Fenris-77 said:

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.

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It depends where you count the bounds of "Traditional" play. I'd argue (and have argued) that The Forge and Narrativism were an attempt to make a set of game rules that supported what was written on the back of books like Vampire: the Masquerade and what good storytellers (and 2e DMs) did despite having to fight the rules every step of the way to succeed.

The biggest difference in my eyes between a lot of trad (as opposed to old school) play and narrative play is how much work it is to get to similar ends.

Neonchameleon said:

The biggest difference in my eyes between a lot of trad (as opposed to old school) play and narrative play is how much work it is to get to similar ends.

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This is the "vanilla narrativist" hypothesis. I am (or at least have been) an instance of the type, as I've often posted about including earlier this morning in another thread:

pemerton said:

I've approximated to this sort of play using AD&D (back in the late 1980s) and using Rolemaster (through the 90s and the first decade of this century). But their tools are not as good. They don't integrate Beliefs and similar elements into PC build; they don't have an analogue to Circles; they default to failure on a roll equals failure at the task; etc. I have a pretty good sense of the extent to which they can be drifted towards this sort of player-driven play, but I would never try and do it these days: because Burning Wheel does it straightforwardly, right out of the box, with no problems of mechanic or technique.

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Based on my own experience, and on the assumption that I'm probably not unique, I used to assume that there must be a lot of other people with similar experiences - vanilla narrativist RPGers - out there.

But given the extreme hostility that discussion of narrativist play tends to receive from self-identified "trad" RPGers, who look to AD&D 2nd ed and other games of that era as their ideal, over the past decade or so I've revised my conjecture. It seems that a lot of "trad" RPGers are not looking for narrativist play, but rather are very happy with play that is based around the players experiencing and working through the GM's setting and/or situation.

pemerton said:

But given the extreme hostility that discussion of narrativist play tends to receive from self-identified "trad" RPGers, who look to AD&D 2nd ed and other games of that era as their ideal, over the past decade or so I've revised my conjecture. It seems that a lot of "trad" RPGers are not looking for narrativist play, but rather are very happy with play that is based around the players experiencing and working through the GM's setting and/or situation.

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Here I think that there are multiple groups who call themselves Trad RPGers.

• Continuing or Modern Trad RPGers who know what they like and are happy with those games. Many of them (like you) also play modern RPGs
• Continuing Trad RPGers with neophobia who stick to their games because familiarity and expertise matter a lot and learning new systems and new ways of thinking takes effort that they don't think (sometimes rightly) is worth putting in
• Continuing or Modern Trad RPGers who are part of the group that played trad RPGs for reasons other than those that lead to modern narrative RPGs. They didn't like that side of RPGs at the time and like it even less now that there's more focus on it
• And a further group who I won't say much more about lest I break the no politics rule

It's not that people were not looking for modern narrative style games among trad RPGs - they very definitely were. It's that those who are still playing the trad RPGs are massively disproportionately not from among that group for obvious reasons. And to many of them the narrativist RPGs may have split groups that had a wide array of players but those who preferred narrativist games aren't playing the older ones any more now they've something that suits them better; they see this slight splintering as painful.

Lanefan said:

When you say "steer(s) the narrative", is that intended to mean something different than, say, "drive(s) the fiction" would?

I ask because if they are indeed synonymous the obvious corollary discussion is about "fiction over mechanics" vs "mechanics over fiction"; i.e. which one is subservient to the other.

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It was actually @Micah Sweet who used steer the narrative first, I was replying to him. It a fair question.