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

Fenris-77 said:

This is very true and as a result the agendas do function more like mechanics in some ways, I agree. The problem is that there isn't always a clear answer what the result should be, which seems to still leave them in a different category than things like fortune or experience mechanics.

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I'm not entirely sure; lot of systems have some fairly subjective bits in things like experience awards and at least some sorts of currency (though admittedly in the latter case, its the ones that are more narrative forms that have some non-quantitative options).

Here's another example from cards:

One way to lose a hand of bridge or five hundred is to get unlucky in the deal. If I'm dealt four suits, with none greater than 3 or 4 length, and no card higher than a 10, I'm probably not going to win the hand. (And for the five hundred players out there, I've got two suits no lower than a 7 - so no misere.)

Another way is to mis-bid, or mis-play. And yet another is bid and play well, but to be out-played by your opponent.

These are all different experiences. The first has you cursing your luck, the second cursing yourself, the third admiring your opponent's skill and wishing you were better.

And there are analogues of this in RPG play:

Being attacked by the Orcs because of a wandering monster roll, or because of a bad reaction roll: I got unlucky.

Being attacked by the Orcs because I didn't anticipate that the GM's notes might mention Orc guards at the dungeon entrance: I've been outwitted by the GM.

Being attacked by Orcs because the GM thinks that makes for a good encounter: things are unfolding in accordance with the GM's aesthetic sensibilities.

These are all different experiences too. It doesn't help us understand RPGing - how it works, and why it can be fun - to glom them all together!

pemerton said:

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.

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This conversation inspired me to go back to AW and formalise and tighten up what I’d do. My word is it complicated. The way threats are organised in 2e is weird because they’re both an actual thing (sometimes) and organisation nodes. So I went and contrasted Burned Over and 1E against each other. In conclusion, I don’t think getting rid of Fronts was a great idea but the way Fronts are formed in the 1e text has issues.

The issue with 2E is that some threats have a cast list and clocks. In which case they’re really a collection of threats. In which case sharing the same name with individual threats muddies the water. So we’re back to Fronts.


I’ve not done a comprehensive write up and this is subject to revision but here’s the process I came up with.

Between every scene you look at your threat map and follow the steps below:

1) Update NPC priorities if they would be updated. Tick clocks if they would tick.

2) Urgent: Any active threats/fronts engaging with the P.C’s right now? If yes cut to scene. (this could be a deadly storm or someone sending an errand boy to the Savvyhead because the water generator is broken)

3) Open: If nothing then just let the PC say what they’re doing but bear in mind you need to telegraph threats if you’re on the future badness part of the clock. You can also just decide to tick a clock at this stage if you want.

When in the scene (not before), you can activate any latent threats if you want.

edit; edited part 3 for clarity.

@thefutilist

Your post just upthread, about AW procedures, made me think about an episode of Torchbearer 2e GMing this weekend, when the PCs went to the tavern in a village, and so I had to roll on the Tavern Rumours table.

The results were:


Each of these requires the GM to make a decision about what to say next.

It was Fea-bella who encountered a spurned lover, talking irately about their lover's behaviour. The village is not far from the Halls of Tizun Thane, where two of the three PCs had already explored (in the previous session). There is little else of interest in the village, or connected to the PCs, so I decided to connect this to the Halls of Tizun Thane. This required adopting a liberal reading of "this place"; but the rulebook says, for Town Events, "Be sure to color these results so that they mesh with the current events of the campaign", and the same logic applies to the Rumours Table.

There once were three leaders in the Halls. Tizun Thane is dead, but his two brothers are still alive. Sega Thane is a necromantic weirdo who hangs out with his animated dead; but Diker, while also not without character flaws, is a bit more normal. The scenario (which is from a 1980 White Dwarf magazine) has rumours in the classic D&D fashion, and one of them mentions Diker Thane has sometimes sent men to the village for supplies in the last six months. This implies that Diker himself has not been going to the village; and so this supplied my material: Fea-bella's interlocutor complained that her boyfriend, Diker Thane, hadn't visited her for six months. (And said a bit more about Diker, such as that is monetarily well off, wearing a dark green cape and having a suit of black plate armour.)

Telemere received the omen, being mocked by an unkindness of ravens. I decided to link this to the haunting of the village by the Night Things - which had already been foreshadowed by my description of wooden building being rebuilt in stone, and shuttered with metal. The Scholar's Guide includes the following instruction to GMs (pp 213-4):


I saw an opportunity to link this omen to Telemere's Instinct, which is to look if I'm being watched when I enter somewhere new. When he entered the tavern, he could see one of the old-timers say something to the barkeep. Using his Instinct, Telemere's player succeeded on a Scout test, and overheard the old-timer telling the barkeep that the mocking of the ravens indicated that the Elven ranger was going to be a victim of the Night Things. (The PCs learned more about these Night things when they spoke to a village elder.)

When I rolled the sudden appearance of Golin's friend, I asked Golin's player to read off his list of friends. One was dead, one was an alchemist quite a way away at the Wizard's Tower, and one was a tinker even further away at the village Nulb. Nulb is the nearest settlement to the Moathouse, which had been the headquarters of Lareth the Beautiful until Lareth was driven off by river pirates and pursued by his (former) Bugbear servitors. The last time the PCs were in Nulb, it had been overrun by pirates.

Now, Nink turned up in this far away village. He told Golin how the Bugbears had returned to Nulb and driven out the pirates and most of the residents. So Nink had fled. A series of encounters had driven him further and further north (I narrated NPCs and places that the PCs had experienced, and that it made sense would cause Nink to keep coming north), until he'd come to a village where he had heard there would be work for a tinker (because of all the building taking place).

I haven't tried to generalise these examples into any sort of general principle. But I hope they illustrate how I approach Torchbearer 2e; how I try to integrate its classic-D&D-esque elements (with dungeons and rumours and stuff) with its Burning Wheel-esque elements (with Beliefs and Instincts and relationships and stuff); and how I try to handle the low myth aspects of play without going completely mad libs.

Campbell said:

Principles (at least in Apocalypse World) not advice or suggestions. They are instructions. The game says, "Always say what your principles demand."

Now, no one can force you to follow these instructions, but no one can force you to use a game mechanic besides through social agreement and setting boundaries.

I'd like to clarify that the principle in question is not "be a fan of the players" but "be a fan of the players' characters" and is specifically clarified to be about being curious about the characters and providing honest adversity with faith that they will be able to handle it.

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The difference is that someone can externally verify if you are following game mechanics because they are procedural. "Be a fan of the player characters" on the other hand is good advice - but means different things to different people. If you look at fan fiction most of it is written by fans - but some people want pure softness and others to put their favourites through hell while even more of them are shipping them. All are fans.

I’d say modern TTRPG mechanics usually focus on streamlining play, giving players narrative tools, or adding emergent gameplay. Things like bounded accuracy, story-driven abilities, and mechanics that let players influence the world outside combat feel modern to me. I don’t really care about the year - it’s more about whether the mechanics feel fresh and flexible compared to older, rigid systems.

Neonchameleon said:

The difference is that someone can externally verify if you are following game mechanics because they are procedural. "Be a fan of the player characters" on the other hand is good advice - but means different things to different people. If you look at fan fiction most of it is written by fans - but some people want pure softness and others to put their favourites through hell while even more of them are shipping them. All are fans.

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I tend to think Be fans of the players' characters is fairly clear. That's not to say that it's especially, let alone narrowly, prescriptive. It leaves a lot of room for decision-making. (Which I think is deliberate.) But I think it's fairly clear what it does or doesn't permit.

I think what it permits are decisions about the fiction that implicate the PCs, that generate meaning or consequences for the PCs, that bring who the PCs are, and what their relationships are to the foreground. Decisions that are indifferent to, or that just shut down or abnegate, who the PCs are; that foreground relationships between characters that don't involve or implicate the PCs; that present a world, setting or situation in which the PCs have meaningful role to play - these are decisions that it excludes, because they don't demonstrate the appropriate orientation towards the players' characters.

At any given table, and in any given session depending on table mood, there will be more precise ways of honouring this principle, and more things will be - at that table, in that context - excluded. Making those moment-to-moment judgements is a component of GMing skill. But I still think the general principle, and the orientation that it calls upon the GM to adopt, is pretty clear.

The thing about “Be a Fan of the Player Characters” that always seems to get glossed over in these discussions is that a) every game that includes that in GM principles expands on what it means to be a fan of them for that game and b) it’s generally about “not robbing them of their cool stuff” when you make other moves and “not denying success when they’ve fought hard for it and won” and “make sure when they succeed despite all the odds their success is consequential,” and then don’t actively do the worst thing you can think of when you make moves.

Regarding meta mechanics and stuff.

I think it is not clear cut so that something is absolutely meta or it is not. It is about whether the decision making of the player and the character are correlated, and this can be a bit muddy; they can be strongly correlated or weakly correlated or not at all correlated.

So whilst for example I can see some force user in a SW game burning force points to power their force abilities corresponding to the character making conscious decision to straining themself, thus limiting their future ability to use force, and thus not being particularly meta, it is hard to argue that when they are used as effectively luck points by non-non-force sensitive characters and even generated by "dramatic moments," this would be any way connected to what the character decides and thus be pretty purely meta.

And yeah, whether something is meta, depends on the connection between the fiction and the rules, thus one can make something "non-meta" by making the process it represent diegetic. This of course is far easier to do with magic and other weird stuff that does not need to correspond to our real world intuitions about how stuff works. Like in my D&D games the spells slots and spell levels are indeed just how the metaphysics work, (not necessary referred with such term, but still) thus are diegetic and non meta. Though this of course is a post hoc justification, and it is admittedly metaphysically weird and not something I would come up were I not trying to marry the rules and the fiction.

Discussion about meta mechanics often revolves around meta currencies, but they of course are not the only, and probably not even the most common, way mechanics can be meta. In many more narativist games for example, the player might be making decision about things the character is not deciding, which nevertheless impact the mechanical outcomes, (making it pretty fully meta) or they might be making in-character decisions, that affect the outcomes in way that is not actually causally connected to the decision (making them at least partially meta.) For example if the player deciding what the character hopes or fears has significant impact on the odds of the mechanics producing those things, then that is pretty meta.

Meta mechanics of course are not bad in themselves at all. They allow us to achieve things we otherwise could not. But they also are a spice many players do not care for, or are even allergic to, so it is good to be aware of roughly what amount of them are present in the game.

Crimson Longinus said:

Meta mechanics of course are not bad in themselves at all. They allow us to achieve things we otherwise could not. But they also are a spice many players do not care for, or are even allergic to, so it is good to be aware of roughly what amount of them are present in the game.

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One also has to account for why a given player is averse to such things, too. Back in our TORG days, one of my players had no real problem with using Possibilities (which while clearly serving the function of a metacurrency, actually represent something that exists in setting and is known by some people including pretty much all PCs) but found the card play element (also strongly metamechanical) disruptive. This had nothing to do with how in-setting either process was, but simply they could spend Possibilities without disrupting their play process (which was strongly immersive) but the card play pulled them out of it. The former was not more intrusive to them than handling die rolling and other mechanics handling, but the latter was.