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And the thing I've bolded is what I'm absolutely naughty word sick of in regards to trad play. For reasons unknown, the GM's creative fiction created 6 seconds / 6 minutes / 6 hours / 6 days / 6 weeks / 6 years ago is seen as sacredly immutable, wholly not subject to the player's expressed...

Ironsworn | Starforged | Sundered Isles Swords of the Serpentine Genesys | FFG Star Wars Honor + Intrigue Court of Blades (Forged in the Dark hack) Tales of Xadia | Cortex Prime

Why is it so difficult for some to differentiate the presence of certain pieces of content within a scene and what is at stake in a scene? Say, for example, a PC has entered into a jousting tournament. The presence of a duke and his daughter in an observation box, the duke's loyal knight dressed...

The strategy seems pretty obvious from the outside. The companies grouped with Asmodee are generally past their "prime earning" product years. You're going to see slow, stable revenue from them but very little innovation, very little "big bang" new product revenue (that's all going to come from...

This list seems like a good set of properties for identifying neotrad mechanics / systems. Looking it over, I can immediately pinpoint Genesys as a system that meets pretty much every criterion. The One Ring (though I've only read it but not played it) also seems to be strongly oriented in this...

I brought up the contra-narrative of "amorphous non-reality" because it was genuinely one of my major concerns about trying "narrative" style games 5 or 6 years ago. "How does the game world of Dungeon World even make sense if players are spouting off lore and it suddenly becomes canon...

Yeah, I have to agree with @Neonchameleon and others here --- the constant, trad-centric claim of "amorphous chaos of non-reality" inherent to narrative style games is meaningless, a massively overstated bogeyman. It's a scare tactic thrown out by trad GMs to warn away the gullible and...

The most common element or throughline of those who have no experience with narrative games seems to be, "Any game where I cannot directly infer a discrete chain of fictional world causal processes that map directly to a game mechanic, its inputs, and its outputs."

To a certain degree I think this true. Again, it's a difference of perspective, but that perspective makes a difference in approach to play. For vanilla SNN (Story-Now Narrative), the genre is important because it focuses the available premises. Neotrad looks at genre as an important (but not...

I've written a few times before that I find it easiest to understand neotrad using the "Player-wants-to-be-Batman (and only Batman)" paradigm. Neotrad assumes that players come to the game with a highly realized vision of what they want the character to be (i.e., Batman), both mechanically and...

So, Savage Worlds can play into neotrad elements very well in some ways. Since it's classless and skill based, you can lean into just about any core character concept. If the players wanted to come to a shared agreement on how to use "bennies" to keep character threads intact throughout a...

No, you really can't go home. I'm now coming up on 5 years removed from having run or played in a Savage Worlds game. Savage Worlds was hands down my favorite system from 2012 through 2019. Nothing even came close. I wouldn't have chosen to run anything else. But I'm not sure what happened...

PbtA is not neotrad. It puts characters at far too much risk. There's way too much of a chance for your character being forced to evolve in ways narratively that may conflict with a player's initial conception.

GURPS, obviously, if that's to taste, which it isn't for me. If I were serious about the type of system you're describing, I'd take a good, hard look at EABA, or its predecessor CORPS.

My current default mode is what I'd call "flexi-trad narrative", heavily influenced from Ironsworn and Genesys, where there is a GM, but with a broad, open view around players contributing / adding to a game's fictional state, both at an immediate and meta / worldbuilding level. I am fully...

Follow-up --- a quick search on Drivethrurpg found no listings for this. Unless there's some query-fu I don't know about, this RPG isn't listed on Drivethru's site. So I guess you basically have to purchase the Gog.com digital game to get it as a reward.

So . . . I was just messing around in my Gog.com profile. I saw that they have the 2000 game Rune: Classic on sale for $2 and thought, "Hey, I really liked that game. It was pretty good for being Unreal Engine V1 back in the day; I should buy it." But then remembered, "I think I bought it on...

I totally feel this, and basically gave up on D&D ever getting it right at the very end of the 3.5 run. Savage Worlds made it easy to do and it always felt right, and was always balanced, because Savage Worlds has a sneaky elegant way of forcing you to make certain character trade offs if you...