Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 9243671" data-attributes="member: 42582">GUMSHOE seems to be neotrad, in so far as it uses indie-ish, Robin Laws-designed mechanics to produce a CoC-type experience. It involves prep in a pretty classic fashion.Fate seems to be a candidate for neotrad: it uses indie-ish mechanics (with compels and a fate point economy and zones and free-descriptor aspects) for a type of high concept sim experience. The prep is done by both GM and players, including the very important choice by players of their PCs' aspects, but (at least based on my reading) play is not quite as "pre-loaded" as GUMSHOE.Agon 2e, which has been discussed in this thread as a possible neotrad vehicle, has prep for situation only, like DitV and unlike GUMSHOE. And that prep is by the GM, not the players. The players don't get involved until the signs of the gods, and that is play, not prep. But player decision-making about how to reveal their PCs, and the capacity of this decision-making to shape the story is where the neo-trad potential lies. And the actual mechanics of this, in a general fashion, resemble Fate: at crunch-time, the players have enough resources on their side (Bonds, Divine Favour, Pathos) that, by spending them, they can buff their dice pools and hence their action resolution results sufficiently strongly to swamp the risks of consequences; and that reliable swamping of the risks of consequences is what makes it not full-bloodedly narrativist. It's a bit less mechanical than Fate (extra dice is not the same as a guaranteed bonus), and the hoarding of points works a bit differently from Fate (Agon 2e doesn't really have an analogue to accepting low-stakes compels) but the general dynamic is comparable.The preceding discussion has, hopefully, served two purposes:*Games which would fall under the neo-trad descriptor vary in way they use prep - it can be very DL/CoC-ish trad; it can be DitV-ish prep for situation; it can be distributed across the players and GM; *It reminds us that play to find out is intended to contrast with decide what happens in play. The slogan is not closely connected to prep at all, except that one method of deciding, as opposed to discovering, what happens in play is for the GM to make those decisions by reference to their prepared secret backstory.To elaborate on the second of the above two points:A system like Fate, or like the mooted approach to Agon 2e, is not "play to find out" because the player doesn't have to find out - rather, at the moment of crunch they get to decide what happens to their PC. A system like GUMSHOE is not "play to find out" because the GM doesn't have to find out - rather, they simply have to read from their prep to tell the players what the important stuff is that their PCs discover and encounter.Apocalypse World differs from this: the players can't decide, they have to discover (by rolling the dice at the moment of crunch), and the GM - even when drawing upon their prep (eg fronts) - is discovering, because the prep is related to the consequences of action resolution completely differently from how it is in GUMSHOE. It is a source of fictional elements, but the GM can't actually use it until the GM works out what will be interesting, or an opportunity, or a cost, or a spot - and those are revealed in the moment of play ("story NOW") by the choices that the players make.And so, to reiterate: Baker uses "play to find out" with a specific meaning, very closely connected to his idea that "<a href="http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/360" target="_blank">The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted</a>". Neo-trad does not embrace it - the whole point of neo-trad is to reject the unwelcome, and rather to provide an experience of the arc as envisaged at the outset. Classic sim does not embrace it - the whole point of sim is to deliver the expected, so that it can be explored and appreciated. And gamism does not embrace it - a gamist player who experiences the unwelcome and unexpected has lost, not won! If it's too unexpected it may even have subverted the whole framework of competition.</blockquote>

Verification