D&D 5E Help me understand & find the fun in OC/neo-trad play...

[EzekielRaiden]

Another thing to add to the list to separate Traditional from Neo T. How do the players react to events happening in the game that effect them directly that they did nothing at all to trigger. This is a big split:

Traditional: the game rolls on and the characters deal with it.

Neo T: The players hate it, and often will vote to make it go away. Though also most Neo T DM hate it too, so they don't do it.

As usual, your severe bias is showing here Bloodtide. I don't run a neotrad game, I run a "story game," because it's Dungeon World. But my players are perfectly happy with, for example, being caught by surprise when the Raven-Shadow assassin cult kills someone important while they were out and about. Yes, in theory, they could have stopped the killing if they'd been there, but they weren't there.

What is key is you have to do this reasonably. That means, you can't just be constantly inserting such intrusions all the time, because then it feels like the players are being punished solely because their characters can't be in seven places at once. You can't do it egregiously, because that feels like being punished for not being omniscient enough to know which threat was the "real" threat and which was the "not really all that bad" threat. You have to consider what makes an interesting event, not just a shocking or frustrating one.

In other words...you have to not just do things SOLELY because you feel like it. You have to think about what the impact of your choices as DM will be. The events that occur are not simply for your enjoyment. They're for everyone's enjoyment. For the good times to be especially sweet, sometimes there need to be bad times--but too many bad times will sour the good ones far worse than not having enough would.

Oh memory unlocked. 1980 something...on a S tar Trek BBS (internet before Windows!) and so many threads would be flooded by Fanfics where Lt. Amanda Jones would fall in love with Spock and live happily ever after...written by Amanda Jones.

Yes, that's the stereotypical (and frustratingly sexist) origin of the "Mary Sue." Just keep in mind that this problem is just as easy for men to fall into as it is for women. Young, inexperienced authors project themselves into wish-fulfillment fantasies that are only interesting to people who personally identify with the projected character. But wish-fulfillment fantasy is not an unusual genre; the entire "isekai" genre of anime, for example, is pretty much pure wish-fulfillment, where someone gets neatly and conveniently removed from our world (often by being run over by a truck, hence the memes about that) and then deposited into a much more interesting fantasy world with special powers.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The DM simply decides to have an events happen, 100% independent of anything the characters have done. But it is not random...it is just the players don't know the "why".

How is that not random? How could the players possibly ever determine the difference between "the DM got a random hair up their hindquarters" and "the DM has a secret master plan"?

Independent events are fine. DMs shoving crap down the players' throats exclusively because the DM feels like it, with zero care or interest in what the players would find interesting or exciting or memorable or curious, is not fine, not in neotrad.

I bash nothing, just show the differences.

You are absolutely bashing it. There is no other description for this. This is not brutal honesty. It is simply brutality for brutality's sake.

For a lot of Neo T games, things only happen when and if the characters do or don't do actions.

And I assure you, this is not true.

In a Traditional game, things happen on the DMs whim.....independent of whatever the characters do.

"DM whim" has little to no place in neotrad, that's true. But that's because DM whim is hostile to the ideas that go into neotrad. Having events occur that are independent of characters' actions or goals is perfectly fine in neotrad. Having events that are pure "DM whim" with no rhyme or reason other than "purely because the DM felt like it, if you don't like it BEGONE!" is not fine in neotrad.

 

[tetrasodium]

Can you maybe go start another thread and stop insisting we who like the style are making stuff up or that we have no experience? Also ths bolded is such a crazy assertion when FREE LEAGUE DEFINED THE IDEA LOL

I linked that to 161 because the claim was made and not challenged. Yes free league might have coined the term, but as even your your last few posts on this page confirm, much of what gets written about neotrad are about something else entirely

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I linked that to 161 because the claim was made and not challenged. Yes free league might have coined the term, but as even your your last few posts on this page s confirm, much of what gets written about neotrad are about something else entirely

I should note that I was referring to things like the blog post. There are people who use the term "neotrad" to label their own preferences. Most of them don't go on the internet and make taxonomic systems of gameplay styles. Most of the people who do write blogposts about gameplay style taxonomy...are much older, much more traditionalist gamers who don't play, don't like, and/or don't know how neotrad conducts itself. Even in this thread, we've had things like Bloodtide's totally erroneous claim that neotrad play absolutely forbids events that aren't caused by the players, when that is lightyears away from the truth.

You'll find few blog posts about this that are actually productive, because most of the people who actually do neotrad...are busy playing neotrad.

 

[Shardstone]

I linked that to 161 because the claim was made and not challenged. Yes free league might have coined the term, but as even your your last few posts on this page confirm, much of what gets written about neotrad are about something else entirely

It's not. If you look at Free League games, they line up with every post I've made so far. They are focused on the characters, there are scenarios happening around them, but the characters are the main focus, theirs ins and outs, what they decide to do. There is no difference.

 

[Aldarc]

It's worth pointing out that the origin of words and how they were first used do not always equate to how they are currently used in discourse. Meanings can and do change. Our understanding of terms will change. The meaning put forth by Free League is useful in so far as it tells us the original idea behind the meaning of "Neo-Trad" and how it applies to their games. It does not tell us what the current understanding of the term entails. And the thing about "culture" is that it's messy. There is a lot of diversity, difference, and overlap within and between cultures.

 

[Shardstone]

It's worth pointing out that the origin of words and how they were first used do not always equate to how they are currently used in discourse. Meanings can and do change. Our understanding of terms will change. The meaning put forth by Free League is useful in so far as it tells us the original idea behind the meaning of "Neo-Trad" and how it applies to their games. It does not tell us what the current understanding of the term entails. And the thing about "culture" is that it's messy. There is a lot of diversity, difference, and overlap within and between cultures.

It is so weird to me, as an English professor, seeing people try to lampoon me and others over definitions when language is dynamic, not static. Recent studies show that misunderstandings happen because we have different definitions of the same words, and also different definitions of the words that make up the prior definitions. But now, unless we're all hivemind in understanding of Neotrad, it doesn't exist?

Thank you for your post, it really helps highlight how discussion SHOULD happen, ie, we really shouldn't be here arguing that we need specifically the same definitions to discuss something.

 

[DEFCON 1]

That just sounds like houserules to me. People ban stuff in their own games all the time.

Heh heh... yep, but it's still funny to read a module like Tomb of Horrors and see all the house rules Gary created and included in it for module's publication, just so players couldn't teleport or walk through walls to get straight to the end and circumvent the adventure itself.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

is so weird to me, as an English professor, seeing people try to lampoon me and others over

I take it that’s Language , not Literature, or you would be aware of the significance of context and nuance.

 

[Shardstone]

I take it that’s Language , not Literature, or you would be aware of the significance of context and nuance.

Hey, is this a good natured joke, or are you insulting me right now? Because that reads a lot like an insult and I do not appreciate it.

Furthermore, telling me that I'm ignoring context and nuance is ridiculous given my actual posts in this thread. I don't know what made you feel so damn bold that you can talk to me that way, but you most surely can not, Paul.