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

[FrozenNorth]

Not exactly sure what makes it poor to you.

Well, I explained what made it a poor adventure in a different post.

As for what made it poor Tolkien fanfic:

Bilbo was portrayed as a faded has-been obsessed with recapturing his former glory-days. The adventures were rooted in a selfish desire to relive a final adventure.

In the adventures, the Shire bore no resemblance to the rustic idyll portrayed in “A long-awaited party”. Instead, the adventures doubled down on Bilbo not just being reclusive, but actively being shunned by other hobbits as a “non-conformist”. The party (all native hobbits) are questioned and regarded with suspicion when in other hobbit villages. Their relationship with Bilbo is considered a black mark against their reputation.

The Shire generally feels like a particularly unpleasant HOA.

 

[Wolfpack48]

Well, I explained what made it a poor adventure in a different post.

As for what made it poor Tolkien fanfic:

Bilbo was portrayed as a faded has-been obsessed with recapturing his former glory-days. The adventures were rooted in a selfish desire to relive a final adventure.

In the adventures, the Shire bore no resemblance to the rustic idyll portrayed in “A long-awaited party”. Instead, the adventures doubled down on Bilbo not just being reclusive, but actively being shunned by other hobbits as a “non-conformist”. The party (all native hobbits) are questioned and regarded with suspicion when in other hobbit villages. Their relationship with Bilbo is considered a black mark against their reputation.

The Shire generally feels like a particularly unpleasant HOA.

Ick.

 

[overgeeked]

I think there’s something to be said for having characters have a reason to a) bite the premise together and b) knit into a party to the get the ball rolling. FU does this explicitly during party creation - you establish bonds and reasons to be an adventuring party as part of premise (and bonds don’t all have to be positive!).

Sure. But you only need maybe a paragraph of text to handle that for the group. Plenty of basic ideas cover it just fine. We're all from the same town. Our village was wiped out and we're out for revenge. The evil prince kidnapped our families. We're all dirt poor and want to become rich.

I don't know about other long-time groups, but we've done simple "how do you know each other" type questions since we started playing AD&D in 1984. None of that led to the kind of...well, Mary Sue fanfiction that is the negative stereotype of this aspect of the style.

It's not "a little bit of history" I object to.

On that pages of pre written story bit, the BG3 party members are to me the final exemplars of the pure OC style in a CRPG form. Each is so freaking extra, and then you have players that show up with that sort of thing on their minds.

It's that.

None of mine thankfully.

Lucky you.

I'm fine with "I'm a farmer, there was a drought and my family is starving, so here I am delving dungeons looking for money."

What makes me run screaming is "My story starts about 100,000 years ago when my father, the High Lord King Head !@#$ In Charge Of The Universe..."

After getting maybe the 50th such backstory I pulled the plug and just stopped running 5E.

 

[Shardstone]

It is very clear that Neotrad has evolved even after Free League coined it. One could argue that Neotrad as defined by the blog article in the OP has essentially created a same-named-but-different RPG style in the greater discourse.

 

[Umbran]

...as you have no respect for people of differing opinion.

Mod note:

You are totally within your rights to walk away from a poster who you don't want to interact with. We have an Ignore function to support exactly that.

But really, you should disengage without taking the parting shot. If you stoop to being insulting, you lose whatever moral ground you had.

 

[prabe]

Starting with the epic novels I've had players hand me does not. I think the line is personal. On the extreme end I think the refrain about railroading DMs being frustrated novelists also applies to some of the people writing epic backstories grander than Lord of the Rings for their 1st-level zero XP characters.

I have seen the point made that the more the players put work into character backstory, the less they think it's going to matter. I've had success getting the players at my tables who tend to write novella-length backstories to moderate that by A) explicitly pointing that the PCs are level 1/at the beginning of their story, not the middle or the end (either phrasing can work, I think) and B) actually making the backstories matter, whether 50 pages or 50 words. There's a good chance that my (now known) habit of asking the players for details of the setting and how they connect to the PCs, and how the PCs connect to each other also works for this--the players know they have input, that what their characters care about can matter, they don't need to give me 20,000+ words to convince me of that.

 

[Umbran]

This is one of the reasons despite understanding more about the neo-trad style now (honestly thanks everyone), I don't think it will ever be my style.

And that's cool.

But, learning about a style of play isn't just about learning if you will adopt the whole thing, jumping in the deep end. It is also learning about the techniques, some of which may be useful even if you don't adopt the thing entirely.

Like, way upthread, the bit about Ashen Stars character arcs, which gives a GM a structured way to find out what the PCs want, without having that long backstory you seem to dislike.

I don't want a character with a detailed backstory telling me how cool they were before the game even starts.

So, with all due respect, the backstory that tells you "how cool" the character was before the game starts is, in my eyes, a failed neotrad element. Painting the entire style with the brush of a poor implementation of one of the methods is not doing the thing justice. It is like eating at McDonalds and swearing off burgers. Maybe don't measure the thing by the sub-standard examples, hm?

To me, a good backstory for neotrad play isn't about how cool you were. It is about backstory plot and events, about what is important to the PC, about their moral/ethical positions, their friends and enemies, and about their internal conflicts. The good backstory lays out the starting narrative position of the character, and the story elements and themes the player expects to engage with as play begins - and for neotrad play that can be very useful for everyone to have.

Indeed, structurally, a backstory that is about failure the character experienced is far more useful for neotrad play than one showing a major impressive powerful success. Because a failure then starts you with an initial narrative target - finally succeeding at whatever you failed at before..

 

[zakael19]

Failure, setback, or betrayal - things that went wrong that establish why you're out striving with awesome hooks.

 

[prabe]

Failure, setback, or betrayal - things that went wrong that establish why you're out striving with awesome hooks.

A backstory that doesn't give the GM anything to twist or pull to frame in something interesting isn't a useful backstory, from a neotrad perspective.

 

[MoonSong]

Indeed, structurally, a backstory that is about failure the character experienced is far more useful for neotrad play than one showing a major impressive powerful success. Because a failure then starts you with an initial narrative target - finally succeeding at whatever you failed at before..

I think that the best backstories have more open questions than answers.