Thinking About the Purpose of Mechanics from a Neo-Trad Perspective

[gorice]

The point I'm trying to express is that there is no outside event, outside of those contained/planned for in a "growth" type character from the outset, that can change the character (or, alternately, any trait that is changed by outside events was never definitional to the character to begin with). The imposition of something of "import" on the character is a violation of the gameplay contract.

It's kind of a minefield though, isn't it? How do I know what is or will be definitive about a character? Running a game for a player like this, I always felt I was walking on eggshells. I don't think, fundamentally, that you can accept emergent events (or other people having narrative authority of your character's past or future) and also have an immutable conception of your character. There's always the risk of a containment breach.

You are correct, it can be both too though, the same player I've been talking about actually has in the past, basically designed for me a setup where their character's bullying brothers appeared as minor antagonists through the campaign (e.g. showing up as hired muscle by other bad guys) so he could have an arc of beating them one by one, and (for the comfort reasons I described) absolutely expects a happy resolution-- this is also part of the reason I think, you see so much ink spilled over litigating the GM's right to PC death on reddit advice forums for GMs, there's friction between the idea of what resolution the player wants to see and the emergent consequences DND-likes typically deliver.

This kind of gets to what I was just saying. Rolling the dice and accepting their verdict can derail the best laid plans. I wonder, what techniques have you found effective at smoothing over this problem? Is there a rule system or player interaction that works best?

Well, just to devil's advocate--what if they did? Unless you've got a character with a very short history, you're not going to fill every moment or even every year of that backstory. Unless there's some reason it seems unlikely for other reasons (established traits that make it very unlikely you'd connect with that character), you just add it in and move on; after all, you can still fill in the parts of it to explain why and how it happened in part, so it need not disrupt your through-line meaningfully.

Just because I think so much in terms of superheroes, it may matter a lot to my conception of Bruce Wayne that he's had a relationship with Talia al Ghul and Selena Kyle, but does it change anything that he also had a relationship with Vicki Vale or even Jezebel Jett? I'd say not really, and you can just encompass that and move on.

The question ends up being whether other things can be inserted in your character's back story without being disruptive of what they're about. I'm sure that for some people anything that comes outside their own conceptualization is a problem, but that isn't intrinsic to the general idea of being focused on character; the latter at most is concerned about not inserting things that simply don't seem to fit.

I think my responses above answer this as best as I can. How do the other people at the table (or the dice, or the snowballing shenanigans caused by something someone did two sessions ago) know where the boundary between 'meaningless fling' and 'character-altering affair' is?

 

[gorice]

On character arcs, for those wondering "what's the point of playing if you already know where your character will end up": if we think about roleplaying as capturing a fantasy, a feeling, then, well, it makes sense how a specific journey can be an integral part of it.

I don't really have a fantasy that I consistently want to capture in the realm of swords and guns and space to talk about it with a required amount of passion and understanding, besides, I think erotic roleplaying shouldn't be spoken of in hushed whispers, so...

I'm really into bimbofication. Not into bimbos, bimbofication. The transformation process, slowly losing the ability and need to think, slowly giving up all the anxieties and fears by giving up humanity and will, turning into a thing, it arouses me. And without the journey, even if the destination is predetermined, this fantasy is incomplete.

When I'm playing a fierce warrior corrupted by a succubus, the scenario, where the warrior displays nothing but sheer human will and crushes the creature of hell under the heel of her sabaton doesn't interest me. Choosing failure, sticking to the predetermined outcome is me, the player, expressing agency, taking control of losing control.

The character doesn't have an agency. She is not a human being, she is a figment of my imagination, a tool, a toy, her mind and body are nothing but a mine full of precious, precious feeling ore, and I'm the one commanding the excavation process, I'm the one swinging a pickaxe, I'm the one bathing in the processed liquified ruination. Even if the character is suspiciously looking like a mirror image of me.

Different things can happen to her, sure, but only a subset of them furthers my goals, and lets me hit the mining quota. Uncertainty is good only so long as any possible outcome is interesting.

---

A character can't be frozen in time and put under the glass without all the context, that's like cutting a piece out of Gioconda. What happens to the character is an integral part of them, working in tandem with their personality, beliefs, drives, looks, whatever. There's a lot of precious feelings ore to be mined, if you take that into account, too.

It strikes me that this kind of play probably works best with very, uh, distinct rules over who gets to have authority over what in the fiction (which I think you mention somewhere else). Or does the risk of success make failure all the sweeter?

Maybe the OC crowd needs to learn to play like a different type of roleplayers.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

That's fair to a point, but I think you're being at least pretty blase about the meaningful descriptive space in the character in B/X and earlier; in practice, if you have to add-in ad-hoc mechanics to make it work, I don't think the system has much wiggle in descriptive space; you're just bolting it on from the outside, and in some areas it will actively resist you.

I'm not sure how 'ad hoc' ability scores are in older D&D. Think of it this way. I have an INT of 15, that's roughly a 148 IQ. You ARE A GENIUS, not just 'kinda smart', and you can definitely play with that. Granted, old school D&D is not going to give you a formal label to put on your character "Scholar of Middle Cardolan History" to leverage, but there was a VERY active school of classic D&D that was doing this sort of stuff by 1976 at the latest. My point is, it isn't exactly subverting the rules, or even adding any new ones. Its more just 'how do interpret and adjudicate'. If "less rules/FKR whatever" means anything, then that's where it lives!

 

[niklinna]

It's kind of a minefield though, isn't it? How do I know what is or will be definitive about a character? Running a game for a player like this, I always felt I was walking on eggshells. I don't think, fundamentally, that you can accept emergent events (or other people having narrative authority of your character's past or future) and also have an immutable conception of your character. There's always the risk of a containment breach.


This kind of gets to what I was just saying. Rolling the dice and accepting their verdict can derail the best laid plans. I wonder, what techniques have you found effective at smoothing over this problem? Is there a rule system or player interaction that works best?


I think my responses above answer this as best as I can. How do the other people at the table (or the dice, or the snowballing shenanigans caused by something someone did two sessions ago) know where the boundary between 'meaningless fling' and 'character-altering affair' is?

Well. In the Blades in the Dark campaign I've referred to a couple times, I had come up with an idea for my character, a murderous little pipsqueak with scary ghost friends who did his killing for him. Our first play session, @Manbearcat asked what I was up to. I said I was out for a walk, looking for a new victim. I expected, you know, to encounter a victim. But no, instead I came upon a sparkwright demonstrating some new piece of electroplasmic tech to a group of potential investors. He added that there was a sniper I could see from my location, ready to perhaps take that sparkwright out.

This is not what I was expecting, but I figured, the GM put this in front of me, he must have his reasons. So instead of walking on by looking for someone to murder, I got involved, and, as things turned out, nearly drowned by a ghost in the area! I came out looking a right fool, getting pwned by a ghost I was supposedly so hip with, instead of like a competent badass.

I could have just walked on by, looking for someone to murder. I could have said, "Hey wait a minute, I said I was out looking for a murder victim." I had those choices, but did not fully know that I did, because I fell back into a different playstyle I was more used to.

Also, this having been introduced to the story, that sparkwright and his machine, and the potential rivalry between him & his investors, and the group the sniper belonged to, could have become a Big Thing in our campaign, but we basically let that whole angle drop. The ghost who almost drowned me, however, became a recurring threat (and later running joke once I became powerful enough to boss him around), as did the arcanist who initially rescued me from that ghost.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Right! This is what triggered my 'degenerate' comment before. A problem statement is just classic storytelling. Leaving it open looks like old-fashioned 'story now' play. My character has this big issue, let's find out how they deal with it. If you write the answer in stone before you even get there, what then?

I'm not sure why there's anything 'degenerate' in there, but maybe we've shifted the context too far from when you said that, so I'm not sure if its relevant. Anyway, Story Now would definitely have the 'open' kind of a structure when the focus is on a character issue.

I think its interesting to point out though that trad -> neo-trad -> story now CAN be kind of a continuum of shifting from setting through to character being primary, but Story Now can also operate on different types of questions, they don't HAVE to be questions about the character. They could be questions of character as part of society, or focus on society or some specific theme. The characters will be central, it will be there story that arises and spins out, but what it is commenting on could be almost anything.

I don't think Neo Trad has that potential for other dimensions. Or maybe its possible, but I haven't seen it much. MAYBE in some supers or sci-fi, like you might be able to delve into that in a genre like Eclipse Phase's Singularity (not that I particularly found that game itself terribly compelling). But I could see EP doing a sort of Neo Trad version of 'this is what its like at the end of history'.

 

[Pedantic]

It's kind of a minefield though, isn't it? How do I know what is or will be definitive about a character? Running a game for a player like this, I always felt I was walking on eggshells. I don't think, fundamentally, that you can accept emergent events (or other people having narrative authority of your character's past or future) and also have an immutable conception of your character. There's always the risk of a containment breach.

Oh, definitely this is a risk. A skilled player will just tell you; I think a lot of how session zeros get used in modern D&D played in this style is about doing this, parsing out the bits of a character that matter and identifying the beats everyone wants to hit. I can imagine a system that would do this better or more specifically for sure though. It might not even be a resolution system, so much as a campaign structure one. You can imagine questionnaires with stuff like "things my character wants to learn, something good I want to have happen, something bad I want to deal with" and so on, and then some advice/guidelines on how to structure those things into a workable narrative.

I think this is where the Trad component of neo-trad comes in, to a degree. You don't generally get to to say anything about another character's mental world or have any direct influence on their actions/decisions in such a system, which works really well for this kind of play by leaving blank space for the characters to exist/grow in. It's why either long-term threats or episodic (or discrete quest/adventure) structures can work so well for this form. There is an outside plot the characters are engaging with day to day, and they get to interject character moments as they see fit and/or get excited when the character beats they prompted start to appear.

I think you do need a safety mechanism, a strong social contract or some out of character forum to cover gaps though, when you run across situations that a player isn't feeling able to express their character, or is feeling like something important about the character it being taken away. Again, there's probably more room for formality in a system here.

This kind of gets to what I was just saying. Rolling the dice and accepting their verdict can derail the best laid plans. I wonder, what techniques have you found effective at smoothing over this problem? Is there a rule system or player interaction that works best?

I suspect this is very much a style that would happily embrace death flags or similar mechanisms.

 

[loverdrive]

It strikes me that this kind of play probably works best with very, uh, distinct rules over who gets to have authority over what in the fiction (which I think you mention somewhere else). Or does the risk of success make failure all the sweeter?

Nah, the rules are very simple: everyone can just introduce whatever new fiction they want to, until the other person disagrees. There's no risk involved, things will always go according to the consensus of the players' vision (and the consensus is usually easily reached).

I can't really give an example of play for obvious reasons, but I guess bolter-porno would suffice too.

P1: I drive my blade through yet another dog of the False Emperor with a satisfying wet noise of torn flesh and cracking of the broken bones
P2: His guts splay your armour red, in his dying breath he utters "Emperor protects", and you can almost hear Her laugher. You can't help but join, your laugher, slowly turning into a howl is just another note in this symphony of destruction.
P1: This is my greatest masterpiece, a worthy offering to Slaanesh! Cosmic nu-jazz improvisation, beyond rhythm, beyond structure, beyond understanding of the puny mortals, true music for a true God.
P2: You toy with the last survivor, stomping your ceramite boot inches away from his skull over and over, revealing in his fear, until you drink him dry. You drop your heel onto his face, exploding his head like a ripe watermelon.
P1: I carefully remove his eyeball that landed on my face and chuckle. This is a good night! Then, I hear booming warcry, that no mortal throat could possibly produce. A space marine. "Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne!". Well, we can't have slaves of that unrefined idiot spoiling the symphony of Slaanesh, can we?
P2: (nah, I'm not into this whole Chaos-on-Chaos stuff, let's just stick to slaughtering imperials?)
P1: (sure) A space marine, clad in heinous, tasteless blue and gold. "We march for Macragge!", he screams and I can't help but feel pity for him. Poor sod, oblivious to the truth, who've never gazed upon the beauty of the Eye of Terror. Regarldess, his dying screams will be one more note in my masterpiece.

Basically it's a process of collaborative creation, focused on milking the situation for cool details, where two minds can produce something more thrilling than one.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

My experience is that since we're still playing a roleplaying game, the neo-trad desire for character definition is always in conversation with other gameplay elements, whatever the mechanics happen to be-- absolute control is more or less disqualified by the multiplayer nature of the activity, but most players don't necessarily want absolute control anyway.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think my responses above answer this as best as I can. How do the other people at the table (or the dice, or the snowballing shenanigans caused by something someone did two sessions ago) know where the boundary between 'meaningless fling' and 'character-altering affair' is?

Well, in the end, the player does. My point was that you can be approaching things this way and not be ultra-sensitive to outside events. Not all characters are eggs; some are stones. And of course there's "this part of my character does not change" and "but this part can, it just won't effect their core". All of that can be managed by the player (the relationship thing, as I noted, is in the player's hands at the end of the day; I just noted that there are many character concepts that can absorb a random relationship and move on without a visible ripple).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not sure how 'ad hoc' ability scores are in older D&D. Think of it this way. I have an INT of 15, that's roughly a 148 IQ. You ARE A GENIUS, not just 'kinda smart', and you can definitely play with that. Granted, old school D&D is not going to give you a formal label to put on your character "Scholar of Middle Cardolan History" to leverage, but there was a VERY active school of classic D&D that was doing this sort of stuff by 1976 at the latest. My point is, it isn't exactly subverting the rules, or even adding any new ones. Its more just 'how do interpret and adjudicate'. If "less rules/FKR whatever" means anything, then that's where it lives!

Edit: Rephrasing this because I think the first version was probably more grumpy than needed.

Essentially, I don't really buy the "less is more" school of rules, so I'm kind of not on board the premise here. If I'm going to want to delve into a character, I want the rules to actually engage with it, not via ad-hoc interpretation (to some extent this is an issue I have with self-defined traits in general, but at least in Fate and the like the fact the breadth of the trait is to some degree a negotiation is intrinsic in the text, not a solution after the fact to the text simply being mum on the topic).