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

[The-Magic-Sword]

It's fun to me. The debate is about 4ed being good for "neo-trad" gameplay, but what the OP is doing is not "neo-trad", it's "trad" (detaching methods on convenience to follow the plot and reattach them is the core of trad).

Neo-trad is something no one is playing or quoting in this forum from what I readed so far. Is playing a setting where the players urges are satisfied automatically. Like MAID. You like Maids, there are Maids, they do Maid things. You don't lose or struggle, your urge of maids already satisfied for the whole time. The player happy.
The focus of the simulation is the player directly, not the metanarrative between the player and his character or the relation between character and ecosystem, or even narrative drive. It's all about make the player feel good. It's "fantasy ganja".
To make an extreme metaphor, is like a Conan game where you don't attack enemies, you roll instead on tables that tell how cool and strong you (you, the player!) are in 100 different ways. Your owm esteem lightened up.

So, to me, the entire debate is a bit faulty. Is 4ed good for "neo-trad"? No. Is good for "trad", but that's actually true for every RPG that's not structured.

I don't think I would accept that definition of Neo-Trad in the slightest, it seems constructed to make play undesirable, and it occurs to me that some people do want a degree of struggle in their arcs, they just want the arc itself to exist and take center stage in the story-- their urge demands the conflict, if only to demonstrate their ability through mild adversity. Like, I guess you could play a game where the point is to be cute and funny as maids and have that game be neo-trad, as a slice of life thing.

The core of trad is the focus of play on a core plot, where the plot is generally external to the characters such that they can play through the story relatively interchangeably without truly significant changes. So if you spend most of the time not on such an externalized plot, and on a set of character backstories whose implications sculpt play, and completing individual arcs or something, that's getting you into neotrad territory.

You can best think of neo-trad as a response to trad that recenters the narrative on the individual arcs of the characters, rather than on the 'world' but while maintaining the idea that there are paths at play, rather than just seeing where the character goes.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well, this backfired as a game design in the original Champions game. For instance my famous hack was to make 'Wizard', a character who's power was all found in his staff! I got a big point value discount for that, I presume the assumption being maybe it could be lost or stolen. I attached a wrist strap to the thing and never let it off under any circumstances!

This is a classic misunderstanding. If you got a limit for your staff being removable, you either couldn't make it non-removeable or not get the bonus. That kind of "ha-ha, I've neutralized my weakness" was addressed decades ago. If people choose to ignore the direction about that, then what a surprise it didn't serve its purpose.

So basically I had this 'disadvantage', but it was so minimal that it didn't really count. I don't remember Wizard ever actually losing his staff in actual play, so it was just free points. My other character, Mushroom Man, shot out spores which did various things. IIRC his disadvantages were things like sometimes the wrong spore effect fired (oh well, they're all nasty, big disadvantage!).

Again, I repeat, if it wasn't a Limitation, you didn't get to save point for it. This has been true for most of the life of the game.

I'm not sure how Hero was different, we never used it, but anyway, the thing worked. It just required either the GM to really go after people's disadvantages sometimes, or else supervise chargen pretty closely and disallow certain things.

Well, duh. It was a wide-ranging build system designed to represent a wide range of superhero characters. Of course you couldn't use it blindly. That's true of every superhero build system and generally most build systems since forever.

For someone who talks about problems with games done by ignoring the principals of the game, the above is quite a post.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't think I would accept that definition of Neo-Trad in the slightest, it seems constructed to make play undesirable, and it occurs to me that some people do want a degree of struggle in their arcs, they just want the arc itself to exist and take center stage in the story-- their urge demands the conflict, if only to demonstrate their ability through mild adversity. Like, I guess you could play a game where the point is to be cute and funny as maids and have that game be neo-trad, as a slice of life thing.

Yeah, honestly, it comes across as just playing the dozens on the approach by misrepresenting it.

 

[Voadam]

Does B/X HAVE a 'detect traps skill mechanic'?

Yes.

Thief ability page B8:

"Find or Remove Traps is a double ability. The thief has the listed chance of finding a trap (if there is one) and the same chance (if the trap is found) of removing it. Either attempt may only be tried once per trap."

The chances were 10% at 1st level, 15% at 2nd level, and 20% at 3rd level.

Also Dwarves had it as an explicit ability as well. Page B9:

"They are expert miners and are able to find slanting passages, traps, shifting walls, and new construction one-third of the time (a roll of 1 or 2 on Id6) when looking for them."

Any character can mechanically check for traps in B/X. Page B22 under traps:

"Any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one in the correct area. Any dwarf has a 2 in 6 chance. (This does not apply to magical traps, such as a sleep trap.) Checking a specific area for a trap will take one full turn. The DM should only check for finding a trap if a player says that the character is searching for one. Each character may only check once to find each trap."

As a player if you were just looking under the beginning section with the player stuff you could easily miss that there is a mechanic for all players to search with a d6 roll.

There is NO SUCH THING in Greyhawk! The skills are 'Open Locks/Remove Traps' and 'Pickpocket/Move Silently/Hide in Shadows' and then thieves get a level-determined bonus to their 'hear noise' roll (which IIRC is d6 based). There is also the Climb special ability of course. In any case, there is no 'Find Traps'! You find them by the old-fashioned method of pixel bitching the dungeon! Also, Remove Traps is defined as 'remove small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)' (p4). Thus thief abilities are irrelevant to the normal sorts of 'dungeon traps' such as covered pits and other 'tricks'. The player must describe HOW she is finding the small mechanical trap, and then may use the Remove Traps ability to defeat it. Presumably this, and Open Locks, were provided as thief abilities in this way is on the assumption that most DMs are NOT trap smiths nor even lock smiths, and thus would be unable to adjudicate these sorts of actions without resort to some kind of mechanics (and would be under heavy pressure from players to NOT make them fail).

I would put it this way, in the famous Indiana Jones trap gauntlet it won't help to be a thief, except maybe at the very end where he tries to lift the idol and replace it with a bag of sand. That one I could see qualifying, and Indy obviously blew his check there!

All that being said, AD&D did add the word 'Find' to the ability. Again though, this explicitly applies ONLY to "relatively small mechanical devices" and I imagine the addition of the word 'find' was intended to help adjudicate these situations, since the DM's notes are going to basically "there's a poison needle trap on this chest which triggers when you unlock it, save vs poison or die!" Finding it by procedural methods simply doesn't work, there isn't enough information. Sadly a lot, probably most, DMs didn't really read the PHB very carefully and assumed that 'Find Traps' meant ANYTHING that is semantically considered a 'trap' including deadfalls, covered pits, etc. This was NEVER intended! In AD&D 1e, even if you have a thief, you need to prod everywhere you intend to step with your trusty 10' pole first!

Different specifics on the mechanics for B/X. The thief description of the remove traps ability does say the removing is limited to small traps though. P. B10:

"A thief's training includes learning how to pick pockets, climb steep surfaces, move silently, hide in shadows, open locks (with a set of lockpicks or burglar's tools), remove small traps (such as poisoned needles), and how to hear noises better than other humans."

The specifics of how thief abilities work vary in each edition. The specific language of the edition you are using makes a difference.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes.

Thief ability page B8:

"Find or Remove Traps is a double ability. The thief has the listed chance of finding a trap (if there is one) and the same chance (if the trap is found) of removing it. Either attempt may only be tried once per trap."

The chances were 10% at 1st level, 15% at 2nd level, and 20% at 3rd level.

Also Dwarves had it as an explicit ability as well. Page B9:

"They are expert miners and are able to find slanting passages, traps, shifting walls, and new construction one-third of the time (a roll of 1 or 2 on Id6) when looking for them."

Any character can mechanically check for traps in B/X. Page B22 under traps:

"Any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a trap when searching for one in the correct area. Any dwarf has a 2 in 6 chance. (This does not apply to magical traps, such as a sleep trap.) Checking a specific area for a trap will take one full turn. The DM should only check for finding a trap if a player says that the character is searching for one. Each character may only check once to find each trap."

As a player if you were just looking under the beginning section with the player stuff you could easily miss that there is a mechanic for all players to search with a d6 roll.


Different specifics on the mechanics for B/X. The thief description of the remove traps ability does say the removing is limited to small traps though. P. B10:

"A thief's training includes learning how to pick pockets, climb steep surfaces, move silently, hide in shadows, open locks (with a set of lockpicks or burglar's tools), remove small traps (such as poisoned needles), and how to hear noises better than other humans."

The specifics of how thief abilities work vary in each edition. The specific language of the edition you are using makes a difference.

Interesting, that's the first system which gives thieves a GENERAL trap-finding ability.

 

[Voadam]

Interesting, that's the first system which gives thieves a GENERAL trap-finding ability.

But notably not as good a percentage chance at 1st (10%) and 2nd level (15%) as the general PC trap finding mechanic (1 in 6 or ~16%) it gives out to all characters.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

But notably not as good a percentage chance at 1st (10%) and 2nd level (15%) as the general PC trap finding mechanic (1 in 6 or ~16%) it gives out to all characters.

Well, this is the problem with the, IMHO crappy, Gygax style design. Its worse than that, what if I wanted to make up an item that improved everyone who used its trap-finding ability? I never ever have understood why ANYONE thinks classic TSR D&D is a mechanically sound design at all. 3e might have feccked up a lot of things, but moving all resolution to d20 was definitely not one of them!

 

[Aldarc]

I'm not sure they're all that separate. Even back in the day, Hero had a lot of encouragement to take Disadvantages, which encouraged or forced you to do things that might be suboptimal play in a mechanical sense because superheroes are for the most part, nothing if not big personalities riddled with baggage, but was also very full of potentially fussy ways to express things mechanically.

I feel like flaws in a lot of games are primarily meant as ways for player characters to pick up extra perks, feats, talents, etc. in return for also having a drawback, flaws, etc.; however, these are often chosen as to minimize impact on "optimal play" for the PCs. In contrast, in games like Fate, a character's Trouble is meant to be a lightning rod that attracts the sort of narrative conflicts the player wants their character to deal with.

 

[Fenris-77]

Well, this is the problem with the, IMHO crappy, Gygax style design. Its worse than that, what if I wanted to make up an item that improved everyone who used its trap-finding ability? I never ever have understood why ANYONE thinks classic TSR D&D is a mechanically sound design at all. 3e might have feccked up a lot of things, but moving all resolution to d20 was definitely not one of them!

This is why many games in the OSR roll-under B/X adjacent design space spend rather a lot of time doing the same thing and deep-sixing the use of a d6 for skills and whatnot.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Well, thief skills were the worst part of it.

Add 10% to the skill and you're better at it than everyone else except dwarves. At fourth level you exceed dwarves. Given that dwarven skill never improves seemed reasonable to me.