What Do You Think Of As "Modern TTRPG Mechanics"?

[SableWyvern]

And we should learn from their silly mistakes and not end up where the musicians are with "modernism" being about a century out of date.

Authorities typically regard musical modernism as a historical period or era extending from about 1890 to 1930, and apply the term "postmodernism" to the period or era after 1930. For the musicologist Carl Dahlhaus the purest form was over by 1910, but other historians consider modernism to end with one or the other of the two world wars.​

- from the Wikipedia page on Modernism in music​

Interesting. IIRC, that seems to line up with literature, but not with art, where I believe Modern means 1860 - 1960.

But it's this ludicrous academic perversion of the term modern that actually makes me OK with it in this context. If people are using modern to literally mean, "things being produced at the moment" then Modern mechanics and philosophies run the full gamut, and the term really is meaningless.

If, instead, it refers to a design philosophy that seems to be reasonably popular at the time the phrase is becoming popular, then it works just fine.

 

[aramis erak]

I also think there are two very big advancements over the past decade:

(i) "Wounds", "Stress", and higher-level abstractions of player points (i.e., character health), and
(ii) Initiative, turn-taking, unit resolution mechanics

(i) doesn't seem to me to be a development of the last decade - most of those concepts are older. Fate's approach with "Stress" is 20+ years old now. I was playing with "wound point" variants in D&D 2e.
(ii) OD&D has initiative. What do you mean by this?

Yeah, Hero had 3 expendables in 1981... Body, Stun, End.
What it lacked by default was penalties for less than all of any one of them gone.

1987 we get WEG's Star Wars, with damage steps instead of HP, and resistance rolls to determine which level. Shadowrun also has a similar (but more complex) version a couple years later.

Wound systems, Pendragon (1985) had a HP with wound effects for severe enough wounds. No details, tho'.

Twilight 2000 and WFRP both, by 1986, had damage by location... but very different approaches to getting that. T2K has HP by location, and it's a count up. < Capacity, slight wound, ≥ Capacity is a serious wound, ≥ 2×Capacity is a critical wound. WFRP has a no effect until 0 wounds remaining, then a hit results in a roll on the critical wounds table for the location hit.

These are parts of why I think of "modern" in terms of overal design, and not individual mechanics. We often learn that individual mechanics are often not new at all - their rise to prominence as part of overall design approaches is what is new.

A great point.

 

[aramis erak]

I don't think D&D or Traveller were aimless at all. I do think most 90s era design was. L5R (before 5th edition)

L5R had a pretty clear intent, and there was more intent in it to those three playstyles than many give credit for. The thing is, one has to be familiar with what its intent to emulate is to see it.

It was intended for the kind of action in Japanese "Pillow Books" - a romanticized samurai story genre, fiction from the era of the samurai. It tended to focus on courtiers and on bushi. Basically, if you film them, they're what samurai of the 16th-18th C would put in soap operas. But, as for playability, the idea of the detectives of the setting, the magistrates, are the second goal. And, because John is a seriously hard core fan of CoC and the Cthulhu Mythos, he added the horror of wall duty, and then, possibly as a nod to Pendragon, a pendragon-like manor system and battle system. Battles, and their after-effects on the samurai, are a part of the Pillow Book genre, as well... the land holding seems to have been because players would want to rise to be daimyō... and he felt that reasonable.

The creation of the great clans serves to create a texture for court, given the lack of species other than humans as PCs in 1st edition. (late in 1st ed, 2 playable non-humans are added: Nezumi (rat-men) and Naga (snake-people with big magic)... Each is specialized slightly for its role in the Empire. Each family for its role in the clan.

It's probably John's truest magnum opus. Later editions, and indeed, first edition's splats, fleshed out the game to be more simulationist; until 5th, 3rd, the most complex, was my favored; not being into the card game, and not liking the setting changes Gold imposed, and not liking the simplifications of 4th ed... well, I mostly skipped 4th.

5th was a redesign from scratch. I've had players who used a conversion mat and normal d6 and d12 with only minor slowdowns during the playtest. It refocuses on the same core conceits: Wall service, inter-clan warfare, court intrigue, and magistrate duty.

It's worth noting as well: The L5R 5th starter set sets up the players to be magistrates... and none of the characters are trained specifically for that duty. The extended tests are a pain to run; they're reimplimented from the same test in 1st ed. The Gempukku tests... hint: cut the number of them in half.
The follow-on is another magesterial mystery, with them being put on the task officially... I've had it go wonky every time, but always starts a good set of ideas.

The honor and glory systems are pretty similar throughout - even 5th is largely the same as 1st⋯4th. If actually used, they provide feedback to players about how well they're doing. They're intentional design specifically to use behavior modification techniques on players.

There's a huge whack of intent. What it lacks is good adventures to give one the gist of how such should run.

5th has good adventures - even if one doesn't run them, they provide ideas on how to run the setting...

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think D&D or Traveller were aimless at all. I do think most 90s era design was. L5R (before 5th edition), Shadowrun, Vampire, Witchcraft, Earthdawn, Cyberpunk, etc. People basically did a bunch of world building (and not even with an eye towards its suitability for gaming) and basically treating the game as an afterthought with many rules carried over from other games without consideration of it served their game well. No real instructions on how to structure play, character creation that did not establish purpose or why characters should give a damn about each other. No real thought put into reward cycles.

I get that a fair number of people don't really want a structured experience and actually prefer the sort of raw worldbuilding of older designs. But the sort of free verse world building is not really an intentional effort to create a game to a specific premise or vision.

I'm one of those "fair number of people" who enjoyed '90s gaming immensely, mostly due to the amazing worldbuilding. I'm happy to add the intentionality myself if needed. To me the setting is more important than the rules, which IMO should just try to model the setting as closely as possible.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not terribly familiar with AD&D, so, yeah, sure! Quite often good ideas are old, and then get replaced by bad ideas, and return back might feel like a breath of fresh air.

Although, as a whole, isn't AD&D famous for having a lot of barely connected subsystems that all function differently?

You say that like it's a bad thing. If modeling the setting matters to you, sometimes you create rules that look to the thing you're modeling first.

 

[loverdrive]

You say that like it's a bad thing. If modeling the setting matters to you, sometimes you create rules that look to the thing you're modeling first.

Broadly I think it's something to be avoided, if possible. If something can be modeled within the existing general rules, creating a bespoke rule is added complexity for dubious benefit (again, assuming it is possible to model with general rules)

Although, I'd say having a wildly different subsystem is miles better than a subtly different one. Certainly less confusing.

Divine Smite 2014 is such a good example because it's almost a spell, but not quite. So it spends spell slots, it can be upcasted, but not counterspelled? What? Why? I'm not saying it's a big problem, but, like, it's better to not have a minor annoying problem than to have one.

So I think modernization is when the new rules model the exact same thing to the same fidelity (or even roughly the same results), just with better UX -- clearer rule text, less snags, slight revision of the same idea.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So I think modernization is when the new rules model the exact same thing to the same fidelity (or even roughly the same results), just with better UX -- clearer rule text, less snags, slight revision of the same idea.

If that can be done to my satisfaction I'm all for it, but I want rules to model the setting as accurately as possible within practical limits.

Also, it's Clearbrook this comment that modern = better to your mind. I don't accept that as a broad rule.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Honestly, this kind of thing just tells me that people discussing "specific intentions" vs "creating aimlessly" are incredibly pretentious.

I don't know what to tell you man. I'm not exactly an enemy of generic systems (I spent probably half my gaming career running the Hero System with some step-outs to GURPS), but its not exactly hard to tell the difference between that and what, say, Chill 3e is doing.

Basically, knowing the difference between a general purpose tool and a special purpose one just can't seem pretentious to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

So I view success with consequences as very distinct from degrees of success and failure in games like RuneQuest. Sure, in both there is a lack of binary results, but success with consequences is rooted in conflict resolution where we are answering "Do I achieve what I set out to do?" while degrees of success answers "How well did I perform this task?"

Success With Consequences says you get what you want but something you probably won't like will happen whereas degrees of success does not care what you want.

While I get the distinction you're making, I'm not sold you can do a proper degree of success without at least addressing what you were trying to do. Or put another way, I'm not sure conflict and task resolution are always as separable as this post would success.

 

[loverdrive]

If that can be done to my satisfaction I'm all for it, but I want rules to model the setting as accurately as possible within practical limits.

Also, it's Clearbrook this comment that modern = better to your mind. I don't accept that as a broad rule.

I think you are misunderstanding me: what I'm saying is other way around. Better = modern.

Modern [X] is better than Old [X], because if it wasn't just strictly better [X], it'd be [Y] (maybe related to or inspired by [X], but still something else)

Spoiler: Neurodivergent overexplaining

It's kind of like "Cogito, ergo sum": it wasn't meant as "oooh I'm so smart and thinking, and those who don't think are just NPCs", it was meant that cognition is, in itself, evidence of one's existence.

So like "modern = better" is "being strictly unambiguously better is a requirement (rather than the result) to be called a modernization, rather than reinvention (which produces something that is subject to taste)"