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

[Aldarc]

No, but I do think it has been suggested by others since.

How do you believe the manner in which they have been suggesting it has been "dangerous" or intended to create conflict?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Monster of the Week is the only PBtA I can get behind. We're playing it next week.

An interesting contrast is, I think, Monsterhearts.

I'm willing to say that PbtA was a good general choice for Monsterhearts, and you'd have had to do some reinventing the wheel to hit the aims it had there. The problems with it are twofold:

1. Because of what its representing, it very much assumes weight to mechanics in making psychological and social decisions in game. Nobody needs to have it explained how hostile some people are about that.

2. Because it is primarily focused on the personal and social relationships of, well, teenage monsters, it treads into some grounds some people either wouldn't be interested in or actively avoidant to.

Neither of these, however, say it was not designed as the right tool for the job; what they say is that a fair number of people for one or the other reason don't really want to do that job (and in a few cases may be somewhat hostile to doing it at all). But its very clearly designed purposefully for that.

MotW, on the other hand, is handling a topic many more people are comfortable with, and leans into psychosocial mechanics less strongly. But I think both were designed for the job intended, and don't do anything that seems much "off" to even the casual user for their intended purposes (the fact that PbtA is inadequate to some of what I want out of an RPG, and actively produces a result my wife would dislike is reasons for us not to use it, but again, that doesn't make the game misdesigned).

 

[Thomas Shey]

But you are using the term knowing the loading is there and will be noted.

If you'll note, I'm mostly applying it to games that are not only apparently misaimed (which I do think can be a problem, but a lesser one) but ones that the design is, from lack of a better term, sloppy. I'm perfectly willing to let people take offense at the latter if they want to, because I stand by it. I've been on record as saying when viewed in a modern light that the OD&D design was sloppy as can be, and I'm not going to say otherwise just because some people love it.

(Its not impossible to sell me on radically distinct subsystems serving a worthwhile and thought through purpose, but most of the defenses of them I've seen haven't done a good job of that as far as I'm concerned).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, I do still read it that way.

From this post, it appears you're saying that's not what you mean but, in that case, I have no clue what point you were intending to make.

As it is, then. If my prior posts didn't make that clear, my elaborating further is unlikely to.

 

[SableWyvern]

As it is, then. If my prior posts didn't make that clear, my elaborating further is unlikely to.

Fair enough. FYI, I added some further context to my post while you were making this comment. No idea if it makes any difference.

 

[Deset Gled]

Heck, just the idea of Player Agency is a term designers and mechanics are striving for and to define, which was not part of the vernacular or process in 1992 across any major group. GURPS and Vampire the Masquerade is good proof of that.

See, this is where I curse the Forge and how its influence on RPGs can be extremely regressive. Specifically, the hyperfocus on jargon. Jargon is supposed to be a tool for communication, not a hallmark of design.

The idea of "'player agency" has been around since the days of Gygax vs Arneson, with Gygax generally being more system oriented and Arneson being more about player agency. Just because people didn't use modern vernacular to talk about it doesn't mean it wasn't a design consideration. Synnibar is the easiest example that I could give because it has the clearest mechanics for player agency. But there are plenty of other examples.

Star Wars WEG D6, for example, specifically gives advice to gamemasters about when to allow players to choose to do whatever they want in the world of Star Wars, when to give a list of options, and how to give the illusion of choice when you don't have things prepared. Just because they're not talking about those things in terms of Player Agency, Illusionism, and Sandbox vs. Railroad doesn't mean they're not actively designing with all those things in mind. It just means they didn't use the same jargon. And make no mistake, West End Games was not only a major group, but they predate VtM as well.

 

[Autumnal]

Y'all stuck with modern gaming?

I only play post-modern TTRPGs. Currently, the party is working to obtain the Schwarzgerät by assiduously engaging in not obtaining it through a recurrent and cyclical process that involves deep psychological examination and silly songs that intersect with the inherent structural connections between Mickey Mouse and the application of genetic algorithms to solve np-complete problems.

We were doing that in Over the Edge in 1998, while waiting for Mind’s Eye Theatre sessions to start. Someone I knew claimed to have done it earlier in Theatrix, but their logs showed it was all just Lacanian BS, more or less Zizek avant la lettre.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

We were doing that in Over the Edge in 1998, while waiting for Mind’s Eye Theatre sessions to start. Someone I knew claimed to have done it earlier in Theatrix, but T he wire logs showed it was all just Lacanian BS, more or less Zizek avant la lettre.

....Over the Edge was so good. Tweet & Laws had some amazing designs- it's part of the unfortunate lack of institutional memory in our hobby that they are often (tragically) overlooked when it comes to game design.

I'm not really going to comment on this thread, but to explain my joke (which, you know, is like dissecting a frog) I don't really get the idea behind it because "modern" is a confusing term, so it will just end up with people asserting that their own preferences are "modern."

Generally, "modern" (in the sense of "modernist") can refer to a specific set of indicators for a movement - modernist literature, modernist architecture, and so on. Heck, people have tried to talk about modernist cuisine - but that term hasn't really taken off since it was first bandied about over a decade ago, and it's really just repacking molecular gastronomy and sous vide under a single rubric. But the problem with labelling any movement as "modern" (or modernist) is, of course, that either you are specifically dating it (by referring to the modernism of the '50s) or you are necessarily dating it (by stating that it is contemporary, and therefore will not be modern at some point in the future).

Alternatively, it might be slightly more interesting to discuss what are the hallmarks of contemporary TTRPG design- in other words, how can we easily tell a game is "of today" as opposed to being from a decade (or more) in the past. In the same way that we can easily see signifiers in other areas that let us know that a book, a movie, a TV show, or an article of clothing is likely contemporary. But that would likely lack the enjoyment people get from asserting that their preferences are superior.

...or maybe not! I'm not the boss of anyone else.

Anyway, I tend to think contemporary games have better artwork*, more inclusivity, simplified mechanics, less exception-based rules design, and usually more express "principles of play" (written guidelines for players and DMs about how games are supposed to be run as 'principles' that were either ignored or were considered norms). But that's just off the top of my head.


*Better is probably not the correct term- more ... considered? As much as I love the old line drawings in '70s and early '80s products, I think that there is more consideration of how the physical product w/r/t the art than there was in the past. But even if you just look at the mass-market products of D&D, you can just look at the physical product and replace all the text with LOREM IPSUM and generally know what decade it is from- but that's also because general "book design trends" and tastes change over time.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, I do still read it that way.

From this post, it appears you're saying that's not what you mean but, in that case, I have no clue what point you were intending to make.

In the context of the overall discussion, your position appears to me to be that GURPS lacks a single overt theme with mechanics designed explicitly to support engaging with that theme in play, and thus you conclude that the designer lacked a clear intent.

Went back to this given your addition of your third paragraph.

I think the problem here is "intent" is serving a bit too many masters for this sub-discussion.

A general purpose game like GURPS or Hero is not really being designed with a theme or even a tone intrinsically in mind; it may hit one because of its evolution (which is largely what happened with Hero) but a lot of is just that its almost impossible to have a generic game system with any detail at all where the details don't put their thumb on some tonal things (GURPS early decision to lean into quasi-realistic representation lands here; they could have just as easily leaned more into the fantastic, but they were going to lean somewhere).

The problem that produces is that in a certain sense, a generic game system doesn't by itself have intent. What I mean by that is its not aimed at doing a specific thing; in fact its very actively aimed at not doing that.

I think "intent" and "purpose" should probably be made more distinct for that reason here. A game aimed at a theme or specific of genre has an "intent"; its trying to get a specific kind of result. A generic game, or a game theoretically aimed at those themes or genres that doesn't do that lacks intent, but at least in the former case, may still have "purpose".

(Its not impossible to still have purpose with a game aimed at a theme or genre and not have intent, but I think I'll stick with the position that's usually a case of some who hasn't entirely thought through what they're doing, or the relatively rare case of semi-generic systems (i.e. ones that are aimed a sort of genre, but very broadly).

 

[Old Fezziwig]

Well, that's a different set of problems; you see it often with game systems that are D&D 5e based where you ask if there's a real reason for that in actual design rather than marketing and familiarity, but I've seen some PbtA based games where I had to ask if they really thought about whether that was the best choice for what they were trying to do, too (and to be clear, some others where it absolutely looked like a good choice--I understand perfectly well why Monster of the Week is, for example).

Absolutely. My thought was really just that there could be situations where a designer could have a really intentional, focused, purposeful approach to a game design that isn't apparent in the final product for whatever reason.