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

[soviet]

I feel like we're on the verge of rehashing the same points all over again. "Play to find out" is a strong signal that you as a player of this game should be looking for enjoyment in surprising outcomes; the bit that is delightful is watching novelty that no player could have anticipated unfold. That joy runs directly counter to manipulating the game state to force an expected outcome to unfold. "What is the outcome of these choices?" vs. "did I make the right choices (or at least a set of right choices) to get what I want?"

Those are incompatible and I read "play to find out" as advising players they should look for the enjoyment of play to be in the former, and not in the latter.

OK, I see what you're saying. Thank you for elaborating. As I understand you you're talking about the difference between (broadly) filling a situation with drama fuel and watching (without particular preference as a player) to see how it explodes, versus a kind of skilled play approach where we have a particular expected/desired outcome (in terms of gam or sim considerations) and we are actively trying to get there. That's an interesting distinction.

 

[billd91]

'Play to find out which of two things happen', sounds great.

Yeah, dude, whatever you need to tell yourself to feel right...

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Oh absolutely. I've played a lot of wargames, and from the perspective of a 70's player of games featuring combat, D&D is nothing like an accurate simulation; certainly it makes a ton of sense to state, to 1970's players, that the goal is not to be as detailed as a wargame. In the 1970's D&D was a modern set of mechanics for games that featured combat.

The title of the book I have in front of me is "Dungeons and Dragons - Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames"

But this thread is, I believe, not looking at all games, but only TTRPGs. So while I am happy to say that compared to wargames in the 70s, D&D was not simulation-focused, I cannot say the same when we compare it to all TTRPGs. Yes, it uses abstraction, genre trappings and has gamist approaches -- I might argue that "hit points" are the most "modern" mechanic, as it's a purely gamist mechanic with minimal connection to realism(*). But the vast majority of the rules are in service of simulation, such as the selection on p13 of vol1 (I picked a paragraph at random) which explains in detail how relatives can inherit character's wealth, if they pay a 10% tax, but that if the original character returns they can recover their possessions, also paying 10%, in which case the player character must revert to being an NPC and start with a loyalty penalty of 0 to -6 ...

It is hard to argue that rules like this are aimed at being fun, or making the game flow easily. They're an attempt at simulation.

(*) Actually, with some more thought, I really do think that

Eh, I think it's more nuanced than that. Mostly because the game wasn't ... well, designed in the same way that we think of today. We can point to things that look like they are all about simulationism, and yet ... hit points? Saving throws (I did a really deep dive on those before)? The entire reward loop (level advancement, gold for XP, etc.)?

The majority of the evolution of the rules was not a response to realism, but was part of a response to watching the game unfold- and treated the game as a a game. The push-pull of haste/aging/system shock, for example, is just the evolution of ad hoc balancing of rules.

That's what I think is missing. Well, that and the fact that the whole GDS (later GNS) wasn't supposed to be about games, but about players (what players and GMs prefer), and also because I think people try to set up a dichotomy - D (N) vs. S ... when they forget that there was a lot of people that were playing the G aspect.

But it's hard for me to view OD&D and 1e- which was an amalgamation of influences from everywhere and everywhen, which included space ships and alternate planes and Lewis Carroll ... to be seriously concerned with simulationism. But again, not arguing with what people want to call their things! Play what you like and call it what you want.

 

[Lanefan]

Misaligned PbtA games have already been mentioned. Same is true for FitD games. People don't necessarily understand why the original games work well for that they do. They may misunderstand the underlying principles, design choices made, game mechanics, and how those things contribute to the overall whole. Misunderstanding Moves in PbtA is a particularly egregious issue. They don't necessarily understand how some changes made to the game can have other knock on effects to the game's feel. So for every good non-AW PbtA game out there (e.g., Stonetop, Masks, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, etc.) there are nine half-baked ones. So Sturgeon's Law and all that.

I do think that an increased trend of some contemporaneous games (obviously not all: e.g., OSR, D&D, etc.) has been the authors sometimes saying "please play this game rules as written first before making changes all willy nilly." It's an appeal to understand the game on its own terms. Some people make changes to a game, say that the game played horribly, but when you find out what they changed, it's pretty clear why they had a horrible time. (Those aforementioned knock on effects caused by changes to the game.)

Agreed.

Thing is, homebrewers gonna homebrew no matter what design is put in front of them, and there's a whole lot of homebrewers out there. Thus, IMO this is something RPG designers in particular need to keep top-of-mind at all times: how can we keep our shiny new system flexible enough to allow people to tweak it without shattering it in the process.

Either that, or present it with "These are the rules and they shall not be altered" highlighted on every chapter heading; but I'm not sure how much market traction that approach would get. Hell, even Gygax tried that approach for a while and couldn't stick to it.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

I don't actually see a contradiction. All of your examples turn over agency to chance; the player does not know and cannot force an outcome, and the enjoyment is presumably in learning which outcome does occur, not in making choices to achieve a specific outcome.

I think the phrase is trying to explain where the "fun" is, what kind of enjoyment you're supposed to receive by interacting with the game.

I was saying that you were incorrect in stating that the player is not meant to care or drive to a outcome. They certainly can! My example of Pasion de las Pasiones is an exact example of a player roleplaying, making a Move roll, and changing the fiction as they state, and not as the GM or other players stated.

So players are very much meant to care and drive towards goals. Just not at a 'task' level.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

I think this is too proscriptive and would seem to suggest that narrativist play isn't possible outside of games specifically built for it. In Apoc World 2e, under Agenda (p 80), Baker says nothing about mechanics or a drama engine; instead it's an admonition against pre-planning the game or situations and being open and responsive to the actions of the characters and "[committing] yourself [as MC] to the game's fiction's own internal logic and causality." I think we can do this in games with task resolution -- I have done it in games with task resolution. It's nice to have tech and structures that support it explicitly, but it's not at all mandatory.

You entirely missed the content of my post.

I said the difference was that PBTA rules mechanics make choices and create new outcomes, new plots, new features in a scene, sometimes in specific, sometimes in vague terms.

GURPS and D&D and other such games absolute do not do that. And "GM can make up whatever they want" isn't a mechanic. Any game and any RPG can do that, so its a non-statement.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Like I said: I cut my gaming teeth on the Red Box rules, which didn't have rules for grids, battle mats, and minis.

I guess technically OD&D didn't have rules for those, either. They were used a lot, but that may have had to do with people coming from wargaming just taking them as a given. The rules were certainly going to force you track distances pretty specifically, though.

I'm sharing my own experiences and perceptions, not trying to mandate what other folks should consider "modern."

I was just noting that it seems a bit odd to list things as "modern" that occured half a century ago.

 

[Thomas Shey]

In an early post, I suggested that, for me, "modern mechanics" pretty much menat "mechanics not meant to simulate a reality". It is encouraging to see that this aligns well with the text you have highlighted! Some reasoning is for narrative, some for gameplay, some to help everyone participate -- but none is for simulation.

So, really, I am still feeling that, although any broad generalization is well, broad, you could do worse than:

Modern Mechanics are ones not designed to simulate.​

Hmmm. That begs the question what even counts as "simulate"? D&D style hit points never seemed to simulate "reality" to any degree, and you can even question if they very properly similated most fantasy fiction. They were pretty gamist right out the gate.

 

[Lanefan]

I guess my problem with this is that it assumes that the only possible intent can be to want to create a particular, narrow experience. I do not think that is a valid assumption at all…

For me, the overarching problem with that "particular narrow experience" approach is that every time I or the table wanted to do something different I'd have to buy and we'd all have to learn a whole new system. No thanks.

It would also be very difficult to vary from that narrow experience within the same ongoing campaign. For example, if I wanted a campaign to start with a series of BitD-like heist situations but then within the same campaign and with the same characters expand to Gygaxian dungeon-crawling and eventually wind up with domain management and courtly intrigue as the focus, I'd need a system that could handle all three of those. A system that's designed to do just one would be useless to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

From summer of 1986 until about 2000....so fourteen years, minus a few years while I was at university and didn't have any time to play games. I wrote more about it in other threads, but the gist of it is that I started with BECM, bounced off of 2E, and then went all-in on 3.X in 2000.

So...guilty as charged? I guess?

That explains it much more, I think. Effectively you were kind of in a box of a particular time and variety of D&D much longer than I'm used to.