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

[Deadstop]

Heck, James Bond 007, pointed to by some as the origin of metacurrency points (though there are earlier examples) had “add something to the scene” as one option for spending Hero Points.

 

[SableWyvern]

Certainly this is "Success with Complications" I can't recall a single game using this before PBTA, and if it did, it did it poorly. The idea of almost never failing rolls, but instead succeeding or succeeding with complications was never a thing that was embraced as a core main mechanic in any mainstream game I can think of. D&D = pass fail, GURPS = pass fail. World of Darkness = Pass fail. So so so many games were pass fail.

While your main point relates to success with complication as a main focus, I think it's worth noting that degrees of success rather than binary pass/fail is not remotely unusual. Tunnels and Trolls, Runequest and Rolemaster all implement degrees of success as core components, as just a few early examples.

 

[Arilyn]

I do not believe that intentional design or careful thought is a new thing. Surely games like Runequest, Pendragon, Ghostbusters, Amber, Paranoia and Ars Magica are games designed with clear intent to support particular styles of play and were developed with careful thought by the designers.

Whether they are games you want to play, or designed to do the things you want, the ways you want, is another question. But I don't understand how anyone can suggest that the designers involved lacked an ability or willingness to use careful thought or to design with intent.


I'm not sure how this observation can even be applied to most games. Unless you're making a new edition or variant of an existing game, what non-fitting, beloved ideas are people generally keeping? Traveller, Runequest and Rolemaster are early games with a clear willingness to ditch D&D assumptions. RM specifically is an attempt to offer D&D while ditching and replacing basically every single mechanic and many fundamental underlying assumptions.. The history of the hobby is littered with attempts to remake D&D and, prior to the d20 boom, these games didn't typically retain much of anything of the original D&D mechanics and they did not tend to retain the so-called sacred cows that linger in the official line. Their selling point was, in general, the fact they were ditching such things.

Which, now that my thoughts are moving in this direction, makes me wonder -- are people's opinions on this subject being influenced by the glut of d20 and OSR products we have seen in the last 20-ish years, and perhaps even things like PbtA and FitD game families, and completely missing the fact that, once upon a time, every game was pretty much it's own thing?

These days, many new games are hacks and mods to existing, successful games. Once upon a time, this was not remotely the case. I would suggest that maybe what we're seeing is things coming full circle in some respects, except that people are accepting hacks of some games into the "modern" umbrella, so it's not just a matter of modern being a game that differentiates itself from others in some way.


It is equally true that with well-designed, older games, players are far less likely to feel let down by unkept promises. A well-designed game is a well-designed game, and a modern, well-designed game is not inherently better than other games by virtue of "modern" being appended to the description.


That's easy to assert, but I'm not sure there is any way show this is actually the case, as it sounds like a question of taste and perspective, to me.

I mean, it is probably true in general that "more games these days" do [anything you wish to state] simply because there are more games. But suggesting that more games, as a significant fraction of the total number, deliver what they're selling ... that seems highly unlikely to me, given the insanely low bar we have and the glut of products out there.

Edit: In summary, I reject any definition of "modern" games that attempts to claim modern games are somehow better designed, as opposed to differently designed, than games that fall outside whatever definition is being used.

I should have said modern games are more likely to be designed with intention. And of course, there were older brilliant games that were designed with intention, but not enough designers back in the day learning lessons from Ars Magica and Pendragon.

My comment about His Majesty the Worm is not to say modern games are all busy being not D&D, but that His Majesty is intentionally designed to redo the dungeon crawler.

RPGs have been around for 50 years so there has been many improvements. Would be strange if there wasn't. There have been discarded experiments along the way, like games focusing so much on simulation that they slowed to a crawl and skills broken down into itty bits.

Not all modern games will be well designed, of course, but the current move is toward more purposeful design, so we have fewer games like the original World of Darkness games that had play not quite matching the flavour.

 

[Koloth]

Things that many folks consider modern appeared in early games. Fantasy Trip has a decent list of non combat Talents(skills). Its unofficial successor GURPS, has a long list of skills, advantages and disadvantages. Both have a 4 levels of success on most rolls. Critical Fail, Fail, Success, Critical Success. Traveller made a run at implementing a trade economy but there is little feedback included. The character generation process for Traveller also winds up creating a decent backstory for characters that survive the process. Plus most Traveller characters are assumed to be experienced before starting play.

 

[bloodtide]

You are describing one game that has little in the way of modern design because of D&D tradition. And even then, your description of the game is biased and unfair because you constantly make assumptions that players just want to skip through adventures with zero challenge.

Odd I did not type that....

I feel, as many have mentioned, that modern design is intentional.

Is this even a question? Is not all game design intentional?

The decisions in games like Drawsteel, Daggerheart, Shadowdark, Mothership, Into the Odd, etc. are carefully thought out, and the designers are willing to throw out beloved ideas if they don't fit the game's intention. His Majesty the Worm, for example is a deliberate desire to redo dungeon crawling. It's tight, strategic, old schoolish, without any mechanical trappings from D&D. Draw Steel states its elevator pitch clearly and closely hews to its purpose.

Agreed. The vast majority of modern games come directly from some players having a very bad time playing, almost always D&D, back in the day. Then they grip a d20 tight and say "I can make a better game!" and do......

With well designed modern games, players are far less likely to feel let down by unkept promises. More games these days deliver what they're selling,which is why I have been buying more games than I'll ever actually get to run.

It does depend on the players.

And time is a great fickle thing: all the players today that that hold up their modern RPG book (like a Tron Light Disk) and say it is the most perfect game ever, are just a product of this time. Come 5 or 10 or 20 ye ears in the future there will be a "new, better, more perfect" game, as there always will be. And the people of 2046 will look back and not think the 2026 games are so great....

 

[SableWyvern]

Is this even a question? Is not all game design intentional?

I have suspicion that what's really being seen here is the tendency of Forge-derived games and their descendants to drill down on a particularly narrow focus. Here is this one specific thing I really want the game to be about, focus on and do well, and every aspect of the game should feed back into that.

Once you're designing a game like that, I think it's much easier to see the designer's intent in every mechanic (if it's done well, at least). This is going to be less obvious with a game that doesn't have that narrow- or hyper-focus. In fact, If you're looking at a game without that narrow focus, there is probably no reason to even be asking, "How does this mechanic feed back into and encourage players to engage with the game's primary conceit?" and, if you do ask that question, most likely you won't find a satisfactory answer because there is no single, clearly defined, narrow conceit in the first place. Additionally, many games aren't made with the intention that the rules need to push the players to engage, because they assume the desire and willingness to engage already exists outside of the rules. Such games will also fail to provide a satisfactory answer to the question, which some might take as indicating a failure of intent instead of recognising as simply a completely different sort of intention.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think it depends on the game. Many of the elements of D&D are, to this day, simply relics of wargaming that have been repurposed for RPGs and have mostly remained out of inertia.

Certainly there are many other games that seem to just be a collection of different mechanics without any clear reason for the mechanics chosen. The Palladium system readily comes to mind. There’s not much about that system that feels like it was strongly considered… d20 for combat versus d100 for skills being a primary example.

But there are also earlier games that were designed with deliberate intent. That the mechanics chosen have been considered and selected because they’re believed to be the best tool for the job rather than “oh, I can use this rule for X in the game I’m making”.

I think where modern games may differ is that they benefit from what’s come before. They have more examples of games to observe, more successes or mistakes to learn from. And I think they tend to more readily discuss these things, generally speaking.

 

[Campbell]

When I think about intentional design I think about designers having a clear vision of what they want the game to be about, not just from a setting/fiction perspective but also as a game. Then the proceed from first principles instead of assuming there are things you need to include because they have always been included. There's a clear gameplay loop and reward cycle that reinforces that vision.

Like it's obvious to me when you look at something like Shadowrun, Legend of the Five Rings or Vampire (in their previous incarnations) there's a whole lot of institutional design carryover without much regard if things like encumbrance or detailed wargame inspired combat systems really serve those games well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This came up in another thread and I wanted to spin it off for its own discussion.

When talking about TTRPG mechanics and how the medium has evolved and advanced over the last 5 decades, are there specific sorts of mechanics that you consider more "modern" than others?

There's a lot I can call "more modern" than others, but "modern" without a qualifier is not terribly useful.

Where do you draw the line at "modern"? Is it arbitrarily some year or the advent of some game? Or is there a qualitative to "modern" that transcends a clear line?

Yeah, its a matter of degree.

And with the dicsussion of "modern" -- are there games with mechanics ahead of their time? Are there "regressive" games now?

There probably are in the former case, but I'd probably need to see them in use before I gave them a nod that way.

"Regressive". Not sure I'd go so far as to say that, but I'll say they're games that don't take advantage of developments that have come over time. One I personally notice is games that are dependent on random character generation (even avoiding them as optional rules). Sometimes there are other mechanical elements that make that hard to do, but when not, it seems kind of stubbornly set in the older paradigm beyond reason when they won't even do it as an optional rule.

Finally, does it matter to you whether a game has more "modern" mechanics, for good or ill?

There are tools I want to have in a game, and avoiding some of the more generally useful ones (clocks, for example) sometimes seems a bit perverse. But its a case of individual rules not how "modern" it is, per se.

 

[Enrahim]

I have not read the entire thread, so this might have come up before - but the main thing I consider modern is attempt to reduce cognitive load during play. In particular in terms of math. Big dice pools, tables with numbers as entries, 30 fixed skills with individual numbers, stacking bonuses and even a d100 feels like relics of the past. Rather the more heavy weight games fill out their page count with qualitative content that fits neatly on a card MtG style - alongside a core mechanic that involves rolling at most 2 dice with at most 2 modifiers that is used in basically all situations.