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

[Aldarc]

"Trad" and "Neotrad" are otherisms used to bury meaningful discussions in meaningless jargon and forgist dogma.

LoL. The term "neotrad" first came out of Free League Publishing, which they used to describe their Mutant Year Zero game.

 

[Reynard]

.

"Trad" and "Neotrad" are otherisms used to bury meaningful discussions in meaningless jargon and forgist dogma.

This is a thread about mechanics, not game theory or philosophical sniping. Please take this line of discussion elsewhere.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

It might be hard to narrow it down to individual mechanics, because there have been many games and many things tried.

I think a "modern" or "contemporary" game often have a certain level of intentionality in how the game will be played a the table, typically with a goal to emulate a certain genre.
It feels "older" games sometimes would tried more to use a kind of physics simulation, and would find that their physics doesn't really lead to the kind of game play they expected. ´
Like a Call of Cthulhu game were the characters get loaded with heavy weapons to beat the horrors that attack them - while you actually wanted to play investigators that enter a world they are unprepared for, there is no mechanical incentive for doing so. Or a D&D 3rd Edition game where the Cleric heals people after battle with a wand of cure light wounds and will use buff spells to out-fight the fighter during combat, and the all go to rest after 15 minutes of adventure. Even 2nd edition AD&D's where everyone is running with 10 ft pole sticks to trigger traps from hopefully safe distance, which isn't what you were looking for if your association with fantasy is LotR or Conan (but nowadays might be if your inspiration for fantasy is D&D).

A lot of the times, a lot of fun could be head, or gentleman's agreements could be made. But "modern" games try to ensure that the gameplay you get from using the rules to their logical extremes matches what they intended. Whether they always succeed is of course another matter. And the biggest drawback might be that it can make them more specific - even a gentleman's agreement might not really work to turn it to work for a different genre.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Im not sure i use the term " modern " for mechanics. When I think about newer RPGs I sometimes associate newish to a shift to story games and narrative games, and mechanics associated with these troops of games, but obviously plenty of modern games are not those types of games.

I definitely have a tendency to think that way as well, and like you I know it's not exactly fair. But it feels like a growing trend regardless.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Modern is a definition that has to evolve. What we think of modern now is different than what we thought as modern.

I know that, personally, there's a few elements that seem vestigial when I spot them. For example, if I see a matrix table in a game, I take for granted it was written on a typewriter while smoking in a carpeted-room.

As to what's modern, I see more and more abstraction in design. Not needing to represent things are they are logically, but designing a more convenient but abstracted way. The Resource Die form Black Hack is a good example. The Advantage system of 5E is another.

I see the same, but obviously I don't believe it's "needed" at all. Just a choice in game design to produce a desired effect.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A subset of narrativism that I find to be particularly modern is more hardcoded genre emulation.

Mutants & Masterminds generally emulates genre via character capabilities and actions. Its rules can be used to create most comic book superheroes and then play out their actions and adventures. The game may play out very much like a superhero comic, but for many aspects of the genre, the emulation of story and drama falls to the GM and players to choose to follow those conventions.

You could use M&M to play a game of angsty teenage superheroes. But, the modern game Masks: The New Generation has rules and systems that emulate the narrative aspects of the genre quite specifically. With its playbooks and moves, it is specifically designed to give you dramatic outcomes that would be expected in the genre it is trying to emulate.

Another example is Sentinel Comics RPG. In many superhero comic books the heroes will use their lesser powers at first, and only bring out the big guns as the fight moves on. SCRPG emulates this by breaking powers and scenes into color-coded phases, from green to yellow to red. To use your red power, the scene must be at red. Until then you can use your green, then yellow abilities.

Generic systems have really fallen out of favor over the years, and the reason I see most often cited is that they tend not to emulate any given genre as well as one geared towards that genre. This was often said before we entered an age of enhanced genre emulation, but now that we are here, it just drives the nail deeper into their coffin. That’s not to say they are truly dead; there will always be people who will seek out the flexibility they offer. Just that they are now even further from what a typical “modern gamer” is looking for.

I'm still not convinced there is a "modern gamer" in the sense you describe. Different people have always liked different things. There are, however, modern games that appeal to a wider range of tastes. Since my tastes haven't changed (much) over the years, that naturally means there are more games (and more discussion about games) that I don't like.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

When people talk about “modern” tabletop roleplaying game mechanics, they often imply a chronological boundary — as if certain design trends mark a new era distinct from the past. But tabletop design doesn’t evolve linearly; it branches. What’s considered “modern” is less a matter of time than of context.

Early TTRPGs established a power hierarchy that positioned the Game Master as the primary storyteller and arbiter, with players operating as participants within a world largely defined by that authority. Over decades, this structure diversified. Designers began to question whether narrative control, pacing, and tone had to belong to one person. As a result, new systems invited everyone at the table to become a co-author of the shared fiction, distributing responsibility and creative agency more evenly.

Equally significant is the shift toward accessibility. For much of the hobby’s history, complexity was equated with legitimacy: rules mastery defined serious play. But the popularity of D&D 5e — a lighter, more approachable iteration — expanded the audience dramatically. The presence of casual and first-time players opened space for designers to experiment with new approaches that didn’t rely on long-term commitment or encyclopedic rules knowledge.

In this sense, “modern mechanics” are not defined by a particular style or ideology, but by the ecosystem that now supports multiplicity. The industry no longer orbits around a single standard of design or audience. Instead, it sustains a variety of purposes — some collaborative, some traditional, some minimalist, some intricate — all coexisting within a broader, more inclusive market.

This framing also blurs the idea of progress itself. Games once called “ahead of their time” often succeed today not because they predicted the future, but because the audience finally widened to support them. Likewise, “regressive” games aren’t failures of design — they serve players who still prefer that structure. In the end, whether a game is modern matters less than whether it fits the table that plays it.

 

[bloodtide]

I lot of what you see in 5E:

*Everyone of all classes and races having flashy cool magic abilities every couple of levels that they can do often, if not all the time.

*Endless easy resting, with reset buttons

*Easy, almost automatic checks and saves, where the DC is low and the PC gets a lot of pluses to the roll or something like Advantage.

*lots of hit points

*Death Saving Throws, where the character has a low chance of dying for real

*Few lingering effects, mostly for spells...."this spell does x until the next turn then is gone"

*Boundless Accuracy

*No keeping track of resources. Like the classic "your archer has infinite arrows " with a vague "oh, um, every so often roll a d6 and if you roll a 1 your arrows kinda sorta start to run out"

 

[billd91]

I don't know that there's any single definition of "modern" TTRPG mechanics that makes sense. I get that narrative tools are all the rage in the way some people look at RPGs in this discussion, but I wouldn't consider narrative-orientation to be a definitive requirement. Rather, I'm more inclined to paint with a broader brush and look mostly at mechanics that are designed for rather than adapted to use in a role playing game, for mechanics that are less beholden on accreting (sometimes wildly-) different subsystems together pulled from prior, non-RPG games.
I fully recognize that this definition probably throws the whole definition so wide that it's functionally useless... but that's generally how I think of the idea of "modern" TTRPG mechanics anyway.

 

[Reynard]

One way I think to engage the question is to look at when certain kinds of mechanics became ubiquitous, rather than when they were developed. There are lots of "drama points" style metacurrencies that appeared at various times, some going way back, but i would call metacurrency a "modern mechanic" because you can hardly throw a rock and not hit a TTRPG that uses some form of metacurrency.

That isn't true for "narrative mechanics" so maybe "narrative mechanics" are post modern?