Aldarc
Legend
LoL. The term "neotrad" first came out of Free League Publishing, which they used to describe their Mutant Year Zero game."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."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..
"Trad" and "Neotrad" are otherisms used to bury meaningful discussions in meaningless jargon and forgist dogma.
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.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 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.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'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.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.