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

There are no task or skill rolls in MotW. But you did state the purpose of the different in GURS vs PBTA = that second part of your sentence is the important part - the mechanic its self n PBTA ALSO includes what to do next, how, and what extra is added. That second part is the part, its the thing that makes the game mechanics so different than GM fiat. The game it telling us, not the GM. :)

Yeah, but it was the "not passing or failing anything" I was disagreeing with. You absolutely are doing that (and the fact that the system buries skills in much broader traits doesn't change that--if it was purely a question of just the moves, talking about someone using their traits wouldn't be a thing. In many cases you're going to get both players and characters to set out and get a result, and they can both pass or fail in doing so.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

One of the pitfalls of these discussions is the idea a simulation is total reality with no game, and that a game is all game with no simulation. The truth is a bit of each is in the DNA of any RPG. The simulation is in the abstraction of game elements that are attempting to emulate the genre/theme.

You can say, "what the hell is going on with HP anyway its not sim!" Though, survival sim was a very popular way to play early D&D though mechanics about starving or dying of thirst were never reality based simulation either. It was all abstractions of the condition. D&D has had sim tools, but has always felt like it had one foot out the door of its connection to simulation gaming. That tends to grind the gears of folks that want a leaning in the other direction, which has quite a bit of ways to go since Chainmail days.

That was more or less my point. There were early games that made some serious attempts at simulation (though even they only took it so far). D&D in its core mechanics (as contrasted with some downtime subsystems) wasn't really one of those. And when they did lean in further, they could sometimes be mighty selective about what they cared about (the weapon versus armor matrix business notably did not address natural weapons at all, even though animal and monster attacks could easily be as common as weapon ones from the NPC end).

So those sort of gamist concerns at least were not only present, they were pretty predominant from the earliest days of the hobby. Thee might have been some more concern for simulation than there is now, but I'm not sold there's any less lean into gameplay back then than now.
 

The biggest question often comes to what degree he's playing in a principaled way about what the consequences of those encounters. In other words, to what extent do those introductions of chaos matter? Its easy for a GM to decide most of the time that they don't, or only do so in a very limited degree, and they may not even be deliberately trying to disregard the player impact when they do so.
Is that really so different for a PBtA game? I know PBtA games usually exhort a GM to follow certain principles, but more traditional games have always talked about fair referees as well. Other than emphasis, what's the real difference? That there's a track record of GMs who have taken player antagonism too far in traditional RPGs? Given enough time, you'll probably see a track record of GMs in PBtA games that take on unfairly antagonistic approaches as well in the way they frame scenes and apply hard moves to blunt player agency.
And in both of these cases, these aren't really mechanics, are they? They're expected practices.
 

Is that really so different for a PBtA game? I know PBtA games usually exhort a GM to follow certain principles, but more traditional games have always talked about fair referees as well. Other than emphasis, what's the real difference?

Well, as noted, trad games tend to have a lot more tolerance for the GM putting their thumb on the scale. In theory at least, if a set of rolls drags a PbtA game in a particular direction, the GM isn't supposed to stop it or even put the brakes on. There's a lot of rationals for doing that in trad games, often some combination of "realistic reactions" and "dramatic interest". Neither of those would be perceived as automatically "unfair", because they aren't often perceived in a trad game as a direct consequence of resolution in the first place. Basically "the result of this combat determines the fate of the sublieutenant to the Big Bad" is a trad GM playing fair. What effects it has on the Big Bad's plans is often left as a far more subjective choice that can end up making it very meaningful or just a bump in the road, and which of those they choose is largely a black box, sometimes even to them.

That there's a track record of GMs who have taken player antagonism too far in traditional RPGs? Given enough time, you'll probably see a track record of GMs in PBtA games that take on unfairly antagonistic approaches as well in the way they frame scenes and apply hard moves to blunt player agency.
And in both of these cases, these aren't really mechanics, are they? They're expected practices.

To a point. The difference is its often not even perceived as bad practice in trad games. In PbtA, far as I can tell (keep in mind I own exactly two PbtA games, and would probably not ever run one and would have to think if I wanted to play one), there'd need to be a certain degree of ignoring those being bad practice for that to start turning into a thing (again, ignoring the sort of "theoretically PbtA based, but actually missing the point" games that Loverdrive mentioned earlier).
 

I'm honestly not sure what people mean when they say 'play to find out what happens', I've seen it used in a load of different ways. Same with Sandbox really, two people can say they run a sandbox but recoil in horror when they learn what the other one means.

To use a previous example. If three characters go and fight six characters at the abandoned water works, then both GURPS and Apocalypse World give us a method of finding out what happens.

It's only the introduction of tech like fudging the dice or suddenly deciding other people show up out of nowhere, that changes 'find out what happens' to the GM forcing the issue.
A lot of it is a reaction to bad nineties adventure paths. There has always been a tendency for adventure paths to be read more than they have to be played. And in order to make sure the story was a good one and would actually work out in the game a lot of 90s adventure paths (from both TSR and White Wolf) had the NPCs getting all the climactic moments and the PCs mostly following them around. (A textbook example was the Avatar Trilogy modules leading into 2e that forced four NPCs on the group and three are scripted to become gods with Midnight and not the PCs being the star of the show).
 

It can be a bit of both.

Look at how real-world people approach their careers. Some people let their professions define them 24 hours a day, others are only their profession during working hours and at other times are something else (e.g. someone's a dentist during the day but when not in the office is a sailor first and foremost).

In an RPG setting, a Monk would be a Monk 24 hours a day - it's a lifestyle as well as a profession. A Fighter, on the other hand, could be a Fighter only while in the field and an amateur stage actor the rest of the time: "Fighter" is just how she makes her living.
Yea, I’m moved away from that handwavey approach.

“Class” is a transformation of the soul. The character is aware of it, and the supernatural abilities and resilience that classes give are known and understood throughout society.

It’s not cultural or vocational in my D&D games anymore, it’s explicitly a supernatural phenomenon.
 


Yeah, but the core mechanics had some pretty severe levels of abstraction; that was even obvious to people in the 70's. When the abstraction gets deep enough, its functionally indistinguishable from a gamist decision. I know you get soggy about hit point being brought up, but the combat roll and AC weren't enormously better, nor were saving throws. I know pretty gamist games that are more focused on representation than that.
I do get soggy about hit points, because bringing it up as a counterargument to any desire for simulation in RPGs is very much beating a dead horse. I prefer that, if a game is going to use hp, that they don't use it exclusively. Some kind of stamina mechanic, long-term injury potential, or (preferably) both is needed for me to be happy with it.
 


the ‘it’ is not important, let me rephrase it to ‘your description sounds like you envision TTRPGs as giant state machines’
I'm not sure what you mean by this.

RPGs are games. They are played by participants, who - as in any game - make "moves" that cause the game to unfold/develop/change/progress. What is distinctive about most RPGs (and is true of all the ones I've seen mentioned in this thread) is that (i) the principal medium of play is shared imagining, and so the shared fiction matters to resolution; and (ii) most of the participants make their "moves" by saying what a particular character in the shared fiction does, while one of the participants (the GM) makes their moves in a completely different way, by presenting, to the other participants, scenes/situations that involve their PCs.

A game like GURPS has a lot of rules about how to represent, in mechanical terms, the stuff that everyone is imagining together. But - as @thefutilist has pointed out - it has not much to say about how the game participants actually agree on what to imagine, or how the GM is meant to introduce the scenes/situations that the characters find themselves in, develop those scenes (ie work out what happens next), and transition from one to the next.

It is this gap in GURPS's rules that opens up the possibility, that thefutilist has flagged, of keeping the GURPS mechanics but adopting the Apocalypse World rules for how the GM does those things.

not sure, they replace what used to be the class sure, but that doesn’t mean they are all that similar. The class defines abilities the character has, the playbook goes beyond that, it tries to drive a narrative / define the narrative role of the character.

The class-character can also attempt stuff that is not covered by an ability of their class. The playbook one has to stick to the moves of its playbook. That is why I mentioned TRRPG as a giant state machine earlier
Neither of these comments is true.

The playbooks in Apocalypse World establish character abilities - unique moves - just as (say) a D&D class does. Eg the Brainer can choose psychic manipulation moves, the gunlugger can choose shooting and fighting moves, the savvyhead can pick doing weird stuff in a workshop moves, etc. The relationship between those moves and a "narrative role" is no different from D&D - eg the things a fighter can do in D&D suggest different ways of engaging the fiction from the things a thief can do.

And just as in D&D, so a player in Apocalypse World can describe their PC doing whatever they want. Unlike most versions of D&D, the resolution rule is clear for all these action declarations: if a player move is triggered, then the appropriate move is worked through and an outcome generated; otherwise, the GM says what happens next , in accordance with the GMing principles which include the principles about when to make a soft or a hard move.
 

Remove ads

Top