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

[aramis erak]

I must have been avant-garde then, because I gave each player a dieroll mulligan each session in my AD&D games in the 90's lol

I gave players 2d of rerolls in character gen in Traveller/MegaTraveller since the late 80's... some saved them for play. I didn't restock them...

 

[pemerton]

I wonder if there's a large section of modern audiences that have active disinterest or even vehemently against verisimilitude as a goal or reason for rulings/rules design

To be clear, what I meant by anti-verisimilitudousness are stuff like how GMs should allow plans of action that are 'cool' by minimizing negative repercussions or making the plan work better than it should be than if believability mattered more; Plans such as the classic swinging from chandeliers, having duels on top of a stampede of horses, surviving a massive explosion by hiding inside of a locker. Or the kind of 'anime martials' fan that feel so beaten down by being shackled to the 'Guy At The Gym' paradigm that they resent believability.

Another manifestation is the 'death only happens in dramatic situations' way of thinking where retaining some amount of believability is nice....but should not prevent an underserving death from happening.

These demographics wouldn't want a complete abandonment of versimilitude ofc but they're more than happy to just throw it aside to better their experience with nary a thought because the believability of the fictional world is secondary at beast compared to highlighting their character.

I think that verisimilitude remains important for modern audiences but it's hardly uniform. While it is a trite point for me to make, everyone has different stress points when it comes to what disrupts our sense of verisimilitude. And to be somewhat cynical, I suspect there is no small part in people's sense of verisimilitude in TTRPGs being coincidentally disrupted when the situation happens to be to their disadvantage as players. (With some players, IME, being perfectly willing to gloss over notions of verisimilitude when it transpires in their favor or advantage.)

I also think that different cultures of play have different approaches and attitudes towards verisimilitude. For example, in even narrative games, there are often principles directed at the GM to breath life into the world in a believable way, respecting established fiction, or beginning and ending with the fiction. Even "follow the fiction" regarding consequences can be read as an appeal for verisimilitude. And when it comes to narrative games, GMs or players generally can't introduce new fiction that contradicts previously established fiction.

Where there is "friction" in approaches tends to rest in what are perceived as causal processes. Narrative games are often designed to create moments of drama for players characters, often engaging with theme and premise. But other play cultures may perceive these games processes as "artificial" when it comes to what is transpiring in the fiction and disruptive to their subjective sense of verisimilitude. And as previously said, people have their own idiomatic disruption points when it comes to verisimilitude. For example, one person may be fine with a wandering monster check producing a quantum ogre while playing a dungeon-delving OSR game but not fine when the GM narrates the arrival of quantum ogre after they fail with Fear with a check in Daggerheart. But it may also be because they have internalized the "logic" of wandering monster checks through 40 years of playing D&D, but have little to no experience with narrative games, which can be contribute to their sense of verisimilitude disruption.

All that said, I am one-hundred percent sincere when I say that I have experienced a much greater personal sense of verisimilitude in my games of Stonetop than I have in all of my games played of D&D over the past twenty-odd years.

This is interesting.

Over the past few years, I've had exchanges on these board where some posters talk about verisimilitude not by reference to the fiction, but rather in terms of mechanics. That is, some mechanics are described as unrealistic or as lacking verisimilitude in themselves rather than in terms of the fictional outcomes they tend to produce. Examples include everything from 4e martial encounter and daily powers, to resolution systems that permit or require the GM to complicate the fiction on a failure (or a weak success).

When it comes to verisimilitude of fiction, I don't think that swinging from chandeliers, or riding out explosions inside lockers, is any worse than some of the Conan-esque stuff that D&D (and some other FRPGs) have embraced from the outset - eg surviving a dragon's fiery breath by dint of sheer stamina, or taking cover in a cleft in the rocks, etc.

But when it comes to mechanics, I think there probably is a tendency, in "modern" RPGs, to adopt outcome-oriented mechanics without insisting that they have to be representative of something that is taking place in the fiction. Whereas I would think of the "trad" way of severing that representational requirement to be GM fiat in suspending or overriding mechanics.

 

[Lanefan]

Very late to this party but if it hasn’t been mentioned so far… the re-roll.

Meta-currencies in general have been mentioned as being a modern thing, or at least a modern trend; and re-rolls usually fall under that umbrella.