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.

 

[Neonchameleon]

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

If it's something I commonly saw in GURPS in the 90s (the Lucky advantage) I have problems considering it "modern"

 

[Neonchameleon]

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 ontop 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.

And this is where I have a serious problem with the people who talk about versimilitude in the context of D&D.

Most of us are not likely to face down a dragon. Most of us are likely to take a punch at some point in our lives and many of us will break bones. Most of us know what it feels like to be hurt. And D&D characters get into fights all the time. Thanks to the D&D hit point system after about level three in D&D in any edition an unarmoured character (yes, even a wizard) can take a maximum damage hit from an orc with an axe and be still standing with no long term negative effect. Just a recovery time that equates to excercise (which is normally considered to be a month for a marathon; one day per mile). No broken bones. No injuries. Just a workout.

Once we are on a hit point paradigm with no death spiral we are firmly in the realms of action movie physics. It is impossible to be otherwise. And combat is a core element of D&D. Which means that for versimilitude to hold we need to stay consistently in the realms of action movie physics (or throw out the D&D combat system entirely). Playing a "Guy at the gym" who can be hit in the face for maximum damage by an orc with an axe and take no long term effect is the part that shatters my versimilitude if we want to pretend that we are using anything approaching the real world.

It gets even worse than that when we consider damage output. Because the same mechanical effect that allows our action movie star to take a hit from an orc with an axe without actual injury means that they can't use sharp steel (magic or otherwise) to one shot or even cripple a large muscular unarmoured person (in specific an ogre) by stabbing them in the heart or pickaxing them in the head. Our "fighter" is, due to the supernatural way fighting works in this world, not actually dangerous to be a real world guy at the gym with a sharp weapon and some martial arts training. The effect of the hit point system is that everyone is swinging nerf bats and boffer swords. Which, again, is fine and in genre if we're allowing the fighter to be e.g. Xena. But not if we're trying to claim realism.

This doesn't mean I have a problem with games that actually try for versimilitude and have death spirals. My first two major RPGs were GURPS and WFRP and while I find them clunky these days I don't consider they aimed at bad targets or did things notably badly on the realism front. But once you have the ability to withstand ludicrous amounts of damage and the ability for many characters to cast spells reliably and safely we're way outside the realms of the guy at the gym. And given it's normally caster players arguing for 'versimilitude' when even wizards are super-tough and able to warp reality this always comes across to me as "Versimilitude for thee but not for me".