What Games do you think are Neotrad?

[Not a Decepticon]

So what aspects of 3E make it neo-trad as opposed to simply trad?

Or as opposed to Forge, whose principles are "give players options to make exactly the character they want"?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Maybe these categories just aren't very useful.

This.

 

[GobHag]

OK, so character-driven play, with some pre-planned events or arcs? How much of what happens is planned?

The blog post you linked (about which... the less said, the better) gives the example of Pendragon. IIRC, in Pendragon, the broad events of the campaign are fixed, but all kinds of wild things can happen to characters. Your character can fail a passion roll and be forced to do something you don't want them to. Or just get eaten by a dragon. It sounds like this isn't what people who are into OC play would want. Is that true?

I'm not very familiar with Fabula Ultima. Can you explain how the game's rules faciliate OC play for you?

Sorry if all these questions and opinions are too much.

Entirely depends on game(system), game(campaign) and from table to table. Some very much would like to know exactly what happens and playing the table is more or less just to further the details, some only have a general route(Saura is going to sacrifice something important to her, be in grief and then moves past it because XYZ), some systems just explicitly give you a... narrative button that you can press(You're a servant to another player and you have specific mechanically described effect of how and when you could betray/show your loyalty towards them)

Pendragon would be more Neotrad if it has ways to be more personalised to the PC yeah, and generally speaking being forced to do something by the system/GM isn't liked(bribery is usually more accepted) though trying to be narratively in control of your character can be an example of 'good play' or as a deliberate challenge in Neotrad. You never want a campaign you're playing to have your character just get eaten by a dragon--you get eaten as a form of heroic sacrifice, as a sign you(r character) is too naive, that you're really into consumption-as-romance, etc, etc.

FU is just I think the most well known system that facilitates Neotrad play first and foremost. You make the world as a table together during Session zero and that's where everyone puts plot-points, possible threats, the theme and mood of the campaign itself but in the end it's the GM that controls it with ways to change 'the fiction' being regulated using the games metacurrency. It has a lot character customization and choices to do since multiclassing is obligatory. And the GM section of the book advices that you shape the challenges according to the table and players.

 

[GobHag]

Also I've actually been using this tumblr post as another reference point for what games that supports Neotrad:

TTRPGs As Terrariums For Blorbos​

One thing that I think isn’t covered enough in TTRPG recommendations is styles of play.
There’s a lot of “this game has this tone,” or “this game is this amount of crunchy,” but less “what are you playing towards?”
In games like Microscope and I’m Sorry Did You Say Street Magic? and The Quiet Year, you’re playing to see what happens to the setting.
In games like Mork Borg and Into The Odd and Mothership, you’re playing to see how far your character can get.
And in a lot of games, you’re playing to create a blorbo, an OC, just a little guy, and the soul of the gameplay is the story of who your guy is and who your guy becomes.

This is blorbo style play.

And the thing about styles of play is that you can apply them to any game, even games that aren’t really built to enable them. So I wanted to take a moment to shine a spotlight onto some games that do specifically enable you to fully blorb out. (I’ll try to cover a mix of genres and tones, but the rpg scene is vast so if you have a favorite that I missed please feel free to shout it out in the replies.)

-Golden Sky Stories. This is the English translation of the Japanese TTRPG Yuuyake Koyake. You play as shapeshifter kids and spirits in a small town and, instead of tracking EXP, the thing that you carry from session to session is your relationships with other characters. The tone of the game is heartwarming, and if combat happens, both sides lose. There can be emotional turmoil, but this isn’t a game where you have to worry about bad things happening to your blorbo.

-New World Of Darkness. On the other hand, let’s say you want bad things to happen to your blorbo. You want to play a guy that’s really going through it. If you also like modern supernatural stories, New World Of Darkness was built for you. Characters in NWoD can be entirely non-combat, or a literal werewolf, or a noncombat werewolf. The game places a lot of emphasis on navigating through the setting socially, as its supernatural creatures tend to run in factions and starting a fight usually means making a bunch of enemies.

-Pasion De Las Pasiones. Of course, not everyone wants a fantastical setting. Sometimes good old melodrama is hearty and comforting. Pasion De Las Pasiones is a playable telenovela, and it encourages you to play your characters bold and recklessly. Every class even has a built-in Meltdown, where if you’re pushed to the edge they become extra reckless, ensuring a broad fallout of messy drama when they do manage to calm down.

-Cortex System / Unisystem. Perhaps you want to drop your blorbo into an existing fictional universe? But you also want stats and meaty character creation instead of just freeform roleplay? There are easily a dozen games on the Cortex engine, including Supernatural, Firefly, Smallville, Battlestar Galactica, Marvel, and Leverage. And on Unisystem, there’s Buffy, Army Of Darkness, as well as a somewhat rare I Can’t Believe It’s Not Planet Of The Apes.

-Lancer / Gubat Banwa. If you like blorb-y play but still want a heavy side of combat, both of these games have you covered. Lancer has a sprawling scifi universe focused on mech pilots, and Gubat Banwa has a violent and lavish mythological Philippines setting. Both of these games also have stunningly beautiful artwork, so if you like seeing a setting visually come to life, these are for you.

-Fabula Ultima. My final recommendation is also an extremely gorgeous looking game. Fabula Ultima is built on the bones of Ryuutama (itself an excellent travel-fantasy game) to enable meaty, blorby Final Fantasy style campaign play. Combat is a rich and deep option in Fabula Ultima, but so is everything from spellcasting to crafting, and players have built-in resources they can spend to affect the story. If a scene isn’t quite going the way you want it to, you can spend a point to nudge it in the right direction. Fabula Ultima also feels extremely complete without being too complicated.

So there you go. Eight options, and that’s barely scratching the surface of the sea of blorb-y games (Seventh Sea, Exalted, Blue Rose, Legend Of The Five Rings, Coyote And Crow, Timewatch, Nahual, and more!)
It’s also not wrong to play non-blorb-y games in a blorb-y way. Do whatever you’re comfortable with! But you might enjoy dipping into these titles.

I'm not familiar with all of these games so there's likely some examples there that I disagree with.

Edit:Fixed

 

[mamba]

And you can make good argument that bunch of OSR devs would probably not appreciate being excluded from very category of games they tried to emulate. Or yu could go into honsensical minutial like "why is 3e neo-trad and not a forge game?". This system becomes utterly useless when applied to games and not people.

It probably does, my point is more that this is a pretty badly written categorization. 3/4s of each category are tangents and the last 1/4 could be much clearer.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

90s era White Wolf (like Vampire) are super-duper trad, totally focused on the PCs being present to explore the heavily detailed setting and factions found in the core book. The newer Chronicles of Darkness is much more of a neotrad evolution of its heavy trad progenitor, I agree.

Yeah I'm fascinated that some people see them as NeoTrad, because even played "superheroes with fangs" (which I can see is potentially evocative of NeoTrad approaches, if not perhaps all the way there), the game design was fundamentally as Trad as you can get. The adventures/campaigns, for example, were significantly more "Trad" than the AD&D ones from the same era.

I think that's how you prove conclusively that those systems were Trad in design and thinking - the campaigns were basically written as "the players are along for the ride whilst big important world stuff happens and they get to watch" - and that was true not only in 2E, but even more true in Revised, with the Time of Thin Blood and so on. I think what Revised actually showed pretty well was a clash between NeoTrad playstyles emerging and slamming hard into Trad design. Revised reinforced the Trad-ness of the design of 2E, rather than, as might have been expecting, giving way to the future.

Also I've actually been using this tumblr post as another reference point for what games that supports Neotrad:
I'm not familiar with all of these games so there;s likely some examples there that I disagree with.

In classic Tumblr fashion the post you linked seems to already have been deleted before we could even see it! If it's a weird permissions issue I'd suggest using Snipping Tool or similar to make a copy of the list as an image and repost it here.

 

[Reynard]

Also I've actually been using this tumblr post as another reference point for what games that supports Neotrad:
I'm not familiar with all of these games so there;s likely some examples there that I disagree with.

The post appears to be gone FYI.

 

[GobHag]

Fixed!

Highlighted some sentences there to emphasize a few things @Reynard @Ruin Explorer

 

[Reynard]

Fixed!

Highlighted some sentences there to emphasize a few things @Reynard @Ruin Explorer

Thanks.

I don't really understand posts liek this. First, "blorbo." What?

Anyway, my main issue is the post opens with telling you that this is a playstyle you can do with any game, and then goes on to give you a list of game to play in this style. it is self contradictory. Why aren't we talking about the playstyle irrespective of the game, if any game can support the playstyle?

I mean, it is another of those jargony terms that seems to try and describe something we have all been doing the whole time and is pretty much meaningless. "See what happens to your character" is the default of RPG play. The other options, like Microscope, are the exception and those would benefit from some terminology. But "playing your character" is just playing an RPG.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Also I've actually been using this tumblr post as another reference point for what games that supports Neotrad:


I'm not familiar with all of these games so there's likely some examples there that I disagree with.

Edit:Fixed

Ok that one bit at the beginning kind of clarifies the way to define NeoTrad more than like, bazillions of words elsewhere - what is the game about? And they give three examples:

1) Is it about what happens to the world.

2) Is it about how long your characters survive/how powerful they become.

3) Is it about what happens to your characters, and what they want/do.

Notice is 3 is different from 2.

All games pretty much have some of elements of all three but I do think it's fair to say that most games have one they strongly favour - or even if they don't - that kind of rules them out as NeoTrad, because NeoTrad favours 3.

And I think what this reveals is that, as a playstyle, NeoTrad is basically older than the internet - it's not exactly how I was taught to play D&D by my second cousin in 1989, but it's pretty close. Hell, if you look at Listen Up You Primitive Screwheads!, the DM advice book for Cyberpunk 2020, published by Mike Pondsmith in 1994, that is absolutely focused on 3. Likewise, there used to a wonderful website with lengthy and detailed accounts of a HERO campaign run at some Midwestern university over like 3-5 years in the mid-late '80s, and absolutely the focus was on 3.

And I think what we can see is that, initially, it's more that this is a thing that rules allow, rather than rules are actively designed to support. The original oWoD VtM games are divided between a focus on 1 & 3, with little interest in 2 (not none - little). The campaigns for those though - they're rock-sold 1. They don't give a toss about the PCs. They're absolutely uncaring to the PCs, who are essentially almost bystanders.

I'm trying to think of the first adventure I read that really tried to get the PCs involved on a personal level, not just with hooks. It has to be early '90s or something? By the late '90s, we were seeing games which were definitely focused very much on 3 - The Marvel one with the cards (MSHAG?) for example.