What Games do you think are Neotrad?

[AbdulAlhazred]

The definition you give is fine, but it doesn't match all of the definitions I've seen on this thread and elsewhere. This is what I keep saying: I'm seeing lots of people say 'I like neotrad games', and then give conflicting accounts of what that means. Those people's preferences are valid, and in many cases they are describing a thing, but 'neotrad' is too broad and imprecise a label.

Given the hobby nature of TTRPG play I think it is unlikely we can expect really expert analysis to be the norm, maybe even to exist at all. I simply provide what, IMHO, seems like a workable and useful definition. Beyond that it is unlikely to exactly describe any real-world play. Honestly I don't think most participants in these discussions really WANT precise definitions.

 

[clearstream]

as someone who used to be really interested in 'simulationism', I'm increasingly convinced that it doesn't exist as an agenda, in Forge jargon. I see it as more of an inflection or mode, in the same way that we can talk of literary realism, naturalism, modernism, etc

I feel like Forge described simulationist techniques while never getting so far as understanding it as an agenda. For which I turn to Eero Tuovinen who suggests that there is an agenda that should be seen as elevated appreciation of subject. Other commentators refer to a noetic appreciation which is possibly one observed way in which appreciation may be elevated.

@Micah Sweet I didn't feel that @gorice was ruling it out as an agenda; only saying that it doesn't exist as one in Forge jargon. That could even be for the best, as the three-fold model, while useful in its time for advancing the discourse, has over time revealed limitations.

Perhaps I'm mistaken: the poster can no doubt best say what they intended.

 

[clearstream]

The definition you give is fine, but it doesn't match all of the definitions I've seen on this thread and elsewhere. This is what I keep saying: I'm seeing lots of people say 'I like neotrad games', and then give conflicting accounts of what that means. Those people's preferences are valid, and in many cases they are describing a thing, but 'neotrad' is too broad and imprecise a label.

I'm philosophically skeptical about precise definitions in the domain of TTRPG, but I do feel we can create labels and develop norms around their use. In this case, I don't feel it helpful to permanently wed OC with neotrad. I've explained why elsewhere. The author of the Six Cultures article is on record saying that they think so, too.

"OC" as a label describes an observed playstyle well-worth describing. With passionate advocates.​

​

"Neotrad" as a label was coined by a game designer to label an approach to TTRPG design.​

These are distinct notions, and it is distinctly useful to be able to address thought toward them with the help of separate labels. If neotrad is expropriated by OC, then not only does it stop having the meaning the person who coined it intended, but we'll need a new label for what was formerly neotrad.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like Forge described simulationist techniques while never getting so far as understanding it as an agenda. For which I turn to Eero Tuovinen who suggests that there is an agenda that should be seen as elevated appreciation of subject. Other commentators refer to a noetic appreciation which is possibly one observed way in which appreciation may be elevated.

@Micah Sweet I didn't feel that @gorice was ruling it out as an agenda; only saying that it doesn't exist as one in Forge jargon. That could even be for the best, as the three-fold model, while useful in its time for advancing the discourse, has over time revealed limitations.

Perhaps I'm mistaken: the poster can no doubt best say what they intended.

I wasn't talking about @gorice , I was talking about Edwards and my issues with GNS.

 

[thefutilist]

To be fair I think the GNS essays themselves do a pretty good job of exploring what's fun about sim play. The stuff about it not being a real agenda and so on all came from forum discussions, and I don't think was ever incorporated into the theory per se.

It was removed as an agenda about 4-5 years ago. Which I think is a great thing because the agenda part of the model makes a lot more sense when you remove it.

I’ve said it before but 90% of the people who claim they are sim are GNS Gamists. They’re just confusing what they like about the medium with the purpose they put the medium to.

An example I often use is the Tomb of the Ice Queen. There’s a tomb right up in the mountains and most people don’t know about it and it’s a real struggle to get to. You have to avoid the usual pitfalls of a hard climb, the snow and ice and maybe some fantasy creatures. At last you find the Ice Queen herself, entombed in, well a block of ice.

The ‘sim’ person is over joyed by this, some real exploration of a world that feels real. Of course they like exploration, and they’ll use sim terms to describe why it’s great. Do that annoying theorist thing though and start kicking away the ladder.

So what about if you do all that but we know you’ll succeed? Then you start seeing stuff like, it wouldn’t feel earned. (hmmm). Yeah but I need my immersion. What’s that? Well I make choices based on my character? And then it turns out that the character is making primarily strategic decisions with a risk of failure (hmmm). And so on and so on.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It was removed as an agenda about 4-5 years ago. Which I think is a great thing because the agenda part of the model makes a lot more sense when you remove it.

I’ve said it before but 90% of the people who claim they are sim are GNS Gamists. They’re just confusing what they like about the medium with the purpose they put the medium to.

An example I often use is the Tomb of the Ice Queen. There’s a tomb right up in the mountains and most people don’t know about it and it’s a real struggle to get to. You have to avoid the usual pitfalls of a hard climb, the snow and ice and maybe some fantasy creatures. At last you find the Ice Queen herself, entombed in, well a block of ice.

The ‘sim’ person is over joyed by this, some real exploration of a world that feels real. Of course they like exploration, and they’ll use sim terms to describe why it’s great. Do that annoying theorist thing though and start kicking away the ladder.

So what about if you do all that but we know you’ll succeed? Then you start seeing stuff like, it wouldn’t feel earned. (hmmm). Yeah but I need my immersion. What’s that? Well I make choices based on my character? And then it turns out that the character is making primarily strategic decisions with a risk of failure (hmmm). And so on and so on.

Why would you know you'll succeed? You seem pretty sure you understand the preferences of others, enough to pass judgement on them at least. What type of games do you prefer?

 

[thefutilist]

Why would you know you'll succeed? You seem pretty sure you understand the preferences of others, enough to pass judgement on them at least. What type of games do you prefer?

I’m not passing judgement so much as stating that within a specific model (way of looking at the world), there is no such thing as sim. In another model, you can have sim for days, all the sim you’d ever want and then some more.

My creative agenda would be Narrativism (or story now, to use the newer term)

 

[Campbell]

The question about simulation being an agenda or not is not about whether or not how closely a game simulates X or Y is an important element of a game's design. It obviously is to some people. It's about if it's the objective or simply a set of aesthetic tolerances will pursuing some other objective. Like at the end of the day if what we are actually doing at the table is overcoming challenges then that's still Step On Up even if our tolerance or aesthetic desires require the game's system to model medieval combat more accurately or if metagame resources are a no go for us.

Our creative agenda is overall a matter of what play is organized around. What are we trying to do when we sit down at the game table?

 

[Campbell]

For my part, while I think Clinton makes some good points, I ultimately disagree with him. I think it's true that there are many tables that are still ultimately organizing their play around providing challenges that just have certain aesthetic preferences I also think there are certain ways to play that do organize their play around simply existing in a fictional world, where players will spend a good deal of their time not actively seeking to overcome challenges.

 

[pemerton]

As a simulationist primarily, I won't support any RPG classification system that says my preferred playstyle doesn't really exist. On that basis alone the Forge loses out.

This is a weird thing to say, because Ron Edwards has an incredibly insightful essay on simulationist play - it did more to help me GM Rolemaster, for instance, than anything ever published by Iron Crown Enterprises.

But in terms of creative agenda, I suspect that you are what Edwards would characterise as a gamist who favours a very high degree of exploration, and both "little red dials" set very low - that is, very little competition between players and between PCs - with the focus, rather, on the party overcoming the challenges set up by the GM. So in fact gorice's view wouldn't exclude you anyway.

I understand the concept of purist-for-system, I just think it's very much of its time. IMO, there's a reason that style of design fell out of use. That doesn't mean that every unfashionable bit of design is bad -- but I think you can read something like AD&D or Rolemaster and find that there actually are reasons for a lot of things existing beyond an abstract commitment to completeness.

A lot of things, perhaps, but not everything. I'll admit that equipment lists in both systems are low-hanging fruit; but I think (as another example) there are even spell lists in RM - the Evil lists and the Alchemist lists, in particular - that are really there primarily to give a sort of "world building" foundation to other aspects of play, like the magic items and the adversaries that PCs meet. High level spells in AD&D, like Cacodemon and Trap the Soul, are similar in this respect.

FWIW, as someone who used to be really interested in 'simulationism', I'm increasingly convinced that it doesn't exist as an agenda, in Forge jargon. I see it as more of an inflection or mode, in the same way that we can talk of literary realism, naturalism, modernism, etc. Seen this way, you absolutely can judge whether a given design is good or bad for its purpose. This ties back to 'neotrad', too, because I think it's pretty clear that a lot of what gets included under that umbrella serves disparate purposes, and the category (to the extend that it's coherent at all) is based on particular inflections or techniques.

I agree that the neotrad category is about inflections or techniques. I've been following the blog post in identifying them; I think they operate primarily on high concept simulationism as the agenda (in the Forge sense of "agenda"), or on a very high exploration, low competition gamism.

As to the issue of whether or not simulationism exists as an agenda in itself, I tend to equivocate a bit. I do find Edwards's analysis of it very powerful - as I said earlier in this post, it shed more light for me on my RM experience (many hundreds, probably thousands, of hours of GMing that system) than anything else I've read. But our RM play was also vanilla narrativist, if haltingly so at times in part because of the incredibly strong tug back to exploration that RM gives rise to.

So if simulationism is an inflection/mode rather than an agenda, it is such a strong inflection that it threatens to swallow up the agenda altogether, if not kept under control (say, in the ways that Burning Wheel does).

Regarding labels like neotrad, OSR, storygames, etc., I'm extremely cynical. They seem to be advanced principally by people who fit the description of 'influencer' better than 'designer' or 'critic'. A huge amount of discussion abour RPGs online is about branding and cliqueishness, unfortunately.

Well "storygame" I personally don't find useful at all, any more than "narrative" (cf "narrativist). "Neotrad" has been useful, for me, in understanding a movement in approaches to RPGing that I'm not myself part of, but can observe - @Campbell has led my thinking in this respect.

As for "critic" vs "influence", I'm sure there are others out there but the the serious "critics" of RPGs and RPGing that I think of are Baker, Boss (though I know her mostly mediated via Baker), Edwards and Laws. Maybe Hite, for horror? And perhaps Crane? And I guess Kubasik because of his Interactive Tookit.

Any list is bound to be controversial, and my list probably just shows my age and inclinations.