What Games do you think are Neotrad?

[pemerton]

The distinction I (and I think @pawsplay , but I don't want to put words in their mouth) have been trying to make is between functional and superfluous detail. The Riddle of Steel is a game about driven people staking it all on vicious sword fights, and it has detailed and bloody rules for fighting with swords. Those crunchy fighting rules might be good or bad, but they're not there out of some obsession with completeness. OK, the game probably didn't need you to enter your character's height and weight, but that's the kind of colour that was de rigour at the time.

Yes.

I think my point may have been misconstrued. What I'm saying is that the "Chekhov's gun mechanics" idea, that is set out in the blog post, is not a uniform feature of, or aspiration for, all RPGs.

There are RPGs - AD&D, Rolemaster, even (as you note) height and weight in TRoS - that don't conform to it. And it's not because those RPGs are poorly designed by some universal standard of RPG design. It's because they are using a different standard of what is de rigueur. They have a "completeness" aspiration that is not just about the utility of that rules element for framing and resolution of action in play.

 

[clearstream]

I am still confused as to whether "neo-trad" is a playstyle or a design ethos.

It's a design ethos, as later acknowledged by the author of the Six Cultures article. A distinctive way to label the playstyle often associated with (and perhaps in some cases pursued by) neotrad design, is "OC".

A neotrad TTRPG design manifesto

In this thread I aim to make two arguments. In this first post, I aim to disambiguate neotrad and OC. In brief, I'll argue that "neotrad" labels a design trend, while "OC" is a culture of play. That will obviously relate to an excellent thread about OC play. Nothing in that thread other than...

www.enworld.org

Whatever your feelings about my manifesto, my first two posts there contain a helpful list of quotes and links. @GobHag for vis. I'd urge you to count the Six Culture's author's express subsequent views (that neotrad is a design ethos, and OC the playstyle) into your reading of their earlier article.

 

[clearstream]

Having rewatched it, I am surprised to find out that I am not, in fact, "trad" because I do not want to tell the players my story. rather, I usually want us to discover a story together, relying on improvisation, random results and player choices. I guess that kind of puts me in the category of OSR, even though I would never have put it that way and don't play OSR games except Shadowdark. But I am definitely not running games where the players run a tavern. Maybe these categories just aren't very useful.

As an aside, I recently noticed that the supplies rules in Forbidden Lands potentially originate in the Black Hack "Usage die" which fits well with Härenstam's comment on the worth of "neotrad" design (when he coined the term). OSR mechanics appear in neotrad designs.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm coming to to that conclusion myself. OTOH, "OSR" is at least as undefined a term as "neotrad" is to me. It certainly doesn't mean what Ben thinks it does to everyone in the OSR community, which is itself pretty divided on what fits under the umbrella and what doesn't.

This seemed like the right post to quote on this juncture. I would call 'OSR' a 'cultural movement', and MAYBE there's a semi-coherent culture of play that goes with it. Beyond that? I perceive very little actual unity in terms of ideas, agenda, etc. Practitioners seem to start out looking retrospectively at actual classic play (mostly D&D), but even there it is often so heavily reinterpreted through various lenses that I don't find much to be in common with true classic 'old-school play' in the sense of "what we actually played in 1976 or so." I mean, there are probably exceptions too, people who actually are aiming to capture the unadulterated essence of those games. I'm not sure they actually fall into the OSR as it is now defined though!

 

[Aldarc]

This seemed like the right post to quote on this juncture. I would call 'OSR' a 'cultural movement', and MAYBE there's a semi-coherent culture of play that goes with it. Beyond that? I perceive very little actual unity in terms of ideas, agenda, etc. Practitioners seem to start out looking retrospectively at actual classic play (mostly D&D), but even there it is often so heavily reinterpreted through various lenses that I don't find much to be in common with true classic 'old-school play' in the sense of "what we actually played in 1976 or so." I mean, there are probably exceptions too, people who actually are aiming to capture the unadulterated essence of those games. I'm not sure they actually fall into the OSR as it is now defined though!

I think that the "semi-coherent culture of play that goes with it" came more from the Nu-OSR side of things when various sub-groups of the OSR community moved on from its "I want a way to keep playing my TSR games..." origins.

 

[gorice]

Yes.

I think my point may have been misconstrued. What I'm saying is that the "Chekhov's gun mechanics" idea, that is set out in the blog post, is not a uniform feature of, or aspiration for, all RPGs.

There are RPGs - AD&D, Rolemaster, even (as you note) height and weight in TRoS - that don't conform to it. And it's not because those RPGs are poorly designed by some universal standard of RPG design. It's because they are using a different standard of what is de rigueur. They have a "completeness" aspiration that is not just about the utility of that rules element for framing and resolution of action in play.

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. 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.

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.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

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.

Inclined to agree, although to be fair there are a number of both designers and critics who also wear an influencer hat - or vice versa, depending on one's opinion about which role has primacy. The labels attached to/adopted by various communities aren't really much help to me beyond possibly showing where I might find discussion of a given game system or playstyle.

 

[GobHag]

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.

I also agree with this but I have no negative feelings towards it. Basically any kind of TTRPG theorisation that reaches even a sliver of acceptance requires influencer-ing.

Also, branding is important and what @Wofano Wotanto said

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think that the "semi-coherent culture of play that goes with it" came more from the Nu-OSR side of things when various sub-groups of the OSR community moved on from its "I want a way to keep playing my TSR games..." origins.

From my perspective, and I didn't really follow OSR that closely, there was a brief period where some people grabbed onto the OGL and 3e SRD and 'resurrected' some of the early classic versions of D&D (OSRIC being the poster child for this). Previous to that there were a few early games, like the "mini 20" game that replicated some of the basic mechanics, though I wouldn't call them complete games. Anyway, maybe there was a coherent 'OSR' conceptually really early on, but even by 2006ish it had already divided itself into multiple different, and incompatible, interpretations. Heck, from what I remember there were raging arguments about what the 'R' stood for back then, with OSRIC going with 'Reference' as a sort of way to stay out of the fight!

 

[Micah Sweet]

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. 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.

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.

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. And it's not my only basis.