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NEOTRAD

(Thu, May 9, 2024)

NOTE: if you aren't interested in hearing me talk about what is cool and uncool in this particular style of play and just want my thoughts on how it can be done better right now, you can skip to here.

A few things are important to establish first so that we're talking about the same things. Most importantly is that I truly like playing in this style. I wouldn't be writing about it unless I felt strongly about it, and on the whole I'm very positive. Importantly though, I'd like to see it improve and innovate because I like it so much. This means there will be criticism of things I have seen (and done myself) in the play space.

So, for starters, I'll be calling the modern zeitgeist, Critical Role-esque playstyle that some people might call "OC play" or "modern narrative style" or "woke bullshit." Basically, if there's a focus on collectively authored narrative, interesting characterization and character growth as a goal, and monster-punching heroism as the bread and butter, it's probably neotrad.

Secondly, I'm not particularly interested in "making a case" for neotrad or whatever. If you have no interest in its offerings, then you don't need convincing, because it sounds like you know your own tastes and can take or leave whatever I say on your own just fine. If you're hostile to its existence in general, you might be one of those weird mason-jar-ass-shoving dudes. That said, I'll explain what I personally like about it.

Third, I come mostly from the milieu of OSR (or whatever the term is in your time and place for OD&D through ADND 1e clones and their offspring) players and writers, though my first experience with ttrpgs was finding the FATE SRD on google and running many failed games for my friends with no further research or guidance. I've played a decent amount of D&D 5e and 4e (I like 4e a lot but would love someone to make a game that can let me stop playing it), a little bit of Pathfinder 2e, a decent amount of PbtA games, and a large helping of OSR slurry. I far from picky, but I don't love most of the PbtA landscape. Apocalypse World is great, though.

Finally, I talk about "theme" a lot here. I use the word to mean the core questions asked or assertions made about the ourselves or the world we live in by a narrative. It's not quite the moral of the story, but it's similar in the sense that a theme can exist outside of a single story, but the theme of a story can't be changed without also altering its narrative.

That about does it on riders and qualifiers. Find me and kill me if I missed something.

I hate to admit this, but I like a few anime and manga series. Some of them are even shonen punch-up fighting series. This will be catastrophic to my image as a cool and snarky internet person and you can show me to the gallows just as soon as I finish writing this markdown file.

I like it when a hero with superpowers wrecks their opponent in a fight (or gets wrecked by their opponent) not because they were better at Doing Punches Fast or Being The Most Clever Boy On The Soccer Field, but because they have more hope or love for their friends or guilt over their parents or whatever. A big superpowered fight tends to be amazingly fertile ground for amplifying the stakes of a work's thematic content, and the best shonen series understand this. Shows that fall flat and ring hollow for me are the ones where the hero wins because they're the best at fighting, totally removed from thematic content. They're not the best at fighting because in the world of the show fighting is about anger or self-control or dedication and they have the most of that, they're the best at fighting because they're the best at fighting.

Neotrad, with its focus on player-authored characters and broad focus on constructing narratives with structures that are recognizably similar to those of other media (as opposed to a more old-school game, whose narrative still exists and can be just as important but is far more emergent from gameplay and might seem incoherent if placed in a TV show or novel) but simultaneous emphasis on having cool action setpiece fights, is very familiar when approached from this shonen battle manga perspective.

Additionally, my sensibilities are shaped by my love of writing for non-interactive narrative mediums as well as my love of writing for TTRPGs, and neotrad makes those skills honed in linear storytelling a little more applicable to the tabletop.

I like having cool powers to use on monsters and getting time in the spotlight to interact with NPCs and my fellow PCs as a player, and I like the heroic scope and more consistent cast from the GM side. I like coming up with scenarios and worlds that bring the PCs into conflict with thematically opposing forces again and again.

All that said, I think there are areas where the common wisdom and games that come with the neotrad playstyle could make huge improvements in serving its players, and ways players (on both sides of the screen) could take that improvement into their own greasy little fingers.

While this section will detail a lot of pitfalls and blemishes, I originally conceived of this diatribe as a checklist for myself to make my own games of this style better. I won't be telling you anything just to throw up my hands in frustration: I personally would like solutions to these problems, and waiting around for a savior system to cure all my ills for me is stupid at best and pathetic at worst. Many things can be solved simply by talking to your players about themes and goals, similar to safety rules like lines and veils. Anything that can't be solved by checking in and chatting can be solved by taking a sharpie to your game books.

Let's first re-examine that comparison I made to shonen anime. I talked a lot about fights being decided not by aptitude in combat but instead by magnitude of a thematic quality like determination or hope or love. I can't think of a single neotrad game that really operates on this principle.

Combat systems in these games tend to focus on being a fun, board game-like experience, which usually comes with the assumption of a hard failure state like a TPK. Without that failure state, there isn't any tension to the gameplay.

Now, a stopgap I often see employed is alternative objectives and failure states in combat. A TPK means becoming prisoners, or having your stuff taken, or failing in some narrative sense rather than an embodied consequence like death or retirement. This is a step in the right direction I think, but doesn't solve our theme issue. If we're adapting traditional literary structures, theme is a main component; if we're going to have thematically meaningful combat, combat must have some fundamental ties to our campaign's themes.

Another wrinkle is that this conflict between traditional D&D-alike combat and having combat that moves the narrative forward in the same way simple role-playing outside of combat can is amplified by the split between in-combat and out-of-combat methods of interacting with the world that are becoming increasingly popular in the segment of games that position themselves as in the neotrad space. In the pursuit of giving permission to people who like combat-heavy games to have fun, combat can be needlessly cordoned off from the "narrative part of the game."

As an addendum, the upcoming (at time of writing) game Daggerheart, from the Critical Role people no less, is positioning itself as The System for doing neotrad stuff. So far, it looks like 13th age but with more production value. Taking D&D monster punchup design and adding some storygame stuff to the other bits to claim the "best of both worlds" thing.

If I were to propose a direction a system should take in order to better serve the neotrad style, I'd propose a system that doesn't simply have both storygame-y elements and a crunchy combat system, but a system that weaves those storygame elements into the fabric of combat. People love their Blades in the Dark flashbacks and their PbtA empathy moves and all that: make those things an essential part of the combat loop. Braid them instead of lining them up in sequence.

All that said, I don't think waiting for a new system to come around (or taking on the monumental task of writing one yourself) is the solution at all. It'd be neat if our game books helped us more than they hindered us, but we can make do in the meantime.

It's also easy to fall into the trap of "plotting" campaigns and such when immersed in the discussion around the neotrad play culture, but I think the OSR and PbtA principle of "DON'T PRE-PLAN NARRATIVES AND I'M NOT FUCKING AROUND" (to paraphrase the Bakers in the text of Apocalypse World) is just as important here.

The systems and expectations that have come to be synonymous with the neotrad playstyle tend to demand a higher level of preparation than old-school systems and lighter "storygames" (which I have been told Apocalypse World falls under the umbrella of), leading to the temptation to put plot beats on a timeline and have players follow them like a candy trail in a dark forest.

I think the scenarios where this style of play shine are sandboxes of constrained scope. Once one sandbox has run its course, move onto a new one that makes sense in the wake of the previous one. Trying to mimic structures like hexcrawls and OSR dungeon crawls usually only leads to frustration: we're powerful characters, why do we need to crawl?

The most important bit of advice to myself (and others, I guess) is that cultivating thematic depth to a campaign is not gonna happen on its own. At the start of the campaign, decide with your group (or on your own, if your group would prefer to react to what you come up with instead of collaborating from the jump) on one to three core themes and thematic elements. Write them down, and angle everything you do towards exploring those themes.

Themes can be questions like "what makes someone irredeemable?" or "how do we go on when everything seems hopeless?" or statements like "the difference between good and evil is just a few bad days" or "love conquers all." Finding a few intertwining or related themes gives multiple angles to play, and also gives some wiggle room if it turns out everyone is way more invested in one theme over the others once play gets going.

For combat specifically, I think explicitly tying preexisting systems like inspiration in 5th edition or action points in 4th edition to thematic expression during combat could do a lot of good in regards to tying in those agreed upon themes to combat. Paired with conditions for losing fights that aren't "you all die" and instead move the story forward (just in a tragic direction) and a world that is geared towards ensuring those fights happen like it's a law of physics, strides can be made. And when I say explicit, I mean explicit. Players should know this is how the game is going to work. Again, communication and goals.

Something else that comes to mind at the intersection of combat and narrative is how expansive a fight can be in other media that are interested in drama and punching. The average battle in One Piece can take many chapters to resolve, containing its own individual skirmishes and setpieces spanning hours or days. One of these battles could be their own entire adventure with a million different paths through and outcomes. D&D-alikes and their vestigial concerns with attrition and rest management get in the way of this. In 4e, short rests are very impactful and take only 5 minutes RAW, though there's no reason they couldn't be even shorter if needed. My sense is that short rests are less impactful in 5e, and take something like an hour. Allowing for more healing in less time means that navigating one of these grand battle scenarios is easier. I'd like to write more on this topic, but this post is getting way too long as is.

This section is for me, so I can remember my own advice.

• At the start of a campaign, choose 2-3 thematic cores for the campaign with the players. The world should be built (or altered, etc.) to reflect those themes, and players should construct characters that have beliefs that react in some way to those themes.

• Pages of backstory is bad because we only really learn who the characters are as we play them. Each character having 1-3 broad strokes statements about themselves, their past, or their connections is all that's needed to start. Pull on those strings early and often.

  • Even if you don't pull on every PC's threads perfectly evenly, just seeing those threads pulled on at all is almost always exciting for everyone at the table. A good chunk of fun in this style comes from watching and interacting with the other PCs' drama as it unfolds.

• Make spatially constrained but deeply interactive scenarios. The existence of monster/player levels and the relatively high complexity of NPCs and battles means trying to cover too much ground at once can be daunting and draining.

  • Choose one of your themes, or a hard question related to one of your themes. Come up with at least 3 perspectives on it: those 3 perspectives are now your factions. Give each faction a figurehead NPC in the locale that represents them and embodies the perspective. Find something that makes the stakes of who gets to answer that question so important that the factions will fight and die over it.
    • Additionally, these factions in the locale could be local representations of larger factions in your world, if appropriate.
  • Come up with a list of interesting places in the locale and detail them to the degree to which you'd feel comfortable running a fight in them.
  • Have a cast of 4-7 recurring bread and butter monsters so the players get a sense of familiarity with them (this also helps to deepen the characterization of the locale).
  • If you want, make a timeline of events that would happen if the PCs were never there, for reference.

• Try to find at least one interesting environmental feature of each battlefield you find yourselves on, and have the monsters (try to) leverage it. The players will respond in turn once they see the possibilities.

• Always try to have a goal for what the opponents in a fight want (that isn't "kill the PCs") and what the consequences are if the PCs fail. TPKs are boring: put them in prison, hurt their NPC friends, display the tragedies they failed to prevent.

That about does it for now. A lot of these topics could be their own write-ups, and I may very well write those.