So it's come up now and again (mostly in response to TCO ranting about how he wants the new D&D to be modern) that there isn't a good definition of modern D&D or modern game design. Jib and TCO took a stab at it I'm not totally happy with, but I don't always like mucking up threads with tangents. I'm trying to keep value judgements out of this while listing traits that people would see as modern if they found them in a game (and, maybe more importantly, that a game without these things wouldn't be modern).

For the purpose of this list, I am assuming that 3 and family, D20 and family, 4, Savage Worlds, and Fate constitute modern games.

So far the list goes like this:

* Fewer, more easily extensible core mechanics. (often these games aren't actually as unified as they could be)
* Character customization.
* Instructional as opposed to conversational clarity in writing (think things like "reach" as a keyword).
* Effect-based mechanics (as opposed to source based mechanics**)
* Skill-like rule units (things anyone can try, but with odds of success depending partly on the character)
* Feat-like rule units (little rules exceptions you can buy, without the scaling of point buy)
* Focus on the encounter.
* Acknowledgement of balance.

Anything here that anyone would dispute? Or add?

**I've got to explain this one. Because either way of doing things can both be intuitive and break with what feels right (when badly done).

Source based mechanics would be things that make sense based on the thing they model. Source based mechanics might be things like hit points going up as you get tougher and higher level clerics being able to heal more. While individually they make sense, together they mean that individuals spend more magic to heal completely than they used to. Cure light is actually less effective as time goes on.

Effects based mechanics are intuitive based on what they do. Minions are weaker than you to the point where they go down in one hit, and the game models this by giving them one hit point. Poison kills slowly and the game models this by continuous damage. But then the game has to choose between minions being immune to poison (because poison shouldn't kill instantly) and minions being killed instantly by poison when no one else is (because that's what the mechanics call for). There are other such examples of dumbness they had to design around.

Modern D&D is one thing (there certainly have been some overarching trends in later versions, not necessarily ones I'm a fan of), but I don't know if there's much of an overall swing in "modern" game design outside of D&D - so many lines have gone in so many different directions.

Quote from: beejazz;538012So it's come up now and again (mostly in response to TCO ranting about how he wants the new D&D to be modern) that there isn't a good definition of modern D&D or modern game design. Jib and TCO took a stab at it I'm not totally happy with, but I don't always like mucking up threads with tangents. I'm trying to keep value judgements out of this while listing traits that people would see as modern if they found them in a game (and, maybe more importantly, that a game without these things wouldn't be modern).

For the purpose of this list, I am assuming that 3 and family, D20 and family, 4, Savage Worlds, and Fate constitute modern games.

So far the list goes like this:

* Fewer, more easily extensible core mechanics. (often these games aren't actually as unified as they could be)
* Character customization.
* Instructional as opposed to conversational clarity in writing (think things like "reach" as a keyword).
* Effect-based mechanics (as opposed to source based mechanics**)
* Skill-like rule units (things anyone can try, but with odds of success depending partly on the character)
* Feat-like rule units (little rules exceptions you can buy, without the scaling of point buy)
* Focus on the encounter.
* Acknowledgement of balance.

Anything here that anyone would dispute? Or add?

**I've got to explain this one. Because either way of doing things can both be intuitive and break with what feels right (when badly done).

Source based mechanics would be things that make sense based on the thing they model. Source based mechanics might be things like hit points going up as you get tougher and higher level clerics being able to heal more. While individually they make sense, together they mean that individuals spend more magic to heal completely than they used to. Cure light is actually less effective as time goes on.

Effects based mechanics are intuitive based on what they do. Minions are weaker than you to the point where they go down in one hit, and the game models this by giving them one hit point. Poison kills slowly and the game models this by continuous damage. But then the game has to choose between minions being immune to poison (because poison shouldn't kill instantly) and minions being killed instantly by poison when no one else is (because that's what the mechanics call for). There are other such examples of dumbness they had to design around.

I would agree that these are features of 4e D&D but are they features of all modern games?

The irony here is that - barring the straight retroclones - most OSR games are "modern gaming".  The renaissance of early design goals and techniques in current design is very much a millennial thing.  It's one of the big sea changes in gaming over the last decade - any attempt to define "modern gaming" without taking this into account is flawed at its root.

Story wank and story-oriented mechanics, transmedia, movie gaming... "RPGs as emulators of other media" in general.
"It" SHOULD be modeled by the game mechanics, otherwise the game does a poor job at "it."
Dissociated mechanics are fine - who cares? It's a game.
The rules are the game. The game is the rules.
Random is bad. (point buy, no random charts, math working a precise way throughout the game etc)
Unified mechanics (isolated sub-systems are bad, "not elegant").
Game balance is the result of careful game design only.
"You and your character are special snowflakes" game design.

Several of these things are linked, of course. There's more too, obviously.

You might be playing a modern game if..........



If you whine about deprotagonization, you might be playing a modern game.

If your chief concern during an adventure is to 'influence the narrative', you might be playing a modern game.

If you are fixated on all the mechanical gizmos that your elf can perform instead of the adventure, you might be playing a modern game.

If your idea of tactics involves thinking in terns of squares, you might be playing a modern game.

I think it really depends on who you ask. For most people I suspect modern really just means streamlined and unified mechanics. For others it probably has more to do with games modeling specific styles of play and/or veering into experimental territory. For others it means something like 4E (which I don't really see as modern personally). For some it simply means "what I like".  

The problem with the designation modern is it really just refers to whatever fads happen to be in at the moment. In the 90s modern meant something totally different than it means today. Right now there is so much variety it would be very hard to establish firm criteria on what being modern means.

I love all the possitive views on modern design.

It's great to see so many folks on here willing to look at new games trying to do new things with a fresh pair of eyes and analyse the new ideas as stand alone ideas as opposed to veiwing them as a corruption of "the only correct way of doing things" that you get on so many other game forums.

If its in Full Color and not type-set (like an IBM manual), its probably a modern game book. hehe.

Quote from: jibbajibba;538022I would agree that these are features of 4e D&D but are they features of all modern games?

A valid question. I'm sort of proposing "modern" gaming in the same way that there is modern art. That is to say, everything that came before doesn't suddenly stop. Likewise, BRP nailed most of modern game design down shortly after gaming's inception.

New things aren't invalidated by the success of the old to continue chugging along.

The fun part of the list though is wondering why the traits get associated with each other. There's no reason an adventure-scale focus and an encounter-scale focus can't coexist. Better advice for (say) building dungeons or running mysteries or whatever would greatly improve a number of modern games. And I'm sure setpiece encounters or aspects of them have had their place at tables running older games. The practice had to emerge from somewhere is naive, given that the people who make games are also the people who play.

Quote from: jibbajibba;538055It's great to see so many folks on here willing to look at new games trying to do new things with a fresh pair of eyes and analyse the new ideas as stand alone ideas as opposed to veiwing them as a corruption of "the only correct way of doing things" that you get on so many other game forums.

The latter is actually what I usually do. I'm willing to try new rules and new ways of doing things. However, I'm not willing to change what I expect out of rules: to help me run (or play in) the campaign I want to play in, in one or more of the styles of play I enjoy. Rules that get in the way of my doing this are going to be rules I do not like no matter if they were invented in 1975 or invented yesterday.

For example, I have never like exception based design or effect-based based design. This is why I played TSR's Marvel Super Heroes over Champions in the 1980s.

I never liked point-based or other detailed forms of character design as it is too fiddly and time-consuming (and favors players who study it over those who just play). I've tried it a number of times since I first saw in it the late 1970s and have never warmed up to it.

I can't stand rules whose effects cannot be described from the point-of-view a character in the game world. We now call this "disassociated mechanics". This annoyed me back when it was AD&D PCs who could not buy magic items but everyone else in the game world could (the only way this could work is if characters in the game world could tell PCs from non-PCs) and my dislike of it is still there today when "modern rules" do it.

I do not like tactical combat with minis and terrain/battlemats/grids in my RPGs. I have tried it a number of times since 1975 and always found it wasted too much game time and put far to much focus on combat for me.  I'm not going to magically like it any better because it is now considered modern design and/or a better way to do things.

I have NEVER found "balanced game rules" to be important mainly because unless you play in a clone of the designer's campaign in the exact same play style the rules probably are not going to be balanced any more. In other words, while it is important that there be fairness/parity/"balance" at the game table, this balance is really something that can only be set up for a specific campaign in a specific style of play (and in some cases only after accounting for the specific players at the table) -- that is, it is something only the GM of a particularly campaign can do effectively. Focusing the rules on "balance" does not do this.

I have never cared for games with lots of minutia that has to be looked up in play -- I prefer rules that give general guidelines to the GM and let him/her wing it with modifiers and such. Every time I am jerked out of the game to look up or deal with rules issues, I lose enjoyment. I want rules to fade into the background as much as possible for players, not be front-and-center and the focus of play.

I choose to play with good players and good GMs. I have never had any use for rules that try to actively prevent bad play and abusive GMs as said rules always interfere with good players and good GMs at some point -- and don't actually prevent bad play or abusive GMs.

So yes, if modern game design is all about doing a bunch of stuff I have tried in the past and determined I do not like in games, the chances are slim that I want to go suddenly love it just because it is in a new game.

Regardless, "Modern" is a tremendous misnomer.

In terms of most cultural constructs we were not only well past the modern movement before roleplaying games were invented, but well past the post-modern period of the arts to which roleplaying games are constituted.

What the OP is referring to are people mistakenly using the word "modern" because they think it means "contemporary" or "new". What is actually being referred to is a new wave of roleplaying game development, and not in any way a modernist movement or having anything to do with the modern project.

The discussion is actually about what constitutes the new direction of gaming, and if it has taken distinct enough shape at this point to categorise it as something independent enough from what has come before in the cultural construct to give it a new banner under which to operate.

3rd wave RPGs?
Post D-20 RPGs?
Post Wizards RPGs?
Hasbro Era RPGs?

You could make a case more or less for any of these, but not just the roleplaying games mentioned - but all roleplaying games, except perhaps for H. G. Well's "Little Wars", are certainly not "modern".

//Panjumanju

Any game I play is modern given I am a modern girl living in modern times.

Seriously, what does "modern" as a term even meaning in gaming? It seems way too nebulous and personal point of view to really define.

Quote from: beejazz;538012For the purpose of this list, I am assuming that 3 and family, D20 and family, 4, Savage Worlds, and Fate constitute modern games.

You forgot about ORE.

I don't think it is a very useful distinction, anyway.