No system

I sometimes call my "playstyle" paleo-trad, but I'm not sure that that's very clear, and even if it was, I wonder sometimes how accurate it really is. I certainly appreciate the priorities and concepts of trad style play, but I approach it from a rather old-fashioned, if decidedly not old-school, approach. But what exactly does that mean? What do I really want a game to do, and what's my ideal of a game? I'm more and more convinced that my tastes might be a bit more eclectic than I thought, and while I can tolerate plenty of design elements that aren't optimized for it, my ideal game is possibly quite different from what most other gamers might want the game to do. Let me go through the specific identified playstyles, from this earlier post, which in turn, of course, links to the original source. And talk about how aligned I am to that playstyle.

1. Classic - I never had much interest in this playstyle, which reached its peak during the phase when D&D was often run as a tournament game. D&D was essentially a complicated puzzle box with level appropriate challenges, puzzles, traps, riddles, etc. overtly in a dungeon that didn't demand any in-world context; it just existed for its own sake because the point of the game was to overcome the challenges.

Right away when exposed to the concept of D&D and roleplaying, I was caught up in the roleplaying aspect of it; the notion that you could have an experience similar to reading an immersive fantasy novel, except with an ensemble cast of characters, rapidly evolving improvisational stuff happening, and a prompt/reaction response creating the story. Like being in a fantasy novel as a kind of instant improvisational co-writer, responsible for your character(s). Classic style never even attempted to do this, and Gygax coming from a context of wargaming probably didn't even think of this at first, and when the so-called Dungeons & Beavers group started house-ruling the game to lean more into those goals, he denounced it as not the "correct" way to play. Of course, he also said frequently that the only correct way to play was what you wanted to do at your table. Gygax said a lot of things, and you have to take all of them with a grain of salt. He often contradicted himself, and often had blatantly obvious ulterior motives that call into question the accuracy and integrity of statements that he made.

Classic was probably an obvious, and maybe even the only possible first step in the evolution of roleplaying games out of wargames, given that the hobby started in wargames and not from some other hobby endeavor, but it didn't take long for people with other playstyle preferences to find it unsatisfying. I did almost immediately.

2. Trad - Trad, or traditional playstyle, was the first real systemic reaction against classic play, and by the early 80s it was pretty well established. Some other games, like Call of Cthulhu explicitly stated trad design goals, modules started changing their focus, and trade (and fan) magazines started calling the dungeon a tired, old-fashioned trope that was ready to be retired. That said, just because people knew what they wanted in the trad space doesn't mean that they really understood how to get there, and much of the early trad stuff, therefore, made some serious mistakes and created a lot of really bad games. Many of those bad habits are still, honestly, pretty commonplace, so lots of people who might not otherwise have a problem with trad think that they do because they've only ever played pretty bad trad games.

In my opinion, the primary goal of trad games is immersion of a realistic character in a realistic setting and realistic scenarios. For "fantasy" versions of realistic, of course. Trad games, in this sense, are often compared to a movie, TV show, novel or story. However, this doesn't mean that trad games should have predetermined outcomes, plots and even specific plot beats, although many trad games do indeed feature that, that's not necessarily a feature of trad, it's a concession to trad for people who don't otherwise know how to run a trad game well. Hence the prevalence of things like adventure paths and pre-written campaigns, which are often correctly characterized as pretty railroady. It's not that trad is railroady, it's that a lot of DMs can't run without having that kind of stuff already spelled out for them to regurgitate. The real goal of trad isn't to fill out a plot outline or plot structure, it's immersion. The characters need to feel real, the setting and scenarios need to feel real—again, within the confines of the fantasy setting—and really good DMs don't need to pre-write their scenarios and campaigns. Chris Perkins, who comes across as a woketard online, is regardless of that a talented GM by all accounts, and his old advice column, The DM Experience is a great example of how a trad game should be run. (In fairness, he's also got a good reputation as a nice and friendly guy in person. His social media is a wasteland of hate and insults, though, when he posts anything at all.)

One side effect of this, at least for me, is that I don't think a lot of trad players really care too much about the system. In fact, they kind of tend to dislike intense interactions with the system, as it is a meta reminder that they're playing a game, and it dampens immersion. I know that I don't. I don't get excited about systemic innovations that much unless the systemic innovation makes the roleplaying easier, more transparent, or more thematically appropriate... without developing enough complexity to take me out of the immersion and have to focus on the mechanics. Mechanics aren't inherently bad, but they need to be both easy and simple enough to be fairly transparent, while also contributing to the tone and theme of the game. It's a tall order, which is probably why I've been tinkering with them for decades before getting to where I want... and I still find innovations that work better than what I've got from time to time, so the tinkering will probably always continue.

I don't know that a lot of other trad players will necessarily agree with me on that one, though, because many of them probably do have their favorite systems, and their favorite systems might not be simple and easy. However, they probably are in the sense that they know their system well enough that it's transparent to them personally, so the effect is basically the same.

3. Nordic Larp - I don't know that this style is even real. I mean, I trust the guy who wrote this that it is, but it seems to exist in its own geographical or philosophical cul-de-sac, completely unrelated to what the rest of the RPG world is doing. I don't think it's relevant to our discussion.

4. Story Games - These, on the other hand, have become more prominent in recent years. One would think, based on prior classifications of roleplayer types, that people who like trad, like me, would probably like story games, but in point of fact, I have little interest in them. Story games are characterized by two things in particular that I disagree with; first a collaborative setting/world building approach between the players and the GM. I dislike this; there is clear sovereign territory between the roles of player and GM in the world I grew up in, and I prefer to leave it alone. Secondly, story games are characterized by narrative mechanics; meta-currencies and other things that allow players to force the game to do certain things due to narrative considerations. Not only does this also intrude into GM sovereign territory in an unwelcome way, but it's extremely meta, and forces a meta perspective on the game, which is completely contrary to the desires I have to be more immersed in the character, situation, scenario and setting (I need to find a synonym for character that starts with [s] so I can keep up that alliterative streak.)

I'm not completely against meta currencies; I liked Action Points well enough, and have an iterative version of the same idea in my game. But that's a pretty low-key metacurrency that doesn't take you out of what's happening; you just have a bonus that you can apply when you need it. And in my system, it's even more used (I would guess; if I were playing it, I'd hold on to it for this) as a "get out of death" card. Just in case, you can turn a character death into a near-death mauling and have him come back from the brink. That's technically a meta-currency, but not really what most people mean when they say that.

5. OSR - The OSR is really two things, but I'm kind on the fringe, at best, of both of them. The OSR as rulesets; well, I don't really love old D&D rules, and I haven't since they were still current D&D rules. The versions of the game that cleaned some of the crap up and made them run a little better are OK, though. But still not my first choice, or at least not without additional modification and tinkering. The OSR as a playstyle also has little interest to me with the exception that I prefer its focus on rulings over hard and fast rules, and I'm still interested in a less super-heroic pandering game that makes it nearly impossible for characters to die unless you just choose to let them do so. But it's certainly not worth it to me to get those things by also accepting some of the other parts that make the OSR what it is; focus on dungeon-crawling, gold = xp, deliberate failure to use any iteration of skills, preference for pixel-bitching and scenarios and settings that need to be pixel-bitched, etc.

I do, however, like the DIY aesthetic of the OSR, and always have, as well as its recent focus on relatively rules-lite yet functional mechanics. I don't really need it, but if I had to take some OSR or NSR ruleset and modify it slightly, or even just run it in a different context, it'd probably work well enough for me. ShadowDark or Knave 2e would probably be my first attempts to point to systems that could work.

6. Neo-Trad/OC - I have no interest in this emerging playstyle, which unlike Nordic Larp does seem to have some honest-to-goodness prominence. Powerful, entitled characters who aren't challenged and are really more into running a SIMs game that the DM crafts rather than a risky adventure game of any kind whatsoever are the hallmarks of this. I dislike the whole concept, and I dislike the rules that have emerged (like 5e) to cater to some of the needs of this style; like player-focused, DM-minimizing, overpowered overwhelming options. It's like the worst trends of munchkins and optimizers had a baby with the worst kinds of dysfunctional, entitled whiners who want the game to just give them exactly what they want as a kind of weird power-fantasy enabled by other players. I can't stand anything that is related to this playstyle at all.

- < † > -

All in all, it's fair to say that my "GM Merit Badges" page is still accurate. It doesn't use the same labels as the current discussion on play styles uses, but it still describes almost exactly what I like and how I like to do it.

And yeah, yeah... I recognize that the image above looks a little bit like playing with your grandma. I'm a Gen-X guy; I am a grandpa. It is what it is.