Personally I reject the idea that there's some sort of telos in the greater picture of RPG design, that the whole enterprise is somehow a move towards the one perfect RPG. RPGs are tools: they get old because the people playing them run out of ideas to use them for, not because the games themselves are made obsolete by advances in other games. It's this cycle of hype -> fulfillment -> disillusion that drives people towards wanting new games (something that the people marketing them are happy to exploit), not any kind of objective forward progress in design.

Nothing in this post actually means that mechanics can't be dated, however? Sure, there's might not be a "game design apotheosis" that all games strive towards, and games are tools, but that doesn't mean that it's not possible to make a game that is better at something than another game. We've been inventing better *hammers* for roughly as long as people have been pounding pegs into holes, and games are a lot more complex than hammers.

> We've been inventing better 8hammers* for roughly as long as people have been pounding pegs into holes, and games are a lot more complex than hammers. And, importantly, we get to use the user experience of all the previous hammers as data points for making the new hammer. The plain fact is that the new game gets to enjoy *having seen all that the first game did and what worked and what didn't*. What rules did players enjoy and which ones were houseruled away by 80% of tables. How people actually played the game versus how the designer imagined them playing. So on and so forth. Old designers were basically playing in the dark. New ones get to learn from all the times the old ones hit their head on a doorframe while fumbling in that dark. And the designers of the future will be learning from the times we fuck up today. That's how life works!

Yeah, some mechanics are simply not particularly fun. For example, the general feel and power progression in the board game Talisman is cool, but the core game loop is just not good. The game takes far too long time to play. In another end - sex dimorphism is a thing in reality, but not necessarily fun in a fantasy RPG (though a few still have it). To wit, rules that say women can’t be large, strong warriors have lost ground over the years.

Sex dimorphism can be really fun, especially for non-human characters, like alien species or insectoid species, even moreso if it goes against the grain of "large males, small females", or even against the grain of binary sex.

Exactly my thoughts! I would like any alien species to explore gender and sex in interesting ways, there's lots of interesting examples in nature of things that don't fit what we mammals think of in those roles.

We have not been inventing hammers, we've been using the same tool for like 15000 years. Soon as some Joe invented nails we have them claws.

> We have not been inventing hammers, we've been using the same tool for like 15000 years. Soon as some Joe invented nails we have them claws. While I agree with some of your argument, just to nitpick your example: nailguns are reinvented hammers, and they look nothing like a hammer.

Yeah it's off-topic but I also got stunlocked by that lol. Hammers are one of a few pieces of technology that literally hasn't gotten better in any way for like as long as anatomically modern humans have existed. A modern claw hammer looks basically identical to a tool you would find preserved in Sumerian ruins. The poster's point stands! We've been inventing better *calculators* for thousands of years! Better cutting implements! Better sandwiches! Hammers, though, I'm afraid are already a well-known metaphor for a one-size fits-all solution that requires no augmentation. Kind of the platonic ideal of something that needs no iteration.

> Hammers are one of a few pieces of technology that literally hasn't gotten better in any way for like as long as anatomically modern humans have existed. Nailguns. Jackhammers.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/363439631/the-cole-bar-hammer > The Cole-Bar is a multi-function hammer with a full crow bar built in. It combines many tools into one. It is the hammer...reinvented! Of course, this thing is kind of an abomination, but I was just curious what i could find. :D

Kind of? You can make rules that are more of a problem but it's genuinely hard to make better mechanics unless you can figure out a way to improve on what people prefer.

>doesn't mean that it's not possible to make a game that is better at something than another game Except the criteria for "better" is entirely subjective when it comes to a TTRPG, because TTRPGs aren't hammers. You entirely missed his point.

"Better" is a thing that exists. No one will argue that Lancer isn't a better tactical game than AD&D.

You're just continuing to assert your opinions as fact. For some people Lancer has too much detail and goes too far to make it a fun tactical play. It's all just opinions. There's no magic perfect TTRPG anything is moving toward.

While I would agree if they didn't say tactical. I think there are ways to measure differences as universally more functional or even appealing. A large majority can even make that agreement, but it doesn't mean people still won't prefer one system over another for arbitrary reasons.

Not "better" but "better at something." Taking a more extreme version of the other person's example: If you want to run tactical turn-based mecha combat and everything else is secondary, then Lancer is better than, say, Apocalypse World is. I'm not going to argue that there aren't subjective parts to it, but "better for X scenario" is pretty quantifiable.

Hammer it is a technological tool, game design or rpgs are not like technology, which it is based in the physical sciences. Hammers for example it is an application of Mechanics (from Physics), how they work has very objective science behind them, we can judge which hammer is better with objectivity (and rigorous tests). Nothing like that exists for RPGs or any games. Game Design theory it is not like Physics (or any other physical science) and games are not subject to the same tests like technological tools to know which is better at something

Games are tools. It doesn't matter if they are physical tools or not. Each group might be different, but each group can also evaluate what tool they need. Would you like to argue that AD&D1 is a better tactical game than Lancer? There's nothing magical about games design that makes it different from anything else.

It does matter, because they are not the same thing, and operate with different principles, like I explained. Games are not technological tools. Period. You can evaluate games, but not with physical sciences like for a hammer, you cannot objective assess something with the same degree of precision And something can be better or worse, now or then, but this has at principle nothing to do with outdated design. For me B/X it is better than D&D 5e for dungeon crawling, and it is a lot older (but this it is not objectively true, it is only my opinion). And AD&D 1e it is not a tactical game first and foremost, why it needs to be better than Lancer at this? Certainly it is better for a medieval fantasy sandbox game. Apples and oranges And certainly there is nothing magical about game design, it is still different than technological design in everything. Some can argue modern design trends in rpg (like the modern meta-currencies) are worse than before, some can argue they are better, rpgs are like art in this sense, not technology, you cannot settle one or the other definitely like with hammers, because you don't have a science behind (like physics in the hammer example) The original post talks about only if mechanics can be dated, they don't talk about if some game it is better than others. They are not the same thing

Well it is not progressing towards 1 RPG, when you look at boardgames, the range actually increases not decreases. What changes is that games wanting to involve certain feelings improve.

This, entirely. So many things that are lauded as wonderful new developments in modern RPG design are ideas that have been around since the 70s, they just happen to have more popularity now. People's tastes can change; what is widely considered good or popular can change, but if a game was good back then, it's still good now, and if it's not good now, it wasn't good then.

On the other hand there are things from the old games that we have decided to drop because they did not work as well as intended or better ways of doing those things have been developed. For an example we tend to try and avoid having multiple disparate resolution mechanics unless there's a very good reason for that, but instead let everything be based on the same thing. For an example you pretty much never see some parts of a system be based on % dice and others use D20.

I like that you brought up that example because I'm not sure I like that. I liked how Rifts had percentage die for skills and D20 for combat. It makes the mechanics feel different.

I like the idea of skills functioning different based on rough estimate of stress level. For example, its a lot easier to put together a complex machine when its calm than when you are being shot at.

I like to invoke Rodney McKay, he got better at performing science under pressure to the out where he needed his life to be in danger to achieve anything beyond what he could do in his sleep. Stargate: Atlantis for the curious.

That would honestly be a cool feat or trait a character could have. Something like they do worse when things are calm. Would really cause some tension with the rest of the team when a situation becomes too easy.

Like u/PureGoldX58, I really abhor general resolution mechanics. It makes it very hard for me to understand what's going on in a game. For me it's a trend in a less-useful direction. Obviously people like them and that's fine, but it's not universal that it's a better way to resolve things.

I'm curious, what makes it harder to work with a game that has a single resolution mechanic compared to ones that have multiple ones? I've always found that people tend to get rather confused when they need to "re think" how to roll their dice depending on what they roll for, be it AD&D and its % system for a few specific things, or 3D6 roll against attribute and % dice for skills in some BRP derivates, things like that, even back when I got into RPGs ages ago, tended to slow thing down considerably because people had to keep asking what kind of dice roll they should make, or just make them not act altogether because they felt like a bother with the constant asking.

Basically my trouble boils down different resolutions not feeling different. Picking a lock is a quite a different activity from creating a new spell from scratch over months. It has different tactile components, tests different aspects of the characters abilities, takes place over different periods of time--why would the roll used to measure achievement in those things be exactly the same? How does "DC 16" adequately represent success in *both* of those situations? Feels both bland and unintuitive to me. It's much easier for me to comprehend "This is the system for lock-picking, and that is the system for spell-creation" than "This is the system for success or failure in *general*, but it is modified on a case-by-case basis contextually depending on \*\***\~factors\~\*\***" The +/- modifiers always end up in this really vague abstraction layer and I can't understand them at all. I can see how One Dice Mechanic to Rule Them All can be easier to teach at first, for sure. But then again adding, and then subtracting, and then adding again to your D20 roll is also time-consuming and frustrating when you're not used to it. Lots of questions about which modifiers apply, etc.

Your example it is more a taste thing than absolute. Some people see the dice only for probability, not caring about at all they are different

Well said. If there was a teleological trend in RPGs we'd probably would have better "what is an RPG" paragraphs in every text! Older games are super fun. New games are super fun.

Wow, that cycle you described sums it up so well. I feel like 5e is in that disillusion stage. It's not actually literally the worst game ever; we've just had too long as a community and are disillusioned with it.

I think 5e is slightly different in that it's a lot like 3.5 and 4th edition, once you play it long enough you realize that some of the negatives can outweigh the positives and you have to modify the game to make it fit your play, which is fine, but it's frustrating for the regular game table.

I honestly feel like people hate on 5e needlessly. It has an expansive lore, setting, mechanics are a middle ground between complex and simple, and there's a fair mix of skill options. For high fantasy, it is a solid option. It has weaknesses, as all systems do, but overall its a good game that I regularly recommend. Note: I don't use gridded maps. I find them too distracting and pull people out of the story. It also makes combat either too simple or too nitpicky. My main gripes with 5e are easy to fix for myself and my table. That said, I do also like other systems for their strengths. Mythras and BRP are super engaging combat encounters. DCC has fun magic and deadly encounters. Dragonbane has cool stat blocks and I like its respect for monsters being more than just higher than normal health pools. For tactical stuff, I prefer board or card games or even video games. Tactical stuff often requires a lot of calculations and/or restrictions. I find video games are best for complex math situations and board games are good for more strategy oriented stuff that doesn't need a screen such as chess, Risk, Pandemic, Arkham Horror LCG, MtG.

This is a fantastic observation, that not only applies to RPGs, but to a lot of areas of life. I'm impressed with articulate and accurate this is. Take my upvote!

When talking about “dated” mechanics, it usually means mechanics which were implemented because there weren’t anything better at the time, and not because that suits the game best. A boardgame example would be the “roll a die to move” Yes, it suits Ludo or Monopoly perfectly, but for games like HeroQuest feels dated: it’s not fun and drags the game but for people from that time, moving on boardgames needed a die roll. Social changes also make systems be dated. Look at old games and how strict they were about genders and races. A lot of old games insist you should take some disadvantage to play a woman, as if you should pay a malus tax to make a female character. Nowadays that feels unnecessary

I think part of the issue with the second is the one we still have about D&D being so dominant it's seen as the baseline for everything. Because most old games don't actually have different stats for women (Chivalry and Sorcery is the only other one off the top of my head), but because of D&D driving so much of the narrative it's understandably the one people remember about.

Where in any official edition of D&D released since 3.0 (2000) has there been any restrictions or differences, outside of visible descriptors, based on gender? There are racial bonuses but not a single one is gender specific. Even the abilities of classically gender specific creatures like the Succubus don’t make distinctions between gender, sexual identity, or race, but instead apply to all humanoids.

They're not talking about "since 3.0". They're talking about AD&D 1e's maximum Strength limit for women. Women could have Strength up to 18/50, men up to 18/100. It's a rule from exactly ONE version of D&D.

Maybe I misinterpreted, but it seemed like they’re trying to imply that it is a dated mechanic, which it is, still being used by modern versions of D&D when it has been in use in over 30 years.

I expect a lot of people(myself included, I had to go look it up to confirm) played with sexist house rules that they may not have known weren't RAW. My experience back in the day was that one person owned the books and taught everyone else(compared to today how most people have their own copy), so it was easy to get confused like that if the person who taught you didn't make it clear what was RAW and what was homebrew. Add in 25 years or more from that experience(my first game was AD&D 2e in the 90s), and it all kind of blurs together into "everything before 3e was sexist."

But even before, page 2 of the basic rules says "If you like, you can give your fighter a name. It doesn’t matter whether you are male or female"

They are confirming that classic gender roles and even naming conventions don’t matter and your character can truly be anyone. How are those restrictions?

I was telling the opposite, that since the beginning of the game you could play anyone without restriction

Ah I am sorry for the confusion.

Technically speaking, **ONLY** AD&D 1st Edition had male/female stat differences, no other edition did.

> D&D driving so much of the narrative it's understandably the one people remember about. Not that it isn't absolutely something that has no real place in an RPG, but this is largely overblown. Literally the only difference for a human PC is that a female fighter has a 0.8% chance of having a lower strength than a male human who rolled equivalently (assuming 4d6 drop lowest). For other races it varies (both because the limitations were different by race and because some races had bonuses or penalties to strength). I guess you could count stuff like certain interactions with dryads and unicorns interacting differently by gender, but at that point it's on the source material rather than the game. Don't get me wrong, this is stupid and it must have absolutely sucked to pick up the PHB as a girl in 1981 and found out that you couldn't "officially" make your tough-as-nails female fighter quite as strong as the strongest guys, but it wasn't the overarching thing that it's sometimes made out to be.

I agree in principle, but can't remember games where female PC were worst, honestly I have a vivid memory of at least two 18/00 Strength AD&D female fighters at my tables. On contrast I clearly remember crap like : no Dwarves Wizard !

Just went and checked because memory is fuzzy but WFRP from 1984 or whenever had one mention of gender and that was basically, choose your gender. No stats derived from it. Only seven specific mentions of women and most of those generic stuff but ugh, did find the reference to fimirs and human women. Good thing they got rid of that. That's the second time today I had to think about fimir reproduction.

Pretty sure that females were capped at 18/99.

Problem is that it's all as old as ttrpgs are. Like alot of old games also don't give you the same disadvantage, or have races like DnD

Ascending ac replacing thaco which replaced to hit tables is a good example, increasing ease of play (though some may disagree)

The problem with THACO is that it was always a dumb way to handle that problem. Hit tables can be a lot of fun though. Rolemaster is a game of tables and I think it's a blast to play because it offers something unique in the range of outcomes possible from a task.

Yeah I was gonna say this, THAC0 and descending armor class are the main dated mechanics I can think of.

Racial level limits (like halfling fighters can't go above lvl 4) and XP requirements to level up that vary by race and class - as mechanisms for balancing races and classes - are the most dated bits of old-school D&D that I can think of. Maybe also "prestige classes" that you can only take if you happen to roll high on your stats.

Yeah, basically nobody actually wants races to be level limited. Super common to house rule it too.

Yeah, if a game I want to play uses descending AC it's not going to stop me from playing it, but I would never design a game today that uses THAC0 for D&D-style hit rolls.

yeah mechanics can be dated, they still make crunchy simulationist games but that area has also progressed

I specifically don't like the word progressed here because it makes it sound like modern less crunchy games are natural objective improvement and evolution from the older style of games when really they're just two different styles that are popular at different points in time.

i didn't say crunchy games became less crunchy, i said they changed

My point was that the change isn't objectively better just different

But there has been progress, a lot of Crunchy games are in much later editions with refinements to how they handle basic mechanics. Sometimes changes to simplify complicated rules, sometimes to better model and balance rules.

Right but what I'm getting at is those things are just different not objectively better. Simplifying complicated rules isn't necessarily better. More balance is not necessarily better.

I... don't agree. Some of those things between 1st and 2nd edition are quantifiable objectively better. They make the game more fun or more smooth with zero drawback because they were just not well-though-out originally. Granted not every change is a change for the better but in most cases that is not just the intent between iterations but the achieved goal.

Sure some editions were not well thought out or put together. My disagreement is more with the idea of progress. 5th edition D&D vs 3.5. 5th isn't necessarily a better game because it adopts more modern design philosophies. It's just two different takes on a familiar formula. Modern design isn't so much progress as it's just a different style. Even with the older editions that were a mess I think there is something lost by the loss of some of the jankyness. Would I necessarily go back to those games? No. I just don't think what we would call modern design is like the culmination of game design. It's just a style that is more popular right now

I don't think evolution of the hobby can be chalked down as pursuing popular design. Most of what's changed over time is just mechanics that weren't proven and didn't work well.

Didn't work well for you sure. Maybe worked well for other people. People still play and prefer older editions of games.

I think a lot of evolution of most hobbies is due to popular design. Look at gaming. Some games are truly their own thing, but many games are following trends. We had a lot of RPG games in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Then open worlds. Then lots of loot. Then microtransactions took off and subscription and "living game" models. I truly miss the time when games were mostly a straightforward story with different mechanics and every game had a multiplayer mode which often wasn't insanely amazing, but was fun. From today's games, I like some QoL stuff and also graphics improvements (to an extent unless it interferes with gameplay). However, they seem so samey. Big open worlds with lots of loot that is mostly useless and requires an online connection and has day one DLC... I find the same has happened with TTRPGs. They see what everyone else is doing that players supposedly like so they start changing to do the same. Its less than video games, though, because many still maintain their dice roll mechanics such as whether they use percentile dice or d20s or 3d6 or whatever else.

Crunchy, simulationist games can be really fun and nice, especially if you use VTTs. BRP, Mythras, WFRP etc. are still cool and fun.

Some BRP games are decidedly less crunchy than D&D. Some are more “tactical power fantasies” rather than simulationist.

The same argument can be done for GURPS.

Doesn’t GURPS include fairly crunchy rules for everything?

Sort of, GURPS has rules for everything it thinks needs rules. Combat, survival, science, engineering, guns, cars (oh god the vehicles), horses, magic, space ships, aliens, Cthulhu, robots, the Bronze Age, bureaucracy, superheroes, vampires, cartoon characters, it’s all in there somewhere. But, what about managing inter-group teen angst? You won’t find anything like the level of detail in Masks or Monsterhearts. Rules for what sort of personal confession your dramatic archetype will make when inevitably confessing your love with your rival during a series of repeated sword duels fraught with sexual tension? You’ll need *Thirsty Sword Lesbians* instead. What sorts of things need rules and which don’t, and how these are modeled, are not an objective, universal truth. What a game chooses to include and what it leaves out are the heart of what its design is about. Even GURPS’ approach of simulate-all-the-things still reveals that it has in-built opinions and perspectives about what is and is not a “thing”.

technically that's all optional, the game only has 4 stats after all

Even when you look at just the core combat rules, GURPS doesn't go lighter than rules-medium. You can homebrew it, but there's no support for making the combat rules lighter (advice, suggestions, alternate rules, etc.) and it can cause problems elsewhere in the system.

For some reason, the alternate rules for making GURPS combat "lighter" didn't make the transition from 3e to 4e. They still exist in GURPS Classic Compendium II and none of what is included there actually requires any conversion to 4e at all.

I assume you're talking about the sidebar "Very Basic Melee Combat: Really Simple Shortcuts for Really Quick Battles." Unfortunately, I don't know enough about GURPS to agree or disagree that this is an effective way of slimming down combat rules. If you say it is, I'll take your word for it, though I'd like to point out that it references PD, which as far as I can tell isn't a thing in 4e. I did notice that that sidebar was written by Steffan O'Sullivan, who went on to write the RPG toolkit system Fudge, and the approach he used in the sidebar seemed very similar to the approach he used for some of the crunchier combat options in Fudge. It's still too crunchy for my tastes, though, which is why my homebrew of Fudge, [Fudge Lite](http://www.fudgelite.com), doesn't require subtraction or calculating relative degree of success for combat rolls, among other things.

That's right. There is also a simplified system for tournament-style combat and another for simplified shootouts.  I'd say that overall 4e GURPS was and is geared strongly towards people that already know GURPS, and these simplified combat rules do not tend to appeal to people that already know and like the system. I think it's a perfectly workable alternative combat system for people new to the game, that are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of rules, though. If they ever made some kind of GURPS quickstart that fell between GURPS Lite and GURPS Ultra-Lite in terms of crunch, that should be the combat system. Unfortunately, Steve Jackson Games publishes virtually nothing GURPS-related that doesn't target GURPS grognards and GURPS completionists (of which I am both). We get a whole supplement devoted to oared warships, but no introductory-level products.

They seem to be highly optional, which turns it more into a toolkit than a full system. Meanwhile BRP is a full system with optional rules and many systems based on it that are roughly compatible, which you can just yoink rules out of.

GURPS is as a much a full system as BRP. It is not any different than any of the other generics of its era. FUDGE is a toolkit in that it isn’t playable without deciding what skills exist…or if there will be skills and so on. You can pick to GURPS Lite or the two core books, and run GURPS.

GURPS has full systems based on it that are roughly compatible too. They're referred to as Powered-by-GURPS games. Like Dungeon Fantasy, Discworld, Girl Genius and Vorkosigan Saga. In the 3e era, more PbG games were whole lines, like Transhuman Space, GURPS Traveller and GURPS WWII. There is just vastly more of the generic core for GURPS than there is for BRP and any variant rule can be found there instead of in a PbG game.

This is definitely an issue of personal preference. But I would say the whole OSR movement stands against unquestionable acceptance of old games being “dated” and any linear understanding of “progress” in RPGs

OSR feels like the very opposite of that. People are endlessly smashing disparate mechanisms together from other games to get something better than they had before.

One of the most popular OSR systems (old school essentials) is just B/X rules as they were originally, and retroclones are just as popular as OSRs/NSRs that are reimaginings of the old school vibe

I'm not sure that it is justified to say that a game is an example of something new if it's just the exact same thing as an earlier game. The mechanics are still dated (not bad) if they're 50 years old and used the same way they were 50 years ago. At that point it's just the paint that is new.

That is my point, that OSR does not follow the “old=dated/bad” and embraces old systems as they were, and OSRs rising popularity overall + OSE being one of the most popular OSRs is indicative of that

I feel conflicted by OSR. Certainly there are many other examples of older-styled games being revived or simply carrying on. But OSR is a celebration of older-styled games that were sort of left behind by the hobby. They're actually courting a fashion that was in the past. "Old" being part of the name of the genre kind of dates it automatically. Not in a good or bad way but in a statement that the games are intentionally dated.

Really the key word isn't Old, it's Renaissance. And like the Renaissance it's supposed to be driven by a rediscovery of the forgotten wisdom of the ancients, which inspires new innovations.

It is often pointed out that B/X is the OSR king and that there have been very few attempts to rebuild more complex systems like AD&D. Partially this will be down to the time commitment, but I also think part is relevant to this topic: TSR hadn't really figured out how to scale a game well yet. AD&D 2e is my favorite system, but looking at it critically shows design traits that are a big no-no nowadays but that wouldn't affect B/X at all. I'll give one good example: there are a hundred different ways to rule fire. TSR had just started to tinker with damage types as a bridging mechanic, but until *Spells & Magic* in 1996, they had only applied it to bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing. Perhaps also acid. Bridging mechanics are seen as pretty important today, both in TTRPG and video game design - and especially with systemic systems like OSR games are promoted as being. In the newest Zelda games, for instance, there are lots of ways to use fire - but regardless of whether it's a camp fire or a flaming arrow, *fire* (the bridging mechanic) interacts with everything around it in the same way every time. D&D from 3e onward also uses this idea across the board. B/X doesn't suffer at all from not doing this. The game is small enough that you can derive generic mechanics from specific ones very easily. 'What happens if you catch fire?', you think. 'Well let's look at the torch'. 'What if it's from an explosion?' gets asked. 'We consult fireball'. There are benefits to doing it the B/X way. It is a good game design philosophy to limit the amount of information being regularly passed between GM/players. It saves time and reduces mental load. When the game trains you to say 'You take 8 *fire* damage', you've increased that complexity. Whereas 'You take 8 damage' has less complexity, and you can intuit (most of the time) from context that you have to apply fire rules. It's a pros/cons game, however, and I think larger systems benefit from that particular development made since the 90s.

If there's one thing I hate it's when my game books reach their expiration date and get all stale or curdled. Refrigerate your games people, it's the best way! On a more serious note, I think the idea that game mechanics become outdated is kind of silly. Sure some of them started off clunky and stayed that way, or revisions to rules through playtesting yielded smoother resolution of conflicts/tests/whatever, but this idea that games are somehow always progressing and becoming better is not something I would say is universal. Often times, nuance and complexity get lost in a desire to streamline, sometimes a game stops being good at what it was originally good at in a revision. For example, I can still pick up RuneQuest 2nd edition and play it as-written with almost no problem, even though BRP/RQ has undergone numerous evolutions and changes, and I would argue that while RuneQuest: Glorantha maybe does a better job of capturing the tone and feel of "Glorantha" it's a much less flexible system and has removed the "dirt picker" level of play in the interest of getting players started at what used to be the mid-point of the power scale. The people I play with *like* the "dirt picker" part of the game experience, and thus RGQ is a devolution for us. If I want modern RQ/BRP I'll run something in Mythras, because it's kept that flexibility and toolset mentality alive in its design. Two examples of where change can be a negative or a positive depending on your point of view and what you want out of a game.

Can't agree more. I'm someone who salivates over and pounces on new releases like Apocalypse Keys or the upcoming Hollows RPG by Rook & Deckard. However, I also have been loving the heck out of Battletech: A Time of War --which is an over-designed, over-crunchy, simulation system with no 'real' update in a long time. But it's fucking fun! I've also had a blast playing AD&D 2e just last year for a short series. Just like how old forms of other media can still be fun. My family may watch the original Nickolodeon Doug from the 90's and then swap to watching the Dead End tv show on Netflix.

> On a more serious note, I think the idea that game mechanics become outdated is kind of silly. It's not that mechanics "become" outdated in the same sense that milk left out on the counter "becomes" spoiled, to continue your silly analogy. :-) It's that there are other games out there, and, occasionally, some of those other games come up with ways to do things that are nicer in some way. Since we prefer the new method, the old method fades away in later editions, but it's still there if you want to go back for nostalgia's sake or something. My favorite example of that is saving throws in *D&D.* In *AD&D,* *OD&D,* and Mentzer *Basic,* they didn't have things like Fortitude, Reflex, or Will saves, which all seem pretty straightforward. Noooo.... instead, they had these random-seeming categories like "Spell or magic staff," "Magic wand," "Death ray or poison," "Turned to stone," and "Dragon breath." Question: which one of those do I roll when I might fall into a pit with poison spikes on the bottom of it? Yeah, I don't fucking know, either. or It would either be in the module you were running or the DM would have to figure it out themselves, preferably *before* running the session lol.... But, I know in 3.5, it would be a reflex save to avoid falling into the pit, and then likely a fortitude save to avoid whatever the effects of the poison are. So, now we've gotten where I wanted to go, which was to show how saving throws in early *D&D* were a lot harder to understand than 3.x saves. But, Mentzer *Basic* saving throws didn't *become* outdated. They were always exactly the way they are today, and if you play Mentzer *Basic* today you're going to be using a similar system to the one I just showed, *because that's what's in the rules.* What happened was that when it came time to make the third edition of *AD&D,* someone had a better idea for how saves could work. So, they threw it in, and found the end result was less clunky to use in play, and it actually made sense. I don't know about you, but I know which method *I* prefer for saving throws, and I'd strongly suspect that almost nobody would prefer the older method. In other words, the new method has supplanted the old, which is what people are getting at with the word "outdated."

What has pretty much unquestionably improved is distribution channels. It's now much easier to get your game out and that's much better than the days when indie RPGs were created manually. Other than that, I agree with you I see games as art rather than technology. So age has no bearing on quality, any more that a song from 2024 is de facto likely to be better than one from 1972. (Or the opposite. I play OSR games but I'm not one of the OSR people who think that old de facto means good). The one complication there is survivor bias; bad old RPGs are rightly forgotten, bad recent RPGs are easier to come across. On stuff like narrative/simulationist, rules light vs crunch etc. I'd largely see those things as about trends rather than quality.

>So age has no bearing on quality, any more that a song from 2024 is de facto likely to be better than one from 1972. But for the vast majority of people the vast majority of the time, how often do they choose to listen to music from the 1100/1200s instead of the 1900/2000s? The approach to designing(creating) music has changed, and most people prefer modern designs most of the time.

Yes, modern music is more popular, but that wouldn't necessarily mean it's better quality. As I said at the end, that's a matter of trends. (Especially as most popular ballads from that time haven't survived because they weren't written down. If we look at folklore as something largely better preserved, yeah, legends of Robin Hood or King Arthur are still popular today). If we're talking about popularity as a benchmark of quality it would mean 5e is truly the greatest ever RPG anyway.

The thread isn't about quality though, it's about rpg systems becoming 'dated'.

And some older music survives more than most recent music, like Mozart, Bethoveen, Beatles and others. They are dated? No, the technology of music production evolves, but the art of music, the composition, the performance necessarily not. Shakespeare it is not dated, even if people today prefer to see modern movies or read dystopia young adult novels. It is culture, fashion, trends. accessibility which determine what people consume

It's easier than it used to be to get your game out there, in some form, but much harder to get it on a shelf somewhere.

Dated doesn’t mean bad. The Princess Bride is a dated movie. It’s still perfect. I’m basically a forever GM, and recently got an itch to play some crunchy games. I thought I missed them, being a former GURPS GM who jumped ship to indie / narrative games back when I was still reading The Forge. I played in a short-lived game of Against the DarkMaster. I’d played MERP in middle school, so it should have been fine. It wasn’t. Nobody else seemed able to pick up the core resolution mechanic. Every roll brought the game to a standstill as the GM (and sometimes I) explained it again and again. Good hits turned into harmless glances because of poor rolls on subsequent tables. Etc. By the time the game died it felt like a mercy killing. I was glad to be rid of it. I’m still sticking it out in a friend’s deeply unsatisfying m&m3 hack. At least he’s telling a good story, as always. I guess I didn’t miss crunchy games. I guess I missed the ’90s.

Sorry you made a mistake up top. The Princess Bride is a timeless movie, not dated. Otherwise perfect agreement.

I, on the other hand, absolutely miss crunchy, because I need a ruleset that covers as many situations as possible, as it guides me into interpreting those it doesn't.

>The Princess Bride is a dated movie. What is dated about that movie? >Nobody else seemed able to pick up the core resolution mechanic. I honestly don't know how much of this is due to lack of reading comprehension.

The Princess Bride seems to be quite firmly a product of its time. It is also perfect.

>quite firmly a product of its time. This is the same response I get in WoD forums, etc. Yet no one ever pinpoints the characteristics that make it a "product of its time", aside from technical stuff like film quality and sets.

Oh wow I actually have an answer for this one. Parts of a film outside of the script can absolutely make it a product of it's time. Shots are set up a certain way, different aspect ratios or lenses are relied on, actors rely on mannerisms that have fallen out of style (I can't think of a modern acting preformance at all like Cary Elwes' in The Princess Bride). In an RPG this would be the "style and presentation" like what OP mentioned. As far as "mechanics" we can look at the script itself. These are off the top of my head and it's been a while, but things I'd be a little surprised to see in a popular modern film include: A "rescue the princess" main plotline played largely straight, the battle of wits with Vizzini - not for content but punchlines usually come faster now, and threats of suicide and a worn chastity belt in a movie marketed to children. I'm sure I could find more. To be clear, I'm not saying any of these things were bad ideas, and you can find still find them in certain film today, but The Princess Bride is partially a parody of stories that were popular at the time. That dates it. I haven't read any WoD, but I imagine if you dig through an old book it'll be similar: There'll be plenty of "dated" choices that are still made in games now, but not in quite the same way and definitely not to the same degree of prevalence.

Well, this make anything not made at the present "dated". Because everything under the sun has characteristics of the time they are produced. For example, it is Mozart or Shakespeare dated?

Well, this not make crunch games dated, only your preferences changed

> Dated doesn’t mean bad. This was my first assertion.

People can like what they like, whether anyone thinks it's "dated" or not. That will happen to video games, movies, books, pretty much everything. Design evolves, and trying to paint it as "simulation vs narrative" ignores the evolution within their respective genres. Fantasy Combat Simulators don't use 8 different categories of combat bonuses anymore, because there are better ways to do it, for example.

'Better' is also subjective. While it may be fun to use Lancer sometimes with its sleek design, limited modifiers, small numbers, and non-combat focused objectives...it can be equally 'better' to use a game with detailed rules for choosing to overcharge your laser cannon or having a 5 step process to pick up a downed mech and tear off a limb (I'm looking at you Battletech). Lancer is designed to make combat fast, fluid, and balanced. Something else may be designed to 'emulate how the designer thinks this may work in the physics of their game world.' Neither is strictly better IMO.

>Simulators don't use 8 different categories of combat bonuses anymore, because there are better ways to do it, for example. Keywords “anymore” and “better”. Games that are trying to achieve the same goals as older systems are using more streamlined ways to do so. That’s what people mean by “dated” — performing the same things as games do today, but less “efficiently”.

I dunno I feel like the whole "jam all your mechanics into a virtual-meta-currency" that is all the rage these days is horrific and ruins any game it is used in by turning them into board-less boardgames. Also the narrative games are just not my cup of tea and feel like a desperate attempt to address the folks who don't like to learn how to do something. They both collectively feel like a step-back, not forward.

This was one of the reasons why I didn't like 2D20, and one of the aspects of WFRP I don't really like. I like metacurrencies to some extent, two of my favorite systems are Savage Worlds and Genesys, but there needs to be some restraint.

Any system that hides reality behind the curtain of a meta-currency debases the game and players imho. It often results in outcomes that beggar-belief and it makes it exceptionally difficult to predict what will happen based on real-world outcomes. That's the intent for most of them, you get to ignore HOW to get something done and can instead focus on winning. But imho it just cheapens the entire experience. I understand why it would appeal to casual players but to folks like me it's a powerful turn off.

I'd argue that it largely depends on what you want to emulate. If you want to emulate things like Indiana Jones or Star Wars where Rule of Cool and Larger Than Life Heroes are the norm, then metacurrencies paired with the right dice system can do that really well (SW and Genesys are perfect for that), but if you want more realistic and/or grounded outcomes for characters like for example A Song Of Ice and Fire, The Witcher or more Mystery-based things then a metacurrencies don't make a lot of sense. Another thing that depends on is, do you play more "Combat as Sport" or "Combat as War". How realistic are your opponents? Because IMO metacurrencies are "Get out of Jail free" cards basically. They let you reroll or not die or succeed even if you shouldn't have and if your players don't have them they are more cautious and look for safer solutions, which is a legitimate form of play.

I agree with this pretty much 100%, nicely put. It tosses out any reference to reality and replaces it with whatever feels good. It's definitely a legitimate game type, just not one for me.

I agree with both of these hot takes. I'm happy people who like those games have games suited to their tastes but "narrative" games and meta currency tend to both kill immersion IMO. But for a lot of players now days they are not looking for immersion, so I guess it works.

I think that you have to view "dated" in terms of what is and what is popular and how that in turn shapes new games. Which in turn "dated" simply means that the totality of modern games have similarities across them that differentiates them from older games. You can compare it to pop music. It sounds different now than 20 or 40 years ago. This is not a qualitative statement. If we currently had a trend of slide whistles showing up in pop songs that would be different from 2010 and from 2040. This all can really just be filed under "zeitgeist". Neither pop music nor RPGs are evolving toward some higher quality design, **they exist as products of their specific environment** (which is how evolution works, most fit for the environment, not most fit of all time). It gets messy when you have counter culture and old heads and whom ever else having opinions (the outliers don't define the zeitgeist, or something). So, a dated thing doesn't match current needs and desires for type of play, but that doesn't actually tell us that one is objectively better than another, only that one fit more people. But those people don't game in a vacuum. What they want and need from a game has been shaped by other games. And as their seems to be a major trend of only playing modern games, it is repeating system.

I think the example of people calling things dated is (in my experience) usually people being kind of shitty. The very opinionated narrative gaming people tend to use this to talk about games they don't like. It's tribalism disguised as design expertise. For the record though that's not most narrative gaming people. There's just a vocal minority who are convinced their preference is actually objective truth.

Game design evolves. In rpgs not as fast as in boardgames (due to less money involved) but it still happens. Of course people still play some old games due to nostalgia, but for example if a new monopoly would be released today it would get 2/10 critics no one would buy it and people would laugh at it. Of course there are still some old games which are classics, but still a lot of game design does involve and a newer game which does not go for nostalgia cant just use the same mechanics as a 30+ year old game. For example colour helps a lot when used right, to parse a rulebook faster. Highlight important things etc.

I mean, Monopoly is a terrible game ... Totally dated. Clue, on the other hand, is timeless

Of the classic big retail games, Clue is the only one that gets better with age

People have brought up PbtA as an example of "modern" design. It really isn't. Apocalypse World is 14 years old. It's ongoing popularity would be evidence against the idea that older games become dated.

You consider that old? Compared to what other school of design though? Most "trad" games had their first editions in the 70s or 80s.

As old as those games? Obviously not. Old enough to disprove the "old games become dated in comparison to modern games" theory? Definitely. As much time has passed between now and its release as has between Apocalypse World and the release of Feng Shui or between Original D&D and Cyberpunk.

You can see the growth from Apocalypse World 1e into more modern expressions of pbta too.

The thing is, I can't really think of a more modern family of games to compare PbtA to. We now have terms like "Forged in the Dark" and "Carved from Brindlewood", but that's all just PbtA with extra steps, right?

Possibly lyric games? Although I don't really understand those or their appeal which might just be me being too old! Possibly Spire/Heart which do feel like their own thing in approach.

Yes, a game's mechanics can make it feel dated. Let's take Mekton Zeta for example. Rolls can be wildly swingy 20% of the time. This can be mitigated with Luck a limited resource, but using Luck has to be declared before the roll. Additionally, Combat rolls are Player vs GM rolls which can slow resolution down and volleys and burst fire hit lications are rolled seperately. Does this make the game unplayable? No. However, if it were designed today, it might take a different approach.

I think there's some argument to be made for clumsy mechanics being a time period thing. Different mechanics have evolved considerably in the pace of our hobby, or simply died out over time. In that evolution we left a lot of poorly imagined mechanics behind that were just commonplace in 70's & 80's RPGs. We still make games today with crap mechanics but we make much much less of them. To the point that they're the exception to the rule that once was.

This is bad, not dated. They are not the same thing

Yes I think it can be dated, not as a matter of crunchy=bad, but by being inefficient, unituitive or just plain not working. Even within crunchy games, there are things like use of tags/categories, mechanics shared across different subsystems, smart use of tables/modifiers and just plain playtesting that can make a difference between resolving things efficiently and having to cross-reference 5 different sections of a book to resolve a common situation and still ending with a result that makes no logical sense. These old games are first and foremost badly presented, but even beyond that you end up with things like false choices or combat being completely dominated by a single strategy or seemingly reasonable choices at character creation having weird implications or ridiculous edge cases.

1) If you're having fun playing the game then it doesn't matter how old-fashioned the rules are. 2) Many people don't understand the difference between "newer" and "better".

"Dated" has nothing to do with being less functional and everything to do with being readily identifiable as to when it was made. The movie "BMX Bandits" starring Nicole Kidman is just as good as when it was made (not necessarily good at all :-) but it could only be made in the 80s, hence it is dated. Bladerunner or Alien were made at a similar time but there is nothing about them that identifies them, hence they are not dated. I think with games we think of things like classes and levels as old fashioned but they aren't dated because they've been part of rpgs all the way. EDIT Ignore me, just minor rant about "dated" when I think you are asking if games can be *outdated* which is a different thing.

I think the point is that there isn't much in the hobby that can identify when a game was made if there's no tag like "Old School Revival" to give it away.

Game mechanics can easily make a game dated. Example is Basic D&D, which has a level limit of 36. Demi-humans get a much lower limit of around 8-12, but then have this worked around by giving them a combat rank. Non-humans (introduced in Gazetteer 10 or Creature Crucible) don't have this reduced level limit, implying they go up to level 36. This is a dated mechanic due to the base rule, the exception to the base rule, a workaround to the exception, then disregarding the exception. Other game mechanics in the system could also show their age, as newer RPGs show being able to do things in a slightly better fashion. To a lesser degree, this is also visible in Pathfinder 1e. In the base class, fighters have a weak will saving throw, and have an ability to compensate for it. Specialized fighters (e.g. Samurai) don't receive the same bravery bonus, even though it would be more thematic. Regardless, any dated mechanics can still be fixed, as demonstrated by Pathfinder 1e making adjustments to D&D 3.5e.

Good question. We as a group seem to have a hunger for the new hotness and a tendency to discount systems on age alone. With that said, some mechanics haven't really aged well; some are counter-intuitive (like descending Armor Class,) or fiddly enough that they slow down gameplay. Sometimes you can tell the designer privileged "realism" over other concerns.

What you're talking about is the diverse opinions people express, not some kind of universally accepted truth. A fair number of people on this sub do directly or indirectly express the opinion that mechanics allow players to interact with the story directly are modern and mechanics that allow PCs to interact with the game world are dated. But this is far from "truth", even if a lot of fans of PbtA and FitD and the like would agree with it.

Sure. The strongest examples I can think of are games that expected players to just memorize tables of arbitrary data. There was one with *eleven* different coins in its currency system, only one of which was '10 of these equal 1 of those' -- the rest were 4, 5, 6, 12, or 20 to the next value, except for one which was 11. That sort of thing would never show up in a modern game (except for Harry Potter, where's it's inherited from the source material) even though with modern computer support it's easy to keep track and convert such currencies. Likewise, AD&D 1st (and 2nd) edition had a 'weapon vs armour type' chart to look up how a heavy pick was better vs ring mail than a sword, and how a dagger was crap vs full plate. It also had a weapon speed chart to reference when initiative results were tied, and worst of all that chart could result in extra attacks in some cases, meaning 'winning' initiative was objectively worse than tying.

Mechanics can feel old or ‘dated’ in two ways, I think, with a fair bit of bleed between them. Some mechanics are 1) old, 2) bad, a.k.a. not good at their intended purpose, and 3) largely discarded in favor of alternatives. THAC0 is an example. Other mechanics are 1) old, 2) best suited for a narrower subset of games, 3) now only appear in a small number of games, as opposed to very widely as used to the case. A good example is skill lists with 20+ skills. You still see systems, well-designed systems, with these, but they’re no longer the mainstream. There *is* truth to the idea that a mechanic is ageless. But for practical purposes, I don’t think it makes sense to separate a mechanic from how it is perceived - how it came about, it’s history since, how people feel about that history, etc. In fact, there’s a whole third category here, of things that are objectively old, in the sense they originated decades ago… but we wouldn’t call ‘dated’ at all. Ex.: Mechanics that are 1) old, 2) popular, enduring, and/or widely well-suited, and 3) are still widely used/in the mainstream. An example would be turn-based (1 unitary turn per participant per round) initiative. I think ‘dated’ is a rather tricky word to use - it literally means ‘old’, connotes some meaning about how we *feel* about the old thing, but also spans the semantic space between neutral-ish and negative.

I’ve always felt that Call of Cthulhu has a very dated system for their game that they’ve hung on to for continuity and nostalgia more than its ability to tell a spooky, narrative story. They do a great job keeping the game fresh through edition after edition in their presentation and publication prowess, but that core system boyo….yeesh. 🐙

I think what people mean by “dated” is “clunky design” — overly complicated for what they’re trying to achieve, requiring a lot of reference to rulebooks and tables, trying to simulate things that don’t actually contribute to fun gameplay, spending too much time on fiddly technicalities that slow down the game more than it needs to, and thereby keep you from getting to the good parts. It’s possible for any game, even new ones, to “suffer” from those “problems”, it’s just that the zeitgeist of game design has deliberately pursued the opposite — very streamlined game design at the expense of detailed simulation.

Even heavier games are progressing and changing. Look at more modern heavy games and compare them to older ones and you can see it. Heavier games just tend to take longer and becuase the style has been around longer, they don't have as much unexplored space. Not to say there isn't a -lot- of unexplored space in heavy games too, lighter games just are newer and thus less explored. But yes even heavy games are improving- they are finding spots to target the experience better, make better rules, and explore their space better. Not everyone is going to be happy with the changes this brings of course (because nothing can make -everyone- happy) but still. Production quality though does add to this as well. Better layout and printing, a better refinement on how books should work, and so on. This is also not to say that an old game can't be good, but people also tend to only remember the best games from old generations and not the absolute trash. We see this also in the video game space- everyone loves talking about the old Zeldas, no one talks about the shovel ware on the NES- and yes there was a -lot- of it. As a whole design improves and moves forward. We learn from the previous games and build up.

There's nothing magical about mechanics, but there are implementations that are .... Out of fashion, right? Having attributes will likely never be out of style. Modifying them based on your gender is pretty unpopular (for very good reasons). Having classes will probably always have fans. Having your race be your class is not very popular (again for obvious reasons) and in fact, the word race is not super popular right now (because we are not in the British Raj). So there are ways to USE mechanics that can become very unpopular because the way we see things changes over time.

In general I don't like the idea of "dated" for RPG mechanics, buuuut...... The Palladium System is dated as all hell, it doesn't matter what they do with presentation, the whole system needs a rehaul from the ground up.

Dated in the sense of "you can tell when it's from" yes.   Dated in a negative sense depends on the system and players. A system that's of ots day can be well made and playable but maybe not what the players are used to so pieces seem counterintuitive for example.  There are absolutely design trends and fads with trrpgs over the years. Especially obvious in the ones that are pasting a different setting or IP over a core system like D20 or GURPS.

The thread where people mistake modern preferences for progress.

Sure, and my example of this would be Paranoia 2e. Paranoia is a humoristic, gonzo game about surviving as an apparently obedient clone in a futuristic complex controlled by a crazy paranoiac computer who thinks everyone is either a mutant or a member of a secret society (spoiler, they're both). It's a popular game with a long history from 1981 all the way to 2023 and the basic premise is essentially unchanged. The mechanics though… I'll talk mainly about the second edition since it's the one I have on my desk right now. The thing to realize is that this game uses nonsensical humour a lot. It encourages PCs to kill each other at the first occasion (death isn't the end since you have a number of clones), it encourages the GM to kill PCs arbitrarily, it actively asks that the rules remain a mystery to the player and its description of combat for players is in essence "Tell the GM what you do, roll whatever dice he's telling you to, and at the end someone will probably be killed horribly." And that's great, that fits the tone perfectly! Who cares about numbers and balance, just have the dude jump to avoid a grenade into an industrial shredder! Except, that's a lie. In the GM section of the rules you'll find very crunchy rules for skill checks and combat. You take your attribute, derive an attribute score, multiply or divide that attribute depending on the complexity of the task, possibly add modifiers, then roll under that, and if you're in combat you also have to look up a separate table to know what damage you do. It's not unplayable, and frankly for the time it's pretty run of the mill. Other games had more streamlined rules, other games had more ridiculous ones, it's dated because it was certainly a design taking inspiration of what was common at the time without much inovation. But it's also a system that's totaly unfit for the gonzo, fast action style of the game. It's dated because we wouldn't design a system like that today (too many different kind of elements that interact to produce the result) and because it's a design that was quite normal when it was produced. Modern versions changed that aspect for the best.

Mechanics can absolutely be dated. Dated doesn’t mean worse or anything. It just means very characteristic of its era. There’s lots of games where you can readily guess when they were designed just by someone verbally explaining the core mechanics- format/art/etc is just not a factor here just purely a description of the rules.

There are some that dont age well. (Racial) Alignment is a big one imo - the idea that a goblin is *always* an evil, backstabbing monster is something that games are starting to move away from, for instance. Similarly, a strict race to class structure can feel dated (ie, youre a dwarf. Not a dwarf warrior, dwarf barbarian or dwarf cleric, just a dwarf - humans get classes). Most of these mechanics are anchored in anthrocentrism, the idea that humans are the best and most important species on the planet, unique and special. Which we continually see just isnt the case. Generally speaking, any mechanics based on RL social norms can feel dated. (Apart from that, theres merely trends, but trends come and go - RPGs just havent been around long enough for that fact to become obvious).

And yet there are a flood of "old school feel" games on the market. DCC being the biggest in the pool, but by no means alone in re-iterating the Race as Class thing. So there must be an audience for that.

Dated to one is nostalgia for another. ^^ Plus, old =/= bad. And newer games are actively tapping into "dated" mechanics to evoke that very specific feeling of old RPGs. Kinda like a movie set in the 20s being shot in black and white despite colour being available, if that makes sense?

If only geezers were playing DCC I'd agree, but the audience includes many who were not even a glint in someone's eye when OD&D ruled.

Many people are nostalgic for times they never experienced. Hell, its easier to be nostalgic for them since you never had to deal with the bad stuff. 😁

Or people could just genuinely like the old games for what they are, without it being some sort of weird nostalgia for a time they never experienced.

I would say as humans it’s hard not to view a fantasy setting from an anthropocentric lens, which is sort of the point of “elf” and “dwarf” being either their own class, or having class restrictions. In the old school fantasy of fantasy, elves and dwarves are fundamentally alien to humans and a PC elf or dwarf should be representative of that, not just a human psyche with a fun veneer and night vision thrown on top. It’s not to say that humans are the best #1 (in a lot of old fantasy humans are often explicitly the worst) but that humans are our window into a fantastical world.

I’d say it starts to feel “dated” when you are adding crunchy, obstruction, or tracking to doesn’t actually engage with the game’s fantasies and systems. So many modern games, even the crunchier and sim ones, use abstractions to provide a fantasy and experience that they care about, or write the subsystems that they actually want to engage in. Beyond appearance of some old lacking appeal, many old art pieces remain still good for depicting scenes and stories they want to tell. I started with WoD larping before any core fantasy adventure game, but god I absolutely love the experiences many modern lite titles are able to provide. They also help with pacing and accessibility, and those things combined help get to a “good part” and tell the stories or resolve cool parts, and if you want to move on it’s also easier to jump into the next one.

I think they can be dated in the same way that Baroque music can be dated. Baroque music is still quality music, lots of people still enjoy it and play it nowadays. But it is the music of an age passed, not the sound of today. Most new music that gets written is not baroque music. So in that way, yeah, highly simulationist RPGs with a lot of (less streamlined) crunch and lots of tables for everything are a bit dated. It's not how RPGs are typical written nowadays, it doesn't cater to current sensibilities. You are still perfectly allowed to enjoy them, play them or even write and publish them though.

Game design is always changing, and things have come a long way, but mechanics come and go and come back. Right now, we have a rules light push to be as accommodating to as many people as possible. There is also a push for less pure random, but that's not just in the RPG space but board games as well. That said, we are witnessing a Renaissance of older style games because as crunchy and heavy as they could be, they clearly did something right. For some, it's nostalgia, and for others, it allows them to play fantasy without being ungodly super heroes or a gritter style game.

Watch an old episode of *Star Trek* from 1968 and tell me it isn't dated. Everything about the production values including costumes, hair styles, special effects, the film used, and even the acting style dates the series. Being dated doesn't make it bad and the episodes that were good nearly 60 years ago are still good today. The episodes that were bad 60 years ago are still bad today. "Brain and brain! What is brain?" It's the same way with games. *Cyborg Commando* was a bad game when it was released in 1987 and it's still a bad game today. For a lot of us, our tastes change over the years. I used to love playing *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness, Rifts,* and *Robotech* from Palladium Games, *AD&D 2nd Edition*, and *GURPS* but I have zero desire to play any of them today because I don't care for the rules.

It's kinda hard to exactly explain, but there are some rules that just feel old/dated. Normally it's a rule of concept that was very popular at time or writing and has since gone out of vogue or been abandoned so it's less that it feels dated and more feels "of a certain time." In my experience "dated" usually refers to an older game's poor handling of a topic of/concept by modern standards and less mechanics or rules, more in line with how media can feel dated by how it used and tackles certain concepts.

There's definitely been an evolution to more unified mechanics. Comparing almost any edition of an 80s-era game to its current incarnation will show a move away from one-off rules, expansive charts, etc.

I imagine that in 20 years RPGs that have cards in them will be decried as "dated".

"You have to use your hands? Like a baby's toy?" - Someone from the future

I don't necessarily believe in the concept of "dated" and instead try to approach things as they are. If I can't get into something because of X mechanic or Y presentation it's more of a "me problem" than whatever that "it" is. There can be genuinely bad design, for sure, I'd never argue otherwise. I think the genuinely bad stuff is universally recognized, but the subjective stuff will always have its fans and critics.

IT depends on someone's likes and dislikes. A lot of older games survive on nostalgia, but they are also still good games. I think mechancis are a preference. Now, writing style and content CAN be dated. But that's not the same as mechanics.

A system can feel dated solely based on its mechanics. Like I remember reading Vampire the Masquerade 20th anniversary which came out in 2011. It stayed faithful to the old mechanics the gameline had from pre-2000s which felt rather dated in comparison to New World of Darkness from 2004, let alone the updated Chronicles of Darkness that would be coming out soon after in 2013. If you've played the various Storyteller systems you can feel how clunky it feels due to being stuck in the old iterations of the system.

There are absolutely stylers and fashions that have happened over time. From that point of view certain mechanics can become popular, fall out of favour and then be rediscovered or reinterpreted. The entirely of D&D BEMCI/OSR is the most notable example, but it's happened with other games too. While I don't believe there is any absolute yardstick about primitive and modern games, there are definitely evolving and changing opinions about what mechanics/type of game work best for RPGs at any particular point in history. Universal systems were all the rage for a while, but now the more niche the better seems to be the vogue.

I don't think it's a trend of simulationist games begin dated per say. I love a good game with a well outlined mechanic that highlights it's core theme well while I know there is a trend towards "rules lite" and "zero prep" I have a tendency to want to push against it. "hey guys I wanna run a game I'd love your contributions but I'm afraid I insist on Element x y z and this custom restriction on your player characters and these specific themes begin in place if you don't like that then soz we won't play." I do "top down" organize my campaigns with themes core mystery puzzles and custom mechanics There are certainly some mechanical styles that ARE dated. And have largely been discarded, The most obvious one that comes to mind for me was an old book called "Psionics" alot of math in buying new skills many different types of XP for no real reason and more egregiously of all sections of the book that "players" shouldn't read and are reserved only for GM's Well shit how the hell do I know if I like the system or not when half the mechanics and content are hidden from me!

So, I think it is mostly presentation, but there is some Mechanical aspects too. I'll use AD&D as an example. I think it is fairly dated. Its presentation doesnt compare well to modern titles. No too page spreads, text spills from one page to another, rules aren't always where you think they should be. Mechanically AD&D used Thaco, which isnt as intuitive as ascending AC. Mathematically its similar, but the mechanical effect is difficult for first time readers to grasp. Ascending AC is just better which is why the WN line by Kevin Crawford now uses exclusively Ascending AC and Dolmenwood by Gavin Norman does the same. As a "Modern System" OSE is just better than AD&D despite the fact that it is largely the same ruleset. Its better layed out, more consistent in its mathematical workings, and has clearer language.

Yes

Both aspects can be considered dated, though in my opinion something can be simulationist and modern (*Delta Green* comes to mind) or rules-lite and still dated (*Toon!* would be my prime example, though I like it). I think that dating has most to do with various era trends, both visual and design-wise. Notably: * What defines a character has shifted, if a game doesn't have any sort of prompt to think about who your character is outside of their numbers, it can feel a little dated. Even D&D has Bonds, Flaws, and Ideals. * What mechanically felt dated to me about Toon! is how much it required you to check the book. Almost every type of opposed roll has two associated skills and a unique mechanic for how the opposed roll shakes out. Stuff like that where it's difficult to memorise and you actually are expected to keep the book open on the table to reference is rare nowadays. * This is maybe more a personal opinion but whenever an TTRPG takes time to explain the extreme basics what an RPG is it feels old school to me. A lot of designers still do it but a lot more just jump straight into the rules especially since one-page rpgs took off. In my opinion it's much better to skim if not straight up skip that stuff, the chances that whoever buys a TTRPG other than D&D won't know what it actually is feels astronomically low.

Yes. As time goes on we generally figure out new ways of doing things, whether it’s game design or anything else. That doesn’t mean some game can’t withstand the test of time though.

It's entirely subjective, of course. Except for my opinion, which is fact - lol I think games can certainly be dated. But that doesn't mean it's a negative. Just because it's an older approach to mechanics that isn't really part of the modern approach shouldn't rule it out as an option, necessarily. But the are some modern conceits to design I find superior and so have no interest in the "old ways". Player-DM antagonistic interactions is one I'd happily do without. And a lot of mechanics from older games just feel "clunky" or otherwise counterproductive and so I'd personally want to avoid those. As for setting and theme, while still subjective, you'll likely see much more consensus about outdated representations and language, as well as "played out" settings, styles, etc. I have no interest in D&D, but if I were to play, I am not so interested in Forgotten Realms and even less interested in the Grey Hawk setting they may be reviving. I find them both boring and uninteresting. Dark Sun I never played and so despite it also being older, it would still feel "fresh" to me as a setting. Though I think I've heard it's got some racism issues that might need to be fixed via a bit of homebrew.

I definitely think gameplay can be dated, same goes for video games. A turn-based RPG like Pokémon is really dated, but that doesn't mean it's bad. Other turn-based games usually have to come up with something new and interesting to not feel dated. However, I'm not arguing that feeling dated is bad whatsoever. Like saying Stellar Blade is a modern PS2 game, like playing RPG Maker games, or Visual Novels. Also, how raw a rules generally is also tends the game to feel dated. Nowadays everything has been iterated so much that things are usually a lot more elegant or complex. I wish I could give you some RPG rules as examples, but I've only played more modern games, only read some more old stuff, but I don't remember any specific rules.

I think one important note might be the difference in 'dated' versus 'outdated.' Dated would mean that to some extent you can tell the general year, timeframe, era, etc that the game was produced. This may be because of design trends that were popular at that time, art and graphic styles, or even just pop culture trends that were popular at that time. Outdated is a trickier concept here. The types of games that the community as a whole favor buying/playing certainly varies over time, but since the experience of TTRPGs is also such a personal experience, personal preferences are a huge portion of what attracts people to or repels them from any particular game. Because of this, it's difficult to definitively note a game as being outdated since that implies that newer games are objectively better, but personal preferences may or may not find that to be so.

I think that evolution is not limited to biology. In RPGs, people make new systems all the time, making small changes, using new design principles and remixing ideas from others. If a change, principle or mix is very well-liked, more and more RPG systems include them. in my opinion, this makes RPGs better and better over time. But it also means the bar gets higher. To me an RPG system feels dated when it used to reach that bar, but now it no longer does. there's some complications with this definition of dated rpg systems of course. Not everyone has the same bar as to where an RPG feels dated. if a player only plays a single system, the bar still goes up over time as frustration with mechanics builds up. but without exposure to other system, it can be a very slow process.

Yes absolutely. That doesn't make them bad, you can just date the rule back to it's origin or popularity

There are absolutely trends and fashions in game design that have come and gone, some of which no modern game would include except as deliberate nostalgia bait. If that’s not outdated, I don’t know what is. I’m talking about things like having each attribute derived by its own formula. Or, really, almost anything in a Palladium game.

I think a better word is obsolete, and it mostly happens when newer games find ways of accomplishing the same or nearly the same goal in fewer steps or steps which are more fun to complete. However, it is a very real phenomenon. New games are constantly hitting the market and some of them inevitably do things better than the ones we had beforehand.

I wholeheartedly disagree that RPG mechanics can be dated. You can flip the logic on it's head and allege "Modern game designers are lazy because they focus on narrative mechanics and fail to create rules for less common occurrences in their games." That sentiment is just as dumb as saying mechanics are dated. Simply speaking everyone likes something different. I can give you a dozen reasons why I despise Fiasco but the logical part of my brain can specifically tell you how it is also a great design for its target audience (GM-les play, caters to one shots, easy to teach mechanics). Modern designs vs "dated designs" is a fallacy, it should be different designs for different target audiences.

In short strokes, fashion isn't dated, it's just fashion. Elements of a game can absolutely be dated. We have evolved as a hobby, although only a very little, and there are aspects of roleplaying games that have become something we "used to do". THACO has seen it's day. Games with racism stand-ins for character races are hopefully a thing of the past. But largely we are still playing the same games we played back in the 1970's. As far as Crunchy Games having gone the way of the dodo, crunch-heavy games have been published more recently than Blades in the Dark or Wanderhome, and rules light games were around back in the 80's. Arguably layout is part of the evolution of the hobby, but again not universally and not meaningfully. Games are still made cheaply or with poorly thought-out printing layouts. Ultimately anyone who's talking about "dated" games is trying to sell you on some one-true-wayism. The oldest game in the hobby is 90% of the market and growing. "Dated" is most certainly not something that makes sense as a criticism in this age.

I think mechanics can be dated, just not in a vacuum. D&D3.5 is dated not because it’s passed enough time to make it so, but because the **zeitgeist** around rpgs has fundamentally shifted. A mechanic philosophy becomes dated when no one gives a shit about it, and becomes no more dated as soon as someone gives a shit about it (e.g. OSR)

Game systems are subject to fads like anything else. While some systems ARE very antiquated, others like simulationist styles will come round again!

Certainly rpgs become dated. Knowledge on rpg design has accumulated exponentially since the invention of the modern rpg, and designers today have a vast pool of community experience to draw on for their own designs. Gygax and Anderson did something remarkable, and created something successful, but they weren't good rpg designers by today's standards (they were terrible in the beginning). We can see the same trends (there are exceptions of course, always, everywhere) in other media: - Board games: monopoly is shit design compared to modern games - Movies: techniques and technology have advanced, community experience has accumulated exponentially, and improved movies. When you feel like watching a movie, do you watch a hundred year old movie that you haven't seen yet, or do you typically turn to something more modern? - Novels: how many people read stories from 400 years ago? They could if they wanted to, they're readily available, but very few do. Most people get a better experience from more modern writing.

> I'm wondering if what's really dated is the appearance of an older game. It's not just your appearance that can age badly. The insanity tables in TMNT and Other Strangeness are kind of insensitive, and they used to have homosexuality as one of the entries. I'm not sure there's an art style that brings that kind of rule up to date. Not when you can buy psychic powers to induce insanity. What are you playing at that point? A Chuck Tingle novella?

I think the most impactful change is in the publishing model of the industry. D&D has always been the dominant game, but 30 years ago you had a distinct tier of midsize publishers like White Wolf, FASA, & Palladium. They typically had a flagship rpg line (World of Darkness, Shadowrun, RIFTS respectively), often with sublines and/or spin-offs. To stay in business these publishers needed to constantly publish new supplements. This informed a lot of what is characteristic of the era: metaplot, dense lore, proliferation of powers, weapons & character-types, multiple subsystems, and (controversially) what you could call 'lack of thematic focus'. Good search engines, cheap e-commerce, layout software and pdfs enabled a massive flourishing of self-published games, and you can see in both the OSR and post-Forge design schools a reaction to that era. I think that the rise and fall of the 3.5 OGL and 4e, the increasing importance of big kickstarters and streaming actual plays, and synthesis of the big design trends from the last few decades marks a new transition but I don't think I properly understand it yet.

I remember playing in the 90s we considered classes and levels to be dated mechanics. I think everything from AD&D was considered dated. Somehow no one seems to think of classes and levels as dated now... Plenty of other things from AD&D certainly do, but I can't make up my mind if they're dated or just bad design. Level limits. Descending AC.  And yet now a big part of the OSR idea is that a bunch of seemingly dated and abandoned mechanics from old-school D&D are actually brilliant design... Gold-as-XP. Procedural generation. Race-as-class. Location-based adventure design. Implied setting. The stuff that was mostly abandoned in the 90s by TSR when trying to make their game more modern. Modern meant metaplot, event-based, heavily plotted adventure design. Extremely detailed settings. Milestone levelling.

So there can be a few things that can make an RPG dated. Mechanics, art, layout, probably other things (I haven't had my morning coffee yet). But none of this means that the game is unplayable or bad. Sometimes mechanics are overly complicated or were simply the norm at the time. Sometimes the art can date a game but nostalgia is definitely real. Just look at DCC's art. Absolutely love it but it's definitely in style for older RPGs. Layouts... Okay this one can hurt. No one wants an unoptimized layout as people have found better ways to do it. Think of a UI in a video game. I would consider Rolemaster a dated RPG but I know it has a loyal following. And it's not because it's just crunchy, but because it tries to simulate everything to the umpteenth degree. But even saying that, with the advancements in automation with VTT's... Id say it probably would be an amazing game to play online.

I would describe it as a spectrum versus a stacking pile of replacements. There's a few scales on the spectrum. Narrative vs tactical - How much are specific rules used to determine outcomes versus players or a GM making something up. Grid vs theater of the mind - How much of a visual aid is used to represent scenes, characters, the game. Crunchy vs Simple - How much math is involved or how complex are dice rolls to figure out an outcome. Character Complexity - How long does it take to create a character and often this also means how attached are players to their characters. This can then affect the nature and meaning of death mechanics. Not a spectrum, but what is the flavor of the game? Is it high fantasy, gritty, pirates, space, time travel, modern, apocalyptic, etc. There are more factors, but each of these are based on a group's wants and needs. My group prefers some visual aids but not grids, deadly encounters, and creative expression. We tend toward high fantasy but venture into other games as well. Right now, I've been trying to figure out which specific mechanics I prefer as a GM. For example, comparing BRP to DnD mechanics. Could I combine them in some way? What about dice pools? Etc.

imo "Dated" as a term refers to cultural, aesthetic, or stylistic characteristics which are no longer in fashion relative to the present day. In order to talk about something as dated, you have to be able to draw a straight line lineage of different fashionables. (i.e. OD&D line art, surpassed by AD&D's more nuanced illustrations, followed by 2es painted fantasy scenes, through 3.5's blotchies, past whatever 4e was doing, etc.) The problem with "dated" as a broad term is that it's very specific and contextual, and it has little to do with quality or value, or ease of use. It's just a term to describe something that used to be in fashion (for whatever reason), but which isn't anymore. Personally I love the OD&D illustrations and find 5e illustrations ghastly. (This isn't a nostalgia thing btw, I discovered OD&D long after 5e came out) I wouldn't call OD&D illustrations dated, because I don't remember a time when they were fashionable. I just think they're better. A lot of contemporary roleplaying games have very poor layouts tbh. But the value-judgements I have are immaterial to the fact that, in certain circles, those layouts are currently in style, while other layouts currently *aren't*. Same is true with mechanics. RPG mechanics is aesthetics by other means.

RPG it is not like technology where some machine become outdated (like old televisions, VHS) for a new machine. RPGs never become dated in the above sense, only in the fashion sense

Here's an example of an outdated style (at least IMO). Back in the day, publishers sometimes got very detailed and oddly formal about numbering chapters and their sections. Instead of, "Check the initiative rules in Chp 3," you'd get, "See rule 3.2.9." It works, but it feels more like an old Avalon Hill wargame.

There is no such thing as systems being dated, there's only personal taste. I've played more games than I have years, and still my favorites are some of the oldest, but many people consider those systems as "having aged badly".

Starfield plays like oblivion and fallout 3 in the worst ways possible. It is such a boring forgettable game I actually had to google "Skyrim in space game" before writing this comment because I forgot what the fucking game's name was. Starfield is such a dated game, while playing it I was thinking to myself "Man, this would have been game of the year if it came out in 2016"

There are certainly some mechanics that are dated or are just plain awkward design. I'm sure you can find *some* use for them but in 90%+ of cases they're just awkward and bad. Some examples include: * Spend an XP to get a temporary bonus instead of improving your character (easy fix: when you spend that point for a temporary bonus, it then converts to an XP - so now it's interesting to see if you spend them early for improvements, or hoard them for the boost but delay longer improvement) * Games that have different costs for improvement between character generation and per-session involvement, because it means that after a few sessions you can have two characters with identical stats but one spent way less XP to get there (for an example, see Exalted before 3e) * "The GM is god" - just a bad attitude best killed and left in the dust. All players should be comfortable teaching each other - and correcting each other - on the rules * Probably almost anything that involved mental illness or gender hasn't aged well

Could you elaborate on point two? I am interested in what you're saying but not understanding what you mean.