So I've seen the term 'traditional' RPG bandied on a few threads and that got me to thinking what do you define as traditional?

Are you narrow band and this means D&D derived only, or perhaps a more generous inclusion. So what do you mean by traditional?

I assume it means rolling dice for outcomes and writing on papers and playing your character at a table with other people and a GM adjudicating.

As with a lot of things, different people have different definitions of just what traditional should mean. I generally use it to refer to the basic features which the majority of games have, but others will disagree. This will almost certainly include D&D and its offshoots but will also cover a lot of other games as well.

Quote from: Dumarest;969647I assume it means rolling dice for outcomes and writing on papers and playing your character at a table with other people and a GM adjudicating.

Pretty much this, though I'd add that traditional games use non-custom dice and the GM makes rolls as well as the players.

something that is recognizable as a game, which has roleplaying as one element, among other elements present in games which preceded RPGs.

Quote from: Dumarest;969647I assume it means rolling dice for outcomes and writing on papers and playing your character at a table with other people and a GM adjudicating.

Well I'd take that as a bare minimum but others may have differing opinions

If you aren't in costume, playing by candle light, eating Doritos and drinking Mountain Dew, if your Dungeon Master isn't a creepy fat guy over forty with a bad beard, and if you aren't playing with a tattered set of photocopied Alarums and Excursions notes as the only rulebooks, if you can't get one new Christian child to kill themselves every month, you simply aren't traditional enough.

To me, "traditional" means you've got a GM creating and running the world, settings, NPCs, and who acts as a referee determining what happens and overruling players as needed, players with PCs who can roleplay their characters but rely on getting most/all of their information from the GM or rules and rolls. The world and locations are mapped. Characters have sheets showing what they are like and what they own and so on. There are rules that explain how to resolve situations including travel, combat, healing, magic, use of skills, overcoming physical obstacles, noticing things, etc.

By contrast, elements that make a game seem non-traditional to me include: Narrativium. Players regularly participating in describing the world and what happens outside what their PC does. Omitting entire expected traditional elements of play such as equipment or wealth or reducing the combat system to all being determined by comparing two small numbers or rolling a couple of dice to see who wins. Treating the game more as a group effort to create a "good" story in some genre, rather than as a game situation that gets played out.

Quote from: Skarg;969660Omitting entire expected traditional elements of play such as equipment or wealth or reducing the combat system to all being determined by comparing two small numbers or rolling a couple of dice to see who wins.

I wouldn't go that far - there are games like Tunnels & Trolls and Fighting Fantasy that use single-opposed-check combat resolution that certainly seem traditional to me. Both of those may require that check to be made more than once though. Likewise wealth and/or equipment may not be relevant in some trad games - some Call of Cthulu or Star Wars d6 etc games may not care about these.

"You are the hero" games without narrative-control mechanics are traditional games. Trad RPGs may have very minimal narrative-control mechanics:

Twilight 2000 - spend a Contact Point to know an NPC
Warhammer FRP, OGL Conan - spend a Fate Point to not die.

But the more of this there is, the less trad is the game, until it becomes a story-creation game not a "You are the Hero" immersive game.

"Traditional RPG" is a somewhat pejorative term used by gamers who want to distinguish newer games as being somehow different to older games. They used to try and distinguish themselves as  "indie" until it was pointed out that most RPGs are hardly corporate and mainstream, and also "narrative" vs "simulationist" when the terms are problematic and ineffectual. Now that just want to point to any game that has an established fanbase as being "traditional" to imply that there is no innovation in the game, compared to one's that they like.

Quote from: Dumarest;969647I assume it means rolling dice for outcomes and writing on papers and playing your character at a table with other people and a GM adjudicating.

dont all RPGs do this?

Quote from: Skarg;969660To me, "traditional" means you've got a GM creating and running the world, settings, NPCs, and who acts as a referee determining what happens and overruling players as needed, players with PCs who can roleplay their characters but rely on getting most/all of their information from the GM or rules and rolls. The world and locations are mapped. Characters have sheets showing what they are like and what they own and so on. There are rules that explain how to resolve situations including travel, combat, healing, magic, use of skills, overcoming physical obstacles, noticing things, etc.

By contrast, elements that make a game seem non-traditional to me include: Narrativium. Players regularly participating in describing the world and what happens outside what their PC does. Omitting entire expected traditional elements of play such as equipment or wealth or reducing the combat system to all being determined by comparing two small numbers or rolling a couple of dice to see who wins. Treating the game more as a group effort to create a "good" story in some genre, rather than as a game situation that gets played out.

By that defintion AW is 'traditional' and Toon, Paranoia and Ghostbusters are not.

Quote from: Psikerlord;969679dont all RPGs do this?

No, all RPGs don't.

Quote from: S'mon;969664Twilight 2000 - spend a Contact Point to know an NPC

I haven't played Twilight 2000 in ages so I may just not recall, but I don't remember this at all. Contact Points? Was that in the first edition or added later?

Quote from: S'mon;969664I wouldn't go that far - there are games like Tunnels & Trolls and Fighting Fantasy that use single-opposed-check combat resolution that certainly seem traditional to me. Both of those may require that check to be made more than once though. Likewise wealth and/or equipment may not be relevant in some trad games - some Call of Cthulu or Star Wars d6 etc games may not care about these.

"You are the hero" games without narrative-control mechanics are traditional games. Trad RPGs may have very minimal narrative-control mechanics:

Twilight 2000 - spend a Contact Point to know an NPC
Warhammer FRP, OGL Conan - spend a Fate Point to not die.

But the more of this there is, the less trad is the game, until it becomes a story-creation game not a "You are the Hero" immersive game.

I didn't mean that if you leave any traditional element out it means the game can't be considered traditional. And I am just saying what I think of as traditional.

For Tunnels & Trolls, it isn't what I had in mind, as even though combat is reduced to one roll, it's several dice being added and totaled and the weapon and several attributes which can range on the typical 3-18 sort of scale all take effect, even though they're slushed together very abstractly to get the result. But armor is subtracted from damage done. I meant stuff where characters have something like one Physical Combat rating that can be from 1 to 5, ignore equipment, and you just beat anyone with a lower combat rating unless they spend a narrativium point, or you roll as many $10 novelty dice and the number of cool skull symbols you roll is the defeat level or something. And, even so, I'd say Tunnels & Trolls combat is slightly on the abstract side for what I think of as a traditional RPG - at least it was one of the atypical things about it.

Again just my way of thinking, but if Star Wars d6 ignores wealth, that does seem like a non-traditional thing to do, even if it seems sort of traditional in other ways. Actually though I also think of SW d6 as slightly non-traditional in the way it does its skill rolls, too. The mapped location modules and stuff seem more traditional to me. But I may also just be conflating what I like about literal representational games and calling them traditional. Probably someone else thinks character classes are traditional and my pet game TFT is non-traditional for not having classes and not rolling dice to generate characters.

Quote from: Voros;969681By that defintion AW is 'traditional' and Toon, Paranoia and Ghostbusters are not.

There are probably more points to add, and/or different views to take, and my view may be unpopular or just not very well thought-out. I was just sharing what came to mind. I think there should be a scale of "how traditional" a game might be thought to be, not just a "that game is traditional, this other game isn't" thing.

I've never looked at Ghostbusters, but I wouldn't expect Toon or Paranoia to be seen as entirely traditional, since they do seem rather different than typical olde RPGs at least in some ways.