Rules Transparency - How much do players need to know?

[GMMichael]

Remember the good old days, when the Dungeon Master's Guide was for DMs only, and it had a significant amount of rules needed to run the game?

This occurs to me at the same time as I'm thinking about a combat position system, in which players have six main places for their characters to be when fighting. But what if the players don't know this? If a player says, "I want to climb the tree and shoot with my bow" (I know, an entirely different thread), can I put him in one of the six places (which isn't a tree) and tell him, "okay, you start climbing the tree?"

How much do players need to know, when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts rules?

 

[Michael Silverbane]

Ideally, the players have enough information (either from the rules or from the DM's description) to be able to estimate the chances of success of various tactics, so that they can make meaningful choices. Your player who wants his character to climb a tree probably needs to know (or to be able to estimate) that while climbing that tree will take some time, that the extra time taken will be rewarded with an improved chance to hit, or better situational awareness from his higher vantage point, or a decreased chance of being injured due to being out of easy reach of his enemies, or all three...

Whether that comes from rules knowledge (I get a +1 bonus on to-hit rolls due to being on higher ground) or the DMs description of the situation (the hellhounds snarl and snap at your heels as you climb out of their reach) or whatever, is going to depend on the game, the group, the fictional situation and so on...

I have played in games where the players had no access to the rules of the game. It can be a bit frustrating, operating without any gauge as to which actions might meet with success and which are impossible within the system. On the other hand, I have played with people who, while access to the rules was available, made no effort to look at or learn those rules, and seemed perfectly content to operate blindly, taking actions based solely on their own internal vision of what may or may not be possible.

 

[Mishihari Lord]

The players don't need to know the rules at all. If the rules of the game conform sufficiently to reality and game fiction, and the players are conversant with the game fiction, then they could make all of their decisions on this basis. For me, this would be the perfect game. Unfortunately, the difficulty of perfectly modeling reality and fiction and lack of player consensus on them, makes designing such a game very difficult.

 

[Celebrim]

Nothing. In fact, many players often play better when they don't know the rules. They engage the environment better, are more creative, and spend more time RPing their character rather than looking for 'edges' in the rules.

In practice though, it greatly smooths most game if the player knows enough about the rules to perform their mechanical functions when prompted. It's nice for example when a player knows the rules well enough to add the bonuses for a roll correctly, and knows what dice to throw when asked to make a check of some sort. Also, it can be an aid to the DM if at least one player knows the rules well enough to act as a check on your insanity, just in case you forget the rules or are otherwise ruling bizarrely.

As for translating natural language propositions to game language, IMO, that's one of a GM's primary jobs and the answer to your question about climbing a tree is unequivocally "Yes!" The game goes better if the player makes his propositions more naturally, and then you turn those propositions into a fortune mechanic expressing the player's intention and chance of success. If that doesn't happen, players and DMs tend to get hidebound, with the result that they never think out of the box and tend to treat all propositions that aren't couched as rules as impossible or invalid. The rules are their to help resolve propositions - not limit the sort that can be made.

The only thing that a player really needs to understand here is some idea of the scope of his abilities and what they mean, so that they have some idea of what sort of propositions they can attempt: "Is my character athletic enough to jump over this pit?" In that, the DM should guide the player enough that the player has a sense of how much risk they are taking in doing so.

 

[RedSiegfried]

D&D is one of the only games I can think of where many people consider it normal and often desirable for some of the players to not know all the rules. I can't wrap my head around that, sorry.

On the other hand, D&D has a lot of rules, and it's not reasonable to expect that every player know every rule all the time - there is just a lot to keep track of.

So while I don't expect everyone to have a mastery of all the rules, I believe that rules should be completely transparent, preferably, but not necessarily, in advance of play.

My biggest justification for this is simply my own experience that the better all the players understand the rules of the game, the more smoothly the game runs, in many different ways. We often talk about having a Session Zero for games, where everyone comes to some kind of consensus on how the game will be run. If that's a good thing, why would it not be a good thing to make sure everyone is aware the rules of that game, even if the discussion's as simple as "we follow all the rules in this book?"

I don't buy the "immersion" argument either. Ultimately, the GM can't control how immersive the experience is for another person, only the other person can do that for themselves. But hiding the rules of a game from someone is a very bad way to get people into the game. It's a great way to jerk people out of the game when you often have to stop to explain to people what they need to do next in order for them to be following the rules. I think the whole idea that there are people who play D&D better without thinking about the rules is only true if those people are not actually playing D&D. Maybe they're just playing story-time then, which is totally cool, but they're not playing D&D.

So I vote for full disclosure on the rules side of things.

 

[Celebrim]

(There needs to be some sort of meme for when multiple posters make XP worthy posts, but all have their XP turned off. Something about wanting to mash a button.)

 

[pdzoch]

I think everything they need to know is in the players handbook. I do not mind that they know the rules. It helps me run the game when they know the rules also -- it is so easy to forget the specifics of every feature of every class of every race. So it is nice when they know the rule appropriate to them. As for the conduct of the rest of the game, they do not have to know the rules -- it is better if they simply states what they want to do and I will determine how to support the action in game play (sometimes it requires a check, sometimes it is straight roleplay, and sometimes (to borrow a phrase from Mike Mearls) "That is too awesome, you automatically succeed.")

My only beef is a player knowing the rules correctly. I'm sure we are all guilty of it, but misunderstanding a rule and taking advantage of that misunderstanding are two different things. And taking advantage of the DM in the gap of rules knowledge is a whole other level.

My players new to RPGs struggle with a game that is as wide open as RPGs. "What can I do?" is a common question and responses like "Well, what do you want to do?" sometimes frustrate them. It takes them a while to grasps the possibilities allowed by the game, so some specific rules (player cheat sheet) to master really helps them form their understanding of how to play the game.

 

[RedSiegfried]

It takes them a while to grasps the possibilities allowed by the game, so some specific rules (player cheat sheet) to master really helps them form their understanding of how to play the game.

I'm a big fan of rules cheat sheets, myself, especially when you're new to the system. I always try to make or find rules cheat sheets to hand out whenever starting a new game.

 

[Celebrim]

My players new to RPGs struggle with a game that is as wide open as RPGs. "What can I do?" is a common question and responses like "Well, what do you want to do?" sometimes frustrate them. It takes them a while to grasps the possibilities allowed by the game, so some specific rules (player cheat sheet) to master really helps them form their understanding of how to play the game.

I generally agree with your post, but from a game design standpoint there is a really fine line to walk here.

In 1e AD&D it was my experience that no one proposed to trip, push, tackle, grapple, throw, kick, disarm or sunder anything. Why? Because the rules did not provide for such actions, and the situations where such actions might be warranted came up so rarely that by the time they did come up the player had been trained into a routine which did not include any of those things. It wasn't merely the that player knew the rules didn't provide for such options and so didn't propose them, it's that the player could not imagine those options. They were outside of the players mental framework. To make matters worse, the DM was poorly equipped with tools to handle those sorts of options, and - if he was a wise DM - very much realized the rules he was provided with to handle them were no good, and as such did not want to steer the players into those options even if he could imagine them.

However, while that was true, the very lack of rules overall and the opacity of the rules to the player meant that outside of the combat sequence, the player wasn't hidebound and was very open to creative problem solving, prodding the environment, and interacting with the environment. On the other hand, the DM was poorly equipped to handle those actions and had to resort to ad hoc rulings, and as a result lots of table arguments arose regarding what the right way to handle the situation actually was.

Fast forward to 3e, and we see that the solutions that 3e tried to provide could also be weaknesses. Combat had lots of explicit options called out to the players in the PH, and players had recourse to them and could purpose to push zombies off cliffs or ghouls away from stricken comrades, or grapple wizards, or whatever came to mind. And likewise, there was a rich set of rules available for DMs to adjudicate whatever proposition the players gave. But conversely, the very richness of the rules tended to give the impression to both players and DMs that the only valid propositions where the ones outlined in the rules. In other words, players and DMs came to believe that anything not explicitly permitted by the rules was forbidden, rather than assuming that anything that was not explicitly forbidden was permitted.

When you are feeding players rules, you need to be careful to open up opportunities and not close them off. You want to say, "These are some common actions you might propose, but they are by no means all the actions you might propose."

 

[RedSiegfried]

When you are feeding players rules, you need to be careful to open up opportunities and not close them off. You want to say, "These are some common actions you might propose, but they are by no means all the actions you might propose."

This is a very good point. I saw this problem for some players especially in 4e which had so many explicit combat options that people infamously became fixated on thinking that using a power of some kind was the only way to go. Power cards made it worse for some of my players - they got focused on their cards and had difficulty breaking out of that box.