D&D General D&D's Evolution: Rulings, Rules, and "System Matters"

[Chaosmancer]

From the given example I did not think Arneson was actually in a helicopter over a burning banana republic throwing out physical leaflets.

I can see imagining a Conan or Tolkien scenario similar to imagining a banana republic one and in both cases using my own understanding of the situation and my own experiences to play a role in the scenario or to be a judge/DM.

Sure, but what does your experience tell you about how a dream of a eusocial goblin empire which carves reality with its weight interacts with the concentrated faith of city of pious humans?

At some point in fantasy, you get to the part where you don't really have a lot of experiences to call upon. Where the scenario is so far outside of what you have experienced before that having guidance is helpful. And the point being made by Argyle seems to be that deciding what happens in a game set in the trenches of World War 1 or in Cuba is very different than deciding what happens in Jhenn Kaa the Land of Dreaming Dragons.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

And the point being made by Argyle seems to be that deciding what happens in a game set in the trenches of World War 1 or in Cuba is very different than deciding what happens in Jhenn Kaa the Land of Dreaming Dragons.

Why?

It's all imagination and supposition.

And ... this might surprise you, but someone, somewhere, had to come up with Jhenn Kaa in the Land of Dreaming Dragons. The "rules" are nothing more than that person's decisions. Why is that person in a better position to make decisions than the people at your table?

Further, the lack of rules for adjudication is not the same as a lack of knowledge; regarding your earlier post, imagine the following two TTRPGs:

Game A has detailed rules, including rules for riding dragons.
Game B is FK game, but has a detailed setting, including information about how there are dragon riders in the world.

Both games have clear indications that dragons can be ridden, right?

 

[TerraDave]

D&D has never been free-form roleplaying.

There is a long running tension on certain systems and if they are needed. 3E was the peak in terms of rules and systems (though I don't think that was its biggest problem).

There are a few areas where systems have persisted. One is to resolve conflict and maintain tension. Mostly involving combat, or magic that can have a large in game impact. Another is to give players explicit cool things there characters can do, or have. For some, these buttons and whistles are not needed, but a lot of players really like them. (I fall in between, but I know as a player, I also tend to like them). The third, which is usually a set of secondary systems, is to answer questions for the DM, like did they find the secret door, can they cross the rope bridge, is the monster in the lair, is it raining, etc. Some of these may not even be in the main rules, but in adventures or other supplements, and they may be optional.

These systems, including things like monster combat stats, will strongly influence play style and will work better for certain in game situations then others. (All versions of D&D have tension about the aspired play style and the actual play style).

And D&D, while a big tent game, really pushes certain play styles, mostly involving fantasy team combat and rewards of various kinds for that fantasy team combat. Plus some travel and investigation in between fantasy team combats. Usually by independent free lancers. There are RPGs that facilitate a more flexible play style. They have never been as popular, but they are there.

 

[Argyle King]

From the given example I did not think Arneson was actually in a helicopter over a burning banana republic throwing out physical leaflets.

I can see imagining a Conan or Tolkien scenario similar to imagining a banana republic one and in both cases using my own understanding of the situation and my own experiences to play a role in the scenario or to be a judge/DM.

The latter part of what you said is my point.

You have some understanding from which to base a ruling.

In my anecdotal experience with teaching new players games, some of the biggest hurdles come when a game system works in a way which grossly defies expectations. Sure, dragons, elves, magic, and such are completely unrealistic; but I posit that even things such as those are (I believe) easier to buy into when the starting point is something a person can relate to.

In other threads, I have used professional wrestling as an example. As an observer, I am aware that professional wrestling is a performance art. However, it is meant to mimic some semblance of reality. When it's done well, it is easier to buy the more extravagant elements if the small details are right. For example, an audience member may not know what a suplex feels like, but many people can relate to how it feels to get punched in the face or poked in the eye. So, when those things happen, an appropriate sell (a reaction to the "damage" done by the move) and reaction is something which can convey a baseline of reality to the audience before layering on The Undertaker being an undead wrestler or The Rock being able to beat someone with a highly theatrical elbow drop.

In a similar way, a fire-breathing dragon feels a little more real when the fire lights things on fire. I'm willing to ignore things like "how does this giant lizard fly" if there are enough small pieces of things I understand to help me buy-in.

 

[Greg Benage]

Others have pointed to the difference between FK deeply rooted in experience and FRPGs deeply rooted in, er, fantasy.

I don’t think it’s an accident that when Arneson makes the move to a fantasy setting, you end up with stuff like this in your “try anything, stop looking at your character sheet, rulings not rules” game:

WHITE BOX:

Sleep: A Sleep spell affects from 2-16 1st level types (hit dice of up to 1 + 1), from 2-12 2nd level types (hit dice of up to 2 +1), from 1-6, 3rd level types, and but 1 4th level type (up to 4 +1 hit dice). The spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice. If more than the number rolled could be affected, determine which "sleep" by random selection. Range: 24"

HOLMES:

Sleep , Level 1 ; Range: 240 feet; Duration: 4-16 turns Puts all kinds of creatures to sleep for 2-8 turns. Monsters of higher level are less affected as follows. To determine the number of creatures put to sleep by the spell: if the creatures have up to 1 die of hit points (or 1 die +1 point), roll two 8-sided dice to find the number put to sleep, creatures with 2 dice of hit points (or 2 dice + 1 hit point) roll two 6-sided dice, creatures with 3 dice of hit points (or 3 dice + 2 points) roll one 6-sided die, and of creatures of 4 dice (or 4 dice + 1 point) only one will be put to sleep. Creatures with more hit dice are unaffected by the spell. Undead are always unaffected. There are no saving throws allowed.

 

[Argyle King]

Sure, but what does your experience tell you about how a dream of a eusocial goblin empire which carves reality with its weight interacts with the concentrated faith of city of pious humans?

At some point in fantasy, you get to the part where you don't really have a lot of experiences to call upon. Where the scenario is so far outside of what you have experienced before that having guidance is helpful. And the point being made by Argyle seems to be that deciding what happens in a game set in the trenches of World War 1 or in Cuba is very different than deciding what happens in Jhenn Kaa the Land of Dreaming Dragons.

Yes, but also no.

I do think those games are different.

However, I think that a goblin empire and dragons can make sense and be understood if the underlying foundations of how the world generally works are things which people can understand.

If a fantasy world works in a way which is different than the world with which we're familiar, I think that the rules (or perhaps the DM) should indicate what those differences are. I'm inclined to believe that defining those differences is a smoother process when they can be contrasted with a point of reference which the audience (players in this case) can understand.

Do the goblins behave similar to bees? Mole rats? (I'm inclined to lean toward mole rats because of their breeding habits and mole rats being one of the few eusocial mammals.) Can my experience at dealing with a hive mind species in Stellaris help me out at all? Do they devour resources like locusts? There are lot of things which can serve as points of reference.

Pious humans aren't difficult to understand. History is full of those examples.

So, perhaps the eusocial goblin empire spreads across the land like a cross between the Mongol Horde and a swam of bees, but with mole rat breeding habits. So, there's one primary colony at the upper echelon of the hierarchy, but then there are various sub-empires lorded over by breading pairs at each new "hive."

At the same time, the pious humans are dealing with resources being consumed by this ever-growing menace. Perhaps some are terrified because the encroaching goblins are seen as some sort of divine omen that they have sinned in some way (much like some Europeans viewed the approaching Mongol Horde).

So, are the goblins the bad guys?

That depends upon what story you're trying to tell. There are a lot of ways you could deal with it. The goblins could be anything from a slightly more-intelligent version of zombies (or the Flood from Halo) to a thinly-veiled lesson about pollution to a misunderstood culture which is struggling with their own problems (which the PCs discover).

In any of those cases, I would be taking one or two bullet points which I can understand and then extrapolating more information from it.

From a player perspective, nothing included in what I wrote above would grossly violate anything I could understand. War and religion are both things I can understand. Packs of animals or hives of insects are also things I can understand. I may not have a perfect understanding, but that's not necessary. I simply need to understand the general ballpark of the idea.

Mentally, I just need to be able to get my foot through the door of understanding. Once I'm into the game, whatever I don't know will be filled in by the game, the story, and the DM. If something seems jarring or difficult for me to understand, I'll ask questions.

 

[Argyle King]

Sorry for the double post, but I felt as though breaking this off might make things easier to read than a wall of text.


I got away from my opening point in the previous post.

Using the goblin example, my starting points would be questions such as...

Can goblins (or humans) be killed with normal weapons?
Yes... okay.
No... why not?
What's the departure point from my normal expectation? (assuming my character could perceive that)
Is some special material needed to harm them?
Is it because health and HP represents something different than injury in the game I'm playing?

If HP represents something different, how different is that difference?
This is somewhere that I think "system matters" and the "ruling not rules" mindsets intersect.
The ruling made in regards to how a conflict plays out will likely be very different if the system says that jumping from the back of a dragon and falling several miles to the ground means doing a cool anime-style superhero landing versus losing 10d-whatever HP out of 100 versus a system which says that gravity plays my character's spine like an accordion.

None of those answers are right or wrong, but they each create very different situations.

 

[see]

I'll note that there were problems with Free Kriegsspiel that resulted in various groups adding formal rules to replace arbitrary umpire judgments. I accordingly would suggest that what drives the addition of rules in roleplaying games, and in refereed wargames before them, is not a simple drive for more money, but a process analogous to the "Wheel of Reincarnation" one sees in computing.

The term "Wheel of Reincarnation" in computing dates back to at least the paper On the Design of Display Processors (T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968). You would start with a computer where a peripheral (classically a display) is driven by the CPU, then the peripheral is given its own processor to speed things up, then both processors increase in power over time, then someone notices that it would be more efficient to abandon the asymmetric load-sharing and just have the peripheral be driven by the main CPU. At which point, someone adds a processor to the peripheral to speed things up . . .

Similarly, refereed games accrete rules in the name of helping the referee judge outcomes, you eventually get games that are utterly rule-bound, someone notices that as long as the referee is making judgments you can toss most of the rules and just have the referee decide outcomes, and then new rules are promulgated for the cut-down games to help the referee judge outcomes . . .

 

[clearstream]

Why?

It's all imagination and supposition.

And ... this might surprise you, but someone, somewhere, had to come up with Jhenn Kaa in the Land of Dreaming Dragons. The "rules" are nothing more than that person's decisions. Why is that person in a better position to make decisions than the people at your table?

This skirts denying that game design is a skilled profession, and overlooking the impact of playtesting on rules quality.

 

[Aldarc]

It was my impression that he was just using the 4e example of a way that ignoring the Rules as Written in the moment can enhance the fun at the table (by preventing the game from stopping to look up some obscure rule), not using it as an example of "this game was designed for 'Rulings, not Rules' in mind from the start". IMO, that tweet misses the point of the video.

As if anything as trivial as "missing the point" would stop the Alexandrian from dunking on 4e when given the chance.

That reminds me, it's no small wonder that some of the D&D people who claim that "system doesn't matter" were also some of the same people in the past who comlained the loudest about 4e as a system, whether that it "wasn't D&D" or that it didn't let them play the sort of D&D they were used to. If anything convinced me that "system matters," it wasn't these oft-discussed Indie Games, but, rather, it was the Edition Wars.