How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[hawkeyefan]

That's still not about control. A DM that wants to control the group is one that railroads them, forcing his vision on the others. That's control. You may not like the above playstyle, but that's all it is. A playstyle. It's not at all about control.

It's not about control of any sort. It's just a playstyle that some like and others don't.

Max, what I'm saying comes from personal experience. I am telling you that I GMed with the intention of controlling the experience to some extent. I did so because that's what all of my early GMs did. It was the prevailing method at the time, and continues to be one to this day.

I can't comment on your game other than to speculate. If you say it's not about control with you, then fine. That doesn't make that universal. Do we really need to hash out the plethora of advice offered in 2e era D&D and similar games that prove my point?

Presumably there's only one right answer. However, I've seen a number of DMs here on the site say that they sometimes go with player musings if those musings are better than what they came up with. So there might not be only one right answer.

No, there's still only one right answer. Even if you leave the answer undetermined, the moment you decide what it is, that's the one answer. This isn't difficult.

 

[Reynard]

No, there's still only one right answer. Even if you leave the answer undetermined, the moment you decide what it is, that's the one answer. This isn't difficult.

Nothing is true until it goes from your mouth to the players' ears. Once it is established as true, it should require something extraordinary to make it not true.

 

[thefutilist]

Hmm. I think a lot of great role-playing techniques come from the fact you can commit to stuff without the knowledge of the other players. The most obvious being something like the plan of a Dungeon or the motivations/values of an NPC.

 

[Maxperson]

It may be an oxymoron, and yet an untold number of people in the real world participate in one or more forms of fantasy realism on a regular basis.

It's not oxymoronic at all. Realism are things that contribute towards the setting feeling some level of realistic. I wouldn't have to separate out fantasy realism if people here wouldn't respond with the following, "Realism shouldn't be a thing because dragons and magic aren't at all realistic. Hur! Hur!"

When making a fantasy setting you have realism. Trees, rocks, air, humans, water, metal armor, bladed swords, etc. But you also have things that you establish as realistic for a fantasy setting. Magic, dragons, gods that interfere, other planes of existence, etc. Those things become realistic for that setting, but are not part of realism dealing with the real world. They need a separate category which I call fantasy realism, because those things are consistent in the fantasy setting and the DM can establish attributes for them that make them more or less realistic for the fantasy setting, much the same way that attributes can be added or removed to make the came more or less real world realistic.

Fantasy realism and realism do not oppose each other, rather they complement each other within the setting. They are not oxymoronic.

 

[Maxperson]

Allow me to elaborate, then:

Realism (from Oxford Languages via Google): the quality or fact of representing a person or thing in a way that is accurate and true to life.​

​

Fantasy (same source): the faculty or activity of imagining impossible or improbable things; an idea with no basis in reality; a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure, especially in a setting other than the real world.​

Something imaginative, perhaps with no basis in reality (eg magic; dragons), and certainly pertaining to magic and adventure in a setting other than the real world, is not going to be accurate and true to life. More-or-less by definition. Hence my remark that "fantasy realism" seems an oxymoron.

See my above post. If you get to invent new terms and definitions, and you do all the time, then so do I.

 

[Maxperson]

In other words, you appear to be saying that a GM is allowed to describe a scene to the players as including a dragon trapped in a circle of imprisonment, because a GM can in fact declare auto success or failure for reasons.

That is correct. The DM can do that. I have never said the DM can't do that. For this entire thread my position has been that whether you give numbers or not, or information or not, is purely subjective playstyle preference.

I'm pushing back at the incorrect notion that not giving out the numbers is somehow about control. It's not.

And my question, to repeat it, is this: What is the relationship between what a GM can describe and the fact that a GM can declare auto-success? I was talking about the first. You replied with a remark about the second. To me, you remark appears to be a non-sequitur, because a GM in describing a scene is not declaring auto-success on anything. There having been no action declared or move made by the player to whom the scene is being described.

They are one and the same. Whether or not a PC knows if it's a circle of imprison and a dragon inside is due to PC knowledge. The DM either says or narrates auto success, auto failure, or asks for a roll.

In the case of the narration you provided with the dragon in the circle of imprisonment, the DM by narration has engaged in auto success for the PC knowing that information. The DM could just as easily have narrated auto failure, "There is a large winged lizard sitting inside a runed circle. You do not know what either the lizard or circle are." Or asked for rolls to determine knowledge of one or the other, or both of those things.

 

[Reynard]

It's not oxymoronic at all. Realism are things that contribute towards the setting feeling some level of realistic. I wouldn't have to separate out fantasy realism if people here wouldn't respond with the following, "Realism shouldn't be a thing because dragons and magic aren't at all realistic. Hur! Hur!"

When making a fantasy setting you have realism. Trees, rocks, air, humans, water, metal armor, bladed swords, etc. But you also have things that you establish as realistic for a fantasy setting. Magic, dragons, gods that interfere, other planes of existence, etc. Those things become realistic for that setting, but are not part of realism dealing with the real world. They need a separate category which I call fantasy realism, because those things are consistent in the fantasy setting and the DM can establish attributes for them that make them more or less realistic for the fantasy setting, much the same way that attributes can be added or removed to make the came more or less real world realistic.

Fantasy realism and realism do not oppose each other, rather they complement each other within the setting. They are not oxymoronic.

People claiming you can't have realism when fantastical elements exist are not arguing in good faith, IMO. That said, I do think it is important to nail down where the differences lie and how much realism we can expect -- not just in regards to the fiction, but the game system. If the rules for some thing (jumping, say) don't reflect "realism" then we have to decide whether they simply represent an abstraction or whether the physics behind jumping in this world is fantastical (like, for example, high action anime/wuxia).

 

[Maxperson]

Max, what I'm saying comes from personal experience. I am telling you that I GMed with the intention of controlling the experience to some extent. I did so because that's what all of my early GMs did. It was the prevailing method at the time, and continues to be one to this day.

I can't comment on your game other than to speculate. If you say it's not about control with you, then fine. That doesn't make that universal. Do we really need to hash out the plethora of advice offered in 2e era D&D and similar games that prove my point?

We have wildly different experiences. As I said, starting from 1983 to present, with DMs who with 1 exception did not provide numbers, all by maybe 1 of the DMs who did not provide numbers did not do so for control reasons. You can bring out all the advice you want to, but it won't change the fact that neither I nor the DMs I played with used it. It was common for DMs of that era to ignore rules and advice.

No, there's still only one right answer. Even if you leave the answer undetermined, the moment you decide what it is, that's the one answer. This isn't difficult.

If I can answer a runed circle of protection, a runed circle of entrapment, a runed circle of summoning or a runed circle of ritual sacrifice, and whichever one I choose is the right answer, then I had multiple right answers to pick from. That the others get excluded after I pick one of the answers doesn't change that I originally had multiple right answers to the question to pick from. There were in fact multiple right answers to the question.

You're right! It wasn't that difficult.

 

[Maxperson]

People claiming you can't have realism when fantastical elements exist are not arguing in good faith, IMO. That said, I do think it is important to nail down where the differences lie and how much realism we can expect -- not just in regards to the fiction, but the game system. If the rules for some thing (jumping, say) don't reflect "realism" then we have to decide whether they simply represent an abstraction or whether the physics behind jumping in this world is fantastical (like, for example, high action anime/wuxia).

But they almost all impact realism. That you can jump at all is realism. Not much, but it is. When you decide to use strength and not intelligence to determine distance, that adds even more realism. When you then add in skill in athletics to push the boundary of how far you can jump, that's even MORE realism.

That's why I keep pushing that realism is a spectrum with 0(completely unreal chaos) on one end, and mirroring reality exactly on the other end. Any given thing in the game is going to fall somewhere on that spectrum.

 

[Corinnguard]

That said, I do think it is important to nail down where the differences lie and how much realism we can expect

The Like Reality Unless Noted trope. If a GM mentions a door while they are narrating, the players are going to assume that the door before them is like the ones in reality. It has a handle that must be turned in a certain direction in order for them to open it. However, the GM could say that the door is a flat slab standing before them and that they must touch a glyph. When the party does so, the door just disappears and reveals what is behind it. Then the players would know that in this setting, the doors are different from the ones we're use to in reality. However, to their characters, the doors on their world have always been like this.
When we are role-playing characters in a RPG setting, we have to treat everything the character experiences as something normal. Even when we don't think of it as normal in our reality.