Rules Transparency - How much do players need to know?

[TBeholder]

Theoretically? Players should know in-universe things that PCs must know. And don't need to know any mechanics if GM is going to roll everything. Which generally isn't a good idea because this may slow down the game, but with some players may accelerate. Why not.
Practically? Most people don't care about such trivial things either way. Thus if GM starts making great big secrets, there's probably either a specific reason to this, or pointless generic control freakery "on a general principle". Either case is likely to lead to something like a Grand Autismo Mind Maze Derby. Which makes it a good warning sign, allowing to avoid such GMs - unless you want moon puzzles, of course.

 

[steenan]

In my experience, players knowing the rules improve the fun for everybody at the table.

It helps in compensating for the lack of in-setting information (no matter how the GM tries, it's impossible to give players all information about the world their characters would have and describe everything they perceive). It makes resolving things easier and faster, without the GM having to process the mechanics of every test. It gives players possibility of making informed choices. It supports the atmosphere of transparency, honesty and trust.

I'd rather play with no rolls at all than hide the system from players.

The only exception are players very new to RPGs, especially ones with little experience in board games. In this case, the GM handling the whole system for the first session or two is a good way to avoid cognitive overload and let the players learn playing with the fiction first, before they start playing with the mechanics.

 

[Uchawi]

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?

To be honest the concept of the DM guide only being for the DM only lasted for about 6 months when I first started playing years ago with AD&D. It is just the nature of gaming to enjoy the game in more detail if it becomes a passion. The same concept applies to the monster manual. Therefore I believe as a DM you should make the rules are transparent as possible, but also let the players know ad hoc actions not covered directly by rules will be considered as well. In reference to what the players should know versus a character, that is topic for meta-gaming.

 

[GMMichael]

If as a player I cant assess my chances of success - either by knowing the rules, or asking the GM for rough odds (good, poor, 50/50), I get frustrated/feel like my decisions are random.

I feel like this cuts to the chase a bit. If you're out to slay the 50' woman (seems kind of inhumane to me), it would be good to know that your +2 machete isn't going to make a whole lot of progress. Or maybe the rules give you all sorts of reasons to be able to do massive damage with that machete, but you throw out the idea because it seems ludicrous.

So I return to Silverbane's words: meaningful choices. The above example is a meaningful choice, but how is that knowledge acquired? The player who knows the rules knows that the +2 machete deals 1d4 +2 magic +1d6 sneak attack +1d6 luck bonus x2 level bonus +38 strength bonus...and someone has to figure out that number. When a game is going to be calculation intensive like that, it's probably good for the player to know how to add that up. The player who doesn't know the rules needs another player or the GM to add it up.

What if it's a more qualitative decision? Psikerlord needs to defuse the bomb that the army placed in the 50' woman's favorite warehouse to sit on. He can choose the Solve Problem with Knowledge move or Solve Problem with Intelligence move...but he doesn't know the rules and is in danger of feeling frustrated.

PL: "I defuse the bomb."
P2: Sighs because PL didn't say one of the moves verbatim.
GM: Knows that PL has 50% odds with Knowledge, or 25% odds with Intelligence. "It looks like you should cut the red wire, but you've studied this type of bomb, and you remember that there's a timer countermeasure that could go off, so it might be better to cut the green wire."

This scenario adds meaning to the decision, and detail to the story, but doesn't flow faster because it takes time to explain options to the player. It can backfire if the GM misses an opportunity and says:

GM: "Roll for your Solve Problem with Knowledge. Hey, great, you defuse the bomb."

Now I'm thinking the answer to my question is: players need to know enough rules to facilitate the GM's job - which will vary a lot by just how much help the GM needs.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

My default is "all of them". But I really think it comes down to the balance of "roleplaying" versus "game" you want to have in your "roleplaying game."

If you want to emphasize the roleplaying and have players react organically, they need to know just enough to be able to reasonably judge the consequences of their actions. Done well, the players don't need to know any rules -- and at one extreme, there aren't any rules anyway.

On the other hand, part of the social contract of most games is an equality of knowledge about how the game is played, which keeps the game fair and allows players to stimate changes of success because they are performing actions they can't know would succeed in the real world. (I'm setting aside the genre of games where the game is figure out the rules.)

So what do you want the game to be about? Figuring out rules? If so, have a lot of them, make them relevant, and don't tell the players what they are. Freeform interaction? Don't tell the players the rules, but don't have many and don't make them significant. Balanced expectation of outcome? Players know the rules.

Note that "knowing the rules" does not have to mean the game doesn't contain hidden information -- rules are about the interaction of game elements; elements can still be hidden (monsters, treasure, where they are, motivations, etc -- all are game elements appropriate for hidden information).

 

[pemerton]

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?

Rules for combat positioning look to me like they are imposing some sort of abstract metagame constraint onto the fiction. If those rules matter to outcomes, and the players don't know them - and so the GM is imposing/applying them "in the background", as it were - then (i) what are the rules for? and (ii) who is really making the key decisions, players or GM?

Think a bit more about your example of climbing a tree to shoot with a bow.

In 1st ed AD&D, with 1 minute rounds, this is a pretty innocuous action declaration: provided the tree has some low-hanging branches and the PC has at least average STR and/or DEX, the character gets into the tree, gains a cover bonus to AC, and starts shooting. (A bow in AD&D has a RoF of two per round. A GM who docks one attack for the round in which the tree is climbed is unlikely to produce too much push-back. The logic of that in the fiction is fairly clear.)

In a game with 10-second rounds (Rolemaster) or 6-second rounds (WotC D&D) or 2-second rounds (HARP), the action declaration is instead a potential nightmare. Depending on how movement etc are handled, the player is potentially taking his/her PC out of the action for multiple turns, and for some of that time - in systems where climbing characters suffer a penalty to defence - making his/her PC more vulnerable in the meantime, rather than getting the benefits of cover.

And what about a game with more abstract action economy and turn sequences, like (say) Marvel Heroic RP? In that game, climbing a tree is essentially an attempt to gain an advantage/augment. It therefore requires its own action in the turn sequence, which - if successful - gives an extra die for subsequent dice pools where being in a tree would help. To make a meaningful decision to climb a tree a player needs to have some sense of what sort of augments are possible and what difference it makes to a dice pool to have a bonus die in it.

And finally - notice that all these different possible outcomes, at the table, of that simple action declaration aren't the result of a player being confused about, or having different perspectives on, the ingame fiction. In each case, all the player wanted was for his/her PC to climb a tree and shoot a bow. The differences are consequences of different mechanical resolution systems being imposed upon a common shared fiction.

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

The idea that in an RPG "you can do anything" is something of a myth.

For instance, in D&D - as standardly run, and putting to one side the 1st ed AD&D assassination table - the action declaration "I sneak up on the guard and slit his throat" will probably fail if the guard has more than single-digit hit points. (There are lots of other examples - eg the fighter player who declares "I sneak a look in the mage's spellbook and try to cast on of the spells" will typically have no chance of success either - but the hit point one is the most obvious.)

There are three main ways of dealing with this issue that I know of. One is [MENTION=6775031]Saelorn[/MENTION]'s preferred approach - treat the rules, including hit points, as modelling the ingame reality, and so if players are to be able to make sense of the reality in which their PCs are living they need to know the rules, including the hit point and damage rules.

The second is to acknowledge that hit points are a type of metagame mechanic, used to modulate pacing, survivability etc in the game - and so, to play well, the players need to know what these mechanics are and how they work. (Which might include mechanics that permit bypassing hit points in certain circumstances.)

The third is for the GM to sometimes apply the mechanics and sometimes waive them. But this either (i) tends to bleed into the second approach, or else (ii) leaves the GM in almost total control of the game.

In my experience (which covers a number of systems, but obviously very far from all of them!) the sort of game where it is easiest for players to get by without knowing the rules is one in which either everything is done via fictional positioning (much of OSR-style D&D works this way - the risk here is what critics of this approach call "mother may I?" RPGing), or in which the character sheet is basically a list of natural-language abilities with numbers next to them that translate straight into success chances - ie there are basically no augments, no decisions about allocation of effort, and an extremely simple action economy (eg nothing like Power Attack, or splitting a combat bonus between attack and parry, or trading off movement and attacks, etc) - and so all the player has to do is read his/her PC sheet to know what his/her PC can and can't do.

Runequest and its offshoots are great examples of this; and Traveller can come fairly close. Some approaches to Rolemaster and its offshoots (MERP, HARP etc) are also similar, though it breaks down a bit in combat.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

How many rules do the players need to know? None. Neither does the DM. My gf's kids DM for us, and they know no rules.

But it tends to help if everyone knows something.

Also add me to the list of gamers who read the DMG mere months after starting D&D. In my case it was because I wanted to DM, but frankly, I think that wishing for some far-off time or place where non-DM players know nothing of the DMG is hopelessly naive. Gamers who love their games are going to learn them.

 

[Aenghus]

There is no magical panacea, no one size fits all solution. One reason we keep discussing these topics here and elsewhere is that they are difficult problems with no easy solution. (They are also trivial problems in the context of the real world but anyway).

Some players love freedom, others work better with a certain amount of constraint. Some players love rules transparency, others hate it. These are subjective matters of personality and taste that don't have a "right" solution. A player's attitude might make the a better or worse fit for a particular game.

I have found that trying to hide rules knowledge from players interested in it is futile and has always been futile. Even before the internet, players could just borrow or buy the rules themselves. They could even buy rules for other games and see competing ideas for game mechanics, discussion of game design. From the very start of the hobby there have been competing memes of "DM as infallible" and "DM as collaborative designer".

I'm strongly against nostalgia for treating players like mushrooms. There's a place for a style of game where the DM firewalls off the mechanics from the players, but I'm distinctly uncomfortable with the "cult of personality" vibe often associated with such a gamestyle.

Personally I crave rules transparency and like reading game rules. Shortly after learning of RPGs in 1981 I had bought D&D, Runequest and Traveller rules and subscribed to White Dwarf when it was good. People who live and breathe rules can if necessary reverse engineer them in part from their observations. This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it just suggests a potentially poor match up with those referees who prefer to keep rules obscure.

 

[Celebrim]

Personally I crave rules transparency and like reading game rules...This isn't a bad thing in and of itself, it just suggests a potentially poor match up with those referees who prefer to keep rules obscure.

How much a player needs to know isn't quite the same as how much rules a player prefers to know.

I have no problem with players obtaining as much system mastery as they desire, but strictly speaking I don't think such mastery is necessary for them to enjoy or play a game. And how important gaining such mastery is to a particular player will depend on playstyle and their particular aesthetics of play.

For my part, I'd rather a player focus on learning how to roleplay before learning system mastery, but I'm not going to force them to stop reading rules if they have different priorities than I do. My experience with highly experienced players is on average they are worse at playing RPGs than players with no experience. The bring too many biases and baggage to the game, and they frequently have developed all sorts of bad habits. They've often become really narrow in their preferred aesthetics of play, very aggressive in pushing for their preferred way of play, inflexible, and have huge gaps in their skills. Introduced to a new system, invariably they attempt to immerse themselves into the rules of the system rather than into the 'play' of the system or expected by the GM. Armed with deep knowledge of many rules sets, they want to interact with the game environment solely through offering rules propositions, and invariably they spend more time negotiating the rules proposition through the metagame than they do actually thinking about their character or the game fiction. They'll test out continually what mechanical rules I intend to use to resolve their proposition, trying out several variations hoping to find some edge, before settling not on what they want their character to do, but what they think gives them the most edge (and since they are operating in a fog of war, many times they are wrong anyway). Basically, their attitude is, "I will only offer a proposition if I'm in full control of the outcome, and my job as a player is to figure out the proposition that produces the result that I'm most comfortable with." This results in slow tedious and uninspired play, and I have to spend an enormous amount of time fighting their ingrained instincts until they finally start to realize that the purpose of the rules is to facilitate play and not be the play itself. Sadly, this usually only happens by way of less experienced players at the table leading by example, winning themselves shining moments of awesome that make for good stories that more experienced would never even try.

I can't imagine a really good reason to hide rules from a player unless the rules in question reflected some aspect of reality that characters couldn't know and could only learn from trial and error. Such rules subsystems would never cover 'kindergarten playground' rules of movement, combat, and skill use that would be available to a character to learn about his environment since a very early age. They might theoretically cover investigation into alien technology, aspects of magic which were truly numinous, or the workings of the larger multiverse in a setting where the existence of such a multiverse was not well known. Rules systems like that to me fall into the same category of rules as the exact structure that a DM has set up for a particular skill challenge, where knowing the rules would give the player metagame knowledge that their player couldn't have. But such cases are in my opinion inherently rare. They don't apply to the normal fortune/resolution mechanics.

 

[GMMichael]

Rules for combat positioning look to me like they are imposing some sort of abstract metagame constraint onto the fiction. If those rules matter to outcomes, and the players don't know them - and so the GM is imposing/applying them "in the background", as it were - then (i) what are the rules for? and (ii) who is really making the key decisions, players or GM?
. . .In each case, all the player wanted was for his/her PC to climb a tree and shoot a bow. The differences are consequences of different mechanical resolution systems being imposed upon a common shared fiction.

Some rules are necessary, since a GM is neither a physics computer nor a telepath. The rules in question are there to help the GM adjudicate outcomes in game terms. Since the player just wanted to climb and shoot, and get a decent outcome from it, I don't see that it's necessary for him to know that his character got moved into Melee Position A Lateral, versus just "I'm in a tree." Different games will work different, mechanically, but if the GM is using the premise "my job is to make this fun," instead of "my job is to kill the PCs," then the player will get a fair, or even acceptable, outcome despite the clunkiness of the rules.

The idea that in an RPG "you can do anything" is something of a myth.

For instance, in D&D - as standardly run, and putting to one side the 1st ed AD&D assassination table - the action declaration "I sneak up on the guard and slit his throat" will probably fail if the guard has more than single-digit hit points.

That's right. The unspoken part of "you can do anything" is "(that your character could reasonably do.)" If I were going to make my players suffer through weird rules, I'd either make sure they know these rules, or give some in-game examples of them. (Suddenly I have so much appreciation for video game in-game tutorials!)

Your character is an assassin? Here's a flashback scene to your assassin training. Remember when you stabbed that innocent bystander three times in the neck before he swooned? Man, that was great...

Your character climbs trees? Try climbing this one (yes you should probably stow your bow first) at the edge of the village. (Five rounds later) so the local kids have hit you with eight cowpies so far as you climb at exactly one-quarter of your walking speed...