Do you enjoy playing roleplaying games in which you have no clue about the rules?

Blue said:

I can enjoy playing without knowing the rules, but that's not my default.

Way back when I had a great experience with this, run by [MENTION=813]jmucchiello[/MENTION]. We knew nothing about anything, and all played young people from a backwater village, just coming of age and needing to go into the wider world. He ran a homebrew system, though part way through he (after talking to us) revamped the freeform magic system because we were getting the hang of it way too fast. I remember being thrilled at being able to make a rope harness and levitate it (since we knew the magic words for, I think rope and telekinesis plus some power booster words), but nothing that would allow us to fly ourselves.

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Of course, that game ended when one of the players had a meltdown about not "knowing" what they could do. In my DMing of that game, when someone asked, "Can I...?" I would interpret it is "Does my character believe the chance he might succeed is greater than the character's implied risk aversion level based on the player background and subsequent play of the game?" Now, obviously this is not the kind of thing that could be codified on a character sheet. It was all in my head and based on my feel for the characters. The other player did not like when I would answer, "You think you can make it." "Throwing in, you're 90% sure." helped but not always.

IIRC, just to add to the "no rules" feel, I didn't use dice. If I needed a random result I would open a large book and look at the tens place number for a 1d10 like value. Given the rough granularity of the "system" a d10 was sufficient for determining a result.

The magic system was less free form than implied. It had a grammar and vocabulary. Anyone who knew the words and could form a proper sentence could ask the faeries and other beings of power to alter reality. If the faeries liked your pronunciation, (Players did have to speak the spells aloud) the effect would happen. "Osoro gen Gothamr Ra Dal Inf Fir La"might translate (loosely) to "In the name of the great Oroso and lost Gothamr, invoke the element of fire upon (gesture pointing at) my enemies." I don't remember the actual syllables but the players did have "spell books" that listed spells they knew would produce specific results. And they reversed engineered most of the words and enough of the grammar to do ad hoc spells.

This would never work at say a convention. The DM must know the players well enough to know how they evaluate risk.

I'm glad you enjoyed it, [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION]. I enjoyed the walk down memory lane.

I certainly enjoyed playing AD&D like that, in a state of idyllic prelapsarian ignorance. For a while, at least. I'm not sure I would feel the same way about more technical games...

I do feel that that the rules often act as an undesirable-but-often-neccessary filter between me and a game's given fiction. The weigh on my decisions in-character. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's not.

My first experience with D&D was like that, and it was fun. But I think it is a "right GM, right players" kind of thing.

As others have noted - the hard part is in setting player expectations with respect to the probability of success when they decide what to do. Some games and genres make this easier - if you run an X-Files kind of game, where it is understood that the PCs will basically be normal people, and all the weirdness is on the GM's side, the players know what they are supposed to be able to do. In a superhero game, if you start with origin stories, you can use this to mimic the learning curve of a normal person learning about their ability to perform extraordinary feats, as the character explicitly does not know their limits.

But, if you are playing a game where characters are supposed to be experienced veterans, it gets more difficult to play in this manner.

jmucchiello said:

The magic system was less free form than implied. It had a grammar and vocabulary. Anyone who knew the words and could form a proper sentence could ask the faeries and other beings of power to alter reality. If the faeries liked your pronunciation, (Players did have to speak the spells aloud) the effect would happen. "Osoro gen Gothamr Ra Dal Inf Fir La"might translate (loosely) to "In the name of the great Oroso and lost Gothamr, invoke the element of fire upon (gesture pointing at) my enemies." I don't remember the actual syllables but the players did have "spell books" that listed spells they knew would produce specific results. And they reversed engineered most of the words and enough of the grammar to do ad hoc spells.

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I'm laughing my butt off because I just learned much more about the "why" of magic then my character had during actual play. I didn't know it was faeries, or proper nouns. I mentally just knew them as "power words" - parts I needed to add oomph and magnitude.

Wasn't there also something with positive and negative words that needed to be alternated to keep it in control?

Blue said:

I'm laughing my butt off because I just learned much more about the "why" of magic then my character had during actual play. I didn't know it was faeries, or proper nouns. I mentally just knew them as "power words" - parts I needed to add oomph and magnitude.

Wasn't there also something with positive and negative words that needed to be alternated to keep it in control?

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There multipliers (literally words that meant "times 2") which is how you make a campfire versus a forest fire (or, IIRC, burning down a wheat field to avoid some goblins). The multipliers had to be interspersed among the other words or the sentence wasn't "correct".

I thought I told you guys about the faeries. Invisible faeries were everywhere in the world one could find elements (air, water, earth, fire). You could speak the heart of the spell and the faery would totally understand it. But unless you told the faeries you were working on behest of a known fae lord, they would be fickle about bringing the effects to life. There was even a bit in there about invoking the right lord to more easily empower the spells but we never got that far. And for darker works, the lord wasn't necessarily a fae.

I wish I knew where my notes on this were. I've moved too many times since college. (Folks, this game took place in the very early 90s IIRC.)

Part of my enjoyment from RPGs involves interacting with the mechanics of the game, in addition to character immersion. A game where I didn't know the rules... I think would drive me up a wall - it would be like half the game is missing. And it isn't a trust issue - I've done solo gaming with my wife for 30+ years, and it wouldn't be fun even if she ran it.

Nope. I need to know the player rules at the minimum before I try anything new. Otherwise, it would be like trying to play Chess or Monopoly or Axis & Allies without knowing any of the rules first.

My starting point for this question is this:


Mechanics can take multiple forms (I think this point goes back to Jonathan Tweet in Everway):


If playing without knowledge of the mechanics means lots of "drama" resolution - ie when I say what my PC does, then most of the time that just happens in the fiction - then it's fine although potentially a bit unexciting (the situations have to be pretty evocatively set out by the GM so that it's fun to engage with them knowing how that engaging is all I need to do to have things happen). If I'm meant to be learning the fiction, like the magic system described by [MENTION=20564]Blue[/MENTION] and [MENTION=813]jmucchiello[/MENTION], the GM had better provide me with the chance to learn!

If playing without knowledge of the mechanics means lots of "fortune" resolution but only the GM knows what is going on - only the GM can call for a check, interpret a check, etc - then it's really a form of GM fiat resolution - the mechanics are imposing pretty minimal constraint under these circumstances - with the players along for the ride. The GM better be a good storyteller!

Playing with heavily GM-mediated "karma" resolution makes me think of Amber diceless - I've never played it myself but that is how it looked when I saw others playing it.

There is zero chance that I could immerse myself in a character if I knew much less about how their world worked than I know about how my own world works. The rules in the book are the bare minimum I need before I can make reasonable decisions from the perspective of someone living in that world.

Enevhar Aldarion said:

Nope. I need to know the player rules at the minimum before I try anything new. Otherwise, it would be like trying to play Chess or Monopoly or Axis & Allies without knowing any of the rules first.

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There's a big flaw in this comparison: In Chess, Monopoly or Axis & Allies you are competing against each other and trying to win. If you're approaching an RPG with the same mindset you're doing something wrong.