Legends and Lore - The Temperature of the Rules

[steeldragons]

Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game Official Home Page - Article (The Temperature of the Rules)

DMs need to be able to run the game, but is their right to override the rules "Plan B" or "Plan A"? Is DM adjudication breaking the rules, or is it in fact the rule itself?

What are your thoughts on the matter?

Call me Goldilocks.

I don't want my rules too hot (so loose/undefined that I don't have some point of reference to look up for a particular situation, if I need one) or too cold (so rigid that my players feel "jilted" if I can change anything). I want rules that are juuust right.

To the above quote, I would say the latter. Adjudication IS the rule of/for the DM. It is what the DM is there for. Whether a particular DM makes that Path A or Path B is a matter of personal preference and playstyle...hopefully with the intent to do whatever makes the most fun for the table. Which letter Plan it may be, it is still (as I've seen it called here often) "Rule 0".

If a DM just created a world or storyline or threw a pre-made adventure on the table and said "Go!" to the players...to follow whatever the rule books say...there really is no need for a DM. Do what the books say. Read the text. Roll the dice. Move your pieces X places. You [the players] "win" or you "lose."

That, to my mind, is not an RPG. A war game, perhaps. A boardgame, certainly. A videogame, sure. Not an RP game.

It goes back to the dawning of Dungeons & Dragons. From Moldvay's quote that "Dungeons and Dragons doesn't have rules, just rule suggestions" to Gary Gygax's assertions in several texts (though a particular reference doesn't come to mind...I'm pretty sure it's somewhere in the 1e DMG at least once) that the role of the DM is to adjudicate and use the rules as they see fit and necessary, again, to create a FUN gaming experience for the players (and themselves).

Did this leave the door open for DMs to "take advantage"? Absolutely. Did it leave room for even the "best" DMs with the best intentions to make a "bad/unfun" ruling? Of course it did. We are humans playing this game, after all. You live, you play, you learn.

But the DM was never once told "These are the rules. You cannot change this! If you do, you're doing it wrong!"

The beginning adventures of the genre were FILLED with traps, spell effects, situations and scenarios that did not follow (or simply did not have) rules in the book or, at least, did not follow the rules as set down for players to use. They were made up, for that particular instance, to generate a creative/deadly/interesting/challenging scenario for the game. But you couldn't look into the rule books to find out "How do I go about creating a big devil face that will utterly destroy beyond redemption anything that passes through it?"

"Well it's not in here, so guess I can't do it." OR "AH! There is it. Page 254." No.

It wasn't in the rules. It simply wasn't necessary. D&D was, again as stated many places in the original texts, a game of creativity and imagination. Not a game of stats and figures and immobile rules...It is a game of Fantasy Role-Playing...or, at least, it was. Can you RP with lots of rules that are unalterable? Sure. I guess you can. But did/should you have to? If it didn't make things fun for your table, absolutely not!

The DM has/is given by their very position a responsibility (to themselves and their players) to utilize the rules...as makes sense...enough to maintain the structure of the game...Where "game"=whatever it has to to be FUN for the table...and to alter the rules, as necessary, for the same end.

So...there's my thoughts on that. If you'll excuse me, I'm going to enjoy my "just right" porridge now.
--Steel "Goldi" Dragons

 

[LurkAway]

And D&D has never really been a strong system for simulationist-immersionist, has it? Ars Magica, Pendragon, Runequest etc seem to do that much better.

Maybe/probably, but when I got into the hobby at a young age, I didn't have friends who played alternative systems. Everyone I knew played D&D. And I was loyal to the D&D brand (I suppose I assumed it was the best system because it was the most popular).

Although there were definitely gamist elements from the beginning (monsters that sat passively in empty rooms, the correlation of dungeon levels to monster strength, etc.), I felt the game was flexible enough to allow players to be engaged inside the story. As a kid, I remember some scenes where I was literally scared as if I was trapped in a dungeon room and didn't know what to do. Maybe kids and teens today feel that with 4E, feeling like they're in the story instead of outside looking in, I don't know.

But I think WotC is in a hard place. If they head back towards Gygaxian gamism with a strong simulationist chassis they'll have to compete with Pathfinder. If they stick with indie-influenced 4e-ish design they'll keep getting hammered by ex-fans.

I'd guess that WoTC will probably put their eggs in one basket, but if I was in their marketing department, ignorant of the crunchy game design challenges and just thinking theoretically, I'd suggest a dual approach:

D&D Legends
- core game
- a streamlined 4.75E
- default campaign setting like FR
- gamist/tactical/narrativist playstyle
- rules are codified by default for tight optimal focus on playstyle

D&D Lore
- mature/advanced DM/players
- a streamlined 3.75E/OSD hybrid
- default campaign setting like Greyhawk
- simulationist/immersionist or TOH-thief-on-a-rope playstyle
- sandbox/exploration-based, flexible class generation
- rules are guidelines by default

Tying the ruleset to a campaign setting is an acknowledgement that a) there are no "best" rules, just optimal rules for a certain narrative feel and fictional tropes, b) unlike a generic RPG, many D&D rules are interweaved with fiction and inform the flavor of the campaign setting and can't be cleanly disjoined. You could still swap campaign settings, of course, but Ravenloft under D&D Legends would play rather differently than Ravenloft under D&D Lore.

I lumped simulationist/immersionist and TOH-thief-on-a-rope (is there a better term?) playstyle together, because I think they are compatible. That is, if you play simulationist-immersionist, you won't choose to jump off a 100' cliff, even if you know you'll survive, but you need to know that you could jump off the cliff if you needed to and there isn't some gamist codified insulation that hinders you from doing so.

There are many different opinions out there, so I don't know if that dual approach ties them together, but I think it's worth exploring when you're between a rock and a hard place.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=6685059]LurkAway[/MENTION], why would any 3.x/PF player switch to "D&D Lore"?

(I also find it interesting that you characterise D&D Lore as more mature/advanced. The self-conception of most indie-style gamers is that they are more mature/advanced. Which is not to say that anyone's self-conception is true, of course.)

 

[LurkAway]

[MENTION=6685059]LurkAway[/MENTION] , why would any 3.x/PF player switch to "D&D Lore"?

More streamlined. If possible, complexity without being complicated.

(I also find it interesting that you characterise D&D Lore as more mature/advanced. The self-conception of most indie-style gamers is that they are more mature/advanced. Which is not to say that anyone's self-conception is true, of course.)

Because of the range of emotions that I see in the hobby, like on rpg.net, posters literally swearing (I acknowledge some people are less civil on the Internet). I think it helps to have a certain amount of roleplaying experience and emotional maturity to deal with flexible rules system that requires messy human adjudication and resolving disagreements about how the rule should work. I didn't meant to imply that the "D&D Lore" rules system would be more advanced or evolved.

 

[steenan]

For me, both the article and the questions under it are meaningless. They lack a crucial part of context.

How I approach rules and how I expect the GM to interact with them depends on what the rules represent and what they do.

If the rules describe in-game actions and their results, they will never be complete. Allowing the GM to use his own judgement instead of the letter of the rules is the only approach that works - the alternatives being super-heavy ruleset with detailed rules for every situation (unusable in practice) or enforcing rules even if the results are absurd in fiction.

On the other hand, if the rules are abstract and metagame, they may be strict without violating consistency of fiction. They should be - because there is nothing else that players and GMs may base their judgement on. The in-game events may be shaped according to genre conventions and common sense and the system guides the flow of game on higher level.

In other words, the more the system tries to model and simulate the game world, the more flexible it has to be and the more it must leave to GM adjudication. The further it moves from simulation into abstraction, the easier it is to use it as written without creating absurd results in fiction, allowing for more defined mechanics.

 

[pemerton]

[MENTION=23240]steenan[/MENTION], my browser is having trouble getting the XP function to work, but your post sums up better than I've been able to what I've been trying to get across in this thread.

At least to me, Monte Cook appears to assume, without any analysis, that the rules of the game are about describing in-game actions and their results (purist-for-system simulationism). Which I feel bodes ill for the direction of 4e, which I think is best conceived of as a system of rules that are "abstract and metagame [with] in-game events shaped according to genre conventions and common sense".

Anyway, great post!

 

[pemerton]

double post

 

[pemerton]

triple post (very embarassing!)

 

[SkidAce]

By "situation based, player driven game" I mean the general indie RPG approach: the players build PCs with hooks built into them; the GM, instead of building encounters that are intended to hook essentially story-less PCs, builds encounters that suit the hooks the players have built into their PCs; the players engage those encounters via their PCs; the fiction that results from that engagement then changes the PCs' hooks; new encounters are built by the GM around those new hooks; etc, etc.

Why is this considered "indie"? IME this is the way it started when we learned to play...OD&D, AD&D....

I know play experience is anecdotal, but I've been playing in and around the military (DM mostly) for 26 years and met a lot of other groups...what you call "indie" I called "standard"

Not adding to the debate, just curious about YOUR viewpoint on this part of your conversation.

 

[billd91]

Why is this considered "indie"? IME this is the way it started when we learned to play...OD&D, AD&D....

I know play experience is anecdotal, but I've been playing in and around the military (DM mostly) for 26 years and met a lot of other groups...what you call "indie" I called "standard"

Not adding to the debate, just curious about YOUR viewpoint on this part of your conversation.

I'm not sure of the indie label either with respect to particular styles of play. I don't see a direct correlation between play styles and whether or not a game is made by industry leaders vs independents.