"Stumbling Around in My Head" - The Feeling of Dissociation as a Player

[Neonchameleon]

Er, I'd be more amenable to this argument if an EN World post by Rodney Thompson hadn't been used in the "Changes in Interpretation" thread as an authoritative source to clarify a point of 4e's rules. A column by one of the game's authors, on the official website, titled "Rules of the Game", and without any preamble such as "this is how I play it", but presented as an authoritative examination of the rules deserves to be treated as more than "a house rule". Claim it changed the rules, if you like, but we don't get to just write it off as a house rule. Would a 4e rules clarification by Keith Baker on "Rule of Three" be considered "just a house rule"? I doubt it.

Apples to oranges if this is about what I think it is.

The argument about 4e and skill challenges was asking what the rules actually said - and in no way did Thompson contradict the rules. But the rules in the DMG1 were illustrated in a way that could easily be read in a misleading manner.

Skip, however, flat out adds rules that are nowhere presented in either 3.0 or 3.5. If the 4e team made a 'clarification' of that magnitude they would have the decency to release it with official errata. (It's worth pointing out at this point that it was a running joke on the Char Op boards that you only knew you were right when you had a CustServ or Sage ruling that disagreed with you).

Skip's column is therefore not a clarification, whatever else it is. It flat out adds properties and rules that are not present in the actual rulebooks of the game. They might have been intended to be there. But when a clarification literally changes the rules it ceases to be a clarification.

 

[S'mon]

While I rarely agree with Skip Williams, was it really the case that 3e entirely lacked an "apply common sense in the interpretation of this rule" clause until he said it was there? 4e does seem to lack a 'common sense' clause, so I felt forced recently to let a PC knock a Titan prone against my better judgement because neither the power nor the stat block said he couldn't. It made the supposedly climactic fight highly bathetic.
But it it wasn't there in 3e I never noticed.

 

[Desdichado]

While I rarely agree with Skip Williams, was it really the case that 3e entirely lacked an "apply common sense in the interpretation of this rule" clause until he said it was there?

Does it really need to?

Any GM who needs that stated or else his game is held hostage by a literal reading of the rules strikes me as too hapless to successfully run a game.

 

[GreyICE]

Does it really need to?

Any GM who needs that stated or else his game is held hostage by a literal reading of the rules strikes me as too hapless to successfully run a game.

Unless that game is 4E, because then the DM can't make judgment calls.

All rules require interpretation. All mechanical descriptions require imagination to adapt to the gameworld. And no ruleset will be comprehensive enough to cover all corner cases. This will never change.

 

[Desdichado]

I agree with the second paragraph. The purpose of your first paragraph, on the other hand, I don't see at all.

 

[mmadsen]

All rules require interpretation. All mechanical descriptions require imagination to adapt to the gameworld. And no ruleset will be comprehensive enough to cover all corner cases. This will never change.

And this is why dissociated mechanics are so maddening.

 

[LostSoul]

And this is why dissociated mechanics are so maddening.

I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Can you expand on it?

 

[LostSoul]

While I rarely agree with Skip Williams, was it really the case that 3e entirely lacked an "apply common sense in the interpretation of this rule" clause until he said it was there?

It's covered on page 6 of the 3.5 DMG.

 

[mmadsen]

I'm not sure I follow this line of thinking. Can you expand on it?

As GreyICE noted, all rules require interpretation, because no rule set can be truly complete. Dissociated mechanics are so maddening because, by definition, the rules are divorced from what's "really" happening in the game world. How do you make a good judgment call about what should happen, when what's happening in the rules seems unrelated to what's happening in the game?

 

[Balesir]

As GreyICE noted, all rules require interpretation, because no rule set can be truly complete. Dissociated mechanics are so maddening because, by definition, the rules are divorced from what's "really" happening in the game world. How do you make a good judgment call about what should happen, when what's happening in the rules seems unrelated to what's happening in the game?

This makes no sense to me, because there is no "what is happening in the game" - it literally doesn't exist. It is imaginary, which means that all that exists are the separate conceptions and models of it that people (players and GMs) hold in their minds. These models and conceptions need to be coordinated sufficiently for descriptions of actions and events based on one conception of the fiction to be intelligible in other conceptions held by other minds. This is a major function of the rules; to explain how events are taken to be resolved such that each model of the fictional reality can be constructed to accomodate those resolutions.

If the rules are "divorced from what's happening in the game world", is this because there is some independent arbiter of what the game world is with which they can disagree, or is it that the players refuse to adapt some part of their world models to accommodate what the rules say about how resolutions will be conducted? I would suggest the latter, since the former is palpably untrue (supposed GM absolutism not withstanding; communicating the entire of a world model sufficiently to allow synchronisation of conceptions would involve the GM communicating the de-facto rules as play progresses - an unrealistic task).

If the players are all fixated upon some fictional elements that don't fit with what the rules say about resolution, then they should change the rules. They should be aware in doing so, however, that the ways that resolutions are made does much to make the process of player decision making an interesting and varied activity - or not, as the case may be.