D&D 5E What's the rush? Has the "here and now" been replaced by the "next level" attitude?

[Majoru Oakheart]

I believe that 'believable' is a very high objective for the most part you never hit. I think you can hit a point where everyone willingly suspends enough disbelief to become immersed in the story, and that's enough.

I'll have to disagree. I've definitely played some games I found believable. There's always going to be moments that bring you out of that, but for the most part it suceeded. Though the difference between believable and enough suspension of disbelief to become immersed in the story are pretty much the same thing in my eyes, so the point is moot.

I disagree. In general, realism is the default assumption - walls are solid, for example. But, this assumption must be backed up mechanically. If your rules say that rock walls are actually tissue paper, then its time to laugh, go out of character and discuss the issue with your PC's, and then repair the damage to the desired reality by getting new rules. Hense, while I expect players to assume stone walls are solid barring any other knowledge to the contrary, the rules will back this up upon inspection. The default way of resolving issues is the rules. The rules model the setting - not 'reality'. The goal is versimlitude, not 'realism'.

Yet detailed rules on these sorts of things are boring and make the game no fun in a lot of cases. I love Champions/Hero System like crazy because it is one of the only games that attempts the "rules for everything" concept. However, my last 2 or 3 attempts to play it as a system have ended the same way: with people bored out of their minds that we have so many rules with so much detail about everything. Most players, I've found, would much rather the DM make a quick decision and get on with the game than rolling hundreds of dice to check for things like penetration and size of the hole created when someone attacks a wall.

Why would you expect players to assume that walls are solid in absence of any other rules? If they aren't meant to model reality then players should expect no such thing. Rock walls made of tissue paper might be normal in this world. The reason they'd expect rock walls to act like rock is because all players assume, in the absence of rules, that the game will model reality. It's ingrained into them. When you say "the walls are made of rock", that means something to people. In fact, it means hundreds of things to people. Words come with baggage and expectations because of our experiences in real life.

When rules disagree with those expectations they cause a disconnect and cause people to laugh as you mention above. Technically, modeling reality creates verisimilitude given that it is a synonym for "realism" and it's definition is "the appearance of being real". People judge how much something has "the appearance of being real" based on how closely it matches their experience of real life.

While the DM could use whatever he wants, in fact, by resolving the situation outside the rules he is now playing the game that Balesir warned against.

Here's kind of the point of what I was trying to say. There's no way entirely around this. You want to minimize it because it's an issue. However, it's impossible for the rules to cover everything, even with a million pages there would still be cases where the DM was making up new rules on the fly in weird corner cases. And that's assuming the game is fun anymore with all those rules.

The key is the need to find a balance between the two extremes. Enough rules that the DM isn't constantly forced to wing it and cause this issue. However, you don't want too many rules that can make simple actions at the table take minutes to resolve.

Plus, a number of times a rule can get in the way of what people expect to see. For instance, if you have a rule that says a stone wall can take 50 damage to get through per inch of thickness and you have a game with a drill designed to drill through stone. It stands to reason that this drill either has to do 50 points of damage or you need a new rule for just this drill. A 50 damage drill might suddenly become the most powerful weapon in the game....on the other hand, if you make up a rule specific to this drill you need to write it down which makes the rules take up more space, makes them harder to understand, remember, and find.

I believe the goal of the game rules should be to apply to the most common scenarios so that the majority of the time you don't need the DM to come up with rules on the fly while still leaving room for the DM to make quick on-the-fly rulings for situations that don't come up that often or don't fit in perfectly with the rules.

If someone fell off the building, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the events can be determined in light of the rules. If someone was murdered using magic, the PC's have a reasonable expectation that the NPC followed the same rules that apply to them. DM impartiality is meaningless if it only applies to the PCs.

Here's where I have to heavily disagree. The vast majority of people will expect that the rules of reality will be applied over the rules in most cases. If I take a bunch of people who have never played D&D before and have them sit down at a table and I say "The man tells you a story about the time he jumped out of a window 10 feet above the ground and landed and rolls then got up and ran down the street", I bet not a single person bats their eyes.

The only time that this discussion comes up at all is with a bunch of really heavily invested hardcore RPG players. They are the ones who will say "He took 1d6 points of damage when he fell so he doesn't have 1 hitpoint. That is for sure or he would have died when he jumped out of the window."

Normal people think "He didn't hurt himself when he jumped out of the window because he landed correctly not to do any damage to his ankle or legs."

I believe it should be an RPGs goal to simulate that second thing so that players don't have to worry about whether the first thing.

No no no no. This is exactly the false expectation Balesir rightly warns against. Reality is not something we all have in common. Reality may be the same but no one of us actually owns reality and knows it, so perforce everyone's perception of reality is different.

True. But it's all we have. Remove reality as a common factor and we have no basis for understanding each other at all other than the rules. It's still impossible for rules to cover everything so in those circumstances that aren't covered by the rules, you're back to having no common factor at all.

Although reality can be heavily based on our perceptions, it is still better than having nothing. If I say "There's a door in the east wall" most people will know what a door is, what a wall is and what east is. Sure, one person might imagine a modern door with a round knob while another imagines a door with no handle at all that you just push to open....However, at least everyone is still thinking of the same general thing. With enough questions and clarity of communication you can bridge that gap. Without falling back on reality, you now have to define what "door" means in your world, what the function of it is, how it works, what properties it has, and so on.

It still comes down to not relying too heavily on the rules and not relying too heavily on the DM. Both of them are flawed and only a careful mix of the two will fix the problems with each.

Won't happen if you have explicit rules for covering jump.

Unless your rules don't cover jumping while in full plate. Doesn't that deserve a modifier of some sort? Sure, the rules cover jumping NORMALLY...but what about wind speed? Certainly that factors in. Add rules for armor modifiers and wind speed and you'll either run into another factor that someone thinks is missing OR you'll run into a situation where your new found rules cause a disconnect that makes people frustrated.

Say that same DM who thinks its impossible for people to jump 10 feet in full plate comes across rules that say you lose 5 feet off your jumping distance for full plate but you can normally jump 30 feet. Now the rules create a disconnect for that DM who doesn't like the fact that the rules let you do obviously impossible things.

Won't happen if fireball explicitly doesn't set objects on fire, thus simplifying the resolution of complex events like burning something down. Simply put, fire doesn't spread unless the rules provide for it. If you want fire to spread in a mechanical way, there has to be a rule. I have no intention of arguing over how fast fire should spread in the setting. If I needed to model it, I'd write rules and then derive average rates of spread of fire in the setting from basic rule principles.

But what if your players complain that the game loses its verisimilitude because it doesn't feel right for fire not to set things on fire? What if they try to set things on fire using a torch?

I'm mostly playing devil's advocate because each DM kind of has to make their own decision on where the line is. Some balance between realism and rules that are easy to resolve and keep track of for the DM is for the best. What that balance is is precisely what causes different playstyles.

Rules. I told Balesir my approach went far beyond what he was suggesting; he evidently didn't believe me. If a player objects to the reality created by the rules, or I find I object to the reality created by a rule, I try to revise it before the next session.

Maintaining a physics textbook isn't practical for most people.

This entire scenario depends on the fact that there are no rules for building bridges. Further more, the scenario plays out badly because no one bothered to stop the DM and say, "How long does my character think it would it take to build a bridge?" or even, "What are the rules for building bridges?" , nor did the DM, upon seeing the player's confusion stop play and say, "In your estimation, you could fix the bridge in an hour." This is therefore only a failure of communication, and one that would be fully expected by me because there were no rules. IF there are no rules for crafting things, you can't expect players to believe that they can do it. If there are no rules you know as a player for crafting things and you think you may need to craft something, to immediately ask what the rules for crafting are would be a very good idea.

In this particular case, it was a 4e Skill Challenge. The DM didn't have any "rules" per se on building bridges. He just suggested that we come with ways our skills would help us build a bridge then roll over the level mandated DC to get one success on the skill challenge. When we got enough successes, we finished building a bridge.

Since he was only concerned about running the skill challenge using the rules in the book as written, he never stopped and considered the scenario in terms of "realism" or "verisimilitude".

We didn't even think to build a bridge at all, since we assumed it was impossible. When we told him that we couldn't come up with any way whatsoever to get the wagons across the chasm he said "Well, guess the adventure is over then unless you think more creatively. Can you think of any way to get across at all? How about this, how do people normally get across chasms? Bridges, right? What are bridges made of? You are in a forest."

We were playing in a Forgotten Realms adventure which means we needed to use the rules from the book with new new rules being made up by the DM. So, we knew there were no rules on building bridges. I admitted that I had no idea how we'd even start building a bridge and he started miming the chopping down of trees.

It doesn't matter what his goal was, he was in fact adversarial and played gotcha. It was his responsbility to convey to you the players something that your players would know, namely that in his world it takes 1 hour to build a bridge over a canyon even if you don't have tools.

I don't believe it is the responsibility of the DM to tell the players everything. The entire point of a challenge is solve it. If I walk up to a chasm and the DM says "So, you need to find a way to the other side. Let me know what your ideas are. Any of them are good. Oh, by the way, you should know that anyone in my world can build a bridge in an hour with their bare hands and can cut down a tree with a sword. So, any ideas?" it seems like the DM is solving all our problems for us. It isn't very fun.

Why does the player have this perception that shooting the rock might cause a cave in and yet this result - this stake on the success if you will - is in doubt? He has this perception because either there are no rules on destroying ceilings or he doesn't know them. Immediately, the DM should be aware that he's about to play 'gotcha' with the player. The player's perception of the world is false, and the DM has a burden to inform the player of the false perception.

The problem is that you might assume there IS no false perception. After all, I think most people would just assume that arrows would hit a solid stone surface and break. However, some people have seen movies or read books where people do some extremely impossible things and won't even stop to think about it, they'll just assume those things are possible. The movie or book made it seem possible.

There aren't rules for most things in most games. There are no actual rules for how to walk without tripping, how to open doors, how to breathe, how to move your arms and so on. I don't assume that every time a player attempts something not covered by the rules that it's suddenly a gotcha. If someone says "I lift my hand in the air and wave at the man" I don't say "You should know that in my game you can lift your hand only as far as your arm reaches and you can only hold it in the air so long before your arm will get tired and you'll need to drop it. I don't want there to be any confusion. In fact, let's update our rules document to reflect that so that we can stay consistent in the future."

If I did that for each time there was no rule for something, I'd be doing nothing but updating the rules and clarifying things. The vast majority of the time we just assume that everyone's experience in real life is about the same and we don't need to explain.

 

[Balesir]

Are you willing to accept that the questions you thought were rhetorical, might not be?

I would be, but since none of the questions I asked were intended to be rhetorical I'm not sure it's relevant.

Because a good and experienced DM should have long ago given up on the idea that anything is obvious.

Impossible. It's possible to be generally aware of the problem, for sure, and to avoid it as much as possible. But things like "we are conversing in English" or "daytime is lighter than nighttime" can be so basic that they will not even be given a thought. There is always something so basic that you don't even consider it, but not basic enough for everybody to agree on it.

Things like "the objective in war is to kill the enemy" and "the objective in a swordfight is to strike with your sword" (both of which are false) tend to be so hard-wired as to be considered unquestionable for many people for a long time. By your own admission it took from the '80s to the '90s for you to "get it". For me the process was gradually happening into the 2000s and is still happening now. If both of us are "idiots" or "noobs" then I despair for those who are actually new to roleplaying.

Unfortunately, some players only experience GMs that blame the players for their own poor commuication skills and badly designed plots filled with leaps of intuition that no one should expect anyone else to make or who actually enjoy screwing with the PCs by forcing the PCs to make uninformed choices.

There are cases of this, I'm certain. But those aren't the cases I'm really talking about. Let's not have it become a strawman, please.

So you start looking for ways to get your game on common ground because its really the informed choices of the players that are interesting. The choice between A and B is only interesting if it reflects an actual choice and not a coin flip. The choice between 'left and right' isn't interesting unless the players know where left and right lead. And one of the key ways to do that is get rid of the idea that your game world is based on 'reality' or your perception of it or that the PC's can be assumed to have the player's knowledge.

I agree with most of this - in fact I think we agree on a lot, judging by what I have read of your posts.

I would add that a "choice" between two options, one of which is quite clearly superior to the other, is not really a choice at all. I suspect you would agree with this (and that it would be reflected in your voluminous house rules, which I am also not talking about, especially since I have no idea what most of them are).

If the GM is going around thinking, "Well, gee, the players should obviously know this..."

If the GM is actually thinking this then the battle is more than half won. All the GM has to do now is remember that "nothing is obvious". The real problem arises, though, when the GM does not spare the situation a thought, because to them the answer is obvious enough that it has no alternative - it is the only thing that the players (or anyone else) could possibly believe/think. Things like "fire needs air" or "things with no legs can't trip" can really be that 'obvious' to many people.

 

[Manbearcat]

However impartial, a DM - like any human being - has a "world view" that describes (models, even) the way that they think of the world as working. It informs how they believe any circumstance arises, how any event works. And these world models all have one important thing in common. They are all wrong.

What does this mean for RPGs? Quite simply that basing "the way the world works" on one person's world model is a problematic way to proceed for two reasons. The first is that the others involved will certainly have different models; one consequence of the "all models are wrong" circumstance is that "no two models are the same". This can lead to "assumption clash" and in extremis can lead to one player having actual experience that demonstrates that the GM's view of "how something would play out" is flawed.

To try to convey something of substance (rather than just laud praises as above), consider the contentious issue of "martial forced movement". I look around and I see a certain cross-section vehemently citing this mechanical archetecture as nonsensical and, as such, breaking of their immersion. Curiously enough, I not only don't perceive it as nonsensical, I find it to be one of the best pieces (perhaps the best) of simulation of the process and outcomes of martial exchanges that we have ever seen in D&D. I've written a considerable bit about this in multiple threads. Due to my background, I have a deeply, deeply informed, high-resolution model of how these exchanges proceed and their outcomes. While it is abstract (and needs to be for table handling), there is no chance that I would be able to be convinced by someone that it is an incoherent model of the component parts of martial exchanges.

This is just a small microcosm of the issue but the vast, sweeping chasm between myself and detractors on this issue is illuminating. It is part and parcel of the issue outlined in your post. I couldn't possibly communicate enough to convey the coherency to a player at the table who doesn't "buy in." Even if I could, the table handling time required would be cost-prohibitive to a functional pacing of a TTRPG. Its better to let them have their working model, I'll have mine and if absolutely necessary (it needn't be), we'll negotiate the space in between the models to come up with a shared imaginary space that is a reasonable accomdoation for the entire table to use as a reference point.

But to demand that they use my model...or that I could make it of a resolution high enough that it could be coherent and sensible when it is so dissonant to them...it just doesn't work out for a TTRPG played in real time.

Again, microcosm. There are dozens of other issues just like this and most of them aren't system or mechanics.

 

[Balesir]

Sure, one person might imagine a modern door with a round knob while another imagines a door with no handle at all that you just push to open....However, at least everyone is still thinking of the same general thing. With enough questions and clarity of communication you can bridge that gap. Without falling back on reality, you now have to define what "door" means in your world, what the function of it is, how it works, what properties it has, and so on.

Thing is, though, all those variations of "door" don't matter. The pictures players have in their heads are bound to differ - but that doesn't matter a jot provided that they are clear on all the mechanical "facts".

A door is blocking terrain unless a Minor Action is used to "open" it. That is all that really matters. It might take damage of some specific types, but only if specifically targetted.

In actual fact, from work I have done in Chemical Industry safety, I can tell you that a fireball will rarely set anything on fire. A sustained flame - that's a very different proposition. But fireballs tend not to.

Unless your rules don't cover jumping while in full plate. Doesn't that deserve a modifier of some sort? Sure, the rules cover jumping NORMALLY...but what about wind speed? Certainly that factors in. Add rules for armor modifiers and wind speed and you'll either run into another factor that someone thinks is missing OR you'll run into a situation where your new found rules cause a disconnect that makes people frustrated.

All those factors matter only if you want them to. If you don't want a slow, clunky game then you don't want them to. A character can jump 2d6+3 feet is a perfectly adequate "jumping" rule. There will never be any requirement to override or change that rule. The only reason is that you (the GM, the group, whoever) want to. In other words, you want the rules to be different. The only reason you need ever have complex, slow rules is because you want them. And if you demand rules that are both realistic to the Nth degree and quick and simple - well, we have a word for folks like that around here...

 

[Balesir]

...consider the contentious issue of "martial forced movement". I look around and I see a certain cross-section vehemently citing this mechanical archetecture as nonsensical and, as such, breaking of their immersion. Curiously enough, I not only don't perceive it as nonsensical, I find it to be one of the best pieces (perhaps the best) of simulation of the process and outcomes of martial exchanges that we have ever seen in D&D.

I agree entirely - and the deeply held vitriol it attracted surprised me no end when it first became an "issue".

In the latest Legends & Lore thread I posted in reply to yet more anger at the idea that mere mundane characters might get others to do things involuntarily in DDN:
"And yet people in the real world do this every day, or the job of "salesman" would not exist. If everything not strictly physical-mechanical is caused by "magic", my conclusion is that I live in a high fantasy world."

Amusingly, it has not even been hinted that this "martial forced movement" will even go beyond such mundanities as pushing and pulling...

 

[Celebrim]

I'll have to disagree. I've definitely played some games I found believable. There's always going to be moments that bring you out of that, but for the most part it suceeded. Though the difference between believable and enough suspension of disbelief to become immersed in the story are pretty much the same thing in my eyes, so the point is moot.

I agree. If you define believable as 'for the most part believable', then yes, we are on pretty much the same page. This is however possibly going to matter later...

Yet detailed rules on these sorts of things are boring and make the game no fun in a lot of cases. I love Champions/Hero System like crazy because it is one of the only games that attempts the "rules for everything" concept. However, my last 2 or 3 attempts to play it as a system have ended the same way: with people bored out of their minds that we have so many rules with so much detail about everything.

This is a problem with a particular kind of universal rules, and not applicable to rules generally. It is however getting to the heart of the problem.

It's easy to come up with a simple, fast, universal rules system. Celebrim's famous Universal Rule System, has one resolution mechanic, which is:

1) Any time a player proposes something, flip a coin. If the coin flip comes up heads, the proposition suceeds. Otherwise, the proposition fails.

Now, this is a system that doesn't get bogged down into details! How does it fail? Precisely because it probably doesn't model the reality that people want. It's just as easy - or as hard - to jump the Atlantic Ocean as a puddle. It's precisely because players are expecting 'realism' of some sort, that the rules start to get complicated.

Most players, I've found, would much rather the DM make a quick decision and get on with the game than rolling hundreds of dice to check for things like penetration and size of the hole created when someone attacks a wall.

Again, this is a feature of a particular type of rules set and not of one generally. But, in general, for the attacking the wall case I find you are wrong. I didn't bring up hardness of walls for nothing.

Why would you expect players to assume that walls are solid in absence of any other rules? If they aren't meant to model reality then players should expect no such thing.

Agree. And here is the thing - you have to expect that the rules don't model reality. They only model the game. If you make the mistake of thinking the rules model reality, you are going to have problems.

Rock walls made of tissue paper might be normal in this world.

In fact, in RAW D&D they are normal. This doesn't normally come up, because players normally make the mistake of thinking that the rules model reality, and not the game so they don't even try to smash down walls. And DMs, blind to the reality of their game because they also believe the rules model reality, don't inspect them.

Right until they try do something like throw a naked PC into a room with stone walls, and it suddenly clicks in the PCs head that the reality is that he's imprisoned in walls of thick tissue paper. So he proposes to the DM, "I start punching the wall."

DM:"What??? You hurt your hand. Your knuckles are bloody and nothing happens to the wall.
PC: I'm a 12th level barbarian with 26 strength and DR 2/-. I do minimum 10 damage on a punch. Stone walls only have 8 hardness, so even with a minimum punch I should be doing 2 damage to the wall. Stone walls only have 100 hit points per 10'x10'x1' section, and I can punch 3 times per round. So I should be smashing a hole in the wall 10' high, 10' wide and 1' deep about every minute.
DM: What??? That's not realistic.
PC: It's the rules. Besides, it may not be realistic for you or me to punch through walls, but this is Grog we are talking about. Stone walls cannot hold him!
DM: Look, eventually even if you could punch stone you'd hurt your hand.
PC: Where in the rules does it say weapons take damage when they strike targets? Every sword we've got would be broken if that was the case. And why don't monsters take damage when they do slam attacks?
DM: Alright, but the stone you are tunneling through is 100' thick!
PC: Ok, so it takes me about an hour and a half to clear through it. Let's call it three hours to account for me moving the rubble behind me in the tunnel.

And so forth. Pretty soon DMs are yelling rules lawyers and pretending this the fault of the player for not listening to reason. But reason here is actually 'read the DM'.

The reason they'd expect rock walls to act like rock is because all players assume, in the absence of rules, that the game will model reality. It's ingrained into them. When you say "the walls are made of rock", that means something to people. In fact, it means hundreds of things to people. Words come with baggage and expectations because of our experiences in real life.

Sure, but if your rules dont' model those expectations, then its not the players fault. And if your rules don't model those expectations, then its important that the players learn that, because they probably have some mixed up DM that will insist on the rules some of the time and on reality some of the time, and they'll just have to read his @$#@#$# mind.

Here's kind of the point of what I was trying to say. There's no way entirely around this. You want to minimize it because it's an issue. However, it's impossible for the rules to cover everything...

I think I just proved that wasn't true.

... even with a million pages there would still be cases where the DM was making up new rules on the fly in weird corner cases.

Only if you insist on modeling reality rather than the game.

The key is the need to find a balance between the two extremes. Enough rules that the DM isn't constantly forced to wing it and cause this issue. However, you don't want too many rules that can make simple actions at the table take minutes to resolve.

I agree, but this has nothing to do with whether you are making your players read you rather than the game.

Plus, a number of times a rule can get in the way of what people expect to see.

Aha! So now we get to the heart of the matter.

For instance, if you have a rule that says a stone wall can take 50 damage to get through per inch of thickness and you have a game with a drill designed to drill through stone. It stands to reason that this drill either has to do 50 points of damage or you need a new rule for just this drill. A 50 damage drill might suddenly become the most powerful weapon in the game....

Only if you are bad at writing rules. You are right though, you will need a new rule for the class of objects that are 'drills'.
So you have a note, explicit or implicit, "This drill is a drill (ignores the hardness of stone objects)". Now, the drill is useful, even if it only does 1 damage per minute, and is never the most powerful weapon in the game. Maybe just as importantly, the drill works more or less like people would reasonably expect drills to work, so even if the player doesn't know the rules - and more importantly if the player does know the rule(!!) - the game keeps working in a way that makes sense.

on the other hand, if you make up a rule specific to this drill you need to write it down which makes the rules take up more space, makes them harder to understand, remember, and find.

Sure, but how often are you looking up the rules for drills anyway?

I believe the goal of the game rules should be to apply to the most common scenarios so that the majority of the time you don't need the DM to come up with rules on the fly while still leaving room for the DM to make quick on-the-fly rulings for situations that don't come up that often or don't fit in perfectly with the rules.

Agreed, but this doesn't require you to 'read the DM'

Here's where I have to heavily disagree. The vast majority of people will expect that the rules of reality will be applied over the rules in most cases. If I take a bunch of people who have never played D&D before and have them sit down at a table and I say "The man tells you a story about the time he jumped out of a window 10 feet above the ground and landed and rolls then got up and ran down the street", I bet not a single person bats their eyes.

No, they won't. But, its worth noting that the D20 rules even RAW have at least that level of casual realism anyway. What's important here though is that the players know the rules for falling. If the players see a character jump 100' out of the window, roll and run away, they are going to assume one of several things: a) falling in this world doesn't hurt much, or b) falling hurts but that was some sort of superhero or c) the DM cheated to protect an NPC. Only the rules provide clarification. Imagine a situation where the player jumps off the ledge after the character 100' below, reasoning that as he has 70 hit points, he's likely to survive the fall. Several things may happen. One, the DM may balk at the players and tell him, "No. It's a 100' fall, it's not realistic that you'd jump off expecting to survive." Or, the DM may go, "Ok, you take 10d100 damage... that's 352... you're dead." Or the DM may accept that is precisely what players are supposed to do given that they are superheroes and falling doesn't hurt much in this world. Or the DM may go, "I need new rules for falling." Some of these responses are disfunctional.

I believe it should be an RPGs goal to simulate that second thing so that players don't have to worry about whether the first thing.

In general I agree. The important point though is that the RPG never simulates reality. You have to give up at some point.

Some people on the boards complain about me having a 534 page house rules document. I tell them that I have far fewer house rules than they probably do. Their house rules are called 'reality', and they are undocumented and unknowable. Despite this, they complain about the players not knowing them.

True. But it's all we have. Remove reality as a common factor and we have no basis for understanding each other at all other than the rules.

What's wrong with that?

It's still impossible for rules to cover everything so in those circumstances that aren't covered by the rules, you're back to having no common factor at all.

They can cover enough. And if you really care about completeness, you can cover the edge cases with a common universal rule, such as the coin flip.

If I say "There's a door in the east wall" most people will know what a door is, what a wall is and what east is. Sure, one person might imagine a modern door with a round knob while another imagines a door with no handle at all that you just push to open....However, at least everyone is still thinking of the same general thing. With enough questions and clarity of communication you can bridge that gap. Without falling back on reality, you now have to define what "door" means in your world, what the function of it is, how it works, what properties it has, and so on.

Flavor perceptions are a different problem than mechanical perceptions. You are quite right though about the mechanics of doors. It's worth noting that the SRD pretty much does exactly that.

Unless your rules don't cover jumping while in full plate. Doesn't that deserve a modifier of some sort?

Not if it isn't in the rules. Again, there is a reason behind the Armor Check Penalty, and it is precisely that 1e didn't cover it and so people would argue (arugably correctly) that it didn't matter what they were wearing.

Sure, the rules cover jumping NORMALLY...but what about wind speed?

Circumstance modifier. This is a rule specific to the situation. As such, you inform the player in the scenario that the high wind may make jumping difficult against the wind before he jumps, and probably just tell him what the modifier is, or else you are playing "gotcha". If it comes up often, it better be added to your rules governing the behavior of wind, and in any event, even if you don't formalize it, it will come up again when the player says, "Don't I get a circumstance modifier for jumping with the wind." That's why there is no difference between a rule and a ruling.

Say that same DM who thinks its impossible for people to jump 10 feet in full plate comes across rules that say you lose 5 feet off your jumping distance for full plate but you can normally jump 30 feet. Now the rules create a disconnect for that DM who doesn't like the fact that the rules let you do obviously impossible things.

That's why DMs are empowered to change the rules. In point of fact, all of them do. Some of them are just more honest about it than others.

But what if your players complain that the game loses its verisimilitude because it doesn't feel right for fire not to set things on fire? What if they try to set things on fire using a torch?

We discuss how we think the rules should work.

Maintaining a physics textbook isn't practical for most people.

Or a game. But we aren't trying to model reality, just the game. The game doesn't work according to physics.

In this particular case, it was a 4e Skill Challenge.

Enough said.

We didn't even think to build a bridge at all, since we assumed it was impossible. When we told him that we couldn't come up with any way whatsoever to get the wagons across the chasm he said "Well, guess the adventure is over then unless you think more creatively. Can you think of any way to get across at all? How about this, how do people normally get across chasms? Bridges, right? What are bridges made of? You are in a forest."

We were playing in a Forgotten Realms adventure which means we needed to use the rules from the book with new new rules being made up by the DM. So, we knew there were no rules on building bridges. I admitted that I had no idea how we'd even start building a bridge and he started miming the chopping down of trees.

LOL. I'll try to refrain from making jokes about 4e DM's.

I don't believe it is the responsibility of the DM to tell the players everything. The entire point of a challenge is solve it. If I walk up to a chasm and the DM says "So, you need to find a way to the other side. Let me know what your ideas are. Any of them are good. Oh, by the way, you should know that anyone in my world can build a bridge in an hour with their bare hands and can cut down a tree with a sword. So, any ideas?" it seems like the DM is solving all our problems for us. It isn't very fun.

Well, it wasn't necessarily a good scenario and it was very unartfully arranged. Even if you had figured out that you could build a bridge, then what? Would resolving 'building a bridge' necessarily been very fun? A good DM would have provided 3 clues regarding how the scenario could be resolved. Imagine the scenario as a text based adventure or an adventure game. You can't expect the player to come to the bridge and type, "Build bridge". The setting should subtly suggest the idea that you could build a bridge, and guide the players toward that conclusion. The chasm should also probably have about 3 ways to resolve, in case building a bridge either doesn't occur to the players, is dismissed as a bad idea, or they push forward on a different idea before even considering it. At the very least, you better be prepared for resolving some obvious alternatives - they decide to ride around the chasm, they try to glide over it, etc.

The problem is that you might assume there IS no false perception. After all, I think most people would just assume that arrows would hit a solid stone surface and break. However, some people have seen movies or read books where people do some extremely impossible things and won't even stop to think about it, they'll just assume those things are possible. The movie or book made it seem possible.

So? Again, it is the responcibility of the DM to interpose here and set some expectations as artfully as possible, regardless. Any player that doesn't know the rules and hasn't tried to acquire information about the setting has to be assumed to have false perceptions.

There aren't rules for most things in most games. There are no actual rules for how to walk without tripping...

In mine their are...

...how to open doors, how to breathe, how to move your arms and so on.

Even the SRD covers the basics of this stuff.

I don't assume that every time a player attempts something not covered by the rules that it's suddenly a gotcha. If someone says "I lift my hand in the air and wave at the man" I don't say "You should know that in my game you can lift your hand only as far as your arm reaches and you can only hold it in the air so long before your arm will get tired and you'll need to drop it. I don't want there to be any confusion. In fact, let's update our rules document to reflect that so that we can stay consistent in the future."

None of those things seem to have came up in the scenario your player proposed. There is no sign of a false perception here, nor any sign of a rule creating an undesirable result. Now, if in your game world, you only waved at dogs or slaves and this would have been a mortal insult, then you better either pause and explain that isn't how greetings are done or make them make some sort of Knowledge check to see if the character knows that. Otherwise, this is a Nitro Ferguson world.

The vast majority of the time we just assume that everyone's experience in real life is about the same and we don't need to explain.

Ok sure, but then you have to accept a lot of DM reading as being inherently part of the game. Also, unless you are playing with a lot of people with common real life experiences, you'll probably be wrong.

 

[Balesir]

Some people on the boards complain about me having a 534 page house rules document. I tell them that I have far fewer house rules than they probably do. Their house rules are called 'reality', and they are undocumented and unknowable. Despite this, they complain about the players not knowing them.

Lots and lots of good stuff in this post, even though I would say that one of the best things about 4E in my view is that I need only limited house rules.

Enough said.

LOL. I'll try to refrain from making jokes about 4e DM's.

And here I think Celebrim is being unkind (by his own measure) to the 4E Skill Challenge rules. The problem with the scenario presented appears to me to be that the DM did not actually engage the rules.

Assuming that the DM had set this as a Skill Challenge, then what that means by the rules is that, in this game world, PCs are capable of bridging a chasm in under an hour by making some skill rolls. That is literally what the rules are saying, here, and, as Celebrim (correctly, in my view) points out, the fact that might not be "realistic" is actually irrelevant.

By not telling the players that they are in a Skill Challenge the DM is witholding important and relevant facts about the rules as they apply to the situation, and thus about the game world. The DM is thus forcing the players to "read the GM" or "guess what the GM wants". This is exactly the sort of issue that I would expect to arise from pretending that the way the rules are being used is "obvious" or that the players "should know this as it's just common sense"...

If the DM had simply used the rules as written then it might not have been believable (jokes about it might well have arisen) and the players might not have had very many interesting choices to make (this being the major flaw with the 4E Skill Challenge as written), but at least the players would have understood what was happening in the game world and how they could proceed.

 

[Hussar]

I'm kinda curious why Celebrim, who is very much a "trust you DM" style DM feels the need of a 500+ page document which outlines additional rules for the table.

After all, if the players actually trusted the DM, why would they need so many rules clarifications?

 

[Hussar]

Going back to the leader of men example Celebrim is right you could handle this in game. Sure.

But now we're back to Mother May I. The DM is completely in control over my concept. When do I get men? How loyal are they? What baggage do they come with? All 100% under the DM.

It might work great. Totally true. Or it might go horribly wrong. Or it might be somewhere in the middle. The funny thing is, if I choose a mechanically supported archetype, I know at the outset what I'm going to get.

Doing it all in game is often much less reliable.

 

[JamesonCourage]

I'm kinda curious why Celebrim, who is very much a "trust you DM" style DM feels the need of a 500+ page document which outlines additional rules for the table.

After all, if the players actually trusted the DM, why would they need so many rules clarifications?

No offense, but what the heck are you implying?

I trust my players, but I did my best to cover as many mechanical situations as I could when I built my RPG. It's not because I don't trust my players, but because I want my players to be able to look over the rules, see how things work, and say "I want to play this type of character, and I know how to do it in this system."

It has nothing to do with trust. It has much more to do with empowerment. My goal was that, for my game, both players and GMs could reliably make decisions during creation (character, creature, location, magical effect, whatever). My players can read my game and say "I know exactly what I want to build, and I know exactly how it'll work. I know what my odds of success are when attempting these actions, and I know what I can do and what I can't."

I didn't make that system because I disliked my players. I made that system because I quite like my players (most of whom I've known for over 10 years as very close friends). I'm sincerely perplexed by what looks like a completely unwarranted attack. What was the point of your post? Was it purely curiosity, or were you trying to play "gotcha, you hypocrite" in another thread? Because if it's the latter, then I'll let you reply to this, but you won't get a response from me. I'm so done with that.