D&D General D&D's Evolution: Rulings, Rules, and "System Matters"

[Aldarc]

I wasn't aware of that, though it doesn't materially change my commentary of how the act of translation affected it.

Your commentary is not really something I particularly want to spend my time arguing against.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Your commentary is not really something I particularly want to spend my time arguing against.

The way you do that is by leaving the thing you don't want to engage with alone. Not alluding to it repeatedly in disdainful tones and putting the burden of disengagement on someone else.

 

[Aldarc]

The way you do that is by leaving the thing you don't want to engage with alone. Not alluding to it repeatedly in disdainful tones and putting the burden of disengagement on someone else.

I feel you are being disproportionately more hostile and disrespectful to me than I believe that my own tone and meaning conveyed.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I feel you are being disproportionately more hostile and disrespectful to me than I believe that my own tone and meaning conveyed.

Ditto, you acted awful when we discussed my experiences with Story Now, though in other interactions you seem fine, and now whenever we happen to intersect over it in other threads including those not about Story Now you disengage, which is fine, but your means of doing so convey a need to get the last word in about how that disengagement should be interpreted. No one is forcing you to debate my thoughts if I happen to spin off you while working through the thread, you don't need to make cryptic allusions to how you see my arguments. I am sorry for the bad blood, because I can see I rubbed you the wrong way too, or maybe made you feel pressured to argue with me? I wasn't trying to pick a fight with you, I'm trying to understand my own experiences in contrast with other cultures of play, which your post helped me crystallize while grappling with the differing styles of narrative source.

 

[clearstream]

As I mentioned above, I'm a fan of rules lite systems, but it's led (for me) to a lot of comparing systems. That is, you start with the ruleset you want, and then you build your setting. Or, you try to match ruleset and setting. So you might start with a ruleset, even 5e, and try to hack it to make it a sci-fi game, or you might pick up Stars Without Number, because it's already a ruleset created for the purpose of running an osr sci fi game.

To me, "play worlds not rules" suggests that you start with the setting/genre, and then you build a ruleset around that as needed. The provocation there, such as it is, is to say that when you do that, actually, you might need a lot fewer rules than you think. As you and others point out, maybe this is only tangentially at best related to Free Kriegspiel wargaming, and if so, fine but I do think the switch in the order of operations (not "ruleset, then setting/genre" but rather "setting/genre, then ruleset) is interesting.

I've skimmed the last few pages, so apologies if I mistake your meaning here. What you describe in your last sentence captures what I have overwhelmingly experienced with rules light games. The setting (or some other premise) comes first. Rules are secondary. I want to caveat here that rules light games are ontologically a patchwork. The motives behind one rules light game may differ wildly from another, and what one such game chooses to codify another might not care about.

I see that as necessarily true because of the role rules play in definition: the fewer rules, the less we can say about what game is being played. Now, one might point to crunch-light / fluff-heavy games. We've already referenced some examples. I think there one is either taking the fluff to be rules, of a sort - play this way - or where the fluff is not taken to have that weight then we are back to what I'm claiming. It might even be that a decent way to analyse rules light games is to understand their use of fluff as crunch. Including fluff in circulation outside the game.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note:

@Aldarc @The-Magic-Sword

I just posted a similar note to this one in another thread. You two seem to butt heads frequently, so perhaps y’all need a vacation from each other. How about using your respective accounts’ ignore feature to not see each other for a while. Like…a month?

Because, while it isn’t happening NOW, if this kind of stuff continues, both of you are on a collision course with the moderation staff.

 

[pemerton]

To me, "play worlds not rules" suggests that you start with the setting/genre, and then you build a ruleset around that as needed. The provocation there, such as it is, is to say that when you do that, actually, you might need a lot fewer rules than you think. As you and others point out, maybe this is only tangentially at best related to Free Kriegspiel wargaming, and if so, fine but I do think the switch in the order of operations (not "ruleset, then setting/genre" but rather "setting/genre, then ruleset) is interesting.

When I see "play worlds, not rules" I think of the blog you pointed me to, which says this:

- You play worlds, not rules. Have you read Brideshead Revisited? The Wizard of Earthsea? Foundation and Empire? Any captivating novel, regardless of timeframe, setting, or genre? Well now you can run a full FKR game based on that book. You don't need an RPG sourcebook because all books are now sourcebooks. All television shows are sourcebooks. All movies and songs and comics and memes and medical brochures are now sourcebooks.​

​

At its heart, FKR suggests that the world is a real place, the players/characters can act in any way which reasonably interacts with the fictional environment, and that narrative concepts reign over and above numbers and abstraction.​

John Ross sums this up wonderfully with the term "Tactical Infinity":

The freedom of the Player Characters to attempt any tactic to solve a problem, subject to the adjudication of the Game Master. ​

And what that quoted passage makes me think of is action resolution based primarily on adjudication of fictional positioning. This is what I take to be intended by the world is a real place [and] the players/characters can act in any way which reasonably interacts with the fictional environment.

Although Brideshead Revisited is mentioned, and that fits withnarrative concepts reign, I would be very interested to see how this is actualised in these systems. Because having regard to (say) Charles's emotional entanglement as part of the process of the GM adjudicating what is reasonable in an argument between Sebastian and Charles seems to me to depart a fair way from free kriegsspiel. The RPG I'm most familiar with that suggests that any novel you're familiar with could be your RPG setting and context is HeroQuest revised (by Robin Laws), but it has very straightforward mechanics for factoring in narrative concepts like emotional entanglements - which it achieves in virtue of not being a free kriegsspiel/"GM decides" RPG.

Even when it comes to The Wizard of Earthsea, there is a lot going on that is not just about the world being real. That book and its sequels are loaded with narrative concepts whose adjudication via free kriegsspiel doesn't seem straightforward to me.

I think the idea of "the world as real" and "reasonable interaction with the fictional environment" fits much more naturally with adjudication via direct reference to fictional positioning. Which makes me think of early D&D, some approaches to Classic Traveller and RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, but nothing too gonzo or drama-laden.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think the notion of neutrality is actually pretty fundamental in analyses of the "GM" role in RPGing. I don't know how common it has been historically, though I would guess that it was more common (at least in proportionate terms) 40 years ago than today.

But conceptually it's been pretty fundamental to understandings of RPGing. And I think it's legacy is felt in many ways even when the reasons underpinning it have been left behind.

I didn't mean the historical presence of neutrality, or the importance of it as a defining element. I agree that the idea has been there all along, and indeed comes from the wargames that predated D&D and other early RPGs.

I think its importance in the actual play of those games is often overstated.

* The setting/situation/scenario is established, and set-in-stone, prior to play;

* Action resolution is (ideally, and hopefully in actuality also) a "model" or reflection of how things would really unfold were these events really happening;

* The influence of the players' desires on action resolution is fully exhausted once the PC's action has been declared (and hence can be disregarded by the referee, provided the action declaration has been properly interpreted);

* The influence of the players' desires on setting and situation design does not extend beyond informally telling the referee what sort of stuff might be fun (and for the truly austere even that might be stretching things, because it risks the players recognising the influence of their expressed desires on the fiction as they engage that fiction via their PCs).

This a solid summary. I think that liberties were taken with all of them at different points very early on in the hobby. And all but the most strident of neutral-GM proponents often cherry pick how to apply them.

But I think why I'm kind of challenging the idea of a neutral referee in this regard is more about the quality of the game. I want a GM who is invested in what's happening and who wants play to, if not go a specific way in terms of the outcome of events within the fiction, to go well. They do have expectations about how things go.

It's not about making sure the PCs are able to kill Acererak, or making sure they discover the fate of the Carlyle Expedition or what have you, but that the players are engaged and interested in the scenario. A neutral referee wouldn't really care.

And I think most people would likely agree, even if they'd also agree with your listed points.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

not about making sure the PCs are able to kill Acererak, or making sure they discover the fate of the Carlyle Expedition or what have you, but that the players are engaged and interested in the scenario. A neutral referee wouldn't really care.

On this one specific point, I would have to disagree.

If you look at (for example) the 1e DMG, you will see that it is written from the perspective of keeping players engaged. See, e.g., pp. 86-87.

It's not correct to say that neutral referee in the 0e-1e mode doesn't care if the players are engaged, or having fun, or any of that! They certainly do! Instead, it's correct to say that they have designed things to engage the players, but that they are running the world (monsters, NPCs, etc.) in a neutral manner. The set-up (scenario) should be engaging, but they should not be intervening to make it more, or less, interesting.

Again, given the history of concepts like "fudging," I think you can argue that this was not always practiced, but even in its ideal and platonic form, I don't think its fair to say that they don't care if they players are engaged and interested.

 

[hawkeyefan]

On this one specific point, I would have to disagree.

If you look at (for example) the 1e DMG, you will see that it is written from the perspective of keeping players engaged. See, e.g., pp. 86-87.

It's not correct to say that neutral referee in the 0e-1e mode doesn't care if the players are engaged, or having fun, or any of that! They certainly do! Instead, it's correct to say that they have designed things to engage the players, but that they are running the world (monsters, NPCs, etc.) in a neutral manner. The set-up (scenario) should be engaging, but they should not be intervening to make it more, or less, interesting.

Again, given the history of concepts like "fudging," I think you can argue that this was not always practiced, but even in its ideal and platonic form, I don't think its fair to say that they don't care if they players are engaged and interested.

I see this kind of sentiment expressed very often, actually. Not universally by any means, but often enough that it would seem to be how many interpret it.

Broadly speaking, I prefer when the GM has designed scenarios without that sense of neutrality as is assumed with the old school modules and similar. Here's the Keep on the Borderlands, plug in party A or party B, and see how it goes. I prefer a GM who is thinking of party A when he designs the scenario.

This is what I have in mind when I'm talking about this. Although I can understand the appeal of a set scenario and seeing how different groups may handle it, and the shared experience that creates across the hobby....it's not generally something that any individual GM or group needs to worry about all that much.

I do find that many GMs that I've played with, and that I've chatted with here, seem to routinely eschew neutrality in this regard, as well as in other ways, such as fudging and curating experience and the like.