D&D 5E Roleplaying in D&D 5E: It’s How You Play the Game

[clearstream]

I don't think Vincent Baker's analysis is very fuzzy. I think it's pretty clear.

I just played a little wargame with my daughter. Our formations "attacked" one another. I can't recall if we said the words My formation attacks yours but we could have. But that would all be cubes-to-cubes, because the wargame has no fiction beyond flavour text in the same fashion as M:tG, Monopoly, etc.

In D&D play, when a player says I attack X, is that a change to the fiction? Or just a manipulation of cues? There is no general answer. Sometimes it's one, sometimes another. You need to be in the room, at the table, looking at the play to see what was going on.

Baker, in his example (which is, after all, his stipulation), Baker is stipulating that a player has changed the fiction such that your character attacks mine (see step 2 of resolution system #1). But suppose at a table a player picks up their token and moves it on a battle map and knocks another token while saying "I attack!" That is a manipulation of the cues, which then generates a leftward arrow (in the fiction, the character has moved and attacked someone) which then in turn generates a rightward arrow.

There is no "test" here, consistent or otherwise, beyond examining what the participants actually do, and then seeing how the procedures/system they are using generate arrows between fiction and fiction, between fiction and cues (left or right), or between cues and cues.

As you say, in many examples it is easy to see that it could go either way. Moving to higher ground could be purely on the game side: I move my figure the allowed number of grid squares to a square designated as high ground. Or it can be in fiction. You have taken fuzzy not as I meant it.

By test I mean some method of predicting if a case is going to be one or the other. It has been occasionally suggested that if it is in mind then it is fiction. It shouldn't matter what the cues are made of! I think fiction appeals to the limitless space of possibilities that aren't able to be crystallised in game. But that's not quite right either: the set boundaries are fuzzy.

 

[clearstream]

Oh, hey, my bad for admitting I had it wrong but not being 100% correct, especially to someone that was equally wrong at the time. Weird, though, that the response is to try to take the high ground on absolute correctness. You can have it, I was still less precise than possible in my voluntary admission of error. This is absolutely a good look to jump with both feet on!

I'm not criticizing your call for there being a better call. I'm saying that the entire play doesn't align to how DW is intended to be played. It's like if, in 5e, someone tells you that they made one character roll a climb check to go up some normal stairs, and when they failed, you had their character trip and die, and that this is how 5e tells you it's supposed to work. Meanwhile, in a combat for 1st level characters against Orcus, you told the player to flip a coin, and they got heads, so that means Orcus got his head chopped off, just like the rules say!

You're describing perfectly fine play -- I've said the many times -- just not DW play as it's intended. You can 100% do this -- the call is just fine for your table and you had fun. But the entire scene is not how DW is intended to play.

I'm not nitpicking, and, yes, I am absolutely trying to undermine your input into the ongoing debate! I disagree with your position, and I disagree with many of the assumptions and premises that undergird it. I am arguing against these with the intent to undermine them. This is normal for argument and discussion!

I mentioned that you're looking at play from a very narrow perspective, where the GM is the only source of story. You've countered, and part of that counter is calling on experience with DW as a story-game to show you have experience. I'm pointing out that the game you're playing isn't how DW plays, exactly for the intent to show that your claims using that as support are not well supported. This is, 100%, my intent here!

What isn't my intent is to suggest that you have to change how you play or suggest that it is wrong to play that way. It's not. Have fun! I will pushback when that kind of play is presented as intended by DW, because it isn't. Perfectly fine otherwise.

And I will also take high offense to the unfounded accusation that I have suspect motives. Or that whatever you've gleaned from streamed sessions (and I addressed this issue upthread to no remarks) marks your approach as intended. If you'd like to revisit why streamed story-now games are unlikely to be revelatory of play, I can do that. You can even ask some people that have been invited to watch some of the games I'm in -- when this happens, we take moments to stop and explain what's happening in play because it's otherwise not very obvious. If you're expecting prep, you'll imagine prep happens and that the GM is guiding the game along their prep. But that's not what's happening at all.

EDITED Why don't we drop this one, at least until it comes to substantially matter to a future claim?

You don't think I run or understand DW as intended. But then, you have not been in the room when we play. As much as you believe that I can't learn about the game from reading the rules and viewing actual play, I believe your doubts are based on limited evidence and motivated assumptions. You will hopefully understand that it doesn't seem to me that you know DW well enough to appoint yourself arbiter of claims.

We are both at a point where we feel offended, and I can tell you being dog-piled exacerbates that! Surely stoking those feelings will do more harm to understanding than might be gained?

I promptly acknowledged my mistake on 7-9, as did you. How about we park this until a later claim depends on unpacking it?

EDITED

 

[pemerton]

Yes it does. Where each arrow represents a causality step:

Change in fiction --> change in tracked mechanical info --> physical act by player (writing stats).

So ultimately the fiction does cause the physical change on a one-thing-leads-to-another basis.

Which conveniently completely ignores the shared fiction all this is supposed to be abstracting.

But if one takes the stance that everything flows from the fiction then one could argue that nearly all the above actions are ultimately caused by events in the fiction. In the fiction your PC decides to attack an Orc; this causes some dice to be rolled at the table. Etc.

This is all fog.

I've played a lot of D&D. I don't need to make reference to the shared fiction in order to determine whether or not an attack roll is successful, hence to determine whether or not a damage roll is required, hence to apply the result of that roll to a hit point tally.

There can be epiphenomenal leftward arrows if a table likes - that is to say, participants can narrate stuff about the fiction in response to those various dice rolls. @clearstream gave some examples. So did @Ovinomancer. But none of those matter to resolution - eg whether we narrate the hit to the Orc as the Orc reeling, or the Orc parrying, or the Orc taking a cut to the forearm, or anything else, nothing about the resolution process changes.

It baffles me that this point even needs to be made. Gygax was aware of it - he argues against the use of rightward arrows in this very context, in his DMG (p 61):

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them.​

In other words, there are no leftward arrows that actually matter. Gygax goes on:

Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents.​

This is an argument for non-fiction-grounded game play - the chance to preserve a favourite character based on a purely cue-based consideration (depleting hit point total) - at the expense of the fiction and leftward arrows with teeth.

And those who want meaningful rightward arrows in their combat (ie such that the leftward arrows are not merely epiphenomenal, but actually have teeth) designed a whole series of games that deliberately depart from D&D's attack resolution process - games like RQ, RM, etc. These feature the very hit location and special damage rules that Gygax eschewed!

Even at your table you use a system that departs from core D&D hp - a system with CON as "flesh" hit points, of the sort first set out by Roger Musson in an early White Dwarf and then set out by WotC in some d20 products around 20 years ago - in order to generate rightward arrows that are absent in core D&D!

The only version of D&D to depart at all systematically from Gygax's conception in this respect is 4e D&D - with its much-derided "damage + condition" as the default structure for the consequences of a hit - but even in 4e there is a lot of reliance on cues to mediate the relationship to the fiction, as @AbdulAlhazred discussed upthread. Nevertheless, this departure of 4e from the D&D default was an essential part of why I was prepared to play the game in a serious fashion. The conditions, not the hp loss, are what generate a robust and constrained set of leftward-pointing arrows.

The situation you describe above involving the plinth could both a) happen and b) be handled much the same* in any edition of D&D; I'm not sure why you're specifically praising 4e here other than 4e happened to be the system you were using at the time.

I thought my post was clear enough:

one strength of 4e as a version of D&D is that it encourages the use of rich fiction in combat which, due to the intricacy of the player resources suites and the resolution mechanics, can generate all these rightward pointing arrows which are easily incorporated into the overall resolution process. It doesn't depend upon leftward-pointing epiphenomenal arrows as AD&D can often tend to (I think AD&D struggles to handle a variety of rightward pointing arrows because its resolution processes are too fragile).

 

[clearstream]

The bolded doesn't really capture what I was proposing, which I think I didn't make clear enough. What I was suggesting was the sort of thing you describe in your second paragraph. I.e. the game is about what the players indicated they were interested in for their characters, particularly in choosing/writing their TIBFs. The DM makes the game about challenging those things by presenting situations that do so, and it's entirely up to the players whether they take inspiration and deal with the repercussions of living up to their TIBFs, or if they find out that their characters are not who they thought they were. I realize this is outside the scope of mainstream 5E, but I'm surprised it isn't something that's more widely acknowledged as a possible use for the TIBF/inspiration mechanic.

I wonder if the Lumpley Principle and my suggested complement can shed light on your questions? The Lumpley Principle gets at a general question about rules, which is rule following behaviour.

Formalists say all instances and actions that fall outside the rules of the game, do not count as legitimate instances or actions of a game. Not following the rules invalidates participation.

Non-formalists say that in addition to the formal rules of a game, there is a socially-determined interpretation of the rules, an ethos. Participants may grasp and uphold the rules in different ways, and still be playing the same game.

Formalism leans into understanding rules as constitutive rather than regulative: when you are not following the rules of D&D you aren't playing D&D. Non-formalists can more easily let in regulatory rules. That is a big deal for RPG.

Regulatory rules presuppose an activity is going on in any case, and they regulate that activity. We would be RPing in any case - rules or no rules - and G doesn't necessarily constitute that RP: it regulates it. Nevertheless, D&D play contains a great number of highly specific activities that wouldn't plausibly be done without the D&D (or similar) rules to constitute them.

For RPG we are forced to prefer the non-formalist view because we have ample evidence that - what are the rules? - is a live question: answered differently in each social bubble.

Lumpley (LP)- "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play."

The complement that I propose (CP) - "RPG systems enable player fiction to progress in the designed direction."

The LP can be satisfied by purely regulatory rules. So long as those rules mean the group agrees to imagined events. It may be intended to include constitutive rules, but it does not necessitate them. That's not a defect.

The CP is intended to demand constitutive rules. (If it doesn't seem to, I need to wordsmith it!) That is because there is little worth in the G in RP if it's not constitutive. We would need only one set of rules - whichever best gets players to cooperate - and they wouldn't matter beyond that. The coin-flipping rules @pemerton cited could even be enough! Rules could be judged solely on regulating agreement, not on the specific and different-feeling play-acts they produced. I think what we see and enjoy is a diversity of games, producing diverse play-acts.

Constitutive rules are so important to games that they cannot be left unsaid, or said elsewhere. A principle should exist that lays that out!

You and I have supposed players might agree to play the way you describe (LP upheld?) You additionally drew attention to TIBFs and Inspiration (satisfying CP?)

@Ovinomancer to my reading has said that the rules need to ensure players get something for giving up agency. It can be supposed that they won't agree if they don't get anything out if it (LP not upheld.) You answer that what they get out of it can be scaled up by DM guiding play more into cases where TIBFs and Inspiration will matter. I really like your concept yet I feel the constitutive rules for that are too threadbare (failing CP).

There may be an interaction between LP and CP so that what you suggest might be achieved in D&D, requiring extra rules to enable gains that players will care about. Or one could say that the only gains that could possibly satisfy players are paradigmatically unobtainable in D&D. How would anyone prove that true, though?

 

[clearstream]

This is all fog.

I've played a lot of D&D. I don't need to make reference to the shared fiction in order to determine whether or not an attack roll is successful, hence to determine whether or not a damage roll is required, hence to apply the result of that roll to a hit point tally.

There can be epiphenomenal leftward arrows if a table likes - that is to say, participants can narrate stuff about the fiction in response to those various dice rolls. @clearstream gave some examples. So did @Ovinomancer. But none of those matter to resolution - eg whether we narrate the hit to the Orc as the Orc reeling, or the Orc parrying, or the Orc taking a cut to the forearm, or anything else, nothing about the resolution process changes.

It baffles me that this point even needs to be made. Gygax was aware of it - he argues against the use of rightward arrows in this very context, in his DMG (p 61):

As has been detailed, hit points are not actually a measure of physical damage, by and large, as far as characters (and some other creatures as well) are concerned. Therefore, the location of hits and the type of damage caused are not germane to them.​

In other words, there are no leftward arrows that actually matter. Gygax goes on:

Lest some purist immediately object, consider the many charts and tables necessary to handle this sort of detail, and then think about how area effect spells would work. In like manner, consider all of the nasty things which face adventurers as the rules stand. Are crippling disabilities and yet more ways to meet instant death desirable in an open-ended, episodic game where participants seek to identify with lovingly detailed and developed player-character personae? Not likely! Certain death is as undesirable as a give-away campaign. Combat is a common pursuit in the vast majority of adventures, and the participants in the campaign deserve a chance to exercise intelligent choice during such confrontations. As hit points dwindle they can opt to break off the encounter and attempt to flee. With complex combat systems which stress so-called realism and feature hit location, special damage, and so on, either this option is severely limited or the rules are highly slanted towards favoring the player characters at the expense of their opponents.​

This is an argument for non-fiction-grounded game play - the chance to preserve a favourite character based on a purely cue-based consideration (depleting hit point total) - at the expense of the fiction and leftward arrows with teeth.

And those who want meaningful rightward arrows in their combat (ie such that the leftward arrows are not merely epiphenomenal, but actually have teeth) designed a whole series of games that deliberately depart from D&D's attack resolution process - games like RQ, RM, etc. These feature the very hit location and special damage rules that Gygax eschewed!

Even at your table you use a system that departs from core D&D hp - a system with CON as "flesh" hit points, of the sort first set out by Roger Musson in an early White Dwarf and then set out by WotC in some d20 products around 20 years ago - in order to generate rightward arrows that are absent in core D&D!

The only version of D&D to depart at all systematically from Gygax's conception in this respect is 4e D&D - with its much-derided "damage + condition" as the default structure for the consequences of a hit - but even in 4e there is a lot of reliance on cues to mediate the relationship to the fiction, as @AbdulAlhazred discussed upthread. Nevertheless, this departure of 4e from the D&D default was an essential part of why I was prepared to play the game in a serious fashion. The conditions, not the hp loss, are what generate a robust and constrained set of leftward-pointing arrows.

I thought my post was clear enough:

I wouldn't count Gygax too relevant to 5th.

Focusing on grapple. My character grapples yours --> roll Athletics --> apply grappled condition --> I drag you to lower ground where my friends will gain advantage to hit you.

F --> G --> G --> F --> G

Looking at a telling blow that drops a foe. I move to higher ground --> attack foe --> hit and deal damage --> foe is dying --> Healing Word foe --> cast spell --> foe is prone but conscious and not dying --> foe crawls away

F --> F --> G --> F --> F --> G --> F --> F

Acknowledged is we can replace Fs with Gs at our discretion in some cases (e.g. use a grid and figures for all moves.)

I feel like replicating a G in mind doesn't make it F. An F is only an F to the extent that it isn't defined in G!

IFF a play-act is not defined by game, it is fiction.
IFF a play-act is defined by game, it is game.

Possibly.

 

[pemerton]

I don't really want to reformulate Lumpley as I count it useful. More complement. Here is another take.

"A vital job of RPG systems is causing player fiction to progress in the designed direction."

So this is hopefully guiding to a few things

1. It's about systematically progressing the fiction
2. It's not enough to have consensus at the table: it's about causing players to play and imagine in the designed way
3. The fiction is unlimited so the system must do the work of limiting: our activity is not formless, differences between games as games matter
4. It holds RPG designers to account for the quality of their craftsmanship.
5. It's not the only job of the system.

Generally, it expands on the terms of success for the G in RPG. (There may be obscure texts that already make this point, but I want it in the light!)

I think there are texts that make this point fairly clearly: written by RPG designers like Edwards, Baker, Czege, Clare Boss and Laws.

{i]The system[/i] of a RPG has a lot of components: instructions to participants on what they should do; and processes that guide them through the development and consultation of the fiction and the use of cues. Very few published RPGs actually spell out, or even try to spell out, the whole of the system. I think Apocalypse World comes closest to this particular ideal, at least of RPGs that I know.

Here is Baker again:

Dogs in the Vineyard's rules ground play solidly in the immediate details of the game's fiction. In a Wicked Age's rules allow play to float above the game's fiction, more abstract. . . .​

​

There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows, but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have that discipline as a practice or a habit, having learned it from other games.​

And he also has this:

Here's my personal rephrasing of IIEE. For this thread you can take it as definitional:​

​

In the game's fiction, what must you establish before you roll, and what must you leave unestablished until you've rolled?​

​

In other words, what fictional stuff do you need to know in order to roll at all, and what fictional stuff should you let the roll decide? . .​

​

Here's a quick resolution mechanism.​

​

1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours."​

​

2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours."​

​

What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish.​

​

What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend.​

​

What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.​

​

Maybe we CAN say what our characters do. Maybe the way the dice or cards work, there's a little space where we can pause and just say it. Maybe that's even what we're supposed to do. "Always say what your characters do," the rules say, maybe. "No exceptions and I mean it." It remains, though, that we don't HAVE to, and if we don't, the game just chugs along without it. We play it lazy, and we get the reading-too-fast effect that Frank describes.​

​

Contrast Dogs in the Vineyard, where if you don't say in detail what your character does, the other player asks you and waits patiently for you to answer, because she needs to know. She can't decide what to do with her dice without knowing. Dogs in the Vineyard's IIEE has teeth, it's self-enforcing.​

​

In a Wicked Age has a similar problem to the example's. Maybe a worse problem. The rules say "say what your character does. Does somebody else's character act to stop yours? Then roll dice." That's what the rules [i[say[/i]. But if, instead, you say what your character intends to accomplish, and somebody else says that their character hopes she doesn't accomplish it, and you roll dice then - the game chugs along, not noticing that you're playing it wrong, until suddenly, later, it grinds to a confusing and unsatisfying standstill and it's not really clear what broke it. If you play In a Wicked Age lazy, the game doesn't correct you; but instead of the reading-too-fast effect, you crash and burn.​

​

So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you?​

​

Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age.​

​

You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing.​

​

Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing.​

And finally, there is this example in the comments on the "3 resolution systems" page:

Case 1:​

​

1. When you want to describe the weather where the characters are, roll. On a success, say what the weather's like there. (On a failure, it's 76°, few clouds, with a pleasant little breeze.)​

​

2. When your character's taking strenuous action, if it's oppressively hot where your character is, you get -2 to your roll.​

​

That's boxes to cloud, then cloud to boxes.​

​

Case 2:​

​

1. When you want to give another player a die penalty, make a roll. On a success, a) say what's making life hard for their character, and b) give them a -2 to their roll.​

​

That's a) boxes to cloud, with a simultaneous b) boxes to boxes.​

​

(So, Guy: no, it doesn't count as a rightward arrow.)​

​

In case 1, the more time and conceptual space between those two rules' applications, the more real the oppressive heat will seem. For instance: you make a weather roll at the beginning of the session, declare that it's oppressively hot, and so for the entire session all the players roll -2 for all their characters' strenuous actions. . . .​

​

Rob: You seriously read that to mean that the (unmentioned) oppressive heat the character's suffering is responsible for the -2, not the successful give-a-penalty roll?​

​

How do you want me to write it so that it's rock-solid-clear that the successful give-a-penalty roll is responsible for the -2?​

​

Maybe this: When you want to give another player a die penalty, make a roll. On a success, give them a -2 to their roll. (Also, incidentally, say what's making life hard for their character.)​

​

An arrow cubes to cubes. (Also, incidentally, an arrow cubes to cloud.) Right?​

In my view, at least, this is very concrete attention, in the context of both general design principles and particular designs (DitV, In a Wicked Age), to how a RPG system does or does not generate, via its use, the desired fiction. For instance, what gives the DitV IIEE "teeth" - what makes its rightward-pointing arrows not "functionally optional" - is that a player can't build their dice pool without having regard to the fiction (what is the arena of conflict? what traits and/or belongings are implicated?). This means that playing the game will oblige players to attend to such elements of the fiction as (i) how does this relate to my traits and (ii) how does this relate to my belongings and (iii) how far am I prepared to escalate this conflict to get what I want.

We could contrast, say, D&D, which doesn't distinguish arenas of conflict (shouting vs punching vs knife-fighting vs shooting) so as to make (iii)-ish fiction salient. Nor does it have anything analogous to DitV traits, at least in most versions, that would make (i)-ish fiction relevant. (4e is a sort-of exception, because if the fiction relates to a Quest that in turn implicates the XP available, and so makes Quest-ish fiction salient.)

I asked myself the question - what are examples of left, right and looping arrows in 5e?

So, what arrows does 5e mandate, as not functionally optional?

When combat is being resolved, very few as discussed upthread already. Most of the attack resolution process, and quite a bit of the attack declaration process (eg I sneak attack or I use Menacing Strike) is cues-to-cues. The brute fact of A attacking B generally involves a rightward arrow at some point.

Outside of combat, there seem to be a range of approaches across the 5e player population. The "goal and approach" crowd insist on player declaration of something in the fiction which the GM then uses either to establish a rightward pointing arrow (ie calling for a check) or to just arrow back to the fiction (eg the GM says what happens next, yes or no or something more complicated, without calling for a check).

Those who allow players to declare checks (eg I make a WIS (Perception) check) allow cues (the result of a check) to yield new fiction (eg You see a such-and-such) - these are leftward-pointing arrows with no rightward pointing arrows of the sort that Baker is critical of in his toy example (eg we never actually see the PC searching the room).

It seems that the game will work perfectly well either way, because nothing about the check resolution process requires having regard to the fiction in the way that the DitV process does. To me, this seems to be linked to the distribution of authority over the fiction across the various participants - the players can never put the fiction to work themselves.

 

[pemerton]

I wouldn't count Gygax too relevant to 5th.

<snip>


Looking at a telling blow that drops a foe. I move to higher ground --> attack foe --> hit and deal damage --> foe is dying --> Healing Word foe --> cast spell --> foe is prone but conscious and not dying --> foe crawls away

F --> F --> G --> F --> F --> G --> F --> F

The bulk of attacks that deal hit point damage in 5e are resolved using the same process Gygax described. "Telling blows" work the same in 5e D&D as in AD&D. @Ovinomancer and I already noted that dropping a creature to zero hp generates a non-epiphenomenal leftward-pointing arrow; and I also drew attention to Baker's structurally identical example of if it's 8 or more hit points, your character knocks my character down.

But most attacks in 5e, as in AD&D, aren't telling blows or knockbacks/downs. The only effect is to reduce the hp tally.

Focusing on grapple. My character grapples yours --> roll Athletics --> apply grappled condition --> I drag you to lower ground where my friends will gain advantage to hit you.

F --> G --> G --> F --> G

The difference here is that grapple imposes "conditions" like immoblised, grappled, be unable to move, etc (precise details depend on edition); and it fees into movement (eg being dragged in your condition) which in most versions of D&D does generate a non-epiphenomenal leftward-pointing arrow.

The point of a system like RM or RQ is to have fiction in combat other than position, movement ability and (perhaps) degree of vulnerability (this is a factor in AD&D - eg losing DEX and shield bonuses due to the fiction - and to an extent in 3E but less so in 4e and 5e). The fiction includes the stuff that Gygax eschews and that 5e follows him in eschewing - where and how the victim of an attack is hurt.

I don't see the point of trying to elide the difference between D&D and RQ/RM/C&S/etc, as far as combat rules are concerned.

 

[pemerton]

The Lumpley Principle on face value can be met by rules that are purely regulative. In game studies, rules are overwhelmingly assessed as constitutive. Seeing as regulative rules are of use in RPG, rules should be assessed in both lights.

I wonder if the Lumpley Principle and my suggested complement can shed light on your questions? The Lumpley Principle gets at a general question about rules, which is rule following behaviour.

Formalists say all instances and actions that fall outside the rules of the game, do not count as legitimate instances or actions of a game. Not following the rules invalidates participation.

Non-formalists say that in addition to the formal rules of a game, there is a socially-determined interpretation of the rules, an ethos. Participants may grasp and uphold the rules in different ways, and still be playing the same game.

Formalism leans into understanding rules as constitutive rather than regulative: when you are not following the rules of D&D you aren't playing D&D. Non-formalists can more easily let in regulatory rules. That is a big deal for RPG.

Regulatory rules presuppose an activity is going on in any case, and they regulate that activity. We would be RPing in any case - rules or no rules - and G doesn't necessarily constitute that RP: it regulates it. Nevertheless, D&D play contains a great number of highly specific activities that wouldn't plausibly be done without the D&D (or similar) rules to constitute them.

For RPG we are forced to prefer the non-formalist view because we have ample evidence that - what are the rules? - is a live question: answered differently in each social bubble.

Lumpley (LP)- "System (including but not limited to 'the rules') is defined as the means by which the group agrees to imagined events during play."

The complement that I propose (CP) - "RPG systems enable player fiction to progress in the designed direction."

The LP can be satisfied by purely regulatory rules. So long as those rules mean the group agrees to imagined events. It may be intended to include constitutive rules, but it does not necessitate them. That's not a defect.

The CP is intended to demand constitutive rules. (If it doesn't seem to, I need to wordsmith it!) That is because there is little worth in the G in RP if it's not constitutive. We would need only one set of rules - whichever best gets players to cooperate - and they wouldn't matter beyond that. The coin-flipping rules @pemerton cited could even be enough! Rules could be judged solely on regulating agreement, not on the specific and different-feeling play-acts they produced.

I don't think anything in RPG design turns on whether rules are considered to be constitutive of the practice of playing a particular game, or rather to operate in a regulative fashion within a practice that has an existence or a nature that is independent of those rules.

A system that enables (in an earlier post you said causes - I don't know which formulation is canonical, but they're neither synonymous nor equivalent) fiction to progress in the designed direction might consist entirely of regulative rules. For instance, using a map or a GPS is not constitutive of driving a car, but a car which comes with a set of maps, or a GPS function, is likely to enable its driver to progress in their desired direction moreso than one which lacks those features.

Rather than focusing on a metaphysical debate about the role that rules play in constituting or influencing gameplay, I think that the sorts of matters Baker raises are relevant: are the arrows you want your game to create, and the cues and fiction at the various ends of those arrows, "functionally optional" or not in the play of the game?

 

[clearstream]

A system that enables (in an earlier post you said causes - I don't know which formulation is canonical, but they're neither synonymous nor equivalent) fiction to progress in the designed direction might consist entirely of regulative rules. For instance, using a map or a GPS is not constitutive of driving a car, but a car which comes with a set of maps, or a GPS function, is likely to enable its driver to progress in their desired direction moreso than one which lacks those features.

This example isn't right. The activity constituted by a GPS is not driving a car, it is navigating. I can navigate on foot or in a boat with a GPS. A canonical example of a regulation on driving a car is a red light. You can drive on ignoring the red light, but the rule requires you to stop.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I don't really want to reformulate Lumpley as I count it useful. More complement. Here is another take.

"A vital job of RPG systems is causing player fiction to progress in the designed direction."

So this is hopefully guiding to a few things

1. It's about systematically progressing the fiction
2. It's not enough to have consensus at the table: it's about causing players to play and imagine in the designed way
3. The fiction is unlimited so the system must do the work of limiting: our activity is not formless, differences between games as games matter
4. It holds RPG designers to account for the quality of their craftsmanship.
5. It's not the only job of the system.

Generally, it expands on the terms of success for the G in RPG. (There may be obscure texts that already make this point, but I want it in the light!)

OK, I accept this proposition as fairly uncontroversial. That is, "when I design an RPG I have a goal of designing it to provide a certain type of experience. That includes some characterization of fiction." I am not at all sure what that tells us about PLAYING an RPG, as an experience.