Why do RPGs have rules?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Oh, I didn't realize things had quite gotten on to the reasoning for the existence of competing roles in RPGs in particular, but on that topic..

I don't find the "introduction" of unwelcome truths by the rules to be essential.

I would just say, rules in many cases don't introduce such things in all cases so much as dictate that they WILL be introduced. Actually its more the classic styles of RPGs that are likely to actually codify such introduction into the rules themselves (IE combat systems which mandate certain outcomes, though as @pemerton likes to point out D&D itself famously avoids any fictional description of most of what happens in combat).

But I do think that rules which give players competing roles (ex: each player say what their individual characters do, but one is a special player says what the rest of the world does) tends to create a more interesting narrative.. and player dynamic! A narrative ceases to be interesting without some thing (or some one) introducing unexpected twists.

And I generally prefer that to be combination of judgment calls and dice.

I think the above description would apply to both classic D&D and other 'GM Derived Fiction' type RPGs as well as a pretty good slice of all more Narrative or other types. The only caveat being that the TYPES of things that some games have GMs introduce are different, and in terms of judgement calls a game like Dungeon World is asking for a slightly different sort of judgment (judgment about what the fiction permits is actually allocated as a table-consensus thing, though the GM is generally the lead suggester).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Crimony. What does "operational" mean in this context? I can't tell if you are agreeing, acknowledging, or disagreeing with me.

I'm just saying "the physical/logistical stuff that the characters are doing" and particularly play which focuses on that without regard to any other kinds of considerations (like the PC as an emotional, intellectual being with a personality for instance). This is a dominant form of play, with the extreme being the "character as playing piece (pog)" and exemplified by things like naming your character "Joe IV" (IE after Joes I-III perished). I mean, even true old school play was generally a little more prone to some RP than that, but it rarely impacted substantive decisions.

 

[pemerton]

The notion of "the world the characters live in," that it somehow has its own independent existence outside the shared space of play.

The fact that the GM can spout fountains of lore surrounding it, can mentally connect wide swaths of contrived history and NPCs and their actions and landscapes and maps, etc., etc., somehow innately transforms this fictional creation of the mind of the GM into a "real place", with "immutable facts."

When really it's just because it's assumed that the GM is allowed to introduce their version of the fiction at will, without any prior consent. It's not any less fictional just because the GM holds a privileged space and function in introducing the assumed "truths" of the fiction.

The entire conception of the RPG "living world" essentially rests on the assumption that the GM is allowed broad power to "say things at the table" regarding "what is true" about the fictional space, and that the "things (s)he is allowed to say" can be conceptualized long before the act of sitting down to play the game.

I posted something very similar to this on another recent thread:

What does it mean to say that the Citadel of Trilus, written about in a book by (let's say - I don't actually know)) Greg Stafford, is part of the shared fiction, even if some of the participants in creating and imagining that shared fiction (ie the players) have never heard of it?

One possible meaning is this: to say that X is part of the shared fiction, even though it is not literally shared, is to say something like If participant P were to posit, in play, that X is true in the fiction, and to extrapolate further parts of the fiction from that posit - even hard moves - then the other participants would go along with it.

I'm personally not the biggest fan of counterfactual analyses, but I think there has to be some account of what these proposition about "the world" mean in terms of how the shared fiction is established.

My the other participants would go along with it is your is allowed.

I think there are two further glosses that need to be added, if we are to feel the full force of the "living, breathing world":

(1) The GM is not obliged to have regard to player-expressed priorities or concerns in deciding what fiction to introduce.

(2) When the GM introduces their fiction that they conceptualised long before play, they are allowed to make hard moves without having to make soft moves first.​

There are different ways that a RPG can not include (1): 4e D&D's player authored quests; BW's Beliefs, Relationships and similar elements of PC build; the way that AW uses the first session to lay the ground for the GM's writing up of threats and fronts; etc.

There are different ways that a RPG can not include (2): say 'yes' or roll the dice; have a rule that limits when hard moves can be made, like AW has; etc.

 

[pemerton]

consider taking Keep on the Borderlands and literally just playing the combats in some sequence. There's no gameplay at all of any kind between the combat sequences. The GM literally concludes a combat, and immediately shifts to the next site of combat and says, "Roll initiative," and instructs the players that all expended resources are immediately available again.

Very much like just playing 5 or 6 Heroclix combats in rapid succession, with no intervening roleplaying, exploration, etc.

If you played Keep on the Borderlands in this fashion, have the rules of D&D provided anything that any other set of wargame mechanics could not? Could you not swap out the D&D combat rules for the Heroclix combat rules, or the Gloomhaven combat rules, or the Journeys in Middle-Earth combat rules, or the Mythras combat rules, or the GURPS combat rules, and achieve largely the same experience?

Sure, some of the underpinnings and choice / resolution factors change, but at the end, either you've conquered all of the combats as a team, or you have not.

What you describe here doesn't seem like it is RPGing at all. It's wargaming, as you seem to say.

(There are some complications, because we would need some sort of principle to establish what "the combats" are. I understand you to mean cave-by-cave, room-by-room.)

Some of Vincent Baker's thoughts only make sense in the context of a game where there's a need to carry over gamestate information across situational contexts, and where the conceptualization of the "rational actor" that exists changes as the situational context changes.

<snip>

For example, after say, Combat 3 of 6 in the Borderlands sequence, one of the players is allowed to say, "Hey, we just killed Orc Leader #6. Doesn't that change something about what we're required to do next? Am I allowed to say now that my cleric pawn is no longer interested in continuing these battles, because conquering Orc Leader #6 was his whole motivation all along, and he has no need to continue?"

What fundamentally changes about the game being played if that's the case?

To me, it seems like we have started RPGing: we have the players engaging the game by way of declaring actions for characters who are persistent from situation to situation.

(I think the framing in terms of "rational actor" might be superfluous. It's the continuity of character that seems to be doing the work in your example.)

 

[pemerton]

I thought this was a thread about why RPGs have rules, not about any particular set of rules.

Yes it is.

But as you know, I'm not really following your posts, other than this one.

 

[pemerton]

In a tabletop role playing game, there's all of that, plus the additional role of portraying a character in a fictional story. Rules exist in these games to guide and manage the conflicting desires of the narrative, the character, the player, and even the person outside the game at various times! It just depends* (which rule(s) you're talking about). Hope this helps

It doesn't really help me make sense of @Micah Sweet's posts.

 

[Davies]

So why do RPGs have rules?

Let me first state that this is not an attempt to insult you or anyone else. It is not an attempt to make light of your question or any part of your post. It is only and simply the most concise answer I can give to this question.

Why do RPGs have rules?

Because the game designers said so.

I'm being totally sincere and serious here. RPGs have rules because the author said, "these are the rules of the game." Any higher purpose, any philosophical intention, none of that is remotely relevant. It all runs on "because I said so", where "I" refers to the person who created the game. You are no more obliged to follow those rules than you are to obey any other rules dictated by an authority, but there are always consequences for refusing. The consequence for refusing to follow the rules of a published game is that you may not find it easy to persuade others to play games with you. If that consequence does not bother you, then go ahead.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This is true. Ultimately there's no fundamental distinction between canonizing information at the point where it's known to two people (No Myth) and canonizing it earlier, perhaps before it's known even to one person (blorb). Neither is objectively superior, but it's fine to prefer one or the other.

Quoting Realism and blorb

The blorb and the gloracle are game components (another word for game components is “ludemes”). The blorb is the make-believe world we play in, the gloracle the set of rules, prep, principles and die rolls we use to give us answers about that blorb world.

A subset of the game’s make-believery is known to two or more participants. Let’s come up with a word for it, the SIS maybe. (Stay in school!)

If you think of this No Myth style SIS as the entirety of the “game state” and then a blorb DM starts talking about their more wider, blorby definition of “game state”, you are gonna have a hard time.

In No Myth, the SIS is a very important ludeme. The act of telling makes it real. To bring it back to the example of the hunt for criminal above, once the players have learned where the criminal is, then that location becomes fixed and real. That’s all fine in a No Myth game, that’s just how a No Myth game works.

In a blorby game, the rules for fixing/canonizing the location of the criminal (or any other entity) happens earlier, that’s all. There are some principles to follow. Why anyone would want to play blorby instead of No Myth?

I can’t explain why.

I just love it.

Well, its a bit of an odd blog, with its terminology and the odd statement about the techniques it discusses being in use in RPGs since "the seventies or earlier." (No actually!) but fair enough. "Blorb" is just classic Gygaxian and post-Gygaxian (Trad, Neo-Trad) RPG play, though its unclear if 'Higher Myth' Narrativist play would also be covered by this term (and Narrativist play is not limited to Low Myth!). This is kind of way standard terminology is nice.

I don't follow what the desire is to introduce a term for "fiction that is not a GM secret" either. However I would note that there's no real difference between types of games, high or low myth here, things are known to two or more people when they are introduced at the table, never before! This "talking about a wider game state" can only indicate one thing, the one canonically forbidden thing in low myth play, that one of the participants rules out the possibility of resolving some game situation in a certain way on the basis of something no other participant knows about.

I think the author here is also rather short of knowledge of, or fails to explicate, important aspects of the distinctions he's trying to make. It is untrue that GMs in Low Myth play simply decide everything on the fly based on some judgment, there are necessarily important constraints, they have to do so with integrity, and they also may have to do so WRT some other mechanical constraints, like in PbtA games the GM doesn't arbitrarily get to introduce stuff, it only happens in terms of framing scenes and/or making moves. The players can OFTEN constrain how and when the later happens, and so can dice! In some games it may require GM resources to do so, the existence of certain attributes in the fiction (aspects being a popular implementation), etc. This is all pretty important stuff.

I mean, what your quoting is fine in the sense of just being a statement equivalent to "I like High Myth classic GM-Derived Fiction play." It just doesn't say much else! As for the blog... I'm not sure I grok the authors fascination with fairly esoteric philosophical questions. It seems fairly unrelated to the question of the initial post of the thread (though I guess we could argue about the differences in 'unwelcome thing introduction' WRT ones position on game state and rules). I think the "clouds, boxes, and arrows" style of discussion that is meatier than this one though, but that's just my preference.

 

[pemerton]

Why do RPGs have rules?

Because the game designers said so.

Presumably, though, in most cases the designers had reasons, rather than just deciding arbitrarily.

 

[Davies]

Presumably, though, in most cases the designers had reasons, rather than just deciding arbitrarily.

How can you know that? And, how is their intention relevant to your decisions?