Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

No I didn't. Here's what I said:
That is basically the opposite of the view you're attributing to me.

If I've misunderstood you then I apologize. That was my honest good faith attempt to paraphrase your position. To me the two quotes seem congruent. What am I missing?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Before we can proceed, I think something needs to be cleared up.


I feel like I don't even remotely understand your point of view...

Compare and contrast to:

1. PCs are going to the church of the Dragon God
2. Ooh I love dragons!
3. Hm, I mentioned a legend about one offhand, about time to introduce the beast properly
4. OK, let's figure out why it will show up...

There seems to be an inherent conflict between the two.

I am not clearstream but to me it appears that the contrast you describe is exactly what is meant by "Possibly what is at odds is the direction of justification".

I think you folks are on the same page here now.

Note also that there are different levels of GM and player resistance to the idea of constructing improbable scenarios and the idea of resolving PC actions within those scenarios in improbable ways. "What would really happen if you did XYZ in situation ABC?" is not quite the same question as "Would situation ABC ever arise in the first place?"

One of the more useful insights I've gotten from Forge discussions over the years is that players often don't view hard scene framing[1] as railroading. I.e. even if you allow them to opt out, "I wouldn't do that!", they usually won't.

[1] Hard scene frame example: "Froederick, you're on your way to visit your sister-in-law one day when you spot smoke on the horizon. Riding closer you see that the village of Wednton is on fire. It looks like the Dominion has attacked it! You see from a distance rough-looking men sorting shackled prisoners into groups. You immediately turn around and ride back to home base to tell the militia and [fellow PCs] that an invading army is only three miles away! What do you guys want to do or ask me?" Assumptions are being made about Froederick's actions in the name of efficiency, but my experience is that as long as Froederick knows he COULD say, "Hey, I wouldn't ride back to home base!" he usually won't, although he might ask "how many soldiers do I see?" before deciding that he's okay with riding back.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

This has at this point diverged from immersionism. There should be no "have some PCs fight some goblins".

Is it legitimate for immersionist play to begin in medias res, with a goblin attack? Play has to start somewhere.

 

[pemerton]

This has at this point diverged from immersionism. There should be no "have some PCs fight some goblins".

If there is no event comparable to "have some PCs fight some goblins", it's going to be the world's most boring ever game of D&D, isn't it?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've posted more than once about a convention game I played, where we were in a space station with oxygen problems. We had two chemical engineers in our group, and they did rough calculations as to how long we had before all our oxygen was gone. We then planned our strategy based on that - it was in the hours, from memory. And then the GM just stipulated that we ran out of oxygen within minutes.

Utterly arbitrary nonsense. Trying to obfuscate the railroad by saying that the GM was actually manifesting their expertise in respect of their imaginary world is bizarre.

At the very least, that's one where an honest GM needs to present things in the proper order and be honest about it; if the situation he's worked out requires the oxygen to run out in a few minutes, you don't sit there and describe anything other than "how long until the oxygen runs out" and maybe the general cause, and let the engineers figure out what that meant about the rest state. But of course that sort of chronologically inverted structure is anathema to some people.

 

[pemerton]

If I've misunderstood you then I apologize. That was my honest good faith attempt to paraphrase your position. To me the two quotes seem congruent. What am I missing?

In my posts, and in many previous posts, I have contrasted the GMing of the austere dungeon environment found in Moldvay/Gygax type D&D, with a non-austere-dungeon environment of the sort common in much D&D play since the early to mid 80s.

My view is that dungeon play can, to some extent at least, be seen as analogous to free kriegspiel or a Braunstein: central to the game are representative devices (eg maps, miniatures; in a Braunstein, perhaps "The kitchen is London, the laundry is Paris"), which are intended to model (imagined) reality. This is all established in advance of play. The function of the judge is to make determinations/extrapolations about the way that reality would work - based on expertise. As things change in the (imaginary) reality, the model is updated - eg tokens are moved on a board/map, the board/map is redrawn, etc.

The reason I emphasise austerity is because this whole set-up only works if the extrapolations are genuinely based on expertise, such that (i) there is a standard of correctness, and (ii) the participants can have a more-or-less objective reference point for making sensible decisions and improving their play. (I accept your point that social courtesies may operate on individual occasions of play - eg a junior officer may be obliged to suck up a bad ruling from a presiding field officer - but this doesn't change my point about the normative standards and expectations that are at work.) And expertise can only operate if the situation is austere.

In my view, even the Against the Giants modules push the limits of austerity, as good play requires judging how different decisions might trigger the cascading of encounters, and this will be based on intuitions about how various sorts of people might respond to their homes being attacked, and it's not really clear that this is something where expertise applies in the same way as someone can be an expert on the effect of rain and mud on cavalry operations. And to flip this point around, I think it's not a coincidence that the most classic dungeons are implausibly static, with their room occupants hanging around with their treasure "waiting" to be defeated and looted by the PCs.

Once the fictional backdrop against which the PCs have to make decisions, and about which the GM is expected to make decisions, becomes remotely plausible or realistic in its "living, breathing" character, the ideas of expertise, and of knowability/learnability on the player side, in my view utterly evaporate. In terms of D&D texts, for me the dividing line on this issue lies between Gygax's PHB, which gives players advice on how to succeed in dungeon exploration that will work only for a basically static dungeon of the classic sort; and his DMG, which gives GMs advice about how to run "living, breathing" dungeons which will make his advice to players of the previous year largely useless.

Given that the world is full of professors of economics, history, social psychology etc who have widely divergent views on how the world will develop in the future, and what processes caused it to become as it currently is, the idea that a GM can use expertise to extrapolate the events of a "living, breathing" world, and to judge how PC action ramify and cascade, is in my view illusory. All the GM can do is to make decisions about these things that seem more-or-less plausible. And in this context, in my view the maps, notes and so on are not models of an imagined reality, but simply records of imaginings.

Even though the divide I'm drawing may be somewhat porous or at least fuzzy in reality - see the Giants modules I mentioned, or even Keep on the Borderlands with its different tribes - I think, at the conceptual/analytical level it is pretty fundamental to understanding the difference between (a) the role played by a judge in FK, at least some Braunsteins, and very classic D&D play, and (b) more-or-less mainstream, "living breathing world" RPGing of the sort that has predominated since some time in the early to mid 1980s, in which the GM is not any sort of judge or referee but rather is a creator/author of fiction.

Vincent Baker's remarks about the role of mechanics, in the OP, are directed at the "GM as author of fiction" side of the divide. And my repeated insistence upthread that the GM is a player, who therefore adopts the lusory attitude and deploys (asymmetric) lusory means, is likewise directed at the "GM as author" side of the divide.

My objection to the notion of GM as expert about their fictional world is that is an obscurantist way of redescribing the fact that the GM is an author, that thereby creates a purely illusory parallel between the role of the GM in the (b)-type play and the role of a genuine judge in (a)-type play.

 

[pemerton]

There seems to be additional thought needed to separate imaginary facts that the group decides should match their real counterparts, from imaginary facts that have no real counterparts. That chimes with what I have said about preexisting norms versus those that supersede or extend them.

So in the case of oxygen consumption. As described, the group have a preexisting norm - oxygen consumption in the real world - that seems to them like the right norm to apply. It's jarring therefore if the GM supersedes that norm. A less jarring case would be where the GM said that 11 and not 12 turpled dragons are found nesting on turple trees, because there are no preexisting norms for turpled dragons and turple trees.

In the oxygen example, it seems that the group did not confer expertise on the GM in regards to imaginary facts with real-world counterparts. Their expected norm was that such facts would mirror their counter-parts. In the case of turple dragons and turple trees, the GM is an expert just so long as it is conferred upon them; i.e. that they should be the one to select which imaginary domain is chosen. In this light, I can sketch out a case where the group established earlier that oxygen consumption in their fiction does not match that in the real-world. In this new case, the putative expertise of the chemical engineers does not apply. Only the participant conferred with selecting oxygen consumption facts can function as an expert.

You are making very heavy weather of what strike me as reasonably simple.

Describing the GM as an "expert" on turple dragons and turple trees, with that expertise having been "conferred", is just a rather obscure way of saying that the GM is the recognised author of those parts of the fiction.

And saying that the GM has not been conferred expertise on the GM about oxygen and referring to a "pre-existing norm" that has not been "superseded or extended" just seems to be a way of saying the following: that when the GM introduced the fiction you are having trouble breathing, he intended that we (the players) would accept this as a logical extrapolation from his earlier remarks about things like oxygen and leaks in the station wall (all the italicised phrases were being used in their ordinary sense); and what went wrong was that the chemical engineers among us were capable of understanding how oxygen leaks behave, and hence the intended extrapolation didn't do the intended work.

It's an instance of the sort of thing that Baker discusses here:

So you're sitting at the table and one player says, "[let's imagine that] an orc jumps out of the underbrush!"

What has to happen before the group agrees that, indeed, an orc jumps out of the underbrush?

1. Sometimes, not much at all. The right participant said it, at an appropriate moment, and everybody else just incorporates it smoothly into their imaginary picture of the situation. "An orc! Yikes! Battlestations!" This is how it usually is for participants with high ownership of whatever they're talking about: GMs describing the weather or the noncombat actions of NPCs, players saying what their characters are wearing or thinking.

2. Sometimes, a little bit more. "Really? An orc?" "Yeppers." "Huh, an orc. Well, okay." Sometimes the suggesting participant has to defend the suggestion: "Really, an orc this far into Elfland?" "Yeah, cuz this thing about her tribe..." "Okay, I guess that makes sense."

3. Sometimes, mechanics. "An orc? Only if you make your having-an-orc-show-up roll. Throw down!" "Rawk! 57!" "Dude, orc it is!" The thing to notice here is that the mechanics serve the exact same purpose as the explanation about this thing about her tribe in point 2, which is to establish your credibility wrt the orc in question.

4. And sometimes, lots of mechanics and negotiation. Debate the likelihood of a lone orc in the underbrush way out here, make a having-an-orc-show-up roll, a having-an-orc-hide-in-the-underbrush roll, a having-the-orc-jump-out roll, argue about the modifiers for each of the rolls, get into a philosophical thing about the rules' modeling of orc-jump-out likelihood... all to establish one little thing. Wave a stick in a game store and every game you knock of the shelves will have a combat system that works like this.​

The situation I describe is analogous to (2), except that the analogue of "this thing about her tribe" - namely, the description of the oxygen leak - failed to establish credibility, because it was meant to be a physical explanation and we had experts who could see that it made no sense.

I see an obvious contrast with something that happened in a Traveller session I ran a few years ago. The PCs were exploring an alien installation. Following the description of the installation in the module I was using, I described a type of electrical energy field that was containing certain gases in the atmosphere of a particular room. One of the PCs is an electrical engineer, and he shook his head and facepalmed when I described it.

I acknowledged his expertise, we had a brief discussion, but he let it pass because it didn't hurt his game position for their to be a type of barrier containing the gases, and he was happy to hand-wave the technical explanation for that.

Whereas in the convention game that I played, the state of affairs that we (the players) were contesting was one that seriously hosed our PCs (I think it may even have led to a TPK).

This is also another illustration of why Vincent Baker is correct to say that content-neutral allocation of authority is not the main purpose of well-designed RPG rules. The problem in the convention game would not be solved by insisting that the players accept the GM's authority over all of the setting but for the PCs (which would, therefore, extend to the rate at which oxygen leaks from a space station). That would just reinforce how terrible the whole thing was.

Contrast, say, the soft/hard move structure in AW, which precludes the GM narrating a hosing of the PCs (like "You've all got trouble breathing") as if it was a low-cost sort of thing like Vincent Baker's (2) in the quote above. It requires the GM to gain credibility in respect of oxygen loss in the course of play, by first making the soft move and then having the PCs fail whatever roll they make in the course of trying to avoid or reverse the threat.

EDITed to add a response to this, which I just noticed:

At the very least, that's one where an honest GM needs to present things in the proper order and be honest about it; if the situation he's worked out requires the oxygen to run out in a few minutes, you don't sit there and describe anything other than "how long until the oxygen runs out" and maybe the general cause, and let the engineers figure out what that meant about the rest state. But of course that sort of chronologically inverted structure is anathema to some people.

In Baker's terms, this would be (i) stipulating that we're low on oxygen, gaining credibility by being the author and curator of the scenario; and then (ii) asking the engineers to explain - if they care to - what the analogue is of "cuz this thing about her tribe" is in this case.

The reason this "inversion" is anathema, in my view, is precisely because it makes it obvious that the source of credibility is metagame authority and not "logical" extrapolation from the fiction, which becomes mere colour that is retrofitted in the name of verisimilitude. Whereas, as per my OP:

In "trad", post-DL D&D, the general expectation is that the players will work through the GM's scenario or story. There are non-D&D PRGs, like CoC, that are played similarly.

<snip>

I would say that an important role of mechanics in this sort of play is to generate a degree of uncertainty on the part of the players about the exact process that the GM is using to determine what happens next.

If the GM is upfront that they are using their authority over the scenario to establish credibility, they are no longer generating a degree of uncertainty on the part of the players about the process they are using to determine what happens next.

 

[pemerton]

S is an expert in domain D if and only if S has the capacity to help others (especially laypersons) solve a variety of problems in D or execute an assortment of tasks in D which the latter would not be able to solve or execute on their own. S can provide such help by imparting to the layperson (or other client) his/her distinctive knowledge or skills.

It seems to me that so long as a participant is the one selecting the imaginary domain, they are uniquely capable of meeting that standard.

This is just a very roundabout way of characterising an author.

Instead of saying that the author "is uniquely capable" of "helping others solve problems in and execute tasks in" the fiction that the author is authoring, I think it is far more straightforward to say that, tautologously, it is the author of a fiction who stipulates its content.

While it's true that so far as imaginary domains go, anyone can solve or execute whatever tasks they imagine, to make that work for a group typically requires a consenus on which imaginary domain is selected. Which can be done in different ways. One way is to assign that duty to GM.

And this is just a roundabout way of saying that one way to establish a shared fiction is to have one person tell everyone else what to imagine. That's trivially true. As a suggestion for RPGing, though, I think it's pretty terrible, because it is a recipe for railroading.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Even though the divide I'm drawing may be somewhat porous or at least fuzzy in reality - see the Giants modules I mentioned, or even Keep on the Borderlands with its different tribes - I think, at the conceptual/analytical level it is pretty fundamental to understanding the difference between (a) the role played by a judge in FK, at least some Braunsteins, and very classic D&D play, and (b) more-or-less mainstream, "living breathing world" RPGing of the sort that has predominated since some time in the early to mid 1980s, in which the GM is not any sort of judge or referee but rather is a creator/author of fiction.

I request clarification on three points:

1.) Is it your position that rule application, and not fiction creation, is the only type of refereeing that occurs in a FK game or Braunstein? If a player in an FK has his troops do something which requires referee creativity, such as going into a civilian home and search the contents of a desk looking for batteries, is it your position that this isn't fiction creation and is qualitatively different from agendaless GMing in D&D?

2.) Is your position that a GM, outside of an austere dungeon, does not engage in dispassionate refereeing, or that they engage in dispassionate refereeing AND ALSO other functions? I would agree that there are often other functions to various degrees, but dispassionate refereeing is also present, and can be predominant even outside the dungeon.

3.) It's not clear to me whether you're trying to draw a dichotomy with (a) and (b). Are you claims intended to apply to all GMing outside of an austere dungeon, or only certain styles, e.g. the sort of modern D&D where DMs act as a sort of tour guide directing PCs from encounter to encounter while preventing TPKs and making sure each PC has appropriate opportunities to look awesome? How expansive is (b), "the sort that has predominated"? I can see your point w/rt a certain subset of GMing styles but not the general case.

 

[Deset Gled]

A universal ability to change, discard or add rules - by definition - means that there is no game.

If I can, at any moment, change the board state or effect of any piece in chess, how can you play me? What move can you legally make if I can declare any move illegal? What move you can usefully make when I declare all the outcomes? What are we even doing?

This is no longer a structured activity governed by a set of rules called 'Chess'. It's now a structured activity in which the apparent rules are a conceit - one which I can choose to pay lip service to in order to present you with the illusion of a game of chess. Or not.

It's also important to note, however, that whatever moves you appear to make, my control of all the outcomes of those moves means I control the boardstate at all times. You're on a railroad that you can't even see.

I don't see RPGs in any different or unique way.

It's trivial to show that this simply isn't true. There are multiple games in multiple genres that include the ability to change, discard, or add rules. Fluxx, Risk Legacy, Mao, 21, Nomic. And that's just off the top of my head (and without delving into Calvinball).