Why do RPGs have rules?

[chaochou]

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.

That's why the word universal - which you ignored - is important.

Did you miss it? Or ignore the way it completely changes the meaning of the sentence such that your statement becomes false on purpose as a strawman exercise?

 

[pemerton]

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?

I'll defer to others who know the history of FK better than me to tell me whether or not this is even a reasonable move. If it is, I would expect that the resolution is via a pre-established throw of the dice.

Or else the judge might make an arbitrary call so as to test the capacity of the commander being trained/tested to handle some or other contingency.

It seems to me that this sort of thing might be more likely in a Braunstein, and the more the Braunstein contains this sort of thing then the more it crosses the dividing line I'm drawing. Which was @AbdulAlhazred's point about Braunstein's a little way upthread.

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.

I don't know what you are meaning by "dispassionate refereeing" in this context.

There can be no "dispassionate" decision-making about (for instance) deciding what happens to the governance of and public order in a town if the ruling oligarchs are all assassinated. All that can happen is that the GM makes something up. But there is no knowledge or expertise possible here: actual human societies, in such situations, can respond in a tremendous variety of ways depending on all sort of considerations that historians and social scientists debate as part of their professional activities.

Gygax's solution to more local problems of dispassionate decision-making (like, does the dragon breath again? who does the ogre attack with its brutal club) tended to be random dice rolls. This can be extended to some contexts, in order to create something slightly less static without being "living, breathing" in virtue of GM decision-making.

But it will break down in any situation of even modest complexity, where the idea of expert knowledge simply fails to gain purchase.

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.

My (b) is a diagnosis of the challenges to GMing once RPG setting and scenarios go beyond the austere dungeon. I don't think the only response to those challenges is railroading GMing. But other responses require rather radical changes to widespread conceptions of what a GM's role and powers consist in (eg rule zero). Vincent Baker's great contribution to RPGin design has been to identify and operationalise various versions of such changes.

Your post upthread about hard scene framing suggests an approach to play in which the GM establishes individual scenes of some degree of austerity, and then exercises scene-framing authority to "move" the PCs from scene-to-scene. I don't know if that's what you intended, but it was what I took away. This approach differes from the "tour guide" approach in that there is no aspiration to "living, breathing" naturalism in the scene-transition process, nor is there any pretence that any non-GM participant has anything but a minor role to play in scene-framing.

I imagine that some 4e D&D campaigns looked like this. Maybe some 3E ones too.

 

[clearstream]

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.

While I reflect on your last few posts, your words here make me feel that we agree on the consequences.

I say that a participant satisfying the role of an expert in the imaginary domain(s) is conducting a function that falls into refereeing RPG. By my lights that participant is not a player when they perform their refereeing functions.

You strongly resist that notion, seeing the parallel as illusory. If I understand you correctly, you accept that RPG game play may be refereed, but believe that in modes under discussion here there is no referee, but only players with asymmetrical roles.

Is that put rightly?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'll defer to others who know the history of FK better than me to tell me whether or not this is even a reasonable move. If it is, I would expect that the resolution is via a pre-established throw of the dice.

Or else the judge might make an arbitrary call so as to test the capacity of the commander being trained/tested to handle some or other contingency.

It seems to me that this sort of thing might be more likely in a Braunstein, and the more the Braunstein contains this sort of thing then the more it crosses the dividing line I'm drawing. Which was @AbdulAlhazred's point about Braunstein's a little way upthread.

I think we have fundamentally different views of what FKing is. My understanding of free Kriegsspiel is that there's no restriction on "what is a reasonable move", nor a requirement to use pre-established dice throws. (The absence of such requirements is precisely what distinguishes "free" Kriegspiel from rigid Kriegspiel!)

My takeaway is that when you try to draw a distinction between FK and GMing you're comparing some limited subset of Kriegsspiel (probably not FK) to some other limited subset of GMing, and I shouldn't think your point is really about FK per se.

I don't know what you are meaning by "dispassionate refereeing" in this context.

There can be no "dispassionate" decision-making about (for instance) deciding what happens to the governance of and public order in a town if the ruling oligarchs are all assassinated. All that can happen is that the GM makes something up. But there is no knowledge or expertise possible here: actual human societies, in such situations, can respond in a tremendous variety of ways depending on all sort of considerations that historians and social scientists debate as part of their professional activities.

This is equally true of FK. If someone assassinates all the oligarchs in Moscow, the referee has to make something up. I suspect the only reason this isn't a concern in professional US Army wargaming is that you're not allowed to assassinate oligarchs in the first place--the refs probably tell you to stop messing around and stick to the scenario.

Gygax's solution to more local problems of dispassionate decision-making (like, does the dragon breath again? who does the ogre attack with its brutal club) tended to be random dice rolls. This can be extended to some contexts, in order to create something slightly less static without being "living, breathing" in virtue of GM decision-making.

But it will break down in any situation of even modest complexity, where the idea of expert knowledge simply fails to gain purchase.

My (b) is a diagnosis of the challenges to GMing once RPG setting and scenarios go beyond the austere dungeon. I don't think the only response to those challenges is railroading GMing. But other responses require rather radical changes to widespread conceptions of what a GM's role and powers consist in (eg rule zero). Vincent Baker's great contribution to RPGin design has been to identify and operationalise various versions of such changes.

Similar to how I simply have to assume that when you say FK you don't really mean FK, in order for your point to make any sense, I think I have to assume that you're not really talking about all scenarios outside of an austere dungeon in order for your point to make sense. A blorby hexcrawl doesn't require any "radical changes" that wouldn't be required in an FK; the distinction between FKs and blorby hexcrawls in D&D lies entirely in the fact that D&D has rules for task resolution, but you're making a point about content authoring, not rules, and in that respect they're not distinct.

I think the issue here is that out of the universe of ways to run games, S = { A, B, C, D, E, F, G }, you're very interested in talking about Vincent Baker's ideas about the relative merits of E and F, but phrased in such a way that they appear to be statements about S. I'm a fan of B so when you say "if not E (austere dungeon) then F (radical changes)" it's been baffling, up until now.

Your post upthread about hard scene framing suggests an approach to play in which the GM establishes individual scenes of some degree of austerity, and then exercises scene-framing authority to "move" the PCs from scene-to-scene. I don't know if that's what you intended, but it was what I took away. This approach differes from the "tour guide" approach in that there is no aspiration to "living, breathing" naturalism in the scene-transition process, nor is there any pretence that any non-GM participant has anything but a minor role to play in scene-framing.

Emphasis mine.

I strongly disagree with your characterization of my post. If anything my point was the opposite of the bolded text: authority isn't the issue here, creative initiative is, because even if the players have authority to veto the hard frame, they usually won't. They just want the GM to take the initiative in moving things along to the point where they can make an interesting decision.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

While I reflect on your last few posts, your words here make me feel that we agree on the consequences.

I say that a participant satisfying the role of an expert in the imaginary domain(s) is conducting a function that falls into refereeing RPG. By my lights that participant is not a player when they perform their refereeing functions.

You strongly resist that notion, seeing the parallel as illusory. If I understand you correctly, you accept that RPG game play may be refereed, but believe that in modes under discussion here there is no referee, but only players with asymmetrical roles.

Is that put rightly?

Side note:

My own view is that games, as opposed to recreational activities, have goals with quantifiable outcomes towards which players strive, and if there's no such goal, it's not a game. The Rules of Play (Zimmerman et al.) introduced me to the idea that RPGs may not be games at all, and once seen it's hard to un-see.

Part of my interest in one-shots and/or discrete adventures within a campaign is driven by an interest in embedding games within RPGs by defining goals and quantifiable outcomes for the players to opt into.

Therefore I read a sentence like "in modes under discussion here there is no referee, but only players with asymmetrical roles" and think "in many cases the GM and everyone else are not game players at all, only participants in a non-game shared recreational activity." This is 10x as true when the GM takes responsibility for preventing TPKs, as is common in 2023. It's more like comedy improv than wargaming.

 

[Deset Gled]

That's why the word universal - which you ignored - is important.

Did you miss it? Or ignore the way it completely changes the meaning of the sentence such that your statement becomes false on purpose as a strawman exercise?

For the sake of civil discourse, is it possible to assume neither of those options are true? Two alternate theories could be that your communication is not as absolute as you believe it is, or that I simply disagree with you (and also gave legitimate examples to back up my opinion)?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

For the sake of civil discourse, is it possible to assume neither of those options are true? Two alternate theories could be that your communication is not as absolute as you believe it is, or that I simply disagree with you (and also gave legitimate examples to back up my opinion)?

FWIW, Deset Gled, I feel that chaochou's point was reasonably clear in the context of their overall post. Your post felt like a response to only the sentence you bolded; to me it seemed clear that the post as a whole was saying something quite different from the argument you thought you were refuting.

$0.02.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Folks, after a couple of the exchanges here, it seems prudent to remind you all that getting heated is apt to have consequences. Keep it to a friendly discussion, please and thanks.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'll defer to others who know the history of FK better than me to tell me whether or not this is even a reasonable move. If it is, I would expect that the resolution is via a pre-established throw of the dice.

Or else the judge might make an arbitrary call so as to test the capacity of the commander being trained/tested to handle some or other contingency.

It seems to me that this sort of thing might be more likely in a Braunstein, and the more the Braunstein contains this sort of thing then the more it crosses the dividing line I'm drawing. Which was @AbdulAlhazred's point about Braunstein's a little way upthread.

I don't know what you are meaning by "dispassionate refereeing" in this context.

There can be no "dispassionate" decision-making about (for instance) deciding what happens to the governance of and public order in a town if the ruling oligarchs are all assassinated. All that can happen is that the GM makes something up. But there is no knowledge or expertise possible here: actual human societies, in such situations, can respond in a tremendous variety of ways depending on all sort of considerations that historians and social scientists debate as part of their professional activities.

I think your latter clause here contradicts your first, unless your premise is that expertise has to evaluate things deterministically rather than probablistically. Or put another way, someone with a good knowledge of history and samples should be able to, with information about other social factors in play in that town, at least be able to evaluate a probable reaction of the town, even if others are possible. That still seems an expression of expertise to me. In fact, expertise seems relevant to establishing a reasonable range of probable outcomes, such as one might use to put a table together. That seems quite far from "no knowledge or expertise possible here" even if the result is not deterministic and there's room to argue the result; anything involving social and psychological elements can produce disagreement, but that does not mean there is no difference between someone going on intuition and someone who has studied the subject in relevance of expertise. Any other claim seems to make any social science pointless.

 

[Umbran]

My own view is that games, as opposed to recreational activities, have goals with quantifiable outcomes towards which players strive, and if there's no such goal, it's not a game. The Rules of Play (Zimmerman et al.) introduced me to the idea that RPGs may not be games at all, and once seen it's hard to un-see.

Sure, but what's the point of making that distinction? See below...

It's more like comedy improv than wargaming.

Because it starts to look like the point of making that exclusion is to be derisive, which isn't cool.

If it were a practical concern, we'd note that many precepts of game design still hold for these things you want to call "non-game shared recreational activities". If the only real distinction is the quantifiable end goal, then it still mostly looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, so to speak, and we are better of considering it a game with some special considerations, rather than a non-game activity.