Why do RPGs have rules?

[Imaro]

Thanks for this. I'm following you now. It seems like a real narrow agenda for a game, but, sure.

Well presumably it would just be one scene/piece that serves the simulation of a greater whole.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Well presumably it would just be one scene/piece that serves the simulation of a greater whole.

Bearslayer! An eco-action game in which you slay bears and level up to become a mighty warrior, while trying not to deplete the bear population so that your sons can someday follow in your footsteps!

 

[pemerton]

I've never met any good players in RPGs.

<snip>

Conversely, I've never met any bad players in RPGs.

<snip>

If there's a skill gap between a n00b and a god-tier capital G gamer in, say, dnd, I'm not convinced it's wider than the thickness of a PHB.

In the context of AD&D play, I've met people who are noticeably better or worse at choosing spell load-out, and choosing when and how to use spells to "beat the dungeon".

And I've been a player who has turned up to a drop-in table, built a MU or a cleric within the specified permitted parameters, and with that build utterly dominated play.

I don't play video games and so can't make the comparison to your "skilled vs noob" in that context. I know that becoming a good AD&D player in the sense I'm describing take nowhere near the same amount of practice and effort as becoming good at chess. I think it might take about the same amount as becoming good at the card game five hundred.

 

[pemerton]

in an RPG context, "You set up camp near the river. Shortly before dusk you see a large brown bear head to the middle of the river. After about 10 minutes it catches a large fish and carries it off to eat."

That's plenty enough to be a simulation of what a bear might do in the woods.

That's not a simulation. It's just a description!

I mean, in my last session of Torchbearer, my final bit of narration for the session was to describe a bolt of lightning blasting the house the PCs were in, blasting it in two.

That's not a simulation either. I just made it up!

That's a nice thought experiment. My first intuition is probably not, but then I have a few questions...

What is a bear?
What is a morning?
Why or how does the bear feel thirsty? What is thirst?
What is the connection between a well and water?
What is the connection between water and thirst? (Or are they unrelated?)
How does walking get a bear to a well? What is it like for a bear to walk?
In what way does walking to a well equate with collecting water?

Each reader will have a set of answers to questions like these. A model, if you will.

OK, let's make up some answers:

*A bear is the sort of thing that I see on TV and read about in books that is called a bear. And it lives in a house and sleeps on a bed much like an idealised 19th century European villager.
*A morning is when the sun comes up.
*Thirst is the desire to drink, which is why I and everyone else feels the need to take a drink.
*Wells are holes in the ground, typically with brick or stone walls about them, with water at the bottom (unless they're "dry" wells, which are a type of deficient or defective well).
*Water quenches thirst.
*Bears walk on four legs in real life (but sometimes on two), and on two legs in my story,
*Walking is the mode of getting to places, such that one can do things at places (like get water out of wells).


That's not a model! That's just me having read Goldilocks. Four years olds can do what I just did: I know, I use to live with some of them, and read and listen to their stories.


Now, let's put some pressure on the story: how does the bear (or the pig, in my Three Little Pigs supplement) build a house? What industry produces the building materials, sinks the wells, produces the clothes my bear (and pigs) are depicted as wearing, etc? How does the bear, with a bear's brain and a bear's mouth and throat, speak? Why does the sun rise? (Any explanation in terms of real world celestial phenomena is probably going to entail fact that are contradicted by my walking, talking, bears and pigs.)

Making stuff up is not a simulation. There's no model. It's just authorship.

Perhaps one could see the authoring itself as reliant on simulation, the product of which is of course static... not a simulation. Under this view, Tolkien would be described as having a model of Middle Earth in mind and drawn conclusions from that model.

But that would be a false description.

JRRT doesn't have a model of Middle Earth from which he extrapolates. He has ideas about Middle Earth which he adds to, writes down, changes from time to time, etc.

What is possibly gained by turning all our nouns into mush, so that "model" = "idea', "simulation" = "imagination", etc?

Well if we're following their principles it's a pointless narration that goes against the way the game is supposed to be played.

I think of simulation as a GM activity, an attempt at dispassionate extrapolation, not involving the players except through their characters, who act within the world and need to see realistic effects.

These two statements are not synonymous. I don't know which is "canonical" for simulation.

The first (from Imaro) implies that narration, in a RPG, becomes simulation if it has no point other than producing the narration for the other participants to take in. On this account, players as well as GMs can engage in simulation.

The second (from FormerlyHemlock) implies that narration, in a RPG, becomes simulation if it (an attempt at) dispassionate extrapolation on the part of the GM, that will be experienced by the other participants as realistic. On this account, only the GM can engage in simulation. And on this account, a lot of classic dungeon crawling counts as simulation; while what makes Apocalypse World count as non-simulation is not the nature of the fiction (which is extrapolation) but the GM's motivation (which is not dispassionate).

 

[pemerton]

Thanks for this. I'm following you now. It seems like a real narrow agenda for a game, but, sure.

It seems to imply that, as soon as the GM narrates something so as to provoke the players to declare actions for their PCs, it's no longer "simulation" in this sense.

Which doesn't just rule out Apocalypse World or Burning Wheel. It seems to rule out every adventure module ever: they all being with prompts to action.

 

[Autumnal]

I think that Tolkien did have something like a model built up over time. If you read his thoughts on Secondary Creation, he clearly valued the attempt to make an environment as strong as reality. (Heck, he did even if you don’t.) He also knew that it would necessarily fall short, since we don’t have the mind of God. And he was almost unique in his dedication, so this doesn’t contradict the generalization.

 

[hawkeyefan]

(A) I thought you were asking which RPGs weren't about simulation, not which RPGs "didn't allow" GMs to have bears catch fish for other reasons. It's very hard to imagine a GM in a game of Hillfolk narrating a bear catching a fish because in Hillfolk, narration is mostly the job of the players: Hillfolk is a game about players talking to other players in character, and as part of setting the scene a player might say, "In this next scene, Bob approaches Alice as she's watching a bear catch fish, in order to talk about how guilty he feels for tattling on her sister Eve." Bob's player must have an emotional agenda in mind, such as wanting Alice to forgive him, and after the scene everybody will vote on whether they think Alice granted his "petition" or denied it, and based on the result somebody gets a drama token. Can you see how that's very different from a play agenda that's about attempting to faithfully model a gameworld? The bear is just scenery--nobody cares what the gameworld is doing.

Hillfolk/DramaSystem does have procedural scenes where it matters what the gameworld is doing, but as I said Hillfolk's mechanics for such scenes are so rudimentary (and the scenes themselves are so pointless unless Alice does something like say "I will forgive you if you can catch a deer for me", leading to a procedural deer-hunting scene for Bob) that it's clear simulation is not in any way a priority for Hillfolk, and you could sub out Hillfolk's deer-catching rules for OD&D rules or GURPS or whatever.

(B) The translation in Diablo 2 from rolling numbers and doing math on them to swinging swords and damaging monsters is there just as much as it is in D&D/etc. The GM may do the rolling dice and math for you, or the computer may do the rolling dice and math for you, but in both cases random numbers are generated and math is done and the swords get swung and monsters get damaged. And what does that have to do with the discussion anyway? You didn't address in any way my observations on Diablo 2's lack of interest in simulation (as opposed to Game or Drama). It's not like Diablo 2's designers couldn't make you take more than an instant to pick up 5655 gold pieces. They could have made you stop and start scooping coins into your pouch, which gets heavier and weighs you down more and more as it gets full. They deliberately didn't,
even though it's unrealistic, because simulation of a realistic world isn't a design priority for Diablo 2.

(C) Realistic in the sense of being self-consistent and not falling apart under examination. And again, you're asking the wrong question: it's not "what game doesn't allow it [an attempt at dispassionate extrapolation, not involving the players except through their characters, who act within the world and need to see realistic effects]?" but "what game doesn't involve it [an attempt at dispassionate extrapolation, not involving the players except through their characters, who act within the world and need to see realistic effects]?" And again I will point to Diablo 2 and (for the most part) DramaSystem. Dispassionate extrapolation is mostly irrelevant to both of them.

I was asking what game doesn't allow for simulation per the example provided by @Maxperson . I don't see how his example actually displays simulation other than that it is plausible that a bear would go into a river and catch a fish. What game doesn't work with some sense of plausibility?

You've offered two... I would agree on Diablo, but I suppose I should have been more specific and said "tabletop RPGs". I'm less concerned about a video game. On Hillfolk, I don't know if I agree. Again, I'm not familiar with it other than the very basics, but I don't think that a bear catching a fish in a river isn't something that could be narrated because it's plausible.

In other words, what is it, other than plausibility, that makes something a simulation?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I was asking what game doesn't allow for simulation per the example provided by @Maxperson . I don't see how his example actually displays simulation other than that it is plausible that a bear would go into a river and catch a fish. What game doesn't work with some sense of plausibility?

You've offered two... I would agree on Diablo, but I suppose I should have been more specific and said "tabletop RPGs". I'm less concerned about a video game. On Hillfolk, I don't know if I agree. Again, I'm not familiar with it other than the very basics, but I don't think that a bear catching a fish in a river isn't something that could be narrated because it's plausible.

In other words, what is it, other than plausibility, that makes something a simulation?

If you make world design choices based on plausibility and in-world logic, then it's a simulation. The more you focus on that principle, the more of a simulation you get.

 

[Fenris-77]

If you make world design choices based on plausibility and in-world logic, then it's a simulation. The more you focus on that principle, the more of a simulation you get.

I'm going to guess that you are here referring to something like the following quote from Edward's venerable article setting out the Simulationist agenda as follows:

Internal Cause is King
Consider Character, Setting, and Situation - and now consider what happens to them, over time. In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. The way these elements tie together, as well as how they're Colored, are intended to produce "genre" in the general sense of the term, especially since the meaning or point is supposed to emerge without extra attention. It's a tall order: the relationship is supposed to turn out a certain way or set of ways, since what goes on "ought" to go on, based on internal logic instead of intrusive agenda. Since real people decide when to roll, as well as any number of other contextual details, they can take this spec a certain distance. However, the right sort of meaning or point then is expected to emerge from System outcomes, in application.

There's nothing there that prevents or elides the bear example. Does the appearance of a bear fit in within the internal logic of the gamestate? Yes? Then we're good.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yeah, and even if they completely trust the GM, losing a character and a set of relationships you're invested in can be emotionally brutal. I get that. How to make game sessions that contain TPK, and continued play afterwards, still enjoyable is a whole branch of the GMing art and I'm still learning it myself. The Felltower gang has a lot of relevant experience: Felltower TPK: The Gnoll Story - Gaming Ballistic

I'll go as far as to say with some people its probably not possible. Even people who might be able to deal with the occasional loss of a character with equilibrium [raises hand] may not be able to deal with the whole group going down.

One of the best suggestions I've ever heard is to give closure by showing impact. Instead of just deleting a dead character from the narrative, you can show how NPCs react to their death, show what changes. My post-game writeup of the next PC death is definitely going to be a vignette of an NPC coping with grief, and then finding some way to constructively move forward (probably by stepping up and into the dead PC's shoes).

In a particular superhero game I ran, when one character died (to some extent at the choice of the player) I had one particular NPC super (technically a villain/antagonist for the group but--complicated) write a eulogy for him on his website. I never did find out of people liked it or not.