Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. No difference between those two things. None at all.

Count me in as someone who would hate both arbitrarily adding HP to a goblin and arbitrarily adding thousands of tarrasques to an adventure enough to quit the table. It's not that I can't see a difference between them, but in a practical sense it doesn't matter: it's like the difference between losing a finger and losing a hand. I don't want either!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

And can a player take a look at the encounter at hand, calculate the CR and say "hey, this encounter is way too easy" (or "this encounter is way too hard", the difference is non-existent too)?

One of my first experiences with 5E was going home after my second session, calculating the encounter difficulty of a fight we'd had, and realizing that the fight we'd just had was beyond Deadly, what Kobold Fight Club called Ludicrous, and getting very scared and excited and proud of surviving. (This is before 5E made the changes to encounter difficulty table to change ceilings to thresholds. Today that same encounter would merely be Deadly.)

This experience helped inform my preference for Deadly+ encounters in 5E.

 

[Imaro]

Let's say you are playing a game of Warhammer for an agreed upon number of points, and you see your opponent placing a tad too many models to the table. You can check their army list and say: "Hey, there's only 3 tactical squads in your list, why are there four on the table?" (note: they are not necessarily cheating, maybe they just mixed things up, drek happens)

You can (and should!) keep the other player in check, and enforce the rules, guided by things more tangible than "this looks like bull####" gut feeling.

Encounter budgets and CR do this... I can literally do (and have seen others do) exactly what you are stating here. Hey DM that encounter felt way overpowered what difficulty was it supposed to be? Easy, well the CR for ghouls is 3 and you used 9000 of them and we're only 1st level so it seems you miscalculated an easy encounter.

 

[Maxperson]

Absolutely none. You might be unwilling to conjure ten thousand tarrasques, doesn't change the fact that your will is the only limiting factor at play.

Same with you and your game.

If you can't see that there's a difference between the DM setting up an appropriate goblin encounter and engaging in extreme bad faith by attacking with 10,000 tarrasques, I think we're done. You won't be able to understand what is really happening in traditional games, blinded by your bias.

 

[clearstream]

If, say, monster list and dungeon layout were open information (or became open information after the game ends, by handing the players an enveloper or, idk, sending them a password-protected archive with notes), then, yeah, GM-as-worldbuilder and GM-as-referee can be feasibly separated.

This restates the same issue @Pedantic drew attention to. It is premised on a distrust or disbelief in the GM role.

Whether the information be open or secret makes no difference to the possibility of player skill.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Awhile back we were discussing simulationism and naturally earlier thought on the subject came up. Questions like this one often arise



To which one possible answer is that



Such a take might appear to either deny the possibility of simulationist play, or express skepticsm as to the possibility of knowledge about simulationist play. But the discussion goes on to accept the possibility and develop some knowledge about it



You might at this point recognise the author, Ron Edwards. Someone who so far as I can tell had no empathy with simulationism, but (or on account of that) was able to discuss the mode with a certain objectivity. He lands on



He gives the mode the byline "The Right to Dream" and concludes that it is focused on having the experience for its own sake. Perhaps without noticing that this is true of game play in virtue of being game play. He questions whether enjoyment of the experience for its own sake can really stand up, in the long term.

My thinking is in part based on his discussion. I say there is a model and the group has heuristics that map to future states. There should be nothing surprising there. It's practically a restatement of what a game is. However, in the immersionist or simulationist play I'm concerned with there are some things that matter

• That there should be referents, which can be previously imagined (i.e. preestablished) referents. That means I am not sure that no-myth play can be simulationist.
• That the functions themselves (heuristics, whatever you want to call them) are proper subjects for attention. I'm not just interested in the scene elements (e.g. the bear in the Goldilocks scene) but also in imagining the relationships and dynamics. I ought to know why the bear is thirsty and have in mind a cause (function, heuristic.) I have in mind simulation, not narration.

Those factors to me make it right to say that simulation is being used or done, and to find other descriptions inaequate. I would say that other descriptions reveal more attempts to understand the mode using the language of other modes, with foreseeable lack of success. It is separated from ordinary language use in the ways I have outlined.

I don't see 'heuristics' exactly. I see post hoc evaluation of what was depicted in terms of its sounding plausible. A need exists within the game to have some kind of fiction and the idea of the bear is surfaced and then evaluated, with the result being 'indeed a bear is plausible' and assuming it also has the requisite game function then it is deployed.

Perhaps the bear appears on an encounter table, but the construction of that table only takes into consideration what is challenging to the characters, plausible and genre appropriate. The idea that some sort of model of how bears are distributed, their population, behavior, etc has nothing to do with it.

 

[Bedrockgames]

There is also the issue that the GM is constrained by the players judgment of his or her decisions. A GM who drops 10,000 tarasques, won't be GM after that session (unless there is an extremely compelling reason for 10,000 tarasques showing up). And every group is going to evaluate GMs using different criteria. But for me when it comes to games where something like player skill matters, I would judge the GM's choices by fairness (to mean being impartial, not rooting for or against the party, etc), logic of their decisions, how reasonable the challenge was (i.e. was it a doom dungeon where the chance of survival is the same as winning the lottery, or is it a dungeon players stand a chance of surviving if they use their heads), and things like that.

 

[Maxperson]

Count me in as someone who would hate both arbitrarily adding HP to a goblin and arbitrarily adding thousands of tarrasques to an adventure enough to quit the table. It's not that I can't see a difference between them, but in a practical sense it doesn't matter: it's like the difference between losing a finger and losing a hand. I don't want either!

Sure. A lot of people don't like fudging, but 1 hit point is not the same as 10k tarrasques. Like not even close. And heck, I'd bet that most DMs don't fudge even a little.

Fudging is also not the same as the players only being able to win if the DM allows. You have to look at the why of the fudging before you can say that.

 

[clearstream]

I don't see 'heuristics' exactly. I see post hoc evaluation of what was depicted in terms of its sounding plausible.

That certainly helps articulate our differences in views.

I can see how through that lense it will be difficult to understand internal and hybrid versus external models.

 

[AnotherGuy]

A) Test is (at least supposed to be) non-arbitrary. Yes, teacher can set harder questions, but it's not like they feasibly can ask first-graders about eigenvectors.

And yet you're comfortable using multiple tarrasques in your examples but eigenvectors is the line we must draw.

B) Teacher is (at least supposed to be) to have a greater expertise in the field than the student. No one is an expert at navigating trap-riddled tombs of dead gods.

The DM has knowledge of the setting, factions, npcs, monsters, opponents, magical items, spells and many of the mechanics of the game thus making them "skilled" in navigating the world created.
For instance, in my Tyranny of Dragon campaign, I know several ways the party could improve their standing with the Council and strengthen themselves against the Cult of the Dragon.
They're aware of the fracture that occurred in the Lords' Alliance due the War of the Silver Marches and yet none of them have thought let's try reach out to ex-Lord Alliance members in an attempt to recruit them against Tiamat and her forces. That would be skilled play.

EDIT: The idea is not even mentioned within the AP. And there are so many more examples. But I'm aware of such things because I'm an expert on that game.