Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

Regards my above, I intentionally leave open the strategy that S is non-normative while secret.* This is premised on saying that normal is down to consensus. Who consented to S while it was secret? Just one participant, right? A meaning of normal is normal for the society - in this case, players and MC together - so how can anything known to just one participant and thus lacking consensus count as a "norm"?

Thus I can resist S being a "pre-existing norm" until it becomes subject to the consent of the society. It might possibly be a prospective norm, but hasn't yet passed into recognition as a norm.

This picture changes for a society that grants to some participant(s) the job of establishing norms. As I have said in different ways further above, any S can be made normal in the case that the person(s) appointed to say what is normal said it. The two modes connect via the idea of prospective norms, i.e. that the appointed person(s) be the proposer of norms that will ordinarily be accepted in this latter mode of play.

*It is with this sort of thing in mind, as well as plain lacunae, that I included the words "so far as pre-existing norms extend", i.e. that they might not extend.

 

[Campbell]

What I mean is, an experience that doesn't rely so heavily on following the principles and restrictions these games require to have the experience they want. I want advice to be advice, not demands on how you have to play the game or you're doing it wrong. I also have no interest in prioritizing narrative beats and drama in my game anyway, so being forced to do so would be uncomfortable to me. In short, narrative/storygame mechanics make me prioritize aspects of the game I don't want to prioritize, and downplay, ignore, or restrict the parts I enjoy.

You have talked at length about the organizational principles of the way you run roleplaying games for pages upon pages. The GM moves / scene framing approaches are no more restrictive than GM describes environment => players as a group say what their characters do => GM (as a referee) makes a ruling about what changes in the environment. That you prefer one over the other does not make it less restrictive. It just makes it the set of restrictions/constraints that you prefer.

 

[innerdude]

Anyway, the additional rules I would have in mind include those yet to be brought into the description: meta-rules. (So I suggest that power-conferring rules are meta-rules, rules about rules, or at least have punted them to here.)

Where no-myth fits my general description of rules is this

• I allowed my description to contain an oversight, which is - what about things GM might write down that are it seems intended to override other norms but aren't really rules? Should I say they are rules? For example, if GM notes down that the sister hates the brother. Is that a rule?
• My take is that in doing so GM is establishing a particular type of norm, one that is a norm of the game world. That's because a player could invoke a rule that had the consequence that the sister not hate the brother, and one would expect play to respect that. Or one could feel instead that the GM's note established a rule, and compare the rules for specificity (specific overriding general)

I think it's closer to say that "Yes Myth" play of this sort is indicative of an assumed rule, "The result or outcome of any application of any other rule, including evaluation of basic state declaration by players, is solely contingent on GM acceptance. The GM may, at any time, veto any assumed outcome or game state that would normally follow from rules application and substitute an alternative outcome."

Introducing alternative game states isn't creating a "rule" in the fiction, it's application of the rule allowing fictional state veto power.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You have talked at length about the organizational principles of the way you run roleplaying games for pages upon pages. The GM moves / scene framing approaches are no more restrictive than GM describes environment => players as a group say what their characters do => GM (as a referee) makes a ruling about what changes in the environment. That you prefer one over the other does not make it less restrictive. It just makes it the set of restrictions/constraints that you prefer.

They're not restrictions if I don't have to play that way from moment to moment. I can choose to ignore constraints I put on myself if I want, because the game I'm playing doesn't demand, in the text, that I follow their principles or I'm doing it wrong and we won't have the very specific experience the game promises.

 

[Maxperson]

What does that look like? I mean, if the GM is following the rules of the game - framing when appropriate, narrating consequences when appropriate, etc then as @loverdrive posted it doesn't matter one bit where they are taking their ideas from (loverdrive identified some colourful possibilities: "from her mind, from her ass, her notes, the module, a random table, or from heavens above on a clay tablet. . . . from an erotic chatbot, cellular automata designed to simulate post-apocalyptic wasteland, or sms from Vincent Baker himself").

Conversely, if the GM narrates a consequence that breaches the rules of the game (eg in DW/AW, makes a hard move when the rules don't permit it; in Burning Wheel says "no" without calling for a roll of the dice), then it is obvious to everyone at the table what is happening, and now the situation is no different from any other game where one participant is breaking the rules: there can be a discussion about it, everyone can storm off in a huff, whatever seems best in that social context!

It looks the same as the traditional game @loverdrive mentioned. She claimed that it doesn't matter that 99.9% of traditional DMs run the game as the rules and guidelines state and don't run an adversarial game where they drop 50,000 liches on the group in order to invalidate their skill. If .001% of extreme bad faith DMs run their games this way, player skill doesn't exist.

That statement applies to no myth as well. It doesn't matter if 99.9% of no myth DMs run the game in accordance with the rules, bec

Please note that I don't believe either one of those things. She has been very wrong about the subject of player skill in D&D games and how traditional games are run for the entire thread(and likely far longer). I'm just pointing out how her argument applies to her style of game as well as the one she has been poopooing on the entire thread.

 

[clearstream]

I think it's closer to say that "Yes Myth" play of this sort is indicative of an assumed rule, "The result or outcome of any application of any other rule, including evaluation of basic state declaration by players, is solely contingent on GM acceptance. The GM may, at any time, veto any assumed outcome or game state that would normally follow from rules application and substitute an alternative outcome."

Introducing alternative game states isn't creating a "rule" in the fiction, it's application of the rule allowing fictional state veto power.

Well, I feel it is more that GM as referee is performing a job for the group, which consents in view of that service.

The assumed rule you offer is too impoverished to do the work. Or perhaps to put it another way, to me you're offering an impoverished form of GMing that no GM is obliged to adopt.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Wouldn’t it be nice if rules and processes of play worked in such a way as to make bad faith GMing obvious as could be when it happens? If you can’t distinguish between good and bad faith GMing, then I think the rules have likely failed in some way.

 

[innerdude]

Couple of notes.

1) My over exaggerated snark from posts earlier was largely for comic effect, and in some ways self deprecating, because prior to late 2017, those were views I would have held myself. I would have unquestionably held sim and immersion as apex priorities in play, and derided any sort of hard encoded rules or system that didn't implicitly or explicitly encode that value set.

In my view at that time 6 years ago, I would have imagined, I would have told anyone who asked that narrative style games were by definition functionally "incoherent".

And the reason I felt that way was because of the notion I had about simulationism---that it was paramount to the overall RPG experience. Sure, it didn't matter that I kind of hated a lot of the baggage sim entailed---the need to "gate" content from players because that's what was "realistic". The need to ignore what were clear dramatic needs of the characters, based on their build and background, because sim doesn't countenance playing to the character. That's by default undoing the nature of sim, and undoing the nature of sim in play means you're likely "ruining" the opportunities for true, deep character immersion.

But I was definitely starting to question by late 2017. Based on my described experience with Savage Worlds, where after a year and a half I could no longer justify or rationalize decisions I was making as a GM based solely on "extrapolation" and "fictional causality".

And it bothered me, because I somehow felt I was being untrue to the paradigm I held dear.

But cognitive dissonance is an interesting thing. So when I tried Dungeon World in late 2017, and totally didn't get it, but saw glimpses of what it was trying to do, I had to admit that there must be something incomplete in my understanding of a GM's role when it came to sim.

The key thing I discovered---that the entire foundation of simulationism rests on---is that I had the notion that I was doing something with sim that simply wasn't the case.

Sure, I was extrapolating, and adhering to causality with all my might, but those processes were only heuristics to the bigger process of "Make s**t up." Or in the more formal vernacular, "Introduce fiction".

I had never examined the broader point of authorial authority --- that I was merely privileged in my ability to introduce fiction to play. The fact that I was using some heuristics---increasingly faulty heuristics beyond a certain length of play/gamestate---to introduce fiction didn't change the fact that what I was doing was introducing/authoring fiction, nothing less, nothing more.

I think the larger resistance of some GMs to narrative style gaming is resistance to this reality. It feels . . . less ennobling, somehow, if the GM role is reduced from "maintainer of game world fidelity" and "keeper of the secret tomes of history" and "grand master of the hidden backstory that shall amaze and astound upon reveal" to "Person with the most authority to make s**t up."

But as soon as I could accept that reality, it unlocked an entirely new realm of RPG play. I'd never have fallen in love with Ironsworn without that paradigm shift. And I can't imagine how much I would have missed out on if I hadn't.

2) Over time I was becoming increasingly disillusioned with how difficult it was to even get the thing that sim supposedly promised---deep immersion. There seemed to be so much sacrificed---character stakes, stronger dramatic tension, player investment in something beyond, "Okay, we're exploring some new cool place that's mostly like all the other cool places we've already explored, and meeting more NPCs we don't care about. When do we get to fight again?"

Not only wasn't sim producing the one thing I cared about---deep immersion---it wasn't even producing intermediate positives.

And I'm willing to bet there's a lot of GMs that have the same problem. Trad sim priorities, unless deeply invested by the players, is largely ineffective at producing more enjoyable intermediate drama/stakes the players really care about.

 

[innerdude]

Well, I feel it is more that GM as referee is performing a job for the group, which consents in view of that service.

The assumed rule you offer is too impoverished to do the work. Or perhaps to put it another way, to me you're offering an impoverished form of GMing that no GM is obliged to adopt.

How is it impoverished? I think it clearly spells out the authority of GM intervention when secret backstory conflicts with rolled outcome or player declaration.

The GM has full authority to veto any outcome state and introduce an acceptable one.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I just wanted to comment on this very briefly. Consider a statement in a game text such as this from Stonetop

S “The rest of the inhabitants are lay folk: families and individuals who garden, herd, cook, clean, and otherwise keep the fortress-monastery running.”

S is normative in that, should characters run into someone coming from among “the rest of the inhabitants” they will normally be gardeners, herders, cooks, cleaners, and such like. Is S a rule? Suppose that for some span of time players are unaware of S. Thus S is yes-myth during that span of time. If at some moment players become aware of S, it transitions to no-myth and can - going forward - decide what happens next (e.g. decide that a random person met in the Barrier Pass is a gardener).

Given that "for no myth to work, there must be a way of working out what happens next other than by referring to pre-authored, secret fiction" MC is on safe ground from the moment players are aware of S onward, and on shaky ground before then. An exception is made for rules - "this is what the rules are for" - so if S is a rule then we're back on safe ground. Maybe. As my question was intended to imply, secret rules are ideally not an exception, on grounds that it might not always be certain whether something hidden that is normative is fiction or rule. So let's not make an exception for secret rules.

Anyway, if I exclude S being a rule, I now have two strategies: 1) make any such statements known prior to their being tested in play, 2) have rules that supersede them... potentially running up against your "mix of the two isn't going to be viable" stipulation. In obedience to the terms of no-myth play, the statement gives way to the rule. Right? The Stonetop game text on Barrier Folk, despite being normative is going to give way to some such rule.

Hey wait, isn't that exactly what I said rules do in #709?



Well, only if I say that S is a "pre-existing norm", and not a rule. Which is why I asked, what happens if S is a rule?!

To be perfectly honest, I'm very much not concerned with this whole logic chopping 'norm/rule/mechanic/whatever' thing. If a bit of setting material in a game like Stonetop (which I would consider 'low myth', not 'zero myth') says X, then X will be held to be the case. Whatever it is, norm/rule it is binding on the people at the table, at least unless they mutually agree that it isn't. Its also possible that some sort of rule/mechanics is in conflict with X. Lets take X to be your statement about the mundanity of the Barrier Folk. Now lets imagine a playbook move which says something like "Whenever you enter a community and try to recruit a follower" and one of the outcomes is "you recruit a unique NPC of unusually high capability." Now clearly that outcome contradicts X. There isn't some completely clear resolution to this, as the move in question is not written as a sub-rule or exception to X. So we now have to decide, on our own, which one we honor, X or the move. This is simply a very common everyday task in RPG play.

Now, I'd question how the heck you do this with integrity in a simulationist paradigm! Its not clear there are objective standards for what is plausible, and that would logically be the criteria for whether or not you can or cannot recruit a unique NPC amongst the Barrier Folk. I would find it likely that the outcome of that adjudication would favor whatever the underlying agenda is of the person making the determination, certainly to be colored by it. In the case of narrative play, this is all up front! Different participants might indeed choose differently, but even if there's something coloring that choice you can clearly articulate questions of "what will contribute to the drama inherent in this narrative?" and come up with some sort of answer. I just think sim is a lot more, maybe too much more, slippery than that.

So, I guess in the final analysis I'm more concerned with 'process of play' and how agenda is expressed through that and much less about fairly esoteric questions about philosophical differences between written and unwritten rules. If I had to comment on that, I'd say specific concrete statements must supersede assumptions. At least if you want to actually play a game that someone wrote instead of just authoring your own. I tend to play games as-written, at least as much as I find feasible.