Why do RPGs have rules?

[AbdulAlhazred]

I would be open to playing in Stonetop, actually. I really like some setting to sink my teeth into, incomplete or not.

As far as that last comment goes, that can be a problem. Which is why I always incorporate into session 0 a conversation with the players focusing on the PCs goals. That way I can make sure to build into the world stuff that matters to them specifically before the campaign begins.

Yeah, the game includes a kind of a process like that where everyone asks questions on certain topics, and supplies some bits of info, like where in Stonetop their house is located, stuff like that. Our game has only had 3 sessions, so a lot of that hasn't had time to become highly relevant yet, but even without it coming up specifically in an action kind of context it does offer a bit of a framework for how we interact. Meda knows that Burkhardt thinks book study is crazy dangerous and that she should be more careful. She's trying to prove him wrong (which somehow feels like it will probably boomerang on her).

 

[pemerton]

That creates some distinction between sim and nar, as the former would ordinarily not be concerned with what anyone hopes the weather would be, while for the latter it follows.

Two things:

First, you haven't shown that in sim play, where the GM narrates the weather, that there is no hope on the GM's part.

Two, it's not an insight or a new contribution to note that narrativist/"story now" play is sensitive to what one or more players want for their PCs. That is obvious and well-known.

So far as pre-existing norms extend, participants can often agree that a description D will have the consequences C. Rules supersede pre-existing norms and extend beyond them.

<snip>

• In the absense of a rule, can I say what the weather will be tomorrow in Balazar? I believe yes, it's pretty straightforward. Especially if I had in play a calendar with seasons (like the Calendar of Harptos for FR.) I can follow a norm - "hmm, well it's summer and Balazar is mostly plains so I'm going with hot and let's say cloudy... light but constant winds".
• So I've got an answer, what do I need the rule for? The rule supersedes and extends that. Superseding means I use the Balazaring Weather Table instead of what I might normally expect. Extending means introducing things I would not normally expect, and that can invite questions I couldn't have without the rule.

<snip>

So far as pre-existing norms extend, participants can often agree that a description D will have the consequences C. Rules supersede pre-existing norms and extend beyond them. During play it can be decided if any D has the consequences C by matching that D to a norm or rule that explicitly states or implies that C.

In the first quoted sentence, you say "participants can often agree" etc. Then in the second, you move from third person plural to first person singular, where a person consults a calendar that they accept as authoritative. Where have the other participants gone? Then, in the final quote passage, the plural returns. And so all that has happened is that we've come right back to Baker's point: rules ease and constrain social negotiation around "what happens next?" (Eg everyone accepts that the calendar is authoritative; or everyone accepts that the weather table is the appropriate process; or whatever other method is being used of establishing shared imagination about the weather in this place.)

This is a proposition that was already set out at the start of the thread, in the OP. It's fine that you've worked you own way to that same conclusion, but you present your reasoning as if it provides new insights when in fact it contains no new results and produces no new knowledge.

D&D gives it to GM to match descriptions to norms (this should usually be a gimme, but actually I believe GM is intended to prevail if there is doubt) or rules (where they exist.)

This appears to be a complicated way of saying: in D&D, the GM gets to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next and further to say that, at least sometimes that procedure is that the GM authors it, unmediated by any other process. This seems obviously true for some approaches to D&D. I don't think anyone in this thread is confused about it.

As my concerns are generally ontological - Hart's scorer's discretion might not be especially relevant to me.

<snip>

I recently learned of Frederick Schauer's work and perhaps my description of rules is more like his. He recognises the need to link a factual predicate to a consequent (that then is what a rule is or does.) He notices as I do the problems of matching (of ensuring that the rule captures just the cases it should capture).

<snip>

AW has a brilliant scheme of forcing the description to fit pretty closely to each move, reducing as much as possible doubt (but not dissolving it entirely, MC still gets to say what matches.)[

I know Hart's work quite well. From time to time I teach it to undergraduates. I know Schauer's work - I have seen him present it. Although I am familiar with this work, I struggle to work out what you are saying in the first two of these three quoted passages.

Like, if you are trying to work out the function of rules in RPGing, why do you say your concerns are generally ontological? On what basis do you deny that (say) they are primarily social psychological? How do we know that Schauer is more relevant than Durkheim? (I mean, your use of "norm" appears to have something in common with the way Durkheim and social psychologists use it.) And what difference does it make that the status of rules and of authority, in RPGing, is wildly different from in systems of legislation and adjudication that Schauer is primarily concerned with?

The paradigm of rules that Schauer is concerned with are legal rules that establish sanctions for conduct. And the puzzle about matching that arises in respect of these rules is how to state the rule so that the right sanctions will always attend a given bit of behaviour. Games don't have this problem, because - as Suits reminds us - they are voluntary. The principle issue with games, precisely because they are voluntary, is to maintain adherence by the participants. Which is why Baker is so concerned with the social aspect of play, including his doubts about the utility of a mere focus on authority (as quoted in the OP). AW uses two main methods to ensure that concerns about "matching" will not cause the "social contract" of play to break down:

(1) The AW rulebook has extensive discussions of how "takebacks" work (both player and GM side) - there is no parallel to this in the sorts of cases Schauer is primarily concerned with, where the conduct is a given and the rule is now applied to generate a sanction;

(2) If a player in AW declares an action for their PC, and after discussion the MC is of the view that the action doesn't trigger a player-side move, then (i) the rules are clear the player can vary their action declaration if they really want to trigger the move, and (ii) if the player elects not to vary their action declaration, then what they had their PC do becomes part of the shared fiction, and all that can happen is that the MC makes a soft move and then asks the player "what do you do?" Which is to say, the issue of "matching" is extremely low stakes. This contrast with, say, the debates that can break out in traditional D&D play about whether or not a player's action declaration for their PC triggered a trap.​

Mechanics are made up of rules. They're almost always (maybe even always) compound. My description does not deal with mechanics, it deals with rules.

I don't think this is a very illuminating characterisation of mechanics. Like, if someone wanted to know how the game bridge works, telling them "it is made up of rules" would not be very informative. Telling them that those rules govern transitions from one game state to another would still not be very informative: that's just a wordy way of restating the triviality that bridge is a game.

Key to understanding bridge is that play involves the use of cards - real physical items, distributed among the participants initially via a random process, and then used by the participants to generate states of play via decision-making within certain constraints.

What is key to appreciating the function of RPG mechanics is not focusing on the rules in which they figure, but rather on the processes that the mechanics involve - processes of tallying (hit points, gold pieces, plot points etc), processes of generating numbers by rolling dice, processes of comparing things (eg dice results to table entries). The use of processes that are not fully under the control of participants (rolling dice, drawing cards from shuffled decks, blind declarations of actions, etc) is one way of introducing the unwelcome and unwanted into play.

It sheds little light on the difference between a character casting a spell in AD&D, and a character casting a spell in Torchbearer, to notice that both are governed by rules about how the fiction changes. It sheds quite a bit of light to notice that both involve a process of tallying (a spell is crossed off a list of memorised spells) but only Torchbearer also demands that a roll be made, which if it fails permits the GM rather than the player to have the principal say of what happens next. From that difference we can see straight away that, in TB, playing a wizard is less different from playing a thief than is the case in AD&D, where playing a wizard is profoundly different from playing a thief. (And that's just one example of the differences we can see.)

I feel some just cannot accept the possibility of immersionist play. For the folk doing the play it is about their experience. I can enjoy the blue sky, right? But that does not mean that the sky is blue for my sake!

This is not responding in a clear way to what I posted. I said "Once we take seriously that the rules are rules for RPGing, it is not obvious that play can be such that it does not, by its very nature, place specific people front and centre. This would need to be shown".

In RPG play in which the only bits of the fiction that are told to the players are bits that their PCs are experiencing, then the PCs are placed front-and-centre. This is not a proposition about anything being for anyone's sake, but rather about how a "field of experience" is constituted. In the real world it has the "self" at its centre. In "immersionist" RPGing it has an imagined self at its centre.

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).

So what about when those things GM notes down are not only normative (or are rules) but also secret or unstated? It seems pretty clear that, that's what no-myth banishes.

Again, you present this as if it is new knowledge, when in fact it is just a complicated restatement of things that are quite straightforward.

"No myth" means that that the GM is precluded from appealing to secret backstory to stipulate what happens next without any intermediation via mechanical processes. Whether the process of extrapolation from secret backstory to "what happens next" is described as a norm or a rule or whatever else is irrelevant to that basic point, and to me seems to shed no light and in fact to obscure that basic point.

The reason for including the phrase without intermediation vis mechanical processes is because - in no myth play - if the player fails their roll, then the GM may very well draw upon secret backstory to decide what to say. This is the function of "fronts" in Apocalypse World: they serve as an aide memoire, or a prompt, for the GM to decide what to say.

Say the GM has a printed book of Star League protocols that players are at liberty to read any time? Is it then okay for the faked distress signal to fail if as it happens printed openly in that book is a distress-signal-ignoring protocol?

"No myth" is an approach to the resolution of declared actions, and so the question becomes What is the player's action declaration? What bit of the fiction has been put into question by that?

In the example I gave, the question was not what does the protocol book say? but what will the captain do? The fact that the contents of the protocol are established fiction does not dictate an answer to that question, and hence does not dictate a resolution of the declared action.

We could even imagine how this might unfold in Burning Wheel: the player declares a Wises check - "Don't I recall that the protocols for distress calls are such-and-such?" The check fails, and the GM responds "But in putting it that way, you're forgetting <this other bit about the risk of fake signals>" And the player responds "OK, but we'll try anyway because maybe this captain is a soft touch" and there is a +1 Ob due to the failed linked test.

No myth is not a conceptually complicated approach to RPGing. I first did it, before the label had been coined, in the second half of the 1980s. It just requires adopting a different attitude towards the relationship between GM prep and action resolution.

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.

This is already contentious.

Normative normally means something like establishing a standard of behaviour or stating a reason for action. S doesn't state a reason for action, nor establish a standard of behaviour. It states a proposition about an imaginary place.

Suppose that the PCs run into someone from among the rest of the inhabitants, then by definition that person is one of the lay-folk. But the PCs run into one of the lay folk is a piece of fiction that must have been authored by someone. And that is where norms come in: what reason did that author have for authoring that thing? Did authoring that thing conform to other relevant reasons?

Only if there is some reason to think that is a person run into by the PCs and is one of the lay folk are reasonably tightly correlated, is there a reason to think that normally when the PCs run into someone it will normally be a gardener, herder, cook, etc. I don't know about Stonetop, but Burning Wheel obviously does not accept the correlation: rather, BW begins from the premise that most people a PC runs into are from among that PCs circles. Which, for some PCs, will not include the lay folk.

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.

How did "yes myth" go from describing a type of play (in contrast to "no myth") to describing an element of secret backstory?

If jargon is going to be used, I think it is helpful to use it consistently.

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.

To me, this makes no sense.

The description of the lay folk seems no different from an AW front, and its relationship to no myth or low myth play is perfectly clear, as per what I said just above.

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"?

<snip>

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.

GM as referee is performing a job for the group, which consents in view of that service.

And this is just an overly-complex way of saying that, at some tables, everyone has agreed to let the GM decide what happens next. No one is confused about that, or unaware of it as an approach to RPGing. I think everyone posting in this thread has probably participated in such RPGing, either as GM or as player.

make any such statements known prior to their being tested in play

What is the relationship of the statement to player priorities, and in particular the dramatic needs they have established for their characters? That will tell you whether or not it should be made known in advance of play.

In AW, the GM does not need to announce their fronts in advance. But they don't write any fronts until after the first session, to ensure that fronts cohere with player priorities as those emerge in the first session.

Ron Edwards wrote about the relationship between revealing vs concealing backstory, and player protagonism, 20 years ago, under the heading "pitfalls of narrativist game design":

Metaplot. From Sorcerer & Sword (Adept Press, 2001, author is Ron Edwards):

Metaplot. The solution most offered by role-playing games is a supplement-driven metaplot: a sequence of events in the game-world which are published chronologically, revealing "the story" to all GMs and expecting everyone to apply these events in their individual sessions. These published events include the outcomes of world-shaking conflicts as well as individual relationships among the company-provided NPCs involved in these conflicts.

Metaplot of this sort, whether generated by a GM or a game publisher, is antithetical to the entire purpose of Sorcerer & Sword. Almost inevitably, it creates a series of game products that pretend to be supplements for play but are really a series of short stories and novels starring the authors' beloved and central NPCs. The role of the individual play group in those stories is much like that of karaoke singers, rather than creative musicians.​

Metaplot is central to the design of several White Wolf games, especially Mage; all AEG games; post-first-edition Traveller; AD&D2, beginning with the Forgotten Realms series; as well as others. Nearly all of them are perceived as setting-focused games, and to many role-players, they define role-playing with strong Setting.

However, neither Setting-based Premise nor a complex Setting history necessarily entails metaplot, as I'm using the term anyway. The best example is afforded by Glorantha: an extremely rich setting with history in place not only for the past, but for the future of play. The magical world of Glorantha will be destroyed and reborn into a relatively mundane new existence, because of the Hero Wars. Many key events during the process are fixed, such as the Dragonrise of 1625. Why isn't this metaplot?

Because none of the above represent decisions made by player-characters; they only provide context for them. The players know all about the upcoming events prior to play. The key issue is this: in playing in (say) a Werewolf game following the published metaplot, the players are intended to be ignorant of the changes in the setting, and to encounter them only through play. The more they participate in these changes (e.g. ferrying a crucial message from one NPC to another), the less they provide theme-based resolution to Premise, not more. Whereas in playing HeroQuest, there's no secret: the Hero Wars are here, and the more everyone enjoys and knows the canonical future events, the more they can provide theme through their characters' decisions during those events.

In designing a Setting-heavy Narrativist rules-set, I strongly suggest following the full-disclosure lead of HeroQuest and abandoning the metaplot "revelation" approach immediately.​

These are solved problems!

 

[pemerton]

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?"

This was kinda my issue as well. There were some settings that sim-oriented GMs threw their entire selves into making a simulated world, only to end up like the bold and my character (and those of the rest of the party) forgotten in the shuffle. Like it didn't really matter what character I had made for the game or how I roleplayed them. It would have mostly ended up the same.

Yeah, I identified a lot with that whole feeling of "yawn, another D&D-esque fantasy world." I started to find I was just getting sleepier and sleepier at the table! Sure, each one is 'unique' in terms of there being an infinity of configurations of orc tribes or whatever, and undoubtedly every GM DOES put some little unique stamp on their thing, but exploration of entirely invented worlds for its own sake simply wears thin. This is especially true if you have been at it for a decade or two!

I would add to this: if a setting is interesting, then shouldn't it be revealed to the players? I mean, this is the normal way a GM becomes enthused about someone else's setting - they read the book!

Having setting information parcelled out via the process of action declaration - "I open the door", "I read the note", "What do I recall about <such and such>?" - seems like one of the least interesting ways to learn about a setting, unless it's a pretty cleverly constructed mystery.

 

[pemerton]

I was actually thinking about BitD which allows the GM to set position and effect level... But in general I feel like any game where the GM is using judgement to determine difficulty is open to this.

If there are benchmarked difficulties, then I don't think this is so - because the inference from framing to benchmarks is transparent.

The upshot of this is that the players can often contribute to setting the obstacle, by helping everyone at the table arrive at a shared conception of the framing.

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

This makes no sense to me.

@loverdrive's claim about player skill is about control over parameters - in a certain sort of D&D play, that is all under the GM's control.

Whether or not that fact about control entails the conclusion about skilled play seems to me to have no bearing on what "no myth" play looks like.

The point about no myth play is that transparency of framing, and of consequence narration, means that by definition concealment is impossible. The GM can't hide the fact that they're not being transparent in their decision-making. The other participants will notice the lack of transparency - eg that a hard move has been made although the player succeeded at their roll.

 

[gban007]

I would add to this: if a setting is interesting, then shouldn't it be revealed to the players? I mean, this is the normal way a GM becomes enthused about someone else's setting - they read the book!

Having setting information parcelled out via the process of action declaration - "I open the door", "I read the note", "What do I recall about <such and such>?" - seems like one of the least interesting ways to learn about a setting, unless it's a pretty cleverly constructed mystery.

Thought I'd jump on here, as ties to something I've been thinking on since reading a bit of that closed thread, around immersion - one of the reasons I like playing in the Forgotten Realms or Dragonlance, is because I know the settings well from various material (Campaigns, novels, computer games) - so feel on somewhat on an even level with the DM (when not DMing myself) when it comes to knowing where cities / towns are, what their populations are etc - and is only adventure points themselves whether from a published adventure of DM authored where I don't know exactly what is going on - but then that feels like what it would be like for someone involved in the adventure - would know general information, but not particulars as such. Often as a group we will look at maps etc of the world to get feel of it.
Is one reason why I prefer playing in published settings like this, as feel I can make myself knowledgeable on what my character would know.
Had one memorable case with immersion destroyed when finally had chance to play a Wheel of Time game using the 3rd edition book, and the DM decided to move us to a different world with different logic, and ended up TPKing us as decided to make up some monster on the spot with abilities that were far beyond us - so not great DMing all round, but immersion was broken even before that TPK, as felt the general common point we had was lost.

 

[clearstream]

These last few posts have been long and covered a lot, so I will respond in time over several posts.

First, you haven't shown that in sim play, where the GM narrates the weather, that there is no hope on the GM's part.

If you are not familiar with the Balazaring Weather Table (and there's no reason you should be) then you might not know that it's a dice roll (d6 and d4) that shifts weather up and down columns for each season. Following the table, there's no hope on anyone's part.

However, let's say the GM has the job of impartially deciding the weather and is not using such a table. The aim is that the weather is external or objective from the perspective of the player characters: unlike nar, player hopes are not expected to be an input. I use the word "impartially" to include not applying desires one way or another. If one thinks that unavoidable then it is better to replace "anyone" with "any player's".

Two, it's not an insight or a new contribution to note that narrativist/"story now" play is sensitive to what one or more players want for their PCs. That is obvious and well-known.

That's okay. I didn't intend it to be. My chief goal was just to state what I understood.

 

[clearstream]

In the first quoted sentence, you say "participants can often agree" etc. Then in the second, you move from third person plural to first person singular, where a person consults a calendar that they accept as authoritative. Where have the other participants gone? Then, in the final quote passage, the plural returns. And so all that has happened is that we've come right back to Baker's point: rules ease and constrain social negotiation around "what happens next?" (Eg everyone accepts that the calendar is authoritative; or everyone accepts that the weather table is the appropriate process; or whatever other method is being used of establishing shared imagination about the weather in this place.)

This is a proposition that was already set out at the start of the thread, in the OP. It's fine that you've worked you own way to that same conclusion, but you present your reasoning as if it provides new insights when in fact it contains no new results and produces no new knowledge.

Rereading your OP I retain the feeling that Baker takes an... I guess it could be called teleological approach. He has purposes in mind and he punts game rules like those that model the world that don't fit those purposes. I am aiming for a definition that will include such rules.

I'm thinking about bare cause and function. I'm not concerned with the social negotiation, only with what concretely happens when a rule is followed. That is why I shift tone: the first line lays out when we have cause to follow a rule. The rest lay out what following a rule amounts to.

Baker writes

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction.

You summarised that

on this account, the function of RPG rules is to help mediate and constrain the process of agreeing on the shared fiction; and not just by assigning authority ("It's your turn now to say what happens next") but by shaping what is said so that it is surprising and even unwelcome to all participants.

I couldn't find anywhere in the account where it states exactly how that "shaping" takes place. The process, not the purpose. I felt that if one could state the process a bit more clearly, one might see how it could fit with a diversity of purposes.

So far as pre-existing norms extend, participants can often agree that a description D will have the consequences C.
Lapses here necessitate the rule so it's right to observe that this reflects the OP, although I call attention both to the possibility of non-agreement, and the possibility of lack of a norm. I can't see where the OP calls attention to the latter.

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .

Baker possibly comes to see that agreement to a rule is never located in the rule - meaning that the social contract if functioning will work without them - and transfers attention to what following rules might achieve. I'm not sure from what you have written whether you agree? I take Baker to be saying, essentially, that rules can be forceful (so that the first and last part of your summary amount to the same thing.) The OP implies the additional necessity of pre-existing norms to rely on: I state it outright.

Rules supersede pre-existing norms and extend beyond them.
Regardless of whether there are or are not lapses (whether participants do or don't agree) if they follow the rule then what the rule functionally does is supersede and extend beyond any pre-existing norm. I cannot see where this is stated in the OP, although I do see where some useful consequences of this are stated. This statement has many useful implications for games and if the OP intended it, then I think it should have spelt it out.

During play it can be decided if any D has the consequences C by matching that D to a norm or rule that explicitly states or implies that C.
I call attention to the matching, which again I do not see in the OP but which I saw right away in Schauer and I understand to be a general problem in law: beyond trivial examples, how do we know that a rule fits a case? This necessitates strategies to secure it: in AW that's a design strategy, in D&D that's an organisational strategy. Once we have a rule that matches, the functional mapping itself is as implied in the OP.

So perhaps it is right that I have just reframed what you felt to be implied in the OP. As outlined, I felt that some things were not well enough implied so I went ahead and attempted to formulate a definition. I'm glad that it reflects the OP, and although you did not say it, there is really nothing in what I have written that should not reflect background discourse. It needs more work. I'd value further insights into whether my supposed additions really are additions in the meantime.

 

[clearstream]

This appears to be a complicated way of saying: in D&D, the GM gets to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next and further to say that, at least sometimes that procedure is that the GM authors it, unmediated by any other process. This seems obviously true for some approaches to D&D. I don't think anyone in this thread is confused about it.

From my perspective putting it as "GM gets to say" has a potential to add confusion. There must be some means by which descriptions are matched to rules, and that is not just an option taken up by D&D. It's not just something someone "gets to say", it's something that someone must say. Both AW and D&D give it to MC/GM to say.

For me it's also not sufficiently clear to make it about saying "what procedure will be used". "Procedure" has a potential to be confused as a synonym for rule. I see that as confusing rules for mechanics. Rather than confusing them it seems better to me to switch to using "mechanic". Or is that your intent? (Perhaps on grounds that rules and mechanics are not clearly separable or shouldn't be separated?)

My statement is about determining which rule matches a description, where I am thinking about what might be called atomic functions. This is not about what GM says or does not say - that's only one example of what I mean - it's necessitated. Computer games achieve it by providing players with an austere language in which each expression maps precisely to some rule, which goes on with other rules to form a mechanic. Glitches occur when it turns out that some expressions map in ways that were not intended.

TTRPGs present what I would characterise as delightful challenges in this regard. AW takes a brilliant approach that builds it into each mechanic (moves are generally compounds of rules) to "look for" just the right description (to do it, do it, i.e. say the right thing), yet - finally - still needs MC's deliberation. I like the court of appeal of take backs: let players confirm that when they said it, they meant to say it. Strategies like these are in a way proof of what is necessitated: they arise because it's necessitated to make a match between description and rule.

 

[Manbearcat]

Putting it as "GM gets to say" is from my perspective adding confusion. It fails to respect that there must be some means by which descriptions are matched to rules. That is not an optional step; it's not something someone "gets to say". It's something that someone must say. And both AW and D&D give it finally to MC/GM to say for reasons that I've pointed toward above.

Nor is it clear enough to make it about saying "what procedure will be used". "Procedure" itself is confused as a synonym for rule because it implies a synecdoche. It mixes rules up with mechanics. It's up to you to say if your OP intended to focus solely on mechanics. If so, and if by "rules" you meant "mechanics", rather than continuing to confuse them just switch to saying "mechanics". Suspend any assumption that when I write "rules" I mean "mechanics".

My statement is about determining which rule matches a description. It's not about what GM says or doesn't say, which I provide purely as one example of what I mean. It's necessitated. Computer games achieve it by providing players with an austere language in which each expression maps precisely to some rule, which goes on with other rules to form a mechanic. Glitches occur when it turns out that some expressions map in ways that were not intended.

TTRPGs present what I would characterise as delightful challenges in this regard. AW takes a brilliant approach that builds it into the mechanic to "look for" just the right description, yet - finally - still needs MC's deliberation to be sure.

clearstream, I'm reading this post as a response to @pemerton and as an attempt to add something to the conversation and I don't have any idea what it is happening here. Here are things that are true that I find are problems with this response to pemerton:

* In D&D 5e and in AD&D, the GM absolutely does "get to say." If the GM feels a thing should happen via extrapolating the fiction/setting/backstory/cosmology (etc), then it happens. If they feel a random encounter or a reaction roll is or some kind of table needs to be deployed, they'll devise that and roll dice (maybe observing the result, maybe ignoring it, maybe rolling again). If they feel like dice need to be rolled then they might use percentile or roll under or Save vs in AD&D or maybe use some PC action resolution mechanics. If its 5e, they might decide there is uncertainty...they might not...they might say Contest Intelligence vs Charisma...or Saving Throw vs Wisdom...or Ability Check DC x, y, z (etc)...they might give advantage or disadvantage...they might apply/reward Inspiration or they might now...they might use Success w/ Cost or Degrees of Failure...they might use Exhaustion...they might use any of the various Transformation mechanics...or they might use simple Diplomacy checks or they might use the Social Interaction procedures...or they might just have the bad guy get away because its better for the story...or they might allow Rustic Hospitality to work in this situation or they might veto it. On and on and on and on and on.

Overwhelmingly, folks like @Oofta and @Micah Sweet and @Lanefan (among many, many others) have called this a "toolkit" or "another tool in my toolbox" and described this breadth of GM say as "flexibility" or "freedom". To examine your first paragraph above in light of this, yes, in AD&D and D&D 5e (for example), "the GM gets to say." That is a feature for the above folks. Its flexibility. Its freedom. In Apocalypse World, "the GM must say." That is a bug for the above folks. Its constraint. It creates a sense of "GM disempowerment" for them.

I read what you write and it feels like you're doing one or two things. You're either looking for the great flattening which mutes the differences of all TTRPGs such that the participants are basically doing the same things and various games lead to roughly the same experience (if not exactly the same experience). Alternatively, perhaps you're looking for this unified theory of RPG everything whereby Apocalypse World and D&D 5e are actually the same because of this unified theory you're trying to resolve in your mind. Regardless, it seems to lead to the same place; heterogeneity, sameness, oneness. Do you think that they are the same? Are you trying to put forward some kind of great flattening or unified theory of RPG everything that neatly bins them together so we can basically say "people who play D&D and AW are basically doing the same thing" or is that just a rogue takeaway by this dude (me) on the internet?

* Procedure isn't a synonym for rule and, in my interactions with pemerton (public, private, live), I have never thought that he has them confused. A procedure is a formal sequence of actions undertaken in order to derive a distinct experience and output novel to that procedure. Whenever we undergo a formal "play loop" or resolve a sequence of actions to derive "what is the state of play at the end of this order of operations" we're following a procedure.

A procedure is a subset of rules as rules entail all of the architecture that governs things said and done during play. In Torchbearer, "Fun Once", "Play on Belief, Creed, Goal, Instinct" and "Fail Forward" are rules (while also being "techniques" which are a subset of rules) while Camp phase, Conflicts, Recovery from Conditions, and Advendure Design are both procedures and rules. In Apocalypse World, "Play to Find Out What Happens" and "Always Say..." are rules while making moves, whether you're a player or MC, is a distinct procedure (when a move triggers and the sequence of actions undertaken to resolve it, or when a soft move turns into a hard move, etc). In Blades in the Dark, "Act Now Plan Later" is a rule for players while "Cut to the Action" is a rule for GMs while "Setting Effect" is a procedure akin to "Factoring" in the BW family of games.

* Game mechanics are anything that resolves the transition from one distinct gamestate to another. If you're just freeform roleplaying and nothing of consequence is happening such that no gamestate transitions are occurring (like players planning their super excellent strategem or performative freeplay of tavern/bath house carousing or muffin buying at your favorite pastry shop or PC weddings or other stuff that is exclusively color without mechanical heft/conflict/or gamestate consequence)? Well, no game mechanics are happening.

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You did write something above that is incisive though. You could say that AW (and the like) are written teleologically and that categorization has some use. The constituent parts of such systems are written with a purpose and that purpose is to give expression to a play paradigm, a premise, a particular game layer...just like D&D Hit Points. They don't start from an orientation to causal relationships. That is for the tables to resolve as they play the game, as fiction collides, as gamestates transition...just like D&D Hit Points.

Its extremely important to note that both system design and the cognitive workspaces of the participants at the table (the GM and the players) are rather different under this orientation to system and play than it is under one whereby exploration and extrapolation via process simulation and internal causality are the apex priorities that governs system and cognitive workspaces. The former invests play with purpose and a game layer to facilitate that while expecting the participants to figure out internal causality and continuity as they play. The latter is predisposed toward the primacy of internal causality and continuity as substrate for world-building and exploration while expecting the GM (perhaps with some input from other participants) to invest play with purpose and a game layer to facilitate their purpose (excluding Rolemaster, Runequest, Traveller and the like here).

Just like its important to note the differences between systems and play experiences whereby conflict-neutral free play without frequent or consequential gamestate transitions is quite different from systems and play experiences where they are is little to no conflict-neutral play and very frequent and consequential gamestate transitions.

Each of these things (and plenty of others) point the arrow away from a great flattening or a unified theory of TTRPG everything.

 

[clearstream]

clearstream, I'm reading this post as a response to @pemerton and as an attempt to add something to the conversation and I don't have any idea what it is happening here. Here are things that are true that I find are problems with this response to pemerton:

* In D&D 5e and in AD&D, the GM absolutely does "get to say." If the GM feels a thing should happen via extrapolating the fiction/setting/backstory/cosmology (etc), then it happens. If they feel a random encounter or a reaction roll is or some kind of table needs to be deployed, they'll devise that and roll dice (maybe observing the result, maybe ignoring it, maybe rolling again). If they feel like dice need to be rolled then they might use percentile or roll under or Save vs in AD&D or maybe use some PC action resolution mechanics. If its 5e, they might decide there is uncertainty...they might not...they might say Contest Intelligence vs Charisma...or Saving Throw vs Wisdom...or Ability Check DC x, y, z (etc)...they might give advantage or disadvantage...they might apply/reward Inspiration or they might now...they might use Success w/ Cost or Degrees of Failure...they might use Exhaustion...they might use any of the various Transformation mechanics...or they might use simple Diplomacy checks or they might use the Social Interaction procedures...or they might just have the bad guy get away because its better for the story...or they might allow Rustic Hospitality to work in this situation or they might veto it. On and on and on and on and on.

Overwhelmingly, folks like @Oofta and @Micah Sweet and @Lanefan (among many, many others) have called this a "toolkit" or "another tool in my toolbox" and described this breadth of GM say as "flexibility" or "freedom". To examine your first paragraph above in light of this, yes, in AD&D and D&D 5e (for example), "the GM gets to say." That is a feature for the above folks. Its flexibility. Its freedom. In Apocalypse World, "the GM must say." That is a bug for the above folks. Its constraint. It creates a sense of "GM disempowerment" for them.

I read what you write and it feels like you're doing one or two things. You're either looking for the great flattening which mutes the differences of all TTRPGs such that the participants are basically doing the same things and various games lead to roughly the same experience (if not exactly the same experience). Alternatively, perhaps you're looking for this unified theory of RPG everything whereby Apocalypse World and D&D 5e are actually the same because of this unified theory you're trying to resolve in your mind. Regardless, it seems to lead to the same place; heterogeneity, sameness, oneness. Do you think that they are the same? Are you trying to put forward some kind of great flattening or unified theory of RPG everything that neatly bins them together so we can basically say "people who play D&D and AW are basically doing the same thing" or is that just a rogue takeaway by this dude (me) on the internet?

Okay, I definitely do not mean to embrace any great flattening. However, I also want to look closely at the details. Would you agree that there is a necessary matching to be done? Someone has to say that this description matches to this rule. SFAIK that's not possible to automate in TTRPG except in artificially narrow cases (e.g. the only permitted descriptions are those exactly matching a rule), but as I called attention to it can itself can be governed by rules (and thence the great unflattening!)

I feel like your concerns are really as to the latter, not the former, right? I ought to acknowledge the unflattening done by those rules that govern the matching of description to rule; and I do! That's distinct from giving up the by my lights proper observation that the description must be matched to a rule (and that ultimately someone decides that.)

* Procedure isn't a synonym for rule and, in my interactions with pemerton (public, private, live), I have never thought that he has them confused. A procedure is a formal sequence of actions undertaken in order to derive a distinct experience and output novel to that procedure. Whenever we undergo a formal "play loop" or resolve a sequence of actions to derive "what is the state of play at the end of this order of operations" we're following a procedure.

Well, that seems to restate my concern, because I'm aiming to look at what rules do, not what procedures do. A procedure or play loop will typically involve multiple rules, right? It could be that it's wrong to try to look at what individual rules do, but that would be quite a different criticism. It would be to say that we should only look at procedures, rather than that rules are procedures.

Maybe I am influenced by software terms. When I say procedural, I don't mean a single rule: I mean a series of rules. Perhaps in a different domain the meaning of procedure really is the same as rule.

* Game mechanics are anything that resolves the transition from one distinct gamestate to another. If you're just freeform roleplaying and nothing of consequence is happening such that no gamestate transitions are occurring (like players planning their super excellent strategem or performative freeplay of tavern/bath house carousing or muffin buying at your favorite pastry shop or PC weddings or other stuff that is exclusively color without mechanical heft/conflict/or gamestate consequence)? Well, no game mechanics are happening.

From wider reading of game studies I would say that mechanics are usually taken to be actions players can take to change the game state. That's similar to your definition, but not identical. As an example, Miguel Sicart defines game mechanics as "methods invoked by agents for interacting with the game world." In esports commentary, if a player has "good mechanics", it means they grasp exactly how those methods work and are adept at employing them. The first line of your definition in isolation is close to how I am thinking of rules.

Its extremely important to note that both system design and the cognitive workspaces of the participants at the table (the GM and the players) are rather different under this orientation to system and play than it is under one whereby exploration and extrapolation via process simulation and internal causality are the apex priorities that governs system and cognitive workspaces. The former invests play with purpose and a game layer to facilitate that while expecting the participants to figure out internal causality and continuity as they play. The latter is predisposed toward the primacy of internal causality and continuity as substrate for world-building and exploration while expecting the GM (perhaps with some input from other participants) to invest play with purpose and a game layer to facilitate their purpose (excluding Rolemaster, Runequest, Traveller and the like here).

If I understand what you are saying here correctly, it gets at some of what I had in mind. Investing play with purposes can have the consequences you call attention to. That's one reason why I prefer "immersionism" over "simulationism". Immersionism is about purposes. Simulation is a means toward the purpose. (I suppose some could have the simulating itself as their purpose... I'm not sure about that.)

Each of these things (and plenty of others) point the arrow away from a great flattening or a unified theory of TTRPG everything.

I think I would not be saying that all cars are identical just because I want to take a close look at how spark plugs work even if all cars have spark plugs. However, if all cars have spark plugs, it seems to me a good idea to get clear on how they work. Just to squash my own analogy, I think rules are more fundamental to games than spark plugs are to cars.