Why do RPGs have rules?

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not denying your experience, but I'm not sure if it's representative of the way AW is supposed to be played.

Player moves are not a "list of delineated actions", they are rules for specific situations, not too dissimilar from, say, rules on fall damage in D&D. Yeah, when you are just starting out, you may need to look for an applicable move in a given situation, but it's just a matter of knowledge of the system. Like, when twenty years ago my ma brought home a PC, I had trouble pointing cursor at things, a couple weeks later, it was natural. The same stuff applies here.

And when no move applies, it's simple: GM makes a move. That's it. It can be hard when coming from trad games, where GM adjudicates action declarations, but when it clicks that your move doesn't have to be related to whatever the PC is doing, everything just falls into place and it works.

When Sekiro came out, I tried to play it as if it was Dark Souls. I had a ####ing miserable time, I hated the game and uninstalled it. On my second try, a year later, I watched a couple of guides on YouTube, rewired my brain and experienced the best action game in the history of action games that I sincerely doubt will be ever topped.

No one in either group I played with had that "moment of revelation" you describe; we were just confused and felt forced to follow a plan whenever we needed to engage with the game mechanically. The assumption that eventually you'll just get it and won't that be the best gaming ever is dismissive.

If you don't want people to treat PC actions as a series of buttons to push, having the character sheet mostly consist of a list of buttons to push is going to be counterintuitive to some (I daresay a lot) of folks.

 

[Campbell]

No one in either group I played with had that "moment of revelation" you describe; we were just confused and felt forced to follow a plan whenever we needed to engage with the game mechanically. The assumption that eventually you'll just get it and won't that be the best gaming ever is dismissive.

If you don't want people to treat PC actions as a series of buttons to push, having the character sheet mostly consist of a list of buttons to push is going to be counterintuitive to some (I daresay a lot) of folks.

Do you remember how unintuitive it was when you first started playing D&D way back when?

No one is saying it's going to the best gaming experience you have ever had. It is a game that is structured differently than you are used to and to learn to effectively play/run it takes time. You might not want to invest that time or even enjoy the experience once you have, but the fact remains that once you get more practice in games like Apocalypse World it goes much more smoothly and mechanics more internalized in the way they have for D&D for you.

That there are growing pains going from one sort of game to another is to be expected, It's no that different from going to an area control game from worker placement game. For someone who has only played one sort it will feel counterintuitive, but that's because it's a different sort of game. Still a roleplaying game. Just a different sort.

I honestly do not know where this bestest game evah energy is coming from. Do I think games like Apocalypse World have their own unique strengths? Sure. But so does the more traditional model of play.

 

[Micah Sweet]

No one is saying it's going to the best gaming experience you have ever had. It is a game that is structured differently than you are used to and to learn to effectively play/run it takes time. You might not want to invest that time or even enjoy the experience once you have, but the fact remains that once you get more practice in games like Apocalypse World it goes much more smoothly and mechanics more internalized in the way they have for D&D for you.

That there are growing pains going from one sort of game to another is to be expected, It's no that different from going to an area control game from worker placement game. For someone who has only played one sort it will feel counterintuitive, but that's because it's a different sort of game. Still a roleplaying game. Just a different sort.

I honestly do not know where this bestest game evah energy is coming from. Do I think games like Apocalypse World have their own unique strengths? Sure. But so does the more traditional model of play.

Most people I have heard from who are fans of narrative/storygames describe finding them in terms akin to a religious experience, where they have  finally found the promised land after years of struggling through the darkness of trad play. I find the attitude rather elitist (even if unintended) and can't stop myself from firing back.

 

[Campbell]

Most people I have heard from who are fans of narrative/storygames describe finding them in terms akin to a religious experience, where they have  finally found the promised land after years of struggling through the darkness of trad play. I find the attitude rather elitist (even if unintended) and can't stop myself from firing back.

It's because they have spent years playing games that do not meet their interest sets, often believing they'll never have the sorts of experiences they crave (which many people tell them are either impossible or selfish), might even consider leaving the hobby entirely or just giving up on ever getting the sort of play they want. Do you have any idea of how frustrating that experience can be?

Imagine if the tables were reversed. If for years all the gaming tables you had access to were games like Dungeon World and you didn't even know the sort of world building / exploration centered play was possible, but then you found it just when you were ready to give up on the hobby. Except even then you were made to feel like you were unwelcome within it.

It's kind of like that.

It's certainly not revelatory experience, but it is kind of like ... Finally!

I mean if you want to take offense that people were frustrated or unhappy with their trad game experience or find it elitist for them to share their own preferences and experiences go ahead brother.

 

[aramis erak]

How does that not fit a chain of imagined causality? Isn't that what the "why" is addressing?

Because in the game in question, Risks determine who decides the outcome of the triggering question. The why, if not previously defined, is subject to changes by other participants. When something causes the GM to think, "That has interesting potential to go wrong in interesting ways" or when something narrated has strong potential to do mechanical state changes, the Risk process is triggered.

The Risk process involves everyone in scene and willing to be (or defined to be within the fiction state) involved or who has a significant setting state or fiction state stake in the affected character, gets to develop a dice pool of d6's, set some aside for making additional statements (those dice are "wagers"), and roll the remaining non-wagered dice for determining who speaks when about the Risk. The players each state their intended reaction to justify the dice in their pool. Note: At least 2d must be rolled dice; if you can't get 2d, you are excluded from the risk.
Anyone who's rolled dice total is less than 10 loses any wagers.
Of those left, the highest roll discards one wager, and decides the core triggering question(s); in my exemplar, both success of the attack and the reason for the attack. all other players lose half their wager dice. Then, in descending roll order, each participant with remaining wagers gives a "Yes [and/but]..." about anything in the same scope as the Risk. Anyone who rolled is automatically in scope.

By introducing the NPC unnamed and defining only the what and how, everything else about that character is fair game. GM perogatives in B&H are different from both Traditional and AWE/PBTA GMs... The GM perogatives are to introduce NPCs without having to run them as a risk; to decide something has room enough to be interesting and thus trigger a risk, and to award honor points.

Anyone paying attention to the game is, per the rules, allowed to introduce new characters, but doing so triggers a Risk to define the character, unless the character is introduced by the GM or the character is introduced by doing something that needs immediate resolution (such as an attack or something making a major setting state or fiction state change). In the first case, any spots on the sheet not generated before introduction can only be filled in by Risks; in the second, the action is resolved without a definition of the acting character (including motivations), and so all others with stake in the scene generate pools based upon how they intend to react to the trigger, but the character doing the action is not rolled for.

This causes NPC's introduced by action to be the trigger for a whole lot of related risks - the introductory action, then, if no one filled in the blanks, a second risk to determine their stats and motivations.

The exemplar has only the following fiction state truths:
Someone (no statement of whom) not already in the scene enters
That unnamed and undefined someone attacks the Daimyō

There's no GM secret (it wasn't the GM introducing it - I was the GM)

Since only the GM gets to introduce prefilled character sheets into play, the player would have to use wagers to define anything past the presence of the katana. One wager per attribute, aspect, reputation, giri (role or duty), piece of gear, or non-mechanical element (clan, family, name, age, gender/sexuality, appearance). NPCs can sometimes be used a lot before all of the sheet is filled in.

So, literally, the NPC has no motivation defined - neither as GM secret, nor as player secret, nor as mechanic, only that they exist and attacked the Daimyō. The introducing player is literally making the risk about the why; whether the Daimyō is killed or not is almost incidental. Everyone who rolled 10+ gets at least one thing to say about the situation (using "Yes, [and/but]..." statements, one wager per each).

Its the ultimate in quantum NPCs... the introduction was a non-sequiteur - no defined reasons given, no identity of the assassin, no reasons exist until after the determination of success.... and no prior presence unless and until someone decides to use a previously defined NPC and spends a wager to make them the assassin..

In the session in question, DB rolled a 9 on his rolled 4d6... with 5 wagers set aside, and so whether or not he had an intended person became utterly irrelevant when one of the players still in defined it was a miss, another player defined who it was and a third other the why.

If DB'd instead summoned up the character without declaring an immediate attack, it would still have been a Risk, but the resulting actions would have been subject to the character being defined away from any intended purpose.

Should the DB have narrated, "Rising through a floor hatch, Ichirō screams 'Death to my usurping little brother,' while attacking him" there's an identity and an action, and a fuzzy but defined reason.

 

[Lanefan]

I haven't been following this thread, but seeing as you called me in...

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?

Not who you're replying to but yes, that's more or less how I see it. Much like boardgames - when you beat it down to the lowest common denominator there's more similarity than differences between the lot of 'em at the foundational level. The differences come in all the bits that go on top of the foundation.

===========
You say this...

* Procedure isn't a synonym for rule

...and then go on to say this...

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.

...where you're taking what (in most cases) things I would see as procedural guidelines and giving them hard-rule status.

* 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.

For this, I'd more define it that game mechanics are what's used to abstract those things which cannot be free-roleplayed, regardless of what happens to the gamestate as a result of their use.

 

[Aldarc]

It's because they have spent years playing games that do not meet their interest sets, often believing they'll never have the sorts of experiences they crave (which many people tell them are either impossible or selfish), might even consider leaving the hobby entirely or just giving up on ever getting the sort of play they want. Do you have any idea of how frustrating that experience can be?

Imagine if the tables were reversed. If for years all the gaming tables you had access to were games like Dungeon World and you didn't even know the sort of world building / exploration centered play was possible, but then you found it just when you were ready to give up on the hobby. Except even then you were made to feel like you were unwelcome within it.

It's kind of like that.

It's certainly not revelatory experience, but it is kind of like ... Finally!

I mean if you want to take offense that people were frustrated or unhappy with their trad game experience or find it elitist for them to share their own preferences and experiences go ahead brother.

Pretty much this. Even within what we may liberally call "trad play," there are similar attitudes when people go from let's say D&D 5e to OSR or even to BRP games (e.g., CoC, RuneQuest, Mythras, etc.) or to Warhammer Fantasy RP/Zweihänder or to Cypher System. There may be some sense of elitism for some - since we can't speak for everyone out there - but I think for most people it's funadmentally about finding a gaming style or community where the style and agendas of play just "clicks."

Most people I have heard from who are fans of narrative/storygames describe finding them in terms akin to a religious experience, where they have  finally found the promised land after years of struggling through the darkness of trad play. I find the attitude rather elitist (even if unintended) and can't stop myself from firing back.

If your reaction to people expressing what they like or their gaming experiences is to fire shots at them, maybe you should learn restraint and rethink how you choose to engage with people in the hobby.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's because they have spent years playing games that do not meet their interest sets, often believing they'll never have the sorts of experiences they crave (which many people tell them are either impossible or selfish), might even consider leaving the hobby entirely or just giving up on ever getting the sort of play they want. Do you have any idea of how frustrating that experience can be?

Imagine if the tables were reversed. If for years all the gaming tables you had access to were games like Dungeon World and you didn't even know the sort of world building / exploration centered play was possible, but then you found it just when you were ready to give up on the hobby. Except even then you were made to feel like you were unwelcome within it.

It's kind of like that.

It's certainly not revelatory experience, but it is kind of like ... Finally!

I mean if you want to take offense that people were frustrated or unhappy with their trad game experience or find it elitist for them to share their own preferences and experiences go ahead brother.

Its a matter of the value judgement implicit in that revelation. "Thank goodness I've evolved past that stone age gaming so many are stuck in". There is a feeling from these testimonials that their preferred gaming is not better for them, but rather that it is simply  better. I have no real appreciation for storygames, but I don't think my style is inherently superior.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Pretty much this. Even within what we may liberally call "trad play," there are similar attitudes when people go from let's say D&D 5e to OSR or even to BRP games (e.g., CoC, RuneQuest, Mythras, etc.) or to Warhammer Fantasy RP/Zweihänder or to Cypher System. There may be some sense of elitism for some - since we can't speak for everyone out there - but I think for most people it's funadmentally about finding a gaming style or community where the style and agendas of play just "clicks."


If your reaction to people expressing what they like or their gaming experiences is to fire shots at them, maybe you should learn restraint and rethink how you choose to engage with people in the hobby.

Maybe I should, but I find it very hard not to see these posts as arrogant. As long as you're not hurting anyone, no one's way to play is better than anyone else's play beyond the personal level, and no play priorities are more important than others, again beyond the personal level. They may be more important for a particular kind of game, but that's just preference.

 

[pemerton]

Putting on my engineer hat for a moment, I am not blind to what @clearstream is saying in this sense. When we software guys implement something, we have certain tools at our disposal (I mean in a loose sense of "techniques and such" as well as things like text editors). It is common for these to be structured in a way that makes them instances or sub-types of more general things. So, when there is a statement like "a procedure is a compound of rules" I can think "well, OK, a rule can be seen as an 'atom' of structure from a certain lens."

Sure. I'm familiar with the concept of an atom (cf molecule), or of an atomic sentence in philosophy of language. But (i) notoriously it turns out that atoms have sub-atomic constituents, and (ii) in philosophical treatments of language and logic the notion of atomic sentence is reasonably tightly defined (eg it contains no truth-conditional operators, and no generalisations), and that definition is defended by reference to broader considerations (eg an argument is given that atomic sentences, so conceived, represent the simplest possible categories of states of affairs).

Just deploying the phrase "atomic sentence" doesn't, on its own, establish any truths about the nature of rules, or how rules are useful in RPGing. Do we learn more about RPGing by focusing on the rule for what happens if a die is cocked after rolling, or by focusing on the rule that sets out what and how to vary a tally by reference to that roll? And if we focus on the latter rule, do we learn more or less about RPGing by analysing our statement of it into (eg) the rules of arithmetic? No answers to these questions are provided by introducing the notion of "atomic rule", nor by asserting without more that (say) an AW move is capable of analysis into multiple rules.

Then I can consider that rules are of two classes constitutive and regulatory, and that a procedure is literally embodied in a game text as constitutive rules,

Again, how much does this matter to the analysis of RPGing? For instance, one might say that it is constitutive of D&D (a "sacred cow") that combat is resolved via the "roll to hit, roll to damage" procedure. Except that originally, D&D also permits use of the Chainmail procedure. Moldvay Basic permits variable weapon damage but doesn't mandate it (so presumably the rule as to which die to roll for damage is not constitutive) but AD&D doesn't - but do we learn anything important by asserting that a table which uses all d8s for damage is no longer playing AD&D?

Is AW constituted by the conversation, and everything else is regulatory but not constitutive? Does it matter to the analysis of RPGing?

I think 'mechanic' is also swept up here, and is maybe overused, like I agree that "the GM determines which move was invoked" is not a 'mechanic', as it doesn't involve cues and such, but its a fine point and probably not usually important.

Although it is important if our goal is to understand how a very popular class of RPGs work - namely, they specify procedures by reference to mechanics without qualification but then state, as a general rule, that the GM may suspend the mechanics at will (D&D-ish RPGs are rather prone to this). Contrast (say) AW or BW, which have (in their different ways) more nuanced statements about when mechanics are invoked, and are thereby able to rely consistently on the use of mechanics to introduce the unwelcome and unwanted. This is a fundamental contrast between two approaches to RPG play and RPG design.

obviously (in view of my other recent posts) I fundamentally agree with you on pretty much all points

Well, likewise!

But the points I've made in my recent posts, including this one, are made deliberately. The introduction of undefined technical phrases, abstract schemas, unstructured formalism etc does not introduce rigour into explanation simply in virtue of form.