Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

I think there's at least some notable differences when outcomes are framed before the dice are rolled there. In other words, even if I'm having to make up outcomes out of whole cloth, if I say (using something like BRP result categories as an example) "On a fumble A will happen, on a failure B will happen, on a success C will happen, on a special, D will happen, and on a crit E will happen" I've permitted more output space than if all I had was success/failure to work with. If I do it afterwards, as you say, its much less clear.

I find that one doesn't even need to fully articulate the outcomes. They don't need to be locked down on every detail. There just needs to be enough in place that the eventual narration is well constrained.

 

[clearstream]

As I've noted elsewhere, you can very much see this in how Chill 3e handled its die rolls. There are four possible results in it, and while none of them entirely bring things to a halt, you very much would prefer a crit to a fumble.

On the bringing to a halt, to me one design choice is whether one wants to retain fail without setbacks. A benefit is that a player can attempt things where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing, rather than invoking additional badness. (Punished for trying.) On the other hand, fail without setbacks can feel static: it only obliquely drives momentum to fiction. Not necessarily in a bad way - for instance it can put it back on players to switch plans.

Anyway, I wondered what you take is on that?

 

[pemerton]

In which case, it extends. But to me Baker wrote that to override other ideas of what players do, not because he thought readers would come to it with a tabula rasa. It was necessary to state in order to override and perhaps extend pre-existing norms.

This seems to imply there could be no first RPG - but there was! And there's no reason in purely abstract principle why it couldn't have been AW!

Furthermore, as Baker puts it in AW, "Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way." He is not overriding pre-existing expectations ("tradition"). He is affirming them![

You're focused on who gets to say what. Baker seems to be saying that's not his main concern when designing rules.

No he doesn't! It's his sole focus.

And on your account we would be bound to view saying who says what - that assignment alone - as unwelcome or unwanted.

No. You're ignoring the what in the phrase who gets to say what.

I mean, I stated a rule of AW. Here it is again:

The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings.​

I've underlined the parts of that rule that set out the who. And I've italicised the bits that constrain the what. Players are under no other constraints as to content, beyond a general one to cohere in what they say with the already-established fiction. The GM is of course under a wide range of constraints when it comes to exercising the permissions and fulfilling the obligations that pertain to their introduction of new shared fiction.

It's probably enough to add that conferring permissions is a consequence; noting that the rule implies a curtailment of permissions for other parties (via "exclusively").

Anyway, why do RPGs have rules? In a nutshell, here is a proposed partial answer*


Each candidate description must be matched to a norm/rule that will explicitly state or imply its consequences. (Explicitly state more often for change to system; imply more often for change to fiction.) Along the D -> N/R -> C chain are a number of tasks -

1. Supply a candidate description
2. Match that description to a norm/rule
3. Read off the norm/rule the explicitly stated consequences, or propose fitting consequences
4. If more than one consequence is possible, select one

2. is not always a trivial task. Unless a description exactly matches a game text there is room for ambiguity. The AW game text calls attention to this (p10 in the 2nd edition.) D&D gives DM the job of matching descriptions to rules.

3. can get pretty nuanced. PbtA moves are compound rules that do a good job of directing toward the system and fiction consequences connected with any description that matched the move. D&D spells in most cases spell out the exact consequence. D&D skills on the other hand define scopes of effect that often imply a wide range of possible consequences. Again, D&D gives DM the job of fitting consequences.

In many games 4. is down to a dice roll that selects between some or all of - progress, progress+complication, no-progress, and no-progress+badness. The word "progress" shouldn't be read too literally here. Candidate descriptions are usually supplied with an ends in mind ("I climb the wall"... to get to the top. "I swing my mace"... to deal damage to the squirrel.) Progress generally means toward that ends.

So just to be clear, you're now telling us that this post - which uses the phrases "description" and "consequence", and talks about a "matching" problem with ambiguity in the gam text, and gives as illustrations PbtA player-side moves and rolling dice to determin degree of success - is also talking about rules like "If you are a player, you are permitted to say this thing about your character."

That rules has no "matching" problem (there is no problem working out who is a player). The consequence is not a "fitting" one (I had taken "fitting" to mean something like "fits with the established fiction", consistent with your own extended history of posting about "saying what follows".)

And under this reading, D -> N/R -> C is nothing but a candidate statement of the general form of all rules: they are normative standards (what you call "consequences read off from the rule") that apply to certain people in certain circumstances (what you call "descriptions").

Think rather of normative standards that lack forcefulness.

Such as? Like the suggestion on the AD&D character sheet that you might want to draw a picture of your PC?

 

[pemerton]

when the DMG in any edition, or any of the basic books, have provided explanations on how to run things like dungeons, which Pemerton mentioned in my post, it isn't as if there is a one true way to approach that. That the game is open to different ways of doing so, and to entirely different approaches.

I don't know what you've got in mind, here, as far as Gygax and Arneson's D&D, Gygax's DMG, or Moldvay Basic, are concerned.

I'm not really the biggest fan of the phrase "one true way", but each of the rulesets I've mentioned gives clear instructions to the GM on how to do their job.

 

[pemerton]

On the bringing to a halt, to me one design choice is whether one wants to retain fail without setbacks. A benefit is that a player can attempt things where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing, rather than invoking additional badness. (Punished for trying.) On the other hand, fail without setbacks can feel static: it only obliquely drives momentum to fiction. Not necessarily in a bad way - for instance it can put it back on players to switch plans.

Anyway, I wondered what you take is on that?

What does this look like, stated using the language of rules for RPGing rather than by way of reification of the purely imaginary?

A player can attempt a thing, where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing.

Given the context of the discussion, "a thing" here seems to mean a thing the player declares that their PC tries to do. Failure seems to have a dual meaning: it means the player attempts to throw a certain number or higher on the dice, and doesn't (maybe in some games it's a dice pool or card draw or whatever instead, but the same idea of win/lose applies); it also means in the fiction, the PC doesn't succeed in the thing they try to do.

The phrase "invoking additional badness" which is glossed as "being punished" or "suffering setbacks" is presented impersonally, but presumably the person in question who would narrate the fiction that counts as "badness", "punishment" or "setbacks" would be the GM.

So the rule here is something like if a player declares an action for their PC, and performs the mechanical procedure that is prescribed as the method of resolving such a declaration, and gets a losing rather than a winning outcome from that procedure, then the GM is not obliged to narrate any additional fiction beyond (perhaps) the passage of an amount of time commensurate to what the PC tried to do.

And when we say "it can put it back on the the player to switch plans", that means that the fiction continues to be unchanged (but for the passage of time) and so the player is still thinking about what to try and contribute to the same given bit of fiction.

I think it is obvious why this sort of RPGing is experienced by many participants as centring the GM's conception of the fictional situation. As the post I replied to illustrates, the most common way of describing it is by way of a reification of the GM's imagination. And when that reification is set aside and instead the actual rules and process of play are described, we can see that the player can make proposals about the fiction ("My PC tries to do such-and-such") which - once resolved - impose no obligation at all on the GM to change the fiction.

Whether this is good or bad play is a further thing, a matter of preference. In this post I'm just trying to clearly bring out some of its salient features.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Yup! With you 100%. No disagreement there. Not saying the outcomes outloud before the roll vs framing them before produces notable differences in gameplay.

The expansion of the output space, though, like does it really dramatically change the play experience? Originally I was responding to this idea:

Define "dramatically". Do I think it does so significantly? Yes.

Isn't an expansion of the output space something more than just "purely fictional differences", specially when, at the end of the day, the GM retains the control of where story can and can't go? I argue that it doesn't.

This requires a GM who is going to steer the result to a specific end no matter what. That's not every GM out there. As an example in the upcoming superhero session I'm going to run Saturday, there are at least three potential outcomes with non-trivial differences in state.

 

[clearstream]

Some very good designers consider the assignment of authority to be the point of rpg design. I do not.​

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As a designer, it's my job to make as sure as possible that the game won't break down into moment-to-moment negotiations about raw assent despite the game's rules and the players' upfront commitment to them. But the brute assignment of authority is NOT how to accomplish that.​

​

When my games assign authority they do so in strict service to what I consider the real point: setting expectations and granting permission.​

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*********​

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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. . . .​

You're focused on who gets to say what. Baker seems to be saying that's not his main concern when designing rules.

No he doesn't! It's his sole focus.

Can you say how assigning authority is not who gets to say what?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think there's at least some notable differences when outcomes are framed before the dice are rolled there. In other words, even if I'm having to make up outcomes out of whole cloth, if I say (using something like BRP result categories as an example) "On a fumble A will happen, on a failure B will happen, on a success C will happen, on a special, D will happen, and on a crit E will happen" I've permitted more output space than if all I had was success/failure to work with. If I do it afterwards, as you say, its much less clear.

What strikes me is the contrast between task resolution and intent resolution regardless of non-binary outcome. That is, in 5e the GM adjudicates the task at hand and states what the outcome is, positive, negative, or perhaps optionally a mixed outcome. In a lot of narrative play the player describes an intent or goal, or such is manifest in the situation, and then describes how they achieve it, or part of it, while the GM describes any problems or setbacks.

I haven't seen 5e played in the latter fashion.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I find that one doesn't even need to fully articulate the outcomes. They don't need to be locked down on every detail. There just needs to be enough in place that the eventual narration is well constrained.

I used that example simply because it was clear. I do think unless the GM has thought through what consequences there are before the roll is made there's going to be a temptation to put his thumb on the scale; how well he'll resist that temptation various from GM to GM. Personally, I prefer that in most cases everyone know the general potential output states before it even comes up, which is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of games that put too much ad-hoc decision making in the GM's hands as a default rather than an occasional necessity.

 

[Lanefan]

First off, apologies to all if this is ground already covered - I was called in on page 81 here and am not about to go over the previous 80 to find out what I've missed...

What is the difference between hard-rule status and soft-rule status you're envisioning here?

A hard rule (a.k.a. an actual rule) is explicit, either allowing or disallowing (or both) something(s) specific to happen in the play of a game.

"A king can move up to one square in any direction" is a hard rule: it allows a king to move one square and disallows it from moving any further. "Constitution 16 gives a bonus 3 hit points per character level" is a hard rule: it allows exactly that bonus and disallows any greater or lesser bonus. "A player on the attacking team may not precede the puck across the defensive team's blue line" is a hard rule: it disallows certain player positionings on the ice in certain situations.

Contrast this with "the objective of the game of hockey is to win via scoring more goals than the opposing team" which, while in the rulebook, neither specifically allows nor disallows anything. It's simply a guideline or suggestion as to how to play and not a rule at all until harder-coded into actual rules that define the win condition, define what a goal is and how it is scored, define the length of a game, and so on. And even then that guideline can still be ignored; a badly-overmatched team, for example, might take a different approach and instead of playing to try to win will instead play purely defensively, and try to lose by as small a margin as it can.

"Play to find out" falls into this same category - it neither specifically allows nor disallows anything and thus is not a rule: it's a guideline.

Because the way it seems to me, in Lanefanian D&D (given your testimonials and excerpts it looks like Hickman Revolution meets some Gygaxian conceits and tropes), all play proceeds under the overarching proviso of Rule 0. So there doesn't need to be any distinguishing between guidelines or rules (hard or soft or anywhere in between). You have "one rule to rule them all." If that rule says "you're in" ("you" here might be a mechanic, or a procedure, or an action declaration, or an outcome of play, or a principle that undergirds either of the former)...then "you're in." If that rule says "GTFO"...then "GTFO."

In hockey (and most other sports), each league has its own minor variants on an otherwise fairly-consistent set of rules; but in the end the league sets the (hard-coded) rules. Chess doesn't often even have that much variability, nor do most boardgames, card games, etc.

TTRPGs, however, are a different animal. Here, while the publisher might want to play the role of the league and set the hard rules*, there's these annoying things called GMs and players who - in the fine well-established tradition of RPG rules-kitbashing - want to make the game their own by taking those hard rules and in some cases putting them through a blender. And so, the role of the "league" falls on the GM (and players, maybe) at each table; to - to some degree - set the hard rules they're willing to play by and then play the game.

And some publishers realize this, and so rather than hard-coding lots of rules they give guidelines and suggestions, backed up by a far lesser amount of hard-coded rules. These guidelines are by nature a bit fuzzy, and that fuzziness makes them harder to change to any extent without (ntentionally or otherwise) changing the underlying foundation of the game as designed.

* - worth noting that most of these hard rules are dealing with quantifications and-or abstractions of those parts of the fiction that cannot be roleplayed in meat-space.

But that is a particular organizational structure (all other aspects of play are provisional pending the approval of the "one rule to rule them all") of a particular game, not TTRPGs in general. I mean, if you want to say "in Lanefanian D&D (and those that play similarly) there is only one hard-rule and everything else is a provisional guideline contingent upon the yay/nay of the one hard-rule", then...sure? I mean I don't see the necessity even in your case because even those provisional guidelines, as you want to call them, still inform and direct play if they're approved. Once they're approved, why does it matter if we call them rules then vs guidelines? Is this kind of a recursive "because letting them graduate from guidelines to rules makes it sound like they're not still subordinate to Rule 0...like they can't be vetoed at a later date or in a particular moment that strikes the GM as veto-worthy." Like it defangs rule 0 and may slippery slope to GM Disempowerment or something?

If so, that just feels needlessly rhetorical (what happens at your game and at D&D tables like it happens at those tables...there is no need for some exception to a philosophical superstructure like "rules are the collection of stuff that informs and direct play...except in the case when another rule allows someone a discretional veto over them...then they're just provisional guidelines") and calling out a novel interpretation of a game-specific exception doesn't seem particularly helpful when discussing all TTRPGs.

I think the above implies a far greater amount of "flaky GM whim" than I'm getting at. That said, IMO someone - be it the publisher, the GM, the table as a whole, or whoever - has to take on the role of "the league" and set the hard rules. And if all the publisher gives you is guidelines and expects them to be taken as hard rules, that doesn't seem to provide much help with the nitty-gritty of sorting those fictional abstractions; instead it shunts that responsibility on to some combination of the GM and players and asks them to figure it out for themselves.

And sure, if you've a table of agreeable not-competitive people willing to help with that figuring-out process on an ongoing basis this set-up could be great. My experience, however, is that a) some people tend to be more stubborn and-or competitive than that, and b) some - generally the more casual types - aren't willing to help with that figure-it-out process and would prefer the game do it for them.

The game mechanics are abstractions or one particular form of negotiated imagination. But they don't do the heavy lifting of abstracting or negotiating. The game mechanics happen in meat space. They happen around the table. Someone rolls dice, references a table, announces a target number, draws or plays a card, spends a currency, subtracts a total, crosses off a piece of inventory, ticks a clock, pulls from a Jenga tower. Whatever.

The negotiation of what happens and abstraction onto the imagined space is conferred to us around the table. Someone (in your form of D&D, that is typically or nearly universally the GM) either outright says what happens next within the constraints, boundaries, duties afforded to them by the ruleset or they resolve what happens now by referencing, and possibly interpreting or extrapolating (TBD pending system generally or game tech specifically), the collision of game text + present imagined space and possibly some prepped material, mapping how that collision gives rise to a change of state in the fiction: game interface.

Game mechanics are usually a fairly basic input-->processing-->output sequence. Most of the time the players provide the input(1), the game does the processing(2a) and gives output(2b), and the GM interprets that output and adds it to the fiction(3).

1. Player input: Action declaration "We search the room carefully, looking for any sign the princess was ever here."
2a. Processing: (meat-space game mechanics occur e.g. rolling of dice, checking of notes, or whatever the system in use asks for)
2b. Output: (meat-space game mechanics determine a result - let's say success in this case - which must be honoured in step 3)
3. Interpretation: GM narration "Tolbert, you find a few long blonde hairs caught in the window sash that roughly match what you'd expect to be the princess'; and Jerelle, you notice a stain on the floor - could be spilled tea - that can't be more than a few days old."

This on its own doesn't seem controversial. So where's the controversy? Is it the specifics around 2a? Is it lack of honouring the result in 2b? Is it that the GM gets to do the interpretation in step 3?


--- edit - typo