Why do RPGs have rules?

[aramis erak]

Eh, I don't think so. I'm actively playtesting my game that involves exactly that: two people tell a story using a prompt until the moment they disagree, then they play a fighting mini-game and the winner narrates how the scene ends, no restrictions. I bring it to parties and it works alright. Well, ok, I mostly hang out with artsy people, unafraid of the cringe of creative expression, but still.

And disrupting the "natural" flow is kinda the point — so the participants can punch, and punch hard, unafraid of being blocked by consensus. Vae victis, all that.

You're surrounding yourself with a generally trusting bunch...
I generally don't have that luxury.

 

[pemerton]

Fighting against that is the simple fact that it's far less work to bend a known system to a new task than it is to learn a whole new one.

This is an empirical claim. In my experience it is obviously false.

You also see this same issue play out with rules light systems. Simplicity is expensive, and you end up paying for it somewhere.

This is an empirical claim too, and taken at face value, as a generalisation of tendency, in my experience it is false.

For instance, Prince Valiant is a far "lighter" RPG than AD&D. I've had no issues playing Prince Valiant. It is significantly more robust than AD&D., in terms of enabling decisions about "what happens next" that are apt to carry the table and not break down into moment-by-moment social negotiation.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is an empirical claim. In my experience it is obviously false.

This is an empirical claim too, and taken at face value, as a generalisation of tendency, in my experience it is false.

For instance, Prince Valiant is a far "lighter" RPG than AD&D. I've had no issues playing Prince Valiant. It is significantly more robust than AD&D., in terms of enabling decisions about "what happens next" that are apt to carry the table and not break down into moment-by-moment social negotiation.

First of all Prince Valiant has far different play priorities than AD&D, priorities I know you share. Comfort in a system is definitely affected by how much it aligns with your preferences.

Secondly, what do you mean by Prince Valiant being more, "robust" than AD&D? Serious question, as I don't understand what you personally mean by that word, and there is precedent for confusion about word definitions here.

 

[pemerton]

So I've been thinking a bit more about the need/prerogative to have an assumed Rule Zero.

It feels like we've generally uncovered at least 3 core purposes to include a Rule Zero.

<snip>

(C) to ensure consistency of rulings vis-a-vis the assumed fiction. Meaning, since the GM is keeper of the fiction, including secret backstory, there's an emphasis/importance to keep future fiction states in accordance with the previously established fiction --- especially if the previously defined fiction was generated by one individual long before play starts.

This emphasis on "consistency of fiction" seems to be a relevant application for sim, if you assume that "consistency of fiction" is a necessary precondition of "immersion". If the fiction is "inconsistent", it is ostensibly harder to drift into an immersion thought state. Players are fighting too hard mentally to reconcile "I'm immersed as my character" against "This situation doesn't make sense".

In cases of (C), it feels like Rule Zero's importance can diminish greatly in the absence/lessening of GM authored fiction prior to play and/or deprioritization of "immersion" through a sim agenda.

I'm bringing this all up in service to a final question---is Rule Zero a strictly necessary precondition for immersion? Absent Rule Zero, is there too much burden assumed to be put back on the players, in terms of authoring and making rulings, that they are unable to drift into the immersive mindset? Is the "immersion thought state" so temporary and fragile as to brook any interruption? It can't be easily toggled between authoring/ruling thought state and back?

When immersion is an apex priority, the chain of requirement for Rule Zero seems to be:

Consistency of fiction >> reduce player need to adjudicate >> reduce player need to toggle/switch out of "immersive thought state"

But if this the case, what is the GM's purpose relative to immersion? If the GM is only serving the needs of the immersion thought state (ITS) for the players, the GM themselves is necessarily not participating in that immersion thought state. The GM's role at that point is to provide an experience in which they will never participate. So it must therefore be assumed that the GM must find satisfaction in some other set of play conditions, since they cannot participate in the ITS.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

I can tell you where I headed, while reading what I've quoted: you seemed to be describing a very mainstream sort of RPGing.

In this sort of RPGing, the GM prepares material - a "world", events, NPCs with various interlocking motivations, etc. And the players, in play, declare actions for their PCs which prompt the GM to reveal elements of the material they have prepared, presenting it as what is perceived by (or otherwise known to) the PCs.

The description in the previous paragraph is true across the (so-called) "railroad/linear <=> sandbox spectrum". The difference on that "spectrum" consists primarily in the principle the GM uses to extrapolate to new fiction from their already-authored fiction, and also in how the GM narrates the outcomes of action declarations about moving significant distances through the imagined world.

In this sort of play, I don't see how the GM is "immersed". At just about every point, they seem to be self-consciously authoring.

 

[pemerton]

First of all Prince Valiant has far different play priorities than AD&D, priorities I know you share. Comfort in a system is definitely affected by how much it aligns with your preferences.

Suppose this is true. Does it confirm or refute the claim I was replying to which was that "you end up paying for [simplicity] somewhere"? Where am I paying for the simplicity of Prince Valiant? (Or Agon? Or Cthulhu Dark? Or . . . . ?)

Secondly, what do you mean by Prince Valiant being more, "robust" than AD&D? Serious question, as I don't understand what you personally mean by that word, and there is precedent for confusion about word definitions here.

I mean "robust" in these sense of enabling decisions about "what happens next" that are apt to carry the table and not break down into moment-by-moment social negotiation.

In my experience AD&D is quite fragile in this respect, especially once the focus of the action moves outside of a rather narrow set of scenarios (eg trying to open doors, and small scale melee skirmishes).

An archery competition, a treaty negotiation, a chase on horseback - just to think of a few stock sorts of episodes that might occur in more-or-less mediaeval fantasy. Prince Valiant handles all of these straightforwardly, such that adherence to the rules by all participants requires little effort. AD&D tends to punt all these things to the GM, and it becomes an instance of "brute" allocation of authority, with all the issues (clashes at the table, hurt feelings, even group break-ups) that are apt to flow from that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Suppose this is true. Does it confirm or refute the claim I was replying to which was that "you end up paying for [simplicity] somewhere"? Where am I paying for the simplicity of Prince Valiant? (Or Agon? Or Cthulhu Dark? Or . . . . ?)

I mean "robust" in these sense of enabling decisions about "what happens next" that are apt to carry the table and not break down into moment-by-moment social negotiation.

In my experience AD&D is quite fragile in this respect, especially once the focus of the action moves outside of a rather narrow set of scenarios (eg trying to open doors, and small scale melee skirmishes).

An archery competition, a treaty negotiation, a chase on horseback - just to think of a few stock sorts of episodes that might occur in more-or-less mediaeval fantasy. Prince Valiant handles all of these straightforwardly, such that adherence to the rules by all participants requires little effort. AD&D tends to punt all these things to the GM, and it becomes an instance of "brute" allocation of authority, with all the issues (clashes at the table, hurt feelings, even group break-ups) that are apt to flow from that.

I think a lot of this has to do with your feelings towards storygames. If you want a dispersal of authority, and the rest of the table is amenable to this, then of course following the rules of the system in question should be easy. Since you have said many times that you have wanted a storygame style through your entire gaming career, it makes sense that a more traditional ruleset, even played the way you prefer, would result in at least the occasional issue.

Regarding simplicity, it's the same issue. If you prefer the storygame style (which tends towards rules-light), then the cost referred is easy to pay to the point of feeling non-existent. If you don't feel that way, believe me the costs start to mount up.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You also see this same issue play out with rules light systems. Simplicity is expensive, and you end up paying for it somewhere.

Well, sometimes that's people who really want to be using the GM as the primary mechanical engine but just don't come out and say that.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Given it's play there are no mandatory standards for it. If a group are satisfied, any putative mismatch amounts to distance from some normal expectation. I'm unwilling to start from - that's not the best way to play the game. I'm more interested in starting from a basic assumption of validity.

Whereas I've usually find that's a massive "if" in your second sentence, and as often as not they aren't satisfied (at least in part), but are either incapable or unwilling to acknowledge the probable source of the problem. So I'm really not willing to go with that assumption any more; I've seen it fail too often or lurch along with groups with vague dissatisfaction too often to take that as a given.

I'm not so much thinking of generic systems, but rather interpreting and using rules to form a game identity distinct to the group. The distributions of recognisably similar game identities are uneven: a normal distribution (all different, but with a lot of similarity), then some relatively empty areas, and then another less strong norm (how it's played in some local scene), and so on.

Again, I've not seen any indications that this sort of thing works out with enough reliability to justify the attempt when other options are available. Sorry, I simply can't follow you here.

This is partly self-informing, where there is in place an idea that the proper modes of addressing a game are submission and constrained freedom, as opposed to subversion and creation.

My view is the latter is called "Making a new game". And one of the important elements to that is starting with core systems and campaign concepts that will support, rather than fight, what you're trying to do.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One kind of frustrating obstacle to claims of this sort is that the TTRPG community to date lacks anything like a data set extensive and detailed enough to prove them. We rely on small data sets supplemented by expertise for our justifications... and it's not always clear how to proceed when experts disagree.

My view is that in general groups will achieve satisfying play by choosing game texts that have been identified by their designers and in the discourse as suitable for that play, and interpreting and using that text close to norms. And at the same time - this will not rule out that some groups achieve equally satisfying play through using those same texts creatively or subversively, or through productive differences in interpretation. I see these latter as a tonic.

I don't disagree with this in general--but this is one of those cases where I have to conclude "frequency matters". There are outliers in everything, and the frequency where our "some groups" occur is not a trivial consideration.

 

[pemerton]

Regarding simplicity, it's the same issue. If you prefer the storygame style (which tends towards rules-light)

This simply isn't true. Burning Wheel is comparable, in mechanical "heft", to RQ or even RM.

I am not arguing that "light" is better than the alternative. Rather, an assertion was made that simplicity generates costs. I'm saying that, in my experience, that just isn't true.

Prince Valiant is simpler, mechanically, than BW. My group plays Prince Valiant as a type of BW-lite. But we don't pay any cost for that - the game is different from BW, but not "expensive" in some not-immediately-obvious-but-will-spring-out-later-like-a-jack-in-the-box fashion.