Why do RPGs have rules?

[Micah Sweet]

It generally hasn't for me. Certainly no less than any other kind of ruling that might be needed.

The grid is what turns every character into a perfect battle computer, able to determine all distances and ranges at all times, all during what's meant to be a hectic and deadly situation. Theater of the mind gets rid of that, and gives the ability for the GM to put in some interesting tactical decisions. Which, to be honest, 5e is fairly lacking.



I think what I've proposed works just as well, and doesn't require any additional rolls.

Both sides have their positives and negatives, and I've used both ways extensively.

 

[Bedrockgames]

It generally hasn't for me. Certainly no less than any other kind of ruling that might be needed.

The grid is what turns every character into a perfect battle computer, able to determine all distances and ranges at all times, all during what's meant to be a hectic and deadly situation. Theater of the mind gets rid of that, and gives the ability for the GM to put in some interesting tactical decisions. Which, to be honest, 5e is fairly lacking.



I think what I've proposed works just as well, and doesn't require any additional rolls.

I very much prefer theater of the mind. One of the things that bothered me when 3E came out was the slow shift to people mostly using grids (and it feels by 3.5 it felt like an expectation). I was still playing 3E at that time, but this is something that will generally disrupt my sense of what makes RPGs so special. Not saying others have this same experience with the grid. It is very subjective. I just much prefer having a shared space we are discussing in our imaginations to a tactical grid. I want to picture a movie in my head, not something that feels tied to a board

 

[hawkeyefan]

I very much prefer theater of the mind. One of the things that bothered me when 3E came out was the slow shift to people mostly using grids (and it feels by 3.5 it felt like an expectation). I was still playing 3E at that time, but this is something that will generally disrupt my sense of what makes RPGs so special. Not saying others have this same experience with the grid. It is very subjective. I just much prefer having a shared space we are discussing in our imaginations to a tactical grid. I want to picture a movie in my head, not something that feels tied to a board

Yeah, it's a bit tricky because I generally want the players to be informed so they can make decisions, and a grid and minis certainly does that. But I don't like the precision of it all. I like things to be a bit more loose... a little less exact in all ways at all times.

And like I said, 5e kind of lacks a lot of tactical play except what the GM brings to the table, so I think allowing the GM some leeway with distances and stuff works well.

 

[aramis erak]

I like the implied premise of your first bullet, i.e. that we can hardly find the mechanics interesting if there are none. I feel like your fourth bullet is a subset of that - we find the mechanics interesting because they simulate something in a way we're interested in. So I would make your first bullet a 6th reason why RPGs need rules.

The middle two I feel fall well into - rules could do this, but are not necessitated. The group could just agree to enforce setting tropes on themselves, and similarly could just ad-lib some starting points. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be more successful with rules; I am drawing a line between what is necessary and what is ideal.

EDIT #3 can be PvP but isn't limited to PvP. Players can want their PvE play to be competitively robust. (They can also want their characters to be able to come into conflict without that amounting to antisocial play. I note your "seldom seen", but in some modes it's more common.)

Player agreement to some limit is still a rule, albeit a different tier of rules from explicit and implicit rules-as-written and written houserules. But for licensed games, genre enforcement is one of the primary selling points. Further, for many players, unless it's in rules text, it simply will not be agreed to. I've often encountered players unwilling to adhere to restrictions not in rules. (There are terms for such people... rules lawyers, munchkins, power-gamers all tend towards that.) Had one who so egregiously violated the group agreed (annd verbally agreed to by him) restriction in a GURPS game, an agreement that every character had the same patron and either a deep sense of duty to him or a weaker actual duty; said player rewrote his sheet after approval and tried to pass it off as the approved one. He decided to kill said patron... I reacted poorly, but everyone else cheered when said patron soul-jarred him, then used a continuous flame-jet on his body. Said patron then used a resurrection spell, and put him back into the reconstituted (but naked, unarmed, and healthy). Turns out the guy seems to be a jerk in most contexts, but he;s just one of a dozen such people I've encountered in >40 years GMing.

The creative tools are, usually, not for the players, but for the GM. Traveller has them aimed squarely at the ref (GM), but uses the coded output strings for both character use and for ref and player knowledgebases. (The strings to describe a world are, canonically, in universe shorthand. Likewise, the strings for characters' attributes appear in the supplement 12 in-setting ID cards...)

Examining the best known such tool, Traveller's world generation (only mildly changed in even the newest editions, excepting and ignoring the ports to GURPS and Hero)... Creating a single world is a big challenge. Creating 10 to 40 of them? daunting. Creating the average of 300 per sector? at best, you get swathes of similar worlds. Which is where the random world gen comes in: I can bang out a subsector in an afternoon, with a couple senteces per world, inspired by the string of physical and social data (Startport Class, Diameter, Atmosphere, Water coverage, Population¹, government type, law level, tech level, presence of bases for the parent interstellar polity, presence of asteroid/planetoid belts, presence of gas giants, and in later evolutions, stellar type.) In the end, it's allowed me to riff world differences much more easily than if I were to create them all from scratch.

Now, Brad Murray's Diaspora uses a different process, but has a system for generating a cluster of worlds, and the worlds themselves, to do likewise... but shifts the rationalizations to group rather than GM alone. Mostly due to the consensus standard that Brad's games employ (final authority is group as a whole, not GM, in all of the games of his I've read.) It works in a similar manner - a short form rolled mechanical description, which serves as a springboard for the group to provide details inspired by it. Less random, more group labeling of new traits, but still, the idea is that it provides a spur of the imagination and a shorthand reference. (While I've not run Diaspora, per se, I've used its rules for solo activities other than in-character play, and used many of Brad's techniques in some Traveller campaigns.)

That said, many games character generation rules are inspirational/evocational... most notably, again, Traveller (with it's career based path) and Cyberpunk 2013/2020 with it's low-mechanical-impact lifepath... but also any game with purely randomized character gen (WFRP1E) or random atts with a few choices following (D&D pre-3E, Palladium, Traveller except the ports...)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure. My point is, however, that once that character does become lord of his own domain, what happens next? Where does or can the greater campaign go from there, and how? How can both the players and GM make further use of the background lore and stories that have built up over the course of play so far?

Completely ending the campaign and starting something new is to me the nuclear option, in that starting brand new means designing a whole new setting - which IME represents about a real-world year of work before even getting to the point of asking who's interested in playing in it. I'd rather not do all that any more frequently than I have to, if it's all the same.

Honestly, since I have not yet played in a campaign where the GM wasn't either too concerned with their own agenda, or hell bent against me, I have never seen it happen! I mean, sure, back in the way old days some of our characters followed the 'build a keep' rules, and then you defend it against the obvious stream of bad guys who try to take it away...

 

[Micah Sweet]

Honestly, since I have not yet played in a campaign where the GM wasn't either too concerned with their own agenda, or hell bent against me, I have never seen it happen! I mean, sure, back in the way old days some of our characters followed the 'build a keep' rules, and then you defend it against the obvious stream of bad guys who try to take it away...

Sounds like you've had it rough. I'm sorry to hear that.

 

[innerdude]

.... its all set up ahead of time. I don't decide in the moment that the orcs are in whatever direction the PC decides to go. I decide where the orcs are, provide access to information that can lead the PC to the orcs, but run based on whatever is in the direction the PC actually decides to go. If that's to the orcs, great! If that's to the goblins, great! It's up to them where they go, but its up to me before they make that decision what is in that direction.

And I think this, right here, is the crux of where my divergence in play preferences began. There came a point after a 7-year run of 3.x as a player in 2009---with a highly "sim" driven GM---where I no longer wanted nor cared to maintain the "simulationism" of, "Well, you chose wrong, so now your character has to fight these meaningless goblin battles before getting to the larger orc problem that actually has narrative stakes for your character."

There was no longer anything compelling about that in play. I wasn't interested in the "sim" or exploration of, "Oh, well now you get to see this tiny little part of the goblin habitat in Forest of Sharpteeth, isn't that cool?"

Well . . . no. No, it isn't cool, or at least isn't as cool as you think, Mister GM. The things that make gameplay interesting to me are things relevant to my character. The game world itself is ever less relevant.

Sadly, I didn't fully learn from my own experience. Four years later I started running a Savage Worlds fantasy campaign in my own homebrew world that was largely successful, but I fell back into the highly ingrained "trad" habits I'd assimilated over the years for running it, and I wonder if players felt some of the similar pains.

So I think my attitude toward "sim" shifted. Because I no longer think that hard sim of this kind is important to "immersion." I no longer believe immersion is predicated on the kind of rigid enforcement of "orcs are HERE, goblins are THERE, because that's just the way it is."

So yes, if I "quantum maneuver" the game world so that what's relevant to character/player stakes into the forefront, that's just what I'm going to do.

 

[Micah Sweet]

And I think this, right here, is the crux of where my divergence in play preferences began. There came a point after a 7-year run of 3.x as a player in 2009---with a highly "sim" driven GM---where I no longer wanted nor cared to maintain the "simulationism" of, "Well, you chose wrong, so now your character has to fight these meaningless goblin battles before getting to the larger orc problem that actually has narrative stakes for your character."

There was no longer anything compelling about that in play. I wasn't interested in the "sim" or exploration of, "Oh, well now you get to see this tiny little part of the goblin habitat in Forest of Sharpteeth, isn't that cool?"

Well . . . no. No, it isn't cool, or at least isn't as cool as you think, Mister GM. The things that make gameplay interesting to me are things relevant to my character. The game world itself is ever less relevant.

Sadly, I didn't fully learn from my own experience. Four years later I started running a Savage Worlds fantasy campaign in my own homebrew world that was largely successful, but I fell back into the highly ingrained "trad" habits I'd assimilated over the years for running it, and I wonder if players felt some of the similar pains.

So I think my attitude toward "sim" shifted. Because I no longer think that hard sim of this kind is important to "immersion." I no longer believe immersion is predicated on the kind of rigid enforcement of "orcs are HERE, goblins are THERE, because that's just the way it is."

So yes, if I "quantum maneuver" the game world so that what's relevant to character/player stakes into the forefront, that's just what I'm going to do.

Well we can of course all believe whatever we want. To me, fidelity to a shared, coherent setting is far more important than twisting the universe to make sure an individual's "narrative stakes" are catered to, and I feel that way from either side of the screen.

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever heard the story of how someone came to love storygames that didn't heavily involve a series of bad GMs in that person's past. It's like the genre's fans are mostly victims of bad actors.

 

[Pedantic]

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever heard the story of how someone came to love storygames that didn't heavily involve a series of bad GMs in that person's past. It's like the genre's fans are mostly victims of bad actors.

I don't think there's any generalizable trend there, and that most of the discontent here comes from treating the specific as the universal.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't think there's any generalizable trend there, and that most of the discontent here comes from treating the specific as the universal.

I did say that it has been my experience. Storygame fans who discuss their history tend to do so in terms of being "burned" by traditional gaming, usually by bad GMs. I would love to hear from someone who loves them and hasn't been hurt by proponents of the older style.