Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

To answer look at the steps I outlined and what I highlighted

1. The referee describes a setting
2. The players describe some character they want to play in the setting.
3. The referee describes the circumstances in which the characters find themselves.
4. The players describe what they do as their characters.
5. The referee adjudicates what the players do as their characters and then loops back to #3.

You (and @pemerton ) are assuming, likely based on my reputation, that all of what I highlighted are handled more or less the same way that Dungeons & Dragons and other similar RPGs campaigns are handled.

I deliberately elected not to expand on what one does to describe a setting, describe characters, describe circumstances, how player describe what they do, and how the referee adjudicate. All of these can be handled in different ways including delegating it to the consensus of the entire group.

I realize that is one of the perils of writing tersely.

I am not criticising terseness. I'm just noting inaccuracy in generalisation.

For instance, the concept of delegation presupposes authority. But the authority structure that you posit is not a generic one. When the players in my MHRP game choose their PCs, and thus their milestones, they are the ones who are deciding what the focus of their play will be. They are not exercising authority that I, the GM, have delegated to them. To describe it that way is to put the cart before the horse!

What actually happens is that we as a group decide to play some RPG or other, and that RPG sets out (whether expressly or implicitly) some assumptions about trope or genre or setting or whatever, and also some principles or rules about who gets to author what. And we start from there.

It obscures things to frame all this in terms of "the referee". Or "the players" for that matter - eg in my Cortex+ Fantasy Heroic games I have written pre-gen PCs and the players have chosen from them.

The fact that it doesn't go into whether the character will be facing the Mad King of Redgate Keep versus The Evil High Priest of the Hellbridge Temple doesn't change that Baker has a very specific type of setting in mind when writing Dungeon World. This is further reinforced by the gamemaster advice given later. Dungeon World is not an RPG that lends itself to running every type of fantasy setting. But instead, focuses on a narrow range of settings that have a specific feel.

<snip>

What I am calling a setting is not just a list of specific details like the Sorceror Supply Shop is on Regal Street just south of the Square of the Gods in City State. It also the more general assumptions and tropes from which those details are created from.

<snip>

Dungeon World is an example of an RPG that starts out a campaign with a setting that is comprised of no details just assumptions and tropes.

Baker didn't write Dungeon World.

And DW is obviously as broad in its genre coverage as D&D, or T&T, or RM, etc.

A setting is the background of the campaign. Anything and everything that could impact how a player will roleplay a character.

The point of all roleplaying whether it is with a human referee as with tabletop RPGs, collaborative storytelling, refereed by a software algorithm, or adjudicated by the rules of a sport (LARPS), is to pretend to be a character having adventures. In order to have adventures there needs to be a place in which adventures can occur. In order for players to decide what to do as their characters there needs to be a context on which the player can make a decision. All of this forms the setting of the campaign.

Not all RPGing involves a "campaign".

Not all RPGing involves an adventure.

And it is perfectly possible to create fiction about - to imagine - characters doing things without having any "background" or "setting" other than a sense of genre. Like, in my first session of Prince Valiant the players wrote up their knights, established some basic facts about their families and we agreed that they were riding through a forest on their way to a tournament:

Because - despite blind allocation - two players ended up with very similar characters (same B/P split, same skills, differing only that one had more 3 Arms and 1 Fellowship while the other had 2 in each), and one had described his PC as in his early middle age (but having accomplished little!) while the other was in his early 20s, the player of the younger one decided they were father and son. They were country knights, on their way to a tournament. The third player described his PC as the son of a noble family of horse breeders, with a gift for working with horses (Riding 4), and we decided that he was also on his way to the tournament and that they met on the road.

The "XP system" in the game is fame, and the default rule is that the character with the highest fame in a group has precedence. But the starting fame for knights is 800, so there was some jockeying in this respect - the three rode abreast, but Sir Tristraine (the horse breeder) was trying to squeeze Sir Justin (the son) into a rear position, while Sir Gerren (the father) did his best to make room for his son to stay alongside the other two. Opposed riding checks resulted in an all-round draw, so this awkwardness continued until they met a young knight in a clearing looking for jousting competition.

This was the first of three short scenarios I used, from the main rulebook and the "Episodes" book that shipped with it. It worked pretty well, and the PCs got some fame by besting a fairly weak knight in jousts. We got to test out the fighting rules, and also the social rules - the horse breeder had better Presence than Brawn plus some social skills to go with it, and the NPC had Fellowship, and so checks were made on both sides.

This was perfectly good RPGing - in fact it was really quite good RPGing - and it didn't depend upon the referee establishing a setting or delegating any authority to anyone.

The procedure that I outlined and claim covers all tabletop RPGs works just fine if the group decides to start the campaign with just general assumptions and tropes and paint in the details later as characters are created and the campaign is played. It also works just fine with campaign where the group is sitting with the entire Glorantha corpus sitting on shelves next to the table.

Thus I stand by my point that the first thing that happens when any type of tabletop RPG campaign is run, is that a setting is defined.

<snip>

These steps I feel represent the minimum one has to do in order to run a tabletop role-playing campaign. A group wants to pretend to be characters having adventures using pen & paper this is what works. There are other broad alternatives but that means you doing something different like playing a board game, a CRPG, wargaming, LARPing, Collaborative Storytelling, and so on. Each of those are fun but have different consideration to make them work.

You state your steps in terms of authority distributions, but then go on to say you don't really mean it.

And you describe setting in such generic terms that any colour, genre, trope or situation is "setting".

With those glosses applied, what your steps really encompass is:

• The game participants imagine some characters in a situation.
• Those participants who have taken up the player role declare actions for those characters (their PCs).
• The game's procedures are applied to determine what happens next.

That's a pretty generic description of RPGing. It doesn't tell us why RPGs have rules.

 

[pemerton]

To add to the post just above:

If we want our RPGing to involve not just "circumstances" in which the PCs find themselves, but opposition to the PCs, we will need a method for establishing that opposition. Here's Baker on this (back in 2003, under the heading "Doing Away with the GM"):

You need to have a system by which scenes start and stop. The rawest solution is to do it by group consensus: anybody moved to can suggest a scene or suggest that a scene be over, and it's up to the group to act on the suggestion or not. You don't need a final authority beyond the players' collective will.

You need to have a system whereby narration becomes in-game truth. That is, when somebody suggests something to happen or something to be so, does it or doesn't it? Is it or isn't it? Again the rawest solution is group consensus, with suggestions made by whoever's moved and then taken up or let fall according to the group's interest.

You need to have orchestrated conflict, and there's the tricky bit. GMs are very good at orchestrating conflict, and it's hard to see a rawer solution. My game Before the Flood handles the first two needs ably but makes no provision at all for this third. What you get is listless, aimless, dull play with no sustained conflict and no meaning.

In our co-GMed Ars Magica game, each of us is responsible for orchestrating conflict for the others, which works but isn't radical wrt GM doage-away-with. . . . GM-swapping, in other words, isn't the same as GM-sharing.​

That's a reason, then, to have the asymmetric participant roles that are typical of RPGing. It's not about setting but about conflict or opposition. It's not a knockdown reason, of course, because not everyone wants genuine conflict or opposition in their RPGing. If the goal of play is to imagine what it might be like hanging out in a tavern, or wandering around a pseudo-mediaeval market and fair, then we probably only need symmetric roles, though it might make sense to have one participant play the main character (the "PC") and another swap in and out of the bit parts (the "GM", but really they're just another player as far as authority and function are concerned).

If we do want conflict, and hence a GM, we are - to allude back to the Baker quotes in the OP - opening the door at least a crack to the unwelcome and unwanted. And then - again, as per the OP - rules become interesting to help achieve this, and hence go beyond what group consensus and negotiation make possible.

If we don't want conflict, and hence aren't looking for fiction beyond what group consensus could deliver, why have rules nevertheless? Because we don't trust what our consensus?

 

[pemerton]

If the referee is a good teacher, coach, and communicator. Knows the setting of the campaign very well including what is possible for characters to do. An RPG campaign can be played without any reference to a system. However, the skill required to make it fun and doable as a hobby is high enough that most folks turn to a written system.

Having an RPG system saves the players and referee time and work in several ways.

• As a terse form of communication as to how a setting or genre works.
• The system mechanics will provide a terse and often precise description of various elements of the setting like characters, and objects.
• By teaching the referee and players how to handle common situations that arise in the setting or genre. Determining when there is a certain success, a certain failure, or the odds are uncertain, thus needs to be resolved with a procedure.
• As a reference so that similar rulings are made for similar situations.

This allows the group to spend more of their limited hobby time and verbal bandwidth on playing the campaign. Rules are not a requirement to run an RPG campaign but having a set of rules make it more fun and doable in the time one has for a hobby.

The key element for tabletop roleplaying that elevates it above "Let's Pretend" that makes it work is the judgment of the human referee, not the rules. The rules are an aide and a tool to make this happen easier as a fun pastime.

Where it gets messy is in the implementation of the system. The only firm requirement that the system needs to follow is that the mechanics reflect the setting of the campaign accurately. If they don't then either one of two things will happen. The rules will be modified to reflect what missing or the setting will be altered to reflect how the rules describe things.

This suggests that the function of rules is to be a type of summary or "aide memoire" for the fiction: the setting is too big or complex to fully convey, and so we reduce it to rules.

But then, why does the referee have any special role? Why can't any player who realises that the rules are getting the setting wrong suspend or amend the rules in order to make the fiction better?

That's before we get to the sorts of comments that @AbdulAlhazred and I have made upthread, that the capacity of rules to summarise setting breaks down completely outside a very narrow range of cases. (Eg AD&D has rules for how hard it is for various characters to force open various sorts of doors and similar portals; but when it comes to toppling various sizes of statue - a pretty classic fantasy trope - the rules have nothing to say and the game participants are left to make things up based on common sense.)

In fact, experience in RPG design and play shows that there is no 'firm requirement" that the system/mechanics need to reflect the setting accurately. The mechanics for AW don't "reflect the setting" in a way that can be accurate or inaccurate: they establish a clear set of processes for working out what happens next in the shared fiction. The same is true for most of the mechanics in Classic Traveller. Or MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. Or Prince Valiant.

Are characters described using class and level or skills and talents? Is armor about avoidance or damage resistance? Does social interaction get the most detail, is it combat encounters? Or both. Level of detail and focus are often the main drivers in which set of rules the group finds fun and interesting.

As long as the result is consistent with the setting and the group finds it fun to play there is no right answer. The loose analogy I like to use is that it doesn't matter whether the car is painted red or blue., they both will get you to your destination. But you may have more fun getting there driving a red car.

I don't find this very helpful. I mean, why aren't character described the way they are in novels: by name, appearance, aspirations, relationships etc? Why does "armour" particularly matter? (Let alone the concepts of "avoidance" or "damage resistance", which only have meaning within rather tightly constrained conceptions of how a certain sort of action is resolved - in Cthulhu Dark or Wuthering Heights or Agon 2e or Marvel Heroic RP or HeroWars/Quest or Prince Valiant, a character may well be heavily armoured, or lightly armoured, or not armoured at all, but the way in which that matters to action resolution, if it does, has nothing to do with "avoidance" or "damage resistance").

Deciding whether to paint a car red or blue is (as best I'm aware) an utterly trivial decision from the engineering point of view, and matters only to sales and marketing. Working out why a RPG needs rules, and what rules it should have, is not trivial at all. It's fundamental to RPG design.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Sure that would be a problem if when we lived an era where a publisher needed capital to make a print run, limited warehouse space at a distributor, and limited shelf space as a game store. But thanks to the changes wrought by the internet and digital technology very specific niches can be now supported efficiently and at a profit by the RPG industry even when the audience is in the hundreds and the company's staff is just one person.

The only remaining issues are legal ones surrounding copyrights and trademarks that prevent alternatives from arising if the original publisher goes down a creative path the game's hobbyists don't like. This is I why I recommend supporting publishers who release their material as open content.

I wasn't the one who brought up this idea, so sure it's not about publishers, you can distribute stuff for free to a tiny audience.

However, when there's a constant drumbeat of commentary largely representing one pov or market segment it can distort people's view of what is really going on. Like 10 years ago you all were calling anathema on 4e, yet I couldn't even run enough games to meet demand!

 

[Lanefan]

I strongly doubt you have much to worry about. Heck, you can still buy 1e and 2e books new on Amazon, lol. Well, they are not cheap anymore like they were 10 years ago, but there's a metric boatload of trad games out there, they're going nowhere.

Even ten years ago the prices on 1e books and adventure modules were climbing fast. The best time to get them IME was around 2003-2005.

As I say, I think there's a huge self-selection in a forum like this. After playing with quite a few groups etc. for many years I have still to meet a GM who has done that. YOU probably haven't met one! (I mean, mirrors aside, lol).

Au contraire, mon ami. I meet one every week (online) and play in his game. He's been running different connected segments of the same campaign since 1981 (with a lengthy real-world-time gap at one point); the current segment is on about session 940, with just over 1000 sessions between the previous two segments. Combined, that's way more than 1000 sessions; and - at 3 sessions per two weeks (two different parties) - the current campaign is on track to hit session 1000 on its own sometime next spring.

There's a long tail out there, but the idea that RPGs, generally speaking, should be designed to cater to that seems odd to me, when it is such a small part of the hobby.

They don't necessarily have to cater to it specifically. All they need to do is be open-ended enough to allow for it to happen without the whole thing collapsing.

And even D&D can't really do it without the DM and players employing some tips and tricks to keep it sustained and playable. We tried it with 3e under a third DM, it got to maybe 450 sessions* and about 14th-ish level* over a ten-year span from 2001-2011; at which point the DM kinda got swamped by the prep required.

* - estimates; I left that game about 2/3 of the way through in order to start my current campaign in 2008, but stayed (and still am) in touch with the DM and players.

The real 'death spiral' in my book is that a few super enthusiast people who WOULD run 1000 session game end up as the loudest voices in the room, and then all the people who are like "wait, I just want a 10 episode series..." leave the hobby because it doesn't really cater to them. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I take a more cynical outlook: publishers promote shorter-span systems because doing so allows them to sell more systems. The tips and tricks to running a mega-length campaign don't appear anywhere in those books.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I consider all my games to be connected by my homebrew multiverse. I’ve run the longest campaign ever!!

 

[Lanefan]

I consider all my games to be connected by my homebrew multiverse. I’ve run the longest campaign ever!!

If the various parties from all those games are relatively easily able to meet and interact with each other, even if they never do, it'd count. Even more so if what one party does in the setting can potentially affect other parties then or later.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

I take a more cynical outlook: publishers promote shorter-span systems because doing so allows them to sell more systems. The tips and tricks to running a mega-length campaign don't appear anywhere in those books.

That would be a pretty diabolical, calculated, and unsuccessful scheme given that the vast majority of creators in the hobby are just publishing passion projects. Forever campaigns are just an antiquated concept, and a lot of newer games are responding to the notion that not everyone wants to play in a single genre and/or setting for decades, and that they want to be part of narratives that are truly player-focused, not players experiencing someone's intricate (and endless) worldbuilding.

It's ok to not be interested in what the majority of designers are doing, but it's not like it's a mystery or conspiracy. Again, there'll always be rules out there that let you adventure for decades for diminishing xp returns.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Does it? Where is the lack of detail in combat in something like Dungeon World? I don't find the combats to be any less detailed or granular than the ones which happen in 5e, for example. Neither game employs a formal 'battle map' and rely on 'ToTM' style combat. Yet DW lacks any formal combat rules whatsoever!

Sincere question to anybody knowledgeable: does Dungeon World even have the concept of modifiers to probability distributions? Simple example: in 5E, if your AC and to-hit are better than the enemy's, it's advantageous to impose disadvantage on both sides (e.g. by dropping prone in an archery duel, or fighting on bad terrain) because disadvantage probability curve hurts them more than you. Or you might try to lead the enemy into a ruined city to create 3/4 cover for yourself for a +5 AC bonus, even if that lets the enemy do the same. Or you cast Bless on yourself, expecting the combat to last long enough for it to pay off. Does Dungeon World inspire this kind of tactical, quantitative decision making? If so would someone mind pointing me to a page reference, as a favor?

The rules-light systems that I've seen generally eschew making tactical details matter but maybe Dungeon World is an exception.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I take a more cynical outlook: publishers promote shorter-span systems because doing so allows them to sell more systems. The tips and tricks to running a mega-length campaign don't appear anywhere in those books.

Right. Because D&D’s known for its minimal output.

If the various parties from all those games are relatively easily able to meet and interact with each other, even if they never do, it'd count. Even more so if what one party does in the setting can potentially affect other parties then or later.

Nah. It’s a bunch of different games. Which is fine. Length of campaign doesn’t translate to quality of campaign.