Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Read your own references, OK? snip irrelevant digression

You didn't answer the question. What business requirement drove the need for exacting fidelity in your airplane simulation? You don't need to hide the ball here. Just answer the question.

 

[robertsconley]

So suppose, as a player, I am more expert in these things than you - who I think upthread identified your profession as software engineer rather than historian, social psychologist, anthropologist or some other sort of expert in village life and human relationships and interactions - do I get to have a say?

I am always open to discussion within reason. And I know the reasons for the things I choose to do.

From page 45 of my Basic Rules

I made the whole chapter free on my website.

But the real issue is trust, without it none of the advice I have given or any of the things I do will work. There are a lot of little but important things I do before, during, and after running sessions to build that trust. That yes I listen and discuss. And will at times incorporate feedback, yes I make fair rulings, and what the NPCs do is a result of motivations and goals, not an arbitrary whim. That it is handled without any formal mechanic or social contract other than a dedication to be fair and practice good sportsmanship.

For example, I am the final arbiter when I run my Majestic Wilderlands campaigns. Not because I desire control, but because a focus of my campaigns that the players can trash my setting. One of the things I do to make that fun, and interesting means infusing the world around the player character with a life of its own. Which means things like fog of war is in play.

But I am not a software algorithm of a CRPG, I encourage the players to ask questions especially if they think something is missing or not there given the circumstance. Or perhaps I had forgotten something.

Also, I assume the character are competent. For example, the players have a high perception and there is enough time to look around. They will notice what is out of place and thus I will describe it to them. I did this half-assed for a long time, and then played a couple of campaigns of Gumshoe made me realize what I wanted to do all along. I had good results since.

But there are times all of this doesn't work. I have been at it enough time to spot when that is going to happen then deal with it out of game.

To clarify none of this is THE way of handling RPG campaign, it just happens to be the way I do. And given the feedback I have gotten over the years some folks seem to find parts of it useful for their own campaigns. And what I responding to here is the general criticism that some have of simulationism in this thread. To point out people have made simulationism work, that their campaigns were fun to play, and that they have been doing this for decades.

To elaborate: in this essay the historian Inga Clendinnen criticises historical novelists for projection, and discusses the difference between imaginative projection of the sort that novelists use and the attempt to come to grips with the realities of other times and places that underpins historical inquiry. She points to elements of her own research - on the attitude of Aztec women to the likely fate of their children; and on the attitude towards death of late eighteenth century sailors - as demonstrations of the differences of outlook and understanding and interpretations of human life that have existed over the course of human history and human society.

Haven't read her book but I am aware of the issues outlined in the synopsis. My opinion is that running RPG campaigns is not an academic exercise. It is an activity meant to be enjoyed as a hobby to be done in the time we have for hobby. Because of the above, a referee or a group is just going to have to make the best of the available information for anything grounded in real life. Those folks are not going to agree with each other as to what their choices whether it is a campaign run by a referee or by group consensus.

Personally, I avoid running or creating historical campaigns. I will use history as a reference extensively but I am too keenly aware of the gaps. As a result, running a historical setting is not fun for me.

On the other hand, as a player, I learned to be chill when it comes to things I am very knowledgeable about. Especially when it comes to science fiction campaigns involving realistic space technology. Or settings that I am very familiar that are refereed by another.

Inga Clendinnen is now dead. But I would expect a "story now" RPG GMed by someone with her historical knowledge and scope of historical and anthropological imagination would outstrip, in its "realism", anything invented by the typical GM of a FRPG.

For referees, experience in academics, life, etc. have an outsized benefit. But there are problems and traps the experienced can fall into. Namely that too many situations there is only one possible outcome especially ones that lie in their field of expertise. For anything with human beings, one has to consider those who are lazy, indifferent, greedy, virtuous, and so on. For a given culture they will all operate within a range but personalities, motivations, and goals mean there will a lot of variations. For RPG one trick a referee will have to learn for a given culture what would a lazy individual be like, what form greed takes, what form generosity takes, and so on. Otherwise, the campaign will suffer as the party will be interacting with a bunch of stereotypes however accurate.

As for Inge Clendinnen, sounds like she would have that covered especially for the Aztecs and other cultures in that region.

It's hard to know where to start with the unrealities of FPRG depictions of mediaeval villages and interpersonal relationships. One of the more striking is the way they utterly fail to grapple with the role of religion in ordinary life.

Yet there are those, including myself, who do incorporate religion as an integral part of their campaigns and settings. My basic rules as terse as they had to be, bake in some of the central conflicts and tensions of my setting. The fact that some best selling RPGs don't doesn't mean that simulationism hasn't been made to work and found to be fun by many hobbyists.

Religion plays an important role in Scourge of the Demon Wolf. In my upcoming Deceits of the Russet Lord it is one of the central tensions of the adventure. And in neither it is not included as "There is the temple go get healed" variety.

And I have to keep saying this, all that I say means it is just one way out of many to approach RPG campaigns. It may not be your way, but it has been made to work and work well.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I am responsible for making up the details of the village of Kensla a medieval village in my Scourge of the Demon Wolf. Or the Woodford Abbey in Deceits of the Russet Lord. So that part is arbitrary.

But I based everything on how medieval villages worked and how interpersonal relationships between humans work. A player who has never experienced my campaigns played my rules, or read the adventure can use their knowledge of both to get further ahead in the adventure than they otherwise would.

Coupled with how my rules work, I am not in the business of making arbitrary decisions in my rulings. I make consistent rulings. Also I will

This is the essence of what good simulationism means. Because things work in the campaign as they do in life, players can use their knowledge to make meaningful accurate choices at the expected odds (when the outcome is uncertain).

This also allows you to playtest. By gauging the reaction of the players to the rules, characters, and situations that suppose to be simulate some aspect of life.

Finally, you don't need to account for everything to the nth level of detail to make simulationism work. In my experience, there is a sweet place between details and playability that is more than good enough.

I made this work this way dozens of time using GURPS, and OD&D and system whose complexity sit in between the two. Under the worst conditions, strangers showing up at my convention games who don't know me, the setting I use, or how I run campaigns.

Last fall at Shire Con 2022, I had two players show up who didn't know my rules but liked to play Harnmaster, and other medieval RPGs. With their help, the party was able to resolve the adventure in record time mostly through roleplaying.

Some images from that game.

We can talk theory and design philosophies all we want but at the end of the day what matters is what happens at the table and what happens at the end.

See, I agree that you do all these things. As I said in my last post, I'm no language policeman to say you can't use 'simulationism' and such words pretty much however you want. Ron Edwards certainly did, as did many people (as I can attest) on alt.rec.games and at Together Net, etc. etc. etc. in the early days (of the 'net, though it was earlyish days for RPGs too).

The point where we break, perhaps, is simply at the point where people start telling me that my narrativist play doesn't contain equally consistent and plausible fiction! I'm not simulating anything, and yet here I am at the same point you simulationists are at. What that tells me is that simulation, in a literal formal sense, is not on the table here.

Honestly, I think Micah Sweet pretty much nailed it. Stylistically the sort of approach that is generally being touted as simulationist (and where actual simulation is asserted by at least some) has more to do with a sort of 'third person play' where situation and setting (in some order) take almost complete precedence over character. Micah seems to define it in terms of a sort of notion that verisimilitude demands this lack of emphasis on character and thus the very idea of drama. This part is a matter of taste, which you all are welcome to assert as anything you wish of course.

So, I don't think our differences actually have much to do with realism/verisimilitude/simulation or whatever you want to call it. I think they have to do with the difference between character as having precedence over setting and situation, or vice versa. Ron Edwards, like it or not, analyzed and diagnosed this entire subject quite effectively nigh onto 20 years ago at this point. I can add very little that he didn't say way back then.

 

[Maxperson]

It’s difficult to read the below as anything but that. So if I’m mistaken, then what did you mean?

It very clearly says it was created by angels via a song to achieve Eru's vision. Does that sound like a geological process to you? It sounds like magic to me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Even though their underlying mechanics might be the same, things are being done right IMO if two characters of the same class/species are immediately identifyable as being greatly different people due to their in-game personalities, characterizations, morals, and quirks.

In short, mechanics ain't everything.

Nice. We've got a few memorable edge-of-the-seat stories, similar to yours here.

Many of our memorable moments, however, also come from the characters' (not always pleasant) interactions with each other; where whatever adventure or story was happening at the time was either irrelevant or merely a backdrop.

For a long time the most famous and talked-about combat our crew ever saw was "The Battle of Three Tents". It was so named because during said combat all three of the party's tents were destroyed by our own MU using a telekinesed boulder - he'd just acquired a ring of telekinesis, and when we were attacked while camped at night he insisted on trying it out. He hadn't a clue how to use it, and as well as whacking all our tents his only contribution to proceedings was to clobber our Ranger for damage and, when the combat ended, drop the rock on my namesake character's foot for more damage.

Who were the foes? Why were they there?* Irrelevant to the stories told for decades after, because all the stories and memories revolved around what that damn MU did to his own party.

* - a patrol of a few Hobgoblins and their Orc soldiers, rolled as a wandering monster and otherwise irrelevant to the adventure.

The fact it was a life and death moment moves it beyond simple 'color'.

Right, but what I'm saying is that Takeo's personality, motives, and personal situation, were CENTRAL to the course of the action, and in fact in the case of the Oni Expellation Score was the ENTIRE POINT of the score itself (the political schemer Tal Rajan got some good mileage out of the situation, and the Whisper, Skewth played a significant part in helping Takeo with the spirit combat part too). In fact every score in BitD is like that, they're initiated primarily by the players and reflect their character's needs and such to a large degree. In fact, what the GM supplies is, to a certain degree, more in the realm of 'color'. I don't think I'd categorize it nearly so trivially as just that, but in a certain sense we already KNOW that trouble is coming for the PCs, that their very nature, and the nature of the crucible of Doskvol is going to mean they come up against risk and adversity, and need to 'make rent' on an ongoing basis. So, effectively the GM's job is more to just present the instantiation of that in terms of what we have already selected as our specific interests (IE as a crew of assassins, or whatever).

This is the fundamental difference with trad or classic D&D. The situation and setting are at the forefront in these games. ANY set of characters could 'run through' a given D&D adventure. Sometimes trad play DOES rise to the level of directly engaging with a character's needs and their specific personality. Its not a given though, by any means! Nor is it a given that this will remain significant beyond the scope of a given scene. So what we commonly see in trad play is a fairly generic party moving through some form of a sequence of encounters. It may be a branching sequence, their quirks and such may even determine which fork they take. They may even, sandbox style, simply choose at some points to strike out one way or another. But the essence of play is on situation and setting, not character. Narrativist play could probably be more aptly described as 'characterist' play, the character itself, for itself, is foremost.

A lot of real-world play isn't quite easily pigeonholed of course, so I am not diagnosing anyone's game by any of this, not to any great degree. Its more "these are bones of it, and we can draw some conclusions about how games can be designed and play approached based on that."

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

You didn't answer the question. What business requirement drove the need for exacting fidelity in your airplane simulation? You don't need to hide the ball here. Just answer the question.

OK, sure! It was simple engineering process. We were designing complex control/sensor systems with safety-of-flight implications. We had to know that we, and the prime contractor, had got it right, else people die. I suppose there were contractual and legal/regulatory stipulations which reflected that as well, which were the proximate motivation for the sort of 'system validation testing' which was my specific area of responsibility (I had a team of software and hardware engineers).

And I'm not 'hiding the ball'. The above answer is largely irrelevant to anything we're discussing here in this GAMING forum. I'm fairly amenable to discussions of systems engineering topics, though I doubt they will interest most people here and are terribly off topic. However, I warn you, my overall expertise in this field is really fairly limited as most of it was "back in the day" and its a large complex topic, many important parts of which I know next to nothing.

 

[Maxperson]

Having this sort of discussion seems monumentally fruitless.

That's how I feel when people constantly use their own opinions to poo poo all over a style that they dislike.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

OK, sure! It was simple engineering process. We were designing complex control/sensor systems with safety-of-flight implications. We had to know that we, and the prime contractor, had got it right, else people die. I suppose there were contractual and legal/regulatory stipulations which reflected that as well, which were the proximate motivation for the sort of 'system validation testing' which was my specific area of responsibility (I had a team of software and hardware engineers).

Okay, so it was a legal requirement. In gaming, GMs don't have the legal requirement, so the benefits of high fidelity (e.g. for falling damage) take a back seat to usability (being able to actually compute what happens to Bob after falling off a 30' siege ladder without stopping the flow of play), so we tend to use very simple simulations with lots of things pre-computed. Which is the answer to the thread question BTW: that's why we have rules in RPGs, to make play simpler and more predictable for GMs and players.

You acknowledged yourself that the key characteristic of a simulation is using a model to update itself (you didn't say this part, but updates are done using certain rules and inputs). I get the sense that in your business, the simulations were closed simulations that took no inputs, but in other kinds of simulations including training simulations and gameplay, user or player input is one of the things which, together with the model state, is used to update the model.

Your 1980s experience has led you to believe that high-fidelity safety simulations are the only kinds of simulations, but that's not the case.

 

[pemerton]

The point where we break, perhaps, is simply at the point where people start telling me that my narrativist play doesn't contain equally consistent and plausible fiction! I'm not simulating anything, and yet here I am at the same point you simulationists are at. What that tells me is that simulation, in a literal formal sense, is not on the table here.

Right. To self-quote:

To talk about what simulationist RPGing involves we need to talk about the actual people doing it, and what they do. Not try and identify features of their fiction that ostensibly differentiate it from others' fiction.

I think Micah Sweet pretty much nailed it. Stylistically the sort of approach that is generally being touted as simulationist (and where actual simulation is asserted by at least some) has more to do with a sort of 'third person play' where situation and setting (in some order) take almost complete precedence over character.

<snip>

So, I don't think our differences actually have much to do with realism/verisimilitude/simulation or whatever you want to call it. I think they have to do with the difference between character as having precedence over setting and situation, or vice versa. Ron Edwards, like it or not, analyzed and diagnosed this entire subject quite effectively nigh onto 20 years ago at this point. I can add very little that he didn't say way back then.

This is the fundamental difference with trad or classic D&D. The situation and setting are at the forefront in these games. ANY set of characters could 'run through' a given D&D adventure. Sometimes trad play DOES rise to the level of directly engaging with a character's needs and their specific personality. Its not a given though, by any means! Nor is it a given that this will remain significant beyond the scope of a given scene. So what we commonly see in trad play is a fairly generic party moving through some form of a sequence of encounters. It may be a branching sequence, their quirks and such may even determine which fork they take. They may even, sandbox style, simply choose at some points to strike out one way or another. But the essence of play is on situation and setting, not character. Narrativist play could probably be more aptly described as 'characterist' play, the character itself, for itself, is foremost.

Largely right. I'll set out my quibble below, but first I'll self-quote again:

For a lot of people, for a long time, learning to RPG has mean learning the tenets/ethos/techniques of "sim" play. Roughly: the GM creates a world and establishes some scenario/possibility within that world; the players create PCs whom the GM frames into that scenario/possibility; the players start declaring actions; the GM has overall authority/responsibility for "what happens next".

Within that broad paradigm, there can be a lot of variation. One important one is what does the GM do if the players declare "We go over here now"? The different answers to that help (though don't fully) constitute the (so-called) "linear <=> sandbox spectrum".

Another variation, coming up in recent pages of this thread, is the extent to which the GM uses systematic methods (like weather charts, random events charts, whatever) rather than unfettered invention. The former are often seen as "more sim" or "more realistic" because they disclaim authorship.

There's no puzzle here, except for the insistence that a game that prioritises the GM's ideas about setting and/or situation is more "realistic".

But now the quibble: I agree with Edwards that it is possible to have narrativist play that elevates the setting higher and consequently subordinates the characters a bit. The key is that (i) the setting has to be a source of theme, and (ii) the players have to be able to pick up that them and run with it.

Glorantha is one of Edwards's examples. I think 4e D&D - played in the default setting - is another. The key, as Edwards explained 20 years ago and elaborate further about 10 years ago, is that the setting information needs to be shared, and the players need to be at liberty to impose their own interpretations/conclusions onto it. Eg in the 4e context, do they try and stave off, or bring on, the Dusk War? Do they support or oppose Vecna? Do they support Asmodeus in his ongoing war with the Abyss, or have some other strategy for dealing with that? Etc.

 

[pemerton]

GMs don't have the legal requirement, so the benefits of high fidelity (e.g. for falling damage) take a back seat to usability (being able to actually compute what happens to Bob after falling off a 30' siege ladder without stopping the flow of play), so we tend to use very simple simulations with lots of things pre-computed. Which is the answer to the thread question BTW: that's why we have rules in RPGs, to make play simpler and more predictable for GMs and players.

What is this simulating? It's just a rules procedure for answering a mechanical question in the game. In D&D, it doesn't even establish any fiction (beyond the self-evident "that hurt a bit") unless the falling damage reduces the character to zero hp.

In Prince Valiant, the GM decides the consequences of a fall. That's a difference of process. But I don't see how it is more or less of a simulation.

EDIT: The impression I am getting is that any mechanical procedure, that takes certain fictional elements of the situation (eg distance fallen) as an input, is being labelled a simulation. Is that a mistaken impression? If it is, what has to be added to what I've described to make it a simulation?