Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

Where do the AD&D rules say that? To me, they seem to imply the opposite - and more realistic - possibility that partial damage to buildings is possible: page 110 of the DMG tells us that a curtain wall has a defensive point value of 20, with a footnote stating that "This indicates the strength of a curtain wall 10' thick in an area 10' wide by 10' high; if a breach, rather than a hole, is desired, the wall must be destroyed from top to bottom."

Hence, it seems to me that a wooden building with a defensive point value of 8, which has taken 4 points from a lightning bolt, may well be half-destroyed.

As I noted, I took blasted in two to imply completely destroyed. If you intended somewhat damaged then sure, that makes sense. What's salient is whether that and each world fact you go on to establish gives priority to internal causes - what I've explained as mapping to references and conformance to shared theories - or not? If this one fits with your internalised theories about TB2 then the debate with @Maxperson arises just because you didn't share those theories at the outset. And your words implied a denial of basing the result on any such.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

The emphasis on GURPS falling rules suggests no.

No it doesn't. You are imagining subtext that I didn't author.

I mentioned GURPS falling rules in the context of how having prewritten rules and tables (and more importantly, people who have already sanity checked those rules against known LD50: RPG reality check: Are falls deadly enough in GURPS? – Games Diner) is faster than having to derive those results on the fly in the middle of a scene. It improves the quality of the simulation; that's not relevant to your question of "is it a simulation?" We've been over this before and I can't believe I'm telling you again because I don't think you'll hear it this time when you didn't last time or the time before that. I'm wasting my own time even writing this post.

 

[pemerton]

That Strider be who he is, situated within the overarching history, is what's resonant. That he is part of a great web, a child of internal causes.

But JRRT made this up. I mean, in early drafts he was the Hobbit Trotter.

Here is Shippey on some of these aspects of the composition of LotR (The Road to Middle Earth, pp 94-5):

It is for one thing remarkable that Frodo has to be dug out of no less than five 'Homely Houses' before his quest is properly launched . . . Each of these locations has of course its images and encounters to present, and some of them (like the meeting with Strider) turn out to be vital. Nevertheless there is a sense that the zest of the story goes not into the dangers but the recoveries . . . Meanwhile, the Black Riders, for all their snuffling and deadly cries, are not the menace they later become, for though they may only be waiting for a better chance, as Aragorn insists, they could have save themselves trouble several times in the Shire, in Bree and on Weathertop by pressing their attacks home. It seems likely that, as at the start of The Hobbit, Tolkien found the transit from familiar Shire to archaic Wilderland an inhibiting one. He said himself that when he first reached the Prancing Pony he had no more idea that the hobbits who Strider was, while in the first draft his place was filled by a kind of hero-hobbit call 'Trotter' . . . Tolkien broke through in The Hobbit with the trolls and then the ring. In The Lord of the Rings his invention came, to begin with, from a sort of self-plagiarism. . . .

The hobbit's first three real encounters are with the Willowman and Tom Bombadil in the Old Forest, and with the Barrow-wight on the Downs outside. All three could almost be omitted without disturbing the rest of the plot. . . . The Barrow-wight does a little more in providing the sword that Merry uses . . . Still, that is a by-product. All three of these characters go a long way back in Tolkien's mind, as far back as hobbits, probably, further than the Shire or the Ring; they are all in the poem 'The Adventures of Tom Bombadil', printed in the Oxford Magazine in 1934 (just as the song Frodo sings in the Prancing Pony is a revision from 1923). Tolkien was raiding his own larder, and one in the end can see why.​

What then follows is Shippey's explanation of how JRRT draws upon familiar Oxford countryside and place names to create a "suggest[ion]" of "a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones, one which has moreover been 'worn down', like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millenia"(p 99).

This is not being driven by "internal causes". It is a very deliberate technique of authorship.

 

[pemerton]

As I noted, I took blasted in two to imply completely destroyed. If you intended somewhat damaged then sure, that makes sense.

I believe I've quoted the actual play report earlier in this thread:

I rolled the weather for the first month of autumn - rain. Not auspicious - as I said, the PCs would not be able to equip the sun streaming through the windows onto the possessed Krystal.

<snip>

There was discussion of what sort of spiritual conflict to attempt - the players opted for Bind, so that the spirit could take the looted spellbook (from the aptr-gangr alcove) into Fea-bella's dreams (as Golin's player had suggested last session). Fea-bella took the spellbook out of her backpack, and Megloss asked what it was. She answered that it was the tome into which the shadow spirit would be bound.

The PCs rolled 6 hp, with Golin as conflict captain (relying on his research into Gebbeth's) - 3 for Fea-bella, 2 for Golin and 1 for Megloss as a helper but not an actor. The spirit rolled 7 hp (based on its Possessing nature). At first it seemed the PCs might do well, as they dropped the spirit to 6 hp in the first round. But then in the next two rounds the spirit regained its lost hp and reduced the PCs to zero.

I had a look at the compromise descriptions for Bind conflicts, and settled on the following (with no quibbling from the players): the spirit left Krystal's body - which was left a lifeless, soulless husk - and entered Megloss. It took the spellbook with it, into Megloss's dreams rather than Fea-bella's. And the unnatural spiritual activity caused the rain to get heavier - a bolt of lightning struck the house, destroying its front half and leaving the PCs outside in the wet, while Megloss remained dry in what was left of his home.

And here is the description of Megloss's house, from my notes:

This house sits at the edge of the village, backing onto a steep drop. It is poorly kept, the equivalent of a stable. But it once was more grand, the home of a wizard. It is built predominantly of timber, and its central pillar is of Elven birch, and once was a post of the Dreamhouse.​

The PCs were well aware of its poor upkeep. The players were also aware of this element of the fiction.

What's salient is whether that and each world fact you go on to establish gives priority to internal causes - what I've explained as mapping to references and conformance to shared theories - or not? If this one fits with your internalised theories about TB2 then the debate with @Maxperson arises just because you didn't share those theories at the outset. And your words implied a denial of basing the result on any such.

I've bolded two words. In the quoted passage they seem to be treated as meaning the same thing, but that doesn't seem right.

I also don't know what you take the relationship between "shared" and "internalised" theories to be.

I can tell you that I narrated something that struck me as conforming to the established fiction - rain, and gloom, and a dramatically failed attempt to bind an evil spirit into a magician's spell book. It seems that you, @Maxperson and @FormerlyHemlock regard what I did as non-simulationist. I haven't worked out yet if this is because of the process used (no tables/charts/random rolls) or the fact that I thought it was interesting (metagame motivation?) or because I deny that was uniquely determined by the prior fiction.

 

[Lanefan]

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.

Dunno - was Eru a geologist?

 

[pemerton]

Here is Edwards on "internal cause is king":

Consider Character, Setting, and Situation - and now consider what happens to them, over time. In Simulationist play, cause is the key, the imagined cosmos in action. The way these elements tie together, as well as how they're Colored, are intended to produce "genre" in the general sense of the term, especially since the meaning or point is supposed to emerge without extra attention. It's a tall order: the relationship is supposed to turn out a certain way or set of ways, since what goes on "ought" to go on, based on internal logic instead of intrusive agenda. Since real people decide when to roll, as well as any number of other contextual details, they can take this spec a certain distance. However, the right sort of meaning or point then is expected to emerge from System outcomes, in application.

Clearly, System is a major design element here, as the causal anchor among the other elements. As I outlined in the previous essay, System is mainly composed of character creation, resolution, and reward mechanics.
​

Applying this to the authoring of a novel is strained at best. A novelist doesn't create their fiction by having other authors create and then declare actions for characters, then applying resolution mechanics to see what happens and reward mechanics to change the characters.

The only part of JRRT's authorship to which "internal cause is king" has meaningful application, at least that I can see, is his invention of imaginary languages, by applying (what he understood to be) the laws of scientific linguistics. Otherwise he seems to have made deliberate choices, either to establish the sense of place (as per the quote above from Shippey) or to convey his thematically-laden story. One thing we can be certain of is that he didn't come up with the plot of LotR by asking "What would happen if a Hobbit discovered the One Ring?" or "What would happen if a prince of Gondor had the chance to take the One Ring?" or "What would happen if the greatest Elven princess of the age met a man who seems noble though humble, and is in fact the heir, in a direct line of descent, of her uncle Elros?"

In the RPGing context, as Edward says "it is supposed to turn out a certain way or set of ways . . . based on internal logic". So we need a magic rings and rings of power table; a tempted by power resolution process; a romantic encounters resolution process; etc. And these need to be calibrated based on a sense of how typical or atypical the LotR story is taken to be (ie what "set of ways" that things turn out is taken to be consistent with the "genre, in the general sense of the term").

Or we could just leave these to the GM to decide, though it can be hard to see what (eg) a dispassionate decision about Arwen's reaction to meeting Aragorn would consist in.

 

[clearstream]

What then follows is Shippey's explanation of how JRRT draws upon familiar Oxford countryside and place names to create a "suggest[ion]" of "a world which is more than imagined, whose supernatural qualities are close to entirely natural ones, one which has moreover been 'worn down', like ours, by time and by the process of lands and languages and people all growing up together over millenia"(p 99).

This is not being driven by "internal causes". It is a very deliberate technique of authorship.

When I read those same words, they fit the bill for internal causes... "the imagined cosmos in action."

 

[pemerton]

When I read those same words, they fit the bill for internal causes.

But JRRT is not driven by those things! He deliberately sets out to author something that will evoke a particular experience in the reader. He is driven by that authorial desire.

When I player Cortex+ Heroic Fantasy set in Middle Earth, I trade on JRRT's authored works and the sense of place that his work establishes. But it would be strange (to me, at least) to conclude that this makes my RPGing simulationist.

HeroWars is another RPG that relies very heavily on a world being created with a sense of place (ie Greg Stafford's Glorantha). This is absolutely central to the play of the game. But HeroWars is not a simulationist RPG.

I've just quoted Edwards: "internal cause is king" isn't a description of the fiction - it's a reference to the process whereby the fiction is created, and in particular how character, setting, and situation interact to generate "how things turn out" (which in this thread I have generally called "what happens next"). A process in which events unfold as they "ought" to (given genre), without the need for participant "intrusion", is one that takes what JRRT (or Stafford) have already created - it isn't about how to create their settings - and extrapolates from that, both to generate situations and to resolve declared character options, via some systematic process.

 

[clearstream]

Clearly, System is a major design element here, as the causal anchor among the other elements. As I outlined in the previous essay, System is mainly composed of character creation, resolution, and reward mechanics.

Rereading this now, it's striking that system isn't also mainly composed of means for procedures for establishing facts about the world. I suppose he means in terms of what he observed in game texts, although that wouldn't be right of texts like C&S.

 

[pemerton]

Rereading this now, it's striking that system isn't also mainly composed of means for procedures for establishing facts about the world. I suppose he means in terms of what he observed in game texts, although that wouldn't be right of texts like C&S.

You can read the essay on this:

Setting-creation and universe-play mechanisms
Another derivation of the Purist for System approach brings the Setting creation process directly into play itself. The System-driven elements of the Setting are as "active" as any particular character might be, during play as well as during preparation. Basically, the setting is played, even created, as a part of regular play.

Boink! I just realized that the original Traveller, or at least one way to play it, represents an example of this approach. Star system and planet creation are written right into the process of play, such that adventures and missions become not only a means of enjoying and improving characters, but also a means of enjoying and basically mapping the game-space.​

Using this sort of game, you are not going to get Middle Earth or Glorantha, which are both highly curated worlds intended to generate particular thematic experiences.