Why do RPGs have rules?

[Bedrockgames]

My own preference, for immersion, is to have all this Q&A stuff resolved in different ways - because as I've posted in a past, nothing is less immersive to me than feeling like a foreigner playing a PC in a world where I should in fact be at home. Again, for me this highlights play techniques rather than properties of the fiction as what is at issue.

Some of this is a language issue. We have a particular language we use when speaking of game issues and you have a different language, and there is even something of a different theoretical frame work. I do think a lot of this boils down to play techniques. But I also think there is no real getting around the importance of verisimilitude, setting consistency and plausibility in this play style. Players in this style want the setting to feel like a real place and they want it to feel like it is operating in a way that isn't just oriented around what the PCs do. You can do that in other approaches but the point is as the GM is using all these techniques and approaches, he or she is expected to be keeping things like verisimilitude in mind when making decisions about what happens, when establishing setting details, when introducing setting details. There is an expectation that certain things are objective for example and not determined in the moment. A certain degree of that is inevitable, extrapolation exists for that reason and it isn't a hard and fast rule, but you will meet more resistance the more you do things butt up against this. And when we are extrapolating we are expected to be abiding by some of these principles (principles I generally file under fairness to the players).

That isn't to say it works for everyone, or that you are going to have the same reaction to it. But I know when I talk with Rob about gaming, GMing and design, we are able to get on the same page when we use this kind of language.

 

[robertsconley]

My own preference, for immersion, is to have all this Q&A stuff resolved in different ways - because as I've posted in a past, nothing is less immersive to me than feeling like a foreigner playing a PC in a world where I should in fact be at home. Again, for me this highlights play techniques rather than properties of the fiction as what is at issue.

For what I do all settings are a foreign country. The only way the players know anything is through what the referee describes. So I developed several techniques to help novices to get up to speed so they feel at home.

My biggest issue over the decades Isn't getting players feeling at home. I lean heavily into standard tropes that quickly establish that my settings are familiar ones. The problem I have are novices not believing they have the freedom to trash my setting followed by if they do trash my setting I will "get' them. Especially when I use a D&D edition. Because everybody knows D&D referees are evil bastards out to get players, especially those OSR folks who use the classic editions.

So as I have been explaining in an earlier post, I developed some techniques to quickly get novices to the point where they feel comfortable making decisions in my setting along with some coaching to get there faster. But when somebody does know me and/or knows their fantasy tropes and how medieval life works. Then it is off to the races. This happened in the session with @Bedrockgames and crew, this happened in my Deceits of the Russet Lord session at Shirecon last fall.

 

[pemerton]

Some of this is a language issue. We have a particular language we use when speaking of game issues and you have a different language, and there is even something of a different theoretical frame work. I do think a lot of this boils down to play techniques. But I also think there is no real getting around the importance of verisimilitude, setting consistency and plausibility in this play style. Players in this style want the setting to feel like a real place

<snip>

he or she is expected to be keeping things like verisimilitude in mind when making decisions about what happens, when establishing setting details, when introducing setting details.

Right, so here is where I get off the bus, because it's hard not to see an implication that verisimilitude, setting consistency, plausibility and feeling like a real place are not important in my RPGing.

I think we're both agreed that Apocalypse World is not a simulationist RPG. But the following is from pp 96 and 108 of the AW rulebook (it is addressing the GM):

SAY THIS FIRST AND OFTEN
To the players: your job is to play your characters as though they were real people, in whatever circumstances they find themselves — cool, competent, dangerous people, but real.

My job as MC is to treat your characters as though they were real people too, and to act as though Apocalypse World were real.

AGENDA
• Make Apocalypse World seem real.
• Make the players’ characters’ lives not boring.
• Play to find out what happens.
Everything you say, you should do it to accomplish these three, and no other.​

This is why I have posted, multiple times, that the difference between simulationist RPGing and non-simulationist RPGing is not about verisimilitude or "realism" or believability. As soon as we get out of "dungeon-of-the-week" type RPGing, and into something more serious, everyone cares about these things. (Putting to one side deliberately surreal or absurdist approaches, like Over the Edge.) When I introduce setting details, as a GM, I keep in mind verisimilitude. Otherwise the game would be silly!

Players in this style want the setting to feel like a real place and they want it to feel like it is operating in a way that isn't just oriented around what the PCs do. You can do that in other approaches but the point is as the GM is using all these techniques and approaches, he or she is expected to be keeping things like verisimilitude in mind when making decisions about what happens, when establishing setting details, when introducing setting details. There is an expectation that certain things are objective for example and not determined in the moment. A certain degree of that is inevitable, extrapolation exists for that reason and it isn't a hard and fast rule, but you will meet more resistance the more you do things butt up against this. And when we are extrapolating we are expected to be abiding by some of these principles (principles I generally file under fairness to the players).

Description of a set of techniques - GM pre-authorship, GM extrapolation, GM introduction of fiction that does not speak to player-established PC concerns/dramatic needs - is here equated with "objectivity". That is what is contentious. Like @clearstream's talk of "warping".

What is not objective about (for instance) Megloss's house being struck by lightning when the attempt to bind an evil spirit fails?

You seem to be talking about methods of technique - how the fiction is established, how action declarations are resolved, etc - but doing so by imputing properties to the fiction itself - objective, verisimilitudinous - as if there is some tight correlation between the techniques and the properties. My point is that other techniques produce the same properties, so focusing on the properties sheds no real light on differences of technique.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Right, so here is where I get off the bus, because it's hard not to see an implication that verisimilitude, setting consistency, plausibility and feeling like a real place are not important in my RPGing.

I suspect this is due to you being more familiar with Ron Edwards and GNS instead of GDS: Edwards IIRC is pretty down on mixing S with G or N--he calls it "incoherent play" IIRC--whereas GDS expects G, D, and S to be intermingled. So maybe your GNS bias is why you're interpreting "XYZ decreases the proportion of verisimilitude/realism/S in your games in order to service a different priority" as if it were "your games are wholly unrealistic bogus," which of course isn't the message AFAIK.

I'll shut up again now.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Question to PBtA fans: do PBtA GMs have the social authority to add tags ad hoc in order to make things make more sense? If I have an enormous hammer that gets +1 vs. targets with the Immobile tag, and someone casts a Superglue spell on a log to give it the Sticky tag, and then a halfling sits on that log... is the GM authorized to say "that halfling is so weak that we're going to treat that Stuck tag as if it were also Immobile" so I get the bonus? Would that generate social pushback if it happened to a PC?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Except when it's not, such as when Middle Earth was created. Fantasy realism/simulation is a thing.

This is false. We also have fantasy models that stem from fantasy world building.

This isn't true, either. If something is unrealistic both as a model of something in the real world AND a model of fantasy world building, then it is less realistic than something that models either one of those two things.

Magic isn't enough on its own. It also has to have been established prior that lightning bolts in that setting are super uber duper.

You don't need to address everything ahead of time. That's not possible. That doesn't mean that realism/simulation doesn't stem from prior established things. Improvising on the spot can be the establishing event, but it's going to have realism issues since it wasn't established ahead of time.

Going back to @pemerton's lighting bolt. The first time is unrealistic as it hasn't been established ahead of time, but further lightning bolts are now established by that world building event to be super uber duper that cut buildings in half. Of course he should up the damage considerably to match that fact.

I don’t think your view on this makes any kind of sense. It seems like you’re picking and choosing what’s simulation and what’s not arbitrarily, and the reasons you cite don’t really handle much scrutiny.

That being said, I don’t think we’re going to break any new ground here, so I’ll leave it there.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Tolkien's words quoted here echo his words in other places; that part of the great wonder of Middle Earth for him is that it had its own reality. He describes feeling at times as if he were discovering, not inventing. That reflects one of the joyful aspects of the simulationist experience: where the logic of the world forces further discoveries upon you. Tolkien applied an expertise to his development of Middle Earth, and I count expertise among means suitable for simulationist purposes (which does not deny it to other purposes.)

The last page or so of posts have reinforced that what is distinct about simulationism is not whether the results are more realistic - unending quibbles on that front will not settle the question. What makes simulationism distinct is that attempted fidelity to references and theories is given priority when establishing world facts. Posts #2083 and #2089 make this point and some of us have been emphasising it for many pages. For example my #1886 which incorporates it into my argument for metaphysical realness



Edwards put it as "internal cause is king", and Tolkien's words remind of why it should matter to take that approach. Tolkien's world resonates because he gave the crown to its internal causes.

Obviously I have no more claim to insight into Dr Tolkien's meaning, but I interpret the words you quoted in a completely different way, to be a commentary about the inevitability, or desirability/obviousness, of certain dramatic elements in LotR given its antecedents. He speaks of the ring as "...the inevitable choice of the link." There's no 'simulation' here, this is an observation about the forms of myths and legends! For example he might well be thinking of the Nibelungenlied, with its ring theme. More straightforwardly, what else was really significant in the story told of Bilbo. The next most significant elements would be the Arkenstone and then perhaps the implications of the death of Smaug itself, along with the destruction of Lake Town and the events which followed. However, the Dark Lord seems to factor heavily here, and any supreme epic of the Third Age must surely grapple with his fate and thus the entwined fates of the remaining ring bearers and the free peoples generally.

Yes, he feels he is discovering A STORY, not some sort of inevitable world come to life through the enactment of some sort of (never defined) laws! I find it hard to even credit that people would advance such a notion, but people hold a lot of views I find strange in this world. He is recounting the various places and events which the laws of dramatic storytelling inexorably drew out of him. This isn't a discovery about Middle Earth, its a discovery about HIMSELF! And perhaps a discovery or deep study of those laws of storytelling.

As for GNS sim, I've also seen, time and again, simulationists decry its very existence or the notion that the category means anything at all. I'd also note that Edwards' account of simulationism NEVER really touches on realism at all. It is simply founded on the idea that character is subservient to other considerations, which are approached in a mechanistic or rule/ruling based (but not necessarily gamist) fashion. However, significant elements of sim are pretty much always based on agreement, particularly in cases of things like simulation of a particular genre. At no point have I personally ever heard of Edwards or other 'Forgites' talking about models and using model/sim/reasoning as terms in anything like the way they are being used here and now. But I will certainly yield to certain posters whom I know are MUCH better versed in GNS/Forge/etc. than I am.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, we know what it should mean by the internal logic of the game world. Fictionally while it has hit points left it's constrained to the building is still standing.

But we have no idea what its condition is. The 8 point building took 4 points of damage because a giant attacked it. Is the roof intact? The walls? The doors and windows? Is the structure in a condition to keep standing as-is or will it eventually succumb to this insult and deteriorate further without immediate repair? Yes, structural points IS plausibly a 'model' of building structural integrity at some level, perhaps, but if we seriously entertain that simulations based on such poor models contain a meaningful quantity of predictive power, or descriptive power for that matter, we are clearly mistaken!

As I explained many posts ago, I think all of these quibbles over whether this or that serves to simulate better are secondary arguments. What makes simulationism distinct is component 1. from my post #2029, i.e.

1. Imagined world facts are established independently of player-character intentions

What about GM intentions?

1. The features of imagined world facts map to the features of real world examples, making them realistic

Which real-world facts do structural points map to? I would argue these sorts of mappings are so vague as to be just barely shy of worthless. In fact I would call them mere 'prompts', basically serving a role as vehicles for bringing unwanted news into the game. Sorry, Joe, your house took 8 points, its gone! Sorry Mary, you fell 70' and took 7d6 damage, your broken body lies at the foot of the cliff. This is useful, but it has little to do with simulation. Its merely a vehicle for allowing the GM to bring such outcomes into the game in a way that avoids immediate bias, though the question of why the cliff was depicted as 70' high is rarely examined!

1. The features of imagined world facts and how they change over time conform to shared theories about the world, making them plausible

I agree that this is a common and useful trait of all sorts of mechanics, regardless of their simulative nature or lack thereof.

Or to put 1. positively, imagined facts are established only in the light of 2. and 3. and not for other reasons such as to tell a story, construct a balanced encounter, or perform dramatism.

Yet I find that 'simulative' RPG play is CHALK FULL of all of balanced encounters, stories, etc.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

He's a child of dramatic need! This is as plain as the nose on my face in the mirror!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Because 'establishing facts about the world' in the sense you seem to mean, that is laws of cause and effect, is not any sort of consideration. The means he is discussing are simply the means to construct and extend a particular fiction, one with a specific genre or perhaps other traits. System is a way of arbitration on the process of decisions about which view of what is most genre appropriate or useful in propagating a story within that genre. Even consistency isn't particularly important, as I would consider Toon a fundamentally simulationist sort of game by Edward's criteria. Its all about producing outcomes that are similar to the sort of action that happens in a mid-20th-Century Warner Brothers cartoon, and evoking the 'feel' of such a cartoon. Even if you try to subvert the game, its structure will produce something pretty close to what its designer intended.