Why do RPGs have rules?

[Autumnal]

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

Chock. Chock full.

Sincerely, yrs in picaresque pedantry,
Bruce

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Chock. Chock full.

Sincerely, yrs in picaresque pedantry,
Bruce

Why thank you Bruce!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

This statement from Fritz Leiber strikes me as an interesting contrast to Tolkien's method of plotting out world details exhaustively in advance (e.g. the Silmarillion):

"It must always be remebered [sic] that I know no more of Nehwon than I have put into my stories. There are no secret volumes of history, geography, etc., written before the tales themselves were spun. I rely wholly on what Fafhrd and the Mouser have told me, testing them against each other, and sifting out exaggerations and lies when I must..." -Fritz Leiber, Dragon Magazine issue #1

(Emphasis in original.)

 

[pemerton]

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!

<snip>

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.

Right. In the context of authorship, the idea of something as fitting - given the previously established events in a story, given expectations about trope and genre, given beliefs about what the nature or purpose of human life is, etc - is not about extrapolation from a model.

If you can bear to, consider again the example of the failed ritual to bind the evil spirit into the spellbook. I as GM am obliged at that point, by the rules of the game, to narrate something that occurs in the fiction. From the Scholar's Guide, pp 58, 74

If you knock your opponent down to zero, you win the conflict. However, the more damage your team took, the more you have to compromise with the loser. . . . If the game master wins but took damage, they owe the players a compromise relative to the final total. . . . If the players’ disposition is reduced to zero while their opponent has points remaining, they lose and did not accomplish their intent.​

On this occasion, the players' tally was knocked down to zero, while the GM did not take any damage at all!

Page 74 also gives this example: "If you were trying to drive off tomb guardians but lose the conflict, the tomb guardians stand their ground and drive you off instead."

And the Lore Master's Manual (pp110-11) gives the following examples of compromises for a bind conflict:

*Rather than your intended vessel, you bind the spirit to this place or to another, unintended vessel.

*The spirit possesses you or one of your companions.

*You only partially bind the spirit — a remnant flies away free and in terror. One spirit has half of the original spirit’s Nature rating and two Nature descriptors, and the other has half Nature and a single descriptor.

*Part of you becomes trapped in the binding. Lose one wise, trait or Nature descriptor appropriate to the level of compromise.

*You bind the spirit, but a second, unintended spirit follows it unbound.

*Summoning and binding spirits against their will is a transgression against the will of the Lords of Chaos and Law. Breaking this law causes freak events to transpire at the conclusion of the ritual: shutters bang open and closed for a full day and night; bells ring and crack; children spit forth toads and salamanders; newborns come forth with cloven hooves, split tongues or strange markings; the faithful strip off their clothes, cast down the idols of the temple and burn them; rivers flow backwards; rain pours from the heavens for nine days and nine nights.​

Are these stating "laws" of the world, or "laws" of storytelling? I'm not even sure the question makes sense, given that the whole point of Torchbearer as a FRPG is to produce events, in play, that are to at least some extent familiar from, or of a piece with, the sorts of things that happen in fantasy stories. (The Torchbearer bibliography includes, inter alia, JRRT, the Earthsea stories, Dunsany, Vance, REH, the Elric stories, and various Germanic folk tales and stories.)

When I had to make the decision, I considered that (1) the players definitely do not accomplish their intent, and (2) the evil spirt owes them no compromise. So I looked through the list, and thought - the spirit is bound to the spellbook, but takes it into a companion instead, namely Megloss, which only makes sense given that Megloss is Fea-bella's enemy (though one with whom some sort of rapprochement seemed to be developing) and the evil spirt sprang forth from Fea-bella's heart (when her attempt to cast a spell in the lair of a demon failed) and hence would have an affinity for Megloss in proportion to Fea-bella's aversion to him. A bolt of lightning blasting the house seemed a final, fitting capstone, a "freak event . . . at the conclusion of the ritual" that also dramatically framed the PCs into their loss, outside in the rain surrounded by charred tinder while Megloss stands above them sheltering in the surviving half of the house.

On a different day I might have made a different decision. And while I don't claim to be a fantasy author of the stature of JRRT, I think the process here is in the same neighbourhood as the one that you (@AbdulAlhazred) impute to him.

A quite different mechanical approach to failed rituals is found in Rolemaster Companion III (p 27); here is the relevant portion of the chart:

49-40 - The ritual fails, and all present are blown back 20 ft. All take an "A" Impact critical and lose all spell points for a whole day.

39-30 - The ritual fails, and the casters are badly hurt. They taken an "E" Impact, others a "C". All persons lose all spell poitns for 1d10 days.

29-20 - The ritual fails. All participants take a "C" Impact crticial, lose spell points for 1d100 days, and are knocked out for 1d10 hours.

19-0 - The ritual is perverted The effects of this are up to the GM. Suggestions are given later in this section. In addition, all present take an "A" Electricity critical and lose all spell points for a whole day.

(-01)-(-20) - The ritual is perverted, and all present take a "C" Electricity and an "A" Impact critical. All participants are unable to cast spells for 1d10 days.

(-21)-(-40) - The ritual is perverted. All present take an "E" Electricity critical and a "C" Impact critical. All participants are unconscious for 1d10 hours and lose spell points for 1d10 months.

(-41)-(-100) - The ritual is perverted. All present take an "E" Electricity and an "E" Impact critical and must make an RR vs the level of the ritual or be deprived of all spell points permanently. All are unconscious for 1d10 days.

(-101)-(-200) - The ritual backfires in a spectacular manner, killing all involved instantly.

(-201)-(-300) - The ritual backfires in a blaze of arcane power. The spell effect will radiate out into a mile's radius, causing whatever effects the GM sees as necessary. The souls of all participants are ripped apart. They may be resurrected, but all mental stats will be halved.

(-300)-(-400) - The souls of all participants contribute their Essence to the power of the ritual. The spell effect will radiate for several miles, with a total effective level equal to: (ritual level) + 0.5 x (sum of participants' levels).

(-401) down - The release of arcane power has caused a breach in reality that will call for a god to repair it. The souls of all participants are totally annihilated, along with the surrounding few acres of land. The magical repercussions will be felt by all spell casters within a thousand miles.​

The concept of "ritual perversion" actually requires similar GMing decision-making to Torchbearer (eg for summoning/possession rituals, the suggested options for perversion are "The caster may very well be possessed, or the summoned creature might be uncontrolled, or the caster may have called up something of much greater power than intended"). But the use of the chart otherwise permits the GM to disclaim decision-making.

One obvious upshot of the RM approach is to encourage attempts to use failed rituals, with hefty penalties to the roll, as an attempt to blow places up by getting a-401 down result; or just to lure enemies into participating and then killing them or sucking away their spell points by lesser failure results. This is a repeated experience with RM, where rules elements introduced in order to generate genre-appropriate results invite being used in other ways to produce genre inappropriate results, requiring either rules modification (we didn't use the ritual failure chart as written) or gentlemen's agreements (we had a few of those in place too).

An alternative solution, which leads directly to classic "high concept sim" methods, is for all these charts and processes to be gated behind the GM's final veto ("No, you can't use ritual failure as a weapon of mass destruction"). That raises its own issues, though - the GM is no longer disclaiming decision-making.

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.

Under the heading "Baseline Simulationist practice", Edwards says:

The five elements of role-playing as laid out in my GNS essay [Setting, Situation, Character, System, Colour] are obviously where we start. Modelling them is the ideal. My first point about that is that the model need not be static; dynamic characters and settings, for instance, are perfectly valid Simulationist elements. My second point is that different types of Simulationist play can address very different things, ranging from a focus on characters' most deep-psychology processes, to a focus on the kinetic impact and physiological effects of weapons, to a focus on economic trends and politics, and more. I'll go into this lots more later.

The second point is that the mechanics-emphasis of the modelling system are also highly variable: it can handled strictly verbally (Drama), through the agency of charts and arrows, or through the agency of dice/Fortune mechanics. Any combination of these or anything like them are fine; what matters is that within the system, causality is clear, handled without metagame intrusion and without confusion on anyone's part. That's why it's often referred to as "the engine," and unlike other modes of play, the engine, upon being activated and further employed by players and GM, is expected to be the authoritative motive force for the game to "go."​

He goes on to say that

Purist-for-System designs tend to model the same things: differences among scales, situational modifiers, kinetics of all kinds, and so forth. The usual issues surrounding incorporated vs. unincorporated effects, opposed vs. target number mechanics, the interaction of switches and dials, and probability-curvature shape are therefore the main things to distinguish these systems from one another. Compared to other designs, high search and handling times, as well as many points-of-contact [= hte steps of rules-consultation, either in the text or internally, per unit of established imaginary content], are acceptable features.​

Modelling is the ideal, but based on my own pretty extensive experience with purist-for-system play, a lot of the time it is less about modelling and more about having a procedure that permits the GM to disclaim decision-making. See the comments just above about RM for issues with that.

 

[Pedantic]

This statement from Fritz Leiber strikes me as an interesting contrast to Tolkien's method of plotting out world details exhaustively in advance (e.g. the Silmarillion):

"It must always be remebered [sic] that I know no more of Nehwon than I have put into my stories. There are no secret volumes of history, geography, etc., written before the tales themselves were spun. I rely wholly on what Fafhrd and the Mouser have told me, testing them against each other, and sifting out exaggerations and lies when I must..." -Fritz Leiber, Dragon Magazine issue #1

(Emphasis in original.)

Tolkein is definitely something of an outlier, but you can find fantasy authors all over the board on worldbuilding. Garth Nix pointedly doesn't do it, Brandon Sanderson pointedly does.

I don't generally like comparisons to literature for TTRPGs, precisely because there's so much you can get away with in fiction that I would find frustrating in a game.

 

[pemerton]

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?

Apocalypse World doesn't use Fate-style aspects.

A hard move might be "You're stuck to the log".

 

[Fenris-77]

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!

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.

Without reading the rest of the downstream replies I have a thought here. On a different forum I interact with rather a lot of old school simulationist type RPG folks. I think that the stakes here are very much about the word simulationist, and thus from there simulation generally. The folks in question, and I love and respect all of them, have a pretty narrow and specific idea of what is being simulated and a very specific idea again from there, about what some version of the idea of 'immersion' means in light of that brand of simulation. To get somewhat granular, that brand of simulation doesn't, for example, involve metacurrency of any kind, nor does it involve abstractions when it comes to resources. Generally it tends to model the very old fashioned separation of church and state in terms of agency, where the player runs their character and the GM runs everything else, full stop. Full disclosure, I played like that, perhaps not exclusively, but regularly, for a very long time. I have fond memories of those games an the people I played with. However, I know more about different games now, I've played more games now, and perhaps most importantly for this discussion, I have a much better grasp of RPG design now that I used to.

To take the path less trodden, I would suggest that the idea of simulation, especially if we can let the ghosts of the Forge rest in peace, is open to more interpretations than just the one I outline above. Frankly, I find the lighter games I play now, the ones that have metacurrencies of various sorts, the ones that have abstractions to ease resource management, and the ones that have newfangled ideas like success with consequences to be just as 'immersive' as those other games, and to extend from there, if I may, just as good at 'simulating' various collections of genres and tropes. What I find very liberating is that I no longer approach my RPG hobby as something that involves my ego, online or not, or any notion of 'right play' or 'correct definition'. I play, or have played, and probably will play, just about every sort of game, and I enjoy them all. I think it's more useful to look for similarities and overlaps than to continue arguing about which pointless trive one wants to belong to.

 

[Manbearcat]

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?

Each game is different, but the relevant ones for this question (Dungeon World and Stonetop) have (a) a suite of codified tags and (b) each creature will have a stat block that gives expression to how it organizes, what it does, and why it does it. Those things inform GM soft and hard moves and they interact with player decision-space when it comes to choosing/mitigating consequences (such as on a 7-9 Defy Danger or when you spend Hold in DW or Readiness in ST during Defend). GMs don't get to eff around with this stuff. If something enters play, these things are locked in.

Here is an example from Stonetop:

Zrajedak
Solitary, large, construct, devious, terrifying, stealthy, shapechanger
HP 16; Armor 4, or 1 vs. bronze (resilience, hide)
Damage maw full of iron teeth d10+3 (hand, messy, grabby, 1 piercing, advantage), iron tail-quills d10+1 (near, area, reload)
Special qualities keen sense of smell
Instinct to torment its prey

• Assume a form similar to that of its prey, but just a little off
• Reveal its horrible, smiling maw
• Cripple a victim and let it suffer
• Chew right through a limb

Each of the tags means something (forceful means to knock someone/thing around or off their feet while grabby means to cling/grab/grapple/ensnare etc).

 

[Fenris-77]

So to pile on to @Manbearcat 's very cogent response, when I'm running PbtA I don't add tags or abilities willy nilly at all. The only time I might add something specific is if in the fiction something occurs that mitigates for adjudication on my part that should be codified as a mechanical item of some sort.

 

[pemerton]

Without reading the rest of the downstream replies I have a thought here. On a different forum I interact with rather a lot of old school simulationist type RPG folks. I think that the stakes here are very much about the word simulationist, and thus from there simulation generally. The folks in question, and I love and respect all of them, have a pretty narrow and specific idea of what is being simulated and a very specific idea again from there, about what some version of the idea of 'immersion' means in light of that brand of simulation. To get somewhat granular, that brand of simulation doesn't, for example, involve metacurrency of any kind, nor does it involve abstractions when it comes to resources. Generally it tends to model the very old fashioned separation of church and state in terms of agency, where the player runs their character and the GM runs everything else, full stop.

I guess my thought is that this pretty much describes AW. There are a tiny number of exceptions (Battlebabe's Visions of Death; Savvyhead's Bonefeel and maybe Oftener Right). On separation of church and state, AW says (p 109):

Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.​

And AW doesn't abstract resources any more than D&D does.

That's not to assert that AW is a simulationist RPG. Only that the sorts of things that are often pointed to as markers of simulationist RPGing don't seem to do a very good job in that respect! To explain how AW differs from the game you old-school friends run, we need to talk about the particular GMing techniques involved, including approaches to prep, to framing and to action resolution.

EDIT: In many ENworld discussions, I see references to "narrative" mechanics, to "player narrative power", etc as if this is what is core to "story now" RPGing. But it's not. The core lies on the GM side, not the player resource side.