Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

In GM-less solo play or novel writing, sure. In normal play though, a player cannot read the mind of the GM, so in the absence of rules, Q&A would be required to learn how the GM imagines the result of snaring a horse in a giant web.

Why can't the group talk it out. Or the GM defer to the player? I mean, why is the GM's imagination primary, determinative even?

 

[Thomas Shey]

Why can't the group talk it out. Or the GM defer to the player? I mean, why is the GM's imagination primary, determinative even?

While I'll give a not to your second sentence (though I think there's some frequent practical problems) I'd suggest your first could well expand the amount taken to impracticality rather quickly, at least for a realtime game.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Why can't the group talk it out. Or the GM defer to the player? I mean, why is the GM's imagination primary, determinative even?

The group could talk it out, but you've missed the point: talking (Q&A) takes longer than thinking, which increases the cognitive separation between player and character.

You're a wizard with 12 spells including Defensive Teleport, Earthen Grasp, Web, Explosive Lightning Bolt, and Magic Missile. You're in an underground shelter of some kind fighting four giant spiders. If you have to Q&A with the GM or the entire group about whether Explosive Lightning Bolt can be used underground or would be able to kill an average sized horse instantly, how much Earthen Grasp would tire you out to cast and how likely a horse (as proxy for a giant spider) would be to escape from it, how big of a web comes out of Web and how long it would hold a horse and whether you could aim it precisely enough to leave your allies unaffected, etc., etc., it's going to take a looong time for you to figure out something your character can reason out in mere moments: which spells are a good fit in this situation. If you know the rules for these spells, however, you'll be on a pretty even footing with your character and can make good, in-character decisions without having to ask more than a couple questions of the GM like "are they bigger than horses?"

 

[hawkeyefan]

If the players, in-character, proactively seek out these adventures then sure, having them find adventures isn't particularly jarring.

So what if this is the default mode of play?

--- the adventures found just coincidentally happen to be tailored to a specific character, every time (not necessarily always the same character)

“Relevant in some way” doesn’t necessarily mean “tailored specifically to”.

But that aside… how is it less coincidental that everywhere the PCs wander to, there’s trouble of some sort brewing? Why is that not contrived?

What if play wasn’t about a group of “adventurers” wandering around seeking treasure or things to kill?

I mean, the idea of adventurers is itself incredibly contrived. I believe in the past you even shared a play example involving an adventurers’ guild where the training of new adventurers was a thing.

That seems incredibly contrived to me.

--- the players in-character do not look for adventures but adventures always seem to find them anyway.

I would expect your game involves a good amount of this, no? You talk about hooks and the like, and you talk about using old modules, inserted into play. It mostly seems to involve goals given to the players by the GM.

Perhaps where this sense of contrivance comes from? When the players form their own goals that aren’t given by the GM, the GM needs to then craft stuff beyond what they’ve already prepared.

Yes.

Why? Because while "something ... established in the game [is] simply true" is - I think - agreed by all of us, many players want to know (or at least be able to then or later learn in-character) the setting-based causal path explaining why it is true and how it is true, so they can a) determine whether they can rely on it still being true if-when the same thing happens again in play and b) extrapolate from that how-and-why to better inform themselves of other truths in the setting before they arise in play. In short: precedent.
And because players often want to learn those hows and whys (and IMO they have a right to try), and further because this is the sort of thing where a GM could really seriously mess up their whole game by trying to wing these answers in the moment and getting it wrong, the GM IMO needs to have at least the kernel of that rationale nailed down well ahead of time.

All of this is still possible, and not even particularly challenging.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's impossible for me to believe that you aren't familiar with the concept of narrative contrivance.

In fact I gave an example of justified contrivance (IMO) in the post you quoted: introducing a character in a contrived way in order to prevent a new player from having to sit and do nothing for an excessively long time.

"After killing the trolls, you journey onward until you hear the sounds of someone nearby shouting for help in a deep voice, and find someone who's been buried up to the neck in sand and smeared with honey for fire ants to find! This is Bruno the Minotaur. He asks to join your quest in gratitude for your aid, and you agree, but if asked how he got there he just shrugs and mutters something about a poker game. Bruno, do you have anything to say before we continue onwards?"

Contrived? Yes. Everybody at the table knows perfectly well that that wouldn't be happening if Bob, Bruno's player, hadn't showed up to learn how to play dungeons and dragons tonight.

But what if Bruno wasn’t a replacement PC? What if he was an NPC that you wanted to introduce as a potential foil or perhaps ally for the party.

Is that somehow less contrived? I wouldn’t think so.

I’m just baffled by this looking down upon interesting or meaningful encounters/obstacles out of some concern that they’re relevant.

 

[aramis erak]

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.

My problem isn't players willing to trash the setting, but hesitating because they don't want to face the ultimate consequence: the character or setting is no longer suitable for play. Either by natural arc growth, by power growth, by change of party due to others, or worst of all, by morphing the game-state and setting-state to such that I as GM cannot forsee a reasonable extrapolation without major refactoring, or where the clear goals of the characters have been met, or the things they would fight no longer exist.

Case in point: twice, I've had Pendragon campaigns where the dice indicated Arthur dies... and a group concensus that no one, not even Merlin, is given plot armor. This puts things into a difficult to play state...
... in both cases, it was agreed the point was the right one to put the story to bed within a (character) year or two...
That story state makes things really tough. Immediately go to Phase 5. The Enchantment Ends.
None of them wanted to play post-apocalypse Pendragon.
Tho' in the first one, they put Mordred on the throne, and a PC, became consort to the Queen Mother, Guenivere. He also built her a monstrously big castle. Another PC tried (and died) attempting to cast another Blessing of Brittain...

(On the other hand, another party had a TPK on the way home from Rome, due to starvation at sea, as the wicca with them refused to cast again, having been exhausted by turning herself into a dragon to help Arthur conquer Rome. Go figure...

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.​

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*The spirit possesses you or one of your companions.​

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*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.​

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

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

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*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.​

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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.​

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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.​

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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.​

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(-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.​

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(-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.​

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(-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.​

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

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(-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.​

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(-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.

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.

Exactly! For instance, we can ask ourselves what characteristics the ideal Trade system would have in Classic Traveller. The answers will NOT INVOLVE realism to very great extent, and will not involve economic simulation AT ALL. The main successful traits will be that the system produces marginal gains for the PCs involved, in fact that it should, ideally NOT be sufficient to support them, certainly not in any style. It should largely prevent them from settling down into a fixed 'trade route' or schedule, since that would become dull and routine, and inhibit the exploration of the Universe that is a thrust of the game. It should probably be amenable to player skill in deploying character resources and leveraging their strengths such that a skill game of "successful at trade" (which will of course involve some 'interesting' activities) should be possible, etc. Obviously this system should be plausible, it should involve the buying or offering to transport goods and the selling or off-lading them at various ports of call, complete with a sense of the various legal and financial factors involved. None of this need be realistic at all, really, just ticking a few boxes that match player's preexisting notions of what trade entails.

And I would maintain that this is the main thrust of PFS type play, or other closely-related forms. It isn't about an accurate portrayal of reality at all. It is about being plausible enough that the players expect things to work how they do work, most of the time. They can plan, reason, employ their planning and reasoning skills, and generally participate in imagining themselves in their roles. This works great, and often realism is actually the ENEMY of this sort of play, not its friend! Its just like the very core conceits of the Traveller Universe, jump drive, anti-gravity, fusion power, etc. etc. etc. is all employed in the construction of a specific sort of genre, exists ONLY FOR THAT VERY PURPOSE. It is classic PFS in a nutshell!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Apocalypse World doesn't use Fate-style aspects.

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

You can certainly employ tagging. Its not that common IME to use it in Dungeon World as a way to dynamically portray traits of a situation, but I guess its possible. Generally speaking you put tags on things like monsters in order to characterize their fiction in mechanical terms (IE a messy tag on a really ugly physical attack). There are also 'instincts' for NPCs/Monsters that tell you about them which are very similar to Fate Aspects, but generally they are simply advisory. Monsters also have moves, like "Aboleth - Instinct: To command. Moves 1) Invade a mind, 2) Turn minions on them, 3) Put a plan in motion" These pretty much tell us how to run the thing.

Terrain could definitely have tags too. There's no list of such tags, and thus no particular established rules for terrain, per se. Locations/environments however DEFINITELY have MOVES! So a sticky log could have a 'stuck' move, which could create some sort of effect on anyone who triggers it. Something like a pit could be described this way, though interestingly DW doesn't actually speak about traps AFAIK EXCEPT for the Thief move 'TRAP EXPERT' which doesn't actually establish any rules for traps per se, and TRICKS OF THE TRADE, which can be used to disarm them. I would basically instantiate a trap as a sort of monster with a move, a nature, and possibly a couple of tags describing if it can be disarmed, if its hidden, etc. A fair amount appears to have been written on this subject!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To continue rather than edit my post above, I might suggest that for some people that change in agency can be hard to grapple with on both sides of the screen. It can be hard for GMs to give up their ultimate cosmic power, and it can also be hard for players to have to sit up and be more active participants outside their character sheet.

Its certainly a challenge for many 'trad' players to understand the real nature of the power of their actions in a DW game, for example. They will tend to assume that the world is mapped out for them, and generally miss ideas like the creative use of DD to both constrain the GM and generate positive modifiers (forward). Of course they also often miss the degree to which the GM is going to focus on their characters and tend to discount the mechanics which enable that, like bonds.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In GM-less solo play or novel writing, sure. In normal play though, a player cannot read the mind of the GM, so in the absence of rules, Q&A would be required to learn how the GM imagines the result of snaring a horse in a giant web.

Alternately the outcome could be narrated by, say, a dice mediated method where the player's success in passing a check grants them the right to describe it, and failure grants the GM the right to describe it. Other options may well exist too.