Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

If you redefine what E is, then of course there may not be a true theorem that is parallel to Loverdrive Theorem but with the new E substituted in.

Huh? This is the literal definition of E that @loverdrive offered

There's an infinite set E, that contains everything, everything, Super Everything possible in a roleplaying game, from defeating princesses to rescuing dragons to finding love to getting shot in the face to randomly dying from complications of teeth cavities. If you can think of it, it is included in E.

Under @loverdrive's definition E is not the set of S's. The set of S's has to be considered when thinking about the size of E. E contains possibilities contributed by S's. S's can be counted by identity. As defined, E does not contain rules, it contains possibilities constituted by rules.

If @loverdrive intended something different, that's okay of course. And such clarification could change my take, too.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

And we're right back to anything you and someone else agree upon as a way of playing a game, is a rule! I mean, surely ANY process or arrangement as to how something will actually be decided in an RPG has a 'rule-like character' to it. The "needless intermediary" was intended to illustrate that we need not write such things down, humans are good at arranging such things. Kids do it every day. Heck, my sister and I heard of the very IDEA of D&D and made up such a thing on the spot and started playing, with no written rules at all. We just got some dice and wrote down stuff that sounded cool.

IIRC I made a room, and it had giant hornets in it, and they stung my sister's character to death, and then we started over!

If you share the rule with your sister (even if you don't write it down), then you get the benefits of having a rule, such as increased predictability.The amount of benefit varies with the specific rule, but practically any communicated rule is an improvement in predictability over GM As Black Box. This isn't exactly revolutionary here--it's so obvious that the first few times I said it on this thread it generated no response because people were busy arguing about Vince Baker and who has the authority to speak when.

I don't know why you're excited about a truism. This is about as novel and exciting as saying "to save money, you need to stick to a budget." Yeah, of course. That's true, and that's not the interesting part. It's relevant only when you're talking to someone who's asking why you would ever want a budget. ("Why Do RPGs Have Rules?")

 

[clearstream]

E is the set of all imaginable things - "if you can think of it, it is included in E". E is not confined to all the things ever thought of or all the things ever thought of as topics of RPGs or even all the things that anyone might be led to think of by applying some presently-known S.

Naturally I can't point to any member of E that has not yet been imagined, but I think that is a consequence of the pragmatics of pointing, not an interesting feature of the membership of E. (See Searle's famous essay on "Assertion".)

Try to consider what sort of set E is. Under what sort of conditions can it be defined?

As the set of all possible things, it is universal and atemporal. My proposal is to consider what it looks like from a local, temporal perspective. The work on hotel infinities tells us that it is possible to add things locally and temporally to even infinite sets. So from that perspective - here today on Earth - we're still in the process of adding to E.

From our local, temporal perspective, there is worth in new constitutive rules - in terms of expanding the possibilities accesssible to us - even if the universal, atemporal set E is logically going to contain all possibilities.

 

[gban007]

Huh? This is the literal definition of E that @loverdrive offered



Under @loverdrive's definition E is not the set of S's. The set of S's has to be considered when thinking about the size of E. E contains possibilities contributed by S's. S's can be counted by identity. As defined, E does not contain rules, it contains the possibilities constituted by rules.

If @loverdrive intended something different, that's okay of course. And such clarification could change what I would think about their theory.

To my mind where confusion is is that you're suggesting in prior post that E will grow as the set of S's grows, whereas Loverdrive's definition suggests that isn't the case - E is already all encompassing - so for me it is like a great big Fog of War, where the various S's in existance are allowing us to reveal some of the entire, but not all of it. A new S may allow us to see more of E, but it was already there in E.

To hark back to Pemerton's original post, as to why RPG's have rules - that we could all just play along happily without rules if we could agree to what occurs, but we would lose out on the unexpected / unwelcome - but to me that points out that E contains more than just the possibilities constituted by rules - it constitutes all the possibilities of role-playing, which may or may not follow rules.

 

[clearstream]

To my mind where confusion is is that you're suggesting in prior post that E will grow as the set of S's grows, whereas Loverdrive's definition suggests that isn't the case - E is already all encompassing - so for me it is like a great big Fog of War, where the various S's in existance are allowing us to reveal some of the entire, but not all of it. A new S may allow us to see more of E, but it was already there in E.

Again, E is defined from a universal, atemporal perspective. I urge others here to look up Hilbert's Paradox and come back to this thinking about what it looks like from our actual perspective, which is local and temporal.

To hark back to Pemerton's original post, as to why RPG's have rules - that we could all just play along happily without rules if we could agree to what occurs, but we would lose out on the unexpected / unwelcome - but to me that points out that E contains more than just the possibilities constituted by rules - it constitutes all the possibilities of role-playing, which may or may not follow rules.

Agreed, although I have avoided saying that myself because we would have to decide if for any possibility there could feasibly be a rule, or if for some possibilities there cannot be rules. The latter is thorny, and nothing seems to turn on it, so I've avoided saying anything about it.

Well, one aside, you can see that upon contemplating possibilities that fall outside rules, the definition of E that I grasped would be the right one. Because the set E will in that case be larger than the set R which is the set of all possibilities constituted by rules.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

...to me that points out that E contains more than just the possibilities constituted by rules - it constitutes all the possibilities of role-playing, which may or may not follow rules.

They're the same set. For every outcome e in E there can exist a rule system S[e] which will produce e.

What makes rules interesting isn't just the outcomes they can potentially produce, it's how those outcomes are connected to each other. I.e. gameplay.

 

[aramis erak]

You're annoyed about some potential instances of coincidence. Moments of contrivance. Yet you're perfectly fine with your world revolving around the gaming activities that you want it to.... that killing things and taking their loot is not only viable, but common. A contrived world.

Many times and places historically had lawless periods...

Those places tend not to stay that way. But they often cyclically get back to that state.
The Balkans, the Middle East, North-western Africa. Cyclic. Periods of structure, then chaos and ethno-religious violence.
The US West was a mess for about 20 years total.. tho' from settlement to relatively civilize, Seattle was 10 years.
Alaska outside Fairbanks, Juneau, Seward, Kenai, and Homer from 1800 to about 1880... Anchorage between 1916 and 1925... (It was empty swamps in 1910...)

 

[clearstream]

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.

I noticed that in our first few MotW sessions. Players not at first realising what such moves empowered them to do.

 

[clearstream]

They're the same set. For every outcome e in E there can exist a rule system S[e] which will produce e.

I share that intuition, but can think of a couple of catches

• Maybe there really are possibilities that can't be expressed in rules. I don't think so, but E contains all possibilities, not just those I can think of.
• Suppose there is a natural possibility N. By natural I mean it's something we're naturally capable of doing in RPG with no system rule needed. In some game there is a rule for N, but in other games N is still possible even though there is no rule for it. How should N be counted in E? Should there be ruled versions of N as well as natural-N?

I suspect that reflection on the second point would lead to seeing that natural-N does not have a singular identity, but rather a myriad of identities based on norms. Seeing as for each such norm there could be a rule, it seems that the set of ruled-Ns can have the same contents as the set of natural-Ns. That would then suggest that rules and norms are similar if not the same. Which is a point I and others made up thread.

It would then be moot to distinguish between natural-Ns and ruled-Ns, as E would have the same contents either way. That provides a basis for some claims that rules aren't needed. On surface, they're not needed whenever we have access to the right sort of natural-Ns.

My approach is to say that 1) at a given time we may not yet have access to the right sort of natural-Ns, so rules can be drafted to constitute those, and 2) that we sometimes want a specific version of N to prevail over all others. (I literally said this, over a thousand posts ago, in my #709.)

What makes rules interesting isn't just the outcomes they can potentially produce, it's how those outcomes are connected to each other. I.e. gameplay.

Yes. So, additionally, sometimes possibilites are emergent when a specific collection of other possibilites is in place, and not others. In these collective situations, rules are needed more than ever to make sure that the specific versions of N are available and prevail. But this is secured by 2) so nothing further was needed.

 

[Lanefan]

I would say that "relevant to what the players want" is the important thing. Not all characters at all times, necessarily, but generally the focus of play is going to be about something that's relevant to one or more characters.

That's because you're using the goals of GP and XP. If that's all that play is about, then sure.

Quite often IME there are but two truly important things to many players: surviving, and getting rich. Anything beyond that is a bonus.

But we're talking about games where that's not the focus. The play is meant to be about more than that.

In theory, perhaps. In practice, unless you've got a high degree of player buy-in, it'll end up being about gold and levels.

Sure, character wealth may be a goal, or my be relevant toward achieving a goal, but there are going to be other goals beyond that.

Completely depends on the players, and I probably run for a more casual lot than you do.

And that to me is so much more contrived than what I'm talking about.

You're annoyed about some potential instances of coincidence. Moments of contrivance. Yet you're perfectly fine with your world revolving around the gaming activities that you want it to.... that killing things and taking their loot is not only viable, but common. A contrived world.

Given as it's a world I made up, and that in its physics, geology, cultures, etc. it has to account for magic (both mortal and not) and divine interference, I find no problem with having it be a place of conflicting goals, cultures, morals, and species.

In other words, I'm going to unapologetically make it playable.

What I'm not going to do is tailor it to any specific characters. Quite the opposite, in fact: I'm going to try and make it such that any character or group of characters can find something to do there if they look, without regard to who those characters might be at any given time.

What if the characters were not pigeonholed into this idea of "adventurers" in the traditional D&D mold? What if they were something else?

Then the game would have a different focus. If the characters were diplomats, for example, then it'd tend toward the non-violent intrigue/diplomacy game I mentioned earlier. If they were rulers and monarchs it'd be a game about ruling realms a la Birthright. If they were knights it'd be about knightly stuff (and would draw heavily from A Knight's Tale for its flavour if I had any say in it!). And so on.

Who says the PCs have to go anywhere? I've had several campaigns that took place in one city.

How long were those campaigns? My experience is that if they stay in one place too long the players get bored of that place, which inevitably means the characters will soon enough start doing things they shouldn't, thus wearing out their welcome. They'll have to move on.

Also, in a long campaign it's fun to change up the background or atmosphere for variety's sake. The world has jungles and deserts and oceans and arctic and forests and cities and dungeons - might as well use all of them as adventure backdrops at some point, hm?

Who says that where they may be is the only hotbed of adventuring? Why would that be the case?

Those GMs who see the PCs as the world's only adventurers would have it this way by default.

So why not work with the players (especially in a one on one game) to come up with goals, and then instead of running a randomly selected module, craft adventures that relate specifically to the characters they've made?

Because we both thought it'd be fun to run something chosen randomly. Hell, all the characters were random-rolled as well, even down to class and species. Odd thing happened, though: that party somehow ended up working out really well and are still going three real-world years later.

Do you think that anyone is actually suggesting this?

That the Emperor should conveniently show up shortly after the players decide on a whim to overthrow him?

Yes, I get the sense that some here are suggesting exactly this; that because the players have decided their goal is to take out the Emperor, it's now my duty as GM to - by way of focusing on their stated goals - somehow put the Emperor in their path.