Why do RPGs have rules?

[Lanefan]

How many times do I, @loverdrive and others have to answer that there are NO such mechanics in AW.

Fine, but AW wasn't the only game being mentioned.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think this kind of illustrates a few things about my shift away from this kind of worldbuilding in my RPGing. There are other factors as well, but this summarizes a few.

First, that kind of worldbuilding is just incredibly difficult to keep straight. Here's the guy who's considered the master... and he had all kinds of contradictions. His son and another professional author had trouble reconciling some of it. And this is someone who had time to do multiple drafts and revise things prior to publishing.

Second, the vast majority of that information just doesn't make it into play. To stick with Tolkien, if the Lord of the Rings is play, and the Silmarillion is the GM's backstory... it's superfluous. I understand that this information can help guide a GM's judgments during play, but that's not a necessity, and it also means that things totally unseen to the players (and likely to remain so) are what's shaping play. I don't think that's ideal for what's supposed to be an exercies in shared creativity.

Third, The Silmarillion is terrible. I think there's a reason that his first attempt with it was rejected, and so it became a background for a more viable story in the form of LotR. There are obviously interesting ideas in The Silmarillion, but the way it's constructed and presented is just not all that interesting. How this relates to RPGs is that presentation matters... just crafting encyclopedia style histories spanning thousands of years doesn't mean it's interesting to read, let alone to shape play.

Fourth, all the effort and energy that goes into this fictional history is, in my opinion, misplaced effort. As a GM I should be creating interesting things for the players to interact with... NPCs and locations and situations and the like. Sure, some of those things may need a bit of historical context, but there's no need to lock everything in ahead of time. Doing so denies me the flexibility to incorporate the ideas of the players should a more interesting take present itself during play that I'd not thought of.

These are the lessons that I've learned considering Tolkienesque worldbuilding. The pros it has on play are minimal compared to the cons.

At dentist so will keep it brief. I think this is just so subjective. Some people love setting lore, some don’t. But in a GMs own setting it is mostly there to help the GM do things like stay consistent. You can do heavy of no lore. But I find both lead to material you have to keep track of. If an NPC dies for example that needs to be noted down

 

[Lanefan]

I've run the sort of campaign you and @Bedrockgames are describing.

The reason I call it post hoc is because the actual reasons for having Excalibur, the Bronze Master etc are to manifest certain genre tropes, to establish certain interesting events, etc. And then the "simulationist" backstory is retrofitted in.

Retrofitted backstory as in said backstory is generated only after the thing (here, Excalibur) appears in play? OK, I'll buy that.

But if the backstory is generated by the GM when Excalibur is placed in the setting to begin with, long before the sword ever appears in play, how is that a retrofit? Even more so if elements of that backstory arise in play before the sword is found?

 

[Lanefan]

Class based games mean that much of the time, when I want to do something as my character, I am moved or even required to reflect on the metagame conceit of classes.

As in, "the thief had better do this thing" or "I wish we had a cleric with us".

Which is very similar to the conceit of professions in reality. If someone collapses on an airplane you're gonna hear "Is there a doctor on board?" pretty fast. In almost any building there's signs to the effect of "In case of fire, exit immediately. Do not attempt to extinguish the fire yourself". If you lock yourself out of your own house (or, more commonly, car) and don't feel like smashing your way in, you're going to call a locksmith. And so on.

Classes are no more a "conceit" than is the real-life concept of leaving certain tasks to the trained professionals.

 

[Maxperson]

I'm reiterating that the set of "natural" possibilities - things we can do in RPG without rules - can have the same contents as the set of ruled possibilities. Whether we decide to count those as possible due to rules, or simply possible, it makes the contents of E not dependent on rules. That's a basic element of @loverdrive's argument.

While she is technically correct, and that's the best kind of correct, real life doesn't work like that. I mean, I suppose I can sit down with 4 players and freeform roleplay for hours on end with no rules, but that kind of play isn't fulfilling and quickly devolves.

Player 1: "I'm a cat."
Player 2: "You were a cat, but since I'm now the most powerful being in the multiverse, I make you a frog."
Player 3: "You were the most powerful being in the multiverse, but I take that power from you, so I'm the most powerful now."

And so on.

Now you can say, "Don't be a douche and that's being a douche," but that's a rule and now we have limits and not everything is possible anymore. The more limits you put on play to make it fair and fun, and you pretty much have to have them, the less of E is left that is not dependent on rules.

The reality is that E is going to be a mix of things that are dependent on rules and things that are not.

 

[Umbran]

Mmmm. I can see how this would be the practical effect among toxic people, but it's not the practical effect among the sorts of open-minded, intellectually humble people I enjoy talking to.

Mod Note:
How about you demonstrate your own open-minded, intellectually humble approach to discussion by not casting folks who disagree with your position as toxic? Please and thanks.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Guys, I've enjoyed talking with you but I've just been reminded why I hate Enworld. I'm going to go elsewhere.

 

[Autumnal]

And much as I said before, I do think that likely many people get the impression when looking at Tolkien that his world-building was performed systematically in advance because they mistake the final product for the actual writing process, which I think likely colors how many authors and gamemasters feel world-building should be done.

In the 1990s, the GEnie network - one of the self-contained services like America Online and CompuServe - gave free memberships to members of writers’ groups like Mystery Weiters of America, Romance Writers’ Association, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Association. They wanted to give GEnie a unique feature, and did; it was also the first time online for many authors. So you could hang out with writers (and editors and publishers) you liked, and watch them talk (and argue) with friends and colleagues about all kinds of stuff. Nothing like it since.

Sorry for the long preamble, but I wanted to set the context. As you might imagine, professional writers think about writing, a lot. Most have tried a bunch of different methods on the way to finding what worked for them. Once they did, some keep experimenting and evolving their methods, while others stand pat. Out of several such threads came a pithy summation by, I think, Richard Kadrey:

Work you love was made by methods you hate. And right now, someone is using the methods you love to produce work you’ll hate.

The point, which I agree with, is that it’s a fandom trap for readers (by extension, any audience) to let obsessions with method overshadow engagement with the actual result. If a thing you love emerged from methods you hate…that means only that its creator isn’t you and did what’s appropriate for them. The result is just as capable of delighting and inspiring you to work in a way that’s good for you. Inspiration is like that.

In that spirit, the last however many pages of this thread are making me wonder - I’m thinking out loud here, and thinking something I haven’t before - whether the campaign log isn’t the right starting point. All our actual play is first drafts, but we can at least see the experience of enjoyable play (or its lack, if the game didn’t work out) and go from there to what worked.

P.S. Also the practical effect of reading Blacow's taxonomy (Glenn Blacow's "Aspects of Adventure Gaming") was, for me, enlightenment about the need to communicate my GMing style and priorities clearly to prospective players, so they can decide whether or not they're interested in the game I am interested in running. I don't necessarily need to make them read the article but I should find a way to make my style very clear very quickly.

I miss Glenn a lot, and I think you’re drawing lessons he’d be glad of here. But while he was much less an advocate for specific options than rec.games.frp.advocacy or the Forge, there’s a distinct element of shittalking powergamers and wishing they’d go away in the Fourfold Way.

(I’ve never been to MIT, but having seen open gaming at Caltech, I can understand why. Still, his take on the style really stands out from his relaxed accommodation of the others.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

Nope. This is the point where you crossed a dangerous line with me.

I get that... sorry! I just think it's apt as a comparison to RPGs. Imagine reading The Silmarillion if there was no Lord of the Rings.

In my opinion, trying to achieve and maintain that for an RPG setting is a misplaced focus of the GM's energy.

At dentist so will keep it brief. I think this is just so subjective. Some people love setting lore, some don’t. But in a GMs own setting it is mostly there to help the GM do things like stay consistent. You can do heavy of no lore. But I find both lead to material you have to keep track of. If an NPC dies for example that needs to be noted down

Yeah, I get that! I just think it's not necessary to do that job. When NPCs die, you can indeed jot it down. That doesn't require anything more than a list of NPCs and a strike through of that one's name. Or, it can just be remembered.

I'm not saying don't prep... I'm saying that world building at that scale starts to become another hobby, almost. It's solo time for the GM, and it may be enjoyable... but it doesn't tend to yield the best results at the table for actual play. Again, if we view LotR as "the game" for this analogy, the readers (or viewers) never hear the name Morgoth, they don't need any context beyond what is in the books themselves (or the films). They can remain blissfully unaware of all of the stuff in The Silmarillion.

I still remember when my older brother told me that Gandalf wasn't just an old wizard and I was like "psssh yeah right".

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yeah, I get that! I just think it's not necessary to do that job. When NPCs die, you can indeed jot it down. That doesn't require anything more than a list of NPCs and a strike through of that one's name. Or, it can just be remembered.

Sure but my point is that is just one thing that comes up in a campaign among many things. My experience has been whether you are doing tons of prep and world building, or very little (both of which are perfectly workable options), once the campaign gets going the real work is tracking everything that comes up (for example you need to be able to quickly recall what arrangements were made with that mercahnt's guild months ago, or what happened to this or that NPC after a given adventure....it just all adds up to a lot of note keeping).

I'm not saying don't prep... I'm saying that world building at that scale starts to become another hobby, almost. It's solo time for the GM, and it may be enjoyable... but it doesn't tend to yield the best results at the table for actual play.

Again I would never say you are wrong to not be into the world building side, or that you wrong that it isn't worth the effort for you. But I think there is a lot of subjectivity here that comes down to how people think, what inspires them, what sorts of information they feel is helpful before hand. For a lot of GMs world building is fun, but it is also important in that it really does lay the foundations for them to help make decisions later on, to extrapolate, etc. That isn't for everyone, I just think if we are giving this a value in terms of the results it yields for some it will be a 2 but for others it will be a 10. As with anything if it isn't yielding results, I think not doing it is the way to go. I just don't think this is a universal experience.

On LOTR. I am not a massive fan. And I get there is a debate over how much Tolkien planned in advance or developed over time, and what the exact blend of that was. But one thing I appreciate about Lord of the Rings when I read it is the sense of depth the world has. And Tolkien isn't the only one. There is a long tradition of world building in science fiction and fantasy. Even Howard put thought into the Hyborean Age (he was also making up a ton as he went a long but he had some interesting reasons for setting it in prehistory and the world he presents feels very alive). But these are people writing short stories and books so they are going to have more opportunity and more reason to revise, to see two things that actually go together in a meaningful way that they didn't originally intend add that in after the fact. A good science fiction writer knows how to do both. Even outside fantasy world building is pretty standard. Most writers aren't simply making it up as they go, they have a plan and they have thought about their characters, their character's histories, etc. Some do it more than others. But it isn't as if all screen play writing or all fiction writing doesn't rely on some amount of world building and planning.

Again, if we view LotR as "the game" for this analogy, the readers (or viewers) never hear the name Morgoth, they don't need any context beyond what is in the books themselves (or the films). They can remain blissfully unaware of all of the stuff in The Silmarillion.

Fair enough. I am not into the Simlarillion so I can't really say in this particular case. But I think a lot of readers and a lot of players in this thread are making the assertion that you can often tell when something like that has a solid foundation and there is more beneath the surface. That can be important not just in science fiction, fantasy, RPGs but in good writing in general. It isn't required in every genre. But I find those kind of details are useful.