How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[hawkeyefan]

And another! Try reading what I said instead of just focusing on TOUCH SCREEN!!!!!! This twisting of what I said in order to win the internet is tiresome.

I did. You said the below.

You surely tapped it, but harder than you would have if your eyes were open. Or else you moved slower than if your eyes were open and tapped it just as softly.

These are unfounded assertions on your part. You are saying them with certainty that you should not have.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Would this knowledge change anything for them? I mean, they still would need to roll a d20 and add their to-hit modifier to their attack to see if they would able to hit such an opponent. They would still have their share of misses, hits and 'defender defends' moments. They would also still be subjected to their opponent's attacks as the latter laughed off the party's attempts to defeat them.

There are any number of meaningful decision in a number of games that you will make differently depending on the quality of opponent, including choice of maneuvers and consumption of limited resources. Its not all just "pick your target and flail away".

 

[Lanefan]

There are any number of meaningful decision in a number of games that you will make differently depending on the quality of opponent, including choice of maneuvers and consumption of limited resources. Its not all just "pick your target and flail away".

I don't think anybody is disputing that.

What's in dispute are two things:

1 - the point in the fiction (and therefore at the table) at which the quality of said opponent becomes apparent, in situations where it's not blatantly obvious. Before a combat begins? After a round or two of combat? Only after the fact, in hindsight?
2 - the degree of specificity to which the players (in and out of character) can ultimately determine the quality of said opponent. In vague terms only? In not-vague but also non-numeric terms? In terms of full knowledge of the foe's numeric stats?

A side dispute lies around how accurately and-or quickly the PCs can assess their foes. A second side dispute (and IMO the key question that drives all these other disputes) lies around whether or not players should be given info their characters don't have.

 

[soviet]

Characters also don't know their own stats though, right? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. 'I'm STR 17 with +4 proficiency and a +2 sword that when it hits does 2d6+5 damage, and I can take a penalty of -5 to hit for +10 damage. I attack twice per six seconds but once per short rest I can attack another two times. Four times per short rest I can also perform these exact manoeuvres. I have 94 hit points.'

'Oh that guy I'm fighting? How capable is he? Er, I dunno, he is 'mediumly dangerous'.

 

[Corinnguard]

Characters also don't know their own stats though, right? Otherwise it doesn't make sense. 'I'm STR 17 with +4 proficiency and a +2 sword that when it hits does 2d6+5 damage, and I can take a penalty of -5 to hit for +10 damage. I attack twice per six seconds but once per short rest I can attack another two times. Four times per short rest I can also perform these exact manoeuvres. I have 94 hit points.'

'Oh that guy I'm fighting? How capable is he? Er, I dunno, he is 'mediumly dangerous'.

You will know your own character's stats because you have either have a sheet of paper, a fillable PDF or even an online D&D Beyond page containing their stats. Why would you be denied to know your character? Does your GM expect you to have memorized your character sheet and be capable of playing without it? Of course, not. That's not how a RPG works.

As for knowing some of the stats of your opponent, why are you incapable of learning that on your own through observation during the role-play session? Your character can roll for a skill check (Arcana, Religion, or Nature) to remember a piece of lore regarding a particular monster. They can learn what spells or damage types the monster is resistant or immune when either one doesn't react as your character expected them to. And so forth.

It's like you want the GM to give you all of that info on a silver platter. No strings attached. What are you going to do if the GM doesn't give you this info? And what if your fellow players don't want to know this info? They might be trying to have fun seeing if their characters have what it takes to get through a fight, an exploration challenge or a moment of social interaction. Do you really want to ruin their fun? Sure, you could ask the GM to hand over the info without the rest of your fellow players knowing, but that's insider knowledge and again, it's not how a RPG works.

Lastly, how would you feel if the monsters knew everything about your character stats? Be careful of what you wish for, you might not like it.

 

[pemerton]

Are you doing all of this consciously or subconsciously? I think your subconscious mind would be doing all of this assessing for you so as not require you to consciously think about certain things all of the time. It's how you can walk and chew bubblegum at the same time.

Do you ride in urban traffic? Or do serious running?

I can only speak about my own experiences. When I'm running, if my mind wanders I slow down, or lose my stride, or have more risk of turning an ankle. I try and remain focused - this enhances my breathing, helps me maintain my stride with a good consciousness of what's happening in my hips (given that I am no longer young), and also helps me maintain control and recover if I feel my ankle start to move in a way that it shouldn't.

When I ride, I am not subconsciously thinking about the vehicles around me. I am conscious of them. Extremely so! (This is why I am worried about electric vehicles. Obviously I have no objections to a reduction in emissions, but I'm worried that I won't be able to tell when an electric vehicle is close to me.)

As I've said, I am not a fighter. I don't know how melee combat works. But I would expect some of the basic elements of the experience, its relationship to perception of the environment and control of the body, etc, to broadly resemble what I am familiar with. Like running, fighting involves deliberate and atypical physical exertion. Like cycling in urban traffic, it requires attention to and response to risk that presents itself rapidly and as not fully subject to one's control.

I find it hard to believe that it is rote, or subconscious, in the sense that the fighter is thinking about other things while fighting and just acting "automatically".

 

[Manbearcat]

Just a few quick comments on automaticity, muscle memory, repetition, and extremely short interval windows for processing & activating (we're talking fractions of a second).

My current understanding of the research is that in various sports/athletics/martial arts there is a combination of prefrontal cortex that governs active decision-tree work and subcortical brain region where automaticity resides. Things like reliably "slipping a punch" and "hitting a baseball (at expert to world class level)" would fall into that latter category (and require enormous amounts of successful repping, and of course a sufficient base substrate of genetics, in order to get there) because the processing & activating window is well below that of how our prefrontal cortex resolves decisions and deploys the body to act.

But in the abundance of activities, you would deploy both (and there would even be some likely overlap). But, as it pertains to this thread, both modes would (a) be reliant upon profound onboarding and operationalizing of spatial geometry and (b) that means that high level operators (baseball players, fighters, etc) 100 % process their environment with a perception and computation model that isn't just "uh...kinda good, really good...really super duper good." You don't reliably and consistently operate at extreme proficiency in those obscenely tiny processing & activation windows with just derpy qualitative evaluations.

And its really beside the point because that is just the "realism" component of things. We're playing games. Games require a language commensurate to transmit and receive "what is happening in the imagined space" onto "what is happening in the corresponding actual game layer" in order to generate (if you're a GM) and in order to process and resolve (if you're a player) a compelling game-related decision-space. If that language isn't sufficient, then the generation of the decision space (GM's job) or processing and resolving (player's job) is going to suffer for it. "Suffer" here is a continuum where "holy crap this is awesome and compelling as an actual game" lies on one end and "what am I even doing...or...why don't you just play the game for me GM because what you're giving me to work with is basically the total absence of gameplay" lies on the other end (with a huge chunk in between).

QUICK EDIT: @pemerton and my partner are two of a few handfuls of people I know who are marathon runner capable and have massive cycling mileage under their belts. I would absolutely defer to pemerton on the subject. My partner basically had this to say on marathon running and long distance cycling (she is also a degreed chemist and biologist); all of this tracks with my intuition on the subject (for what that is worth). The significant chunk of cycling and marathon running involves the engagement of active processing. However, once resources become extremely depleted and systems taxed, there is definitely a "handing off" to automaticity in marathon (or marathon+) running and at some point, overwhelmingly so (the threshold for this is individual-based). The threshold for this in cycling (where she hasn't experienced this depletion and taxation because the, presumed, mileage required to do so) has to be waaaaaaaaaaaaaay up there when contrasted with running.

 

[Corinnguard]

Do you ride in urban traffic? Or do serious running?

I can only speak about my own experiences. When I'm running, if my mind wanders I slow down, or lose my stride, or have more risk of turning an ankle. I try and remain focused - this enhances my breathing, helps me maintain my stride with a good consciousness of what's happening in my hips (given that I am no longer young), and also helps me maintain control and recover if I feel my ankle start to move in a way that it shouldn't.

When I ride, I am not subconsciously thinking about the vehicles around me. I am conscious of them. Extremely so! (This is why I am worried about electric vehicles. Obviously I have no objections to a reduction in emissions, but I'm worried that I won't be able to tell when an electric vehicle is close to me.)

As I've said, I am not a fighter. I don't know how melee combat works. But I would expect some of the basic elements of the experience, its relationship to perception of the environment and control of the body, etc, to broadly resemble what I am familiar with. Like running, fighting involves deliberate and atypical physical exertion. Like cycling in urban traffic, it requires attention to and response to risk that presents itself rapidly and as not fully subject to one's control.

I find it hard to believe that it is rote, or subconscious, in the sense that the fighter is thinking about other things while fighting and just acting "automatically".

I try to at least once or twice a week go for a long distance walk. I haven't rode a bike in years and I don't like running.

When I do go for a walk, I tend to stick to familiar routes that I have walked many times over the years. I can imagine that you have rode a bike or have run along familiar routes as well. So you don't need to think about the route unless you want to go down a different street because it's there, or you are curious about what lies down it. Instead, you allow yourself to think about other things. I go for long distance walks because walking gives me a chance to be introspective about myself and whatever catches my interest at the moment.

I am not fighter either in RL, though I have role-played a fighter in D&D in 5e and 2e. I don't know what it would like to be in an actual fight in RL or if melee combat in a RPG even comes close to what happens in a RL fight. Is the experience of a fight comparable to the experiences we have actually experienced in RL? Yes, fighting does involve deliberate and atypical physical exertion. And yes it does require attention to and a response to risk that presents itself rapidly and not under your complete control. It also probably requires performing the same stances and maneuvers over and over again till it's familiar enough for you to do them with very little hesitation or thought.

You probably have done quite a number of things in RL where you were thinking about something while performing rote behavior. So has everyone including myself. Why can't a Fighter do the same thing?

 

[hawkeyefan]

A side dispute lies around how accurately and-or quickly the PCs can assess their foes. A second side dispute (and IMO the key question that drives all these other disputes) lies around whether or not players should be given info their characters don't have.

It's a little more nuanced than that. It's not so much about the player having access to information the character doesn't have; it's about:
1) differences in opinion of what the character would be able to discern
2) providing as much information as possible to try and bring the player's understanding of the situation in line with the character's

Now, item 2 above is less concerned with the specifics of what's explicitly known or not known by the character, but what it's about is acknowledging that the GM, responsible for communicating the situation to the players, cannot possibly give sufficient information to match the character's understanding of the situation, should instead share as much as possible to try and create a parity between character information and player information.

I think ultimately, for me, both the rules of the game and rules expressions like AC and the like... generally speaking, I want to know what players will do with the information they have, not keep the information from them. I can't help but think a game that revolves around having to learn basic stats like AC and the like is less focused on more meaningful discoveries. Minutiae like that just don't interest me compared to what the characters are doing in the fiction... what they're trying to accomplish and why.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You know in Level Up the fighter (the class most likely to be able to gage fighting ability like you all are insisting) actually has access to an ability that lets them do that.