How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[pemerton]

That the rules place certain aspects of the game into my hands does not make what I do about control.

Normally, X is put into Maxperson's hands would be understood as an idiomatic, or metaphorical, way of saying Maxperson has been given control over X.

 

[Maxperson]

Knowing is not a success state. Unless one is trying to know. In the context of the play of a RPG, my understanding is that it is normally the players who decide if their PCs try to do or achieve things.

These are not meaningful English sentences. Like the colourless green ideas sleeping furiously.

An attempt to remember is automatic man. When you see a banana you either remember it automatically, succeeding in recognizing it. Fail to recognize the banana for some reason. Or occasionally you will have trouble remembering the banana and struggle to bring up the memory of what it is, failing sometimes and succeeding at other times. You aren't choosing to act. It just happens.

In game the narration determines the first two, auto success and auto failure to remember, and typically a roll of some sort will happen if the outcome is in doubt.

 

[Maxperson]

Normally, X is put into Maxperson's hands would be understood as an idiomatic, or metaphorical, way of saying Maxperson has been given control over X.

And yet when talking about RPGs, control is typically understood to be when the DM is deliberately asserting control over the players in some manner, such as with a railroad. Atypical definitions need not apply.

 

[Manbearcat]

Here is a Rorschache Test on GM Control. This is totally a legit way to play, but it is absolutely a Rorschache Test and there is a contravening approach to this:

First, it should be noted that this game engine does not possess (a) mechanical lever/widget (like an essential piece of PC build that richly encodes novel theme or gives specific expression to motivation which constrains the GMs content generation accordingly while simultaneously rewarding you for pursuing your player-authored themes/motivations) nor (b) a procedure-based vehicle for players to flag theme/motivation/relations that the GM should be challenging during play (like a Session Zero or a principle of 'ask questions and use the answers"). That is a crucial piece.

Now lets take a look:

* "If you want to get the PCs involved in whatever you (the GM) have designed for them to do"...<give them...motivation...and they will do what you want them to do>

* Then, this section on Motivation (which might have been a section that actually gives rise to player protagonism in which the players' rich themes and motivation actually give rise to the shape and trajectories of play) goes on to talk about how the "tailored motivations are ones that you (the GM) have specifically designed" (you are giving the players the motivations to engage with your content...the players aren't giving you, the GM, their own motivations to generate particular content). Lets look at those bullet points:

1) No attachment mercenaries interested in gold!

2) Fetch Quest!

3) Deus Ex Machina of the content they just resolved!

4) This one gets the closest to possibly engaging an actual player motivation that is generated by a player but we surely don't know (and given the above text, why would we suddenly interpret an inversion of paradigm?). Note that they don't (a) put Tordek's brother specifically at stake, (b) we have no idea if this is a consequential NPC that the player brought into play and made actual connections with (but we definitely know there is no system tech/PC build tech facilitating this because the game doesn't have it) or just NPC001 generically skinned as kin and giving a Fetch Quest (see 2), and (c) note they didn't say "Hometown"...so how do we know Dumadan isn't just DWARFCITY001 because dwarfey-trope where if the player doesn't jump at it they'll get metagame derision for "you're not playing your dwarf right!" Social pressure to play their character the right way is definitely not "control!"

GM has exclusive authorship over all content (from situation to setting to main plot to auxiliary content and even authoring PC motivation to facilitate engagement with their prep…and then they have a massive roll in action resolution mediation on top of this) of consequence and the result is overwhelming control over the shape and trajectory of play.

---

And, post-Rorschache Test, there is a contravening approach to juxtapose against the above:

• Instead of generating PC-neutral content and then contriving motivations for thematically-empty PCs (effectively "vehicles to onboard and operationalize GM-authored plot, side quests, setting-as-protagonist") to engage with your PC-neutral content...solicit thematically rich PCs with player-authored motivations...and generate content that specifically engages with the player-evinced themes and motivations of their PCs! All the better if the game has levers/widgets and procedures to facilitate this!

Net: This isn't a value judgement. Either approaches are fine. But one of these is absolutely about GM control over content/shape/trajectory of play and players onboarding and operationalizing that paradigmatic GM control over content/shape/trajectory of play...and system facilitating that paradigm because there are no levers/widgets/procedures that push back via handing the proverbial bag of breadcrumbs to the players to lay them for the GM to follow.

 

[Lanefan]

I dunno, if I went into the Museum with a bunch of friends lacking any specific knowledge skills but sharing a similar cultural background, it seems unlikely that every statue will randomly get recognised by half the group and not the other. Most likely some statues will be recognisable enough that we all get it, and some will be obscure enough that none of us do.

And there'll be some that some of you recognize and some don't.

Same is true in the game: sometimes you'll see a statue and most or all of the PCs will know who it is of, be it by research or cultural knowledge or even having met the person in person. Other times you'll see a statue and collectively not know a thing about it. And yet other times you'll see a statue where there's a chance some of the PCs know about it; and that's when the roll comes in.

The other issue is that there are absolutely no interesting stakes to this roll.

Depends on what counts as interesting (or important). If for example it's important that the PCs either know or find out who the statue is of, someone knowing it then and there saves the PCs having to do research later. Or, being able to put a name to the statue allows the Bard (or equivalent) to maybe dredge up some tales and lore about that person.

That, and not every roll has to be life-or-death important.

 

[Lanefan]

Suppose we think that it is possible that someone will recognise the statute, then - until you tell me why it matters - I don't see the difference between the GM tossing a coin, the GM calling for a die roll, or the GM just deciding.

More generally, there is an assumption sitting behind your example that the players may encounter statues and the like where there is little at stake in the encounter itself. That's not an assumption that I adhere to in my RPGing.

They encounter all kinds of things where there's little or even nothing at stake. Not everything they see is guaranteed to be relevant, and if by a die roll they can change my narration on the fly from "...a finely-carved statue of a well-armoured Dwarf wielding a 2-handed axe in a pose as if he is fighting a much larger opponent..." to "...a finely-carved statue of Clanggedon in battle, clearly engaged in his favourite pastime of fighting giants..." what's wrong with that?

And for all we know (given this example has no context whatsoever around it) that statue could be anything from pure dngeon dressing to the key element in the whole adventure.

 

[Lanefan]

OK. The world contains flying dragons. Hence "reality" as far as it pertains to biodynamics, the density of air, and perhaps universal gravitation more generally, doesn't obtain.

Our world has bumblebees in it, which violate some of those same principles and yet can somehow get and remain aloft.

A dragon in a fantasy world and a 747 in our world aren't aerodynamically all that much different.

Now we can talk about what actually governs D&D worldbuilding - a bundle of tropes and expectations, some established by genre authors (eg REH, Jack Vance, JRRT) and some developed over time by the game authors.

One can still wrap those tropes and expectations up in a reality-based setting bolstered by consistent underlying in-setting physics to account for those things that work differently from our own reality. In other words, reality-plus.

 

[Lanefan]

I've linked it because success and failure are associated with attempts or things tried.

This jargon-istic use of "success" to mean the GM tells you something and "failure" to mean the GM doesn't tell you something, independent of anyone trying to achieve something, is not one I'm familiar with.

Sometimes you "succeed" at noticing things without intentionally trying to. Today, for example, while walking around town I happened to notice a squirrel running on a rooftop. Was I looking for squirrels on rooftops? No. But I saw it anyway, and was glad I did.

In D&D, passive perception seems to be a system attempt to move determination of NPC success in some situations over to the player. A PC isn't specifically looking into the bushes but there's an NPC trying to hide there; instead of having the GM roll for the NPC's success in hiding, the PC's passive-perception mechanic is invoked.

But what is involved in deciding to have the GM give me more or less information? What is the strategy here? How is it tactically significant to know, now, who the statue is of? It seems to me like it could easily be low- or zero-stakes colour.

It could very easily be low- or no-stakes colour, but that isn't known to the PCs/players in the moment; therefore the default would be to treat any element like that in the here-and-now as if it is important and let its actual importance (or lack thereof) emerge later.

 

[Lanefan]

So why, then, do the societies in D&D worlds more closely resemble modern ones than mediaeval ones in their basic social arrangements?

A good and valid question, to which my answer at least is that I can't be arsed to do all the historical research I'd need to do in order to get it even vaguely right.

That, and true historical respresentations would likely run hard afoul of some modern sensibilities. I don't need those arguments.

And why do they have so much more production taking place than their actual, narrated, technologies would appear to suggest?

Given the relatively active involvement of divinities in typical D&D settings, the answer to this might simply come down to divine blessing, coupled with again not being arsed to do the research.

 

[Lanefan]

Knowing is not a success state. Unless one is trying to know. In the context of the play of a RPG, my understanding is that it is normally the players who decide if their PCs try to do or achieve things.

One can, I think, safely assume that when someone sees something unusual and is not sure what it is, there'll be at least a passing thought given to wondering what it is; and that passing moment of curiosity is all you need for it to be an "attempt" at knowledge.

And on that attempt you'll either quickly realize what it is and-or what it's for "it's a runic circle for holding demons in", or you might determine part of that e.g. what it is but not what it does "there's a runic circle on the floor here for some reason", or not have a clue "there's a bunch of strange marks on the floor, roughly in a circle".