No More Massive Tomes of Rules

[Thomas Shey]

The "trust" part in particular. Which I will never understand. The GM is there to help you kick ass and have a great time.

I trust their intentions. That's not the same as their judgment.

 

[Maggan]

That all lands in my "wait to find out how the GM wants to handle it", and I can't say I consider that a virtue in routine handling, either. Its not as bad as "do it and find out" but its still not a virtue.

Doesn't everything land in that vicinity? The GM sets the difficulty, handles the consequenses of the roll, sets the circumstances.

I am not blind to the problem of playing a game of "guess what the GM accepts", but to me it's a GM problem and not a rules problem.

 

[Autumnal]

failed novelists'

This is a digression. One of the quietly delightful things to me about Onyx Path in recent years (ever since their friend Jacob Burgess persuaded me to hire them for Book of Oblivion) is OP has had an extremely successful author contributing to OP projects: Cassandra Khaw. They’ve won a Stoker for best short story collection and been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award, four times for the Locus Award, once more for the Stokers, twice for the Shirley Jackson Award, twice for the World Fantasy Award, once for the Ignyte Award…all in a career that started in 2014. (If they weren’t so nice and fun to do business with, they’d be intolerable ).

So if the cliche is to get failed would-be authors…darn it, OP lost the plot again.

 

[Reynard]

[Raises hand}. I've stated before I don't trust GM's judgement absolutely. If you wait around for that, you'll find me very frustrating.

Traditional RPGs feel like a bad choice of entertainment for someone that doesn't trust GMs. At best it sets up a situation where you are second guessing and rules lawyering everything the GM does. At worst it makes you an adversary to the GM and game itself. If a player doesn't trust me to run the game, they should leave my table for everyone's benefit, including their own.

 

[Reynard]

This is a digression. One of the quietly delightful things to me about Onyx Path in recent years (ever since their friend Jacob Burgess persuaded me to hire them for Book of Oblivion) is OP has had an extremely successful author contributing to OP projects: Cassandra Khaw. They’ve won a Stoker for best short story collection and been nominated twice for the British Fantasy Award, four times for the Locus Award, once more for the Stokers, twice for the Shirley Jackson Award, twice for the World Fantasy Award, once for the Ignyte Award…all in a career that started in 2014. (If they weren’t so nice and fun to do business with, they’d be intolerable ).

So if the cliche is to get failed would-be authors…darn it, OP lost the plot again.

I am actually often making a secret in-joke dig at myself when I talk about failed novelists that write RPGs, because, well, here we are.

 

[Pedantic]

Exactly.

No matter which way you go, you still have to go through the referee to interact with the world. The referee can still change the rules, ignore the rules, etc. Having a rule on paper is effectively meaningless as the referee can decide whether it's an automatic failure, what the DC is, or that it's an automatic success in the moment.

I think that's the one thing a few people in this thread are dead set against.

I would not generally assign those powers to the GM, and I think RPG design is generally harmed by assigning those powers as a norm. That's stuff that should live in the same territory as board game houserules: obviously you can do it, and the game may be improved thereby, especially if it had some design error in the first place. To make it a normative part of play undermines the ability to play in the first place.

The "trust" part in particular. Which I will never understand. The GM is there to help you kick ass and have a great time.

Trust isn't the problem, particularly given I'm writing from the GM position, and my players trust me far more than I do myself. The question is one of capability; I'm a mediocore game designer, and I don't get better when I'm asked to perform under sharp time constraints. I want the game to be robust and interesting, I want players to use the mechanics to do things, I want to be surprised and delighted by their applications of those rules in novel configurations, I want a series of interesting decisions to unfold in front of me. I am not a substitute for a bunch of rigorous design to make those things happen, and it's a poor use of me to do that, when I have all these NPCs to do voices for and worlds to create and explain.

 

[overgeeked]

Doesn't everything land in that vicinity? The GM sets the difficulty, handles the consequenses of the roll, sets the circumstances.

I am not blind to the problem of playing a game of "guess what the GM accepts", but to me it's a GM problem and not a rules problem.

And if you want to gamify disagreements, you can always bust out an Engle Matrix Game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

feel the "rules should be short and concise" party has gone off on a tangent where they are conflating lengthy with restrictive. And I think that those are tangential concepts where you can have either short or lengthy rules that are restrictive depending on how you write them. But proving that is a much longer conversation.

There's also a number of moving parts about what you're willing to sacrifice to have shorter rules; as I've noted, at least three of them are "covers the necessary ground" which as noted can to some extent be bridged by having a sound basic resolution system, "provides sufficient mechanical character definition" and "is engaging enough on a game level" which are both in the eye of the beholder (and which I've rarely found with compact rules sets).

 

[Thomas Shey]

Doesn't everything land in that vicinity? The GM sets the difficulty, handles the consequenses of the roll, sets the circumstances.

There are any number of rolls in any number of games where I only need to get the GMs attention to A) Let him know I'm doing it, and B) allow him to note the results. They have standardized target numbers or other resolution for common results, and the only time he has to address that is uncommon results, and even some of those are clear-cut. If I need to make a running jump to cover 10' I can name any number of games I don't need for the GM to tell me what I need to do. In Runequest I rarely need the GM to tell me what I need to make an attack or parry roll.

I am not blind to the problem of playing a game of "guess what the GM accepts", but to me it's a GM problem and not a rules problem.

I don't think they can be entirely decoupled that way.

 

[overgeeked]

I would not generally assign those powers to the GM, and I think RPG design is generally harmed by assigning those powers as a norm. That's stuff that should live in the same territory as board game houserules: obviously you can do it, and the game may be improved thereby, especially if it had some design error in the first place. To make it a normative part of play undermines the ability to play in the first place.

People have seemed to manage to play RPGs just fine with the referee having these powers. As I said before, it's literally a foundational element of RPGs. The referee has the ability to do these things and it's even spelled out explicitly in the rule books that are seemingly so important.

I am not a substitute for a bunch of rigorous design to make those things happen, and it's a poor use of me to do that, when I have all these NPCs to do voices for and worlds to create and explain.

That is literally where the position of referee came from, why it exists, and again...foundational to the existence of RPGs. The typical human meat-computer is a much better judge in the moment than 3000+ pages of esoteric design that could never possibly cover everything that results when players interact with a fictional environment.