How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

Reynard said:

This displays an absolute ignorance of the hobby and its formative years. Read "The Elusive Shift." Please.

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40 years in the hobby and people still want to preach at me. I am well aware of the bad ideas that were uncommon even in the very beginning of TTRPGs. There is a reason that only one person in a any rpg publishing house espoused this ridiculous idea. It makes the game unfun for players beyond a session or two and dumps the weight of the system operation on the GM. Assuming the GM is n’t just making it all up as they go. People who profess this as a good idea should go play monopoly without being able to see the board, its the same.

Reynard said:

Just as a reminder, I am actually a "players should know the rules" person because I think it generally enhances agency. But, it does so at the expense of immersion. So, if someone cares about immersion (I don't), I can see the argument for the "invisible rules" school of thought.

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That second part (the bolded) is an enormously contentious take and I just want to put that out there. No one I run games for agrees with it. The state of being immersed (both what constitutes it and the means through which one arises at it) is deeply personal, wholly autobiographical.

You (a) take away the prospect of binding social influence mechanics (which emulate things like amygdala hijack) and/or (b) you remove the deeply informed interaction with action resolution mechanics and reward cycles/advancement mechanics or currencies that let players evaluate thematic/strategic/tactical decision-space while considering trade-offs in various lines of play while functionally evaluating the consequence space and risk profile for each prospective line of play? You're actively harming immersion. You aren't helping immersion by removing those things.

So what any given individual needs for the slippery concept of "immersive state of being" is very personal and possibly volatile (folding in stuff outside of play that impacts the state of being they bring into the current instance of play or even the current moment of play). And there isn't "one immersive state to rule them all." What is needed for "an immersive state of being" for any individual game will (and should imo) vary game by game.

A Flashback or a Reflection-based Conflict (and then smash cut into the future moment for a follow-on conflict) might be enormously immersive for Blades in the Dark or Dogs in the Vineyard while simultaneously being "immersive cruft" for another game.

MacDhomnuill said:

40 years in the hobby and people still want to preach at me. I am well aware of the bad ideas that were uncommon even in the very beginning of TTRPGs. There is a reason that only one person in a any rpg publishing house espoused this ridiculous idea.

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Maybe people "preach" at you because you make obviously wrong statements with such confidence?

Reynard said:

Just as a reminder, I am actually a "players should know the rules" person because I think it generally enhances agency. But, it does so at the expense of immersion. So, if someone cares about immersion (I don't), I can see the argument for the "invisible rules" school of thought.

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A while back I participated in the Night's Black Agent campaign The Dracula Dossier. As I've run the game before, I pretty much understood how the rules worked, what my characters could do, and I even had an inkling of some generic vampire abilities. But I didn't own Dracula's Dossier and I didn't know specifically what the abilities the vampires in that campaign had. It really helped rack up the tension because none of us players knew exactly what a vampire was capable of or what they were vulnerable to. This is an area where ignorance of the rules really helped enhance the experience for us. Contrast that with D&D where most of the players at the table have a pretty good idea of what any particular creature can do.

Manbearcat said:

That second part (the bolded) is an enormously contentious take and I just want to put that out there.

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Again, that's the traditional argument being made: removing rules from the players focus more fully allows them to inhabit their characters and immerse themselves in the world. I don't know if that is true, but I can attest to the idea that players turning consistently to their character sheets and the rulebooks interrupts immersive moments. Not all the time and not universally, but enough for me to accept that it is broadly true.

And just to be clear: I am not advocating for a "the players don't know the rules" style. At least when running traditional RPGS like modern D&D, I am a "players should definitely know the rules of their character" style GM. However, I do also keep DCs secret and use descriptions as above. Usually. Consistency is hard.

What I do take issue with, though, is people adamantly proclaiming hidden rules games as badwrongfun or untenable, because we know that some people at least do enjoy that style and it works for them

MGibster said:

Contrast that with D&D where most of the players at the table have a pretty good idea of what any particular creature can do.

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Luckily there is a simple solution to that: reskin everything.

Reynard said:

Just as a reminder, I am actually a "players should know the rules" person because I think it generally enhances agency. But, it does so at the expense of immersion. So, if someone cares about immersion (I don't), I can see the argument for the "invisible rules" school of thought.

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Knowing some or all of the rules in a RPG and being able to immerse yourself aren't mutually exclusive. You can do both within an RPG. I agree with you about knowing the rules enhances agency, but I don't believe it does so at the expense of immersion. Maybe knowing the rules actually enhances immersion as well by helping you get into character. The rules remind you of what you can and can't do with your character.

MGibster said:

A while back I participated in the Night's Black Agent campaign The Dracula Dossier. As I've run the game before, I pretty much understood how the rules worked, what my characters could do, and I even had an inkling of some generic vampire abilities. But I didn't own Dracula's Dossier and I didn't know specifically what the abilities the vampires in that campaign had. It really helped rack up the tension because none of us players knew exactly what a vampire was capable of or what they were vulnerable to. This is an area where ignorance of the rules really helped enhance the experience for us. Contrast that with D&D where most of the players at the table have a pretty good idea of what any particular creature can do.

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I think there's a distinction to be made between secret information and secret rules. Not knowing the capabilities of the vampires seems to me more a case of the former than the latter, though I acknowledge that the borders between the two can be a bit fuzzy. In this case, I'd say that while you don't know what vampires can do, you do know that they'll be using stats more or less like yours (in Gumshoe, NPCs have very simplified stat blocks, but at heart they're a collection of skill points like PCs). You know that they'll be using the same task resolution mechanics.

Here's another way to illustrate the distinction for Dracula Dossier in particular. Given how it's structured, you could read all the monster rules from the core rulebook and read the entire Director's Handbook for the Dossier and still be surprised, because the campaign doesn't actually give you anything set in stone. It gives you three to five different variations on almost everything, including what the vampires are and can do.

Corinnguard said:

Knowing some or all of the rules in a RPG and being able to immerse yourself aren't mutually exclusive. You can do both within an RPG. I agree with you about knowing the rules enhances agency, but I don't believe it does so at the expense of immersion. Maybe knowing the rules actually enhances immersion as well by helping you get into character. The rules remind you of what you can and can't do with your character.

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I'm not necessarily arguing against that generally, but constantly reference to the character sheet is definitely immersion breaking.

Oh, another example of the distinction between secret information and secret rules: the stress and fallout mechanics of Spire. In this system, when you take an action you will often take stress. Stress is assigned to one of five tracks. By itself, stress does nothing; a character with 10 stress is equally likely to succeed at an action as a character with no stress, other things equal. However, every time you take stress the GM rolls a die. If it's less than your total stress (across all tracks) you take fallout, reducing your stress by a certain amount but taking mechanical penalties as well, up to and including death. The rules for stress are not secret; there are player-facing mechanics like class abilities that directly interact with stress tracks, and you can't really decide what abilities to take unless you know how stress works. However, once you are playing, all the rolls relating to stress are made by the GM and the numeric results are secret. The GM is expected to narrate the effects of increasing stress, and the players need to evaluate how bad things are likely to be based on that narration. This is great and works very well in play, in my experience, and it's a clear example of a setup where secret information makes the game more fun, but where the underlying rules are public information.