Be a GAME-MASTER, not a DIRECTOR

[pemerton]

In most games there is a GameMaster who has the final responsibility of deciding what becomes part of the shared fiction — that feels like an editorial role to me.

"Rule Zero" allows a GM to arbitrarily ignore rules, but even so, they rarely do so per se, it's almost always because of a rule that is hidden from the players' view.

These passages attribute an authority to the GM that may be true in some RPGs and at some tables, but is not true in general of RPGing.

For instance, in Apocalypse World (as per the rulebook, p 109):

The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings.​

There is no "rule zero" that permits the GM to start telling a player what their character says or thinks or feels or remembers or undertakes to do. And the GM doesn't have responsibility for deciding what becomes part of the shared fiction.

As far as editing is concerned more generally, in RPGing there is - at least in my experience - very little editing. There are few takebacks. Action declarations and resolutions are followed through on, with the results they produce being incorporated into the shared fiction, not filtered through some further decision-making process. GM narration is given impromptu, with little re-drafting or starting again to get it "right".

This is why - if the goal of RPGing is to have exciting and thematic fiction (it isn't always) with genuine coauthorship (which isn't always the case - see eg many post-DL modules for D&D) - the rules become important. They need to reliably prompt the participants to say exciting and thematic stuff:

If you want awesome stuff to happen in your game, you don't need rules to model the characters doing awesome things, you need rules to provoke the players to say awesome things. That's the real cause and effect at work: things happen because someone says they do. If you want cool things to happen, get someone to say something cool. . .

If your rules model a character's doing cool things, and in so doing they get the players to say cool things, that's great. I have nothing against modeling the cool things characters do as such.

Just, if your rules model a character's doing cool things, but the player using them still says dull things, that's not so great.​

I think it’s the combination of shared authorship and rules that differentiate it.

Well, as a great designer of, and thinker about, RPGs once said (I've omitted the footnotes),

if all your formal rules do is structure your group's ongoing agreement about what happens in the game, they are a) interchangeable with any other rpg rules out there, and b) probably a waste of your attention. Live negotiation and honest collaboration are almost certainly better. . . .

As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an rpg's rules is to create the unwelcome and the unwanted in the game's fiction. The reason to play by rules is because you want the unwelcome and the unwanted - you want things that no vigorous creative agreement would ever create. And it's not that you want one person's wanted, welcome vision to win out over another's - that's weak sauce. No, what you want are outcomes that upset every single person at the table. You want things that if you hadn't agreed to abide by the rules' results, you would reject.

If you don't want that - and I believe you when you say you don't! - then live negotiation and honest collaboration are a) just as good as, and b) a lot more flexible and robust than, whatever formal rules you'd use otherwise.

The challenge facing rpg designers is to create outcomes that every single person at the table would reject, yet are compelling enough that nobody actually does so. If your game isn't doing that, like I say it's interchangeable with the most rudimentary functional game design, and probably not as fun as good freeform.​

That's putting the point pretty strongly, but does set out a clear contrast between a RPG and improv/freeform.

 

[Umbran]

As a minor detail, I have also seen a fair amount of improv where the actors have no idea of the general plot and do make up the entire story on the fly.

With respect, there's probably less on the fly than you'd think. If you have a handful of stock standard frameworks everyone in the troupe knows, with a few cues you settle on one and adapt it to your needs.

Also, flying by the seat of your pants for a 5 minute skit isn't the same as doing it for the half-hour or hour of a commedia dell'arte play.

 

[Umbran]

It's a much stronger statement. In the context of games, a rule typically:

• Is explicit -- usually written down.
• Has an authority that has defined it.
• Has penalties for not being followed

For the first, while I won't argue "explicit", but the written element should be left out. Games existed before most people were literate. There are mancala boards that date to before 5500 BCE. Meanwhile, portable papyrus to write down the rules of mancala was only invented around 3000 BCE. And tons of people learn, say, checkers and chess by oral tradition - someone teaching us.

For the second... I don't think the authority behind the rules are meaningful in the context of this discussion.

With that third, I believe you are confusing "game" with "sport". Sports often have penalties for rules violations. But most board games, however, have no stated penalty assigned for doing something outside the rules.

 

[clearstream]

I don't actually think games need a winner, so I'm happy to ignore that part (I really don't think RPGs or improv scenes can be "won"). But let's think about a rule.

For improv, I'm guessing you're thinking of things like "don't block" in terms of rules. And indeed, if you look up the definition of "rules" in a dictionary, you might find a definition that says that it's anything that defines conduct. We talk about the "rules of love" or "rule of cool" or a host of other ways that fit that definition. So I'll concede that you can say "improv has rules" in the same sense as you could say "how to blow your nose has rules" -- there are a set of expected ways to do this which form a social expectation and make the experience a better one for all.

But if we are talking about a game, people generally use rules in a stronger sense. We don't think of how pawns move in chess as simply an expectation that people usually do this and will make things more fun for all. It's a much stronger statement. In the context of games, a rule typically:

• Is explicit -- usually written down.
• Has an authority that has defined it.
• Has penalties for not being followed.

If you are playing D&D, you have written rules, defined by the game company (or your GM's wiki of house rules) and if you don't follow them you will be corrected or ejected from the game. This feels very different from, for example, GM advice to "be a fan of the players" or for players not to block while roleplaying. Not less important -- but different.

I'm curious whether as you would define it freeform roleplaying such as that recently labelled FKR counts as playing a roleplaying game? The sort of arrangement I am thinking of involves a GM and some number of players. Much as @pemerton laid out, GM manages setting and antagonists, and players protagonists. GM often makes rulings, serving in that capacity as an enabler of the group's play. Other freeform arrangements include multiple-GM and players-only, but I am not focusing on those here.

At times when I've played that sort of freeform, my intent has been to participate in a roleplaying game. Although intent to do something doesn't secure that I do that thing, what I experienced was closely similar to other instances of playing a roleplaying game that were fresh in my mind. There were differences, but those were no more than the differences between playing L5R and playing MotW. Our ongoing play was structured and we stuck to agreements about who could say what.

I think the heart of roleplaying is something like a structured approach to an imaginative conversation, that we project ourselves into as subjects. A collective imagining that is governed by agreements among participants. In that light, reflecting on your three conditions

"Is explicit -- usually written down." I would just say "known". There are rules (some agreement), and we know something about those rules (could answer questions about them) but they may be implicit, may be fluid. It must be acknowledged that participants can know different rules, or different versions of roughly the same rules, so I do not intend "known" here to mean that all know the same rules. I'm aware of but won't dive into here proposed cases of accidental rule following, which I believe are readily reconciled with.​

​

"Has an authority that has defined it." It is right to say the rules have an authority (we choose to put them in force for ourselves) and this is rightly silent on where that authority has its source (could be in us each individually, or in a specific person, or in a book, etc.) To connect authority to the definition of a rule is also right, in the sense that the putting in force for ourselves of a rule relies on our knowing that rule. We put it in force in the way that we know it. One could interpret your phrasing as implying a singular external authority... I don't see that to be necessitated.​

​

"Has penalties for not being followed." When we do not follow the rule, something might happen that we would prefer not to happen. Play might cease. Others might censure us. We might feel chagrin. In play, we put rules in force for ourselves because we're conditioned to, because others expect us to, and because we want the experiences that following those rules make available. We skirt penalties along all those lines when we do not follow rules. What I think is necessary here is that to constitute a game, some rules are shared (whether that be through knowing precisely the same rules, or only roughly the same rules.)​

So to refine your trinary, I might put it that in the context of games a rule typically

Is known​

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Is put in force for ourselves​

​

Is shared with others​

​

The above is very general. For roleplaying in particular, I would focus on how those rules condition the imaginative conversation that we make ourselves subject to.

 

[DEFCON 1]

With respect, there's probably less on the fly than you'd think. If you have a handful of stock standard frameworks everyone in the troupe knows, with a few cues you settle on one and adapt it to your needs.

Also, flying by the seat of your pants for a 5 minute skit isn't the same as doing it for the half-hour or hour of a commedia dell'arte play.

You might actually be surprised just how often improv troupes can improvise full musicals and plays without having a plotted framework to follow a la commedia dell'arte (unless we want to consider standard narrative three-act structure / rising and falling action / stories having a beginning/middle/end to be the framework we are referring to.)

Commedia had standard character archetypes, regularly used narrative plotlines and many standard "comedy bits" that were used over and over in all their performances, so their plays were not completely invented on the spot. The dialogue might be new each night (although with the repetitive nature of the plots I'm sure many bits of dialogue that "worked" were used numerous times over as well and would become the "latzi" they used) but the arcs the characters went through and the storylines they followed would be standardized and re-used. But there are many, many improv troupes who will in fact improvise for a full 60 minutes using nothing but a single word as inspiration, completely inventing new characters and new plots along the way that they've never played before-- whether that be numerous independent scenes one after the other (that might be connected thematically but not with a single story), or indeed complete stage plays or musicals with all the acoutrement of an actual written performance, but with all of it made up at the time of performance.

My apologies if you do in fact already know about this type of improvisation (as I do not know your relationship to the medium)... it was only your quoted statement that seem to suggest you thought even long-form improv was "pre-plotted" in many regards. But I may have misinterpreted or misunderstood your intention and knowledge behind your statement, so I'm sorry if I was passing on info you were already aware of.

 

[DEFCON 1]

But there's a pretty big difference between "Rules" in an RPG and "improv rules" -- or Chess rules, at the other end of the scale.

Chess has strong rules. If you break a rule, you are no longer playing chess. If you are playing chess and decide to move your bishop horizontally, the game will stop and not continue.

RPGs have medium rules -- they are rarely broken and if they are, it's often because a new rule supersedes an old one. If I want to go before an orc in initiative, I'd usually have to have a rule-based reason to do so. "Rule Zero" allows a GM to arbitrarily ignore rules, but even so, they rarely do so per se, it's almost always because of a rule that is hidden from the players' view.

Improv has soft rules. If I don't "establish the location" or I block, it doesn't stop the improv -- people don't suddenly jump into a rules discussion like they would if you declared you were going before the orc. It just makes the event weaker and makes you look bad. It's advice or guidance, not rules. You could ignore all the listed "rules" and still be doing improv. You couldn't ignore all the rules in D&D and still say you were playing D&D.

For me, that's not equivalent to an RPG rules - Improv "rules" are more like a social contract. In fact, you could take most of the above improv advice and it would make a good social contract. So I'm not in agreement that you can compare the two.

As a minor detail, I have also seen a fair amount of improv where the actors have no idea of the general plot and do make up the entire story on the fly. Dropout has a whole series of musicals that are improv, and the cast create plots, characters, resolutions, locations, you name it.

I absolutely understand and agree where you are coming from with your three levels of rules, and do not find fault with the way you have laid them out or assigned things to them as you have. My only quibble over what you have offered up is just the matter of details, many of which will come down to personal interpretation and what each person "feels" like where things should be placed.

For an example... you had stated that you can't ignore all the rules in D&D and still say you were playing D&D. Now at that extreme-- not using ANY D&D rules-- certainly means you aren't playing D&D. We can agree to that. But if we play D&D and only ignore some of the rules (which almost all of us do all the time in some form or fashion whenever we house rule something)... how much can we houserule or just make arbitrary decisions on before it stops being D&D? That's a grey area where every single person will have a different line drawn to distinguish when "D&D game" turns into "no longer D&D game".

So that then perhaps brings D&D more in line with the general art of improvisation where even D&D's rules are more guidelines and socially constructed contracts than actual "rules" per se (since as been mentioned, you don't get "penalized" for not using them, other than perhaps getting argued with by other players at the table). Now that being said, I do still agree with you that roleplaying games are further along the rules numberline towards "medium" and general improv is still down by the "soft" end, even if both things can fluctuate and move up and down it depending on the game in question. As you mentioned previously, a game like Fiasco (and other indy RPGs) are actually closer to pure improv performance at the "soft" end than they are to a medium-rules "game" like D&D... which just shows us just how nebulous and fluctuating things can get along the rules numberline. Fiasco is basically nothing more that a long-form improv format you would use for performance like The Harold or The Armando or La Ronde, and yet we'd still call Fiasco a "game". If for no other reason that we don't do it on our feet in front of an audience, but sitting around a table playing to each other. But you could play The Armando the exact same way with everyone just sitting around a table plus having written down in a book how the format of The Armando goes. Which would basically turn it into a "game" like all these other indy RPGs.

Basically what I'm saying is that I do agree that your levels of rules as you put them are useful and correct in a generalized capacity... but that I don't think any of us can state with any concreteness exactly where things fall in an absolute sense. Because the gap between "Medium rules" and "Soft rules" with relation to how the various types of roleplaying/improvisation/gaming falls will be different depending on who you talk to.

 

[tetrasodium]

You might actually be surprised just how often improv troupes can improvise full musicals and plays without having a plotted framework to follow a la commedia dell'arte (unless we want to consider standard narrative three-act structure / rising and falling action / stories having a beginning/middle/end to be the framework we are referring to.)

"improv troupes" generally implies that the members have some level of experience practice training and so on yet the same bar is not one that can be expected of ttrpg players. To illustrate how wide of an ocean exists between those two expectations I'll reference what was called "legitimate" play and defended when called on it earlier. That player was "Show up as a player, choose not to learn the rules or your character, and just tell the other players and DM you envision being a dragon type creature who sneaks around and also knows magic. They can make it for you, explain all the powers, and then re-explain all the powers several dozen times. (They'll need to because you have no context for it to stick to, a la, lack of knowing the rules.)"

Such a "legitimate" player is one who would obviously fall far short of the bar needed to successfully contribute towards the success of those hypothetical improv musicals and plays.

 

[DEFCON 1]

"improv troupes" generally implies that the members have some level of experience practice training and so on yet the same bar is not one that can be expected of ttrpg players. To illustrate how wide of an ocean exists between those two expectations I'll reference what was called "legitimate" play and defended when called on it earlier. That player was "Show up as a player, choose not to learn the rules or your character, and just tell the other players and DM you envision being a dragon type creature who sneaks around and also knows magic. They can make it for you, explain all the powers, and then re-explain all the powers several dozen times. (They'll need to because you have no context for it to stick to, a la, lack of knowing the rules.)"

Such a "legitimate" player is one who would obviously fall far short of the bar needed to successfully contribute towards the success of those hypothetical improv musicals and plays.

Oh, of course. I don't disagree at all. I think the convo morphed a bit in the interim where the parts you were having conversation about and the ones I was having ended up being two separate things. So the long-form improv stuff I was mentioning (regarding whether they could be considered games or not) should not in any way be considered part and parcel to your typical RPG player. Agree 100%.

 

[Gorgon Zee]

All,

First of all, thanks for the comments and especially the tone in which they have been conveyed -- a lot of "yes and" and "yes, but also" that is as helpful in discourse as it is in roleplaying and improv.

At this point I don't feel I have much new to add to the convo. If you'd like me to address a particular point, let me know, but overall I'm not seeing much in the way of solid differences -- it's more definitional and concerned with emphasis on importance.

• I tend to draw a strong distinction between "freeform roleplaying" and a "roleplaying game". For me there needs to be some form of codified structure to make roleplaying a game. But I think others don't see any substantial difference, and certainly there are games with very light rules that test the distinction I draw.
• I do think of "rules" in the context of a discussion of games as being more than a social contract or advice on how to do an activity well. I tried to express this with examples of things I think of as rules (written down, penalties for disobeying) but wasn't clear that those were not meant to be defining. I was probably thinking too heavily about competitive games like bridge, chess, MTG and similar where the rules and penalties for breaking them are very forward. Hopefully I got my main point across, which is that I think of "rules" as a fairly formal thing in terms of RPGs.

I play a wide variety of RPGs, and like a variety of styles, so it's really helpful to get a good feel for what people mean when they talk about game rules, etc. I have found that in the same way that I enjoy poetry with minimal structure (e.g. the love song of j alfred prufrock) and ones with strong structure (such as sonnets) but don't really like completely unstructured poetry -- in that same vein I'm happy to play DramaSystem or D&D4E, but a pure freeform game doesn't appeal.

So thanks for the comments!

 

[bloodtide]

But there's a pretty big difference between "Rules" in an RPG and "improv rules" -- or Chess rules, at the other end of the scale.

I think everyone is missing the most important part of an RPG Beyond the Rules. Where gamers close the rule book and have fun without following some words scribbled on a page by someone years ago. This is the true improv. The rules say "The. Door. Has. Ten. Hit. Points.", so "by the rules you must do ten damage to destroy the door". And the type of gamer that are lost in the rules...and AI...will only have door destroyed if it takes ten points of damage by the rules. Of course, by Improv, there are a lot of ways pass the door. But for a lot of gamers, if it's not in the rules, it is "impossible". Like any dumb video game where you "can't" cross a river or go past a hedge, or climb in a window because it is not programed into the game.

As far as editing is concerned more generally, in RPGing there is - at least in my experience - very little editing

I would count the way a DM can alter game reality on a whim as editing. No matter what is said, by anyone, the GM can change, alter and "edit" it on a whim.

For an example... you had stated that you can't ignore all the rules in D&D and still say you were playing D&D. Now at that extreme-- not using ANY D&D rules-- certainly means you aren't playing D&D. We can agree to that. But if we play D&D and only ignore some of the rules (which almost all of us do all the time in some form or fashion whenever we house rule something)... how much can we houserule or just make arbitrary decisions on before it stops being D&D? That's a grey area where every single person will have a different line drawn to distinguish when "D&D game" turns into "no longer D&D game".

As, above, this is the best thing about RPGs: The fact that you can (try) to do anything. Even if the game does not have a rule on page 11 that you must use. When a character needs to get past a guard, the player does not just sit there and roll a skill check to do it....they close the book and improv some role playing acting.