Blaming the System for Player/GM actions

[fusangite]

I say that it was anything but a poor analogy, and here is why. I chose a random object for just that purpose; it truly applies to anything and everything.

This strongly indicates you do not understand what analogies are or how they work.

A person always has a choice to do something or to not do something.

With you so far.

To imply people are simply sheep that will, or even worse that they should, go after whatever the biggest carrot you dangle in front of them no matter what it is you are trying to have them do strikes me as incredibly disrespectful of free will and the intelligence of everyone.

I'm not suggesting people are sheep. I'm suggesting they are rational actors. Rational actors tend to do things for which they are rewarded and to refrain from doing things for which they are punished.

Let's suppose D&D deducted 1000xp from your character every time you killed a monster. Do you think people would be more or less likely to kill monsters? By making this argument about murder you are using hyperbole to obscure normal human interactions with reward systems.

What's more, you are also grossly trivializing the need for everyone to take responsibility for the decisions they make.

No. I'm not. As another poster has observed, your argument effectively states that game designers do not need to take any responsibility for any decision they make and can blame players and GMs for every single failing in the design of their system.

To draw the lines for anyone not following this mental path, you can apply this to literally everything mentioned.

So you feel, then, that whether people are rewarded or punished for doing something has absolutely no effect whatsoever on whether they do it? I guess you don't see any point in disciplining children or having a criminal code if you believe that rules have no effect on what people do.

Your argument seems to be that people who have free will are unaffected by rules and that it is disrespectful to people's free will to suggest that they would be. What are you even doing here if you think that's the case? If it doesn't matter what rules a game has, or whether it has any rules at all, why not throw out the DMG and PHB and sit around with your friends playing 'let's pretend'?

Just because it is a choice available and perhaps you appear to benefit directly (or greatly, depending), there are consequences to every action.

Indeed there are. So, if killing a kobold suddenly gained the consequence of losing you 1000xp, wouldn't your reaction to the kobold change?

Taking each situation as a case-by-case basis is what you should do.

How is having rules in conflict with making case-by-case judgments? In each case, the person will factor in a number of things, one of which is what the rules say.

If, on the other hand, you wish to substitute case-by-case judgments in place of the rules, why don't you ship your PHB and DMG to Iraq? I understand there are still troops over there who need D&D books.

Trouble begins when you start making blanket statements like “I was just following the rules”. That is just as bad as saying you should do drugs “because all the cool kids are doing it.”.

Actually, to follow your analogy in a remotely rational direction, wouldn't the person refuse to do drugs because doing drugs was against the rules?

I'm aghast at this assertion. This is exactly the sentiment the Nazi officers and soldiers presented as a defense after World War II.

Wow! Hitler showed up waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy faster than I could have imagined.

Look buddy. If you think dialing up the rhetoric to these levels will help your case, you have not spent enough time on message boards.

But just to clarify: believing that rules matter is not actually the same as gassing 6 million Jews to death.

Tell me Dethstryke: do you believe we should have laws? Or do you feel personally insulted every time you see a DON'T WALK signal or a speed limit sign? Do you feel that our social order is threatened by these signs and that we're now a hop skip and a jump away from invading Poland?

Just because someone says "I'll give you a million dollars to kill someone", that doesn't make it right,

No. It doesn't. But it sure does increase the probability that someone will do it.

Please note, I continue the killing/Nazi train of thought not because I think min/maxing is anywhere as important as real life horrors such as the Nazi movement, but because taking personal responsibility for your actions IS as important.

I think personal responsibility is important too. Hence me devoting a decade and half of my life to fighting for environmental and social justice issues. Hence me intentionally getting arrested to protest unjust laws, pleading guilty and serving time in jail.

But your argument that we can have personal responsibility or laws is silly. You seem to believe that because we have personal responsibility, laws are unnecessary and insulting. While anarchism is a legitimate political position to adopt, I don't think it's fair to argue that everyone who's not an anarchist is a Nazi.

I'm sorry, but it *is* the player's fault or DM's fault if they follow rules that are not balanced,

But sometimes it takes a little while, for those of us who are not great at math, to notice where and how the rules are unbalanced. We go into a store, buy a game that seems to have high production values and then, as we play, we discover the rules are unbalanced. Some shoddy designer has released a game before it was adequately playtested and we've paid them $60 for it and wasted hours and hours of time figuring out that it's a lemon.

The designer is at fault. He has ripped off me and my friends, wasting our money and our time. When you go to the store to buy fish, you have a good faith expectation it's not rotten. When you go to the store to buy a lamp, you have a good faith expectation the wires are connected. I do not see what is so special about gaming products that their manufacturers should not also be held to quality standards by consumers.

or present situations that will kill them constantly if they are not stacked for "optimum effect" for two very good reasons. They can think for themselves, and clearly thinking for himself/herself is desperately needed.

Again, I have to ask: how have you come to the conclusion that having quality standards in an industry is incompatible with free will? If your grandma buys an electric scooter and the battery stops working after two weeks, it does not mean she's not thinking for herself. It means that she didn't notice the scooter she bought was defective until after she had purchased it.

If you think everybody who buys a defective product deserves whatever they get, let me just say I never want to purchase anything you are associated with manufacturing.

My whole point is that you are not a slave to the words written in a D&D book!

I'm with you so far. I have house rules just like everyone else.

To begin with, the first "rule" in the very ruleset discussed is that the "rules" are all guidelines and can/should be ignored by the DM as he sees fit, or even at whim!

You seem to be trying to argue that because of Rule Zero, no rules matter at all. Again, I have to ask: why did you buy the books at all? Your statement about whim suggests that you and your gaming group would have been just as happy to receive a bag of oranges and felt-tipped markers in exchange for the money you handed to the clerk at the game store.

Otherwise, we have the DM choosing to not do anything about it. That's his fault. He chose to not change it or get rid of them.

It's not my fault if I decide not to open up the defective blender I've been sold and try to rewire it myself. I've purchased the blender on the assumption that its manufacturer knows more about making household appliances than I do. The same holds true for games. I am not a system design wizard; I am not especially mathematically skilled; nor am I willing to spend the time and energy it takes to playtest a system myself. I've paid somebody to do that work for me. To expect value for money is not equivalent to shirking personal respsonbility; nor is it even remotely comparable to gassing 6 million Jews to death.

Secondly, personal responsibility would trump the rules EVEN if that first "rule" was never there.

I'm all for personal responsibility as a player and as a GM. As a player, I align my objectives with those of the other party members and attempt to meet challenges and explore areas the GM seems to want me to. That's just common courtesy. And I prefer games that enhance my ability to do these things; if a game system undermines my ability to do these things, its designer is blameworthy.

In reality, the view you expressed is shared by MANY people, especially Americans. Generally, I find that it is held by anyone who has had too much success or prosperity and not had to suffer for it.

Look buddy. People in every country on the face of the earth think that reward and punishment matter; that rules and laws matter. This terrible malaise you perceive is a nigh-universal human trait.

It is a great thing to be given the benefit of the work, sacrifice and toil of those generations who came before you, but all of that is nothing without the wisdom to apprecaite the cost of those benefits. Especially when you were not the one to pay that cost. You disrespect the mothers and the fathers who worked all day, every day and lived in poverty for years so that you could have something better.

So let me get this straight: wanting to purchase adequately playtested products is an insult to every single person who has every lived in poverty anywhere? And, furthermore, is the first step towards Naziism?

This has just got to be a troll post. I have seen some serious asshatery on this forum but you win the gold star.

As a side note: The total lack of understanding of personal responsibility, or willingness to accept it in today's world scares the holy heck out of me. I seriously am afraid to have children, I fear for our future so much.

I'm afraid of you having kids too, if that's any consolation. Evidently you won't be enforcing any rules while raising them, will buy them cheap shoddy toys because you don't care about testing and will teach them to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a Nazi. I sure wouldn't want my kids near them.

Is this what the world is teaching everyone? That if you follow corrupt rules and don't incite change, you'll make out in the end and it won't be your fault?

I don't know. But what I'm saying is that if the rules are corrupt, the people who made the corrupt rules should be held responsible for the flaws in the rules. It is by holding people accountable for bad rules that we can exert the pressure necessary to make the rules better.

 

[fusangite]

It's true that the rules do reward certain kinds of behavior for certain kinds of characters. But I don't think that's necessarily 4-square on topic of player behavior. The rules do set up certain trade-offs - higher skills + sneak attack = lower hp and BAB, high BAB and good feats = low skill points, etc. But the player still has a very broad set of choices to make about the kind of PC he wants to play. The game, in that sense, does not really reward or punish behavior in the player other than to enforce certain trade-offs in choices.

Trade-offs like those you describe are at one end of the reward-punishment continuum set up in the game. At the other end you see things like paladin code breaches. Actually, if you play any alignment-restricted class the rules punish you for switching to a prohibited alignment.

Once those character choices are made then, yes, there are certain behaviors that are rewarded and punished. But the player has effectively chosen for himself what those behaviors are by designing his character.

Agreed. Until the Mystic Theurge was released, the rules punished you for multi-classing divine and arcane casting classes, for instance.

 

[DethStryke]

Hot damn I'm a wordy mo-fo. Again, sorry about the novel. If you are interested in replying, and I am more than happy to, and encourage, debate on alternate views, I would humbly ask that you read my replies in full.

As another poster has observed, your argument effectively states that game designers do not need to take any responsibility for any decision they make and can blame players and GMs for every single failing in the design of their system.

No, I'm saying the blame is equal. The designer is just as wrong as the person who abides them.

So you feel, then, that whether people are rewarded or punished for doing something has absolutely no effect whatsoever on whether they do it? I guess you don't see any point in disciplining children or having a criminal code if you believe that rules have no effect on what people do.

It's not about whether you obey rules/laws or not. Rather, it's about quality control. The rules are put forth as guidelines, and the hope is that they are balanced and fair and that everyone agrees with them. The decision to agree or disagree with whether those rules are fair or not is for the person following them to decide. One should not simply go along with anything another person says just because they say "this is the rule". The point of disciplining children is not to simply punish them for not "following the rules", but rather to emphasize and teach the abstract concept of right and wrong. If that is taught correctly, it should not matter what comes down the pike at them; they will be able to correctly discern what is right and wrong and make the appropriate decision on a case by case basis.

Your argument seems to be that people who have free will are unaffected by rules and that it is disrespectful to people's free will to suggest that they would be. What are you even doing here if you think that's the case? If it doesn't matter what rules a game has, or whether it has any rules at all, why not throw out the DMG and PHB and sit around with your friends playing 'let's pretend'? Indeed there are. So, if killing a kobold suddenly gained the consequence of losing you 1000xp, wouldn't your reaction to the kobold change?How is having rules in conflict with making case-by-case judgments? In each case, the person will factor in a number of things, one of which is what the rules say.

You are twisting my comments into an all or nothing proposition in regards to rules. That is not so. Some rules as written are good ones. They make sense, they don't harm anyone else, and they should be followed. You're dealing in absolutes without application of common sense. Common sense, combined with a feeling of right and wrong, and all decisions to follow the rules would be based on that. The benefit of the rulebooks are that a majority of the "rules" are good ones, and work well together. Like a garden, you have to weed out the bad ones or the ones that simply don't work for your group. To not do that, either out of laziness or whatever, is the fault of the DM/players AND the designers. The players for not doing so when they realize that they don't work, and the designers for not doing the same originally. Anytime errata is provided, that is a physical representation of the designer/publisher taking responsibility for their mistakes.

...Actually, to follow your analogy in a remotely rational direction, wouldn't the person refuse to do drugs because doing drugs was against the rules?

That is one way of looking at it, and could be the reason they use to fall back on, but they could also choose to do so because it can easily kill them and ruin their lives, even if the drugs were legal. Regardless of the legality of the drugs in question, the responsibility of the action of taking drugs lies with the person that takes them. I understand that this is an abstract thought process, and one that is hampered by years of society.

Wow! Hitler showed up waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy faster than I could have imagined.

No, not Hitler. I never brought up Hitler. That is your distortion based on your efforts to verbally discredit me, which continue in earnest below. I mentioned the remnants of the Nazi regime that was brought to trial after the war. The process of the Nuremberg trials specifically, which dealt with the consequences of following rules that it was clear to anyone who thought for themselves, applied common sense to them and had a working moral compass that could differ between right and wrong would have realized was very bad and should not have followed them. If you follow a law / rule you know to be bad or incorrect, then you are JUST as wrong as the person who made them. I included links to the Wikipedia articles on both the Trials and the Codes, which I encourage you to read. Although I do appreciate that ignorance of what I'm speaking of does appear to strengthen your replies.

Look buddy. If you think dialing up the rhetoric to these levels will help your case, you have not spent enough time on message boards.

But just to clarify: believing that rules matter is not actually the same as gassing 6 million Jews to death.

I never said it did. Again, you are distorting my words and clearly not reading my whole reply in your haste to reply. As you can see here, from my first post:

Please note, I continue the killing/Nazi train of thought not because I think min/maxing is anywhere as important as real life horrors such as the Nazi movement, but because taking personal responsibility for your actions IS as important.

Interesting. I will assume you simply did not read my post in full or (conveniently?) forgot that I included this.

Tell me Dethstryke: do you believe we should have laws? Or do you feel personally insulted every time you see a DON'T WALK signal or a speed limit sign? Do you feel that our social order is threatened by these signs and that we're now a hop skip and a jump away from invading Poland?No. It doesn't. But it sure does increase the probability that someone will do it.I think personal responsibility is important too. Hence me devoting a decade and half of my life to fighting for environmental and social justice issues. Hence me intentionally getting arrested to protest unjust laws, pleading guilty and serving time in jail.

You confuse the use of rules and laws with the concept of free will and personal responsibility. They exist in concert, but not to the exclusion of each other. Rules or laws are statements that exist to vocalize what one person or group of people believe to be the correct decision that everyone should follow. These rules then are presented to the people, and it is the people's decision and responsibility to agree and follow them or NOT to agree and NOT follow them. Both actions have consequences; that is the nexus of my point.

Anything that happens after that decision is made by the people is simply window dressing to the framework of free will and personal responsibility. Do not misunderstand me, if a person or group of people put forth a rule / law that is "wrong" or bad or whatever, they are to blame JUST as much (if not much more) as the person who follows it without thinking. That is the crux of personal responsibility. The problem that I am talking about, and indeed the whole long winded point I have evidently been quite poor at making, is that the person "following the rule" that they know to be bad is blaming the one who made the rule, but claiming innocence at the fact that THEY chose to follow the rule without doing anything to effect change. They are BOTH to blame, and so you cannot have one without the other. What you are looking for is an avenue to AVOID blame after the fact, and I'm saying that you should accept the responsibility for your actions, WHATEVER they are. I don’t disagree that it is a hard road to do so, but it has been said that nothing worth while is easy.

But your argument that we can have personal responsibility or laws is silly. You seem to believe that because we have personal responsibility, laws are unnecessary and insulting. While anarchism is a legitimate political position to adopt, I don't think it's fair to argue that everyone who's not an anarchist is a Nazi.But sometimes it takes a little while, for those of us who are not great at math, to notice where and how the rules are unbalanced. We go into a store, buy a game that seems to have high production values and then, as we play, we discover the rules are unbalanced. Some shoddy designer has released a game before it was adequately playtested and we've paid them $60 for it and wasted hours and hours of time figuring out that it's a lemon.

Again, I never called anyone a Nazi. I likened what you said to the defense the Nazi regime made. Please read the articles on the trial, as I think you clearly don't know what that important event was about, and it shows every time you start waving the “ZOMG he called me a Nazi!!1!” flag.

As to the rest of it, while it is unfortunate that you spent the money, it is still your fault AS WELL as the designer's fault if you continue to play with the rules you know to be bad. The difference is that at the moment you realize that the rules are lemons, you can choose to continue to follow them or affect change. If you choose to follow them despite the fact that they are lemons, then YOU made THAT decision and what happens after that, good or bad, is YOUR responsibility. REGARDLESS of your actions, all of that does not divorce the designer from blame as well! In your example, the right choice is to offer Errata for free that corrects those problems.

The designer is at fault. He has ripped off me and my friends, wasting our money and our time.

I totally agree. That is HIS slice of the responsibility pie. That does NOT excuse you from the results of YOUR actions though.

When you go to the store to buy fish, you have a good faith expectation it's not rotten. When you go to the store to buy a lamp, you have a good faith expectation the wires are connected. I do not see what is so special about gaming products that their manufacturers should not also be held to quality standards by consumers.Again, I have to ask: how have you come to the conclusion that having quality standards in an industry is incompatible with free will? If your grandma buys an electric scooter and the battery stops working after two weeks, it does not mean she's not thinking for herself. It means that she didn't notice the scooter she bought was defective until after she had purchased it.

Yes and no, it depends on the actions involved by all persons. To continue the example, it depends on what my grandma does after she now knows it is broken. If she takes the machine back and asks that it be repaired, then the responsibility of her actions is that she took the scooter back and it should be fixed. The fact that it broke IS the responsibility of the company at that point.

However.

If the battery failed because Grandma sprayed it with a hose while watering her flowers, then the battery failing is Grandma's fault. The company can take pity on her, and replace it despite the fact that it was HER fault the battery died, but that doesn't make it any less HER fault. It just means the company is willing to take the responsibility of HER actions on them; the effect of that responsibility being a new battery at their cost.

If you think everybody who buys a defective product deserves whatever they get, let me just say I never want to purchase anything you are associated with manufacturing.

If you think that when you buy a car and slam it into a wall and then expect the car company to fix it for you because it clearly couldn't handle being slammed into a wall but you think it should be, then who is to blame? I would not want you as a customer if that is the kind of mentality presented to me. Luckily for me, the mentality you attribute to me is incorrect, so I should look forward to healthy growth of sales.

I'm with you so far. I have house rules just like everyone else.You seem to be trying to argue that because of Rule Zero, no rules matter at all. Again, I have to ask: why did you buy the books at all? Your statement about whim suggests that you and your gaming group would have been just as happy to receive a bag of oranges and felt-tipped markers in exchange for the money you handed to the clerk at the game store.It's not my fault if I decide not to open up the defective blender I've been sold and try to rewire it myself. I've purchased the blender on the assumption that its manufacturer knows more about making household appliances than I do. The same holds true for games. I am not a system design wizard; I am not especially mathematically skilled; nor am I willing to spend the time and energy it takes to playtest a system myself. I've paid somebody to do that work for me. To expect value for money is not equivalent to shirking personal respsonbility...

But to continue using them and simply saying that we will suffer these poor rules because i paid money for them and they SHOULD be right is YOUR decision, not theirs. Just as I said before, you should go back to the company and demand a change. Perhaps even ask to have a revised version of their WRONG book mailed to you at no cost. Then, if they deny you, it was only THEIR fault, NOT yours because you DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT!

I removed the nazi reference because it's getting old and I believe I have adequately explained that rationale in previous paragraphs. Please refer to them above.

I'm all for personal responsibility as a player and as a GM. As a player, I align my objectives with those of the other party members and attempt to meet challenges and explore areas the GM seems to want me to. That's just common courtesy. And I prefer games that enhance my ability to do these things; if a game system undermines my ability to do these things, its designer is blameworthy.Look buddy. People in every country on the face of the earth think that reward and punishment matter; that rules and laws matter. This terrible malaise you perceive is a nigh-universal human trait.So let me get this straight: wanting to purchase adequately playtested products is an insult to every single person who has every lived in poverty anywhere? And, furthermore, is the first step towards Naziism?

Naziism isn't even a word. Rules and Laws matter, indeed. Reward and punishment matter, correct. The method you use to determine which laws and rules are good or bad is what I'm talking about, and taking responsibility for the action that you take as a result of that determination of good/bad is the crux of it.

Reward and punishment are tools employed by those who wish you to follow the rules and laws they provide. IF those rules and laws are proven to be wrong, then the rewards or punishments are JUST as wrong. They still do not absolve YOU, as a separate person, from deciding to follow those rules or laws. Nor should they. This is why standing up for what you believe, despite the punishments that may come as a result, is considered an admirable trait among human kind.

This has just got to be a troll post. I have seen some serious asshatery on this forum but you win the gold star.I'm afraid of you having kids too, if that's any consolation. Evidently you won't be enforcing any rules while raising them, will buy them cheap shoddy toys because you don't care about testing and will teach them to accuse anyone who disagrees with them of being a Nazi. I sure wouldn't want my kids near them.I don't know. But what I'm saying is that if the rules are corrupt, the people who made the corrupt rules should be held responsible for the flaws in the rules. It is by holding people accountable for bad rules that we can exert the pressure necessary to make the rules better.

I would not liken children to Nazis, but I would make sure my children were at least taught about important historic events. It is clear that your grasp of history is lacking, and that is a shame. I again strongly urge you to review these important and ground-breaking events in detail. I think they will allow you to better understand what I'm saying, rather than just a knee-jerk response of "ZOMGBBQ HE CALLED ME HITLER!!1!". Ignorance is not flattering. Attacking another verbally is a clear sign that you have run out of things to debate like a rational person. I was hoping that we could continue without the name calling.

 

[DethStryke]

If I pull the trigger on my gun and it blows up in my face due to faulty design, it's my fault for expecting the gun to work properly. Whenever I buy a gun (or a blender or any tool or appliance) I'm obligated to dismantle it to make sure it was assembled properly. By the very act of activating a device, I forfeit the right to complain about its function. Why, it's actually quite cowardly to do so--the poor gun can't defend itself against my accusations.

Despite your sarcasm, I will reply in earnest. You are indeed correct in the spirit of your comment; in those examples you would not shoulder any blame for expecting something to "work as advertised". The point I was attempting(?) to make is that AFTER you know that something does not "work as advertised", what YOU do about it is what you should take responsibility for.

If the gun blows up and you continue to pull the trigger, then shot 2, 3, 4, etc. are YOUR fault. The first one was ALL the manufacturer’s fault. The rest are yours.

This fallacious analogy is not unlike the one I made about relieving oneself in Keebler's cookie batter.

Dethstryke, you should hire yourself out as a lawyer to companies like Firestone. You have taken a laudible concept like "personal accountability" and warped it to create a world where no one can be held accountable by anyone else.

All sarcasm aside, I hope you do understand that it's not actually the rules themselves that is the actual object of criticism, but rather the human beings who designed them. They can defend themselves, and often do.

I think the rest of this is moot, as I believe my comment above reveals that we are fundamentally in agreement. My further comments, I hope, better explain my position and reveal that agreement even further. Thank you for helping me clarify my positions, as that is the general goal of even posting and entering any debate.

 

[Piratecat]

If you have to bring up Nazis, you've already lost.

Fusangite, Dethstryke, time to remind you (and everyone else) to stay on topic and away from politics. Please don't continue this hijack/argument.

If this is somehow a problem, feel free to email me.

 

[scourger]

Yes. The system/rules influences the way the game is run (DMed/GMed) and played.

 

[fusangite]

If you have to bring up Nazis, you've already lost.

Fusangite, Dethstryke, time to remind you (and everyone else) to stay on topic and away from politics. Please don't continue this hijack/argument.

If this is somehow a problem, feel free to email me.

Grrrrr... Fine.

EDIT: Actually, scratch that. Sign me up for a 3-day ban please.

 

[fusangite]

The legislature is an institution. The legislators are tools.

Nice one. Sorry this gem got lost in all the Hitler stuff.

 

[Odhanan]

Oh. My. God. I can really see both sides of the argument, but you guys should really slow it down, take a deep breath, and then maybe have some form of discussion. Right now this isn't a discussion.

 

[Psion]

Returning to a page one style response here.

I would have liked an in-between answer, but lacking that, I went with yes.

There are some reasonable expectations and allowences for a system. Ultimately, though, the system should support the players, otherwise you should go shopping for a new system.