Defining RPG's Take 2 - Prescriptive vs Descriptive

[Hussar]

A while ago, I tried to take a stab at differentiating RPG's from other games. The reception of my ideas was... mixed . Ok, fair enough. Critics of my idea made some very valid points and I can see now where I went wrong, although, to be perfectly honest, I do think that there is some validity in the idea that RPG's are differentiated from other games by the fact that RPG's require the group to create the actual game that you play. But, I don't want to rehash that. I'm going to go back to the drawing board on that one and let it lie.

No. Thinking about it, I think I might have another angle to take. And that's what I'd like to discuss here.

Basically, the idea is this: In RPG's, the mechanics of the game are descriptive while in non-RPG's, the rules are prescriptive.

Let me expand on that. It's true that in many non-RPG's, you can create scenarios to play - Warhammer is a great example of this. But, in Warhammer, even after you create that scenario, what you actually do in that scenario is prescribed by the rules of Warhammer. The rules say that the player, on his or her turn, can do A, B or C. The player may not choose to do X which is not prescribed by the mechanics of the game. So, I cannot suddenly decide that my orc figure falls in love with that skeleton figure and they go off and have a wonderful life together. I cannot choose to pull out a Magic the Gathering card and use it in my Poker game. Well, not without serious chance of getting punched in the nose by the other players.

Essentially, if I created a Warhammer scenario and handed it off to someone else, it would play out mostly the same. The details would be different of course, one side or the other might win, someone gets a real hot or cold streak on the dice, that sort of thing. I remember playing an old Axis and Allies game years ago and watching my German forces get annihilated in the second round as I couldn't roll a single success. Shortest game of A&A I had ever seen. But, again, nothing that happened was outside the prescribed mechanics of the game.

But, in all RPG's, the mechanics are not prescriptive. They are descriptive. If the player chooses to do A, B or C or even X, the players then engage the mechanics in order to resolve the results of that action. Which leads to each RPG table being a very idiosyncratic collection of resolutions that are virtually impossible to replicate at another table. Because the mechanics are descriptive, player choices (whether they are a player or the DM/GM/whatever) will create a chain of events that will play out very differently at different tables.

To me, this is the essential difference between RPG's and non-RPG's. The way the mechanics are used in play are very different. You don't suddenly decide that your car runs over the thimble in Monopoly. You can't. It isn't allowed by the mechanics. In any non-RPG, EVERY action is prescribed by the mechanics and this applies to board games, card games or computer games. But an RPG does have this limitation. If your PC's decide to cover a moon in invisible whale scrotum, they can do so (and yes, this is an actual event from an actual RPG that I ran - Sufficiently Advanced can get seriously weird).

Am I barking up the wrong tree again?

 

[Blue]

I'm reminded of playing 4e. I wanted to trip someone in combat. Because there were powers that would knock someone prone, it was determined that I could not do it without an appropriate power. That seems to be more in the prescriptive.

A more general example is that I can't have my fighter just decide to cast a spell. Or my star trek doctor cast a spell. Or my hard-boiled detective. We're just so used to the boundaries of the rules that we don't try to break them.

Many years ago my daughter wanted to know what I was doing when I was making a D&D character. When I explained she wanted to make one. And trying to fit what she wanted to do without knowledge of the shape of the rules just wasn't possible. So I ended up explaining classes to her, and she decided on druid because it did some of what she wanted - healing, able to turn into a cat. But explaining the ability scores she wanted her dump stat to be wisdom because she felt her character was impulsive and lacked common sense, but to be "agile like Peter Parker". (Not like Spider-man, like Peter Parker. *shrug*). That ... makes a pretty lousy druid by the rules, but could make a perfectly fine character in some other RPG or in a story.

So the rules are there, and we adjust what we do to fit inside them, without really thinking about it because of our exposure to them.

 

[Hussar]

I'm reminded of playing 4e. I wanted to trip someone in combat. Because there were powers that would knock someone prone, it was determined that I could not do it without an appropriate power. That seems to be more in the prescriptive.

A more general example is that I can't have my fighter just decide to cast a spell. Or my star trek doctor cast a spell. Or my hard-boiled detective. We're just so used to the boundaries of the rules that we don't try to break them.

Many years ago my daughter wanted to know what I was doing when I was making a D&D character. When I explained she wanted to make one. And trying to fit what she wanted to do without knowledge of the shape of the rules just wasn't possible. So I ended up explaining classes to her, and she decided on druid because it did some of what she wanted - healing, able to turn into a cat. But explaining the ability scores she wanted her dump stat to be wisdom because she felt her character was impulsive and lacked common sense, but to be "agile like Peter Parker". (Not like Spider-man, like Peter Parker. *shrug*). That ... makes a pretty lousy druid by the rules, but could make a perfectly fine character in some other RPG or in a story.

So the rules are there, and we adjust what we do to fit inside them, without really thinking about it because of our exposure to them.

I'd point out though that your fighter can certainly try to cast spells. He'll just fail. But, there's nothing stopping him from trying. ((And, I'm sorry that your 4e DM was so poor, but, that's another story)) Being able to try something does not guarantee success. But, in a non-RPG, you cannot try at all. There's no way to do anything other than the prescribed actions in board games or computer games. If the game doesn't let you climb, then you absolutely cannot even attempt to climb.

And, really, the fact that I can make a "lousy" druid shows the difference between RPG's and non-RPG's. The mechanics describe a druid. And, the mechanics do describe a good vs a bad druid. But, the mechanics don't force you to play only one druid. You have the freedom to choose to play a bad druid simply because the mechanics are descriptive.

There's nothing stopping me from playing a 4 Str fighter with a spork. Sure, I'll suck, but, sucking is not prevented by the mechanics.

 

[Blue]

I'd point out though that your fighter can certainly try to cast spells. He'll just fail. But, there's nothing stopping him from trying. ((And, I'm sorry that your 4e DM was so poor, but, that's another story)) Being able to try something does not guarantee success. But, in a non-RPG, you cannot try at all. There's no way to do anything other than the prescribed actions in board games or computer games. If the game doesn't let you climb, then you absolutely cannot even attempt to climb.

This isn't correct. My fighter can not take the "Cast a Spell" action. There is no way in the rules to attempt in the first place. So it's not mechanically supported.

If all you are looking for someone to say "the rules don't allow that", you can get that in any game. I can try to steal from the bank in Monopoly and be told no just as easily.

And, really, the fact that I can make a "lousy" druid shows the difference between RPG's and non-RPG's. The mechanics describe a druid. And, the mechanics do describe a good vs a bad druid. But, the mechanics don't force you to play only one druid. You have the freedom to choose to play a bad druid simply because the mechanics are descriptive.

There's nothing stopping me from playing a 4 Str fighter with a spork. Sure, I'll suck, but, sucking is not prevented by the mechanics.

[/quote]

And you've missed the entire point of that section. That my daughter had a character concept that can't be described successfully using the rules. Her concept is a useful one, the mechanics would make it nearly unplayable - which is not the concept.

 

[Umbran]

I think pointing out that there are some actions that are not allowed is missing the point.

Yes, my character doesn't have the wings, spells, or magic items that allow them to fly, so they cannot fly. That doesn't make the game suddenly 100% prescriptive.

I think the central point is still there - if you are playing chess, you have a list of allowed moves, and *everything else* is forbidden. In a typical board or card game, what you do on your turn in a normal game is very specifically spelled out for you - first you roll the die, then you move your piece, and then you resolve what happens, given where you land on the board.....

In an RPG, it is more like there's a list of things the character cannot do, and *everything else* is at least possible to try, if occasionally unlikely. Maybe you roll the die, maybe you don't. In Monopoly, I roll a die, and I do not control where I move. if I land on Park Place with two hotels on it, I hand over a whole lot of money. In D&D, I *choose* whether I enter an expensive tavern, and maybe I hand over a lot of money. Maybe I sing for my supper. Maybe I skive off before dawn to avoid paying. Maybe I start a bar brawl that ends up burning the hotel to the ground.

I think, in the face of this, the idea that D&D is particularly prescriptive is weak. This isn't really a binary choice - wholly prescriptive or wholly descriptive, with nohting in between. There's a continuum. D&D has some things you can't do, but the rules are still largely descriptive.

 

[Umbran]

That being said... "the rules are descriptive" is insufficient as a definition. If nothing else, it fails to differentiate role-playing games from story-telling games, which I expect we would find are also descriptive. It probably also fails to differentiate from some forms of simulation games - like SimCity, where within a domain, you are largely allowed to do whatever you darn well feel like.

And, as in previous discussion, I submit that we are talking about a genre definition - aim for a definition by inclusion, rather than exclusion - talk about what helps make a game an RPG, not what eliminates a candidate from being one. Or, to be self-referential, the definition should be descriptive, not prescriptive

 

[pemerton]

So the rules are there, and we adjust what we do to fit inside them, without really thinking about it because of our exposure to them.

Agreed.

I'm reminded of playing 4e. I wanted to trip someone in combat. Because there were powers that would knock someone prone, it was determined that I could not do it without an appropriate power. That seems to be more in the prescriptive.

With respect, that seems like poor GMing by someone who hasn't read p 42 of the DMG.

Which isn't to dispute that rules are prescrptive. Of course they are (that's pretty much the definition of a rule). Page 42 is prescriptive. But it doesn't proscribe knocking someone prone without a power. (STR vs Reflex. Done.)

I'm sorry that your 4e DM was so poor

Agreed.

I'd point out though that your fighter can certainly try to cast spells. He'll just fail.

<snip>

But, in a non-RPG, you cannot try at all.

I think this is trading on an unhelpful ambiguity.

The player can declare the action My fighter tries to cast a spell. And that action will succeed: the fighter, in the fiction, tries to cast a spell, and nothing happens.

But the player can't declare the action My fighter casts a spell. In D&D, at least, that's simply not a legal move for the player of a (non-Eldrtich Knight) fighter.

The mechanics describe a druid. And, the mechanics do describe a good vs a bad druid. But, the mechanics don't force you to play only one druid. You have the freedom to choose to play a bad druid simply because the mechanics are descriptive.

The mechanics tell you what counts as a legal PC build. Eg in AD&D a druid must be human or half-elven and must have at least 12 WIS and 15 CHA. In 5e a druid can be any race and has no stat minimums, but the rules still prescribe what stats a PC can have (eg you can't just say "My druid has all 18s" and at most tables you probably can't say "My druid has all 3s" either).

The fact that the rules leave a player to choose certain stuff doesn't show they're descriptive. The law of contract doesn't tell you whether to buy clothes, food or RPG books, but that doesn't mean the law of contract isn't prescriptive!

 

[pemerton]

This "descriptive vs prescriptive" thing was basically incoherent when Mearls said it, and that hasn't changed.

Here's an example of a prescriptive rule: How do you work out what hapens when you declare as an action that you cover the moon in inivislbe whale scrotum? By following such-and-such a procedure. Many RPG rules look like this.

Here's one sort of descriptive rule: the rule that describes universal gravitation. It's descriptive because the rule is an attempt to describe - in a highly general and highly systematic way - a fundamental physical process. But no RPG rules look like this - they aren't statements of natural law like universal gravitation.

Here's a different sort of descriptive rule (with credit to HLA Hart for the example): at least c 1960, the English go to the cinema on a Friday evening. It's descriptive because the rule is an attempt to describe - in a generalising fashin - a certain widespread if not strictly universal social practice.

Here's another example from Hart: again at least c 1960, English men take of their hats when they go into churches. This is descriptive - again of a widespread if not striclty universal social practice - and, unlike the cinema example, the practice is understood by those who participate in it as prescriptive. There's not such thing as "breaking" the rules of universal gravitation. There's no such thing as "breaking" the rule about going to the cinema on a Friday evening - if English people stop doing that, it just ceases to be a rule. But one can break the rule about taking off one's hat in church, and may well be censured for doing so (as rude, or sacreligious, or both).

But RPG rules aren't descriptions of widespread social practice. Like other game rules, they are (partial) constituents of a specialised social activity. And they have prescriptive force, in two sense. First, like the example above, they tell you how to do things within the context of playing the game. And second, as a general rule the participants in the activity expect them to be adhered to (much like the no-hats-in-church rule). That is, they are treated as prescriptive by the participants in the activity. Indeed, because they're (partly) constitutive of the activity, these two modes of prescription come together: the expectation among participants that we are going to do this thing together rather than some other thing generates the expectation that, when a question comes up within the context of playing the game (like is this move allowed? or what happens when a player makes this move?), it will be answered by following the rule. External prescription - social expectations - reinforce internal prescription - following the procedures the game sets out.

I say that rules are partial constituents of an RPG because a game as an activity has constituent elements other than its rules. (Eg in the context of D&D there is no rule that play invovle an adventuring party, but that's a pretty fundamental element of D&D play although no doubt there are outlier instances occurring in the world.)

Now just as with the no-hats-in-church rule, you can get interesting questions arising when social practices change. What happens if half the churchgoing men start keeping their hats on, but the other half keep telling them off about it. What's happened to the rule? There's no uniform opinion about the answer to this question among sociologists, philosophers and legal theorists.

So likewise, what happens if, among the community of D&D players, a widespread practice emerges of (say) ignoring the rules for stat allocations, and instead allowing players to pick whatever stats they want for their PCs, even up to six starting 18s? Opinions would differ here, just as they do for the more widely studied examples. One might want to say that it's silly to insist that a game has a rule X when most of the professed players of that game do something different from X.

But in that sense of a rule being descriptive, RPGs are no different from chess. If every player in every chess club the world over changed their expectations about castling - so that (say) you can castle even across an attacked square - then it would make little sense to insist that they're no longer playing chess but playing some other game. Games, like other social activities, can change and evolve over time.

TL;DR: there's no sense in which RPG rules are descriptive that distinguishes RPGs from other games.

 

[Hussar]

That being said... "the rules are descriptive" is insufficient as a definition. If nothing else, it fails to differentiate role-playing games from story-telling games, which I expect we would find are also descriptive. It probably also fails to differentiate from some forms of simulation games - like SimCity, where within a domain, you are largely allowed to do whatever you darn well feel like.

And, as in previous discussion, I submit that we are talking about a genre definition - aim for a definition by inclusion, rather than exclusion - talk about what helps make a game an RPG, not what eliminates a candidate from being one. Or, to be self-referential, the definition should be descriptive, not prescriptive

Personally, I don't see any point in differentiating "story telling games" from RPG's since story telling games ARE RPG's.

And Sim City, while you have a great deal of freedom, is very prescriptive. You can only build what the game lets you build. You may not build anything else. Other than what the game permits me to do, there is nothing else I can do in the game.

 

[pemerton]

Personally, I don't see any point in differentiating "story telling games" from RPG's since story telling games ARE RPG's.

I don't play many storytelling games, but earlier this year I did play A Penny for My Thoughts. It's not an RPG. This came through very clearly when one of the players had to leave, and went to hand over the page of notes made playing the game: "Here's my character - I mean, my narrative!"

Here are some differences: (1) each player is the locus of his/her own shared fiction, but these fictions need not connect; (2) the moves in the game don't consist of action declarations for a protagonist in the fiction, but rather are suggestions to other about "what happened next" or else responses to such suggestions; and (3), as a result of (2), there is no "playing the fiction" as there is in an RPG. You don't leverage the fiction to have your character achieve goals - you are, via the game procedures, tellin a story about what happened to you (as your ingame persona) that resulted in you losing your memory.

Also, the rules of A Penny for My Thoughts are prescriptive - they tell you how to play the game.