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Do You Use Your RPG Rules as Written?
- Thread starter Mark
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Celebrim
Legend
We've had some pretty notorious arguments over your distrust of the DM and distrust of the motives of DMs, but I think underneath all that, we are tying to accomplish the same thing at the table in very different ways.
I totally get that, for several reasons. First, one of the reasons I typically have 100's of pages of house rules is precisely to keep players from feeling like they are being blindsided, or feeling like they are trying to negotiate a reality that is slippery and ever changing and subjective. This is pretty darn essential if you are running a competitive game like Bloodbowl or Necromunda, but its in my opinion still very important even if the game is nominally cooperative like D&D. I am a very vocal opponent of the idea of "rulings not rules" not only because I consider it incoherent nonsense, not only because I think suggests the speaker has no concept of the importance of procedures of play, but also because I think often as not it is an excuse for DM authoritarian behavior.
Unlike you though, I don't necessarily think that adhering to RAW actually in and of itself guarantees that. I do think that there might be some correspondence between RAW adhering DMs and DMs that see one of their primary roles as being a referee and neutral arbiter, but I've also seen plenty of RAW adhering GMs when I ask questions about methodology, encourage me to resolve all the scenario problems with illusionism as if it was trivially obvious and of course the GM should use his power in that manner. Any GM that thinks illusionism is the one size fits all solution to everything does not believe his job is to be a neutral arbiter, and any GM that doesn't believe his job description includes neutral arbiter fundamentally has as much distrust of his players as you have of your GMs.
I also don't believe that the RAW is ever complete, and invariably each table will generate different rulings and procedures of play that extend the rules where the rules are silent. They'll often do this while claiming that they are playing strictly by the RAW, even though if you compare two tables doing that, you'll see that the game that they've produced is often radically different. This is especially true of older game systems where the procedures of play were assumed by the writer but rarely if ever actually stated, or in 'rules light' games that typically leave almost everything but the fortune mechanic up to the GM.
If I sit down at the table and the DM pulls out his three inch binder of house rules, I'm very, very likely to recuse myself from the game, simply due to past experiences. Which, really, is probably a shame because I'm possibly missing out on some really great games. OTOH, fool me several times, and I'll finally figure out what I want.
Back when ENWorld had a dedicated house rules forum, most of my interaction with EnWorld was through that forum. And one thing that was immediately obvious was that the vast majority of people smithing out house rules, lacked the skill and understanding to actually do that successfully. They either had really vague ideas about what they wanted to achieve with the rule change, or else if they had an idea about what they wanted to achieve the rules change that they were proposing rarely achieved that. Some where the equivalent of Monte Haul GMs that were handing out treasure in the form of broken rules, and others where the equivalent of death dungeon DMs that wanted to change the rules to "keep players in their place". Most of my posts from that era consisted of me trying to explain to some young DM why they probably shouldn't change the rules until they had a bit more experience and a very concrete reason why they wanted to change something and what they hoped to achieve by that change.
This is where you lose me. Because this sounds like you're saying that if one player successfully demonstrates tactical play and the other players then learn from that and start using the same tactics, you then punish the players by reducing the effectiveness of being tactical. It should be SOP to seek maximum tactical advantage. To me, that's when a party goes from being a chaotic collection of conflicting interests and agendas and becomes a cohesive combat unit. And it would just be bewildering to me to have the DM say that the party is playing wrong by seeking tactical advantage.
This is entirely out of the blue. To be clear, I haven't said anything that would suggest I think RPGs are just "dungeon crawls and killing stuff." I'm not sure why you felt the need to go off on this tangent.
Nobody said anything about just wanting RAW or the GM not making rulings. There is a huge difference between "The GM made a ruling." and "The GM keeps making new rulings about already decided things because he can't be bothered to learn the rules or remember his ruling from one week to the next." I personally don't care if the game is run RAW or with plenty of house-rulings. I just have bad experiences with inconsistent GMs who play by the seat of their pants and think "on the fly" rulings are a valid substitute for, you know, learning the rules.
Mercule
Adventurer
No. What I'm saying is that there is the potential for rulings that are just mechanically better than they should be. The +1/+2 for higher ground is a somewhat contrived example. I do think it's appropriate for tactically-minded players to look for things like higher ground to give them advantages. But... if turns into a situation where all the PCs and NPCs make a mad dash for the tables, leaving cover and/or taking on opportunity attacks, then there's something not right.
Now, I don't know that a +2 for higher ground would actually cause that sort of weird ripple effect. As I said, it's a somewhat contrived example. The point is that, it's something I'd consider if a player wanted to do something not covered by the rules, but that sounded reasonable.
Really, though, you calling out the idea of tweaking the bonus as unreasonable is exactly the sort of thing that would cause me to stop working with a player to have their character do cool things. I'm more than willing to look at a player suggestion and say, "Yeah, that does sound like something that would grant an advantage, so let's try it." But, if it turns into an unreasonable advantage, then the player needs to be willing to work with me, as well. If the "try it out" only works in the player's favor, then it's not a matter of the DM being unreasonable. It's the player being uncooperative.
Never said you did. In trying to explain the sort of game I enjoy, I realized that I could be taken as dissing those folks who leaned to the tactical and "old school" dungeon delves (my wife happens to be one of those). The pure "kill things and take stuff" would be the extreme example of that, so I just clarified that I wasn't throwing shade that way.
Oh, if the GM were a complete flake, I'd hate it, too. Maybe the key point that has us talking past us is that I nail the ruling the vast majority of the time. If the rule is in the book, I'd prefer to follow it unless I have good reason not to (which shouldn't be whimsical). I also have a darn good memory for rules and am, typically, the guy everyone hands the rules to to digest and explain for everyone because I'm the one most likely to get them all right the first time and remember them.
I'm at a point in my life, though, where I have a lot more going on than just gaming. My youngest kid is now the age I was when I learned to play D&D. My oldest is heading off to college. I've got a 40+ hour a week job that requires me to do to tech what I used to do for games. Remembering whether higher ground gives a +1 or +2 bonus has a slightly different priority than it did 25 years ago. It definitely doesn't have the priority to stop the game for 10 minutes to confirm that I was right, when we only play for 4 hours every-other week instead of 10-12 hours every week -- and I'm 80% confident that I'm right and 99% confident that a mistake isn't going to kill a PC. We can look it up after the game. Or, if it's a rule that doesn't exist and I have to make a call, we can tweak it if it even ever comes up again. For something that does end up becoming a regular thing, I would definitely want to be consistent and have it written down.
On the other hand, I had a case in 3.5 where a player made a stink because he tried something and I made a different ruling than I had three years earlier, under 3.0, when he was playing a different character, in a different setting, and we were all coming back to D&D after a few years with WoD. I honestly couldn't even remember the event, let alone the ruling or whether there were other factors at work. While it would have been nice to get it exactly the same, I don't feel particularly bad in giving a +1 vs. a +2 modifier for something that came up, literally, twice in eight(ish) years of play. Heck, I'm not even sure the player was right in his recollection. So... that's the sort of inconsistency I'm talking about. Not week-to-week variance or not bothering with learning the rules, just being willing to be "close enough" for things that are uncommon and confirm/revisit them later, rather than being OCD about things.
For the whole "higher ground" thing, that's just an example of there being no rule in the book and it's OK to play test rulings before committing them to stone. By objecting to refining house rules (rulings) based on experience in play, you're really just saying that the GM should either not work with the players by working outside the lines of RAW or that the GM should always make the least favorable ruling his players will let him get away with because God help him if he's ever too generous and has to walk it back.
FWIW, my most recent "walk it back" was in PotA, where I'd been so easy on stealth when combined with temorsense (spoilers) that the rogue was able to set the party up in such a way that they pretty much made it through the Water temple without the cultists having a chance to get an attack off, even when they had to open heavy stone doors. Everyone agreed that the combo was just too good and the players would have felt cheated if I'd used it on them, but it took a bit to figure out how to get all the rules (stealth, initiative, tremorsense, etc.) could interact correctly without removing the clear RAW of each or totally nerfing tremorsense or stealth. I made the initial ruling to favor the players (when in doubt, do that), but the remaining Earth cult would have eaten them alive, if it'd been applied consistently. So, we refined it.
Hussar
Legend
Now, here is one area where we are in 100% agreement. I've largely come to the same conclusions that you have here. Yes, it's fun to bang out new mechanics, but, watching what people post has made me realize that many people are very bad at it. Like you say, they either set the numbers too high or too low and wind up with mechanics that just aren't all that good.
Heh, it's funny [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], while I was writing my answer to [MENTION=5100]Mercule[/MENTION], I did have you in mind when I mentioned 3 inch binders.
And, I know, from your posts, that you spend incredible amounts of time on your game. Fantastic stuff. But, I also know myself well enough that I would be a very bad fit at your table. I just would. The constant rule changes would bug the heck out of me and I would wind up spending far more time whinging about this or that rule change than actually playing. I've gotten very used to playing in groups where RAW is generally the baseline we're all working from. From 3e onwards, the groups I played in and DM'd have generally tried to adhere to RAW. It works better for us. I'm not interested in playing amateur game designer nor am I interested, particularly in indulging anyone else's amateur game designer proclivities. I just want to play the game that we've agreed to sit down and play.
Mercule
Adventurer
I'll agree with this, too. I'd say I'm better than average, but that doesn't mean I always get it right the first time. Even the pros play test stuff.
I didn't have a 3" binder, but I did use one of those legal accordion folders and I'm pretty sure my stack of house/setting rules was thicker than the 1E DMG. As I moved beyond AD&D, those eventually became outdated to the point I only have the pure fluff material around, anymore.Heh, it's funny [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION], while I was writing my answer to [MENTION=5100]Mercule[/MENTION], I did have you in mind when I mentioned 3 inch binders.
I've gotten very used to playing in groups where RAW is generally the baseline we're all working from. From 3e onwards, the groups I played in and DM'd have generally tried to adhere to RAW. It works better for us. I'm not interested in playing amateur game designer nor am I interested, particularly in indulging anyone else's amateur game designer proclivities. I just want to play the game that we've agreed to sit down and play.
I tried running 3E/3.5E as straight-up RAW. The system strongly encourages it and the couple times I did tweak things -- even with Unearthed Arcana content -- it was clear just how tightly that particular system was wound. Whether this is a feature or bug probably depends on perspective, but I would definitely count it as a bug and it was one of the things I grew to despise about the system. It's also a cultural contribution that has lasted beyond the run of that system and which I definitely consider as a negative. I don't have any beef with tables that want to play RAW and I've had the same sort of WTF moments with crazy GMs as many folks. I do think it's appropriate, however, for a GM to make rules for a variety of reasons.
I do think that, when and how much it's okay to change needs to be a group/table social contract, though. As you say, you probably wouldn't have as much fun at [MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] or my tables. Likewise, I wouldn't do as well in a 3.5 or Pathfinder game that was straight RAW. The "default mode" has shifted, over the years, though. AD&D kinda made the implicit assumption that each GM would have free reign to run their table as they saw fit. Gygax made some comments about how far you could push it and still legitimately claim to be playing D&D, but he certainly didn't argue that the GM had the right to run the table. The d20/3.5 era was the opposite. There was an almost explicit push towards making sure the GM had a hard time changing rules or even making on-the-fly rulings without a lot of thought and even specific permission from the players.
Personally, I think there's a reasonable middle ground and that 5E is closer to it that any prior edition. The GM doesn't get to be whimsical in approach to the rules, but he needs the authority that comes with the responsibility of his role at the table. Don't change rules just to change them or that try to force the rest of the group to play a game only you like. On the other hand, it's your job to keep things moving. A good GM should not just know the RAW, but the underlying principles to why the rules behave that way. Once you've got that, you have the freedom to make rulings during play. You also have the option to intentionally deviate from RAW to encourage a certain flavor or play style. But... your job is also to make sure the rest of the table has fun, not push them around. A GM shouldn't have to run every ruling or house rule by the entire group or "put it to committee", but you should understand what sort of changes are going to make folks uncomfortable and respect those boundaries.
As my lifestyle and time availability has changed, this means that I'm currently more in a mode of rules-light systems that allow me to use my experience to keep the game moving and fun without having to worry about minutiae that no one else has time to read, either. We're playing RPGs because we've always loved them, but we know we don't have the time we used to. Actually, most of my players are only reading the parts of the PHB that directly apply to their characters. They rely on me to keep things running and let them know when an appropriate UA article comes out (and even print it out for them, most of the time).
Celebrim
Legend
Making good rules and particularly rules that prove functional and useful in play is not easy. Not only do the pros play test stuff, they frequently even after play testing have rules that aren't well thought out.
One thing that I think older systems have as an advantage on post-FORGE systems is most Indy inspired systems are imagined whole cloth, usually without any play testing at all, based on a designer's conception of what an elegant, unified system will look like. And those systems are so tightly designed, play testing can't reveal much about them. There isn't much that you can actually tweak or change. The system just is, like it or leave it. Most of the time I leave it. I find that systems that grow organically out of play tend to vastly outperform (for me at least) those that were conceived fully formed from the mind of the designer. I admire those conceptions, and I read for example everything by Luke Crane, and try to apply what I learn to my table, but I'd never actually run Mouse Guard or Burning Wheel. I buy the rules to read them, and that's about it.
I was headed that way late in my AD&D era as I became increasingly frustrated with various aspects of the game. At the time, I lacked the language to really grapple with the problem intellectually, and I tended to - as many did in that era - fetishize 'realism' as the missing ingredient that was going to fix the holes in the game.
Had I had a word processor at the time (something I didn't get until '96) I might have stayed with AD&D, but I became increasingly frustrated with trying to track my 'errata' and house rules on hand written notes. So I spent the later part of the '90s experimenting with different 'more realistic' systems. The problem with those systems though I was to discover is that they were too much of a burden on play and especially on prep. They also didn't actually fix a lot of the central problems that I had had with the game during my AD&D era. I learned a lot from systems like GURPS and it influenced how I look at rules, but I don't ever want to run GURPS again. Besides, I ended up with a 1" thick set of GURPS house rules (many of which made it into later editions of the game).
When 3e came out I was largely done with RPGS out of frustration with them, lack of friends that wanted to play, and a deep love of games coming out of the German board gaming renaissance and an abiding love for Bloodbowl (GW's one real masterpiece IMO). I didn't get drawn into it again until a friend of a friend tried to get us all to play a game during the Christmas holidays (he was pushing either 3e D&D or Delta Green, neither of which I'd paid much attention to until that point).
The thing that blew me away as I read the 3e rules was that it was the game I had wanted to write 10 years before, cleaned up and in many ways more elegant than I'd imagined it. For example, what the designers were doing with combat maneuvers and attacks of opportunity paralleled what I had been doing with parry/riposte mechanics. That said...
RAW the system had some obvious problems right off the bat, and a bunch of even bigger problems that became apparent as the characters leveled up. The more books they published, the worse the problems got. PrC's went first. By 3.5 I'd had enough. So much was changed in 3.5 that clearly showed that they hadn't really play tested at all. The changes weren't organic. They looked very much like the sort of changes I'd expect to see bad designers make on the house rule forums. Unlike the original core rules, it was very clear that the 3.5 designers weren't really drawing on their experience as 1e DMs to figure out what problems needed to be solved. The changes to polymorph for example were obviously not tested and were right on their face immediately recognizable as bad ideas by anyone that had played the earlier editions. Casters were already a problem in 3.0: 3.5 blew the doors right off.
I'm pretty sure I would not play with a group that played 3.5 'RAW' and which blessed every single book published by WotC in that era as valid at the table. 3.5 without any restrictions at all is just a mess that depends on a bunch of implicit or explicit table contracts not to abuse it too much. But even more than that, I think it's the attitude implied by such a decision that would drive me away. Those tables to me are basically saying chargen is 100% of the game and the purpose of play is to facilitate chargen. Moreover, to me there is a bit of incoherence here in a table that says "No house rules at all" but readily accepts every single rule published in an official book. To me, all of those supplements official or not is just some other DMs house rules, that he's been lucky enough to have been paid to publish. The fact that he got paid to do it in no way guarantees though that those rules are somehow better than what the table or the DM might have come up with themselves through play. In point of fact, most of the 3.5 supplements were clearly not playtested and churned out to generate revenue streams regardless of how the rules enhanced or detracted from the game. It was clear very soon after 3.5 that WotC had lost interest in making the game better, and was just trying to milk the cash cow. The idea that those rules are somehow more valid than what you adopt to fix problems actually encountered in play to me boggles my mind.
[MENTION=22779]Hussar[/MENTION]: I have no idea why you think my table rules are less stable than the RAW of 3.5 edition, or really any official edition. If anything, my house rules are _more stable_ and less subject to change than the RAW. The RAW gets errata all the time, and your table doesn't get input on those changes. The RAW gets altered or extended by new supplements all the time. Why should the table be forced to accept everything or anything that is in that supplement? Moreover, since the goal of writing my house rules up in a formal manner is to limit the number of times I have to make rulings, I probably less rarely make a ruling that I can't reference the letter of the rules than someone running the RAW. Running the RAW doesn't stop you having problems with rules interpretation. The RAW is and has been vague in every edition. You frequently don't notice this though until you actually use the rules, particularly if the player is creative in his propositions. New house rules only happen generally when something clunky happens in play that reveals just how dumb the RAW is. I rarely if ever have to amend my house rules. It's the RAW that generally has the holes in it, largely because its the RAW that was written as a result of play testing.
Hussar
Legend
[MENTION=4937]Celebrim[/MENTION] - whereas I ran 3e/3.5 for quite a few years and rarely had any of the issues that seem to trouble you so much. We just didn't. The game ran best when we just stopped trying to fiddle with it. Again, it's all about different experiences.
It has very little to do with stability and more to do with the fact that I have zero interest in learning another game, particularly someone's home-brew one. Again, I just don't.
Note, RAW =/= you must accept every single book. Where is that part of RAW? RAW means that the rules that you use, you follow. Not, just because it's in a book somewhere, that we're not using, we still must abide by. That would be bizarre to reference a book that no one is using.
It has very little to do with stability and more to do with the fact that I have zero interest in learning another game, particularly someone's home-brew one. Again, I just don't.
Note, RAW =/= you must accept every single book. Where is that part of RAW? RAW means that the rules that you use, you follow. Not, just because it's in a book somewhere, that we're not using, we still must abide by. That would be bizarre to reference a book that no one is using.
Mercule
Adventurer
I think I get what you're saying, but I don't entirely agree. I think one advantage a lot of older games had is that they were created by folks who liked statistics and nerdly pursuits in the vein of military history. I'm not sure they did much more play testing than modern games, but the probabilities did a good job of modeling what they were intended to model (at least, close enough for playability) and were mathematically transparent, for the most part -- the dependencies only went one layer deep. Some newer games either go the "indy" route of heavily favoring the narrative over gamism or simulationism or try to "fix" the gaps in the shallow/transparent math of older systems. 3.0/3.5 has multiple layers of math that are rather interdependent, for good or ill. Fate uses a much bigger hand wave in, effectively, saying "Characters who are exceptional in something should succeed in exceptional tasks, most of the time," and built their bell curve from there -- though they're more focused on the narrative than anything else. There are also some (Savage Worlds, Genesys) that look quite good, but don't scratch an itch I have -- I think.
There are a lot of other modern games that I haven't played because, quite frankly, they're crap and don't bring anything to the table beyond the publisher's vanity. I would agree that they look neither well tested nor grounded in good math.
I played an afternoon of Phoenix Command, at a con, once. It was enjoyable, but pretty much cured me of my nascent fetishism with reality. I managed to get shot in the face with a shotgun slug. Actually, I know that my mouth was open, because it exited the back of my head without harming the front. My character survived the damage, itself. The immediate shock didn't kill him, either. Nor did the shock after half a second. Or one second. Nope. He bled out for a full two seconds before his body finally shut down from shock. I didn't hate the experience, by any means. But, I knew I'd never be able to compete with that level of realism in my own system or tweaking another. I also knew that I wanted the game to move a bit faster and for heroics to be possible. So.... I learned, right there, that there was a difference between realism and verisimilitude (though I didn't know the word, at the time) and that what I really wanted was verisimilitude.
I've played one session of GURPS and it was probably the single worst gaming experience I've had. The GM was well respected, so I don't think it was him. I just hated the system. Can't tell you why, anymore.
3E brought me back to D&D because it looked to fix some of the things that drove me away from AD&D -- class lock-in, mismatched mechanics (why was grapple D%, but combat D20?), little-to-no ability to customize your PC beyond class. It did deliver on those, but caused its own set of problems.
I cannot tell you how much I grew to hate the feat treadmill and the entire "char ops" mentality. I'm all for having enough command of the rules to not make stupid characters. I'm just not a fan of numbers over personality. Fortunately, my group is largely of the same mind and, over the years, a couple of short-term players have been dubbed "Numbers" and "Super Numbers" by the other players because there wasn't any actual character there.
Mercule
Adventurer
While I've had experiences more akin to Celebrim, it's generally been limited to one of three scenarios: 1) a player having a bad day and being uncharacteristically argumentative and rules-laywerish, 2) a short-term or guest player, or 3) a horror story from one of my players who also played in another group. My core group is pretty solid and sane.
This is actually the biggest reason why my group is still playing D&D. I don't really have any huge problems with 5E, but tend towards being somewhat promiscuous with games -- variety is the spice of life. My players, on the other hand, are more about just being comfortable with what they're doing. Considering I've got two players that have someone else (me) build the stats for their character and another player who can't seem to remember what his abilities do or look them up until his turn, I'm not sure where the strong attachment to a particular rules set comes from. It's especially odd, to me, that the strongest opposition to changing systems comes from the two players who don't manage their own characters and (less odd) the only borderline char ops player in the group. But, I have a five person group, and that's not nothing. Also, one of the "make my character for me" players is one of the more tactical minded and leader-ish players, so it's not like she's phoning it in, she just doesn't want to fiddle with minutia.
