Game rules are not the physics of the game world

[Professor Phobos]

Besides, look at it from the character's perspective.

They have no reason to think killing a dragon strengthens your neck somehow. Thousands of people ride their horses every day- from the dragon killing noble to J. Random Peasant. A character who hears about Dragonkiller is going to think, "Oh wow! Talk about bad luck!"

Remember, characters aren't aware of game mechanics. They knew Dragonkiller was a pretty badass dude, but they have no reason to think his skin is impenetrable or his bones are unbreakable, just that he's been very lucky, clever or skilled in the past.

Only the player is aware that this is incongruous with game mechanics. And if we're talking about player immersion, I can't see how this is any worse than the fact that you are right there sitting at a table imagining everything anyway. Your character doesn't know what level Dragonkilller was or that falls only do 1d10 damage or anything like that. He has no idea.

 

[AZRogue]

Besides, look at it from the character's perspective.

They have no reason to think killing a dragon strengthens your neck somehow. Thousands of people ride their horses every day- from the dragon killing noble to J. Random Peasant. A character who hears about Dragonkiller is going to think, "Oh wow! Talk about bad luck!"

Remember, characters aren't aware of game mechanics. They knew Dragonkiller was a pretty badass dude, but they have no reason to think his skin is impenetrable or his bones are unbreakable, just that he's been very lucky, clever or skilled in the past.

Only the player is aware that this is incongruous with game mechanics. And if we're talking about player immersion, I can't see how this is any worse than the fact that you are right there sitting at a table imagining everything anyway. Your character doesn't know what level Dragonkilller was or that falls only do 1d10 damage or anything like that. He has no idea.

This.

 

[pemerton]

I will point to the number of people in this thread who have commented along the lines of "I'm a player, and I love it when things that directly contradict the rules happen!" as argument that your strategy of DMing, while most useful when constructing a narrative and certainly applicable for your player base, does not generally result in hugs and kisses for the GM when attempted.

<snip>

the vast majority of the playerbase will walk away before they engage in these leaps of illogic.

Are you really asserting that no-one plays HeroQuest, The Dying Earth, TRoS, Burning Wheel, etc? Or that of those who do, few enjoy it?

players assume that the fluff of the world flows from the crunch

Did you ask them all? If not, how do you know? Are you familiar with the mechanics of The Dying Earth? Or TRoS? If so, please explain how any player of those games would believe that the fluff flows from the crunch? The crunch of The Dying Earth tells us nothing about the fluff of the world. TRoS does to a greater extent, but Spiritual Attributes are obviously a purely metagame device.

Well, I don't think you will with your group, because your group does not expect the rules to be constant.

You keep saying this. It's not true. There is nothing inconstant about the following rules: (i) use action resolutoin mechanics when player protagonism is at stake via the PCs; (ii) use player-GM negotiated drama when player protagonism is at stake in some other fashion; (iii) use GM drama when no protagonism is at stake.

If your group has no problems accepting that mechanics in the world resolve X way when they are present and Y way when they aren't

If you have no capacity to distinguish between the players (who really exist in this world) and the PCs (whom we all pretend exist in the gameworld) then you will be unable to articulate the premises, benefits of and disadvantages of narrativist play.

Likewise, when you declare that nothing in the world has fixed mechanics but the PCs, what you are saying is that there are no fixed mechanics for anything but PvP.

That has not been declared. What has been declared is that the action resolution mechanics are used to resolve the PCs' actions. This would include their fights with NPCs. It wouldn't include NPCs' fights with one another (the vast bulk of fights in a typical gameworld, assuming that the PCs are only a tiny fraction of its population).

If the general shape of reality is that death can come on swift wings to anyone, then the rules should support this; bring in massive damage rules.

<snip>

From where, then, should come the assumption that the world is different for other heroes of equivalent power and accomplishment?

Well, playing RM is one way to play RPGs. It's not the ony way. Because one need not assume that the mechanics are the physics of the gameworld. Once that assumption is abandoned, we can find other ways to do it, such as the following: when PCs are involved, they enjoy plot protection, which means that they could die, but they don't. And when only NPC heroes are involved, they don't enjoy such plot protection, and we know thaty they could die, and sometimes they do. And when PCs battle NPC heroes, we let the dice and action resolution mechanics decide, because that is our agreed way of resolving conflicts involving the PCs.

If you tell the players "You can die from a single lucky stab wound." and then run them through combats with standard D&D rules, the players will notice that no matter how many times they're stabbed (sometimes by magically lucky people with actual control over local fate and such) they don't die.

Of course the players will notice! That's the point of the rules. Will the PCs notice? Batman hasn't yet, because he's plausibly scripted. If the players want to play a narrativist game of fantasy adventure, why would they script their PCs any less plausibly?

lots of players will seriously wonder why things that happen to other people never happen to them

I don't even need to go to funky narrativist interpretations of D&D's rules to rebut your rhetorical point - I can do it within the confines of d20. When you run Conan OGL do you not give the playes Fate Points (as per the rules)? Or if you do, do your players ask "Why do we recover on the battlefield, but NPCs don't?" as if it were a great mystery? Everyone knows the answer: the PCs have plot protection, NPCs don't. It's a feature, not a bug!

If your point is only that players who don't want to play an RPG a certain way will not, fine. No one is denying this. But if you are claiming that no one can consistently play a narrativist RPG (in which the mechanics are not the physics of the gameworld), you are obviously wrong, because it's being done every day.

If you are saying the D&D rules can't be used for narrativist play, that's a bit more interesting. But you are going to have to actually provide some arguments for that conclusion which are specific to D&D and its rules, and don't just consist in asserting either tautologies or obvious falsehoods, or asserting, without argument (other than generalities that are easily refuted), that to do so is not to play D&D.

 

[Kahuna Burger]

This.

That.

 

[Celebrim]

Thanks Celebrim, very enlightening - and as I am married to an American and likely to be moving to the USA in a few years, also potentially useful.

Np. I'll pretty much leap at any chance to present the American culture in a more respectful manner than it gets presented on, oh say, the BBC. Personal peev. Oh well, wrong board to go into any detail on that.

 

[Celebrim]

Remember, characters aren't aware of game mechanics.

Most people couldn't calculate the kinetic energy of a free falling object at time 't' either. Nonetheless, whether they've studied mechanics or not, objects obey the rules. And, simply by living in the world and observing it since a child, they have an seemly intuitive grasp of how things can be expected to work.

 

[pemerton]

KM, this post isn't meant to be antagonistic at all, because (after your response to my kobold vs 20th lvl question, and my question about "cheating") I think I've got a pretty good handle on how you like to play, and (unlike some others on this thread) I don't think you're trying to say that other ways of playing can't be done.

What I wanted to do was just pick up on a couple of your comments and say how a different playstyle might handle those issues:

Because D&D (and most any PnP RPG) allows for more autonomy than a videogame.

In the playstyle I'm trying to articulate, this can be handled not only through the action resolution mechanics, but via GM-player negotiation over the relevant parts of the gameworld (to put it crudely, "say yes" mechanics). Prof Phobos gave some examples way upthread involving town guards and skeletons. And John Snow gave another example by reference to Lois Lane conventions of play.

That is, the playstyle I'm articulating is not interested in thwarting player autonomy. In fact, its principal aim is to enhance player autonomy. That's why I'm upbeat about 4e. Everything I've read about it (especially W&M) seems to me to indicate the default assumption is far greater player control via various metagame mechanics and conventions.

Because the game involves more than PCs on adventures. At least, for me, it does.

The gameworld involves more than this, agreed. Sometimes, the game does also - but I have to admit that when the PCs aren't adventuring it can drag a bit (by "adventuring" here I'm meaning the interesting stuff that PCs do). "Say yes" rules can help reduce those moments of drag by expediting them - as Prof Phobos articulated with his aforementioned examples.

Drama and stories are my day job. D&D I do for fun.

Rules are my day job. Roleplaying - ie creative exploration and development of thematic content in collaboration with others - is what I do for fun.

 

[Celebrim]

The rules definitely don't say or imply that NPCs interacting with other NPCs off-camera are supposed to use the rules. That would be impossible to run.

No, it would be impossible to resolve all offstage events using the rules, in as much as you couldn't throw all the dice for every assumed event occuring off stage even if you knew what they were.

But you can easily run a game with such an assumption.

 

[S'mon]

No, it would be impossible to resolve all offstage events using the rules, in as much as you couldn't throw all the dice for every assumed event occuring off stage even if you knew what they were.

That's all I meant.

 

[pemerton]

there's more to the organic game world than what you see around the table every Saturday night. Either that, or your PCs are living and functioning in what amounts to a vacuum.

the assumption *has to be safely made* that the battle was fought under the same rules that the PCs used when taking down Krakatoa the Red Dragon last session, and thus if the PCs ever bump into Al-Cid in the future his explanation of how the battle went will at least vaguely jive with the established game mechanics.

Lanefan, I don't want to inflict my posts on you if you're not interested - but in several of them on this thread I've explained how a certain playstyle gives a very definite "Yes" to the first of your quotes above, but an equally definite "No" to the second.

I fully appreciate that you may not want to play that way. But I deny that it can't be done.