pemerton: I know this is unfair, but it is precisely because you have been generally logical and consistant that you don't get responded to as often. Your objections are generally reasonable. Addressing your objections involves an extremely complicated argument that would get really technical, and sometimes in the interest of time the more interesting debate - yours - loses out.
pemerton said:
What distinguishes narrativist (ie metagame-heavy, thematically-oriented) play from "rules as physics" play is not that it is light on mechanics, but rather than those mechanics are not interpreted as the physics of the gameworld. Rather, they are a metagame device for distributing narrative control, and (in some cases) determining the resolution of conflicts.
First, I disagree with your claim that the distinction in narrativist play is mechanical or even the assumptions about the mechanics. What you are describing is features of games designed specifically to facillitate narrativist play, and not essential distinguishing features.
Secondly, I don't deny that a game can have metarules which shape play but which have no real existence at the in game universe level. I've kind of hinted around that this is true without really getting into it. And, it's at this point that things get complicated, because alot of the things that you say are metagame rules don't strike me as being pure metagame rules. Rather, very often the metarules you describe are in my opinion 'simulationist' in character and have both metagame and in game existance. That is they shape play at the table, and are also from the standpoint of an in game actor 'real'.
Now, I have to qualify that in as much as that there is often a metagame rule that the in game actors are themselves 'genera blind' and don't know the tropes of the universe that they inhabit. For example, you keep bringing up the 'Lois Lane' rule, and I would argue that the intent of this rule is primarily simulationist, in that is attempting to simulate the universe in which certain types of heroic literature occur, and in these universes the significant others of a hero enjoy some measure of heroic protection from ordinary harm. In other words, only a heroes villainous peer can actually harm them and they will otherwise will survive any other threat. I would argue that that is actually the 'physics' of those sorts of universes.
I think the general problem is that if a rule has some metagame intention, that it is a metarule, and I don't agree. A metarule is a rule about rules, but if it actually effects the game universe then it is part of the physics of that universe. In that universe, events actually do rearrange themselves to protect the significant others of those that have hero status. And, hero status is real quality.
Take the example with Conan. You ask, "Can Conan change the universe by wishing?", and the answer is, "Yes, he can." To an observer in the game universe, that's exactly what has happened. From Villain's perspective, if we allow him to not be genera blind, he can see that the universe is not 'fair'. He can see that the Hero consistantly enjoys good fortune that non-Heroes don't enjoy. And that is actually how the universe in question works. Heroes really have tangible 'Fate' and 'Destiny' (or whatever) such that the universe is ready to fulfill thier needs, and very likely has arranged itself such that it knows what those needs will be before the in game characters do.
Celebrim, it's a litttle unclear whether your hypothetical system has one rule or more than one.
I apologize. My intention was to create a system with one rule. I may have confused the matters by allowing that this rule needed more explanation than I gave it, but its intended to have one rule.
If it really has only one rule, then I agree it is unplayable as, for example, it doesn't tell me (i) how to introduce adversity into the game, nor (ii) what counts as a conflict, nor (iii) what the parameters of player and GM narration are (eg am I allowed to explain my success in jumping to Mars by explaining "It turns out my PC had rocket fuel in his backpack"?), nor etc etc.
Errr... I don't think RPGs actually need any of those things. In fact, very few RPGs have explicit rules for any of those things. You can get by just fine with a rules set that doesn't define what is at stake, who is in conflict with what, whether you should use FitM or FatE narration to describe the results of the conflict resolution mechanics, or who has explicit narrative control. None of these things needs to be consistantly defined. 'D2' is a generic, universal system.
It lets the players define what is at stake, what the conflict is, and allows the narrator/referee to adopt whatever storytelling method they prefer.
But once I supplement d2 with the sorts of rules you suggested would be there in your original post, then I have a game that looks a little like Prince Valiant, don't I?
No, I don't think so. 'D2 2nd edition', from the latter post looks something like a rules light system like Prince Valiant, but even so it's far lighter of a system than even PV. Both have coins. That's about it. For one thing, its a system that still says nothing about relative difficulty. Things are either easy, impossible, or fail 50% of the time. I've focused on how badly the system handles things like 'I jump to Mars' or a 'I jump over the dime.' when it comes to versimilitude, but I could have just as easily focused on how poorly it handles 'I jump over the 10' trench'. It's playable with heavy referee arbitration in the 2nd edition, but just barely so.
But I think you are missing the important point. It's not playable in its 1st edition form not because it lacks details which IMO are mostly 'fluff', but because the universe it simulates is not imaginable. Even if we defined everything you think its missing, and you are welcome to try, the 1st edition game is still set in a universe that is so far removed from ours that we simply can't relate to it. The only way to play it is to add some rules, implicitly or explicitly, on what propositions you are allowed to make. Thereby you'll backhandedly define what the rules of the universe are by elimenating from consideration anything that makes the world unimaginable.
I also don't know why anyone would assume that the d2 rolls modelled anything in the gameworld.
Because, in practice it would. Nothing in the game rules prohibits the impossible from being a proposition that succeeds, and nothing in the game rules makes the easy possible. Of course the players are going to assume that the universe that the game plays in follows those rules, because that is what they would experience. Narrating an event like, "I found rocket fuel in my jet pack." doesn't change the basic physics of the game. It is I think a pretty futile stab to add some coherency into what is going to be an inherently incoherent game universe.
And such physics may well have mass, space, time etc, (or no not, if we play in a more Toon-ish approach - this is why supplemental rules about the source and context of adversity matter).
Isn't this as much as saying that you need to have a set of assumed rules about the physics of the universe? I think where we may be sticking is that in your description of narrativist play, there is a body of rules describing the physics of the in game universe which are implied by the setting. I grant that this is true. It's true of pretty much every PnP RPG that they have this assumption. However, as I've repeatedly stated, I think a rule that is in force, but which is not part of the formal written down rules of the game, is still every bit as much of the rules as the RAW.
The example that keeps coming up on this theme is, the RAW don't actually say that solid objects are solid or define what 'solidity' is. This is true, but that doesn't mean you can walk through walls in D&D (without special in rules exemptions like incorporality).
Yes, it may be that in the narrativist games that you play the vast majority of the physics of the in game universe are bound up in these implied rules, but that doesn't mean that the action resolution mechanics aren't part of the physics of the game world any more than the fact that 'fate points' or 'saving throws' have meta-game reasons means that they don't also have in game existance. Even if an in game observer didn't know the name of the meta-game constructs like 'fate points' or 'saving throws', he certainly could observe thier effects and would recognize them as being a part of the predictable behavior of the universe he lived in.
You have not actually addressed this issue, despite the fact that I have raised it in numerous posts: some mechanics in some RPGs are expressly not about the physics of the gameworld. They are about the distribution of narrative control at the gaming table. The physics of the gameworld are the product of the decisions made by those exercising that control.
Well, in theory, yes a rule can be entirely a 'rule about rules'. But you have to be very careful in assuming that a rule has no in game reality, because we could often work back from the constructed narrative to the rule. For example, one of the more explicitly metagame rules in 3rd edition D&D is that players take turns. You might say the 'taking turns' rule is about distributing narrative control, and no one thanks that the universe being simulated by 3rd edition D&D is strictly speaking 'turn based' (or more precisely 'impulse based', since players take discrete sequential turns within the turn). Nonetheless, on observing the narratives we must conclude that it is the nature of events in the game universe to tend to be sequential so that the really pertinent events follow one after the other instead of happening at the same time. We may not like this. We may prefer to think of the world being described as being a little more analog, but in point of fact the narratives constructed in universes simulated by D&D would have this inescable feature.
For example, two fighters never stab themselves at the same time. Ever.
If we really couldn't stand this, we might note that earlier editions of D&D had simultaneous declarations of intent and sometimes simultaneous resolution of events, and we could adjust or rules such that the universe allowed events more suited to the narrative we wanted to tell.
The first assumption, in a narrativist game, presumably would be "I have narrative control (or plot protection in the form of hp and other aspects of the action resolution mechanics) in respect of my PC, that I do not have in respect of the NPCs in this world." Such a thought is consistent with the thought that the ingame universe works the same way in respect of both - its just that, as far as those workings are concerned, the player has some control over them when they implicate his or her PC (just as the GM has some control over them when they implicate an NPC).
Part of the problem is that in most narrativist games I'm aware of, the action resolution mechanics are so generic and abstract that the sort of edge case conflicts we are describing simply aren't possible. Maybe I just don't know the rules of those games well enough, but with an abstract mechanical resolution system - whether narrativist or not - is it ever possible to note that an offstage event was impossible under the rules?
And what is this rule? It is obviously not part of the physics of the gameworld - there is nothing about PCs, qua ingame beings, that makes it impossible that they should enter the service of a lord. It is an obvious metagame rule.
Do you have to be a 'cohort' to be in the service of a lord? I think that the leadership rules describe a universe were people can really have the special status 'cohort', just as they can have the special status 'hero'.
I'll say it again: if you refuse to distinguish gameworld and metagame - and so refuse to distinguish between the physics of an imaginary universe, and the rules for handling the interactions of players in the actual universe - then of course narrativist play will look strange and problematic.
I'm perfectly willing to distinguish between gameworld and metagame rules. I'm perfectly willing to distinguish between a rule that governs the interactions of players, and a rule that governs the interactions of thier characters. Oddly enough, I think that you are having trouble doing so. A rule like 'the DM doesn't have to pay for the pizza', governs the interactions of players. A rule like, 'If we can't decide what the correct interpretation of a rule is, we flip a coin and move on rather than argue', governs the interactions of players. The rules you keep citing govern the interactions of things in the game universe.
Narrativist play doesn't look strange and problematic. I don't know where you'd get the idea that I think that it does. Your description of it is sometimes strange and problimatic, in that you seem to what to define narrativist play in a way that I don't find conventional, but which is highly useful for the argument at hand.
As would I. The point of plot protection rules is to undergird players' protagonism via their PCs. A GM undermining that by ignoring or breaking the rules is not good.
You seem to want to cloak this responce in language that I'm not sure is applicable. You are getting hung up in descriptions that depend on us knowing what a particular rule was designed for (nevermind that different players might percieve the utility of rules in a different way). The GM ignoring or breaking rules is generally not good regardless of what we may think the purpose of those rules to be.
Just as aside, you appear to be trending toward a FORGEism that I expressly deny - namely that the GNS ways of playing a game are incompatible.
This response depends upon assuming what the narrativist does not, namely, that the action resolution mechanics are the physics of the gameworld, rather than a device for undergirding player protagonism by way of PC plot protection.
I deny for example that this is a clear distinction. The action resolution mechanics are the physics of the gameworld,
and those physics may be designed in such a way that a player's character enjoys some measure of plot protection. That the rules grant PC's plot protection is not a necessary and inescable feature of the rules (though its often a desirable one), but that they model a universe in which a game takes place is necessary and inescable.
As such, it is not the response that would be universally had.
Of course. But its impossible to control how people respond to something.
(To draw another parallel to Conan OGL: if the players found a dead NPC at the end of a battle, would they ask themselves "Why did she not spend a Fate Point?" I assume not - the players know that Fate Points are a purely metagame device, to give the players limited control over their PCs' fates.)
I think I would assume that the NPC ran out of fate points, or that the NPC never had any to begin with. I would not assume that something called a 'fate point' was intended to model a character's freedom to choose thier fate, but rather in game represented thier lack of freedom to do so. It indicates to me that in the described universe, some people have bigger destinies than other - like the universe of Greek myth, live big, die big. That it happened to give the player some control over thier PC's fate is quite possibly even incidental. But whether incidental to the design or intentional, it inescapably describes something in the game universe.
For example, in a fortune in the middle system, how do we know whether Black Bob's foot got stuck in the stirrup?
That's another thing. You keep using FitM in a way that strikes me as very unconventional as well. Doesn't it just describe a mechanic whereby the outcome is not known until after the dice are thrown? For example, if in D&D the table rule is that you roll the dice to determine if you hit, and then only after that describe the scene, aren't you using FitM?
You seem to be pigeon-holing FitM to some very specific mechanics, in much the same way that you seem to have an overly narrow definition 'narrativist'.
