Game rules are not the physics of the game world

[Lanefan]

Never mind rules for high-level knights falling off horses. When talk turns to in-game physics I *do* think of physics as in the science, and I *would* like the game rules to at least acknowledge how those physics work...even if only to say "use real-world physics as a default and go from there"...because otherwise I have to make those rules up myself; it's less work for me if the designers do it.

And it's surprising how often physics comes up in the game...without notice, sometimes. How fast does something fall? How much does something weigh? How far can you throw it before gravity does its thing and brings it to ground? Etc.

The game rules don't touch on any of this, and so it remains perhaps the last great realm of DM fiat and madly flapping wings behind the screen. Not that I mind that as such, but if 4e wants to have a rule for everything there's a gaping hole right here to fill.

Lane-"and how do physics work on the outer planes?"-fan

 

[Professor Phobos]

Well, since the rules say 'make up a rule,' I really don't know what else you'd be looking for. Aside from 'do whatever you want', meaning DM fiat, meaning, for me, the DM running roughshod over my believabilitometer and making me feel utterly impotent as a player.

Well, maybe we're just talking past each other? "Make up a rule" is indistinguishable from fiat. I don't define fiat as running roughshod over anything. Rule 0 is just, "Feel free to employ fiat decisions."

And that blows my believability completely out of the water and makes me feel impotent as a player, too.

Which bit did? The player deciding on how his PC ended up, or the knight?

In nothing I can do matters when the DM gets an idea in his head, why am I bothering to do anything?

Where are you getting this? I didn't say anything about player actions not mattering. In my own campaign, they matter more than anything- barring certain edge cases where I negotiate for some kind of compromise, I let player whim trump my own. Admittedly this is because I am very lazy and if they want to drive the plot, I'm not going to stop them.

If my high-level knight is only a high-level knight when the DM allows him to be, what is he the rest of the time?

Ah, the PC is always a high-level knight, because he's a PC. So long as it's a PC, it is assumed to be the dominant factor in the narrative (or "a" dominant factor, alongside the other PCs). If the player retires the character and hands him to the DM, then it changes, but in that case there's a reasonable expectation of the GM to treat it with reverence or allow the PC to fiat what happens next.

As for NPCs, what they are "the rest of the time" is a basically what they are unless they're somehow linked to the PCs- wholly disposable plot devices and setting elements. Basically, I don't believe anyone other than the PCs are "important." I try to make NPCs interesting , but they should serve some purpose for the player's enjoyment. Other than that, I tend to go through them like a thresher machine.

You can't honestly see how I can reasonably have issue with this? And you think it's me that has the problem?

Well, at the moment I'm just confused as to what exactly we're discussing. What is the "this" to which you h ave an issue?

I am saying that I wouldn't be happy, and defending my right to be unhappy, and play the game I want to play against your continuous hostility, however.

Sorry for the hostility, actually, it was uncalled for.

And yeah, pulled out of nowhere, it would bug me, if I played the Heroic Mountaineer, and you just arbitrarily ruled that everybody could scale it just fine. It would also bug me if I played the Heroic Warrior and every combat was an opposed Strength check just because you thought the rules were boring.

Well, this is an important point- I only skip/ignore things the players are uninterested in. Recently they requested a session devoted to "Home and family life" rather than the life-and-death struggles, so we did a session on that. If they really enjoyed climbing a mountain, we'd do that, though I might try to negotiate a bit since I find mountain climbing terribly tedious and so maybe it'd only take a half-session for my sake.

It's just bad DMing not to enable the players however you can.

The way the players interact with the narrative context is the rules via their characters. They make Strength checks to move statues and they make Attack Rolls to damage goblins and they cast spells and have hit points.

Yep, exactly, but I don't view this exclusively. For example, I usually let players define their family, friends, social position etc, up to and including starting up side-plots and whole storylines based on that. I tend to view that stuff as part of the wider penumbra of their character background and completely up to them.

If the DM just decrees things and the players just decree things, without reference to a shared, mutual middle ground of 'the rules,' I feel robbed of my character's ability to impact the world. I can tell a story with my friends without the need to resort to D&D. D&D lets me do it as part of a game, which needs to be played according to the rules, or why bother playing?

The thing is, again, you're operating on the idea that the two are mutually exclusive. I like to use the combat rules when I want some tension and some tactical gameplay, or if the scene is important and dramatic. But I don't see the value in running a whole combat just for the sake of following the rules- if it isn't interesting, and the players don't care, I'd just skip it. Outclassed opponents? Slaughter 'em however you want.

There are degrees of decree. I don't just decree that Santa shows up and saves the day, but I might decree that a villain, tired of blood and war, surrenders instead of fighting when confronted by the PCs. A player might decree that his character's brother shows up at his doorstep with a knife in his back, but not that he's suddenly an Elven Warlord with an army at his back. There's an expectation that game world decrees will be reasonable and fit within the established context of the setting.

Basically, RPGs are not like other games. There is a wide variety of game activity not covered by the rules, or for which the rules are only guidelines, or for which the rules are useful tools sometimes but not always.

"Mother, may I?" play is not rewarding for me, either as a player or as a DM. I don't want my players to ask me if they can do something, I want them to try, and I'll tell them what happens as a consequence.

Well, let's look at some concrete examples, as I think we're definitely talking past each other here.

"Can I grab the Hobgoblin and use him as a shield?" is a game-mechanics question; the player is asking if the game makes it possible. I would say, "Yes, make a grapple check to grab him and, oh, a dex check to get him in the way in time." Something like that. He's trying something not explicitly covered in the rules.

"Can I talk the Princess into making peace?" I would normally say, "You can try."

"Can I shove the folding boat into the creature's mouth, shout the command word, and have the boat enlarge inside it's skull?" I would definitely say, "Hells yes! Make a (appropriate roll) and if you succeed it dies!"

"Can I get a message from my father informing me my mother has died?" I would nod, and tell the player that he doesn't even need permission for that kind of thing.

As a player, I don't want to discuss with the GM. I come to D&D to play a game, not to help him craft a story.

Let me give you an example from my game a while back. I thought it might be fun if one of the PCs got turned into a vampire and the other PCs had to kill him (this was for a horror game). It's not the kind of thing I'd just do to a PC, so I picked a player I'd think amenable and asked if he wanted to do that story. He said sure, played it to the hilt, and it was a great session.

I want to roll some dice and break down some doors and thwart some evil. If the DM is willing to violate the rules just to tell his little tale, then I have no assurance that he won't do so when my player's turn comes up and I try to do something he doesn't want me to do, something that's not narratively expedient for him, something that ruins his precious story somehow.

You'll have to understand my frustration when you deliberately phrase things like "precious story" and "little tale." That's not what I'm advocating at all- again I don't have a story in mind when I start an adventure, I just want to see a good one to have appeared by the end. And it's not my story. I don't have any characters of narrative importance; all I have is the scenery.

My goal is to give the players a good story of their characters- which involves working with them. More importantly, it involves giving them the narrative context to be awesome. I don't "want them to do" anything. Occasionally I have a player ask, "Hey, if I do this, will it screw up your deal?" and I say, "I have no deal! Do whatever you want!" About the only time I really do any railroading is the start of the adventure, as I"m fond of sudden paradigm shifts ("You all wake up in each other's bodies!") but even then, all I'm interested in is getting the ball rolling and seeing something cool come out of it at the end.

When I collaborate with my players, I give them the rules with which they can accomplish their goals fairly, with the odds of the game standing against them. I mean, if it boils down to my choice as a DM, why have players? If it's not making a good story for them to loose, I'll let them win, if it's not making a good story for them to win, I'll make them loose, what purpose is the game serving, here?

The game is serving to add tension and the risk of defeat. A good RPG story has no pre-determined ending; if they lose, then they lose. If they win, then they win. I'm entirely comfortable with having the apocalypse if they don't save the world. But what I'm not comfortable with is unsatisfying defeats and unsatisfying victories, so I try to arrange things that they only lose after an epic battle or only win after some great sacrifice or act of daring-do.

If the world serves at the DM's whim, so does everything my character does.

No, not at all. One certainly does not follow from the other. Remember, there are no rules for a lot of things. I can, as a DM, decree that a town the PCs have never visited in a kingdom they've never heard of suffers a landslide. There are no landslide rules. It's pure fiat.

Now if they were in the town, and wanted to save the people, they'd have all kinds of rolling to do. It'd be an adventure. Not up to my whim since it is "on screen", it is part of the story of the PCs and they have input (both via game mechanics and via player whim) on the outcome.

And this is fundamentally unsatisfying for me as a player and as a DM. If the DM doesn't adhere to the rules, they feel meaningless. The DM can change the laws, but he cannot be above the laws.

The rules are tools for the players and GM. They serve at the pleasure of the group. The DM is above the law. Hell, in a sense, the players are above the law- this is why house rules get made. In most cases it's just agreed to follow the rules for the player actions, because that's part of the point of the game.

"NPC" isn't a distinction my character knows. It's an artificial construction of the game, and to have NPC's break their necks randomly at DM decree means, to my character, that people break their necks falling from horses, even when they're powerful knights of the world who should know how to ride horses, and thus I should never ride a horse, because they slay heroes.

Yes! Of course they should think so. People in the real world still ride horses despite there being danger inherent to it. Batman doesn't know he's never going to get killed. He has no idea he's got plot immunity. He acts accordingly.

Which is absurd to me, as a player, and breaks the believability of the world.

People with unbreakable necks breaks the believability of the world. People who, by narrative logic, will just never break their necks is fine, because that's how almost any story works.

Which just reminds me that it's the DM's story and I'm just along for the ride. The DM decides what's available and what isn't, not according to a mutually binding set of rules, but according to his own estimation of what makes a good story.

GM's have been deciding on what is and is not available in their world since the hobby began. I'm in a campaign that bans arcane magic. This is world-building. This is normal.

Are you really suggesting that it is inappropriate for a GM to regulate the availability of magical items or obscure Trained by a Master abilities? Are you really saying that the GM can't decide compound bows or steel forging haven't been invented yet in his swords-and-sandals game?

There are very, very few RPGs, particularly semi-generic ones (or at least, "Homebrewing is Encouraged") that operate on that level of restriction. Maybe Burning Wheel, I've never tried it. Wealth-by-level and all that malarkey are just guidelines.

I mean, GURPS is the only game I know that has the "rules=physics" design goal, and it's explicitly built around customized campaigns.

This wasn't my campaign, but I know of a D&D game set in Mythic Medieval Russia. All kinds of things were changed. By all accounts, it was a great, flavorful campaign. This is normal. This is expected. This is good.

World-building is one of the perks of GMing.

 

[pkt77242]

Kamikaze Midget, you talk alot about your believablity being blown out of the water or the DM is beating my sense of believability with a mallet a few times and that is your choice to feel that way.

My thought is that I am playing a game in my head and on paper so I already threw believability out the window before I started playing. It is meant to be a game and a fun, fast game to play. If I want to try some difficult and crazy thing, you are right my DM proably could look through the book and find a rule that is close and change it to fit the situation and give me a +/- to it but spend 5-15 minutes finding it and chaning it. Or he can think about it for a couple of seconds and give me a quick approximation, and hey maybe he is spot on or maybe he is off slightly but that doesn't ruin the game. I think more games are ruined by dms who are rules strict and slow down the game by looking everything up then by DMs who wing it a little.


It might just be that you are a rulesy person and that is ok, fine for you but not for me. If you want more rules then add some back in, no one is telling you, that you can't have them.

 

[KarinsDad]

The rules are tools for the players and GM. They serve at the pleasure of the group. The DM is above the law. Hell, in a sense, the players are above the law- this is why house rules get made. In most cases it's just agreed to follow the rules for the player actions, because that's part of the point of the game.

In this discussion, you are more wrong than right. The DM is not above the law. I agree more with KM.


Yes, the DM can bend or break the rules. But, the DM should rarely do it. It's fine to have a magical effect that cannot be explained by the rules in order to advance the story. For example, a magical explosion that ends up catapulting the PCs to another dimension.

But if a player makes a mistake in combat, the normal combat rules should apply. Here is where you are wrong. The DM should not change the combat rules to "save the PC and make the game more fun for the player". The reason is that "Who knows?". Maybe the game will be more fun if the PC dies.

DMs are people too. They are not omniscient, hence, they really do not know what is in the head of other players. They can guess, but they might be wrong as often as they are right.

The concept that "the rules take a back seat to fun" is totally arrogant and presumptuous of you. The DM knows best. Nonsense. Fun occurs in many different ways. It can be fun for the DM to break the rules, but for many players, it might be more fun for the DM to follow the rules.

Since it is a game, there will be players like KM who expect the DM to follow the rules. You stated:

You have an incredibly unreasonable perspective. Frankly I would consider you a bad player and eject you from my game.

What you ask is tantamount to asking the DM to not have any fun. To be bound to some mindless set of rules instead of his own imagination. You're also asking for every other player in the game, unless they happen to share your rigid expectations, not to have any fun.

KM is not a bad player. He just has different expectations than you do. He expects the game to be a game and as such, all players, including the DM, should follow the rules of that game.

Sure there can be exceptions, but those should be carefully considered by the DM, not just knee jerk decisions for some potential DM perceived fun. The best intentions when making on the fly rules changes or just flat out breaking the rules can torpedo a game just as quickly as a TPK.

Players have expectations. A DM cannot just ignore that, or he is not a good DM. If the players expect the game to have wierd rule breaking things occur, then your "anything goes in the name of fun" system would be fine. But, many players do not have those types of expectations.

Note: I think the phrase "for the sake of fun" is vastly overused by posters. It can be used to justify just about any DM or player behavior.

 

[robertliguori]

Professor Phobos, the reason many of us play D&D specifically is that the rules of D&D create a set of assumptions many of us find interesting. We know that the D&D rules stop describing people in our world past about level 6 or so; this is a selling point for us.

And this is why having rules and keeping to them is important. You find the idea of humans that can bathe in lava snaps you out of your immersion in the game world. This is well and good; you can avoid this element simply by not creating representations of humans with this capacity in the game world, or optionally make use of one of the many supplemental rules for magma damage.

I don't like the idea of mechanically representing a character that should, according to the known rules of the game, be able to swim in lava, then die (with no save) simply because the GM thinks that lava should be super-extra-killy compared to the dragonfire I waded through last week. If it breaks your suspension of disbelief for heroes to be able to survive such abuse, cap level advancement at six.

Another question for you: Which is more realistic, Vanican magic or psionics? The answer, of course, is neither; both magic systems reflect something that does not exist in reality. The XP system and its real, tangible noticeable effects in the game world likewise does not have a real-world analogue, but claiming that it is an abstraction misses the point; although what exactly XP are is nebulous, their effect is as well-defined within the game universe as fire.

You do not have a clear idea how it is or why it should be that after a lifetime of adventuring, you should achieve superhuman levels of toughness and capacity. This is well and good. I, myself have no idea how it is or why it should be that Superman's Kryptonian metabolism can convert yellow sunlight into superhuman levels of toughness and capacity, but within the context of Superman comics, I don't claim that Superman's powers are an abstraction; he actually can fly, despite flight being conventionally impossible.

The world of comics contains rules and assumptions that (obviously) do not hold true in reality. This is not generally a problem; to enjoy the story, we internalize the new rules, accept them, and judge the world based on its consistency to its own internal reality, as opposed to ours. It bothers some people to recognize that their gritty fighter or streetwise rogue turned into Achilles or Gyges a few levels back, and that superhumanism has been thrust upon them. However, this is the way D&D universes work; expecting otherwise is like killing Superman in an auto accident.

If you communicate beforehand that your world does not contain high-level characters of any stripe, that fifty points of damage are enough to kill any humanoid target guaranteed, and so forth, and then proceed to play in this gritty, dangerous setting, then this is good and interesting. This is making a rule. But deciding that a fall should be capable of killing a high-level knight in adventuring condition with full HP is making a ruling, which contradicts the existing rules and the internal reality set up by the games. A high-level knight is, as we from Earth would understand it, about as human as Superman; he has a similar level of protection from harm, and if he's taken Power Attack, can also be inhumanly destructive. (His, however, is ablative; enough damage will start to kill him, and beat him down to his last few HP and throw him from a horse, and he may well break his neck).

If you start from the inherent assumption that the world is low-magic, high-pulp adventure, with two-fisted (or two-sworded, or sword-and-shielded) adventurers questing after priceless relics and defeating bands of evil villains, then this is fine. You probably don't need to enumerate that the party shouldn't expect to be playing Artificers, or crucians, and you probably don't need to mention that the party level will be capped somewhere before "Wait for the evil god to finish manifesting, then beat him into submission with our bare hands." becomes a viable strategy. This is all well and good. But D&D does not contain these assumtions from default; relying on them to be shared without explicitly communicating it will result in bad juju.

 

[Hussar]

You want a character to die from falling off a horse? He's not high-level. You want a character to Call a high-HD outsider? He is high level. You want a character that takes feats that require you to be high level to take? He's high level.

Just picked that one out as an example.

The strength, as I see it, from what we've been told of 4e is that you can do exactly any of these things without having to go too far afield. After all, summoning something you shouldn't isn't too much of a stretch in fantasy.

Heck, go back to the old Thieves World collections and you'll find exactly this. An apprentise wizard causes all sorts of disruptions all over the city. Fantastic lead in and something I'd like to do in D&D.

But, I can't. An apprentise wizard can't summon anything in D&D. Spells never, EVER backfire in D&D. If I want a spell to backfire, I'm going to have to go beyond the rules.

But, with these new rituals rules, hopefully we'll be able to do exactly this. Now the demon worshipping cultist doesn't need to be an archmage to create a gate. I can have a gate without the tactical nuclear weapon. Great!

By relaxing the stringency of the mechanics, while still providing baselines for judging relative power, you gain a huge amount of flexibility.

I'm really looking forward to these assumptions. It seems we're getting the best of all editions. The rules looseness of 1e and 2e without the complete and utter kludge that those rules were. And the focus and ease of use of 3e without being locked down into certain concepts.

 

[Imban]

To reference Vampire: The Masquerade, you can't discover the blood point. A vampire only knows he's full, or hungry, or starving. He doesn't know he has blood points. Blood points don't map to pints of blood. They're abstractions.

Just as a point of order, a canon NPC (Dr. Netchurch) researched and discovered exactly what blood points are in-setting in Vampire: the Masquerade. Motes of Essence (and quite likely values of characters' attributes and abilities themselves, in the First Age) are things that were researched and talked about as setting terms in the past in Exalted.

White Wolf's actually very big on the idea that fluff should follow naturally from the crunch. (So is R. Sean Borgstrom, who did a bunch of the writing for Exalted.)

 

[JohnSnow]

I have a question for all the folks who believe "NPCs must operate under the same rules as PCs." And here it is.

Do you use the game rules to adjudicate the outcome of every NPC vs. NPC fight in your game? In other words, when two nations in the game world go to war (or there's a tavern brawl that the PCs don't take part in), how do you resolve the battles?

Nobody's suggesting changing the rules at the point where they interact with the players. We're just talking about what kind of control the DM has over what happens in the game world when the PCs aren't involved in the action.

 

[Imban]

I have a question for all the folks who believe "NPCs must operate under the same rules as PCs." And here it is.

Do you use the game rules to adjudicate the outcome of every NPC vs. NPC fight in your game? In other words, when two nations in the game world go to war (or there's a tavern brawl that the PCs don't take part in), how do you resolve the battles?

Nobody's suggesting changing the rules at the point where they interact with the players. We're just talking about what kind of control the DM has over what happens in the game world when the PCs aren't involved in the action.

If it doesn't matter, I don't care save that I'll try to avoid positing events that are rules-impossible. Tavern brawls happen all the time, and assuming a rules system that provides that two 1st-level commoners can meaningfully hurt each other, people get hurt. They're not people that matter, so I just don't care.

When two nations in the game world go to war, I'd probably look (again) to the rules to inform me, if possible. I may not have enough information for the rules to give input - if all that's given, information-wise, is that Human Nation A and Human Nation B have armies and are at war, essentially anything I come up with would be valid. However, I would still be careful to not posit rules-impossible events in such a narrative.

 

[Professor Phobos]

But if a player makes a mistake in combat, the normal combat rules should apply. Here is where you are wrong. The DM should not change the combat rules to "save the PC and make the game more fun for the player". The reason is that "Who knows?". Maybe the game will be more fun if the PC dies.

I never said anything about that, though. Presumably we're only playing D&D because we want the possibility of character death, after all. I wouldn't consider that a reasonable exercise of fiat, most of the time.

But there are exceptions. Let's say I completely overpowered an antagonist and the players are basically annihilated instantly. I'd probably fudge that. It is my mistake I'm correcting, not theirs. But if they know the risks, and there was the possibility of failure or success, then I usually let things stand as they are.

DMs are people too. They are not omniscient, hence, they really do not know what is in the head of other players. They can guess, but they might be wrong as often as they are right.

Sure, but if you make a mistake, you just try not to make it again in the future. It's not like this is life-or-death stuff here. People spill their beer on the Player's Handbook, it's okay. It's not the end of the world. I have enough confidence in my own ability to make judgment calls, and my player's willingness to call me on errors.

The concept that "the rules take a back seat to fun" is totally arrogant and presumptuous of you. The DM knows best. Nonsense. Fun occurs in many different ways. It can be fun for the DM to break the rules, but for many players, it might be more fun for the DM to follow the rules.

Then maybe the DM should only break the rules when it is fun, and not do so when it is not-fun? I'm not suggesting anything else. You folks seem to be fighting some other argument. I disagree that it is reasonable for a player or a GM to operate on the extreme end of either curve. No player has the right to demand completely rigid adherence to the rules under penalty of death, nor should any GM discard the rules entirely. I maintain that there is a middle ground. There is good and bad fiat. I do not think adhering to the rules in one case demands adhering to the rules in every case. I do not think ignoring the rules in one case means ignoring the rules in every case.

KM is not a bad player. He just has different expectations than you do. He expects the game to be a game and as such, all players, including the DM, should follow the rules of that game.

Yes, I shouldn't have called him out like that. It was unkind of me. I still maintain, however, that his play style is wholly incompatible with mine. I cannot accommodate him. This is relatively rare, as I have found I can incorporate a wide range of player expectations in my gaming. But zero-fiat? It's just not going to happen, if only because I am very lazy and I do not bother to look up rules when I do not think it matters.

Sure there can be exceptions, but those should be carefully considered by the DM, not just knee jerk decisions for some potential DM perceived fun. The best intentions when making on the fly rules changes or just flat out breaking the rules can torpedo a game just as quickly as a TPK.

Not in my experience. If I wing it and it goes bad, I don't do it again next session. Or I say, "Man that was dumb. Sorry about that guys." Maybe I buy the pizza next time. It is, after all, just a game.

Players have expectations. A DM cannot just ignore that, or he is not a good DM. If the players expect the game to have wierd rule breaking things occur, then your "anything goes in the name of fun" system would be fine. But, many players do not have those types of expectations.

But there are reasonable and unreasonable expectations. I'm entirely willing to pay a lot of attention to the rules, so long as the players are patient as, again, I am extremely lazy and often forget to ask for rolls. I have a "Say yes or roll the dice" policy, and I rarely say no, so most of my games don't involve a lot of rolling and only the occasional combat round.

Note: I think the phrase "for the sake of fun" is vastly overused by posters. It can be used to justify just about any DM or player behavior.

Fun is the primary objective of any recreational activity. If it is fun, it is good. If it is not fun, it is bad.

However, if your definition of "fun" is so constrictive as to impede the fun of others, as I believe to be the case here, then there is a problem.