Game rules are not the physics of the game world

[LostSoul]

Am I a respected lexicographist such that I'm such an authority on the meanings of words that you don't need a dictionary?

I'm just trying to understand what you're saying, because I still can't seem to wrap my head around it.

I think I have it. How we decide what happens is the rules framework we're working with. What we decide happens defines the physics, so therefore the rules are the physics.

I'm cool with that.

edit:

I understand what they are claiming, but I think that they need to do a bit more reflection on that claim and realize that even though they aren't achieving consistancy in the same way as simulationist leaning rules sets they still need and require consistancy.

Ok. I think that, for a narrativist, we don't want consistency to begin with. We want to add that consistency through play. The rules need to leave open some "physics" questions - the ones that relate to theme.

"Does might make right?" Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't; we won't know until we play through it. Once we answer that question, then we have that consistency, and we are finished playing through that story.

 

[JohnSnow]

No, I'm point out that the definition of rules is such that my thesis is true by definition. I don't think I've had anyone disagree vigorously with how I've defined 'rules of the game'.

Ah. But for the purpose of what everyone (save you) was actually discussing, is the rhetorical device you used to "win" the argument actually relevant? What does stating out loud that "hey, the rules cover all rules, even rules about ignoring rules," actually prove?

In other words, your statement and victory is irrelevant to the discussion and debate, which actually boils down to this:

Should events in the gameworld be constrained by what is "possible" following a literal interpretation of the D&D rules as written (and potentially also including anything with a mechanistic resolution system that the DM decides to add to his game)? Or are all those mechanistic rules merely an abstraction intended to facilitate gameplay that have no bearing on what's actually possible in a narrative context?

And your semantic victory doesn't answer that debate. Moreover, from what I can tell, there is no answer to the debate, except what each person decides for themselves according to their preferences.

It's like (and strangely enough, tied up with :\ ) the old discussion about whether hit points represent one's ability to absorb actual physical damage or just a playable abstraction representing one's ability to avoid being seriously injured. Neither answer is objectively "right" or "wrong."

And I still think we're doing nothing but going in circles at this point.

 

[Celebrim]

Well, that understanding could come from the players/DM talking about the narrative. That would be the most direct approach...

Leaving aside that I think that they have to have some common framework to even do that, I still don't think this approach qualifies as 'not a rules based approach' if it is either the formal rules of the game or if it becomes a precedent for how future conflicts over the narrative are resolved.

I somtimes play a game called 'Ultimate' which involves moving a flying disk across the field. It's fairly unusual among sports in that even at the highest levels of play, the players are also the referees. In its formally codified rules, it has a conflict resolution system that involves talking with the opposing player about the just occurred event so as to construct a shared narrative experience of the event. And it has formal rules for conflict resolution in the event that a shared narrative can't be constructed. These rules are unusual in atheletic competitions, but that doesn't make them any less the rules of the game.

Likewise, when I play Ultimate there is an unspoken agreement that play continues without a turnover if the disk is dropped on the huck. It's not part of the rules of the game as written, but is effectively a rule of the game that the group I usually play with has adopted. And since it's an informal group that just plays for fun, that rule carries at least as much weight as the official ones you'd find in a rulebook (and more than alot of them).

Most RPGs use very different sorts of conflict resolution systems than 'simply talking about the narrative and then making a decision', or 'if you can't reach a conclusion, flip a coin', but that doesn't mean that those resolution systems aren't rules. Rules, I think everyone agrees, don't have to involve tables and dice, even if, generally speaking in RPG's they do.

 

[Celebrim]

Ah. But for the purpose of what everyone (save you) was actually discussing, is the rhetorical device you used to "win" the argument actually relevant? What does stating out loud that "hey, the rules cover all rules, even rules about ignoring rules," actually prove?

It proves that the statement that follows this claim is a false dichotomy.

Should events in the gameworld be constrained by what is "possible" following a literal interpretation of the D&D rules as written (and potentially also including anything with a mechanistic resolution system that the DM decides to add to his game)? Or are all those mechanistic rules merely an abstraction intended to facilitate gameplay that have no bearing on what's actually possible in a narrative context?

It proves that the above statements aren't sufficiently dissimilar to distinguish one type of play from the other, since the implicit contrast between 'playing by the rules' and 'not playing by the rules' isn't something you can draw as sharply as the original poster (or you) are trying to do. By demonstrating that the assumption of the rules being incomplete was inherent in either statement, and by demonstrating that both groups were essentially extending the rules of the game through thier play, I'm demonstrating that the original posters constrast:

I offer this up for debate: Game rules are not intended to model the physics of the game world. Rather, game rules are intended to offer up a rough simulation of the game world that will yield useful narrative results.

did not in fact express a useful distinction. Game rules ARE intended to model the physics of the game world (and they can't really do anything but do that), AND those same rules are also a rough simulation of the game world with the anticipation that the referee will extend the rules in narratively useful ways to cover uncovered situations as they arise. And conversely, game rules ARE NOT intended to fully model the physics of the game world (because a complete description of most PnP universes is impossible), but those same rules at least implicitly expect the referee(s) to resolve uncovered situations in some manner. And I'm arguing, that regardless of how you look at the situation, by definition you can't play an RPG any differently than that. No rules set is actually complete and doesn't develop a body of rules set by the precedent of play. No rules about interactions in the game world can do anything but attempt to model the physics of the game world.

If you go back in the debate, you'll look and see that that was exactly what I was arguing back when we were focused on that area of the discussion.

And your semantic victory doesn't answer that debate.

I think it does, once you realize what it means.

Moreover, from what I can tell, there is no answer to the debate, except what each person decides for themselves according to their preferences.

Well, what kind of debate doesn't involve a person deciding for themselves according to thier preferences? It wouldn't be much of a debate if it worked any other way, would it?

And I still think we're doing nothing but going in circles at this point.

Anyone can lead a debate, but no one can't stop it from going in circles.

 

[JohnSnow]

So in other words, we've just spent 10 pages on a discussion that serves no purpose. I can agree with that.

 

[apoptosis]

My point is, "Where is this shared understanding of the narrative coming from?" It's all well and good to postulate that it exists, but it had to come from some place. That someplace it comes from is I think provably, the rules of the game. Even if you claim that the understanding of the shared narrative comes from a shared understanding of how actions tend to be resolved in the real world, then all you are really saying is that one of the underlying rules of the game is, "Whereever the rules are silent, you may assume that the narrative universe works very much like the real universe."

Celebrim,

Have you tried some of the Indie games like Dogs in the Vinyard, Sorcerer, Burning Wheel or Shadow of Yesterday?

I ask as these games deal with the issues up front.

Maybe you have tried these types of games and dint like them, but just curious.

 

[pemerton]

Celebrim, I haven't had a chance yet to read all the rest of your exchange with John Snow. Nor have I had a chance to reply to your earlier post in which you replied to my post and "threw down the gauntlet" to the narrativists. Work has this pesky habit of sucking up my time.

So just a couple of comments:

I agree with you that the discussion is interesting and doesn't need to be shut down.

I disagree with your "pocket universe" analysis. In my view, you are taking for granted what the narrativists deny, namely, that there is a more-or-less strict correlation between metagame and gameworld. (In your earlier post you talked about functional equivalence, I think.)

Below I just pick up a couple of your points and try to make the narrativist reply. Obviously I don't expect you to be convinced - but I think you might at least see why it is I think you are begging the question.

Which in turn creates certain reasonable expectations on the part of the PC's on how the mechanics regulate adversity when they aren't direct participants.

There is no adversity when the PCs aren't participants (in the narrativist sense).

Now maybe you wanted all the weight to fall on "direct" - and yes, there can be ingame matters which don't directly involve the PCs and do implicate future adversity, like your King's champion example:

If they for example are defeated in a contest of arms by the Kings champion, and then learn that the King's champion was killed in battle by a kobold, they are going to have reasonable expectations about that kobold and it isn't going to be 'The DM just decided Sir Reginald died from a single stab wound of a kobold'.

Of course not. But depending on what the point of the game is, they may think that "The GM wanted to make a statement about the perils of hubris." The players would draw inferences about the challenge of that kobold, for their PCs, not by trying to reason via ingame phsyics, but by reasoning in light of known metagame priorities. That is the nature of narrativist play.

Thus, when you say this, you are already begging the question against narrativism:

narrative control would have been excercised much more properly if it fit the player's expectations about the world described by the rules - that is to say - if it fit the established setting.

I'll reiterate - in narrativist play, the players draw inferences not just from the gameworld's internal logic, but from the (metagame) narrative logic. That is part of what narrativist play is about. Thus Lois Lane rules: the players know the GM won't roll wandering monsters every day to see if Lois Lane is killed by one of the many Nycadaemons wandering the city (as per Appendix C of the DMG) because part of the narrative logic is her enduring relationship with the PC protagonist.

Don't the players have a reasonable expectation that the rules will inform the playstyle?

Of course. But as you have correctly said, the rules may be more than just the character build mechanics and action resolution mechanics. They may also include rules (or implicit understandings) for the distribution of narrative control, and the criteria according to which that control is to be exercised. And those criteria may have nothing to do with the logic or physics of the gameworld, and everything to do with metagame narrative logic.

if you insist that you are happy with a game universe in which the PC's must be signalled that this event or the other is a 'cut scene' occuring outside of game context and that inferences about game state can't really be drawn from it, then fine.

As I've said, the players will be reasoning with metagame narrative logic. So they'll work it out. Or we can talk about it: as in Prof Phobos's earlier examples, we all just agree that the town guard is trounced and the skeletons crushed.

I think however that you are making alot of trouble for yourself for no real reason given how easily you can make the story fit the universe.

<snip upwards>

It is certainly not obligatory to go down the RM route. The RM root comes from thinking that the universe being simulated must in some fashion have everything in it that exists in the real universe

As I've said, I may not want to play in that universe. And as you note, if I want to play in something more like the real universe I come under pressure to head down the RM route. I've been down that route, and it didn't work for me.

And in particular, isn't it rather unavoidable that the action-resolution mechanics have a very large role in creating the playstyle?

Perhaps. But that role may be negative: for example, if it is part of the action-resolution mechanics that they only apply to PC protagonism, then the playstyle will recognise that when the PCs aren't implicated, other techniques will be used to establish the nature and evolution of gameworld elements (eg the rules, be they implicit or explicit, may permit the GM to declare a high level Fighter to die from a riding accident, if this is consistent with the mutually understood narrative logic of the game).

How can you expect anything but conflict over what the playstyle is or is supposed to be when the players are forever recieving mixed signals from you because you are using two completely different sets of rules in what is unavoidably a somewhat arbritrary fashion?

Why would the signals be mixed? As to arbitrariness - in practice, nearly all decisions are arbitrary to an extent. When can or can I not take 10? Does a halfling have to make a jump check to get into bed in a human-sized inn? Corner cases can arise in any RPG, and so I concede that corner cases can arise in the sort of play I am describing. Like all corner cases, they are resolved by negotiation. The starting point would typically be, if a player thinks that his or her PC is implicated in a certain way, and thus that s/he should have a say (whether via the action resolution mechanics, or some other system that gives that player narrative control) then s/he should have that say.

if you do create two different game worlds, the one in which the PC's live which works according to one set of rules, and another one that the PC's can only hear about or perhaps catch glimpses of which clearly works by a different set of rules, then I think you are creating unnecessary problems for yourself.

Ah, the pocket universe objection! For the reasons implicit in what I've said above, there are not two worlds. There is one world with its inner logic. And there is another world - the actual world in which the GM and players live - with its metagame priorities. These determine what happens in the gameworld, but they are not part of its physics (just as Batman's status as protagonist is not a property that he has in the fictional world as Gotham city, but is merely a meta- status that he has as a character in a fiction).

The last sentence is so vague as to have no real meaning. I made a point of listing some of the ways that a sentence like that could become a red herring earlier.

If you can point me to the "red herring" post that would be helpful - I'm not sure which one you mean. But in fact the sentence is crucial. The difference between "does" and "can", "will" and "might", "would" and "could" - in short, actuality vs possibility - is crucial to the verisimilitude of the sort of play I am talking about. Batman could have been shot, but wasn't. The PCs could have been fallen off their horses, but didn't. In the sort of play I am talking about, the whole point of action resolution mechanics being used sometimes, but not at other times, is to open up and close down various outcomes in the world for metagame reasons, without therefore taking that to be any sort of statement about what is possible or impossible in the gameworld itself.

I can't imagine how you think you are making the universe fit the story if in fact you aren't shaping its physics, you are merely implying that you have.

I don't quite follow this. The physics of the gameworld are whatever the GM and players, as shared creators of the universe, say they are. This will emerge over time, probably taking the real world plus at least parts of the magic mechanics as a baseline, and consistency over the campaign certainly helps with verisimilitude (though sometimes has to be abandoned to fit other more important priorities - maybe a major balance issue with the magic system is discovered and a spell has to get nerfed or retconned or whatever).

So the story fits those physics. The story, in so far as the PCs are concerned, is also generated in part by application of the action resolution mechanics. But those mechanics are not the physics. They are a metagame device for resolving certain aspects of the story.

So, if a PC falls down a cliff and survives (because the action resolution mechanics tell us so), then we now know that the physics of the world permit heroic survival (perhaps she grabbed a tree - so it's the sort of heroic survival that can happen in the real world - or perhaps a zephyr softened her fall at the last minute - so it's the sort of heroic survival that can happen only in a magical world). We certainly have no basis for saying that those ingame physics mandate heroic survival, even if the action resolution mechancis (via hit points, fate points, whatever) made it impossible for the PC to die. That impossibility exists only in the metagame. It is not part of the story, and not part of the physics of the gameworld.

Btw: at The Forge, they call what I've described in the previous paragraph "fortune in the middle". They identify it primarily with games like HeroQuest or The Dying Earth, but there's no real reason that it can't be done in D&D as well (at least as far as I can see). It is quite a bit harder to do in RQ or RM.

 

[pemerton]

If you go so far as determining the success or failure of a rules possible event, but not posit rules impossible events, you have a reasonable level of predictability / consistency in the setting. If you posit a rules impossible event, those elements are damaged. So, off camera stipulating of a roll result is more acceptable to me than off camera stipulating of something that would be a mechanical impossibility on camera.

What if the stipulated dice rolls are an improbable sequence of 20s and 1s, so that the 20th level Fighter is killed in single battle by a Kobold?

Let's say that the Kobold does 6 damage on a crit, and the Fighter has 240 hit points. So the Kobold needs 80 20s in a row (to get 40 confirmed crits) and the Fighter 160 1s in a row (to miss with all 4 attacks for 40 rounds). The likelihood of that is 0.05 to the power of 240, which is pretty slim.

But it is possible within the action resolution rules.

Now, my question is this: is that really less offensive to verisimilitude, immersion, etc, than having the Fighter die from falling off a horse? Or to put it another way: does the game really need John Snow's 1-in-a-million critical horse-riding accident chart in order to make the riding fall as legitimate for immersive play as the kobold battle already is?

 

[Kahuna Burger]

What if the stipulated dice rolls are an improbable sequence of 20s and 1s, so that the 20th level Fighter is killed in single battle by a Kobold?

Let's say that the Kobold does 6 damage on a crit, and the Fighter has 240 hit points. So the Kobold needs 80 20s in a row (to get 40 confirmed crits) and the Fighter 160 1s in a row (to miss with all 4 attacks for 40 rounds). The likelihood of that is 0.05 to the power of 240, which is pretty slim.

But it is possible within the action resolution rules.

I think we're playing it fast and loose with the use of possibility here. Stipulating a single or opposed die roll and "stipulating" a nigh impossible series of rolls along with the fighter not noticing he was cursed and simply running away are not in the same range for me. It's a lot closer to the fighter breaking his neck in a 6 foot fall.

 

[Celebrim]

Now, my question is this: is that really less offensive to verisimilitude, immersion, etc, than having the Fighter die from falling off a horse? Or to put it another way: does the game really need John Snow's 1-in-a-million critical horse-riding accident chart in order to make the riding fall as legitimate for immersive play as the kobold battle already is?

The two questions are very different. So different, that they need completely different answers.

a) Yes, it really is less offensive than having the fighter die from falling off a horse, because the rules describe a universe where one is at least possible on a bad day, and the other simply never is. That isn't to say that having the fighter lose a contest in which his only way of losing the contest was to roll 80 consecutive 1's (for instance) is a perfectly reasonable off stage scene for the described universe, but its ever so slightly more reasonable of an off stage scene than the one where the fighter falls off his horse under normal conditions and breaks his neck and dies.

So, yes, in my opinion neither such a scene should ever be scripted by a good DM, or if the DM must have such scenes in his game, the DMs game would be improved by changing the rules to match the desired setting.

This is not however nearly the same as saying that a 'critical horse-riding accident chart' is mandated.

b) IMO, a 'critical horse-riding accident chart' is just bad rulesmithing . It's the obvious solution to the problem. It's the first sort of thing you'd come up with if you wanted to formalize the hazard. But that way lies madness, and the best you can hope for is intentional comedy. A chart like that does several things wrong. One, in introduces probably unwelcome specificity into a generally abstract rules set. No other injuries are specific, why should this one be? Second, it attempts to solve only a single narrow instance of the general problem with a single specialized table without more general application that bears no resemblence to any of the other resolution systems in the game. That's pretty typical of 1st edition design where the game is growing organically as DMs imagine and encounter scenarios and problems for the very first time, but we've got more experience now. We ought to be able to do better, and save the over the top tables for nolstalgic humor games. Thirdly, the designer doesn't really seem to understand what they want to accomplish. What I think in the context of this thread what we want to accomplish with our new mechanics is actually pretty simple - we want to alter the universe such that every attack has some possibly remote but still real chance of killing anyone. The whole 'falling off his horse' thing is just a specific example. It's not the real problem.

The better solution in my opinion for a D&D game that once to increase the element of risk is to implement unbounded criticals in some fashion. The simpliest system I can think of would be if you roll a '20' its a critical, and you can make an additional identical attack. If that roll is also a '20', then you can make a third attack, and so forth. Then you just tweak the rules such that every physical blow in treated as an attack. In this fashion, there is a '1 in a million chance' falling off a horse will kill anyone, and we obtain the desired result without the need for a separate subsystem for everything, and without invalidating the rest of D&D's abstract system.

This has pretty important narrative effects, in that it is an in game constraint on metagame behavior. In default D&D, a high level player knows that his character can fall a certain distance without risk of death. Thus, high level characters ran by players who've learned the system tend to act as if they can't die from falling off a cliff (or off a horse). They act this way because in point of fact, they live in a universe where they can't die as the result of such events and thier players know that this is so. A good player might pretend for the purposes of the scene that his character is in some risk if he has some reason to believe that the DM wants a narrative where this is true (in defiance of the explicit rules!), but even this strikes an unintentionally comic note because it has to be feigned. Any fear is purely affectation, quite possibly in an attempt to get the DM to accept the character's purely metagamed proposition of jumping off a 90' cliff merely because of its tactical value. But if a player knows that there is some finite risk of death no matter the size of the attack, they'll tend to play thier character more in a way that reflects this fact. If your desire is stories in which the characters act as if falling off a 90' cliff is quite possibly hazardous, then you are better off adapting the game universe to reflect your goals.

PS: Your longer post is extremely interesting, and I want to respond, I just need to actually get something done and I don't have time to do it justice.