Game rules are not the physics of the game world

[Celebrim]

And I disagree with your spin on "player thinking." I don't have any players who think in purely gamist terms

No, of course not. If you ever had any that did, you would have drove them away long before now.

I've seen players accept mechanical disadvantage for roleplaying purposes and I expect to see it again. They're not doing it just to make me happy.

Sure, I've done that. I've seen it. I've even seen players that lean gamist do it, for a combination of reasons, some narrativist and some involving challenging themselves.

But I've rarely met pure narrativist players either. I was being somewhat cynical in describing a player's internal thought processes, but I wasn't being completely cynical. And I have met players, some of them good roleplayers, who did think _exactly_ like that.

Eh. If it comes up, and a player says, "But that's not in the rules!"

Alot of the recent confusion about my point stems from this misunderstanding you are demonstrating here. I think 'not in the rules' is a very different situation than 'contravenes an established rule'. The rules aren't complete and never can be, but once you've established precedents you should tend to stick to them.

No, I'm not. I'm giving one description. The rules do not describe the world.

Errr... no. Even your earlier claims don't go so far. Perhaps you meant to add a qualifier, like 'fully'? If not, you can say that, but if you literally meant it, then it would be the same as not having rules... and I'm not even sure that's humanly possible. Like it or not, the rules do describe the world. The PC does something, and the world reacts accord to the rules. That's a description.

I don't think you have to discard a system entirely if it has wierd edge cases you don't like. No one is required to create a 'perfect system' before they sit down to play. But I do think you should be conscious of the potential products of the system that you know or at odds with the setting you want to create and which you won't be able to live with and adjust the game rules accordingly, particularly before they are used to create precedents you don't want to honor. If you want certain concrete things, knights that break thier necks, 'zero' intelligence morons, babies that can't throw footballs, whatever, and you need these things, then you should adjust the rules accordingly.

Now, you're saying these goals are contradictory- that my system doesn't support my setting. I say, "Sure", but I shrug and ignore it because I don't care.

Not caring about the contridictions is very different than them not being there. If you don't care that the system doesn't support the setting, that doesn't mean that its going to support the setting. Sure, you can play through problems. That doesn't mean that they aren't problems.

Anyway, we seem to have reached a point where we are going, "Is too!", "No, it isn't!" and not saying anything new.

 

[The Little Raven]

No it isn't. That's my point. It's entirely consistant within the framework and guidelines of this universe. The rules of this universe mean that knights that fall off thier horses can break thier necks. But, the game isn't occuring in this universe, even if one of the conceits of the game is that it is. It's actually occuring in an imaginary universe that has rules which are usually abstractions of the rules in this universe (plus usually a little something extra). And the knight falling off and breaking his next is not at all consistant with the framework and guidelines of the imaginary universe.

To be clear, you seem to be saying "If the game rules do not allow for an action or a particular possibility, like a 20th-level fighter falling from his horse and instantly breaking his neck, then that action is impossible within the setting, because the rules model all possibilities within the setting." Would you say that is correct?

 

[Celebrim]

To be clear, you seem to be saying "If the game rules do not allow for an action or a particular possibility, like a 20th-level fighter falling from his horse and instantly breaking his neck, then that action is impossible within the setting, because the rules model all possibilities within the setting." Would you say that is correct?

No, not quite. You are doing well until the last clause, which doesn't logically follow from what comes before it.

What I'm saying, among other things is, "If the game rules do not allow for an action or a particular possibility, like a 20th-level fighter falling from his horse and instantly 'breaking his neck', then that action is impossible with in the setting, because the rules of the setting clearly preclude it from occurring."

Or more simply, "If something can't happen in the game, then it doesn't."

It doesn't follow that, "If something can't happen in the game, that the rules model all possibilities within the setting.", and I have never said that. In fact, I've expressly said, "The rules (as they exist at any point in thier development) do not model all possibilities within the setting." But, where the rules are not silent, they should be either followed - or if you don't want to follow them, changed.

Alot of the counter-examples offered to me don't really apply to what I'm saying. If the rules don't expressly provide for insomnia, that doesn't mean insomnia doesn't exist. It merely means that once insomnia is introduced the game, some rules for it must be invented and then once those rules are set as a precedent you should strongly resist violating them.

Just to complicate things, It also may mean that a character possesses insomnia as what GURPS calls a 'quirk', in that we may say that they have insomnia for the purposes of thinking about characterization but that they don't have insomnia sufficient to actually meaningful impact play. 'Quirks' aren't part of the physics of the game world, and don't impose a rule on anyone, so there isn't any 'rule' being violated. On the other hand, a quirk may eventually force a rule on you, like the penalty for not getting enough sleep for several nights in a row if a characters insomnia becomes a major part of game play. For exmaple, if your NPC gets no sleep for several nights in a row, you must either decide to impose a penalty on the NPC, or decide not to impose a penalty on the PC when thier character doesn't get enough rest. Either way, at that point, you've created a rule. The interesting thing about a 'quirk' is that even though it is a description of the game world, it has more reality at the metagame level than the in game level. Boiled down, its just a non-binding commitment by the player to play the character in a certain way.

 

[pemerton]

I can accept that some few elite and blessed people (e.g.: those with high levels) just aren't going to die from simply falling out of their saddle, even though, in the real-world, such a thing is impossible

How do you deal with the coup-de-grace rules? A peasant with a small knife is actually more threatening (they can trigger a Fortitude save in a sleeping 20th level Fighter) than is a fall from horseback at full gallop. That suggests that these elites are not that blessed. It suggests to me that the immunity from horseback fall is more a mechanical glitch (as per the sleeping example) than a nod to the physics of the assumed gameworld.

If assumptions are not shared, you'll run into conflict when players attempt to act in ways that make sense according to their understanding of the world, but don't according to others.

<snip>

The default understanding of the D&D world is that the heroes aren't just well-trained ordinary people who keep getting really lucky; they actually can do things and withstand hazards in a way flatly contrary to what ordinary people can do.

Hence the need for shared expectations among players and GM. Establishing those can displace that default (which is itself not something I fully concede).

A focused 20th-level barbarian, for instance, can engage in feats of strength that not only exceed what any human has done, but violate our understanding of what human flesh and bone can withstand.

I do think that Prof Phobos had made a good point about coup-de-grace rules. They don't really run your way, do they? They suggest a somewhat unstable default.

If you get a player who requires a consistent world to have fun playing, who demands that the story take place within the boundaries established by the world and not the other way around, who will balk at having his character surrender with a knife to his throat

This example bumps into at least three problems:

1) You are assuming that a consistent world is equivalent to one in which the mechanics are the physics. This has been denied by myself, John Snow and Prof Phobos at least.

2) The coup-de-grace rules push against your example.

3) The narrativist contention is that the action-resolution mechanics are a device for resolving PC adversity. So your example doesn't step outside the posited boundaries of those mechanics in any event.

I think we need to keep firmly in mind that we pretending that the game world is real, and isn't actually real. What are we going to measure game world reality by if not the rules? Aren't the rules pretty much all in existance so that we can measure the reality of an unreal place?

Well, if I was playing a game set in Middle-Earth I'd rely on LoTR as my measure. In the Oriental Adventures game that I GM, we rely on shared experiences of Jet Li films plus a few Samurai history texts as our measure - ambiguities are pretty easily resolved by discussion.

In short, as Prof Phobos put it:

Description. Fluff text. Genre assumptions.

 

[pemerton]

Rules are brought in not to interpret laws of physics in the imagination, but to put controls in place in the imagination so that different peoples concept of a given fantasy can be played out with other people.

This puts no restriction or governance on the laws of physics within a gameworld. It merely places parameters that are acceptible to multiple imaginations in place so that intereactions between said imaginations can take place.

The 'Physics' of the world (again IMO) are an outcome of the combination of the DM and Players imaginations, and the rules that they have used to allow said imaginations to interact.

In conclusion I put forward that the rules are a mathematical mechanic for drawing together different imaginative processes in order to create a representation of what the physics of a fantasy universe might look like, in a cohesive image that can be applied in all individual imaginations involved.
This does make rules integral to establishing laws of physics, beyond DM Fiat (ie in absolute complete non narrative gaming, which doesn't exist), but it does not make the Rules 'the laws of physics' of the game world. That would be like saying mathematics is the Laws of Physics in the real world.


Which side I have just agreed with I have no idea, but hopefully you see my point.

I think you've broadly agreed with me, at least: the rules distribute narrative control in various ways, and place certain parameters on what can be said to be part of the narrative, and the physics of the world can be inferred from the results of these exercise of narrative control.

Personally I prefer 'The DM's word is LAW, if that is beyond your suspension of disbelief then you are playing with the wrong DM'.

Here we differ. I prefer player GM-negotiation on these matters.

 

[The Little Raven]

Or more simply, "If something can't happen in the game, then it doesn't."

Okay. Do you have any rules for the agricultural revolution (the domestication of cereal grains in order to produce heartier strains that don't release their spore as easily, to allow humans to gather them), or any other rules-based explanation for why farming exists in your world that you'd like to share? After all, I'd hate for my players to point out that I need rules for that to have a consistent world, and be lacking them.

It doesn't follow that, "If something can't happen in the game, that the rules model all possibilities within the setting.", and I have never said that. In fact, I've expressly said, "The rules (as they exist at any point in thier development) do not model all possibilities within the setting." But, where the rules are not silent, they should be either followed - or if you don't want to follow them, changed.

I get it. You're saying "If you want it to happen in your setting, you have to make a rule for it." Other people are saying "No, I don't. I interpret the rules as being there to adjudicate the adventures of my players, not to describe the 'physics' of the universe." And you seem to be arguing that they're wrong, and that anything that happens in their setting has to have a rules explanation if they want it to have occurred. That kinda strikes me as you telling people that your way is right and their way is wrong.

Alot of the counter-examples offered to me don't really apply to what I'm saying. If the rules don't expressly provide for insomnia, that doesn't mean insomnia doesn't exist. It merely means that once insomnia is introduced the game, some rules for it must be invented and then once those rules are set as a precedent you should strongly resist violating them.

So, basically, you're advocating rule bloat, since you imply the need for all this minutiae for systems that have never had rules in any previous edition?

 

[LostSoul]

Alot of the counter-examples offered to me don't really apply to what I'm saying. If the rules don't expressly provide for insomnia, that doesn't mean insomnia doesn't exist. It merely means that once insomnia is introduced the game, some rules for it must be invented and then once those rules are set as a precedent you should strongly resist violating them.

That makes sense to me. Let me try to put this in my own words to see if I get it.

If the fact that someone in the gameworld has insomnia is going to affect the resolution mechanics, we should deal with insomnia in a consistent manner.

I am going to challenge you. Post some actual play experiences that deal with this issue. Times when something existed, like insomnia, that wasn't covered by the rules, and how you dealt with it. And how the people at the game responded. A good case and a bad case would be even better.

 

[AZRogue]

The rules provide guidelines for how to adjudicate the actions of the characters (players) in a setting. In that respect they actually are the "world"--for the players.

The setting itself, however, is there to provide the DM with a framework to tell a story/challenge the characters/entertain. You should probably use the guidelines given when interacting with your PCs, since that's why they were provided, buy there's no need to do that when dealing with your setting outside the influence of your players. You don't need a guideline to tell you how you can interact with the world because you *are* the world. (the term RPG-Masturbation came to mind, which I think is funny--no offense is intended to anyone)

I think it is possible for a person to fall off a horse and die from a broken neck. If I want an NPC outside the influence of my players to fall and die in such a way, that's my right, duty, and obligation--the world is in my keeping. Due to the nature of the game, though, the PCs could never fall off a horse and die from a broken neck. That's an important distinction.

 

[robertliguori]

Force them to do what?

And I disagree with your spin on "player thinking." I don't have any players who think in purely gamist terms- in addition to the calculations of "Will this help me win?", there are, "What would my character do?" (and sometimes, "What would be interesting?") I've seen players accept mechanical disadvantage for roleplaying purposes and I expect to see it again. They're not doing it just to make me happy.

I think one issue (or rather, one cause of issue in discussion that is itself a happy lack-of-issue) is that you have and accept as not undesirable an unusually high level of communication among your player base. If your players accept that things just happen in the world and approach each case finding out how they are supposed to respond before doing so, then your method will not have any problems.

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.

Eh. If it comes up, and a player says, "But that's not in the rules!" I'll probably just copy & paste some of pemerton and John Snow's posts and send them to him.

Well, I don't think you will with your group, because your group does not expect the rules to be constant. 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, and artfully never notice this in character ("Wow, we were really lucky to survive that battle...and the one before it...and the eighteen before that...and the being set on fire a dozen times before that..."), you're good to go. Again, however, the vast majority of the playerbase will walk away before they engage in these leaps of illogic. People like to understand the rules of the game they're playing; deciding that your world has properties X but is mechanically described as extremely-not-X to the players will result in any player that values consistency having their character engage in speculation as to why people assume X when not-X keeps happening, or why X keeps happening.

No, I'm not. I'm giving one description. The rules do not describe the world.

You keep making this statement. 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. They may also notice that the first wounds of any battle tend to be the least severe, and so on, and so forth. If what happens to the players is what's in the rules, and what happens not to the players is whatever you decide which goes outside the boundaries of the rules, then lots of players will seriously wonder why things that happen to other people never happen to them.

I totally can [keep them separate].

Well, not really. What you can do is have one universe of "Whatever I think best at the moment with no regard to precedent." and simply have what happens to the PCs be the rules.

Again, we've hit this point before- "Just don't play D&D!" and the answer is, "But we like D&D!"

Maybe I want all that feats, AoO malarkey, prestige class stuff? (I don't, but hypothetically) Let's say I want to have all that stuff and a grim world of perilous adventure.

Now, you're saying these goals are contradictory- that my system doesn't support my setting. I say, "Sure", but I shrug and ignore it because I don't care. It is a trivial effort to just recognize the game mechanics as serving other purposes than simulation. I can have this cake and eat it too.

Take Storytelling (the system). Mortals in the current World of Darkness system are surprisingly robust; gunshots do not tend towards all that much lethality. Is this because mortals in the World of Darkness can take a lot of punishment? No. It's designed that way because getting one-shotted sucks for a player. Intelligence is rated between one (below average) and five (extremely intelligent). Does this mean every individual in the World of Darkness can be evenly broken down into five categories of intelligence, or that there are no mentally retarded people whose intelligence could be said to be lower than one on the scale? No. Not at all. The fluff and rules contradict. Where fluff and rules contradict, the fluff wins, except in the case of PCs, of course.

Take Call of Cthulhu. There are all kinds of edge cases where "the simulation" breaks down, and if the rules were the very laws of the game universe, it would not then resemble a real historical or modern day setting. People would probably notice if babies could throw footballs.

But I like BRP. It is simple, it is fast, I know it well, I can run it from memory, I like the SAN system, etc. No system is perfect. Why should I discard it entirely if I'm not willing to accept its little contradictions and occasional bit of silliness when I can just take it to be solely for the purpose of PC interaction with the world?

Pointe the firste; because unless you actually go through the rules and mark out what you consider 'unrealistic' (See Celebrim's comment, only with a wave at the explicit magic and more of a sneer on the end), or are playing with a player base that expects your particular idiosyncrasies, players assume that the fluff of the world flows from the crunch. They assume this because they interact with the crunch, and if they are roleplaying characters capable of pattern-matching, will notice if what happens when they are around and what happens when they aren't around are wildly different. Even if the player therefore knows that this is a world that is gritty and people can die from falling off of a horse, he's seen his barbarian buddy head-butt stone golems to death; the character will assume D&D rules are standard.

Pointe the seconde: You're not using the rules as rules, you're using them as inspiration for your own story. This is fine and good, but it's not D&D. I can mechanically represent a 10th-level cleric in a Call of Ctuthlu campaign, but I will not be playing D&D (as the term is commonly meant to be understood) if I change the world to this degree. 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.

Nope. The purpose of the mechanics is to create a certain gameplay result. Tactical elements, genre emulation, speed and ease of play. Those sorts of things.

After considering the many and weighty citations and stunning turns of rhetoric, I am forced to resort to falling back on a rebuttal offered previously in the thread: Nu-unh.

Seriously, dude/ette/honored individual of indeterminate sex. Asserting the point under discussion buys you extremely little on the persuad-o-meter.

Also, a basic rebuttal; although the rules should not determine reality exactly (as there will always be corner cases, such as trying to make a Climb check in pouring rain or whether or not a dead character that somehow manages to gain 11 temporary hit points springs back to life), they should conform to the general shape of reality. 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. If the rules are that death can come on swift wings from seemingly-insignificant injuries, the rules should support that, as well (or you should abandon the pretense that the rules mean anything.)

The shape of the rules is that by the time you're into the heroic tiers, you can survive hours of exposure in sub-zero or desert-high weather. Injuries fail to affect you direly; it's not that you can shrug off a sword to the heart, it's while you have hit points, it is impossible for anyone to do so directly while you're not helpless (and, at certain levels, you can even shrug off a blow taken while helpless through sheer toughness). It is entirely possible for you to be struck directly by lightning and survive. From where, then, should come the assumption that the world is different for other heroes of equivalent power and accomplishment?

You know those RPGS (mostly console, and mostly J-) that have battle mechanics that bear totally nothing to do with the actual world? Those game where you can literally kill and ressurect someone dozens of times, but if they happen to be fatally injured in a cut scene, they die for real?

You know how the reason that a lot of us tabletop gamers really, really hate those games for their inconsistent and run-on-rails natures?

Huh. Quick and dirty heuristic question: Who here thinks that Final Fantasy and similar games make good models for tabletop RPG play?

 

[pemerton]

We need to carefully say what we mean by 'exist'.

<snip>

We might say that 'love' exists, but it doesn't exist in the same way 'a brick' does.

There is a long tradition in European philosophy (beginning with Plato at least) that does not identify "existence" with "the property to affect the material world".

But I really don't think that this thread needs to touch on these difficult technical questions of metaphysics.

You just defined a term 'color' to refer to things that exist in the game but have no actual mechanical effect.

Actually, I think he used a term which is already well established as a term for describing RPG play (and is borrowed from the technical terminology of other literary/narrative pursuits).

In the same way that others in the thread have used the term "physics".

These things actually exist outside of the rules, and hense the physics of the game.

Does "game" here mean "gameworld"? Then your claim is false - the gameworld includes the rain. Does "game" here mean "action resolution mechanics"? Then your claim is true, but seems to not establish anything non-tautologous.

Lets say that 'color' exists. Well, we can certainly say that 'color' is not part of the physics of the game. But we can't say that because 'color' exists, the game rules are not the physics of the game world. And I further assert that since this thing called 'color' isn't part of the physics of the game world, its existance is of a different sort than those things which are defined by the physics of the game world.

The reasoning here is completely obscure to me, especially because you seem to use "game" and "gameworld" as equivalent, when clearly they are not.

I would define the role of color by analogy.

<snip programming analogy>

Your analogy is completely inapt for anyone who doesn't play an RPG so as to experience outputs that are calculated, logically/mathematically, from certain inputs. In short - if you play non-narrativistly, then you may well think that the mechanics are the physics of the gameworld. But narrativists don't play non-narrativistly. If they did, they wouldn't be narrativists.

If I say it is cold and raining, I expect my players to do things like: "My character puts on his poncho, or stands in an alcove, or stands there shivering and complaining about the cold."

It's a hook they can hang roleplaying on. It doesn't need to penalize ranged attacks or have any other mechanical impact to have a tangible impact on the game via roleplaying.

Exactly right.

If those are enforcable, if they have any mechanical effect, then those sound like synonyms for 'rules'. And if they aren't, they don't sound like a means of precise communication.

"Enforceable" is an odd word to use here. But I take you roughly to be saying that "If you have players who only respond to the action resolution mechanics, and are not interested in the gameworld for any other reason, then narrativist play will fail." That claim is true, but it doesn't remotely show that narrativist play cannot take place. Every day, narrativist RPGers are refuting that suggestion by doing it.

The key to their success is that such players are interested in the gameworld for another reason - namely, for the way in which its elements constitute statements of thematic importance.