D&D 5E How do you define “mother may I” in relation to D&D 5E?

[clearstream]

My personal feeling is that the following are all rules and you need them all to make a game work:
1. Mechanics
2. Procedures
3. Principles

I feel like when we regard principles as distinct from rules we might not regard them as prescriptively as we should.

For me, it is hard to understand the value of emptying some words of meaning this way. So I would prefer to continue to differentiate between rules and principles. That said, I would agree with a sense that the boundary between principles and rules - once they are written down - is not unambiguous.

As a quick take, typically

1. Principles overarch rules and guide interpretation and application, as well as matters not covered by rules
2. Rules are constitutive or regulatory, and amount to instructions as to how we may update the game state (fiction and system)
3. Parameters are settings or values that identify the current instantiation
4. Mechanics are methods invoked by (typically) agents to interact with the game state, formed from collections of the above
5. Procedures are stipulated sequences of the application of rules (possibly or in many cases amounting to mechanics)
6. Examples provide insight as to what the designers had in mind
7. Guidance is text that has lower deontic weight, intended to influence but not instruct
8. Titles and indexes characterise and locate the text, but again exercise much lower deontic weight

Something like that. One way that I might restate your take is to say that the whole game text should be considered to make the game work. So I wouldn't exclude any of the above from the game text which is perhaps not far from what you mean by your more general application of the word "rules" (thinking for example of the common term "rule book" to mean the game text.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

In other games, like PbtA or FitD or BW derived games, the principles ARE rules. It's only if you come from the D&D-born mindset that anything in the book is just a suggestion that you get to anywhere that you'd consider them not rules.

ETA -- this is supporting your points, not disputing them.

I think this is defining a very broad category of games, past and present as "the D&D-born mindset". There are at the very least a very large number of games, many of them that are at least as alien in play to D&D as the PbtA games, that still do not consider their rules fundamental principals, but just tools to get you where you're going. But where they're going are often radically different places than you'd be going in any D&D game.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My personal feeling is that the following are all rules and you need them all to make a game work:
1. Mechanics
2. Procedures
3. Principles

I feel like when we regard principles as distinct from rules we might not regard them as prescriptively as we should.

Well, that's because in a fair number of cases, people don't consider them prescriptive. Outside of very focused games, I certainly don't.

 

[Ovi]

I think this is defining a very broad category of games, past and present as "the D&D-born mindset". There are at the very least a very large number of games, many of them that are at least as alien in play to D&D as the PbtA games, that still do not consider their rules fundamental principals, but just tools to get you where you're going. But where they're going are often radically different places than you'd be going in any D&D game.

That idea was born with D&D, though, and is often endemic to the D&D fanbase. I'm not denying it hasn't spread out from there, I'm pointing to where it really started for RPGs. And I think this is natural because the early D&D fanbase had incomplete games in the infancy of RPG design and largely had to fend for themselves. This got better then got worse, with 5e going back to 'fend for yourself' as an intentional design principle for the rules it suggests. If you want to say that Vampire is the same way, okay, I won't really argue with you.

 

[Ovi]

Well, that's because in a fair number of cases, people don't consider them prescriptive. Outside of very focused games, I certainly don't.

Most people don't, which means they're effectively not playing the game presented by the designer but instead a the game they imagine was presented (or even one they've intentionally changed). As I've come along in experience with various RPGs, I find that I'm really keen to play the game as presented and take what is offered and run that to ground to really understand what the game is before I decide I might want to monkey with it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That idea was born with D&D, though, and is often endemic to the D&D fanbase. I'm not denying it hasn't spread out from there, I'm pointing to where it really started for RPGs.

That kind of privileges certain games as their differences being more significant than others though, when what it really says is what those differences are matter more to some people than others. My point is that unless everything in the hobby but a very limited subset is "D&D" for purposes of this discussion, writing all that off to D&D seems a bit of a stretch.

And I think this is natural because the early D&D fanbase had incomplete games in the infancy of RPG design and largely had to fend for themselves. This got better then got worse, with 5e going back to 'fend for yourself' as an intentional design principle for the rules it suggests. If you want to say that Vampire is the same way, okay, I won't really argue with you.

Its not just Vampire though. As I said, once you get outside of the PbtA branch and close kin, its most of the hobby, no matter what else they do different. It varies considerably in degree, but the number of games that never think its okay for the GM to just go "You know what, lets look at the situation and just decide what's an appropriate roll is with what results" is pretty thin on the ground, even if they don't think that's an intrinsic virtue. There are prices for constraining the need to do that, and they aren't prices every game is willing to pay, anymore than they're all willing to have most of the game be pulled out of the GM's behind.
There's kind of an all-or-nothing view on this sort of topic that tends to come up that I don't think really serves the discussion well.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Most people don't, which means they're effectively not playing the game presented by the designer but instead a the game they imagine was presented (or even one they've intentionally changed). As I've come along in experience with various RPGs, I find that I'm really keen to play the game as presented and take what is offered and run that to ground to really understand what the game is before I decide I might want to monkey with it.

Or, alternatively, they're playing with ones that don't have (and don't need) strong principals in the first place in style-of-play. Again, if all you're looking for is an effective set of tools to get where you want to go, what the designer thinks is, in the end, kind of irrelevant as long as the tools serve.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Like @FrogReaver, I do agree with you that these systems have lessened vulnerability. Maybe even much lessened. Yet I feel morally certain that under each system, rule-following or not-following, inadequately principled or misaligned on expectations, participants may still experience MMI.

Security is not the impossibility of a breach, but sufficient deterrent such that a damaging breach is unlikely to occur, or sufficiently difficult or obvious that it can be caught and dealt with before it becomes actually damaging.

This seems to be granting everything I have argued: rules and explicit principles genuinely matter, perhaps even a great deal, for how much risk of MMI there is; good rules + good principles provide an effective deterrent against MMI; poor rules and/or a lack of effective explicit principles can cover for or even encourage MMI.

I'm genuinely not sure what your third sentence is trying to accomplish. You seem, in essence, to be saying, "Yes...but...it theoretically still could happen!" I don't see how that criticism is pertinent; no one is asking for a perfect defense, just better tools and better approaches. Things that allow us to drag MMI into the light so it can be identified, understood, and dealt with quickly. Those tools will never be absolute certainties of success. Nothing made by human minds could be. Why is that a problem?

 

[FrogReaver]

Security is not the impossibility of a breach, but sufficient deterrent such that a damaging breach is unlikely to occur, or sufficiently difficult or obvious that it can be caught and dealt with before it becomes actually damaging.

This seems to be granting everything I have argued: rules and explicit principles genuinely matter, perhaps even a great deal, for how much risk of MMI there is; good rules + good principles provide an effective deterrent against MMI; poor rules and/or a lack of effective explicit principles can cover for or even encourage MMI.

I'm genuinely not sure what your third sentence is trying to accomplish. You seem, in essence, to be saying, "Yes...but...it theoretically still could happen!" I don't see how that criticism is pertinent; no one is asking for a perfect defense, just better tools and better approaches. Things that allow us to drag MMI into the light so it can be identified, understood, and dealt with quickly. Those tools will never be absolute certainties of success. Nothing made by human minds could be. Why is that a problem?

I was with you all the way up to the end. It’s very possible we have been misunderstanding, but it’s seemed to us there were arguments that such play couldn’t generate MMI or something akin to it at all.

If that position isn’t here then I’ve made a lot of posts and points for nothing. And that’s fine, but a bit disappointing if so.

 

[Ovi]

I was with you all the way up to the end. It’s very possible we have been misunderstanding, but it’s seemed to us there were arguments that such play couldn’t generate MMI or something akin to it at all.

If that position isn’t here then I’ve made a lot of posts and points for nothing. And that’s fine, but a bit disappointing if so.

There are systems where MMI can't be done until and unless you add "except if you ignore the rules." When looking at a system to determine what play it can create, ignoring the rules seems like a bad approach to evaluate the system.