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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Professor Phobos" data-source="post: 4158261" data-attributes="member: 18883">Okay I'm definitely not making myself understood here. I am not talking about things within the game world the rules do not cover, like Economics. I am talking about the rules modeling a particular set of interactions of a class that do not exclusively represent even those interactions within the game world. In an Economics game, the rules do not represent all of Economics, just Cinematic Economics. I am talking about genre. The lens, or a lens? I am going to return to this later.Is this the only criteria for good/poor rules? As a DM, I expect my players to have a certain degree of "wink and nod" behavior in certain cases. If, for example, I have a hostage with a dagger to their throat, I expect the players to react as if that throat can be opened and the life's blood of the hostage spilled. I expect them to recognize that while someone going after someone with a dagger in combat couldn't ever do that in one slash, in this kind of circumstance, it can happen. I would even go so far as to expect the same behavior from a player character. In that instance I would say: "I won't roll damage- if you do some funky maneuver, you'll make a Dexterity check. If you fail, then you have a slashed throat, if not, you break away. The other guy's success will determine whether it's just a scratch or a grievous injury. A slashed throat needs medical attention in five minutes or so or you'll be dead." The threshold of medical attention being pretty low. I wouldn't even have them subtract hit points. It's not an abstract "hit" but a tangible injury emerging from the story.In other words, because the damage model doesn't govern this eventuality, I'm declaring it by fiat. I'd certainly make these sorts of stakes clear at the outset, but I'd have no trouble introducing this sort of situation nor would I expect revolt from my players. I guess you could characterize my style as a hybrid of the much derided "mutual rules-free narrative" and "we're playing a board game ironclad rules.' I am comfortable switching between the two as necessary. As a player, I have found GMs unwilling to do this to be extremely tedious. I think the root of our disagreement is over the whether or not the rules are the exclusive lens of game world interaction, or just one of many. I certainly recognize that players are going to make decisions based on their expectations of the rules. But what I do not expect is that this is the only sort of information they'll base decisions on- I expect them to engage with my expectations (and vice versa), I expect them to engage with the ongoing narrative and the genre considerations of the game in question. I expect engagement with common sense and a willingness to discard the rules when they do not seem to apply. I expect them to engage with me if they don't like something or have a request and all that.</blockquote>

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