How to emphaize something is important without rules?

[innerdude]

In my experience, I tend to emphasize the "importance of things" through the game world, namely by showing the players what the various NPCs are actually invested in. This tends to work best when approached through specific NPC characters, and not just through a group as a whole.

For example, it's far less interesting to say, "The Zhentarim want to take over the city," versus, "Kahlus, Zhentarim Lord of Harrowdale, has a personal vendetta against the Branson trade guild that dominates the city's politics due to shady land transactions that affected the Lord's relatives."

I use Charles Ryan's "Five things everybody knows" principle extensively in my games to set up in-game stakes--who knows what about who and what and where.

http://charlesmryan.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/five-things-everybody-knows/

It's amazing how quickly players start to care about stuff the people in the game world care about --- because 99% of the time, when they know what people in the game world care about, they know how to have their characters act to get the rewards they crave.

 

[GMMichael]

2. Reward what you want to encourage.
It works best when the rules for rewards are clear and unambiguous, not something that requires evaluative calls from the GM ("good roleplaying", "interesting ideas" etc.).

My inner economist agrees with this. Unfortunately, economics and roleplaying do not seem like amorous bedfellows. In my RPG, for example, I take a crack at rewarding roleplaying - something I'd like to emphasize - by offering bonuses (hero points) to skill contests. I don't wander far into the realm of "this is how you roleplay," but I encourage roleplaying with minimal rules by saying that players can run their PCs however they want. IF a player obstructs his character's goals by roleplaying well, then the GM can award a hero point. In turn, the hero point is an opportunity to enhance one's character by spending it in a thematic or dramatic way. This isn't required, so it's not an explicit rule, but it's a guideline aimed at encouraging roleplaying.

However, there are a lot of important concepts in RPGs like that a DM should create constant time pressure to force PCs to act efficiently, lateral thinking, the importance of teamwork, and a bunch of other things I can't think of.

So many concepts that it's not very practical to be able to write even one book that covers everything. Maybe D&D's new modularity will come to the rescue. Or maybe the grassroots will, instead. But as some posters have noted, rules can be written for such things as these.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think this tends to get people into the wrong frame of mind and put the cart before the horse. You see this a lot in messageboard discussions - people will state that D&D's about killing monster and taking their stuff because that's what the rules spend the most effort on. But I don't think that's correct. That's an element of the game and an important one at that. But the whole RPG conceit behind D&D is to be more than that.

I'm not really trying to make a statement about what D&D is, I'm just describing the fact that rules support tells you what has a big effect and what you do a lot of in a game because the major reasons you HAVE rules is to keep big effects fair and to keep common activities interesting. This might not be the intent of the writers, especially not consciously, but it is the game that they're writing.

Rather, I think those areas of the rules (combat and rewards) have been so detailed and relatively robust because those are the areas of the game that needs the rules the most.

Why do we need combat rules at all?

As far as I can see, it is because the consequences are huge and the activity is supposed to be pretty regular.

In D&D specifically, the consequences of character death (permadeath!) are rather tremendous: you will never be able to play that character again. So because of that, the rules for how and when a character dies (mostly, through combat, but occasionally other things) received more attention, to make life and death more equitable (the rules for trap-finding and the like are nearly as detailed in certain e's: 10-foot poles and whatnot).

Additionally, fights happen regularly: monsters are there to be fought and killed in combat by and large. Fights also, by 4e, became the major source of variance in your character. Most of your powers in 4e are attacks. You'll use the same Diplomacy skill over and over again, but you will never swing your sword the same way twice in a row. Which is more interesting, detailed, and multifaceted? Which offers more room for player exploration?

D&D could easily have lighter consequences (death flags are great for more narrative-style games; 5e imports 4e's death saves which makes permadeath fairly rare in practice) and less combat variation (OD&D weapons all do the same damage and are weilded the same way; 5e attacks don't come in 6 different level-1 flavors), and D&D has, of course, flirted with these ideas, and supported different styles of play to different degrees over its lifespan.

But for the OP's purposes, 4e is an example of of how importance creates rules, because the importance of combat created a lot of combat rules. If you're looking for something to be important, it will "want" to have rules attached to it. The only way you can get away with not having rules for important things is basically to force the players to trust the DM implicitly, and outside of mind control or certain particularly close groups, that ain't happenin'.

 

[MichaelSomething]

However, these is some amount of truth that things that have more documentation are likely to have been viewed as more important to document than things that are less documented. Most editions of the game are relatively tight lipped on the topic of basket weaving. one might deduce that the designers did not think the craft to be more important than blacksmithing or swimming.

Now suppose I thought basket weaving was super important and wanted to buy a Pathfinder/3.X splat book based around basket weaving? How many books can people recommend? Compare that to the number of books full of combat options that one can get for Pathfinder/3.X. Is there a huge different in their numbers and if so, why?

Oddly enough, Pathfinder does have a magic item you can use to change your gender. It seems that they felt a magic item was a good way of signalling that the subject was okay to include.

 

[Jhaelen]

As an example here - there are FATE variants in which social conflict is mechanically *completely* analogous to physical combat. Change the skill names, and the rules are the same!

Absolutely! This is actually a change I'd like to see for D&D:
Why isn't the skill system used for combat and spellcasting, too? This is actually a feature of many rpgs. If combat and spellcasting were skill-based, then you could indeed resolve any kind of challenge or conflict using the same rules.

In 4e, a fundamental design decision was that every character had to be proficient in combat. So, since the basic assumption was that every character would engage in combat regularly, it didn't make sense to make it a skill. The guidelines for advancement show this as well: The expectation was that 70% of the experience would be gained from combat encounters.

Which leads me to the question: What are the xp guidelines in D&D 5e (if any)?

 

[Janx]

Now suppose I thought basket weaving was super important and wanted to buy a Pathfinder/3.X splat book based around basket weaving? How many books can people recommend? Compare that to the number of books full of combat options that one can get for Pathfinder/3.X. Is there a huge different in their numbers and if so, why?

Oddly enough, Pathfinder does have a magic item you can use to change your gender. It seems that they felt a magic item was a good way of signalling that the subject was okay to include.

I'm not sure what to make of this latter remark. It might be a profound observation.

If nothing, else it reinforces my point. We can't know for sure the author's intention, unless the author writes something saying "XYZ was most important to me when I wrote that" At best, we can guess based on verbosity or inclusion of a topic.

It might be the potion of gender changing was to promote trans-gender awareness. Or it's just an update of an old gag from Gary Gygax. At least the original Girdle of gender changing seems to have been a joke. Is there more or less content written in the rules on gender changing than Swimming? Combat?

 

[Umbran]

Absolutely! This is actually a change I'd like to see for D&D:
Why isn't the skill system used for combat and spellcasting, too? This is actually a feature of many rpgs. If combat and spellcasting were skill-based, then you could indeed resolve any kind of challenge or conflict using the same rules.

The reason D&D doesn't do it is largely historical - the earliest versions of the game didn't have what today we would today call a "skill system". Fighting and casting spells had different systems because, well, fighting and casting spells weren't much alike in the original designer's minds.

It wasn't until later, when other folks were creating games that were intended to specifically contract with and differ from D&D, that magic-as-skills came into being.

And that's okay. There is something (quite a lot, actually) to be said for having different games doing things in different ways. Sometimes, I *want* magic to have a fundamentally different approach than mundane tasks, for example.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Now suppose I thought basket weaving was super important and wanted to buy a Pathfinder/3.X splat book based around basket weaving? How many books can people recommend? Compare that to the number of books full of combat options that one can get for Pathfinder/3.X. Is there a huge different in their numbers and if so, why?

There's more at stake in combat and folks do more of it while playing a game of fantasy murderhobos.

Now, if your game was about, I dunno, living in a stone-age society and carrying trade goods to market and trying to get rich of cowrie shells or something, basket-weaving might be much more important (easily available materials, sturdy container when crafted, potential for art to increase the value, etc.), and the difference between materials and weave patterns and dyes might be important (*roll* looks like geometric patterns with *roll* blue decorations on a white background are at a premium of *roll* 5 cowrie shells, so you make a *roll* substantial profit because of your geometric pattern mastery and your expanded blue color palette). Raise the stakes (your failed craft might mean your family starves!) and add some variety (substances, colors, patterns, crafting houses), some places to roll (profit, loss, substance quality, random marketplace events -- you don't want the big comptetitor to come in and crush you!) and you've got a nice little system going. Maybe have little chits or tokens to represent different styles of basket your character can weave.

Adding that onto D&D would be pretty niche, since D&D isn't really about stone-age mercantilism and handicrafts -- it's not what the rest of the rules considers important. There's not much of a market for it beyond the limited rules for the Craft (basket) skill (you can make a palm-leaf spellbook! neat!). Like most truly niche things, you'd have to make your own house rules, simply because most people aren't looking for basket weaving to be very important in a game of dungeon-crawling adventurers, so we don't need much ink spilled over its rules.