How to emphaize something is important without rules?

[MichaelSomething]

RPGs have rules. From how much damage a Fireball does to how many polearms you can carry, there are plenty of rules to it.

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.

If you can't make rules for it, how do you show that it's important?

Maybe I should try a different example?

4E had a lot of combat rules, and largely devoted little space to non combat rules because they assumed that a lot of people would rather just free form it. However, because 4E devoted little space to non combat rules, people assume that non combat wasn't important. It's not that it wasn't important, it was something that was ill suited to be covered by rules. Got it?

 

[Derren]

It's not that it wasn't important, it was something that was ill suited to be covered by rules. Got it?

Except for all the Rpgs out there which manage exactly that. That 4E rules were ill suited for non combat interaction was because of decisions made during the design process, meaning that non combat suitability was deemed to be not important for the rules.

 

[delericho]

Another way something can be emphasised as important is in gameplay (and especially "emergent gameplay"). If the published adventures include lots of puzzle-like elements, for example - if, say, it features lots of clues that allow observant players to find and avoid the many traps - then there's good reason for the players to look out for those elements and make use of them. They're not particularly rules elements, but they're certainly being emphasised.

(And the same could be done with the setting elements, such as cultures or invented languages, or whatever - in most games those things tend to be just, well, there, but there's no particular reason that they shouldn't play a role in adventure design or execution, and thus become emphasised through play, without needing rules to do so.)

Broadly speaking, a game will encourage those things that it rewards. If you want to emphasise something as important, reward those players who pay attention to it.

 

[GMMichael]

How do you emphasize that something's important without rules?

Well, you could use guidelines.

Back to rules, though. Reading between the lines is difficult. Even harder is writing between the lines. Which is to say, the easiest way to make the game happen is to write rules for it. Since you used D&D as an example, look at this:

The 3e PHB used half of its pages describing combat and spells.

The 5e PH uses about one third of its pages doing the same thing.

Hopefully, this means that 5e is emphasizing combat and spells less, and other things more. Regarding your examples of things that aren't amenable to rules, I think guidelines would work very well for such things.

 

[steenan]

1. Not all rules are about numbers and rolls.
For example, Dungeon World gives very specific agenda and principles for the GM and lists "moves" they can use while running the game. They define the style and flow of the game. Ignoring this part of the rules affects the game much more than fiddling with numbers.

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.). For example, Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine describes genre-based actions that gain you XP before it even gets to character creation. They are much more important and have more effect on how the game plays than rules for skills or for wounds.

3. Use "creative void" that rules point to.
Sometimes it works the best if there are no rules for the most important part part of the game, but there are rules around it that focus players' attention on the "void". For example, in Dogs in the Vineyard, there are no rules for morality, no alignments or anything similar. The GM is forbidden from telling players what is "really" moral in the setting. There is a well described background with the religious rules of PCs' culture. There are rules for conflicts where you can affect others and persuade or force them to behave as you think they should. But what to do in a specific situation encountered in game, how to judge what is good and what is evil, how to solve community's problems and how far to go in doing it - is completely up to the players, with no rules to restrict them.

 

[Umbran]

I don't think rules actually emphasize what is important. They instead inform what you can reliably do - which is not the same thing. When presented with an issue, players will tend to turn to turn to the rules to tell them what they can expect to accomplish - the rules tend to be viewed as a toolbox, and there will be a tendency to first think along lines of what is in the easily accessible toolbox.

You typically want "what is important" to correlate to "what is in the toolbox", but that's not always how it goes.

You emphasize what is important by rewarding the desired behavior. I disagree with steenan, above, in that I don't see an issue with GM evaluative calls. I don't think the game rules need to be the only source of "what is important". The game rules can tend to reward certain activities, *and* the GM can also tend to reward other activities. This is a good thing, and allows campaigns run by different GMs, or by the same GM, even, to have different areas of focus.

 

[Janx]

I'm not sure I'd equate devoted page count to importance. Just because half of most editions of the PH is spells, doesn't mean spells is actually the most important thing. Only that it is the most verbose thing in the game's design. It may be possible for an RPG to have a magic system that is not as "thick" to document.

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.

 

[I'm A Banana]

4E had a lot of combat rules, and largely devoted little space to non combat rules because they assumed that a lot of people would rather just free form it. However, because 4E devoted little space to non combat rules, people assume that non combat wasn't important. It's not that it wasn't important, it was something that was ill suited to be covered by rules. Got it?

I think you need to question the assumption that combat is any better suited to rules than non-combat. Any reason that you have as to why it non-combat doesn't work also applies to combat. What you have rules for is a choice, not a statement of suitability.

RPGs don't need any rules. Make-believe doesn't have rules and it works fine and RPGs are just make-believe ultimately.

So any rules you have serve a purpose.

The purpose of most rules is to resolve ambiguity -- when someone says "I shoot you with my laser and kill you," the rules are there to say if that happens.

The rules are also there to make play fun. If every question of if I hit you and killed you with my laser was resolved by asking the table judge if that happened, it would be less interesting than if that question was resolved by rolling some dice to find out what happened (ennabling things like situational modifiers and unexpected results).

Play needs to be more interesting if it is something you do over and over again. If your game involves a lot of laser-shooting deathmatches, you want a way for shooting lasers to be fun on a visceral, sensory level, not just in your mind.

Play needs to resolve ambiguity where the stakes are high. If I am killed with a laser shot and can just declare myself re-spawned instantly, there's low stakes, and we don't need a lot of rules for that. I just do it. The game wants me to comb back right away. If, instead, I'll be sitting out the rest of the session, the stakes are really high, and it's important that if I am killed, that it is fair and agreeable to everyone involved (otherwise I'll get upset because people just kill me because they don't like me or something and fun will not be had).

So rules for RPGs exist where there are high stakes and where you do the action a lot.

Which means if there are rules for it, it is IMPORTANT and it is something you are expected to DO A LOT OF.

And if there are not rules for it, it is not as important, and you are not expected to do it as often. This was certainly true of 4e non-combat resolution IMXP.

If you want to emphasize that something is important without rules, you're going to get a bit stuck. To emphasize its importance, you raise the stakes -- make sure that what one does in that situation has a BIG effect in play. For instance, if you wanted talky-style diplomacy to be important in D&D, you might determine that failing at it means you have to sit out the rest of the session and that doing it successfully means that you get XP and treasure.

Of course, once the stakes are so high, it is important that failing and succeeding are not subject to a DM's whims, so that the ambiguity is resolved neutrally and mechanically rather than relying on a human process. But once you take the judgement call out of the hands of a DM, you're going to need rules to resolve it.

5e, for instance, gets away with "rulings not rules" more often because it has less "important" rules. Whether or not you succeed at stealth or at a particular spell is not of vital importance to 5e's overall gameplay. So it's fine if a DM makes those judgement calls -- the stakes are not so high.

An individual DM might be able to get away with a high-stakes decision without rules, but this would not be something you could write into a game, it would be something that a group with a huge level of DM trust (maybe to the level of DMs controlling PC actions) would be able to pull off. And even then, it would not necessarily be something that group could pull off a lot of.

Rules tell you what is high-stakes and/or what you'll be doing a lot of. If it's low stakes and you don't do it that often, it's hard to say it's "important." And if it's high stakes or you're doing it a lot, rules serve a good purpose.

 

[billd91]

Which means if there are rules for it, it is IMPORTANT and it is something you are expected to DO A LOT OF.

And if there are not rules for it, it is not as important, and you are not expected to do it as often. This was certainly true of 4e non-combat resolution IMXP.

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. 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. The rules follow the fiction. Dave Arneson wanted modified rules to support the developments in Minneapolis involving players taking on the roles of individual operatives - PCs. Gary Gygax adapted the Chainmail rules to be suitable to such a task.

 

[Umbran]

I think you need to question the assumption that combat is any better suited to rules than non-combat.

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!