How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Reynard]

Since the beginning of the hobby (and earlier, see The Elusive Shift) there has been disagreement over how much players of RPGs should be aware of the rules of play. Some people think that full access to the rules is the only way for players to have any real agency, while others think that the rules should be invisible to the players in order to enable immersion. There are, of course, many opinions between those poles.

What do you think? How much knowledge of the rules should players have, both going in (creating a character, etc) as well as during actual play? Why? What aspects of players' knoweldge and awareness of the rules and play system impacts your opinion on this?

For my part, I mostly lean toward the "players should know the rules" part. I am not particularly interested in immersion, at least compared to gameplay, so I think that players who understand the rules (both in their character and in the game at the moment) have more agency and more agency by players makes the game more fun. That said, I have experimented once or twice with "hidden rules" and it has turned out interesting, at least. But those were definitely very rules light games.

Note that this is about opinion and preference, so everyone is right. Please respond to others' posts accordingly.

 

[lolsworth]

The best games I have both run and played in have been situations where players didn't know "the rules" and didn't need to.

I put "rules" in inverted commas because to play the game, you still need to understand the structure of the game and "how to play", even if not the rules.

So a dnd player needs to understand how to read their character sheet, and how initiative order works. But they don't need to fully understand how stealth or fall damage works, because the DM can adjudicate that.

Likewise in a pbta game like monster of the week. The player just needs to know how to read their playbook, and understand when moves happen. The rest of the game is a conversation.

I guess what I'm saying is there's a baseline of player facing mechanics and structure the players need to grasp as a baseline. But beyond that in many cases the gm can adjudicate.

 

[GuardianLurker]

+1 for "players should know". Not for any theoretical, or ideological reason, but for the simple practical reason that it makes my job as GM easier.

 

[R_J_K75]

In theory I think that if someone is exclusively a player then they only need to know the PHB, but as the years have gone on, in practice, most players read all the core books these days. Anyone who is a DM needs to at least make an attempt to know the majority of the rules in the 3 core books. If a player can separate what they know from what their character would know then there shouldn't be a problem, but when they start metagaming is when I have a problem.

 

[Reynard]

The best games I have both run and played in have been situations where players didn't know "the rules" and didn't need to.

I put "rules" in inverted commas because to play the game, you still need to understand the structure of the game and "how to play", even if not the rules.

So a dnd player needs to understand how to read their character sheet, and how initiative order works. But they don't need to fully understand how stealth or fall damage works, because the DM can adjudicate that.

Likewise in a pbta game like monster of the week. The player just needs to know how to read their playbook, and understand when moves happen. The rest of the game is a conversation.

I guess what I'm saying is there's a baseline of player facing mechanics and structure the players need to grasp as a baseline. But beyond that in many cases the gm can adjudicate.

I think there is a line of reasoning that suggests the PCs shouldn't even have a character sheet. They should just know who they are playing and tell the GM what they are doing (in character).

 

[grimmgoose]

Immersion doesn't come from "not knowing the rules", but I will note that - as it is with almost everything in this social hobby of ours: it depends on the group.

I have two groups: one where, the crunchiness and mechanics of the rules is half of the fun. The other couldn't really care less. Different strokes for different folks.

 

[billd91]

I think there's a happy medium between extremes. I want the players to know enough of the rule to understand how they work, how many actions they have in the action economy, how various checks and attacks are rolled, etc because they're more likely to make effective choices. But I don't want them to feel constrained from trying to do something by those rules or use the information written on their character sheets and the sole menu of options they can try or to think of ways to lawyer up those rules and exploit them.

 

[prabe]

I figure that the rules are how the players interact with the game--and plausibly, at least in some systems, with the game world; if the players are in fact playing a game, it seems to me they should know the rules they're playing by. To the extent there are rules that represent how the world works, the players should know those as well as their characters know how the world works.

 

[lolsworth]

I think there is a line of reasoning that suggests the PCs shouldn't even have a character sheet. They should just know who they are playing and tell the GM what they are doing (in character).

Yeah, there's definitely something there. But that strays into improv rather than playing a game. As others have said, having that baseline understanding of the character side rules is important. And a character sheet can help do that

 

[Thomas Shey]

I've noted that I'm here both to roleplay and play a game. The latter is difficult (and unattractive) to do if you don't know the rules.