How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Maxperson]

Yes, you can recognize a banana because it is a ubiquitous thing in your life and our culture. Can you remember what year is considered the fall of the western Roman Empire?

Doesn't matter since this is not what I claimed. I said the ATTEMPT was automatic and yes I would automatically try and remember that fact(assuming I knew it) if asked.

Can you remember the genus of an earthworm? Can you remember the names of all the zodiac constellations? The answers to those questions is dependent on when you learned those things and how often you use that knowledge. More importantly, you can actually pause and dig through your memory to get the answers -- and then potentially still be wrong!

None of that matters since none if it is what I claimed.

So, no, memory is not "automatic."

But the attempt to remember is, even if you fail or get it wrong.

 

[pemerton]

Realism in RPGs is used to mean a scale, not a mirror of reality. The definition is different for RPGs than the dictionary. RPGs tend to do that with words.

Is there any way to get access to this RPG lexicon other than reading your posts?

I mean, for over 30 years I've been talking about realism in my RPGing, but I've always just had the ordinary (dictionary) meaning in mind. Clearly I was doing talking about RPGs wrong!

 

[Maxperson]

No one in this thread is doing that. They are talking about the particular details of the 2nd ed AD&D DMG and the 3E D&D DMG.

These posit that all the significant elements of the fictional situation that confronts the players are brought by the GM.

You, and @Maxperson, and others may deny that that is an interesting feature of RPGing. OK. Meanwhile, those of us who care about it, and want to avoid it, will be busy over here playing RPGs - actual ones, with published rulebooks and everything - that avoid that feature that is undesirable to us.

(Also, and in passing, you seem to be committing the same logical fallacy as @Corinnguard did upthread, of inferring from The GM does not create all the content to The GM creates no content.)

No. I don't deny much of anything about RPGing is interesting, since it's pretty much all interesting to someone.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Or instead they go off and buy a copy of Burning Wheel, In A Wicked Age or Apocalypse World, and learn how to play a RPG that doesn't rely upon the GM preparing content that then gets force-fed to the players.

I am pretty sure that even in those games the GM generates content for the play. I know of no RPG where they don't.

 

[James Gasik]

When I see a banana I don't try and recognise it; I just do recognise it.

In the context of a game, a player succeeds when they make a move and it works out for them; and fail when they try to make a particular move but it doesn't work for them. An approach to GM side narration that puts the GM in charge of not just resolving but establishing player action declarations is one that, from my point of view, undermines game play.

I discussed this upthread. Save vs ninja is the GM bringing a consequence home, and the player getting a roll/check to avoid or at least blunt it.

But save vs ignorance doesn't seem to me to have the same structure at all. What consequence is the GM bringing home? None that I can see. Rather, it seems that the GM is playing the game on the player's behalf.

I'm reminded of an early AD&D game I played. My character entered a town and the DM said there was a sign posted on the wall of the Inn.

"Do you read it?" He asked.

I looked at him blankly. "My character can read, yeah?"

"Yes."

"And it's in a language I know?"

"That is correct."

"How would I not read it the instant I see the writing?"

 

[Reynard]

But the attempt to remember is, even if you fail or get it wrong.

No, it isn't. Or, at least, if your "passive memory" fails, you can make an active check.

Tell me you never actively try and remember something and I will call you a liar.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is all words. It's not an account of how the setting involves reality or is fundamentally realistic.

I'm not saying it is. I'm just saying the dragon's presence is irrelevant to whether other elements of the setting are realistic or not.

Dragons fly because they're magic (but that magic can't be dispelled by anti-magic effects). Heroes can fight giants without being beaten to a pulp because they're . . . magic? Lucky? Something else?

If you want me to say level elevating hit points are realistic, you'll be waiting quite a bit and I suspect you know that.

Gygax, in his DMG, sets out the idea of a character flying to the moon on their winged steed. That makes for fun fantasy. It also tells us that the "physics" of his imagined world does not exhibit universal gravitation as ours does.

All we have here are tropes. Why can the winged steed carry us to the moon, but the archer not shoot an arrow to the moon? No reason at all, and the latter would be a completely feasible feat for a powerful heroic archer in Epic-style D&D play.

Again, all this says is that those elements are not realistic. The premise of "realistic with exceptions" is just that--that the default is realistic, but there are exceptions, possibly many of them. But the fact exceptions exist is what makes them exceptions; when you want that effect (which I'll freely admit I don't go to D&D-sphere games) the fact you can point at some doesn't change the principal. And the principal is in play because it provides some degree of predictability that otherwise wouldn't exist.

 

[Micah Sweet]

If control isn't inherent to the playstyle, what would you say is inherent about it then? The word refers to existing in something as a permanent, essential or characteristic attribute. I think that one thing that makes playstyle inherent is cooperation. You have the DM cooperating with the players to create an interactive story for the latter's characters to exist in. You have the characters cooperating with each other in quite a number of things. Survival, solving a mystery, and probably more importantly saving the day.

Control otoh is something that is imposed. Usually by someone who wants things to go their way. They want the story to go their way, and no one else's way.

So why, then, do the societies in D&D worlds more closely resemble modern ones than mediaeval ones in their basic social arrangements?

And why do they have so much more production taking place than their actual, narrated, technologies would appear to suggest?

They probably shouldn't, and in my games I try to be less anachronistic, but what does that have to do with the principle of "reality until proven otherwise "?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Here is what I described as "a characterisation of the flow of play, and the process of play, that assumes (or that places) everything into the GM's hands":

characterising a GM describing things to the players as the GM deciding on auto-success for an action not declared by the player.​

The reason it about GM control is because it denies or elides the play of the game - which, for players, is predominantly the declaration of actions for their PCs - and makes it all just fiction narrated by the GM, with action resolution turned into a type of heuristic the GM relies upon (when they feel it warranted) to decide what to narrate.

Saying that the players have full control over their characters means nothing more than that players are doing the bare minimum necessary for the activity to count as a RPG at all - that is, they are saying some things about what their PCs do. But the framing, the stakes and the consequences are all entirely in the hands of the GM. (Just as in the AD&D 2nd ed examples that I quoted not far upthread.)

Should the framing, stakes and consequences be in the PC'S control? If not, then they shouldn't be in the player's control either (in the sort of gaming I prefer).

 

[Micah Sweet]

Well, I am quite familiar with both D&D and Burning Wheel, and I can tell you which one is more realistic by your criterion: Burning Wheel.

Yet @Micah Sweet thinks that D&D is more realistic than Burning Wheel.

So either he is ignorant of the sorts of things that are found in the fiction of Burning Wheel, or he is not applying your criterion. As far as I can tell, the latter is the case.

I am ignorant of Burning Wheel's fiction. Never read or played it.