How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Maxperson]

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.

I covered that in the banana post.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Notice that "paraphysics" isn't an actual body of knowledge. Nor a set of principles that can be expressed by way of differential equations, set out in a textbook, etc.

It's just a label invented by a storyteller as part of telling a story.

In my fantasy story-telling, I can imagine boffins in point hats talking to one another about "paraphysics", or I can imagine priests incanting prayers to "the powers of the dark", or I can imagine anything else I like. None of it is realistic. Nor does this stuff exhibit degrees of realism. It's all just made up as part of telling the story!

Like, Marvel Comics didn't become more realistic because the characters started talking about "unstable molecules" and "Pym particles".

It certainly felt more realistic. Lip service to reality matters, because as @Maxperson said, realism us a scale, not something you ignore because it can't be perfect.

 

[pemerton]

So what? It is still not the player declaring an action, like you demanded, yet they can fail or succeed.

What do they succeed at? Avoiding a consequence.

What does the knowledge check involve succeeding at? Avoiding ignorance?

This is not just about usage, either. It's about the structure of game play. When the consequence is being brought home, it is - at least in the sort of RPG that I enjoy - "on the table", incipient in what has happened so far.

In the statue scene, the GM narrates the statue, but doesn't identify what it is a statute of. (Eg the last time I did this, I described an idol of a muscled humanoid with a long tongue, painted red.) In other words, the GM has decided that the nature/identity of this statue is not common knowledge. (In my case, the statute had been rolled on a table for random treasure: "An idol of an unknown religion.")

At this stage, there is no consequence on the table; nothing is being brought home.

If the player wants their PC to remain ignorant, why is that not their prerogative? If the player wants their PC to know, why can they not ask ("Do I recognise it?") or say ("I reckon I might recall what this is, given my knowledge of things arcane and mysterious")? And then the GM can call for the appropriate check. (Note that this conversation at the table doesn't tell us whether, in the fiction, the recognition is immediate, or takes time like Gandalf at the gates of Moria. That is a further matter, and often - not always - a matter of mere colour.)

Consequence is not having that piece of information. What exact importance that has depends on the situation, but presumably some.

Why is the GM entitled to force the player to stake this consequence, that the player doesn't even know the significance of? This is the crux of my whole point: the GM calling for the knowledge check is putting their control over the fiction at the centre of play.

or even worse, constantly declare that they're looking out for danger in paranoid manner.

I think that this approach from players comes from a completely different element of play, namely, the GM imposing consequences that are not on the table.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

See now, that characterization of a style you don't prefer is unkind.

 

[pemerton]

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.

But not all of it. And the GM does not unilaterally establish what is at stake, what the themes are, etc.

(Also, you're the third poster in this thread to read a post Not all As are Bs and respond as if you're responding to No As are Bs. What's going on?)

 

[pemerton]

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?"

Perhaps your character needs reading glasses? Or at least needs to concentrate to focus? For the past five to ten years I've find myself having to make an effort to read signs that once I would not have had to.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

What do they succeed at? Avoiding a consequence.

Again, so? They succeed at a task they didn't initiate. That was anathema to you earlier.

What does the knowledge check involve succeeding at? Avoiding ignorance?

That is a weird way to describe it, but as I am not stuck on semantics, sure.

This is not just about usage, either. It's about the structure of game play. When the consequence is being brought home, it is - at least in the sort of RPG that I enjoy - "on the table", incipient in what has happened so far.

In the statue scene, the GM narrates the statue, but doesn't identify what it is a statute of. (Eg the last time I did this, I described an idol of a muscled humanoid with a long tongue, painted red.) In other words, the GM has decided that the nature/identity of this statue is not common knowledge. (In my case, the statute had been rolled on a table for random treasure: "An idol of an unknown religion.")

At this stage, there is no consequence on the table; nothing is being brought home.

If the player wants their PC to remain ignorant, why is that not their prerogative? If the player wants their PC to know, why can they not ask ("Do I recognise it?") or say ("I reckon I might recall what this is, given my knowledge of things arcane and mysterious")? And then the GM can call for the appropriate check. (Note that this conversation at the table doesn't tell us whether, in the fiction, the recognition is immediate, or takes time like Gandalf at the gates of Moria. That is a further matter, and often - not always - a matter of mere colour.)

Because that's not how knowing works. If the person happens to know what that statue is, then that recollection happens involuntarily when they see it. And because we don't want to waste time the player separate asking "do I recognise it?" for every bloody object or detail the GM mentions, when the GM could just tell them whether they do, either mediated via a roll or not.

I am not even saying that your method is wrong, it just is not weird to do it in the way I suggest and there are rather obvious reasons for doing it that way.

Why is the GM entitled to force the player to stake this consequence, that the player doesn't even know the significance of? This is the crux of my whole point: the GM calling for the knowledge check is putting their control over the fiction at the centre of play.

The "consequence" the player "risks" was the ground state they began from, i.e. not knowing. Thus they can only gain from this.

I think that this approach from players comes from a completely different element of play, namely, the GM imposing consequences that are not on the table.

I'm not sure I understand what this means. In most games things that were hitherto unknown to the characters and to the players can de revealed.

 

[pemerton]

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.

I don't accept the notion of default here. Nor the notion of realism, unless the latter is itself just used as a label for a bundle of tropes.

I've already posted that the default sociology of D&D is not realistic. Nor is its default ecology. Nor is its default cosmology. The setting permits perpetual motion machines (golems, zombies) and motion that appears to be at odds with relativistic constraints, and so the default physics is not realistic either.

"Realism" just means that there are thatched houses in villages that have wells in the middle, and people wander around talking to one another in Olde Englishe. (Or in a sci-fi game, it means that there are banks of flashing lights in sleek metal/plastic cockpits, and people wander around talking to one another about flux capacitors and hyperspace.)

 

[pemerton]

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 "?

Because it refutes it. The default D&D setting is not reality. It is imagination, where the imagined elements are taken from a pretty well known set of folk tales and literary works inspired by them.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It certainly felt more realistic. Lip service to reality matters, because as @Maxperson said, realism us a scale, not something you ignore because it can't be perfect.

Maybe instead of describing it as a scale, we can describe it as something more like a mosaic? Because a scale implies that one can have more than another. You're framing it as a quantifiable thing that can be measured, and one game can come out ahead of the other. But that's not really the case.

We all pick and choose the little bits that work for us or make sense to us, and we ignore the ones that don't.

Like, upthread @Lanefan pointed out how he isn't concerned about the socioeconomic trappings of feudalism. However, based on past conversations, we know he wants consistency in fiction and so on. He cares about cause and effect of what the characters are involved with, but he doesn't necessarily care about how the lord in the local castle maintains the upkeep of his holdings other than some hadwavery at "taxes" and so on.

Except for certain games that might lean into the absurd a la Monty Python, I don't think there are any GMs in this thread who don't want some sense of realism about the game. We just have different ideas on what helps maintain that.

So yeah... scale kind of sets it up as a comparison, and I don't think that's served us any good. Mosaic isn't an ideal term, but it kind of hints at bits and pieces, rather than some kind of accrual of "realistic points" or the like.