How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[hawkeyefan]

Yeah if a significant number of people in this world where trolls are only folklore and not real, know that trolls need to be killed with fire, can you imagine how many would know in a world where trolls are a real risk if you travel too far from civilization. This is the sort of stuff most villagers would know, so of course adventurers would have picked up.

I think I mostly just want this example to die by fire. If you don’t want your players to act on details they know about a monster, then use monsters they don’t know.

Don’t use the monster they know and then get mad at them for knowing. And then blame this situation on them.

It’s so easily avoided.

In part because doing so would make it too easy to metagame before the characters have had time to figure things out in the fiction. Sometimes foes are tougher or easier than they look, never mind when you've got illusions involved.

For example, it'll usually take a round or two for characters to figure out roughly how difficult it is to hit their foes; during that round or two the players would highly likely take a different approach if they already knew the foes' AC, as in "This guy's only got AC 12? Hell, it's Power Attack all the way!" rather than taking a round or two to come to that conclusion. Or "He's only in leather and he moves like a brick yet he's got AC 18? I'd better buff up my to-hits rather than my damage", which doesn't allow space for the player/PC to buff the wrong thing due to deceiving appearances.

I would think more often than not, most characters have an AC that’s clearly observable. Will that occasionally not be the case? Yeah, sure. But I’d rather make players jump through hoops in those cases rather than all the time.

Only by using information their characters don't have; which is metagaming, which is bad.

As I said above, it’s not based on info their characters don’t have. It’s based on what they can observe of their opponent and what they know of them and their world.

So the Ogre in chainmail… they know he’s wearing chainmail and they know he has a thick hide… so it’s AC 18. This reflects what they know. It’s not really about out of game knowledge.

Metagaming gets overdiagnosed, I think. We really need to revise how we view it. Because very often, it gets applied to “engaging with the game” instead of “engaging with non-game elements”.

 

[Pedantic]

Metagaming gets overdiagnosed, I think. We really need to revise how we view it. Because very often, it gets applied to “engaging with the game” instead of “engaging with non-game elements”.

I think it's mostly a design side problem. It's only an issue when your rules aren't intuitive, or you want to play around with the fixed canon of NPCs and monsters. I don't really care that much about the troll problem... Give the GM more and more interesting monsters to play with, and make the ability to know about fire and acid an easy (and clearly adjudicated) PC facing ability.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That would probably require a spreadsheet given the number of rules currently found in 5e

And we aren't even just talking about D&D.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Then perhaps you clarify when there's a disconnect? As I said, I don't mind time consuming.

Note my comment about how impatient people who want to operate this way often are with anything that slows down the game. If someone can't stand to look up a rule because of the time it takes, what is supposed to make me think they'll be patient with the back-and-forth to peg this down.

In addition, how do they even know there's a disconnect until after the situation is resolved? They only even ask if they're uncertain what the GM means, but if they think he means there's a 90% and he means there's a 70%, how are they to know there's a problem until they roll 75%? Will he let them take it back, then? Given the reaction of some people to take-backs, that's far from a given.

 

[pemerton]

Mentally too, I suppose. The point is, they aren't about the PCs personality, or how they are roleplayed. They're about what they can do.

I think there is a high degree of overlap between what a character can do and how a character is roleplayed.

For instance, I don't feel that it makes sense to say that a character has a charming personality, if few people that the character meets and interacts with are charmed by them.

 

[pemerton]

What does the PC know about the spread of consequences? That would determine how those questions are answered.

It is more than what the PC knows.

Suppose there is a hidden pit on the other side of the wall, which a character might fall into if they drop or fall while climbing. The PC won't know that possible consequence (assuming they fail to notice the pit).

As a player, though, I want to know whether that sort of hidden consequence is on the table. I mean, in classic dungeon-crawling D&D it generally is, and that heavily informs how the game is played: Find Traps spells, wands of trap detection, pushing sheep ahead of you through the dungeon to trigger the pit traps, etc.

In most of the RPGs that I play these days it isn't - or, at least, that sort of "hard move" is gated behind a soft move/hard move structure.

As a player, I need to know what sort of RPG I'm playing, and what sorts of methods the GM is using to determine what is at stake in situations, before I can decide how to approach the game i a sensible fashion.

 

[Short-Peanut]

I rather have Players know more about the Rules that make the Game work then they know less.
For i rather see more GM's/Referee then less. (I would like to be a Player to )
This does not mean they would know every detail of the World or every puzzle.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think there is a high degree of overlap between what a character can do and how a character is roleplayed.

For instance, I don't feel that it makes sense to say that a character has a charming personality, if few people that the character meets and interacts with are charmed by them.

Of course that gets into the question of how attempts to charm someone are resolved. Are the traits the primary way or the roleplay? All one or the other? Fifty fifty?

 

[Micah Sweet]

But, if you aren't communicating numbers, you don't know when there's a disconnect.

You know through trial and error, if it comes to it, so long as you're getting accurate description from the GM.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Note my comment about how impatient people who want to operate this way often are with anything that slows down the game. If someone can't stand to look up a rule because of the time it takes, what is supposed to make me think they'll be patient with the back-and-forth to peg this down.

In addition, how do they even know there's a disconnect until after the situation is resolved? They only even ask if they're uncertain what the GM means, but if they think he means there's a 90% and he means there's a 70%, how are they to know there's a problem until they roll 75%? Will he let them take it back, then? Given the reaction of some people to take-backs, that's far from a given.

Like I said I speak for myself, not for "people".