How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Lanefan]

It’s untenable because just by taking part in the game and simple observation, the players will learn the rules. Or, many of them, at least.

Like the hidden AC. Forget that AC represents things that are mostly observable, so sharing it seems reasonable… after a few rolls in combat, it’s usually pretty obvious what a creature’s AC is. “Oh, I missed when I rolled a 14, but then Tom hit when he rolled a 15.” It doesn’t take a rules lawyer to figure that one out.

So why not just share it ahead of time?

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.

 

[Lanefan]

Knowing the odds may help you decide what to do. Maybe there are two opponents with different ACs. Maybe there’s something else you can do with a better chance to succeed compared to attacking an opponent with a high AC.

There could be many ways it helps. It allows the players to make truly informed decisions.

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

 

[Umbran]

They have little to do with how the PC interacts with the setting physically, which is what most of the numbers on a character sheet are for.

In many traditional games, sure. (and, I mean colloquially "traditional". I am not referring to what folks sometimes call "trad" games).

But when I pull the Tales of Xadia RPG off my bookshelf, and I look at the subsytem to manage harm the character takes (for which D&D uses Hit Points) - the game has six different kinds of Stress.

One is Exhaustion, another is Injury. Fine, nice physical things. Then they have Corruption, which is for magic only. And then we have Afraid, Angry, and Insecure.

So, fully half of the "damage" the game manages is emotional, rather than physical.

When I pull Masks: A New Generation off my shelf, it has the following paragraph in it:

"Masks doesn't pay close attention to physical harm, though. How much physical harm can an invulnerable space alien take before they go out? How much punishment can the utterly human bowman take? Masks isn't about that -- in Masks their responses to getting punched are far more important."

And, to back that up, the conditions the characters can take are Afraid Angry, guilty Hopeless, and Insecure - none of them physical.

The focus on the physical is still pretty common, but I don't know that it is a good idea to take it as the general assumption going forward. We aren't just about what the character can do any more.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You work it out between you until there's a compromise, with the goal of approximating the real world to the best of both of your knowledge. Maybe do some research?

Which goes back to doing it right being very time consuming.

If that sort of thing is valuable to you. It of course doesn't have to be, but not caring about that doesn't make people who do wrong.

Doesn't make it less time consuming to do it right, though. And this is often the same people who are really fussy about pace and time consumed otherwise. The logical consequences of that combination should be obvious.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Sure, if there's a difference. If instead you're talking about rules for genre emulation, then I do not agree, at least not in a classic or trad D&D-like game.

No, I'm talking about basing what the participants are trying to communicate about a situation.

 

[Thomas Shey]

You are welcome to feel that way, but I would expect pushback, especially if you yuck other people's yum with words like "counterproductive" and "harmful".

I'm willing to take a hit if people want to swing here, they just have to be willing to deal with me standing my ground. I've come by my opinions on this honestly, and I'm not going to hide them.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Who said it was? The players should IMO act on information their PCs have access to. That can easily include a solid idea of how easy or difficult common tasks undertaken by an adventurer are.

And again, that's conveyed--how? If its not through mechanics, I'm back to saying that people are bad at conveying things like that without a common metric.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I agree, but I think that should all be in-situ hidden information, not system level mechanics. You may not know something about the wall that will have a meaningful impact on the DC, but the process that will be used to climb it and the relationship between the DC and that information should be reverse engineerable.

Okay, we're pretty much on the same page. I just qualified because there's been some mixing of what "transparency" means in this thread.

 

[Lanefan]

The problem with this, as always, is it assumes people have no concept of how likely it is for them to succeed at most things. It may not be precise, but I don't find that particularly credible in anything that relates to anything they've done with any frequency. There's a heck of a difference between my character having a 90% chance of jumping over that pit and a 50% and just the GM's description doesn't tell me which one is the case, because his perception of what his description means and mine may be significantly different.

Agreed. But to maintain that imprecision I'd say it's on the GM to find a way to describe the odds without using numbers. If the GM has determined the odds are 90% then "There's a small chance you'll blow this but it certainly looks make-able, you've done longer jumps than this before" will do; and if the player wants a clearer definition of "small chance" it won't be forthcoming.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The focus on the physical is still pretty common, but I don't know that it is a good idea to take it as the general assumption going forward. We aren't just about what the character can do any more.

This isn't even exceptionally new, though its more solidly lodged in games like Cortex and the like. Things like ST Willpower or some constructed Talents in Hero have had a lot to do with state-of-mind impacting success.