How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Then unless they know the GM that response means nothing; some people consider 1/3 a small chance, some 1%. The term doesn't have to describe the precise number, but if you're not at least describing a range, you're not really telling anyone anything.

 

[Lanefan]

If the players don't know the rules, they'll put the GM into the unfortunate position of having to explain every rule to the players. Thus they'll be taking away time the GM could be spending on generating compelling gameplay for the players to participate in. GMs spend a significant amount of time preparing for an upcoming RPG session. They review their notes on the previous sessions they have hosted. They look over the adventure they have created or a pre-generated adventure they have bought from a RPG company. So they're looking forward to is an entertaining time with their players.

What they are not looking forward to is holding the players' hands. An RPG session runs smoothly when the GM is dealing with players who can grasp some or most of the rules in the RPG. An RPG should not be a Q&A session. It's a role-playing session where everyone is looking to having fun being someone else.

The question is not whether the players should know any rules at all, it's whether they should know (or be able to know) rules they don't need to know e.g. monster stats, enemy ship capabiities, wandering-monster or interruption frequency rules, etc.

 

[Lanefan]

No antagonism, just if the player isn't aware they can do something (because they don't know the rules), they might not even try it.

And yet sooner or later they might blunder into doing it anyway, just by happening to hit a caster while said caster is in mid spell, and seeing the results.

There is the inverse effect, that players that don't know the rules seem more likely to try stuff the rules don't address as they don't feel bound by them (which is a trap players with a lot of rules knowledge tend to fall into).

Very much agreed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Sure, not all games run that way, and if they don't, players should have different expectations.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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



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.

I don't have a problem with time consuming, and never suggested I did. I have a problem with unnecessarily poor modeling.

 

[Lanefan]

Luckily there is a simple solution to that: reskin everything.

It's a solution, true, but it ain't simple.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

This is an incomplete sentence. Basing on what?

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Just saying you can get more flies with honey than with vinegar. I have found (eventually, and not without difficulty) that talking up your preference is more conducive to conversation than talking down the preference of others.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

Its conveyed by solid rules that indicate what a given character is good at, and by conversation with your GM, and by trust on both sides of the screen.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Then unless they know the GM that response means nothing; some people consider 1/3 a small chance, some 1%. The term doesn't have to describe the precise number, but if you're not at least describing a range, you're not really telling anyone anything.

All games work better when the players and GM know each other.