How Visible To players Should The Rules Be?

[pemerton]

Our world has bumblebees in it, which violate some of those same principles and yet can somehow get and remain aloft.

A dragon in a fantasy world and a 747 in our world aren't aerodynamically all that much different.

One can still wrap those tropes and expectations up in a reality-based setting bolstered by consistent underlying in-setting physics to account for those things that work differently from our own reality. In other words, reality-plus.

Really?

All "in-setting physics" means here is we make it up and toss a figleaf/lampshade over it. My setting has dragons. Your setting has dragons plus a page of notes trying to explain how a dragon generates the lift of a 747 despite not having jet engines. This doesn't make your setting more realistic!

A good and valid question, to which my answer at least is that I can't be arsed to do all the historical research I'd need to do in order to get it even vaguely right.

That, and true historical respresentations would likely run hard afoul of some modern sensibilities. I don't need those arguments.

And here we see it's not "reality plus" at all.

People fall to earth, but dragons don't. Kings live in castles, but don't extract labour from their peasantry to build and maintain them. Castles are treated by all and sundry as seats of power, although they are not capable of serving the military function that real-world castles did. Etc, etc.

This is an agglomeration of tropes that - from the point of view of actual causal processes that actually operate in reality - is just arbitrary. What makes it non-arbitrary is nothing to do with reality, but rather to do with the folk tales and literary works that it is all derived from.

 

[Maxperson]

First, it's abundantly clear what @hawkeyefan means by control. Doubly so when on refers to the text from the AD&D 2nd ed rulebooks that I posted upthread.

Second, given that you are using non-standard meanings of "realism" and of "success" in post after post, I don't see how you suddenly assert the authority to dictate some normative standard for use of the word "control"!

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.

 

[Reynard]

An attempt to remember is automatic man.

As a near 50 year old in a Civil Engineering BS program with a bunch of GenZs, I can say with confidence that is completely wrong. That's not how memory works theoretically, and it isn't how memory works in practical daily experience.

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? 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!

So, no, memory is not "automatic."

 

[pemerton]

That doesn't necessarily follow. Its easy enough to have "physics operates except where magic happens". The idea magic is an extraphysical element that operates outside of the normal laws of such is not exactly unknown. You can question, depending on how common magic is, how useful the distinction is, but in that context the fact that the dragon doesn't care about those laws of physics does not make them irrelevant, it just makes there two distinct sets that sometimes interact.

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

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?

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.

 

[pemerton]

In the novel Operation Chaos by Poul Anderson, things like magic and dragons were covered by a different brand of physics called paraphysics. If something wasn't covered by physics such as how a dragon could fly, it was covered by paraphysics.

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".

 

[pemerton]

If you construct an understanding of agency that specifically precludes the GM from creating content, then it's pretty trivial to claim the players don't have any.

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.)

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think that follows at all. The implication is that failing to produce content that will align with the PC's motivations will result in the GM wasting a lot of effort, which seems pretty clearly to suggest it is a concern before you do all that work.

Regardless, why does the timing matter here?

I don’t think it does, ultimately. It’s very much still GM directed play. The GM is the one that’s responsible for the bulk of what happens and what play is about.

And there’s nothing wrong with that at all, unless one prefers something else.

 

[pemerton]

is it really contentious that focusing play on player's stated priorities was not a major thing circa 2000? That the normal paradigm was that the DM came up with a plotline and setting and adjusted it around the margins to get the PCs onboard?

Yes. It must be contentious. It's very important to persuade people who play Sorcerer, Apocalypse World and Burning Wheel that they're not doing anything different from what Monte Cook was doing when he wrote the 3E DMG.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

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.

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

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.

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

Rather, it seems that the GM is playing the game on the player's behalf.

Not at all. Not any more than not wasting time having the player constantly declare that they defend themselves or even worse, constantly declare that they're looking out for danger in paranoid manner.

 

[pemerton]

If the GM can't produce content the PCs want to engage with at all, then nothing happens, the game falls apart and everyone does something else with their hobby time.

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.