Interesting Ryan Dancey comment on "lite" RPGs

[dcas]

I think John lays it on pretty thick in the unsupported assertion department:

I'm wondering what statitistical study he drew this from.

Rollyeyes icon, how I miss you...

He was responding to something that Mike Mearls wrote:

I can count on half of one hand the number of people who understand d20 enough to build products for it.

 

[Psion]

He was responding to something that Mike Mearls wrote:

Not that I think Mike is anywhere near quantitatively correct on that score

(and I'll repeat, because whenever I put such a qualification, people replying tend to ignore it: Not that I think Mike is anywhere near quantitatively correct on that score), he was referring to designers, not users.

 

[dcas]

Not that I think Mike is anywhere near quantitatively correct on that score

(and I'll repeat, because whenever I put such a qualification, people replying tend to ignore it: Not that I think Mike is anywhere near quantitatively correct on that score), he was referring to designers, not users.

I don't think he's correct, either, and I don't think John Nephew thought he was correct. I think he (Nephew) was merely making a rhetorical point. It's hard to argue that 3.x D&D is the greatest game ever if there's hardly a soul to be found who can design for it. Or that one needs a degree in a scientific field to be able to design for it!

 

[dcas]

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Just goes to show what I've always said: the OGL causes lung cancer.

 

[Gentlegamer]

I don't think he's correct, either, and I don't think John Nephew thought he was correct. I think he (Nephew) was merely making a rhetorical point. It's hard to argue that 3.x D&D is the greatest game ever if there's hardly a soul to be found who can design for it. Or that one needs a degree in a scientific field to be able to design for it!

I was about to say something similar.

 

[Psion]

I don't think he's correct, either, and I don't think John Nephew thought he was correct. I think he (Nephew) was merely making a rhetorical point.

It tends to weaken rhetorical points when you create a functional strawman of what you are replying to.

 

[John Morrow]

And now we have someone else stating anecdotal evidence as fact, and pulling the thread back on topic. So...do rules light systems run faster? Anecdotal evidence claims yes. Dancey (who, AFAIK conducted the only observational market research ever done on roleplaying games) claims that wasn't what he found in his research.

FYI, the scope of my anecdotal claim was "often". If I qualified everything I said with "in my opinion", "in my experience", or "I think", the size of my posts would be even large and I've already received complaints that I'm writing novels. I suppose I should also mention that I was talking about the mechanical resolution portion of running a game and what I said doesn't necessarily conflict with what Ryan Dancey said.

What really slows a game down (in my experience, in my opinion, I think, etc.) is detail. My group can run fairly fast combats using the Hero System or D&D 3.5 because we often strip out detail. We don't keep careful track of Endurance in Hero. There are things I don't bother with in D&D 3.5. The fewer variables you plug into an equation, the faster the equation is to solve. To successfully use a rule-light system (and avoid the "Mother May I?" or "Twenty Questions" problems) is to keep the detail and situational modifiers simple and coarse.

No, you can't explicitly feint in combat because your character is assumed to be using feints as part of their attack when appropriate for their skill level. No, you can't get a "plus" because you're trash talking your opponent or your description of your attack was really vivid. No, you don't get a "minus" because the ground is muddy or you tossed some coins in the air. As soon as you start factoring in details, either as part of the rules or described to and factored in with the GM, the game slows down. What I think Ryan Dancey was claiming is that the process of negotiating the details of a particular task resolution with the GM can be as time consuming as figuring it out with the rules. And in my own experience, what negates much of the benefit of not looking up the rules is the bottleneck of the GM as the arbiter.

Bear in mind, he probably means "after correcting for variables like DM ability." So while a DM with a good understanding of his preferred system runs the game quickly, a DM with a lesser understanding runs the system slowly.

Correcting for DM ability and the detail level at which the game is being run. There is also a style issues that I think play a big role in the assumptions people bring to this debate.

So can you teach someone to be a good rules-light GM? Or is Ryan right that the only GMs who can run rules-light games without them bogging down (or becoming unduly frustrating to players) are people with the natural talent (the "on-the-fly game designer" hypothesis presented in Ryan's original post). Thoughts?

For the record, before we started using a modified version of Fudge, my group primarily used homebrew systems designed by the GM (or group) so the GMs were literally both GM and game designer. Our heavily modified version of Fudge is often a mix of Fudge and our last generation homebrew systems. So, yes, I can understand how GMs who are not on-the-fly game designers could have trouble doing what my group does. In fact, if you are good at assessing things on-the-fly and your players like your on-the-fly calls, you don't even need rules or dice, and if you want to use dice for surprise all you really need is a rule like "high rolls are good, low rolls are bad". My group can and has run one-shot games like that.

That's totally apart from the session prep time issue, which I wholeheartedly concur with. I think some people are willing, through mature assessment of the factors in question, to conclude that they can live with the inconsitencies of a GM lacking that talent if it addresses other areas of concern to the group (time to prepare certainly being one).

I don't think that looking at this in terms of "maturity", "intelligence", "trust", or "evolution". That leads to the same-ol' judgementalism that runs rampant in all discussions of role-playing styles which inevitably turn into some variation of, "My way of role-playing is more mature/intelligent/highly evolved than your immature/simple/primative way of playing." Once the discussion goes down that road, it becomes impossible to communicate because it becomes personal and more about twisting everything to fit the theory than really finding out what's going on.

Let's step back from that.

My group doesn't have a maturity problem, an intelligence problem, a creativity problem, a trust problem, or an evolution problem and we're not afraid to try different things. Our problems with rule-light systems, when we have them, are caused by the play style of many people in our group and insurmountable differences in our assessments of reality when we GM. Because of that, a certain amount of complexity seems to improve the quality of our games. Our challenge is finding the level of complexity that's "just right".

I know that was the case in our group. We agreed to put up with whatever inconsistencies and limitations existed (there weren't many - as I've said before, Akrasia's a very good DM, maybe even one of those extremely rare "on the fly game designers") in the name of a good game where we could all have fun (and with a prep time that our beleaguered DM could live with).

Out of curiosity, do your group play world-based games or story-based games?

Personally, I think the 3e rules serve to train people to be good DMs. People may eventually conclude they don't need 3e's complex rules, but I think attempting to master them makes people better DMs. They internalize the rules, maybe even without realizing it. Subsequently their rulings are consistent and they can deal with a much "rules-lighter" version of the d20 system because when in doubt, they default to a ruleset they're not even aware of using. Of course, I could be wrong. :\

I think that's true of one segment of the hobby. I also think D&D 3e's complex rules drive a certain segment of gamers away from the hobby. I think the mistake many people make is that they assume that everyone plays for the same reason and has the same ideals. That's not true. Heavy rules serve certain ideals better than light rules do, and vice-versa. Each also sacrifices certain benefits that some styles value more than others.

 

[John Morrow]

The reason I'm curious about it is that I could see there being far more disagreements in perception (or however you want to phrase AOR) with things like interacting with NPCs. I mean, a pit's a pit, you jump it or you don't, but people are very complex things to interact with.

The complexity is what makes interacting with NPCs less of an issue for many people. Yes, a pit is a pit and you jump it or you don't but people have very rigid opinions (based on real world experience, guesses, or genre expectations) about how wide of a pit a person should be able to jump or what happens if a person fails to jump a pit of a certain depth. Most people aren't as certain about how a person might react to a certain line of discussion or a certain request, thus there is a lot more flexibility before the GM's assessment of reality leaves the bounds of any of the players' assessments of reality.

Is part of it perhaps that when it comes to NPC reactions, players just go "OK, this I cede to GM fiat" and roll with it?

When it comes to NPC reactions, I think it's often because there is a wider range of behavior that people allow for in their assessment of reality and because players expect the behavior of people to be based on more unknowns. But that doesn't mean that players can't and don't call a GM on NPC behavior that seems wrong, either because the PCs know the NPC really well (and the characterization suddenly seems "out of character" -- much as you are more likely to notice a friend acting strangely than a stranger) or because the GM has the NPC react in a way that falls outside of the players' assessments of reality for the expected range of behavior for a person in the same situation as the NPC. I've seen players question why NPCs won't surrender, for example, or why an NPC had a sudden shift in behavior.

Ultimately, GM fiat isn't a problem unless the players notice it. In my experience, GM biases can be noticed by the players (and can be tested for by clever players) and once they are noticed, they can change the nature of a game. And the more subjective a GM's calls, the more likely it is that biases will creep in.

I ask partially because I'm fascinated that so many rules-heavy systems are either rules-light or no rules at all for things like character-to-character interaction, and partially because I have a group where the one thing the players are most likely to battle with me about is how a NPC might respond to something. (Okay, part of that's due to the fact that we have shared ownership and authorship of NPCs, but it's still relevant.)

Is part of the reason why you are most likely to battle with how an NPC might responsd because you don't have rules to deal with character-to-character interactions?

My group rarely has shared authorship of NPCs. In cases where I've created background NPCs and the GM's portrayal didn't fit my expectations, I've tried to roll with it for the sake of game harmony, though I'll rarely create such NPCs for one of the GMs in my group because our assessment of things is inevitably too different for it to work out right. In the cases where we co-GM (two GMs running one game at the same time) GMs generally own the NPC that they play so that the players don't have to experience a split personality as the NPC gets played differently by each GM.

 

[John Morrow]

This is why I think that rules-lite vs. rules-heavy almost always makes significantly less impact on how safe or comfortable the players feel than how good the social contract and group interpersonal communication skills are.

In my own anecdotal experience, that's not the case. In my experience, rule-light vs. rule-heavy has to do with the style of the participants, the length of the game, and the detail level of the game. Certain styles, campaign lengths, and detail levels seem to be better suited by one or the other. We don't have a "comfort" problem (I am starting to really hate the word "comfort" in all of it's variations because it's become a soft way to claim that a person or group has some sort of unatural and embarassing psychological hang-up). We don't have an interpersonal communications skills problem. Our social contract is just fine.

By the way, I answered your poll about the GM assigning situational modifiers as saying that I'm OK with it so long as they are applied equally to PC and NPC. That's a stylistic answer, not a trust or deep-seated psychological hang-up answer. My own sense of verisimiltude and suspension of disbelief depends on my not feeling like my character is starring in The Truman Show.

In any game that follows the standard RPG model, there are going to be significant instances where the referee/GM/DM/CK/whatever has to make decisions that significantly impact the game world and, as a result, the PCs (there are a few games where all players share the powers of the GM, which have their own issues).

And I think the mistake you keep making is that you assume that every decision that a GM makes that impacts a game world is equivalent. That's not true. If the GM decides that the sky is purple, that's not the same as deciding that an NPC doesn't like the PCs, that a PC can't jump across a 20 foot chasm, or deciding that a PC that falls trying to leap a 20 foot chasm dies instantly. Nor is it the same for the GM to decide that a chasm is 20 feet wide as it is for the GM to decide how hard it is for the PCs to jump it. If you can't see that distinction, I suspect that's a style issue.

For certain styles of play, there is no difference between the two because a GM puts the 20 foot chasm in front of the players to create an obstacle of a certain difficulty. With other styles of play, that's not necessarily the case and a 20 foot chasm might be there simply because it's a logical feature of the game world. In fact, a dungeon can feel very different if every challenge is crafted to provide a certain challenge to the PCs than a dungeon that simply makes sense for the setting.

For players to feel some comfort level, the GM has to either 1) share a fairly similar outlook on how the game world works with the players, meaning his decisions mesh pretty closely with what they expect; or 2) consistently and actively engage in communication with the players - letting them know how he sees things and listening to their ideas about how they perceive the game world working.

In my experience, in the absence of (1), (2) is very time consuming. Thus it's not a "comfort" problem but a tedium and effort problem. It's a pain in the neck.

While I'm sure that having a pre-packaged Assessment of Reality provided in the rules makes it easier for some groups to reach consensus, I still maintain that those groups (if the necessity arose) could probably do the exact same thing on their own, without the benefit of a pre-packaged AOR - and that groups who seem unable to establish a shared AOR with a game that comes without a pre-packaged one would generally run into the same problem even if they were playing a game that provided one for them.

And here I think you are missing the point because you want to get a certain solution. It's not a matter of what a group can do but how they can get the best game on balance once you count up all the benefits and problems. Of course my group can run a game with no rules except "high rolls are good". Heck, I've even role-played with no rules at all, flipping a coin when I needed a randomizer. Can I do it? Sure. But the "pre-packaged AOR' provided by a more complicated set of rules is, in my experience, an easier and better solution.

On what basis do you make the claim that groups who have trouble establishing a shared AOR in a rule-light game that doesn't provide much of one won't have an easier time if they have a pre-packaged AOR provided by a more complicated rule system? Not only is that counter-intuitive (Why wouldn't being provided an AOR help a group that has trouble establishing their own?) but it defies my own long personal experience designing systems and experimenting with different levels of system complexity.

IME, if the communication between players and GM is good, a shared AOR usually just happens. If communication is bad, no matter how many aids the rules provide to help the group toward that goal, a shared AOR is very difficult to achieve.

And in my experience, that's just not true. Neither part of your claim, in fact. If the group has an AOR problem, why do you assume that the rules providing an AOR won't help? Apply what you are saying beyond the narrow subject of role-playing and ask yourself if it really makes any sense. Would you really argue that following a software development methology makes no difference and that programmers would be better off just winging it? Do you really think a baseball game would work work just as well if the umpires got to make up the rules on-the-fly? Do you really think the roads would be just as safe without formal traffic laws providing a shared set of rules for driving for everyone?

In fact, if what you say is really true, then why use any rules at all? Why not simply use "high rolls are good and low rolls are bad" as your only rule or, heck, just let the GM make it all up as they go? And if some rules are useful or helpful, why is it difficult to imagine that more rules might be more useful or more helpful in at least some situations?

 

[The Shaman]

All Dancy did was replace subject bias with experimenter bias. If there were a way to do a double blind experiment with different game systems, that would be something. Without a double blind experiment, all we're left with is a lot bias.

Quoted for trufery.