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lowkey13
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King Lear is just English words put in order: Expertise, Knowledge, and RPGs
Celebrim
Legend
There are two observations about RPGs that I've made so far that I'm proud of.
Celebrim's 1st Law of RPGs: Thou shalt not be good at everything.
Celebrim's 2nd Law of RPGs: How you think about playing a system is more important than the rules system itself.
Your lengthy and interesting discussion above to me is just delving into the truth of the second law. That "thinking about playing a system" is what I am talking about when I mention "processes of play". Processes of play are rarely documented by game systems. They are usually implicit. To the extent that they are documented and the game designer tells you how to play the game, they are almost always the first thing that a table will ignore. Quite often in my experience, I discover from play examples and discussion by the game designer that the game designer themselves actually regularly violates their own described process of play, and just kind of assumed that any skilled GM would do so and doesn't really think about the fact that the document that they produced telling people how to play their game doesn't correspond at all to how they themselves play the game.
On the forum's, I'm found of using as an example, "The World's Simplest RPG", which I will claim for the purposes of the discussion has only one rule:
"For any proposition, flip a coin. On heads, the proposition succeeds. On tails, the proposition fails."
For all the times I've used that example, no one on the boards has ever challenged me on the quite true fact that in order to become an RPG, in addition to that one rule, I'd need pages and pages of description of what the game actually was. By "rule" I'm really only describing the resolution mechanism, what we normally think of as rules. But the resolution mechanism in fact doesn't describe the game, in the way we think that the rules of a game do. For example, hidden in that rule are a bunch of metarules about RPGs like that you are playing pretend, that you have a single character, that the character faces situations and then proposes actions that they undertake, and very likely that there is a secret keeper that knows the setting and is responsible for creating it who also undertakes to describe the outcome of the actions that player undertook.
It's amazing to me how little attention tends to be put on the process of play at a table, and how complex that process can actually be.
Celebrim's 1st Law of RPGs: Thou shalt not be good at everything.
Celebrim's 2nd Law of RPGs: How you think about playing a system is more important than the rules system itself.
Your lengthy and interesting discussion above to me is just delving into the truth of the second law. That "thinking about playing a system" is what I am talking about when I mention "processes of play". Processes of play are rarely documented by game systems. They are usually implicit. To the extent that they are documented and the game designer tells you how to play the game, they are almost always the first thing that a table will ignore. Quite often in my experience, I discover from play examples and discussion by the game designer that the game designer themselves actually regularly violates their own described process of play, and just kind of assumed that any skilled GM would do so and doesn't really think about the fact that the document that they produced telling people how to play their game doesn't correspond at all to how they themselves play the game.
On the forum's, I'm found of using as an example, "The World's Simplest RPG", which I will claim for the purposes of the discussion has only one rule:
"For any proposition, flip a coin. On heads, the proposition succeeds. On tails, the proposition fails."
For all the times I've used that example, no one on the boards has ever challenged me on the quite true fact that in order to become an RPG, in addition to that one rule, I'd need pages and pages of description of what the game actually was. By "rule" I'm really only describing the resolution mechanism, what we normally think of as rules. But the resolution mechanism in fact doesn't describe the game, in the way we think that the rules of a game do. For example, hidden in that rule are a bunch of metarules about RPGs like that you are playing pretend, that you have a single character, that the character faces situations and then proposes actions that they undertake, and very likely that there is a secret keeper that knows the setting and is responsible for creating it who also undertakes to describe the outcome of the actions that player undertook.
It's amazing to me how little attention tends to be put on the process of play at a table, and how complex that process can actually be.
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lowkey13
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Yeah, interesting stuff. Given the recent threads about play styles, the DM, and theory, I think the problem, or perhaps difficulty, indexed in the OP is pretty clear. We can talk about rules because they're stable, they exist in the text, and can be compared to other rules. Easy-peasy. As soon as we start talking about actual play though the thread explodes into multiple subtopics, people start picking teams, and psyching themselves up to kick a little ass before the teacher breaks things up (tip of the cap to @Umbran, who does a hero's work here).
Even the basic idea that one set of rules can support radically different play styles gets poo-poo'd by some people, mostly for reasons that, regardless of what's actually said, read as "because I don't like it and it's not what I do". How often does the phrase "it wouldn't work in my game" appear with the accompanying unstated idea that the phrase someone negates something someone else said about the game in general, or at their table.
I'd love to see this thread remain on point without too much schoolyard shenanigans, it's an interesting topic that deserves it's own discussion
Even the basic idea that one set of rules can support radically different play styles gets poo-poo'd by some people, mostly for reasons that, regardless of what's actually said, read as "because I don't like it and it's not what I do". How often does the phrase "it wouldn't work in my game" appear with the accompanying unstated idea that the phrase someone negates something someone else said about the game in general, or at their table.
I'd love to see this thread remain on point without too much schoolyard shenanigans, it's an interesting topic that deserves it's own discussion
As both of you have noted, table process is idiosyncratic to the table. For a rules-discussion, we have a shared text. For discussion of the table process, we don't.
Plus, if we were to enter into a discussion of table process, we'd have a very large tendency to critique (and outright say, "You are doing it wrong!") without the full context of that process. Noet that table process will also include not just the GM's personal style and approach, but likely the personalities of players at the table. "I do X because players Y and Z like the results of C, even though normally this isn't recommended," would be pretty common, I bet. Getting all that into readable form for table process to really get a critique is daunting...
... and makes people rather vulnerable. With the vast majority of rules discussions, the rules were written by someone else. For table process... it is ours.
Celebrim
Legend
Yes. It's also at the same time, as most hard things actually are, intuitive and unreflected upon - like walking, talking, throwing and catching a ball, or how you know what a fellow simian is feeling.
I've on occasion thought to try to start the conversation by documenting the different undocumented processes that tables use to play the game. You mention one important one in your discussion:
"How does a table agree that a proposition has been made?"
It's a really important question that D&D has rarely addressed, and to my knowledge never addressed directly. Gygax seems to be addressing this question in at least some of the cases by suggesting you need a party "caller" or "leader" who validates that the propositions being offered aren't hypotheticals, but the one the party is actually going to undertake . But in his example of play, he shows that he also is willing to bypass the caller and directly interact with a player who is temporarily in the spot light, and willing to accept propositions that they player makes directly about their character. So there is some complex idea of group versus individual actions that probably underlie the declaration by the designer that the process of play requires a "caller", which not only most tables ignored, but which Gygax doesn't make explicit when he tells you to play that way (otherwise, it would have likely seemed more sensible).
Another related one is:
"What filter is used by the GM to determine whether a proposition, once made, is a valid proposition. And, as a side issue, how does the GM communicate back that the proposition is invalid."
An example of this might be the proposition: "I climb the wall.", where the GM decides that since there are several walls in the room, this proposition fails for being vague (establishing a metarule that propositions must be specific) and responds not with resolution of the request, but, "Which wall do you want to climb [and at what point are you climbing it?]?" This seems like a strange example, but it is entirely relevant to the very common proposition, "I search the room", a request that will be affirmed or be rejected depending on the table's proposition filter. Likewise, "I attempt to persuade the gaurd to let us pass.", is a request that may fail or may pass the table's proposition filter.
But most tables aren't even aware that they have a proposition filter, or that other tables may have different ones, and most GMs, if you point out that they've created a massive house metarule that governs their proposition filter and other GMs have massive house metarules of thier own, in my experience don't go, "That's interesting." They instead go, "Well, they are doing it wrong."
But what's even more interesting to me is that these metarules can functionally amount to two completely different games, even if both tables are playing with the same "rules".
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I am, too. I've seen some (half-finished) stuff that was short, but that sounds like a whole other thing.
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lowkey13
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*Deleted by user*
Well, if you are talking about major league football, at least there you have a shared text - the game was played for the cameras, transmitted and reviewable by many. But if we played a game of touch-football in my backyard BBQ... nobody who wasn't there saw it. Before we could begin to discuss the individual game, I'd have to spend a whole lot of effort just relating events and context.
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