On completely artificial restrictions

[Celebrim]

So, yeah, this is a complicated topic.

First, let me introduce Celebrim's First Law of Role-Playing Games - "Thou Shalt Not Be Good at Everything". The idea of the first law is that all the rules of an RPG exist to fulfill the first law as sub commandments of it. And the reason for this is actually related to the observation you've made, namely, that is the limitations on what your character can do that make the game fun regardless of the aesthetic of play you have. If you are in for the challenge, it's the fact that you can't do everything that makes the game challenging. If you are in for the self-expression, then it's that fact you can't do everything that is fostering your imagination. If you are in for the narrative, then it's that fact that you can't do everything that is driving the narrative because narratives are about overcoming a problem and if you can trivially overcome the problem you don't have a narrative. Every single player at the table regardless of their aesthetics of play depends on the first law to enjoy the game.

However, your particular take here on the issue of disassociated mechanics or arbitrary restrictions being fun because they increase the limitations you have and therefore foster more challenge and more creativity is not one what supports every aesthetic of play. So what is really going to happen is you're creating a system that only will support the fun of a certain type of player some of the time. And for that reason, I tend to feel that they are more appropriate to board games or other games that already have limited aesthetic appeal (in that they appeal only to certain aesthetics and not that they are objectively less fun) rather than to RPGs that tend to broadly appeal to many aesthetics of play.

While it's true that you can increase say the Challenge aesthetic to a tactical minigame in an RPG by giving the characters chess-like restrictions on the moves that they make, I would argue that that would be one of only many ways you could increase the Challenge interest of an RPG's tactical minigame. If you are feeling the need to do something like that, it is a sign that indeed that tactical minigame isn't bringing the interest that it probably should, but that doesn't necessarily mean that adopting chess like restrictions on movement is the best way to do it. You can do it, and it would be as you've observed fun, but it would also be a huge trade off in that it could harm other aesthetics like Fantasy, Narrative, and Discovery to the extent that a player would lose interest in the game. That is to say, if for some reason to enjoy the game it needs to feel "real" to a player, your choice to prioritize Challenge in this way is going to inherently limit your audience.

And while the 1st law can be applied not just to the participants but to the rules themselves, in that all game systems have to make some tradeoffs, this is one particular tradeoff that I don't feel is worthwhile.

 

[loverdrive]

So, yeah, this is a complicated topic.

First, let me introduce Celebrim's First Law of Role-Playing Games - "Thou Shalt Not Be Good at Everything". The idea of the first law is that all the rules of an RPG exist to fulfill the first law as sub commandments of it. And the reason for this is actually related to the observation you've made, namely, that is the limitations on what your character can do that make the game fun regardless of the aesthetic of play you have. If you are in for the challenge, it's the fact that you can't do everything that makes the game challenging. If you are in for the self-expression, then it's that fact you can't do everything that is fostering your imagination. If you are in for the narrative, then it's that fact that you can't do everything that is driving the narrative because narratives are about overcoming a problem and if you can trivially overcome the problem you don't have a narrative. Every single player at the table regardless of their aesthetics of play depends on the first law to enjoy the game.

However, your particular take here on the issue of disassociated mechanics or arbitrary restrictions being fun because they increase the limitations you have and therefore foster more challenge and more creativity is not one what supports every aesthetic of play. So what is really going to happen is you're creating a system that only will support the fun of a certain type of player some of the time. And for that reason, I tend to feel that they are more appropriate to board games or other games that already have limited aesthetic appeal (in that they appeal only to certain aesthetics and not that they are objectively less fun) rather than to RPGs that tend to broadly appeal to many aesthetics of play.

While it's true that you can increase say the Challenge aesthetic to a tactical minigame in an RPG by giving the characters chess-like restrictions on the moves that they make, I would argue that that would be one of only many ways you could increase the Challenge interest of an RPG's tactical minigame. If you are feeling the need to do something like that, it is a sign that indeed that tactical minigame isn't bringing the interest that it probably should, but that doesn't necessarily mean that adopting chess like restrictions on movement is the best way to do it. You can do it, and it would be as you've observed fun, but it would also be a huge trade off in that it could harm other aesthetics like Fantasy, Narrative, and Discovery to the extent that a player would lose interest in the game. That is to say, if for some reason to enjoy the game it needs to feel "real" to a player, your choice to prioritize Challenge in this way is going to inherently limit your audience.

And while the 1st law can be applied not just to the participants but to the rules themselves, in that all game systems have to make some tradeoffs, this is one particular tradeoff that I don't feel is worthwhile.

I've said it upthread, but it's worth repeating. Roleplaying games aren't "real". Wave a stick in your FLGS, and none of the games that will fall off the shelf will be real.

Rolling dice to determine the result isn't any more or less "real" than playing a chess étude, or a Quake duel, or an armwrestling competition for the same effect.

It's a tool that feeds into fiction (but not necessarily vice versa), that's all, and I see no meaningful difference between a single dice roll and a combat mini-game. The purpose is the same: to feed into fiction. To determine who gets to narrate what happens next, and in what boundaries.

I mean, maybe I have a low abstraction tolerance, but I don't see how characters politely waiting for their opponent to hit them (or shrugging off sword hits; or making four attacks with a comically large sword; or any other game abstraction) isn't a dealbreaker, but moving only in chess patterns is. Most players understand that what they, as players, are doing doesn't map 1-to-1 to what happens within the game world, and are more than willing to accept that.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Yet no one wants to replace dice rolls with Doulbe Dare style physical challenges...

 

[niklinna]

WHOOOOOSH

 

[Celebrim]

@loverdrive : I'm struggling to understand why that response was even relevant. Quite obviously a game isn't real. That's a big part of what makes it a game. You don't really make an interesting observation to say that it isn't real.

Your point seems to undermine itself when you write: "It's a tool that feeds into fiction..."

Right. So, your mechanics go a long way to determining the sort of fictions that you produce. The more disassociated your mechanics become, the harder of a time you will have to make the fiction that you produce seem like it isn't the story of a game or game universe. So yes, you are correct turn-based abstractions produce fictions that tend to have problems where you can see that in the fiction people tend to wait for other people to react. You can even see this for example in published authors. For example, Jim Butcher writes action scenes (especially in his early works) that read as if they were generated by a turn-based combat system. They read like fictions produced from something like a ttRPG.

Yes, obviously a fantasy universe isn't real, and yes obviously a fantasy universe where explicitly people can only make chess moves is self-consistent, but generally speaking a fantasy universe where the participants can only make chess moves isn't the fiction or fictional universe people were intending to generate.

So there becomes a point where you have participants in the game who are saying, "I can't do the work to translate the fiction that we are producing into the fiction that I want, because the system is producing a fiction that has too many attributes of being produced by a game." For some people, that might even be turn-based. Most turn-based games have some rules in them to try to make them simulate non-linearity and if people abuse the rules to produce something like the elf fire brigade cannon to produce fiction that is obviously based on mechanics of a game and not implied universe, well then people will have problems with the rules and try to rectify it in some way. There is reason that many systems make mention of things like segments or impulses to try to make turn-based systems better resemble the reality of continuous action. Because people don't actually want to generate fiction that is obviously turn based when generated and put down to paper (as it were).

Yes, obviously people understand there can't be a perfect 1 to 1 mapping between the generated fiction and the desired fiction, but that doesn't mean that all mappings are equally effective and elegant.

 

[Autumnal]

Yes, obviously people understand there can't be a perfect 1 to 1 mapping between the generated fiction and the desired fiction, but that doesn't mean that all mappings are equally effective and elegant.

But it’s very compatible with the idea that habit governs the perception of naturalness, relevance, connection, etc, to a very large degree. It’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t seem natural or obvious to someone who hasn’t played roleplaying games and hasn’t picked up D&D-ish assumptions from computer games and such. It’s often very different from what someone already in the belly of the beast might think. (There’s a reason a lot of story games and narratively oriented games do well with non-previous gamers.)

 

[gamerprinter]

As a game designer I've learned that any new mechanic you introduce into a game is going to have impact with everything that already exists in the game, and if not well thought out, some new mechanics can completely rip the game apart, taking it into places it was never meant to go. A game is a set of fairly consistent rules that interact and create the 'physics' of a working system. TTRPG game mechanics are not meant to realize 'real things in the world'. It's only meant to artificially represent a 'reality' that fits within the context of a workable set of rules. Everything new 'rules wise' impacts everything else, possibly creating unplanned synergies in ways that can break the game, as well as untenable destruction of existing rules. A competent game designer measures that, looking for synergies and untenable results in any possible new mechanic into the game. One has to be very, very careful in doing that. Just because something works a particular way in reality doesn't mean it can be effectively replicated mechanically - there's no need for that, to create an effective game.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Long ago, I got my start role-playing on forums (which essentially had the same infrastructure as Enworld, what with subforums and threads) through games that could hardly be described to have rules in the sense that TTRPGs have rules, and were instead governed by nothing more than etiquette and the sensibilities of their founders. That very free form environment was entirely predicated on a combination of a desire for the dramatic, and justifications for things in the fiction. It was fun, and I'm happy I did it, but it gave me a fundamentally different perspective on rules than most gamers have because it taught me what feelings are hard to invoke without mechanics that restrict the player, and what those restrictions can do.

For me, comparing my experiences, the procedures that I use in TTRPG project a sense of cause and effect on the proceedings that is emotionally satisfying, whereas my free form days were more sharply characterized by literal clashes of willpower between participants or who had more social clout in that game and could therefore have their direction more respected. Seperately, mechanics help me feel a sense of alignment with my character-- they are fighting a dragon, and I'm fighting a dragon-- I'm doing what my character is doing by engaging in problem solving or conflict with an entity, rather than doing the even more fundamentally different activity of portraying someone who is fighting a dragon from an authorial perspective.

We crossed that line before, but its easier with mechanics, and it varies the game play.

 

[niklinna]

Disconnected mechanics are the whole point of this thread. (All mechanics are dissociated/disconnected, to some degree or other.) I'm pretty confident that @loverdrive's "desired story" is whatever emerges from the gameplay, within the logic and chaos of the gameplay, and not measured up to some predetermined idea of what the story/outcome (or even the nature of it) must be. Why play a game to begin if you have a desired story? Just recount the desired story and skip the faffing around with dice.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

The "baseline" form of a roleplaying game, slovesochka, freeform roleplaying, negotiated imagination, whatever you may decide to call it, allows for absolute freedom. Anything can be achieved there. A ruleset can only subtract from that absolute freedom, and by doing so, creates a space where players can interact with each other with intentionality, plan, strategize, engage with the game.

The frames and constrictions of the ruleset directly impact what story emerges from the game and how the players can interact with the world and its inhabitants. Using arbitrary rules and frames without goal or aiming for a specific result might be fun, but not the best if you want to use the game to create collaborary stories and in-game interactions within a specific genre, say high fantasy. Using chess queen movement rules might be great if you want to have stories in a high fantasy world where beings move like chess pieces, but not if you want stories in a world and milieu that emulate conventional high fantasy fiction. But to each their own.