D&D General [rant]The conservatism of D&D fans is exhausting.

[EzekielRaiden]

It's harder to encounter a corner case with rolling where the rule would need to be changed/ignored on the fly. While corner cases are rare individually, there are enough rules in 5e that some corner case popping up is not all that uncommon.

Perhaps 5e should use fewer rules then?

Remember, the player-facing rules of DW fit into all of, like, 15 double-sided pages (albeit with reduced art)? Something like that. The GM-facing ones are bigger only because they have to include monster stat blocks (it is, after all, a single book RPG.)

A friend bought me the text itself earlier this year, so I can actually tell you the page count: 404 pages. (Technically 408, but the last four pages are a single full-page piece of IMO kind of bland art, and then three blank pages apart from page number.) Of that, only 139 pages (from page 4 to page 143), plus a further 22 pages of equipment, are anything the players ever need to look at--and the vast majority of that is explaining the process of setup and play. The actual player-facing rules--the basic moves and the various playbooks--occupy only 88 pages, and that's full of full-page art spreads. So, 110 pages of actual player-facing rules text--all spells, equipment, moves, playbooks, everything.

Maybe 5e wouldn't have to keep telling people to ignore or break the rules if it used fewer rules and did better checking to make sure that its rules actually, y'know, work.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Ah, this inspired me. I think I might see an important conceptualization now that have eluded me.

First off, when I wrote my rant about the kriegspeil/free kreigspiel split, what I had in mind is what I will label the hard FK hypothesis in mind. That is the hypothesis that an expert can produce a better simulation than any rules mechanics. This hypothesis is contested.

However as is easy to point out, this hypothesis is in itself not relevant for TTRPGs, as the referee (GM) is typically not an expert - at least not in all aspects touched upon in a typical RPG. My realization is that there are (at least) two different approaches to formulating hypotheses inspired by this strong hypothesis that would be relevant for TTRPGs.

The first is to accept that the simulation might need an expert to be superior to mechanics, but to formulate the hypothesis that the loss of simulation accuracy compared with an expert is sufficiently low that any hypothetical improvement to adding simulation rules are not worth the gameplay cost of engaging with such rules. I will call this the soft amateur FK hypothesis

The other approach is to claim that the expert criterion is not required. That is that even amateurs can and do produce better simulation results than mechanics. I am going to call this the hard amateur FK hypothesis

I think a problem with talking with many of those that feel like they belong to the FKR community is that what they are actually ascribing to the soft hypothesis, while they tend to express one of the hard hypotheses as their justification. The trouble is that the hard hypotheses are making claims that might appear objective in nature, and hence a valid target for analysis and criticism, the "worth it" part make us not able to say the same for the soft.

This can invite the situation where someone make a claim about a hard hypothesis, but when engaged with relevant counter points refuse to respond and rather just dismiss the concern as the soft hypothesis make the issue practically irrelevant anyway. This can be done as the soft amateur FK hypothesis can hold even if the hard FK hypothesis is shown to be false. Might it be this pattern that is core to at least some of your frustration with the FKR community?

The same cannot be said about the hard amateur FK hypothesis. If not even experts can outperform mechanics, then surely amateurs cannot. As such the dispute around the hard FK hypothesis (which was the one I alluded to in my rant) is still relevant for the hard amateur FK hypothesis.

Personally I find the hard amateur FK hypothesis implausible in the way I have formulated it here, while I do think the hard FK hypothesis is solid for most fields of expertise. This is the backdrop fir my previous statements about FK.

I would like to propose a moderated hard amateur FK hypothesis framework: For any thing we might want to simulate in a TTRPG, a sufficiently supported autonomous referee will outperform any rigid mechanics (Edit: There might be edge case exceptions like realistic physics with known closed-form solutions). If the required support is none for all things we want to simulate this reduces to the (unmoderated) hard amateur FK hypothesis. Also important is that I would allow for simulation mechanics as a valid support in terms of this hypothesis, as long as the referee is not bound by the outcome given by the mechanic (in which case we would be in rigid mechanics territory).

Another important property of this framework is that while it has a lot of parameters (how much support is "sufficient" for each thing we might want to simulate), I believe the entire framework to be falsified if the hard FK hypothesis do not hold (I think it is unreasonable to consider the scenario of an amateur being supported to higher than "expert" level for this purpose).

It is in imagining trying to hash out the parameters of such a framework I was envisioning engaging with the hard FK hypothesis idea while not committing to the no-rule extremes of the hard or soft amateur FK hypotheses that I think characterizes (most of) FKR.

I intend to respond to this (much) more fully later.

But the hyper-simple summary is, I'm running aground on the very starting premise. I flatly do not believe that even a world-class expert is guaranteed to be superior to any ruleset for this purpose. I find what you call the "hard FK hypothesis" so obviously untenable I am frankly shocked to see you accept it seemingly so blithely. I have quite a bit more to say but I am about four hours past my (already delayed) bedtime. For good reasons, for once, but still.

If even the "hard (non-amateur) FK hypothesis" is utterly implausible to me, all the rest is already a problem. Even your "soft FK hypothesis", at least if I'm understanding it correctly, doesn't sit well with me. (But I'm stumbling on the phrasing so I think I might be misunderstanding it.)

 

[Maxperson]

Perhaps 5e should use fewer rules then?

Remember, the player-facing rules of DW fit into all of, like, 15 double-sided pages (albeit with reduced art)? Something like that. The GM-facing ones are bigger only because they have to include monster stat blocks (it is, after all, a single book RPG.)

A friend bought me the text itself earlier this year, so I can actually tell you the page count: 404 pages. (Technically 408, but the last four pages are a single full-page piece of IMO kind of bland art, and then three blank pages apart from page number.) Of that, only 139 pages (from page 4 to page 143), plus a further 22 pages of equipment, are anything the players ever need to look at--and the vast majority of that is explaining the process of setup and play. The actual player-facing rules--the basic moves and the various playbooks--occupy only 88 pages, and that's full of full-page art spreads. So, 110 pages of actual player-facing rules text--all spells, equipment, moves, playbooks, everything.

Maybe 5e wouldn't have to keep telling people to ignore or break the rules if it used fewer rules and did better checking to make sure that its rules actually, y'know, work.

Few rules means that the rules in place need to be broader. The broader the rule, the more likely you are to encounter a corner case that the rule isn't fully appropriate for. On the other hand, the more rules you have the more the game gets bogged down by rules searches, misinterpretations, and imagination gets stifled as people look to the rules to tell them what to do.

It's a balancing act to enough rules to minimize corner cases, while at the same time not overly bogging down the game or stifling imagination.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Few rules means that the rules in place need to be broader. The broader the rule, the more likely you are to encounter a corner case that the rule isn't fully appropriate for. On the other hand, the more rules you have the more the game gets bogged down by rules searches, misinterpretations, and imagination gets stifled as people look to the rules to tell them what to do.

It's a balancing act to enough rules to minimize corner cases, while at the same time not overly bogging down the game or stifling imagination.

This claim--if a rule is broad it necessarily has more corner cases--only applies if the rule is, as I have said many many times, specific and singular, applying a single, concrete thing to situations that aren't actually similar. It is completely avoided by the simple acceptance that all rules are always abstractions, and thus, even if abstraction should not be used wantonly, it can be leveraged for benefit rather than viewed as an eternal boogeyman to be hated and feared.

If our rules speak in generalities, rather than trying to make every rule perfectly concrete, we can in fact have our cake and eat it too. Corner cases only come up if you have a shape with corners.

5e has dramatically more corner cases than Dungeon World ever will--because it has more rules!

 

[Umbran]

First off, when I wrote my rant about the kriegspeil/free kreigspiel split, what I had in mind is what I will label the hard FK hypothesis in mind. That is the hypothesis that an expert can produce a better simulation than any rules mechanics. This hypothesis is contested.

However as is easy to point out, this hypothesis is in itself not relevant for TTRPGs, as the referee (GM) is typically not an expert - at least not in all aspects touched upon in a typical RPG. My realization is that there are (at least) two different approaches to formulating hypotheses inspired by this strong hypothesis that would be relevant for TTRPGs.

The first is to accept that the simulation might need an expert to be superior to mechanics

No.

The first is to understand that you have not established any method of determining which is "superior". Without that, the question cannot be resolved, even in theory.

 

[Enrahim]

No.

The first is to understand that you have not established any method of determining which is "superior". Without that, the question cannot be resolved, even in theory.

Fully agreed. And this is one of the reasons it is hard to get traction on resolving this dispute.

 

[Campbell]

FKR advocates have setup a boogie man of rigid mechanics to strike down, assuming a given event must be resolved either entirely through GM judgement or a mechanic that takes in fictional circumstances and a dice roll and spits out a direct result rather than imagining mechanics like we see in Pathfinder Second Edition, Chronicles of Darkness and L5R Fifth Edition that integrate targeted GM Judgement as part of the design of discrete mechanics.

It's not always judgement or mechanics. It's often judgement and mechanics.

 

[Umbran]

Fully agreed. And this is one of the reasons it is hard to get traction on resolving this dispute.

Well, there would be wisdom in considering whether there should be a dispute in that case.

"I don't actually know this way is superior, but I'll get into an argument on the internet about it!" maybe isn't a great place to be, hm?

 

[clearstream]

But the hyper-simple summary is, I'm running aground on the very starting premise. I flatly do not believe that even a world-class expert is guaranteed to be superior to any ruleset for this purpose. I find what you call the "hard FK hypothesis" so obviously untenable I am frankly shocked to see you accept it seemingly so blithely.

Some further hypotheses I'd like to add for @Enrahim to consider are the

'amateur-player' hypothesis, which says that fidelity to real world beyond that which satisfies normal player expectations cannot add to the experience​

​

'authorial-expertise' hypothesis, which says that an author of an imaginary world is de jure an expert in it (what they say is true in the fiction, just because they are the appointed person to say it)​

​

'resisted-dichotomy' hypothesis, which says that more than one hypothesis can be true at the same time, they're not dichotomous​

​

So when Arthur Conan Doyle says that a certain kind of snake that cannot climb in the real world, climbed down a bell pull to poison the victim, it's true that this snake can climb down bell pulls in the imaginary world of Holmes just because Doyle said so.

 

[Faolyn]

Why?

And could I not find its historicity entertaining?

While I've been not paying much attention to this particular argument and don't know where @EzekielRaiden is going, I feel the need to point out that actual history is often pretty awful to a large number of people of all sorts, and thus not always all that entertaining. So, you kind of have to be careful about what sort of history you're sticking to for the game.