I think there are texts that make this point fairly clearly: written by RPG designers like Edwards, Baker, Czege, Clare Boss and Laws.
{i]The system[/i] of a RPG has a lot of components: instructions to participants on what they should do; and processes that guide them through the development and consultation of the fiction and the use of cues. Very few published RPGs actually spell out, or even try to spell out, the whole of the system. I think Apocalypse World comes closest to this particular ideal, at least of RPGs that I know.
Here is Baker again:
Dogs in the Vineyard's rules ground play solidly in the immediate details of the game's fiction. In a Wicked Age's rules allow play to float above the game's fiction, more abstract. . . .
There are a couple of places in the game where there are supposed to be rightward-pointing arrows, but they're functionally optional. I assert them, but then the game's architecture doesn't make them real. So it takes an act of unrewarded, unrequired discipline to use them. I suspect that the people who have the most fun with the Wicked Age have that discipline as a practice or a habit, having learned it from other games.
And he also has
this:
Here's my personal rephrasing of IIEE. For this thread you can take it as definitional:
In the game's fiction, what must you establish before you roll, and what must you leave unestablished until you've rolled?
In other words, what fictional stuff do you need to know in order to roll at all, and what fictional stuff should you let the roll decide? . .
Here's a quick resolution mechanism.
1. We each say what our characters are trying to accomplish. For instance: "My character's trying to get away." "My character's trying to shoot yours."
2. We roll dice or draw cards against one another to see which character or characters accomplish what they're trying to accomplish. For instance: "Oh no! My character doesn't get away." "Hooray! My character shoots yours."
What must we establish before we roll? What our characters intend to accomplish.
What does the roll decide? Whether our characters indeed accomplish what they intend.
What do the rules never, ever, ever require us to say? The details of our characters' actual actions. It's like one minute both our characters are poised to act, and the next minute my character's stuck in the room and your character's shot her, but we never see my character scrambling to open the window and we never hear your character's gun go off.
Maybe we CAN say what our characters do. Maybe the way the dice or cards work, there's a little space where we can pause and just say it. Maybe that's even what we're supposed to do. "Always say what your characters do," the rules say, maybe. "No exceptions and I mean it." It remains, though, that we don't HAVE to, and if we don't, the game just chugs along without it. We play it lazy, and we get the reading-too-fast effect that Frank describes.
Contrast Dogs in the Vineyard, where if you don't say in detail what your character does, the other player asks you and waits patiently for you to answer, because she needs to know. She can't decide what to do with her dice without knowing. Dogs in the Vineyard's IIEE has teeth, it's self-enforcing.
In a Wicked Age has a similar problem to the example's. Maybe a worse problem. The rules say "say what your character does. Does somebody else's character act to stop yours? Then roll dice." That's what the rules [i[say[/i]. But if, instead, you say what your character intends to accomplish, and somebody else says that their character hopes she doesn't accomplish it, and you roll dice then - the game chugs along, not noticing that you're playing it wrong, until suddenly, later, it grinds to a confusing and unsatisfying standstill and it's not really clear what broke it. If you play In a Wicked Age lazy, the game doesn't correct you; but instead of the reading-too-fast effect, you crash and burn.
So now, if you're sitting down to design a game, think hard. Most players are pretty lazy, and telling them to do something isn't the same as designing mechanisms that require them to do it. Telling them won't make them. Some X-percent of your players will come to you like, "yeah, we didn't really see why we'd do that, so we didn't bother. Totally unrelated: the game wasn't that fun," and you're slapping yourself in the forehead. Do you really want to depend on your players' discipline, their will and ability to do what you tell them to just because you told them to? Will lazy players play the game right, because you've given your IIEE self-enforcement, or might they play it wrong, because the game doesn't correct them? Inevitably, the people who play your game, they'll come to it with habits they've learned from other games. If their habits suit your design, all's well, but if they don't, and your game doesn't reach into their play and correct them, they'll play your game wrong without realizing it. How well will your game do under those circumstances? Is that okay with you?
Take Dogs in the Vineyard again: not everybody likes the game. (Duh.) But most of the people who've tried it have played it correctly, because it's self-enforcing, and so if they don't like it, cool, they legitimately don't like it. I'm not at all confident that's true of In a Wicked Age.
You could blame the players, for being lazy and for bringing bad habits. (As though they might not!) You could blame the text, for not being clear or emphatic enough. (As though it could be! No text can overcome laziness and bad habits.) Me, I blame the design, for not being self-enforcing.
Anyway, you're the designer, and maybe it's okay with you and maybe it isn't, that's your call. (It's my call too for my games, and for the Wicked Age, yeah, maybe it's okay with me.) But I raise the question because from experience, slapping yourself in the forehead when people don't play the way you tell them to gets pretty old. If you don't want the headaches, do yourself a favor and make your game's IIEE self-enforcing.
And finally, there is this example in the comments on the "3 resolution systems" page:
Case 1:
1. When you want to describe the weather where the characters are, roll. On a success, say what the weather's like there. (On a failure, it's 76°, few clouds, with a pleasant little breeze.)
2. When your character's taking strenuous action, if it's oppressively hot where your character is, you get -2 to your roll.
That's boxes to cloud, then cloud to boxes.
Case 2:
1. When you want to give another player a die penalty, make a roll. On a success, a) say what's making life hard for their character, and b) give them a -2 to their roll.
That's a) boxes to cloud, with a simultaneous b) boxes to boxes.
(So, Guy: no, it doesn't count as a rightward arrow.)
In case 1, the more time and conceptual space between those two rules' applications, the more real the oppressive heat will seem. For instance: you make a weather roll at the beginning of the session, declare that it's oppressively hot, and so for the entire session all the players roll -2 for all their characters' strenuous actions. . . .
Rob: You seriously read that to mean that the (unmentioned) oppressive heat the character's suffering is responsible for the -2, not the successful give-a-penalty roll?
How do you want me to write it so that it's rock-solid-clear that the successful give-a-penalty roll is responsible for the -2?
Maybe this: When you want to give another player a die penalty, make a roll. On a success, give them a -2 to their roll. (Also, incidentally, say what's making life hard for their character.)
An arrow cubes to cubes. (Also, incidentally, an arrow cubes to cloud.) Right?
In my view, at least, this is very concrete attention, in the context of both general design principles and particular designs (DitV, In a Wicked Age), to how a RPG system does or does not generate, via its use, the desired fiction. For instance, what gives the DitV IIEE "teeth" - what makes its rightward-pointing arrows
not "functionally optional" - is that a player can't build their dice pool without having regard to the fiction (what is the arena of conflict? what traits and/or belongings are implicated?). This means that playing the game will oblige players to attend to such elements of the fiction as (i)
how does this relate to my traits and (ii)
how does this relate to my belongings and (iii)
how far am I prepared to escalate this conflict to get what I want.
We could contrast, say, D&D, which doesn't distinguish arenas of conflict (shouting vs punching vs knife-fighting vs shooting) so as to make (iii)-ish fiction salient. Nor does it have anything analogous to DitV traits, at least in most versions, that would make (i)-ish fiction relevant. (4e is a sort-of exception, because if the fiction relates to a Quest that in turn implicates the XP available, and so makes Quest-ish fiction salient.)
So, what arrows does 5e
mandate, as not functionally optional?
When combat is being resolved, very few as discussed upthread already. Most of the attack resolution process, and quite a bit of the attack declaration process (eg
I sneak attack or
I use Menacing Strike) is cues-to-cues. The brute fact of A attacking B generally involves a rightward arrow at some point.
Outside of combat, there seem to be a range of approaches across the 5e player population. The "goal and approach" crowd insist on
player declaration of something in the fiction which the GM then uses either to establish a rightward pointing arrow (ie calling for a check) or to just arrow back to the fiction (eg the GM says what happens next, yes or no or something more complicated, without calling for a check).
Those who allow players to declare checks (eg
I make a WIS (Perception) check) allow cues (the result of a check) to yield new fiction (eg
You see a such-and-such) - these are leftward-pointing arrows with no rightward pointing arrows of the sort that Baker is critical of in his toy example (eg we never actually see the PC searching the room).
It seems that the game will work perfectly well either way, because nothing about the check resolution process
requires having regard to the fiction in the way that the DitV process does. To me, this seems to be linked to the distribution of authority over the fiction across the various participants - the players can never put the fiction to work themselves.
