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Rules Transparency - How much do players need to know?
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<blockquote data-quote="GrahamWills" data-source="post: 6976085" data-attributes="member: 75787"><p>Players need to know enough to be able to make informed decisions, and not to slow the game down by needing to ask questions. They don't need to know all the rules, but they need to know what the rules cover.</p><p></p><p>So, in my Night's Black Agents game, there are a ton of stunts, special cases and cherries for all sorts of things., but in combat, players don't need to know all of them. But they do need to know the it makes sense to try something. So I don't have players saying "I punch through the wall" or "I interrupt his shot with a plea to talk" (which would be fine in a superhero game, and in a Doctor Who game respectively). </p><p></p><p>So, last night, one player was having bits of a car thrown at him by a vampire who hadn't been invited in and was irritated. He'd just killed a wolf and wanted to use the idea wolf as a shield. He had no idea if there were rules for that, but he DID know it was the sort of thing that the genre and system supported. Another player said there were rules for a mook shield, but it assumed the mook was alive. We made a slight adaptation of the rules and used that (good call too -- the vampire maxed out a throw of the broken windshield, and the wolf's corpse took half the damage). </p><p></p><p>For me, this is a good way to run. No-one needs to know everything, but standard actions (shoot, hit, flee, cower, hide, jump in, take extra shots) are well known. When an unusual case comes up, the game is slightly slowed as the player learns the new rule, but it isn't common and players don't waste much time asking for things that don't make sense.</p><p></p><p>As a mathematician, I guess I could derive some formula that minimizes the time spent on learning rules and looking them up in play, weighting the latter as more serious than the former, but it basically boils down to "if it's common, you should know the rule. If it's uncommon, you should know it's possible. If it's not possible, you should know that too"</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="GrahamWills, post: 6976085, member: 75787"] Players need to know enough to be able to make informed decisions, and not to slow the game down by needing to ask questions. They don't need to know all the rules, but they need to know what the rules cover. So, in my Night's Black Agents game, there are a ton of stunts, special cases and cherries for all sorts of things., but in combat, players don't need to know all of them. But they do need to know the it makes sense to try something. So I don't have players saying "I punch through the wall" or "I interrupt his shot with a plea to talk" (which would be fine in a superhero game, and in a Doctor Who game respectively). So, last night, one player was having bits of a car thrown at him by a vampire who hadn't been invited in and was irritated. He'd just killed a wolf and wanted to use the idea wolf as a shield. He had no idea if there were rules for that, but he DID know it was the sort of thing that the genre and system supported. Another player said there were rules for a mook shield, but it assumed the mook was alive. We made a slight adaptation of the rules and used that (good call too -- the vampire maxed out a throw of the broken windshield, and the wolf's corpse took half the damage). For me, this is a good way to run. No-one needs to know everything, but standard actions (shoot, hit, flee, cower, hide, jump in, take extra shots) are well known. When an unusual case comes up, the game is slightly slowed as the player learns the new rule, but it isn't common and players don't waste much time asking for things that don't make sense. As a mathematician, I guess I could derive some formula that minimizes the time spent on learning rules and looking them up in play, weighting the latter as more serious than the former, but it basically boils down to "if it's common, you should know the rule. If it's uncommon, you should know it's possible. If it's not possible, you should know that too" [/QUOTE]
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