Sorry - I think the point was missed...

[Gentlegamer]

In fact, i can pick up Fudge and play a game with literally zero prep work--just tell the players the genre/setting, and make characters. No generation of skill lists, or powers, or figuring out gadgets, or any of that stuff (assuming you're willing to use one of the default wound systems, basically).

Do you have a set of "FUDGE dice" . . . ?

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Because I seek to understand it, and by discussing it I hope to gain that understanding. I honestly thought this discussion was the difference between:

I move 30 feet, drawing my weapon and I attack, since he is flanked, I get plus +2 to hit.

vs

I make a physical roll of 12, which beats it by 5. He beats his by 4? I win the battle, defeating the enemy.

Which, is what I know of the difference between rules light RPGs and rules heavy. Now, since it was then told to me that there be a different definition of rules light that I had never heard before, I'm now trying to understand it.

My question is, how do these forms of rules light that you are referring to working? Is it different because the players describe their actions however they want regardless of the rolls and perhaps even have power over NPCs or other players by using narrative or "drama points" or something similar? Is it empowering because using that example of the physical roll above you could describe your character as tumbling out a window, making an impossible leap and stabbing the enemy amazingly right through the heart and it makes no difference other than you got to do "cool stuff"?

I think this discussion is very helpful. I think the core issue kind of comes out in what you said above, as far as what we were talking about in rules-light games was so different from your understanding.

What we're really talking about, I think, is style of play. I don't mean that as high level vs. low level, high magic vs. low magic, what game world it's set in, etc. You can vary all those and still be playing the same style.

I'm talking about style in terms of "campaign is about defeating tactical challenges" vs "campaign is about the decisions the players make" or "GM defines plot, players experience it' vs "Plot is defined through player decisions and GM handling of their consequences".

For the style that I think you're thinking of as the one way people play RPGs, there's a heavy focus on physical challenges like combat, and so those challenges are handled in high detail. What about another style of game, that's about characters dealing with the tension between getting what they want and treating other people fairly? That could be an interesting game (I hope so, it's basically my current campaign), and in that kind of game you might put a lot more screen time on character decisions and the consequences they have on family and friends. It might matter that a PC beat up someone who was opposing them, but the decision to have it come to blows would merit much more screen time than the fight itself.

For a style of play that really isn't about fighting, having lots of rules that focus on physical combat just serves to dilute the game. If the real issue is "Do I pay the blackmailer to keep him from telling my wife I'm having an affair, beat him up, or come clean with my wife?", then it isn't worth spending a lot of detail on the fist fight. It's just not what the game is about.

As far as characters describing their actions any way they wanted, yes, that happens, and it doesn't necessarily have a mechanical effect. But descriptions of actions don't just have to be fun color. They are a way for the player to say things about their character.

Wierd example here, but let's pretend the movie The Princess Bride was a roleplaying campaign. The theme might have been "How far will you go for love?" There's a fight between Inigo and Wesley that's a great fencing scene, lots of detail, fun stuff. Is the scene about two master swordsmen trying to kill each other? Not really, IMO. It's about Wesley's devotion to Buttercup (he's trying to save her) versus Inigo's devotion to his father (he's become a master fencer so that one day he can get his revenge). The real point of the scene is to show that the two PCs are so obsessed with their own goals that they're fighting, even though they don't really have any reason to. In that case, all the detail of the fight is just narrated color the players came up with, but it's still meaningful.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

See, my big problem with understanding the situation is that I don't understand creating a character whose goals you didn't want to be accomplished. To me, the game is about a bunch of heroes fighting against evil. They try their best, sometimes they win, sometimes they lose. Sometimes it is a lot easier than expected. Still, there are other evils to fight and other adventures to go on. So, the PCs go on them because they are heroes and are dedicated to defeating evil in whatever shape it make take.

And that's one valid style of play. Continuing campaign, split into different "seasons" where you fight a particular evil, then go on to the next. That's what the game's about. The GM's role is to provide evil to fight, the players' role is to play characters fighting evil. If an NPC kills the evil for you, hey, you have another one to kill next.

Another style of play might have characters who each have their own goals and their own problems, sometimes working together, sometimes opposing each other, sometimes off on their own. The game's about exploring how these stories (authored as much by the players as by the GM) address a given theme. If an NPC solves your problems for you, your role as a player has been short-circuited.

I could see the PC you were talking about, the guy who didn't really know how to relate to humans any more, as being really interesting in a game with a theme of alienation. His refusal to help "save the princess", rather than being a situation where you were impeding play, could have been the whole point of play for him.

Whatever the game, it's vital that the GM and players communicate about what they want play to be about. Too often, GMs look at the character sheet and go "cool powers" and at the backstory and go "cool backstory" and then go on with their campaign as written. I figure that charactes are imagined things that players come up with. If a player's found something worth writing down on the sheet or in the backstory, then that's something they want to factor into play. The character is their avenue of creative input.

 

[Akrasia]

...
I'm talking about style in terms of "campaign is about defeating tactical challenges" vs "campaign is about the decisions the players make" or "GM defines plot, players experience it' vs "Plot is defined through player decisions and GM handling of their consequences".
...

Right. IME as a GM, I've almost always run the latter kinds of campaigns (at least in recent years). That is, in all my campaigns, the focus has been on decisions the *players* make, and the consequences of those decisions (in response, of course, to a variety of different things going on in the world). I think I would find running a linear campaign with a 'preset' plot rather boring.

I've run this kind of campaign with both rules heavy and rules medium/light systems. After my last 3e campaign, I realized that other systems better suited my style.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

That was my experience too, Akrasia. Last year I was running a campaign with D20 Modern, and we got to a point where I realized that almost nothing on the character sheets or in the rules was relevant to our game. Play was about the characters dealing with their issues and relationships, the stuff that conventional wisdom says you're supposed to "just roleplay". We were freeforming. It was fun, but we wanted some "game" in there, the sense of risk and occasional surprise you get with randomizers.

When we moved to something in the HeroQuest model, we could use the rules to help us figure out if a character would succumb to their obsessions at a bad time. We had a Drama Point currency in place to add structure to the ebb-and-flow narratives each player was coming up with. Because the rules-light system we chose addressed the issues we dealt with in play, we actually had more rules than we did under D20.

 

[Majoru Oakheart]

I'm talking about style in terms of "campaign is about defeating tactical challenges" vs "campaign is about the decisions the players make" or "GM defines plot, players experience it' vs "Plot is defined through player decisions and GM handling of their consequences".

This along with the issue of role playing vs combat oriented is system independent. Although I've never actually played in a game where the plot was defined by the PCs, I'm certain they must be out there somewhere.

I've had more role playing based games played in D&D with no problem at all. Although, most of the time the role playing rarely centers around the things you've mentioned. Most of my friends and people I've played with in the past pretty much all say the same thing about that, "Like I want to explore love, integrity, duty in a game. I get enough problem with that in real life, I spent all week long frustrated that the girl at work won't talk to me and I have to make decisions to screw over our customers all week long caught between integrity and duty. When I play an RPG, I want to be someone as far removed from myself as possible. I want to kill monsters that are clearly evil and not worry about moral dillemas."

I've very rarely met someone who didn't have this view of role playing games. Generally if someone cares too much about their character or goes into the finer details of their character background, they are made fun of. So, yes, I generally viewed the concept of that sort of role playing as what a select minority of people play. I've gone to many, many conventions and played games with people, played with multiple home groups, moved to another country and played with multiple home groups and cons there. Probably played with over 500 people total. I've met maybe 2 people who had a view of role playing like you describe.

I don't mean to be insulting, I apologize if that's how I come across. As a player, I come to a game hoping for an interesting story, the same way I would when I pick up a book. I expect to have challenges thrown at me and have to defeat them. Sometimes the challenges are "figure out who murdered this man" and sometimes they are "defeat the demon horde", sometimes they are "negotiate with the dwarves in order to secure a peace treaty".

However, I don't have the energy to try to come up with plots for my own characters. I want to relax, otherwise RPGs would be just as stressful as the rest of the week.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Hey, that's not insulting at all. My group finds authoring plots for our characters and exploring moral issues fun and diverting. Yours doesn't. (Then again, my fiancee and I watched 28 Days Later last night, and had a half-hour conversation about the movie being about how family connections make life worth living. We're weird like that.)

All I'm trying to get across is that if your game isn't about X, detailed rules about X aren't going to make it better. We don't have detailed rules for fighting, you don't have detailed rules for moral crisis.

As for your style of play being a majority, I agree. So's your preferred game system. But it's not the right system for every kind of play, though it is for the majority you belong to.

 

[woodelf]

That's hyperbole. I'm perfectly comfortable with the GM coming up with homebrew settings and creating adventures. I just don't want their outcome and path pre-determined before I start playing.

I said "entirely of the GM's imagination." In other words, if the sole point of my character is to be part of an overarching plot arc that the GM has predetermined, then it's pointless to play.

I think his point was that "entirely of the GM's imagination" was, itself, hyperbole--that no one was advocating playing like that in the first place, and that he is skeptical that anyone plays like that.

Well, as Akrasia accurately points out, the GM comes up with the whole setting. In a sense, everything in the game world is his creation. If it then functions according to rules he made up, well, the player's input is minimal to say the least.

[snip]
The players should be a part of creating game world in collaboration with the GM. Granted, their contributions are going to be unequal. The GM has more control over most of the specifics, while the players have less. In fact, the one thing players truly do have control over (or should) is their own characters and the decisions those characters make. By eliminating the relevance of those choices, the GM is cutting back on his players' ability to contribute to the game.

I glommed those two bits together because i think they illustrate the fundamental difference in viewpoint: what you describe is one POV, not necessarily shared by all RPGs. Lots of RPGs at least blur the "player=PC; GM=everything else" dichotomy, and some throw it out completely.

Also, whether the rules are made up by the GM or by a game designer has zero impact on how much input the player has. Think of it like this: if the game rules define 10% of the game experience, and the GM defines 60%, the players are left with 30%. If the game rules define 60% of the game experience, and the GM defines 10%, the players are still left with 30%. And while the former might technically be "rules lite", that's not what most rules-lite advocates are describing. IME, most "rules-lite" games look more like rules: 10%, GM: 40%, players: 50%. And while i've invented all those %ages [i'm not even sure you could meaningfully measure the distribution of power in an RPG in a way that added cleanly to 100%], their relative magnitudes are intended to be reasonable approximations. That is, the bigger difference between crunchy and rules-lite systems isn't so much the decrease in rules input, but the increase in player input. IME--and this is much of the appeal of rules-lite games for me--players have a *lot* more input into the game, at the cost of the GM having considerably less control.

I just don't buy the "feel" argument thrown around about rules-light games. IMO, feel is mostly system independent. However, it may not be GM-skill independent and some GMs have a different skillset than others. For most GMs, some systems are probably "superior" to others from this standpoint. However, gaming books exist to provide rules for gaming. A gaming book with fewer rules is a simpler, but, in my opinion, less complete game.

In other research, i just stumbled onto a thread on The Forge that expresses what i want to say better than i can, i think: <http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=8471>, specifically the first post. In short, the vast majority of commercially-visible RPGs are mechanically pretty much interchangeable, so, if those are your only experiences, and you're happy with at least some of them, systeom won't seem to matter. But if that style doesn't work for you, you won't be happy, and you may see the system as the problem. And once you've tried other styles of RPG, and discovered one that doesn't make you unhappy, you'll probably decide that system does matter. [Though, honestly, given our discussions, i suspect you're already aware of that--it's just that not many commercially-visible RPGs use systems that you'd strongly dislike.]

 

[woodelf]

Do you have a set of "FUDGE dice" . . . ?

6 sets (i.e., 24dF), in 4 different colors.

But then again, i've got "one of everything" when it comes to dice, more-or-less--my dice bag is ridiculous. You never know--I just might need a d14 some day.

 

[SweeneyTodd]

Sign me up with woodelf; I'm in total agreement with his last post. What's frustrating to me is that I think the stuff he just said should have been the ground rules for this whole conversation!

How You Play does matter to your gaming experience. How You Play = Rules + Social Contract. Using fewer or more rules puts more of the onus on Social Contract. Whatever power isn't taken by the rules is given to the group, and the group decides how much of that goes to GM and how much to players.

We spent so many pages talking about things from the perspective of, okay, granted these unstated assumptions like the GM having creative control over everything outside of the PC's skin, and an adversarial GM-Player relationship, and a heavy focus on specific, physical activities rather than bigger issues... how do the rules tell us how to jump over a pit?

Maybe the conceptual gulf is too wide. I have trouble seeing the other side -- I can't imagine playing in a game where the GM provides 90% of the creative input, or with a group that consistently argues about minor task resolution issues. I just don't get it. But it's a different playstyle, and if someone wants to play that way, then go for it. Use a rules system that supports it by guaranteeing the players tactical input and can arbitrate disuptes.

But I'm still kind of lost as to why so many people assumed that a rules-light system must be bad or insufficient because it did different things than they expected. If we're advocating a system, it must do something that we want it to do!