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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7026965" data-attributes="member: 42582">First, just to get a possible confusion out of the way - I prefer a game that is overt about its design principles and the play experience it sets out (and, hopefull, does) deliver. That's why Luke Crane's Burning Wheel is my favourite set of RPG rules from the point of view of writing (I like them a lot in play too); and why I like other clearly-written rulesets too (eg Maelstrom Storytelling, bits of Over the Edge, HeroQuest revised, Marvel Heroic RP most of the time, and bits of 4e).But second, I don't think my preference is universal. I'm not even sure it's very widespread. I think a significant number of RPGers - perhaps even a majority - prefer that the rules not talk about their underlying concepts or the way they are intended to yield a certain play experience, because that is already too much "pulling back of the curtain". They want the experience of immersion/verisimilitude to extend from play even into engaging with the rulebooks.<a href="http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/15/" target="_blank">Ron Edwards identified this as a factor in RPG rules presentation</a> over 10 years ago:A lot of game texts in this tradition reach for a fascinating ideal: that reading the book is actually the start of play, moving seamlessly into group play via character creation. Features of some texts like the NPC-to-PC explanatory style and GM-only sections are consistent with this ideal, as well as the otherwise-puzzling statement that character generation is a form of Director stance. It supports the central point of this essay, that the value of Simulationist play is prioritizing the group imaginative experience, to an extent that expands the very notion of "play" into acts that from Narrativist or Gamist perspectives are not play at all. This ideal poses two problems: one for the GM in particular, and one for the group as a whole. The GM problem, only partly solved by GM-only sections, is that it makes it very hard to write a coherent how-to explanation for scenario preparation and implementation. Putting this sort of information right out "in front of God and everybody" is counter-intuitive for some Simulationist-design authors, because it's getting behind the curtain at the metagame level. The experience of play, according to the basic goal, is supposed to minimize metagame, but preparation for play, from the GM's perspective, is necessarily metagame-heavy, and if reading the book is assumed to be actually beginning to play ... well, then a certain conflict of interest sets into the process. The usual textual solution is to assume that the GM is already on the same page and to address him or her as a co-conspirator. In many games, however, such information is outright punted, such that a GM must bring a particular set of experiences and values to the text in the first place in order to play the game. The whole-group problem is that individually-conducted character creation often produces differing conclusions about the point of play from player to player, which is to say, the characters are fully plausible and created by the rules, but are also manifestly incapable of interacting in terms of any one person's desired genre/setting. The classic example in fantasy-adventure play is the party including a paladin and an assassin; the one in superhero play is the super-team that includes both a Spider-Man clone and a Wolverine clone. The usual textual solution is to urge that all character creation be subject to the approval of the GM, which in practice poses some problems. For instance, it assumes that the Social Contract of the game group permits such authority and presents no procedure to follow if that happens not to be the case. Also, I have never seen any text explaining what a GM is supposed to do or to say to the player regarding how to re-write the character or to design a new one; every example, and there are many, seems to assume that the GM "just knows" how to communicate the je ne sais qua to the player.(It's interesting to see how popular the idea of "session zero" has become to deal with the whole-group issue that Edwards identifies; whereas Gygax in his PHB, being at least sometimes prepared to talk frankly in metagame terms and to distinguish prep from play, treats this sort of thing - getting together a compatible party with the right load-out of spells and gear - as something to be done in advance of play by converation between the leading players.)</blockquote>

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