That's a good example of what I am discussing. A parking rule is not binding in itself, it is binding
because it is enforced. It's easy to see that we can park where we like - the rule doesn't make us park in accord with it - rather it is our concern to avoid a fine that secures our consent to the rule. (Or we may feel a sense of civic duty, etc.)
For RPG we often agree to process rules. Like this
- We know that sometimes we have different ideas about what should happen next, in circumstances where that will take what follows down different paths (the antecedent behaviour)
- We author a rule "In case of 1., you will roll 1d6. On 6, what you say goes. On 3-5, what you say goes and I get to add something. On 1-2, what I say goes."
- We come to a case of 1. You pick up 1d6 and roll it - a 6. What makes me go along with that? It's not the roll. It's my consent to the roll, due in very large part to the player-ethos we share that would make my behaviour that of a spoilsport (see Huizinga et al) should I now disregard this rule that we gave our prior consent to.
Of course, I don't normally think about consenting or not to every roll (as John Harper reminds in a recent video). Our shared ethos is normative. Instead I give my consent as we enter the magic circle, thus adopting a lusory attitude that should (but is not guaranteed every time to) meet the lusory expectations of my fellow players.
Again, we are perhaps in the end just agreeing (by disagreeing). I am absolutely talking about whether a rule is
inherently binding or not. I gather from your caveat that you perhaps agree that rules aren't inherently binding. Have I got that right?
We're speaking to a conversation about rule zero versus every other rule in 5e, and I am saying that none of those rules are inherently binding. They are binding because of norms and penalties, anticipated benefits, etc, that bring us to accept/enact them for ourselves. This makes
@Thomas Shey's argument exactly right: a GM could wield Rule 0 in an unhelpful way - any participant could wield any rule in an unhelpful way - but they do not because they don't follow the rule just because of the existence of that rule. They follow that rule because of (and in the way that satisfies) the shared-ethos and the benefits the group desire that rule to have.
Can I just say that this deconstruction you're bent on of "what makes a rule binding" might feel interesting and informative on your end of the conversation, but it feels very much neither of those things to myself.
We all are either formally trained on how complex social systems work or we have sufficient life experience to understand such things.
When we're talking about TTRPG designs, we can assume the designers have a semblance of understanding that some measure of social contract is the foundation for the undertaking of the play. That is pretty much where the interesting and informative aspect of this begins and ends. Any further deconstruction feels (and I'd go further and I'd say "is") regressive. Its like this black hole of "we're never going to get anywhere because we can always deconstruct further."
Personally, I'd infinitely rather focus on Harper's diagram and Baker's statements on task resolution vs conflict resolution. They're concrete things in short, easily digestible form so they should actually move the ball down the field. Can we talk about those things rather than gaze into the abyss of "what is the nature of rules in social systems really and is it adherence to social contract or casual indifference or empirical understanding of the functionality of a ruleset to yield its design goals during play that makes a rule binding?"
So, focusing on those two things, I would hope it would be clear how an intricate and intricately integrated, codified, player-facing conflict resolution system like Torchbearer derives skillfullness of play in a way that a GM-facing, heavily GM mediated (rather than codified), maybe-task-resolution-maybe-conflict-resolution (ask your GM in every moment of play), intricate but mostly modular and not particularly tightly-integrated system, serial exploration without the deft-and-handling-time-friendly-supporting tech just fundamentally cannot do.
In
Torchbearer:
* We have an Obstacle as a unit of play. We know how Obstacles integrate with Adventures and how they integrate with the rest of the system.
* We have a Turn. We know how Turns and Obstacles are integrated and how they individually and collectively integrate with the rest of the system.
* We have multiple attrition models (Light, Grind, Conditions, Nature, Disposition and Concession in Conflicts) and we know they all work individually and how they intersect.
* When an Obstacle is before us, we not only have codified Factoring to determine an individual Ob (DC in D&D parlance), but we have Adventure design that tells us what the spread of this (total # and type) should look like. We know the Ob rating, we know how much dice we can muster based on the Help rules (and the exposure assumed by the helpers) and Nature and Traits and Fate/Persona. We have intent-driven tests and conflicts and we have a simple loop for resolving every moment (after players have oriented themselves to an individual situation, poked and prodded at it through meta-conversation or within the imagined space, and declared action and intent).
- Passed test = Success: player achieves their intent
- Failed test = Game master chooses (a) Twist (a new obstacle but Fun Once - bypassed original obstacle or situation has changed) or (b) condition (but intent achieved)
- (a) and (b) on failed tests should be near parity
- If Conflict then resolve intent and consult procedures for intent realization and concessions
Now contrast that with
the inverse paradigm:
* We don't have discrete, transparently encoded moments or problem : resolution like Obstacles and we don't know how they integrate with total # of Obstacles on an Adventure.
* We don't have discrete, codified Turns, but we have something very, very vaguely approximating to Turns (a process-sim-ish Travel Pace) to time happening at the table with this kind of "serial exploration" paradigm (rather than scene to scene to scene etc). What if because this is book-keeping-intensive and neither evocative nor well-integrated nor creating a sense of urgency (compared to Turns + The Grind et al), we just handwave this whole Travel Pace thing and don't carefully map progression in the way that is necessary for actual "serial exploration" of a gamespace (Dungeon Crawl or Wilderness Crawl)? Also, we don't have an integrated Turn : Obstacle relationship so we have no objective input to this relationship (because it doesn't exist in the system) in either Adventure Design (for the GM) nor for the players exploring whatever it is they're exploring so they can discern their relative progress (more on this below as its a big deal when loading out). Now that we've sort of handwaved this book-keeping-intensive "not Turn" exploration Travel Pace with no real knowledge about any kind of a Turn : Obstacle relationship, what if we have abilities that work off of time but we don't know how that interacts with individual time spent delving/trekking/exploring nor the potential collective time that we may be looking at taking on when we accept this Adventure...because...well, we don't even have an individual and codified unit like "The Adventure" as a frame of reference! So we don't precisely know how to loadout nor hire cohorts nor whether we should requisition precious assets that may come with taking on significant downstream liability (should things go awry). Now we may do some surveillance beforehand to try to exchange this vacuum of information for a marginally less nebulous decision-space, but (a) its likely never to achieve much more than "nebulous status" and (b) the surveillance procedures are possibly subject to the same task resolution issues cited by Baker and Harper above (unless they are powerful spells that, while still subject to GM block/veto, are the most codified procedures of the game)...and (c) see below for recovery of resources spent in this surveillance (or if we even spent them at all...they may be at-will and therefore pretty much trivial in the navigation of their decision-space...which is harmful to Skilled Play).
* We do have an attrition model but (a) its not as well-integrated with a structured play loop as it is in Torchbearer (because their isn't a structured play loop...its pretty much free form and the purview of the GM) and (b) Recovery is overwhelmingly under the Harper and Baker cited model above; the GM-facing purview of the GM (contrast with Camp phase and Town phase procedures and Instincts in Torchbearer).
* Tests are different in very way than the Torchbearer model. Do we test at all? What is the baseline (an adventurer of x level or level of PCs or etc etc etc) for the DC of the test? Are we using Genre Logic or the Process Sim to determine framing/say yes inputs/DC inputs/consequence inputs? What is the DC of the test? Dis/Adv? What happens on failure? How much is left of the situation after the test resolves and what happens pass/fail? All GM-facing and GM-purview.
Now go back and look at Harper's diagrams, Harpers words on the different loops, and Bakers words on Task vs Conflict resolution. The nexus of all of this should yield the following:
* Torchbearer is System-Player-GM (in that order)-directed engine for Gamist priorities.
* The inverse (some kind of D&D) is a GM-directed engine for High Concept Simulation priorities.
Now let us say that both of these games have the exact same high level "Adventure Aesthetic/Theme" paramaters in common for one instance of play. It may be that these two discrete play-throughs may incidentally produce a similar fiction on a chance. However, that is as far as it goes. The experience of playing them and GMing them and the end product is vastly different. One of these is distills Skilled Play in as objective a way as can be done (to date) in a TTRPG while the imagined experience of "being there" is incidental. The other pushes toward creating an imagined experience of "being there" with heavy emphasis on mood, tone, color, performative theatrics, purple prose flourishes, and genre emulation...meanwhile, the signal of Skilled Play is either deeply muted or outright nullified due to the powerfully-ingrained GM-directed nature.
