One might read a rule like Rule 0 and think something like this
"Aha! I grasp that rule, and I see its consequences, and thus if another upholds it I will be able speak to that with accuracy."
That runs into a conflict when one is using that grasping to make arguments as to the undesirability of following that rule.
This claim is false of rules in general. For instance, I can grasp a rule of
eldest male succession to the monarchy, and if another upholds it - eg Australia until fairly recently - I will be able to speak to that with accuracy. There is no conflict between the previous sentence, and grasping arguments as to the undesirability of such a rule. In fact, all the arguments I'm aware of in favour of changes to the succession law depending upon grasping the consequences of upholding the male-succession rule.
Why would rule zero be any different in this respect?
One may come to think something like this
"Why are these fools following Rule 0, when it is so patently unappealing?!"
Do those fools understand Rule 0 to be unappealing but follow it anyway!? Or do they follow it out of plain ignorance of its consequences? Perhaps they find the unappealing, appealing in some way - a matter of taste? All of these are possible, but they are also problematic. They skirt reliance on a challengeable assumption that one's own position is one of holding the high-ground (hence I call them "fools" so that we are clear what ignorant persons of questionable taste they must be.)
I could look at America and ask "Why do those fools not have a monarchy?" or "Why do those fools not have a system of parliamentary government?" They might look at Australia and ask "Why does those fools not have a republic?" or "Why do those fools allow for changes to the head of government without the need for a popular vote?"
I might look at people playing T&T - a game I have no interest in playing - and ask "Why to do those fools play such an unappealing game?" Those T&T players might look at me playing (say) Torchbearer and ask the same question? Even someone who is
playing Torchbearer might express doubts about its merits - see eg
@niklinna and
@AbdulAlhazred in the Torchbearer thread expressing some doubts about whether all the crunch in the game (including all its different variations in currency, in sub-systems, etc) is truly necessary.
It's no mystery that preferences are different in various ways, and that there is a high degree of path dependence in any particular person ending up living by any particular set of rules. When I cross streets in America or in Europe or in North Africa I often narrowly avoid getting run over because I look the wrong way. "Those American fools drive on the right hand side of the road! Why?"
Alternatively, their grasping of the rule - and this is what I believe
@Thomas Shey and I have been essentially saying - is one that has
appealing consequences.
<snip>
Those fools are grasping and upholding an
appealing version of Rule 0 that is
not identical to the
unappealing version grasped and upheld by those up there on the high ground.
You seem to be treating
appealing and
unappealing as if they were inherent properties of games. Whereas they are - self-evidently, I suggest - relational: appealing, or unappealing,
to whom?
If someone wants to have a GM-curated RPG experience that will permit exploration of character, setting and/or situation - what the "cultures of play" calls trad or neo-trad - and if one wants very mainstream/typical PC sheets (stats, skills, hp) and resolution systems (roll against stat or skill to resolve the task at issue), then some version of "rule zero" is probably essential. As per John Harper's diagram that
@Campbell posted a couple of times upthread, those sorts of techniques need "GM-as-glue" to combine them in order to produce any movement in play at all.
Not far upthread, Campell posted this:
@clearstream
You seem to be making an argument against clarity of expectation. Is that what you are trying to do here? What thesis are you putting forward?
My thoughts and questions about your posts are similar. By treating "appealing" and "unappealing" as non-relational properties of rules, you seem to be implying that all RPGing is more-or-less the same thing; and by framing analysis, criticism and dislike as involve judging others as "fools", you seem to be reinforcing that implication: the "foolish" RPGers really want (say) gamist play, or story now play, but don't know how to achieve it.
From my perspective, those implications are all nonsense. It seems to me obvious that the most popular approach to RPGing is high concept simulationism. This is borne out by how people play RPGs, how they discuss them, which RPGs have been popular since the early-to-mid 1980s, etc.
The second most popular approach is a low-competition gamism that (as Edwards points out in a passage I've now quoted many times in this thread) resembles characters-face-problems simulationism but adds in a performance metric. The addition of the metric is normally achieved by amping up the difficult of combat encounters sufficiently that losing is a real possibility (hence luck and/or somewhat clever gameplay is required to avoid losing), perhaps in combination with the GM disclaiming decision-making at certain key moments (so eg no deus ex machina rescues, no fudging, etc).
As Ovinomancer observes dozens of pages upthread, most discussions on these boards of 3E and 5e D&D play reflect the differences between these two approaches, and the tensions that will arise if you try and satisfy them both at once.
You seem to be introducing fog where none is needed, and to be presenting as obscure a state of affairs that seems reasonably clear to me.
pemerton said:
Look at Vincent Baker's example of the fight to try and get to the departing ship on time. The player (via the play of their PCs) wins the fight - their PC "kicks the other guys butt". But does the player get to the ship? In Classic Traveller, 5e D&D, Rolemaster and CoC - just to point to a few example systems - that question is answered by a GM decision. The decision may be made in various ways, and typically may have regard to the PC having kicked the other guy's butt, but the GM makes the decision.
Now consider a 4e skill challenge, where the stated goal is to get to the ship before it departs. Winning the fight will count as a success in the challenge. So the connection between winning the fight and getting to the ship before it departs is not hostage to GM decision-making.
With that all in mind, would you say that a group that chooses to
not accept/enact Rule 0 for themselves (which is more common in neo-trad 5th edition play) therefore evades these problems? Or at least, is not committed to them.
What problems?
I'm pointing to a phenomenon: that a certain approach to the resolution of action declarations - the one that Vincent Baker calls
task resolution, which is used quite a bit (not solely) in Classic Traveller, 5e D&D and Rolemaster, and perhaps
is the sole approach used in CoC - means that GM decision-making is needed to determine the relationship between
resolution of an action declaration and
the character achieving what the player hoped they would achieve.
You are the one framing the phenomenon as a
problem.
Of the systems I've mentioned where this phenomenon occurs, I've GMed a fair bit of Classic Traveller in recent years. Off the top of my head, I can think of two occasions where the phenomenon manifested itself.
The first was an episode of on-world exploration:
Using a slightly ad hoc mix of the vehicle reliability rules and the animal/event encounter rules, plus some improvised rules for tracking the other ATV, we resolved the journey across Byron. A lot of rolls guarantees some fails, and at one point they got lost and so used Electronics plus Jack-o-T to repurpose a communicator as a satellite uplink so they could get GPS coordinates. After about a week out of the dome, with their rations running low, they were able to find the outpost the other ATV had travelled to (by having Tony put on his vacc suit and climb to the top of a mountain to look around).
I felt this exploration episode suffered a bit from a lack of tight resolution mechanics, with nothing like a skill challenge or similar "closed scene" resolution; but also not the in-fiction structure that gives Traveller interstellar travel a similar de facto character.
Traveller has rules for rolling for encounters, and rules for rolling for mechanical problems with a vehicle, but no rules for working out whether or not the PCs get where they're going, or find what they're looking for, other than GM fiat or classic hex-crawling. The latter is a useless method for a game that involves travelling from world to world (who has a hex-map of the whole of the earth, let alone of the dozens of worlds that might come into play in a Traveller game?). The former method, therefore, is what was used in this case. And since then, I have avoided running any onworld exploration activity. The last time that it became relevant, a different approach was used to work out where the PCs needed to go (a Navigation- and EDU-based check to interpret some diagrams) and then we just deemed that they flew there in their spaceship.
I don't have a neat actual play report for the second, but the PCs were investigating an abandoned starship while an Imperial Navy cutter was bearing down on them. It was possible to calculate a time required for the cutter to arrive, based on stipulating some starting distances that made sense based on world generation information, and then solving the relevant kinematic equations. But how much can characters in Traveller achieve, by way of investigation, during a given time?
There is no answer to that other than GM decision-making. Which means that the pending arrival of the cutter wasn't so much a genuine constraint, as a type of framing device. My recollection is not perfect, but I have memories of the players asking "How much time do we have left?", me giving an answer, and that forming something like a consensus basis for what further actions they could or could not declare.
Unlike the onworld exploration example, this dependence up on GM-as-glue didn't cause any problems. We achieved consensus on what could be done before the cutter arrived, and thus everyone was happy with how the fiction was configured when the cutter eventually turned up. And the interaction with the Imperial Navy personnel was resolved in our standard fashion for that system. Here's an actual play post which explains some of the techniques used, in this repsect, to avoid the need for GM-as-glue:
By
secret backstory I mean elements of the fiction that are known only to the GM - and so in at least that sense are not part of a
shared fiction - but that nevertheless are used by the GM to inform the outcomes of action resolution.
<snip>
I GMed a session of Classic Traveller today, continuing the
Aliens meets Annic Nova scenario. As originally presented (ie in the published module Annic Nova), there is not a great deal more to this scenario than the players moving around the abandoned vessel learning backstory from the GM by performing variouis sorts of "moves" (some of which require checks, some of which are simply gated behind skill levels, and some of which have to be puzzled out by the players).
I call this sort of play
learning what it is in the GM's notes., For it to be interesting, I think the notes have to be pretty damn clever and the atmosphere etc well presented also. I've encountered this as a player in CoC one-shots; I don't think the Annic Nova scenario, as published, gets over the line.
So I've adapted it in a couple of ways. There is an external source of pressure, namely, an Imperial Navy cutter investigating the vessel and the PCs' interest in it. That came into play today and was handled in the standard way we resolve social encounters ie a roll on the reaction table, with a +1 DM because the PC in question was a noble like the naval officer he was dealing with, and was being relatively charming in his blather. The modified result was a 12, ie genuine friendship, and so the officer has come on board the PC's ship but has accepted their explanation that things on the abandoned ship (the Annic Nova) aren't yet suitable for inspection by the Navy. No secret backstory was at work here (I'd prepped the NPCs, but it wasn't
secret backstory eg the officer announced herself by her title -
Lady Commander Askol - and my explanation of the circumstances of the reaction check, including the +1 DM, was all out in the open) .
There's also an internal source of pressure, namely, aliens (or rather Aliens) on board the abandoned vessel. Because of the way Traveller works - eg pretty old-school resolution for combat, based on position on a map or more abstract bands (but in this case we're using floor plans from the module) - there is a lot of scope for secret backstory to affect things. In the session today I handled that by using the surprise mechanics together with the encounter distance mechanics to determine who got the drop on whom, in circumstances where - to use AW terminology - the
unwelcome truth of the aliens on board had already been well and truly revealed.
For other aspects of framing and so establishing possible action declarations, there were some INT checks, and a check where a bonus from EDU got the relevant PC over the line. None of this was at the AW-level of elegant narrative pressure, but I was using it to try and have the backstory come out and hence the framing established in ways that followed the established fiction (including the fiction of the relevant PCs) and tried to make the session about
more than just learning what's in the GM's notes while not using the content of those notes as a secret determiner of action resolution outcomes.
