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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8643673" data-attributes="member: 42582">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?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 [USER=71235]@niklinna[/USER] and [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER] 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?"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 [USER=16586]@Campbell[/USER] 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: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.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: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:</blockquote>

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