The Rules: Who cares?

[kitsune9]

But why would the halfling with the dagger go first? All other things being equal, I'd think he would never go first.

Or are you saying that a "judgment call" and a "fit of pique" are indistinguishable? Because if a Ref told me that the halfling with the dagger that charged the line of halberds gets to strike first, I'd think he was totally irrational (now, the turn after moving to contact, I can see why Bulbo would go first... he's inside the reach).

I in no way meant to suggest that going by judgment calls and common sense meant that you should have Two Face as your Ref. Some sort of grasp on reality is needed.

And if the retort is that rules are needed because your Ref doesn't have a grasp on reality... well, if that's the problem then you've already made a drastic mistake!

Hi Korgoth, the above was an example of some of the randomness and non-consistency that DM's who play fast and loose tend to fall into (well, at least in my experience). I feel that I run into Two Face as Ref when they are running fast and loose.

 

[mmadsen]

Some associate the concept with artificially limiting what characters can do. "We don't want a riding skill in the game, because then our characters would start falling off their horses." That's an extreme objection, because the question of when to require a skill check can be answered just as reasonably as when to require an ad hoc factor.

Certainly knowing when to use the skill system and how difficult to make the rolls is important, but one of the biggest arguments against many skill systems is that they force trade-offs in character design -- trade-offs that may have seemed like a good idea in the game-design process, but which don't work out so well in play.

Look at all the Fighters out there who can barely ride, climb a rampart, etc. It gets worse when someone decides to add skills to the game or to use skills that were only vaguely referenced originally. Suddenly knights don't know who's who at court, rangers don't know the lay of the land, etc.

 

[Ariosto]

The contrived is likely to bite back in more ways the more of it there is. The 3E system is probably most familiar among D&Ders, and by design it makes trade-offs a big issue and introduction of new skills problematic. To the biggest fans of the game, the "sub-game" of character design may be among its valued assets. To many others, whether inclined to see a skills system as necessary or as needless, the 3E model is a conceptual mold that can be hard to break. That in certain ways it resembles those in many other games reinforces the association.

The Fantasy Trip may be instructive. Released (in "Advanced", full-RPG form) in 1980, it combined a number of features commonly dividing "schools" of D&D today: character design with points; a skills system; and detailed tactical combat rules (originally presented in the board games Melee and Wizard). Yet, it seems to be fondly remembered among fans of old D&D who also played it.

It does not follow that they want to mix their TFT and D&D; it is quite common to appreciate different things as just that (meat-flavored ice cream, for instance, not being a big seller). However, there may be things to learn from the design in terms of different approaches to similar subjects.

SPI's (later TSR's) Dragonquest is another RPG that started out as a combat board game. Discussions of later versions of D&D sometimes get hung up on the notion that if they are also partly of that species, then somehow they are less legitimately RPGs. That is unhelpful, but so is ignoring the influence of that design priority on a game's overall effect.

Looked at one way, most RPGs amount to basically "just the same thing", but in practice the differences in detail are significant. There are various allocations of rules comprehensiveness, and of players' time and energy; as processes, they flow in different ways, move to different rhythms.

 

[mmadsen]

There's a leeriness of rules-lawyering, as if players are going to start dictating absurd probabilities to a hapless GM. The real bottom line in most cases is that players' control is more illusory than real. With or without a number on a character sheet, it is at the end of the day still up to the GM to set a reasonable probability for a given outcome.

If there's a written rulebook, and the written rules spell out specific probabilities for, say, spotting a secret door or climbing a wall, it should come as no surprise that players expect those probabilities to hold for them.

And, being human, they'll argue vociferously for those probabilities when it helps them -- and remain oddly quiet when it doesn't.

That's one reason why hyper-specific rules aren't always a good idea in a free-form game, like most RPGs.

 

[Ariosto]

[That's one reason why] hyper-specific rules aren't always a good idea in a free-form game, like most RPGs.

There's a conflict between those interested in exploring the situation ("simulation") and those interested in manipulating the game abstraction. There can be some cross-over in rules-heavy but "realistic" games, and actually some people equate realism and mechanical complexity.

To keep a rule-book compact and allow for taking into account the specifics of very variable situations, provision for rulings in place of set rules is invaluable. Even with a very comprehensive rule-book, there can be a lot of wasted text-searching time only to find that nothing precisely fits the matter at hand. Without intense devotion to the Book, that's not a big problem; the prolonged search won't be undertaken in the first place, people preferring to get on with the game.

That frustrates people who are playing the numbers, whose head-space is in the mathematical construct. That was sort of hard to get into when one was not privy to the data in the first place -- an extraordinary situation given proliferation of rule-books to the extent that players are pretty much expected to own them (which has been widely the case for a long time).

So, there's a reactive tendency to take factors neat. If you let ad hoc modifiers into the picture, then your nominal 55% (or whatever) rating could end up anywhere from 100% to 0% on a case-by-case basis. Circumstances might even weigh so heavily as to overturn the status quo, as in the case of a "brilliant" guy who slacks off and parties while a "not so bright" fellow puts his nose to the grindstone and studies.

"Not fair!" cries the player banking on the points he or she has put into an Intelligence score. What's fair from that perspective is to use the same odds regardless, and then make up a story to rationalize the outcome (however unlikely it may be).

Thus, in a curious way, the "gamer's" game slips toward the "story-teller's".

I think that on balance this has less to do with mechanical design than with players' relationships with RPG mechanisms. The emphasis in a design and its presentation, though, is likely to have a lot to do with the kinds of gamers who flock to it.

I have written elsewhere that I find the "narrative-focused" association of White Wolf's "Story Teller" games to lie more in attitude than in rules. (I do not have a depth of experience with those, though, having found the system just too clunky for my taste after some early Vampire play.)

RuneQuest skewed one way because of its basically simulation-oriented presentation. The whole business of acquiring and improving skill ratings was conceived in terms of modeling real-life processes of personal development. Quibbles over accuracy and genuine "realism" of the model take a back seat to the priorities expressed. That has much to do, I think, with why the use of skill ratings did not (in my experience) radically change the game from role-playing to "roll-playing" as many old-style D&Ders fear.

Another factor is that, in 1978, the original D&D ethos in that way still informed most gamers of my acquaintance as the norm. The impetus behind a skill-based (rather than character-class and experience-level) game was to apply a different set of tools to character description, not to make the referee's role more rigid.

Notably missing was the injection of heavy-handed "balance" seen in later efforts (in TFT somewhat, and more in Champions). If one starts with such a scheme as a goal, then naturally one is going to treat skills in such a way as to facilitate it. If one sees it, through "old school" eyes, not as a desirable feature but as a Harrison Bergeron handicap, then the lack of motive is going to introduce the means only by accident.