fanboy2000 said:
The rules are not the physics of the world. The rules are to facilitate gameplay.
Rules exist to keep things fair, to make fair chalenges posible. They are not physics.
That's one POV. I disagree. In fact, the more gamelike an RPG is, the less i like it. Rules that "facillitate gameplay" often actively detract from my RPing experience. Rules that
don't match/provide the underlying physics of the world, likewise, tend not to interest me--unless the rules are so light/loose that they don't do that sort of stuff at all (IOW, OtE works just fine for me, because it's not about the behavior of the world at all).
I have never, in all the games I've played in, in all the games I have ever sold, and all the customers I have ever talk to in five years at working at a game store met anyone else who has ever said.
One: you've just talked with another. Perhaps with a slightly different POV than fusangite, but more similar to his POV than yours.
Two: there's tons of them hanging out on r.g.f.advocacy, RPGNet, and The Forge, among other places--*and* i've met them in real life, and there are enough of them to drive sales of quite a few RPGs that accept that premise.
I say this, not to disagree with you. It was long established that your game in far diffrent from mine. I say this so that you know that there are likely a great many people who do not thnk that rules are physics. I also say this so that you understand that I refuse (we are moving into emotional discorse, not logical, so you may wish to keep that in mind) to look at rules in such a fashion. RPGs in general, and D&D in particular, appeal to me precisely because they do not model the real world. They are imaginary constructs that exist to give me a few hours of escapist entertainment.
I don't think he's referring to modelling real-world physics--i certainly am not. I'm saying that the rules model *a* world, and that that world's natural laws are essentially defined by the mechanics of the game.
I also don't think that this is the only way to approach RPG mechanics. To use a concrete example: you can take escalating hit points in D&D to either be a literal model of the physics of the world (more powerful warriors can absorb more physical abuse), or a purely game construct (the hero is no tougher, just more skilled, luckier, or granted greater script immunity). Sometimes i prefer the former; sometimes the latter. In my particular case, i generally prefer the former when dealing with crunchy systems, and the latter when dealing with very light systems. Thus, D&D3E, frex, drives me batty because it generally doesn't model the physics very well, but is fairlyl detailed.
To sugest that fluff is just as important to rules is, to me, to sugest that I need to be a slave to bad fiction written under deadline by a person who may or may not use the fluff in their own game. It sugests to me that what this person wrote is more important than the material created by me and my players. Fluff in an RPG book is just words on dead trees. It has no life untill a gaming group breaths life into it. The breath of life given by gaming groups is a strang thing and it may not match what is on the paper. It may not match what was in the mind of the game designer. What me and my players create though gameplay is 100x more important than anything Monte Cook, SKR, Andy Collins, or even E. Gary Gygax wrote about their gameing worlds when it comes to my game. I'm not saying this to disparage people who's work I admire enough to purchase and place on my gameing self, I say it so that you understand that I look at RPGs as a social game and I'm more interested in what comes out of my game.
I agree that what you do is more important than what the game designer provided--and that goes for the rules, too. As to which is more important, i don't think you're actually picturing a fluff-free game, based on what you say. Look at the D&D3E PH, minus the fluff: no description of what an elf looks like, how one behaves, or what they believe. Just that bulleted list of game rules to define one. Likewise, as much as half of every spell description would go away. The D&D3E core rules are *full* of fluff--probably 1/3 to 1/2 the wordcount. And, for that matter, those same rules are, for the most part, *based* upon the fluff--note how the fluff is basically the same as AD&D2, but the crunch is almost completely different. It's *because* the fluff says that an elf is around 5' tall and 110# that the rules classify her as "medium size".
Now, i'm not saying that you can't also change those bits, or that you don't, just that fluff is far more pervasive than you seem to imply, and is far more encompassing than just bad game fiction (which, i, too, hate--in fact, i pretty much don't even bother reading it any more, even in setting books that i otherwise love).
