What are the rules for?

[Thomas Shey]

Yes, this is getting at what separates many of the rules with mechanics from not-quite-rules about how the world works, the kind of knowledge characters in the game world could discuss.

I'm not even sure it quite reaches the latter in some cases, because sometimes there's nitty-gritty that will matter to some people in the world who interact with it but won't exist in general "lore". As an example, people may generally know that a magical metal is harder and tougher than whatever the commonly used, but that may not translate into them understanding its better at cleaving shields (but warriors may well know that) or difficult to get a really sharp edge on (but smiths may know that). These are the sort of things that the combat and crafting rules will tell you, though. The people in the two specialties may not have the specific numbers or whatever those rules do, but their understanding of their professions will often translate into that, and there's probably no clear way to express it in the lore (if it exists there at all--its the sort of detail the "lore" as presented for a setting rarely gets into) but its been conveyed in a meaningful way by word of mouth among those it'd be relevant to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We actually don’t rely on rules for a lot of that. The canonical example would be a map.

I'd argue the map has rules baked into it too: distance is usually there in some way, and that's relevant because players know how long it takes for people to cover those distances. The latter in particular are part of rules.

 

[Thomas Shey]

nods For instance, a narrative example (rather than an action-by-action play) of a dragon soaring through the sky and occasionally unleashing a gout of flame is unlikely to allow one to deduce how quickly it flies, how often it can breathe fire, or the area of effect or the precise lethality of its flame breath. Arrows and spears may bounce off its scales, but is it merely unlikely or literally impossible for a mundane projectile to have a meaningful impact on it? And so forth.

If one is running a system that abhors the very notion of combat as a subsystem and prefers to reduce the entire scene to a single die roll or two based on preferred drama, estimated task difficulty, and some narrative metacurrency -- such details may not be important.

Even with this case, if its going to be resolved in anything but a completely arbitrary way, the question of "How likely is the dragon to be defeated?" comes up and has to be expressed some way, as is the question of whether that's predictive of a similar situation in future (i.e. does it happen only because someone has a special black arrow?).

Really, if its going to be resolved in anything but an utterly ad-hoc way, there still needs to be some kind of rules framework around it, even if its inimalist or is more about the dragon's narrative function than any physical properties.

 

[MGibster]

I hadn’t shared the excerpt about randomized combat results when you shared your story, but this is a good example of how randomization is definitely important — the most likely outcome does not always happen — but intricate rules are not the only way to introduce random outcomes.

For most of us, playing a game is simply a form of entertainment, playtime can also prepare us for the real world. Lion cubs play fighting prepares them to hunt or fight other lions. Hide & seek can teach children the necessary skills to survive when the Hill People show up. Kriegsspiel was developed to train Prussian officers in how to command military forces. I imagine an arbiter might just decide, "Nah, those jerks didn't win. Let's see how Herr Klink adapts to an unexpected loss."

 

[pemerton]

When do we want actual rules, rather than a simple understanding of the situation?

Why do RPGs have rules?

Here are the key points in the OP of that thread:

One of my kids likes to play imagination games - she and her friends all pretend to be other people (often superheroes) and do exciting and interesting things.

These clearly have a lot in common with RPGing. But they don't have rules - disagreements about what happens next are just resolved by people talking it over and reaching (or sometimes not reaching) agreement.

So why do RPGs have rules?

Some of the best answers to this question that I know come from Vincent Baker (here, here and here)

<snip>

In summary: on this account, the function of RPG rules is to help mediate and constrain the process of agreeing on the shared fiction; and not just by assigning authority ("It's your turn now to say what happens next") but by shaping what is said so that it is surprising and even unwelcome to all participants.

There are approaches to RPGing, and examples of RPG rules, that at least to me don't seem to fit with Baker's picture. That doesn't necessarily make them "bad" RPGs. It does mean that they are meant to provide a different sort of experience from what Baker has in mind.

The two examples I'm thinking of:

(1) In classic dungeon-crawling and puzzle-solving D&D, some of the rules do have the function of easing negotiation - eg rules about likelihoods of finding secret door, and rules about surprise and encounter distance, and some elements of the avoidance and evasion rules. But some of the rules really seem like they're largely disconnected from "shared imagination" except that, at the end of the rule process, they spit out an answer to "what happens next" - I'm thinking about the combat rules in particular here, which involve playing a mini-wargame to answer the question "what happens when the PCs fight the monsters". And the idea of "unwelcome" outcomes doesn't really seem applicable.

(2) In "trad", post-DL D&D, the general expectation is that the players will work through the GM's scenario or story. There are non-D&D RPGs, like CoC, that are played similarly. Some of the rules in these RPG do seem to have the function of easing negotiation - eg Perception checks or Research checks will determine when and how the GM dispenses new information to the players - but the rules don't seem to have any function of generating "unwelcome" outcomes. In adventure modules intended for this sort of play, there are often instructions to the GM about how to blunt outcomes that might be unwelcome (eg if a Perception check is failed, here's another way to provide the new information; if a NPC is killed, here's a way to introduce a new NPC to play the same role as the dead PC would have played in events that are yet to occur in play but are intended to occur as part of the scenario). I would say that an important role of mechanics in this sort of play is to generate a degree of uncertainty on the part of the players about the exact process that the GM is using to determine what happens next.


There are probably other reasons too why RPGs have rules, other things that those rules can do.

 

[500 Toads]

Some rules are also clearly intended to provide guidelines to make something a better game even where it might be flagrantly contradicted by any likely imagination or lore.

For one obvious example, in D&D 5E, your equipped and worn inventory is very, very rarely at risk of destruction even against what would logically threaten it. A meteor swarm spell damages creatures, and ignites unattended flammable items; but, it will not damage even an ordinary, non-magical wooden staff being held by somebody at the center of any of the fiery bursts, nor would it ignite a straw hat worn by a character, or a paper document in a pocket of one's clothes. If you run an adult red dragon strictly rules-as-written without adding any additional consequences, its fire breath is even more discriminating; it only affects creatures. Even unattended items are perfectly safe from it, never mind carried or worn objects. This is more than slightly silly in terms of... well, making sense in terms of how you'd expect dragonfire to work; but it makes perfect sense in terms of simplifying game play, like minimizing the need for every bit of equipment (and building materials!) to have its own stats regarding destructibility, and not making the game unplayable for anybody unwilling to use software tools to resolve and track fire damage against dozens and dozens of items along with the occasional wall in an AoE (and for players who'd dislike having spellbooks and other fragile valuables obliterated on a regular basis, too).