What are the rules for?

[Thomas Shey]

There's plenty of reason, it just may involve priorities you don't share. In particular, expecting, on the whole, an unarmed specialist to be, in a broad range of situations, to be useful as a ranged specialist isn't going to pass the sniff test even in relatively cinematic settings. You have to cook the books on situations to make that work. I'd have to do some careful filtering to find game systems that involve modern firearms where it was true.

And far as that goes, even games where wrestling/grappling can be somewhat useful, throwing often isn't the way they are, because most games don't assume most character can throw most kinds of opponents any real distance.

 

[mmadsen]

There's no reason at all that a character who invests the same amount of resources in wrestling as I do in swordfighting shouldn't be as effective in a fight as I am.

This is an odd tangent, but an unarmored wrestler should have roughly zero chance of grabbing a swordsman without being crippled or killed in the process — unless we agree that we’re playing an intentionally wildly unrealistic game.

Grappling actually becomes quite important once heavily armored knights become impervious to most weapons. Then you need a way to drive a sturdy point into a gap (with just mail), and that’s much easier with an immobile target.

 

[Thomas Shey]

This is an odd tangent, but an unarmored wrestler should have roughly zero chance of grabbing a swordsman without being crippled or killed in the process — unless we agree that we’re playing an intentionally wildly unrealistic game.

Grappling actually becomes quite important once heavily armored knights become impervious to most weapons. Then you need a way to drive a sturdy point into a gap (with just mail), and that’s much easier with an immobile target.

Well, any number of games are wildly unrealistic because they're trying to emulate certain subgenre's of action fiction and media which are, themselves pretty unrealistic. I just think assuming they'll happen to be unrealistic in a way that supports use of grappling and then throwing usefully human or larger sized opponents with any regularity outside of superheroes is a pretty big stretch (in that particular genre its actually pretty common with super-strength combatants, but nobody would describe superheroes as a genre as having more than passing contact with realism).

 

[mmadsen]

The rules are everything printed in the rulebook.

The whole point of this thread is to note how a game — a hyper-realistic simulation, by the way — evolved toward more and more “rules” (complicated game mechanics), and then made a sharp break back to very few rules, relying on an umpire’s judgment and a simple roll for contentious events.

 

[A_Carrington]

There's plenty of reason, it just may involve priorities you don't share. In particular, expecting, on the whole, an unarmed specialist to be, in a broad range of situations, to be useful as a ranged specialist isn't going to pass the sniff test even in relatively cinematic settings. You have to cook the books on situations to make that work. I'd have to do some careful filtering to find game systems that involve modern firearms where it was true.

And far as that goes, even games where wrestling/grappling can be somewhat useful, throwing often isn't the way they are, because most games don't assume most character can throw most kinds of opponents any real distance.

This is an odd tangent, but an unarmored wrestler should have roughly zero chance of grabbing a swordsman without being crippled or killed in the process — unless we agree that we’re playing an intentionally wildly unrealistic game.

Grappling actually becomes quite important once heavily armored knights become impervious to most weapons. Then you need a way to drive a sturdy point into a gap (with just mail), and that’s much easier with an immobile target.

No, none of these things are true a priori. Everything in a game is imaginary. If we decide that a wrestler with 10 ranks in Might is as effective as a swordfighter with 10 ranks in Strike, then he is.

There isn't any such thing as should. A game works however we would prefer it to.

 

[Thomas Shey]

The whole point of this thread is to note how a game — a hyper-realistic simulation, by the way — evolved toward more and more “rules” (complicated game mechanics), and then made a sharp break back to very few rules, relying on an umpire’s judgment and a simple roll for contentious events.

That just indicates the author(s) had a change in priorities.

 

[mmadsen]

No, none of these things are true a priori. Everything in a game is imaginary. If we decide that a wrestler with 10 ranks in Might is as effective as a swordfighter with 10 ranks in Strike, then he is.

There isn't any such thing as should. A game works however we would prefer it to.

There’s no point in anyone else making a game for you if everything is arbitrary and up to your personal taste, unrelated to reality or popular fiction.

Anyone producing a game for other people should base it on shared understanding of the topic, either realistic or following unrealistic but established genre conventions.

 

[Thomas Shey]

No, none of these things are true a priori. Everything in a game is imaginary. If we decide that a wrestler with 10 ranks in Might is as effective as a swordfighter with 10 ranks in Strike, then he is.

There isn't any such thing as should. A game works however we would prefer it to.

Depending on its priorities, "should" is a perfectly appropriate phrase. Game rules don't exist in a vacuum; they have purposes they're going to share, and if a quasi-realistic combat system is one of them, likely your decision to make wrestling as effective as gun or sword use is a design failure.

 

[A_Carrington]

It is objectively correct that balancing player options is better than making some player options obviously bad. If an option is strictly worse than another, than you just wasted page space and ink by printing it.

Depending on its priorities, "should" is a perfectly appropriate phrase. Game rules don't exist in a vacuum; they have purposes they're going to share, and if a quasi-realistic combat system is one of them, likely your decision to make wrestling as effective as gun or sword use is a design failure.

The purpose is fun.

Balance is fun. Telling a player their concept is naughty word and shouldn't be played, after you printed in the book, implying that it it's a perfectly valid option, is not.

Failing to balance player options is deceiving your customers, straight up. It is fraud.

 

[mmadsen]

That just indicates the author(s) had a change in priorities.

They still wanted a realistic simulation for training officers and working out military problems. What they found was that a more complicated system wasn’t necessarily more accurate, and it was, of course, much more work for no real benefit.