D&D General When does the system "work"?

[Hussar]

I think I mean "encourages" as a middle-ground between "tolerates" and "requires."

But, there is a bigger issue here.

If you are house ruling because you want to drift the game in a new direction and the mechanics are robust enough to support that, then I think you could say that the system encourages tinkering. Savage Worlds is probably a great example of this where you have a Savage version of pretty much every game under the sun and most of them work pretty well.

At the other end though, you have systems where the mechanics are not reliable. Where the players, instead of being simply encouraged to tinker with systems, are required to start reworking mechanics just to get through a session. Early RPG's are full of this sort of thing, and not just D&D. D&D just makes a very easy poster child for this sort of thing.

Encouraging tinkering does not mean rules absent.

 

[Irlo]

At the other end though, you have systems where the mechanics are not reliable. Where the players, instead of being simply encouraged to tinker with systems, are required to start reworking mechanics just to get through a session. Early RPG's are full of this sort of thing, and not just D&D. D&D just makes a very easy poster child for this sort of thing.

Agreed re: early D&D.

I'm convinced though that a game that encourages house ruling to meet the partipants desired experiences can be a valid and valuable design choice for game designers. (That is, the designers don't need to have a specific, well-defined player experience in mind to make a game that works.)

I'd never suggest that early D&D was that game!

 

[Minigiant]

At the other end though, you have systems where the mechanics are not reliable. Where the players, instead of being simply encouraged to tinker with systems, are required to start reworking mechanics just to get through a session. Early RPG's are full of this sort of thing, and not just D&D. D&D just makes a very easy poster child for this sort of thing.

A lot of people don't want to admit that in the early days, game design was so in its infancy that designers didn;t know how to make a working system. Percentages would just knida made. Bonuses were just kinda thrown out. So outcomes didn't mach expectations as designing for that wasn't really a thing yet.

Then those mechanics become sacred cows that yoke the system from matching expectation. So you still get the Halfling/Orc Strength issue because a 2 point difference in Strength still wont mean much on a d20 die roll without a bunch of complex mechanics.

 

[Malmuria]

To me, a system/rules “getting out of the way” doesn’t mean you don’t use them, just that they don’t…get in the way…of playing. A game so complex you have to always look up the rules, even when you’ve been playing for a while, or rules that are poorly written or ambiguous leading to disagreements at the table. Or a game with math that is tedious or takes a long time to do (e.g. multiple modifiers from different sources, etc).

Conversely, you can have game mechanics that are easy to remember and apply. In 5e, advantage and disadvantage would be an example. The name of the mechanic says what it us, and it’s easy to remember how to use it, as opposed to a series of situational modifiers. (5e rules get in the way in a lot of other instances though…). I think also having a system where it is easy to extrapolate what a rule would be even if you didn’t have the answer in front of you suggests that the system is easy to learn and has a least some interior consistency.

 

[Aldarc]

Exactly.

A good analogy is team sports, in which the referees/umpires are usually seen as doing a great job if nobody notices their presence and yet the game doesn't descend into mayhem.

Rules are constantly in the way in sports. Constantly. They form part of the strategies, tactics, and meta-game of play. When are the rules not a visible part of play when watching basketball, hockey, baseball, or football? Most professional players, and even most avid sports watchers, have mostly internalized the rules. This is also why Gygax imagined the GM, rather than the rules, as the referee of play. So maybe for your analogy to work more appropriately, the GM should be neither seen nor heard.

 

[Deekin]

The System works when you, as the players and the DM, actually want to engage with Rules and the System, becouse they transform the game state in new and interesting ways.

 

[Malmuria]

Rules are constantly in the way in sports. Constantly. They form part of the strategies, tactics, and meta-game of play. When are the rules not a visible part of play when watching basketball, hockey, baseball, or football? Most professional players, and even most avid sports watchers, have mostly internalized the rules. This is also why Gygax imagined the GM, rather than the rules, as the referee of play. So maybe for your analogy to work more appropriately, the GM should be neither seen nor heard.

Last postseason a NBA basketball game took 33 minutes of real time for 90 seconds of gameplay, because the refs kept reviewing each call and debating what was correct or not. IMO, it's not using the rules that is them "getting in the way," it's when the adjudication takes up so much more time than the actual playing of the game.

 

[Lanefan]

Rules are constantly in the way in sports. Constantly. They form part of the strategies, tactics, and meta-game of play. When are the rules not a visible part of play when watching basketball, hockey, baseball, or football? Most professional players, and even most avid sports watchers, have mostly internalized the rules. This is also why Gygax imagined the GM, rather than the rules, as the referee of play. So maybe for your analogy to work more appropriately, the GM should be neither seen nor heard.

In the role of referee, I agree things are working best if the GM's voice is minimal.

As player of the setting and NPCs, however, the GM should probably get a say in now and then.

 

[Hussar]

Last postseason a NBA basketball game took 33 minutes of real time for 90 seconds of gameplay, because the refs kept reviewing each call and debating what was correct or not. IMO, it's not using the rules that is them "getting in the way," it's when the adjudication takes up so much more time than the actual playing of the game.

I think that's a very good way of putting it.

Yes, I know that instant replay is a MUCH more fair an accurate way to judge sports. I know. I totally understand the rationale.

But, it does MASSIVELY slow down play. I love NFL. And, I think the instant replay rules are pretty good. But, good grief does it get awfully tedious sometimes. And, I would never want an instant replay rule in, say, my backyard game of touch football. The stakes just aren't the same.

Look at 3e's grapple rules. There's a perfect example of rules getting in the way. These were baroque rules that were not easy to adjudicate and came up infrequently enough that not many people had the rules memorized, but, often enough that it was a problem. And it would grind the game to a halt. It certainly didn't help that every monster and its mother had improved grab at higher levels.

So, roll forward to 5e. Grapple rules are now a paragraph long. Simple, clean, elegant, easy to use and intuitive. That's, I think, what people mean when they say the rules should "get out of the way". Another example would be the evolution of initiative in D&D. The rules for initiative used to take up more than a page. The ADDICT document, while it's probably longer than it really needs to be, is still EIGHT PAGES long. Now, initiative takes up what, a paragraph? And, it's a standardized die roll that you do for everything else.

Again, I think when people say that the rules should get out of the way, what they mean is they want the rules to be intuitive enough that you don't have to grind the game to a screeching halt for half an hour every time this particular bit comes up.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

So, roll forward to 5e. Grapple rules are now a paragraph long. Simple, clean, elegant, easy to use and intuitive. That's, I think, what people mean when they say the rules should "get out of the way".

Point of order: The grappling rules might be shorter, but they still suck, and require you to go to a separate rules section to figure out what the grappled condition actually does to a target. The PHB doesn't even give you a page number to go to, just "Appendix A." Best of luck!

And like in essentially every trad game, grappling in 5e doesn't feel like grappling in real life or in other kinds of narratives. You're essentially gluing the target to yourself, so you can walk them around, whereas any actual grapple should end up with both people on the ground within seconds. It's unclear in RAW how you do damage to the target you've grappled, whether they can defend against attacks from you or others, whether at the very least the grappled person's AC is temporarily lower. And worst of all (imo) you only need one free arm to grapple someone, so people are just running around doing one-armed hugs on each other that somehow incapacitate them.

I don't think 5e is uniquely terrible about grappling--basically all trad games turn PCs into combat-optimized Terminators for whom wrassling with a single enemy is usually just taking yourself out of the combat for a while, and not doing enough damage per round (if any damage at all) to justify that. And if you were to try to really carefully model how grappling and close-fighting works, it'd make already cumbersome grappling subsystems even worse. Never mind that most grapples should also probably be part of that other poorly-modeled and basically-never-attempted maneuver of tackling someone (which no PC does in RPGs, but that defines and ends most real-life fights). I think you basically have to step out of trad games for grappling to work, and be as common and attractive as it is in every narrative medium that isn't an RPG.

The one-armed grappling though...yeah that's maybe uniquely silly and deserves to be ridiculed.