Why do RPGs have rules?

[loverdrive]

It feels here like the idea of referee is not finding any purchase in your conceptual framework. So it is quite hard to explain anything further about that.

Perhaps one can say something like - Given I believe that GMs are unfair and biased, I ought not to preference GM'd modes of play that rely on fairness and impartiality. That's not an irrational position, even though I disagree with the premise.

Now I'm thinking about it, maybe fairness and bias are secondary concerns.

Expertise (or, rather, complete lack of one) is more important. Let's say I'm running a game where PCs are officers in the orc resistance, defending from the invading armies of the Iron Kingdom. They come up with a plan to harass supply convoys of the invaders to halt or at least slow down their advance.

Will it work? I have no clue! How does the Iron Kingdom protect their supply routes? Do they even have established supply routes, or every little lord handles their logistics separately? Maybe they mostly rely on marauding nearby settlements? What is their military doctrine? I don't know! And I'm not even remotely qualified to make one up, on the spot or before hand, because my understanding of medieval warfare is close to non-existent.

My judgement of this situation will boil down to "yeah, this sounds smart". I'm not qualified to test the players' skill at repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army (there are people who certainly are, but I'm not sure if 100% or even 10% of GMs are experts on medieval warfare), so the only skill being tested is their ability to please me.

Replace "repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army" with "traversing trap-riddled dungeons full of monsters", nothing of matter will change.

 

[clearstream]

Now I'm thinking about it, maybe fairness and bias are secondary concerns.

Expertise (or, rather, complete lack of one) is more important. Let's say I'm running a game where PCs are officers in the orc resistance, defending from the invading armies of the Iron Kingdom. They come up with a plan to harass supply convoys of the invaders to halt or at least slow down their advance.

Will it work? I have no clue! How does the Iron Kingdom protect their supply routes? Do they even have established supply routes, or every little lord handles their logistics separately? Maybe they mostly rely on marauding nearby settlements? What is their military doctrine? I don't know! And I'm not even remotely qualified to make one up, on the spot or before hand, because my understanding of medieval warfare is close to non-existent.

My judgement of this situation will boil down to "yeah, this sounds smart". I'm not qualified to test the players' skill at repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army (there are people who certainly are, but I'm not sure if 100% or even 10% of GMs are experts on medieval warfare), so the only skill being tested is their ability to please me.

Replace "repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army" with "traversing trap-riddled dungeons full of monsters", nothing of matter will change.

Are we still discussing the gamist concern of skill in play? On surface, the expertise demanded is expertise in game system.

(I know of complexities to that, but it seems like a safe place to start.)

 

[AnotherGuy]

Now I'm thinking about it, maybe fairness and bias are secondary concerns.

Expertise (or, rather, complete lack of one) is more important. Let's say I'm running a game where PCs are officers in the orc resistance, defending from the invading armies of the Iron Kingdom. They come up with a plan to harass supply convoys of the invaders to halt or at least slow down their advance.

Will it work? I have no clue! How does the Iron Kingdom protect their supply routes? Do they even have established supply routes, or every little lord handles their logistics separately? Maybe they mostly rely on marauding nearby settlements? What is their military doctrine? I don't know! And I'm not even remotely qualified to make one up, on the spot or before hand, because my understanding of medieval warfare is close to non-existent.

My judgement of this situation will boil down to "yeah, this sounds smart". I'm not qualified to test the players' skill at repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army (there are people who certainly are, but I'm not sure if 100% or even 10% of GMs are experts on medieval warfare), so the only skill being tested is their ability to please me.

Replace "repelling imaginary vaguely medieval army" with "traversing trap-riddled dungeons full of monsters", nothing of matter will change.

But how is this different in a Story Now game. The players certainly don't have experience in medieval warfare.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

That's interesting, because on surface you are allowing a metagame concern (player knowledge from other campaigns) (A) to influence your world building assumptions (that characters in this world know something about trolls, and that trolls in this world might fit that knowledge.)

One way to see that is as a pragmatic compromise, rather than necessarily ideal. Another way is to just note that players are going to come into the game world with all kinds of assumptions that - ordinarily - are just going to stand. Things fall down, for example. It's a game. The simulationist isn't looking to build a universe from first principles.

I don't think I am doing (A) at all.

The characters might have beliefs about trolls. Those beliefs might or might not be accurate. Even if they are accurate, they might or might not be accurate for the right reasons. Just because a character decides to burn a troll with fire doesn't necessarily mean he's ever met an expert on trolls. He might just have a crazy grandmother who loved to make up wild stories about how setting trolls on fire tricks their ghosts into possessing your shadow instead of possessing your body. I can avoid having an opinion on why a character does something until such time as the player tells me.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Thanks, I didn't see it earlier. With the limits of the transcript, it reads that you employed an internal model in which "unnatural spiritual activity caused the rain to get heavier" and that imagined cause yielded "a bolt of lightning struck the house."

Good lord, thousands of fine engineers are rolling in their graves...

This could be disingenous, because of the infinite possible interesting and exciting things, you oddly chose one that fit a chain of imagined causality.

EXACTLY!!!!!!!!! This is precisely how I see all of this posturing about models and simulation. It's all just a huge disingenuous smoke screen, a way to attempt to wrap "the GM does whatever suits their actual agenda" and cloak it in a wrapper of 'objectivity'.

 

[loverdrive]

Are we still discussing the gamist concern of skill in play? The expertise demanded is expertise in game system.

...it started with OSR, which heavily prides itself on players coming up with creative solutions to problems.

Like, things covered by a combat mini-game are only a small part of the gamist concerns. If it was the entirety of the appeal, they would be playing wargames, not RPGs.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Hi. Nice post, I'm ruminating on it.

I share your feelings and satisfaction when "it" happens at my table as well. I doubt that no strings were pulled, however delicate the pinch might have been.
(Snip)

I dunno, maybe?

I mean, the proximate cause to my post was thinking about a player's reaction during an intro scenario I ran yesterday to teach him the basics of DFRPG combat. He had knocked down a zombie and broken its arm, and managed to just barely hit it in the head (needed 8 or less on 3d6 and rolled an 8).

Me: 8 just barely succeeds at 15-7, and he can't defend, so roll damage.

Him: 12

Me: His skull (DR 2) absorbs 2 points of damage, and Mr. Whoosit takes 40 points of injury.

Your morningstar slams into his head and turns it into mush. He collapses, inert once more.

Him: Holy Moly.

I was thinking about how good that reaction made me feel for some reason, and how if he'd rolled slightly different things would have gone differently, and that post came out of that thinking.

You're right that I definitely made decisions that affected that outcome, such as earlier deciding to All Out Attack (Determined) for the dual purpose of introducing him to the concept of All Out Attack and mitigating the zombie's penalty for attacking after being knocked prone (and the zombie's defenses while prone stink anyway, so giving them up doesn't hurt much). If you looked hard enough for a reason to think I "pulled strings" you could probably convince yourself that I did. But I didn't feel like I did, and that made me feel really good when he had a genuine emotional reaction to what happened.

 

[loverdrive]

But how is this different in a Story Now game. The players certainly don't have experience in medieval warfare.

The difference is that in a Story Now game no one pretends like there's anything more than "this sounds cool!" to GM's decision making and everybody understands that the actions the characters take are only vaguely correlated with whether they succeed or not.

The goal of the process is to have story authored right now of desperate defence of orcish motherland, not to test players' skill at overcoming challenges.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm still not understanding this line of thinking... If I have a square room with 4 MM goblins... and I have two different players try to defeat said goblins in combat as a test of skill... How is this biased? How does it not determine skill in the rules of D&D?

EDIT: Even if I add terrain or traps or a locked door as long as I as DM am consistent with DC's and stats how is this biased?

But that is blorb-style play, which @loverdrive has said sounds interesting and might enable skilled play. She just hasn't ever played that way (yet), where the GMs don't allow themselves to add more goblins/etc. if they feel like it.

 

[Maxperson]

The idea that player skill at playing the game is a major factor determining success in a game with a participant with unlimited power who ultimately decides whether the player is successful or not, sounds, at the very best, dubious to me.

That's because you can't seem to wrap your head around the fact that the traditional game just isn't run that way. As long as you continue to misunderstand and misportray the playstyle, you will continue to believe that it isn't possible or is very unlikely.