Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

I am disagreeing. To me, the metagame agenda of fairness is orthogonal to simulation. Not necessarily in opposition to it though. After all, the campaign has to start somewhere.

So it can be simulationist if there's a metagame agenda of "fairness"?

@pemerton is reading more into what I said than was there. When you are wandering the setting, there will be easy encounters, medium encounters, hard encounters and some that are just plain out of reach. The party will encounter all of those, but it is still a game so you aren't going to throw a bunch of unwinnable encounters at the group. The vast majority will be in the easy to hard range, which the party is capable of handling. It's perfectly realistic to hit the group with fair encounters and simulates encounters in the world quite well. They are just not going to be all of the encounters, just the vast majority.

What is this simulating? Where do these "encounters" come from, in the world?

And in D&D, why does the world keep track of the PCs' level(s)?

 

[pemerton]

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.

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

Well, in the games I'm familiar with, there are rules for establishing whether or not the players' plan works that don't require the GM to work out whether or not it works (and thus which don't require the players to persuade (or "please", in @loverdrive's more cynical lexicon) the GM).

In 4e, for instance, this can be resolved as a skill challenge.

Or in Dungeon World, the player say what their PCs do, and the GM makes soft moves in reply, until the players declare an action that triggers a player-side move, at which point that action is resolved. While the GM is making soft moves, all they have to do is think of plausible things that don't foreclose whatever it is that the players are having their PCs work towards (because only a hard move generates irrevocable consequences).

More generally, there are resolution structures for constraining what the GM says happens next, which don't depend solely on the GM making a decision about whether or not things will work a certain way. (The word solely is important here. Of course the GM is going to narrate things that, in the fiction, follow from what has already happened, unless like Toon or Over the Edge a type of absurdism or surrealism is intended.)

 

[Imaro]

Another point of confusion for me... Are agendas ways/styles to play games or are they design goals for games... or does this depend on the specific model/theory?

 

[pemerton]

Where I land on things (which was the player's point-of-view I rendered), is that the GM was wrong on both game engine integrity grounds and, if you're going to point to internal causality, there is a very strong case to be made that "there is no such thing as mindless for things that must be possessed of sufficient goal-directedness and sensory receptors that allow them to move, perceive, and interact with their environment in the way that zombies do." Therefore, a GM adding the charm tag to the Defender suite of mechanics would be (a) an example of the last part of your prior post; GMs making game engine adjustments to resolve edge cases that bring about, their sense of, Sim-incompatible fictional results.

<snip>

I agree that Purist-for-System Simluationism of Traveller, Rolemaster, and Runequest doesn't fundamentally require Illusionism. Skillful, disciplined GMs can absolutely run those games and let the gameplay machinery see where they go + adjudicate edge cases.

<snip>

Then you have the added pressure of resolving those idiosyncratic game engine moments where there might be disagreements over how internal causality and extrapolation should inform adjudication. That might not be Force...but it might feel like Force to a player (because they disagree or don't understand the extrapolation that governed the adjudicative process).

When it comes to edge cases - the ad hoc rejigging I mentioned upthread - I think this has to be a table matter, although at least in my experience the GM is the chair of the committee.

It has to be a transparent discussion about what is going on, whether and how the simulation is breaking, and what to do about it.

It can't be the sort of ad hoc in-the-course-of-resolution thing that you describe in your post with the mindless zombies.

Again in my experience, one thing that can make the play of a game like RM quite slow is that the need to convene the committee and have a discussion about how to handle some aspect of resolution comes up quite often!

Because dynamism (I'm talking about play taking dynamic shape which can change aggressively and be shaped aggressively by players) isn't coming from the game engine-at-large (thinking of Torchbearer or D&D 4e or AW etc) nor various techniques for GM Consequence/Twist handling/Fail Forward, that puts a significant amount of pressure on GM situation framing and scenario design. That kind of pressure can absolutely lead to either (a) Illusionism to infuse play with dynamism or (b) falling back on using a Purist-for-System engine for Gamist scenariors and imperatives.

<snip>

Illusionism or Gamism masquerading as Purist-for-System Sim or stale games lacking dynamism or burn-out or the sort of calamitous in-situ disagreements over edge case internal causality/extrapolation-based handling (like the conversation I envisioned for "3.x-ifying 4e" above) were the rule...not the exception.

Running and playing those games well while producing dynamic, exciting experiences and little to no "feels bad" moments might be the most difficult ask in all of TTRPGing.

The point about pressures is right. And the risk of collapse into illusionism - because in RM at least the mechanics mostly handle "local" processes, the GM can use authority over more "global"/strategic backstory to manipulate things. It's a problem. (Classic Traveller is a bit different here, with its world-gen, trading, etc rules.)

Whether it's the hardest gig of all I don't know. In my RM play, there was always a tendency that these days I would label "vanilla narrativism".

 

[hawkeyefan]

If you asked yourself - would it be exciting to have a dragon here - then that's not it. If you asked - would it be challenging to have a dragon here - that's also not it. If you asked - why in the world would there be a dragon here - that's it. If you followed up with - and what will be the consequences of that - you're really there.

But if I'm the person who created the "there" and also created the "dragon" then of course I can decide that a dragon would be there.

In this case, it appears that I am simulating my imagination.

This could arguably constitute "Think Off-Screen" in Dungeon World terms. Players can certainly, for example, encounter a town where I dragon had attacked recently. The players weren't involved in that, but it could be part of the situational framing for the PCs' call-to-action.

Oh, absolutely! Having evidence of things happening beyond the PCs immediate area is a way to help portray the world in a way that feels more real. I just don't think it needs to involve simulation. You can just make up stuff. Which sounds like what would be happening with mention of a random lightning strike or two, and many other examples that have been offered as simulation.

This kind of thing comes up all the time in campaigns. If you are trying to make a model of a campaign world that tracks all lightning strikes, that is obviously an extreme. But people have random weather tables, random global and regional event tables or simply decide what’s going on where (including seemingly minor details like a location the players aren’t at being struck by some kind of natural disaster). You can put as much or as little effort into it you want. The idea is generally to keep the world from feeling like things only happen when the players arrive. We have debated the terms s lot here so not really interested in arguing over the terminology itself but this is the sort of thing living world or world in motion refers to

That said like anything it can be taken to a ridiculous level. Most games have kind of balance, where stuff happens around the PCs do the hand stays interesting but acknowledges things are going on elsewhere too. But I do know GMs who are on the far end of world emulation.

I think your mention of tables is a key element here. I feel like that is what helps maintain some kind of simulation that doesn't just devolve into the GM deciding things. So if you have a weather table, and the results on the table have taken into account the kinds of weather possible for the time of year and location, and then you roll on the table, that to me seems far more like simulation than simply deciding on one of those results.

When I think of simulation, I think of the outcome of the simulation being beyond control. That's usually the point of a simulation... to see how things turn out. Simply deciding the outcome seems contrary to the idea of simulation, in that sense.

This is why I'm struggling to accept a GM deciding the outcome as an example of simulation.

I think that this then leads us to deciding the method of determination. How we decide what's on the tables and similar concerns.

Agreed. I feel there is a conversation worth having about how each thread can be woven together. When might I pivot into narrativism to drive a rising tension focused on the inner world of characters? Where could gamist challenges elevate that for the group? How might it feel plausible on account of how things are and must fall out? Along every dimension, I can be intentional and I can play to find out.

In your example, you made a decision to prioritise story for one facet of play. I wouldn't make that particular compromise, but I don't feel doing so forces you to prioritise story for every facet of your play. You could, but then you wouldn't have any questions to ask of simulation.

I feel like these things must be considered. If you don't think about game concerns or dramatic concerns, then play is likely to suffer for a variety of reasons. Like, if a first level party wanders into the lair of some truly dangerous monster like a great wyrm or something similar... this thing can stomp them out easily, no matter what they do. Do we just have it do so? Do we have it speak to them instead? Does it consider them below its notice? Do we signal its presence in some way so maybe they avoid it?

If "what would the dragon do" isn't tempered at all by these considerations, then it incinerates them and play ends.

Same thing with a group of 18th level characters who wander into the kobold den. Is this common in simulation play? Something tells me it's not. And the reason MUST be dramatic or gamist concerns.

I feel like if these are removed entirely, then the GM is just deciding how everything goes without any consideration for the satisfaction of the players. This is likely my biggest gripe with simulation...it's utterly indifferent to the quality of the experience for the participants. Where as the players' experience is essential to gamism and narrativism.

 

[pemerton]

Okay, you and @AbdulAlhazred seem to have (slightly??) different takes on what No Myth entails and I've seen plenty of proponents on these very boards, some liking your post, claim that you are not supposed to have things pre-made. But given that your premise above is correct, how is this enforced by the game and how can the players be sure it is not being subverted by the GM without their knowledge.

This seems to me to come back to a fundamental point about action resolution.

"No myth" play, as @loverdrive says, is compatible with thinking of things in advance.

What "no myth" play excludes is using that stuff that was thought of in advance as a basis for deciding, in advance, how things go in the fiction independent of the action resolution mechanics.

Now, this point has implications. If the action resolution mechanics can't be applied except by reference to stuff that has been thought of in advance, then the RPG in question will not work well for no-myth play.

The most obvious case I can think of that raises this issue is the resolution of interaction with NPCs. If there is no social resolution system (eg the Classic Traveller reaction table), and the GM is expected to resolve how NPCs respond to the PCs by reference to their already-known personalities etc, then no myth probably can't work.

That said, another distinction is relevant here: between framing, and secret backstory. The following could be an example of no myth: the GM narrates the NPC saying "I don't really want to <do such-and-such>, but I would love for you to give me <this thing>". That's framing, and the player can respond to that: just as if the GM frames a scene involving a pit and a wall beyond it, and the player responds with some action declaration involving a rope, grapple and acrobatics.

On the other hand, this is not an example of no myth: the GM makes a note to themself that NPC really doesn't want to <do such-and-such, but would love to be given <this thing>. And now the success or failure of the players' action declarations is adjudicated by reference to this secret backstory.

In passing, this also shows that nothing about "no myth" play precludes what has been described in this thread as "simulationist" reasoning. All it does is put additional limits on what the GM can extrapolate, and how they present that to the players.

Here's an example... A manor is established in play that is owned by a benevolent mayor who really has his town's best interests at heart. The players are invited to the manor as acting diplomats for the town to discuss the rising tensions in the political state with a group of representatives from a secondary village to the north. There is a feast, introductions and the true negotiations are declared to start tomorrow. The players are all ready for a game of political intrigue, negotiation and closed door deals... I however as GM want to run a dungeon crawl I wrote up last night full of ghouls, undead and body horror. So I have decided that under the manor is a dungeon secretly built by his son (a secret cultist) who, when the players sleep at the house for the night, drugs them and dumps them into the ghoul-infested, haunted catacombs full of body-mutatring fungi. Now going strictly by what you said this doesn't violate No-Myth.

This is clearly not a no-myth game. You have all this secret backstory, and you are making hard moves by reference to it, bypassing any action resolution framework.

 

[Maxperson]

What is this simulating? Where do these "encounters" come from, in the world?

And in D&D, why does the world keep track of the PCs' level(s)?

It simulates the nature of monsters in a fantasy world.

I spoke hastily when I said easy to hard, forgetting that 5e rates monsters in the same ranges. I was speaking of the nature of the encounters, rather than mechanical fighting difficulty. The vast majority of monsters PCs encounter will be easy to beat, a challenge or hard to beat. The PCs being exceptional in the world will not find many that are impossible for them, because if there were that many super powerful monsters wandering around, the PC races of the world would have been overrun and wiped out eons ago by the hordes of super powerful monsters that would be able to wipe out towns and cities.

The world doesn't care about PCs level at all. It just can't be full of monsters so powerful that the PCs would die if they ran into them on even a semi-regular basis.

 

[pemerton]

This kind of thing comes up all the time in campaigns. If you are trying to make a model of a campaign world that tracks all lightning strikes, that is obviously an extreme. But people have random weather tables, random global and regional event tables or simply decide what’s going on where (including seemingly minor details like a location the players aren’t at being struck by some kind of natural disaster). You can put as much or as little effort into it you want. The idea is generally to keep the world from feeling like things only happen when the players arrive.

Can we talk concretely about processes here?

I mean, I used a random weather table to determine that it was raining - that's how Torchbearer works.

But having made a decision about a lightning strike, if I want to make that a simulationist decision does that mean that I have to, in the future, narrate other lightning strikes, and how they do or don't affect houses? (That seems like one implication of what you're saying, but it's weird because it means we can't know if my play is simulationist until more play has happened.)

 

[pemerton]

When might I pivot into narrativism to drive a rising tension focused on the inner world of characters?

Is "narrativism" here meant to have the meaning Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker et al give it? In that case, it's a shared goal for pay revealed over the course of one or more sessions. It's not a GM technique that one pivots into.

If you're meaning something else, are you able to say what that is?

 

[Bedrockgames]

Can we talk concretely about processes here?

We can but people use lots of different processes for this. It is more about the goal than the individual process (it can be anything from tables, to deciding all regional weather and political events on a calendar in advance, to the GM having some unique rolling method, to fiat).

I mean, I used a random weather table to determine that it was raining - that's how Torchbearer works.

But having made a decision about a lightning strike, if I want to make that a simulationist decision does that mean that I have to, in the future, narrate other lightning strikes, and how they do or don't affect houses? (That seems like one implication of what you're saying, but it's weird because it means we can't know if my play is simulationist until more play has happened.)

I think we probably have a different view on what simulation means. And I am not advocating for a simulationist mode of play. I am just saying some people want a sense of a world, a sense of a concrete place, people in these threads sometimes call that simulation. I don't think wanting that means you have to always have to do things the same int eh future for perpetuity. The goal here isn't to create a literal model of an actual world that stands up to measurement. It is to create a sense of a world that exists outside the players and you can commit as fully or not fully to that as you want (maybe one day you want to simply highlight that lightning occurs in other places so you roll on a chart to see and let the players find out about it, or maybe you get obsessed with what lightning is hitting in the world and you are constantly charting it).