Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

Ok, this is feeling like a regression. I don't know how your first sentence above is responsive to how I've defined procedures. I'm feeling like clarity and understanding is actively decaying with the deconstruction and struggling communication we're undertaking here. I'm going to take this moment to do something I really don't have any interest in doing, but maybe it will help...something. I'm going to define rules, procedures (again), mechanics (again) and give screenshots of examples.

RULES: The entire corpus of language and ephemera that substantively informs and directs play. These include agenda, principles, best practices (or "meta"), authority distribution, all procedures, all mechanics, and possibly some ephemera (like maps, handouts, possibly some illustrations, etc). Taken together, you have "system" or "game engine."

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PROCEDURES: A formal sequence of actions undertaken in order to derive a distinct play experience and output novel to that procedure. Any given component part of the sequence typically (though sometimes a step may just be color, whether structured or freeform) entails referencing features/relationships of the play space/gamestate and/or invoking and resolving a mechanic.

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MECHANICS: A function of system that resolves or facilitates the transition from one distinct gamestate to another. This might be one part of a full combat procedure; a single roll of a dice + modifier to signal combat and dictate turn order like D&D initiative. This might be a discrete mechanic that interacts (could be amplifies...could be mitigates...could be triggers...could be resolves...etc) with another discrete mechanic like Acting Outside of Your Nature (mechanic) in Tochbearer to gain a large dice pool at the risk of taxing your Nature if you fail the Test (another mechanic; the Test). This might be a nested mechanic within a larger mechanical framework (typically conflict resolution) like the pulling of a block of a Jenga Tower in Dread to coincide with action taken in the fiction, the act of which either increases tension or triggers calamity.

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Whether anyone agrees or not, hopefully that makes my position on these matters clear. I'm probably done with this part of the conversation as I feel like this is already well-trodden ground that doesn't need to be examined or deconstructed. This is the basic substrate of all TTRPGs.

It's helpful to see what your concept of rules is. To me, when I look at even one part of that - the TB2 camp phases or the Dread rules, say - I can count at least a score of rules collectively making up those mechanics and procedures. That is what I used the word "atomic" to get at. One rule. Not procedures comprising series or collections of rules. Not a mechanic afforded by compound rules. At least we are clear on that now!

 

[clearstream]

This doesn't strike me as correct. Hit points are a mechanic, but they are not 'invoked' by anyone. They simply serve as a mechanical part of the game, an objectively recorded concrete fact asserted in the real world about the state of the game, separate from the fiction. Rules can be triggered by changes in hit points (IE character death) and rules can specify as part of their execution a manipulation of hit points (IE you are hit by an attack, you take damage). Baker locates these elements at layer 2 in his onion, along with core rules which presumably depend on them, like harm, basic moves like Hack & Slash, etc.

I would agree with the notion that mechanics are 'means', they serve the purpose of assisting in achieving the agenda of play, but they are generally intermediaries. I mean, maybe your description and mine are partly at variance for semantic reasons too, some people would call moves a 'mechanism', but here I don't use the term in that way.

I agree with your point about hit points. Sicarts version does seem too narrow, maybe due to as @Manbearcat observed sub-domain assumptions. I would definitely count moves as mechanics. They're largely compound rules (i.e. moves can be deconstructed into a set of rules.)

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think I would not be saying that all cars are identical just because I want to take a close look at how spark plugs work even if all cars have spark plugs. However, if all cars have spark plugs, it seems to me a good idea to get clear on how they work. Just to squash my own analogy, I think rules are more fundamental to games than spark plugs are to cars.

I'm not so sure. Having designed a few games and interacted with some game design people, including some university faculty in that field, my observation is that successful games are a lot like successful businesses. They are established and built upon a CONCEPTUAL framework that is oriented towards WHAT, and then perhaps secondarily a particular HOW. That is, and here I'm making an educated guess, Monopoly was designed around the core concept of building up and developing assets in a competitive milieu of limited funding and uncertain but calculable cost/benefit ratios. Yes, the author undoubtedly also had details in mind, like the board representing Atlantic City and such from the start, but that's secondary to the core idea of buying property, development, and (mis)fortune all interacting.

Likewise IME of creating businesses: Its not actually the individual technical ideas that generally have all that much weight in terms of convincing people to fund you and whatnot. Its all about your ability to orient your activities in the direction of achieving the fundamental goals, and ability to analyze your assumptions, assets, and strategy with that in mind. This is what I saw instantly in terms of 4e as a game, the authors clearly were able to look at every element purely in the light of "this is a game, how do we make it work well" as opposed to being mired in some bog of preconceived notions and artificial constraints about how it 'must work'. I see the same thing in PbtA and FitD game design. I don't see it so much with 5e, although I do think there's a good deal of pragmatism at work in how it is designed. It's just that most of that involves "what can we get our existing customer base to accept?" rather than what really makes an excellent game in and of itself.

 

[pemerton]

Would you agree that there is a necessary matching to be done? Someone has to say that this description matches to this rule. SFAIK that's not possible to automate in TTRPG except in artificially narrow cases

Your focus on this problem is putting the cart before the horse. Or to use a different less metaphorical description, is mistaking a prominent part of one RPG - a certain sort of approach to D&D, and similar games - for a crucial part of all RPGing.

The first question is: what is the procedure for determining what happens next?

In a RPG, the answer to this will consist in an allocation of "ownership" over bits of the fiction, and some statements of rules about who can say what about things they own. (Eg a player can say what their PC looks like - but perhaps only after rolling on the random appearance table, and establishing some constraints around those permissions!)

Then we can say that, sometimes, when someone says something that requires a specialised procedure to be used to allocate the subsequent permissions. Only at this point does your "matching" problem arise. And there are many ways of solving it. John Harper, in the Agon 2nd ed rules, explains in half a page that, and how, the player gets to do most of this. Luke Crane, in the Adventure Burner (reprinted in the Codex), spends more than half a page explaining how a Burning Wheel GM does this, taking input from the player so that the framing reflects a shared conception of the fiction.

The result is that the play experiences of Agon and of BW are quite different. But both are apt to produce agreement on both fiction and process: in the case of Agon because the party with the interest also has the authority (and so unless they act irrationally, will be happy with how things work out); and in the case of BW because back-and-forth negotiation is fundamental to the procedure.

D&D (and similar games), at least as commonly played, is rather distinctive in purporting to solve the "matching" problem by way of an allocation of authority to someone other than the participant with the interest: that is, it is the player who has the interest in how things are "matched" (eg they want their declared action to be considered an "Acrobatic" one, because their PC has high DEX) but it is the GM who is given the job of matching. One ostensible reason for this is to maintain immersion - the player never needs to think about the rules. Another is to preserve the challenge - the player doesn't get to always "match" in their favour (Agon has a different way of handling this, by rationing players' resources). In order to avoid the evident risk of conflict of interest, the GM is urged to be "fair" and "impartial" but it is far from clear what this means outside some rather narrow class of cases. (Hence @loverdrive's doubts, upthread, about whether there can be skilled play in D&D.)

So anyway, as this post shows I think it's quite straightforward to explain why the "matching" problem is a big deal in a certain sort of D&D play (and in similar RPGs) because of particular rules and the particular processes they mandate. But this is all a downstream phenomenon, which results from relying on authority in a voluntary activity. It's not any sort of primordial problem.

 

[clearstream]

This is simply not correct.

Baker is not asking what RPG rules can be used for. He is aware, for instance, that rules can have some sort of representational relationship to elements in the game world:

Mechanics might model the stuff of the game world, that's another topic, but they don't exist to do so. They exist to ease and constrain real-world social negotiation between the players at the table.​

His assertion is that this is not something that rules have to do. And, in saying that the sole reason to have rules is to introduce the unwanted and unexpected, he is making an aesthetic judgement. As he says, using rules for other things is a waste of time.

This is also connected to the imperative to purist-for-system RPGs: the reason for using tables isn't just to model, but to model "impartially", which is to say - to get results that no one would choose, or can be relied upon to choose.

Conversely, his assertion is that if the things your rule tell you to say are things you'd say anyway, then you're better off doing away with the rules and just saying those things!

These claims about what is useful, what sensible and so on are conclusions of arguments about what is valuable in RPGing. Rebutting them requires setting out some account of why other things might be valuable. I make a couple of suggestions in the OP.

You've not said anything concrete about what happens when a rule is followed, either in general or in RPGing. Your various schemas do not ever refer abstractly to actual humans actually performing the task of creating, sustaining and developing a shared fiction

Innumerable accounts have been given in this thread. My word "shaping" lives in the same functional and explanatory space as Baker's "constrain": I chose "shaping" rather than "constrain" because there is a reading of "constrain" that is negative and so doesn't sufficiently capture the "enabling" or "permissive" character that a rule can have.

Here's an example of how a rule can shape what is said about what happens next: If the players look to you to see what happens next, make a soft move. This is not a point about the abstract nature of rules in general: rules shape what is said about the fiction in virtue of their content, the actual permissions they confer and prohibitions that they impose. All the content that constitutes participant roles, and governs what participants do, which is missing from your purely abstract and formal schemas.

I don't even know what this means. What statement of the process in AW could be more clear than what I've said, or what Baker has said in the rulebook?

If you want to serve a different purpose with your rules, then you will need rules with different content from the AW ones. For instance, if the purpose is "Make the players feel immersed in a setting narrated to them by the GM, but not compelled to action", you would probably suggest different rules from the AW ones. Because one obvious purpose of making a soft move in AW is to compel the players to action! You would probably have rules that tell the GM to narrate colour, to make extremely soft moves that barely hint at conflict, to make certain sorts of hard moves even if an opportunity has not been offered on a platter, etc.

I don't know what this means. What is a "pre-existing norm"? I think you mean a belief (but whose?) about what is likely to (or what must?) happen next in the fiction - but I'm not sure of that. What sort of lapses are you referring to? On whose part?

When you say the OP does not call attention to the possibility of a lack of a norm, do you mean the OP doesn't mention that someone (the GM? some or other player? all of the participants?) don't have a predisposition as to what happens next? I think the OP focuses precisely on that: because it talks about the introduction of the unwelcome and the unwanted!

If you mean something else, I do not know what that is.

In the context of RPGing, this is the Lumpley principle - that is to say, it bears Vincent Baker's name. So I think it's fair to say that he noticed it, 20-odd years ago.

I don't know what any of this means. For instance, what is the difference between a "design strategy" and an "organisational strategy" - organisations are often designed! The AW rulebook contains rules for organising the conversation, and the resulting process of creating, sustaining and developing a shared fiction.

I already explained why Schauer's problem is basically irrelevant to a voluntary activity. Suits sees this. So does Baker - hence why he notes that distributions of authority ought not to be the main focus of RPG design.

This all makes it apparent that what you think I am saying, and what I am saying, are somewhat at odds. I am aiming to look closely at individual rules. Not procedures or mechanics made up of rules. I am not trying to say how rules ought to be deployed, I'm aiming to say what they are.

To give a sense of these differences in perspective, to my reading the LP is not a statement of how rules are agreed to. "System is the means by which people agree about what happens in play" says what consequence rules can go on to have given they are agreed to. What happens if people don't agree with system? It can hardly then go on to be the means by which they agree about what happens in play!

My slogan "agreement to a rule is never located in the rule" is not about whether rules lead to agreement in play. I find Suits' insights valuable in part because he grasps hold of the question of why game rules are agreed to. Agreement is located in the prelusory goals and lusory attitude, not in the rules.

The comments by Schauer I refer to are from his book on Rules, and the extent of my interest is what he sees as their essential structure and his outline of the problem of over-or-under-inclusiveness.

It seems to me that our wildly at-variance concerns drive some misunderstandings. Thus it feels most profitable at this stage to read back over what you have said, do some reflection, and read more on other viewpoints, before saying anything further.

In the above I don't mean to say that I have the right or best grasp of anything, but principally to point out that your and my concerns are very different. Mine are ontological, as I said. What are rules?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Yes. Other ways I have seen it put is as propositions and factual predicates. I was thinking of language such as "player describes what their character does." I'm not wedded to the particular word.


So by your lights, there can be a procedure containing just one rule. Why call that a procedure exactly? Isn't rule clearer?


I'm cautious of mapping computer game design philosophies onto TTRPGs. However, TTRPG mechanics are normally easily deconstructed into multiple rules. Can you say what problem you see with understanding a mechanic as a compound rule? Or supposing we take mechanic and rule to be synonyms, what do you propose for compound rules that collectively fabricate methods?


Well, as I have repeatedly said that I don't think we should say mechanics when we mean rules, this would be a problem for those saying mechanics Which is to say, in defining mechanics as compound rules, I am reserving for myself the resources needed to cover all those other things.


It's kind of an open question whether there can be any sort of general game studies or whether classes of games such as TTRPGs can really only be studied as separate domains. But anyway, almost all of the literature identifies rules as basic to games, so I feel on safe ground to want to examine them in detail.

I'm not really that hung up on terms, and it might even be too reductionist to go to atomic rules (assuming too, that it's even possible.) I've made the possible (but I think pretty much unavoidable) mistake of embedding my definition of what a rule is into what looks like a procedure for using the rule. Making quite reasonable the sort of resistance you raise.

Strictly, an RPG rule as I define it is a supersession or extension of a norm, that is a rule fills in for a norm wherever one would serve. A para-norm, if you will.* One can agree or disagree with that (I see plenty of issues myself) but all this other criticism feels to me a bit off-track. I'm most interested in the question of whether that definition of a rule does enough work? And on the work such a definition seems to presuppose norms are doing for TTRPG. Perhaps what a norm does is something quite functional... as I think I've implied.


[*Rules are paranormal. You read it here first!]

Overall this is again where I think your analysis is fraught. Process is more basic and core than rules. I agree that rules are then instantiated, and I'll agree that mechanics are instantiated by constitutive rules, which regulate the underlying process and help to suit it to the agenda of the participants. But it is best to understand the principles/agenda and fundamental (I would almost say universal for TTRPG play) core process FIRST. So I think a focus on process as a construct of rules, while it may provide some kind of structuralist understanding of how most games are actually written, is not all that helpful in understanding them at a fundamental level. Baker, Edwards, Lumpley, et al seem to have done that and it produced really excellent results.

I understand that people who are not that enamored of narrativist/SN/ZM kind of play are chapped by that because, frankly, they didn't spend nearly as much energy on actually figuring out how to build those other sorts of games (Edwards has a bunch to say, though there are mixed opinions as to the utility of his observations). Given that nobody went through that analysis and built a pure HCS or PFS (or whatever category you like) sort of game means there's a bunch left unexplored there! I think that would be a rich gold mine for further design work.

Finally I also follow Baker and Edwards in believing that "the proof is in the pudding" and all the ink in the universe can be spilled, but you need to actually do the gaming and the game designing to gain real insight.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This is not the most interesting feature of AW. Working out whether or not a player-side move has been triggered; or working out whether or not everyone is looking at the GM to see what happens next, hence requiring the GM to make a soft move, are not major problems in play.

They are certainly not illustrations of a game in which the GM is permitted to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next.

You know you can't speak for anyone beyond yourself as to how "Interesting" a feature of a game may or may not be.

And those issues were a major problem in play for my group when we played both AW and MotW. Someone would pick an action from the list on their Playbook (not because they had to, but because there's a clear list of delineated actions with fancy names in front of every player), and the GM would mechanically respond as appropriate. We also did this because if we didn't, there would immediately be a scramble-discussion as to what "move" the player was trying to make. Someone would inevitably try an action that didn't fit into a move in their estimation, but still required adjudication, leaving the GM scrambling to keep up. As clear as the rules in these games may be, they can still be very confusing for folks.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

What is an "atomic function" in this context? What does a rule look like? What is a description?

You use these words and phrases as if they have precise, technical meanings. But to me they are serving more to obscure than to make clear.

I didn't say anything about "matching descriptions to rules". To repeat, I attributed to you the view that in D&D, the GM gets to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next. @Manbearcat has elaborated on the point in his post not far upthread.

For instance, when D&D is played in this fashion, the GM gets to decide whether to call for a dice roll or check; whether to narrate what happens next by reference to their notes; whether to narrate what happens next by extrapolating from their notes; even whether to narrate what happens next by giving voice to their sense of what would best fit, regardless of notes!

None of that is about "matching descriptions to rules". It's about actual processes whereby the shared fiction is established.

A procedure is a way of doing something, of brining something about.

A rule is a normative standard for conduct. A rule can mandate a procedure (eg "When combat starts, roll initiative"). A rule can forbid a procedure (eg "When we're playing a module, you're forbidden from peeking at the maps").

Nothing meaningful can be said about how RPGing works without discussing the procedures of play - that is to say, the actual methods that actual people use to creates, sustain and develop a shared fiction. The question asked in the OP is What do rules contribute to this endeavour? One contribution they make is to mandate some procedures, and forbid others.

Mechanics, as per my post upthread, is generally used to refer to a particular sort of procedure, that involves reference to what Baker calls a "cue" - ie rolling dice, making a list, adjusting a tally, writing down a blind declaration, etc.

All game mechanics are, or figure in, procedures of play. But not all procedures of play involve mechanics.

For instance, when the AW rulebook tells the GM to make a soft move if everyone looks to them to see what happens, that is a rule mandating a procedure - ie the GM is to say a particular sort of thing - but the procedure does not involve a mechanic.

This is not the most interesting feature of AW. Working out whether or not a player-side move has been triggered; or working out whether or not everyone is looking at the GM to see what happens next, hence requiring the GM to make a soft move, are not major problems in play.

They are certainly not illustrations of a game in which the GM is permitted to say what procedure will be used to work out what happens next.

Putting on my engineer hat for a moment, I am not blind to what @clearstream is saying in this sense. When we software guys implement something, we have certain tools at our disposal (I mean in a loose sense of "techniques and such" as well as things like text editors). It is common for these to be structured in a way that makes them instances or sub-types of more general things. So, when there is a statement like "a procedure is a compound of rules" I can think "well, OK, a rule can be seen as an 'atom' of structure from a certain lens." Then I can consider that rules are of two classes constitutive and regulatory, and that a procedure is literally embodied in a game text as constitutive rules, probably more than one being required, or at least the procedure utilizing some sort of generalization, as in how "The GM determines which move was invoked" is both a rule and a procedure. I think 'mechanic' is also swept up here, and is maybe overused, like I agree that "the GM determines which move was invoked" is not a 'mechanic', as it doesn't involve cues and such, but its a fine point and probably not usually important.

But obviously (in view of my other recent posts) I fundamentally agree with you on pretty much all points. I just see how gaps arise between different poster's views at times.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm not so sure. Having designed a few games and interacted with some game design people, including some university faculty in that field, my observation is that successful games are a lot like successful businesses. They are established and built upon a CONCEPTUAL framework that is oriented towards WHAT, and then perhaps secondarily a particular HOW. That is, and here I'm making an educated guess, Monopoly was designed around the core concept of building up and developing assets in a competitive milieu of limited funding and uncertain but calculable cost/benefit ratios. Yes, the author undoubtedly also had details in mind, like the board representing Atlantic City and such from the start, but that's secondary to the core idea of buying property, development, and (mis)fortune all interacting.

Likewise IME of creating businesses: Its not actually the individual technical ideas that generally have all that much weight in terms of convincing people to fund you and whatnot. Its all about your ability to orient your activities in the direction of achieving the fundamental goals, and ability to analyze your assumptions, assets, and strategy with that in mind. This is what I saw instantly in terms of 4e as a game, the authors clearly were able to look at every element purely in the light of "this is a game, how do we make it work well" as opposed to being mired in some bog of preconceived notions and artificial constraints about how it 'must work'. I see the same thing in PbtA and FitD game design. I don't see it so much with 5e, although I do think there's a good deal of pragmatism at work in how it is designed. It's just that most of that involves "what can we get our existing customer base to accept?" rather than what really makes an excellent game in and of itself.

Hard-designing a game from a perspective of it being a game does have its downsides though. It was the reason why I ultimately couldn't accept 4e. The rules were from my perspective more important than the feel of the game.

 

[loverdrive]

And those issues were a major problem in play for my group when we played both AW and MotW. Someone would pick an action from the list on their Playbook (not because they had to, but because there's a clear list of delineated actions with fancy names in front of every player), and the GM would mechanically respond as appropriate. We also did this because if we didn't, there would immediately be a scramble-discussion as to what "move" the player was trying to make. Someone would inevitably try an action that didn't fit into a move in their estimation, but still required adjudication, leaving the GM scrambling to keep up. As clear as the rules in these games may be, they can still be very confusing for folks.

I'm not denying your experience, but I'm not sure if it's representative of the way AW is supposed to be played.

Player moves are not a "list of delineated actions", they are rules for specific situations, not too dissimilar from, say, rules on fall damage in D&D. Yeah, when you are just starting out, you may need to look for an applicable move in a given situation, but it's just a matter of knowledge of the system. Like, when twenty years ago my ma brought home a PC, I had trouble pointing cursor at things, a couple weeks later, it was natural. The same stuff applies here.

And when no move applies, it's simple: GM makes a move. That's it. It can be hard when coming from trad games, where GM adjudicates action declarations, but when it clicks that your move doesn't have to be related to whatever the PC is doing, everything just falls into place and it works.

When Sekiro came out, I tried to play it as if it was Dark Souls. I had a ####ing miserable time, I hated the game and uninstalled it. On my second try, a year later, I watched a couple of guides on YouTube, rewired my brain and experienced the best action game in the history of action games that I sincerely doubt will be ever topped.