Why do RPGs have rules?

On the bringing to a halt, to me one design choice is whether one wants to retain fail without setbacks. A benefit is that a player can attempt things where the cost of failure is simply not achieving the thing, rather than invoking additional badness. (Punished for trying.) On the other hand, fail without setbacks can feel static: it only obliquely drives momentum to fiction. Not necessarily in a bad way - for instance it can put it back on players to switch plans.

Anyway, I wondered what you take is on that?

Well, honestly, for general purpose usage I'm not sold that either fail-with-setbacks or neutral-fail are virtues. To use the Chill example again, a fail will give you motion forward, but minimal; it doesn't set you back but it doesn't advance your progress as much as a success or a critical will. Even a fumble is more of a mixed bag than an unmitigated disaster. For some sort of very simulationist oriented kinds of campaigns this is probably not a good model, and its used where it is simply because Chill is a monster-hunting game and there's always a risk of stalling out otherwise (its a different take on the principals used in Gumshoe in a way), but I came to very much appreciate it in play, and I suspect something like it would be virtuous in most types of campaigns.
 

log in or register to remove this ad

I think it is obvious why this sort of RPGing is experienced by many participants as centring the GM's conception of the fictional situation.
Under most game texts players are active here, describing what their characters do in a situation that they grasp. Under some texts they will say what rule their act falls within the scope of. In many cases game texts will set the target for success.

None of that is at odds with failure without setback. Here a GM need say nothing at all, but as referee encourage the upholding and carrying through of the lusory attitude. Perhaps explaining the lusory means - pointing to the rule.

The concern of yours that I have quoted does not turn on inclusion or otherwise of failure without setback.
 
Last edited:

I used that example simply because it was clear. I do think unless the GM has thought through what consequences there are before the roll is made there's going to be a temptation to put his thumb on the scale; how well he'll resist that temptation various from GM to GM. Personally, I prefer that in most cases everyone know the general potential output states before it even comes up, which is one of the reasons I'm not a fan of games that put too much ad-hoc decision making in the GM's hands as a default rather than an occasional necessity.
Likewise. I suppose we could have different ideas of what counts as sufficient. In fact, I think that can vary within the flow of play.
 

What strikes me is the contrast between task resolution and intent resolution regardless of non-binary outcome. That is, in 5e the GM adjudicates the task at hand and states what the outcome is, positive, negative, or perhaps optionally a mixed outcome. In a lot of narrative play the player describes an intent or goal, or such is manifest in the situation, and then describes how they achieve it, or part of it, while the GM describes any problems or setbacks.

I haven't seen 5e played in the latter fashion.

Well, I'm not going to speak on that as I'm not particularly a fan of intent resolution, so my commentary would not be unbiased.
 

Likewise. I suppose we could have different ideas of what counts as sufficient. In fact, I think that can vary within the flow of play.

I was probably vaguer in that post than was useful. What I meant by that is that if a game is going to have, say, four results possible in a given task output, the player should have a fairly good idea what those results will be given other elements of the situation. There are going to be cases where they won't (because data about the situation is obscured for reasons in-game) or where the situation is sufficiently outside the normal play events that the only way they'll know is if the GM tells them (and under that circumstance, I'd much prefer he did), but to use a simple example, if someone is jumping across a small chasm, I'd much prefer that the standard mechanics tell me what the outcome possibilities are there and what category they land in.
 

You are saying that partial successes reduce the likelihood of a GM having to "manipulate things either behind the scenes or directly in order to keep things moving forward".

Your statement already assumes a bunch of things about gameplay namely:
  • That there is a thing that needs to be moved forward.
  • That the GM determines whether that thing is being moved or needs to get moving.
These situations can and do arise if (when) the players aren't driving the bus and things have ground to a relative standstill. And IME not all players are good bus-drivers. :)

But, a flexible system can equally-well handle either the GM, the players, or both being the drivers of the story.
  • That the GM may at any point chooses to or chooses not to manipulate things behind the scenes.
Yeah, old-school as I am, I still think this represents bad GMing.
 

First off, apologies to all if this is ground already covered - I was called in on page 81 here and am not about to go over the previous 80 to find out what I've missed... :)

A hard rule (a.k.a. an actual rule) is explicit, either allowing or disallowing (or both) something(s) specific to happen in the play of a game.

"A king can move up to one square in any direction" is a hard rule: it allows a king to move one square and disallows it from moving any further. "Constitution 16 gives a bonus 3 hit points per character level" is a hard rule: it allows exactly that bonus and disallows any greater or lesser bonus. "A player on the attacking team may not precede the puck across the defensive team's blue line" is a hard rule: it disallows certain player positionings on the ice in certain situations.

Contrast this with "the objective of the game of hockey is to win via scoring more goals than the opposing team" which, while in the rulebook, neither specifically allows nor disallows anything. It's simply a guideline or suggestion as to how to play and not a rule at all until harder-coded into actual rules that define the win condition, define what a goal is and how it is scored, define the length of a game, and so on. And even then that guideline can still be ignored; a badly-overmatched team, for example, might take a different approach and instead of playing to try to win will instead play purely defensively, and try to lose by as small a margin as it can.

"Play to find out" falls into this same category - it neither specifically allows nor disallows anything and thus is not a rule: it's a guideline.

In hockey (and most other sports), each league has its own minor variants on an otherwise fairly-consistent set of rules; but in the end the league sets the (hard-coded) rules. Chess doesn't often even have that much variability, nor do most boardgames, card games, etc.

TTRPGs, however, are a different animal. Here, while the publisher might want to play the role of the league and set the hard rules*, there's these annoying things called GMs and players who - in the fine well-established tradition of RPG rules-kitbashing - want to make the game their own by taking those hard rules and in some cases putting them through a blender. And so, the role of the "league" falls on the GM (and players, maybe) at each table; to - to some degree - set the hard rules they're willing to play by and then play the game.

And some publishers realize this, and so rather than hard-coding lots of rules they give guidelines and suggestions, backed up by a far lesser amount of hard-coded rules. These guidelines are by nature a bit fuzzy, and that fuzziness makes them harder to change to any extent without (ntentionally or otherwise) changing the underlying foundation of the game as designed.

* - worth noting that most of these hard rules are dealing with quantifications and-or abstractions of those parts of the fiction that cannot be roleplayed in meat-space.

I think the above implies a far greater amount of "flaky GM whim" than I'm getting at. That said, IMO someone - be it the publisher, the GM, the table as a whole, or whoever - has to take on the role of "the league" and set the hard rules. And if all the publisher gives you is guidelines and expects them to be taken as hard rules, that doesn't seem to provide much help with the nitty-gritty of sorting those fictional abstractions; instead it shuts that responsibility on to some combination of the GM and players and asks them to figure it out for themselves.

And sure, if you've a table of agreeable not-competitive people willing to help with that figuring-out process on an ongoing basis this set-up could be great. My experience, however, is that a) some people tend to be more stubborn and-or competitive than that, and b) some - generally the more casual types - aren't willing to help with that figure-it-out process and would prefer the game do it for them.

Game mechanics are usually a fairly basic input-->processing-->output sequence. Most of the time the players provide the input(1), the game does the processing(2a) and gives output(2b), and the GM interprets that output and adds it to the fiction(3).

1. Player input: Action declaration "We search the room carefully, looking for any sign the princess was ever here."
2a. Processing: (meat-space game mechanics occur e.g. rolling of dice, checking of notes, or whatever the system in use asks for)
2b. Output: (meat-space game mechanics determine a result - let's say success in this case - which must be honoured in step 3)
3. Interpretation: GM narration "Tolbert, you find a few long blonde hairs caught in the window sash that roughly match what you'd expect to be the princess'; and Jerelle, you notice a stain on the floor - could be spilled tea - that can't be more than a few days old."

This on its own doesn't seem controversial. So where's the controversy? Is it the specifics around 2a? Is it lack of honouring the result in 2b? Is it that the GM gets to do the interpretation in step 3?
IMHO there's nothing terribly controversial in terms of a specific type of play. Maybe there's a question like "do all styles of RPG play use rules in the same way?" That sounds like possibly the direction the discussion could be going in, I'm not sure...
 

This seems to imply there could be no first RPG - but there was! And there's no reason in purely abstract principle why it couldn't have been AW!
Sure, and that would bring in "extend".

Furthermore, as Baker puts it in AW, "Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way." He is not overriding pre-existing expectations ("tradition"). He is affirming them!
That's really beside the point. Making it a rule gives it force it would otherwise lack. Norms are probabilistic: there may be in a population in which behaviour or expectations etc converge to a norm, a distribution. Rules forcefully narrow that distribution. In the example, it’s plausibly the case that not all players have the understanding Baker is affirming.

The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings.​

I've underlined the parts of that rule that set out the who. And I've italicised the bits that constrain the what. Players are under no other constraints as to content, beyond a general one to cohere in what they say with the already-established fiction. The GM is of course under a wide range of constraints when it comes to exercising the permissions and fulfilling the obligations that pertain to their introduction of new shared fiction.

So just to be clear, you're now telling us that this post - which uses the phrases "description" and "consequence", and talks about a "matching" problem with ambiguity in the gam text, and gives as illustrations PbtA player-side moves and rolling dice to determin degree of success - is also talking about rules like "If you are a player, you are permitted to say this thing about your character."
Yes. As a rule it supersedes, including extending, preexisting norms.

That rules has no "matching" problem (there is no problem working out who is a player). The consequence is not a "fitting" one (I had taken "fitting" to mean something like "fits with the established fiction", consistent with your own extended history of posting about "saying what follows".)
This has been addressed upthread. The matching problem is not part of that definition of a rule, it is entailed by that definition of a rule.

[EDIT I can perhaps see a way to better put this, more clearly locating the criteria for a match in the rule.]

Such as? Like the suggestion on the AD&D character sheet that you might want to draw a picture of your PC?
If you like, yes. It's normative in encouraging a common behaviour.

A rule that you must draw a picture of your PC will have greater force. It will override "might want".
 
Last edited:

I was probably vaguer in that post than was useful. What I meant by that is that if a game is going to have, say, four results possible in a given task output, the player should have a fairly good idea what those results will be given other elements of the situation. There are going to be cases where they won't (because data about the situation is obscured for reasons in-game) or where the situation is sufficiently outside the normal play events that the only way they'll know is if the GM tells them (and under that circumstance, I'd much prefer he did), but to use a simple example, if someone is jumping across a small chasm, I'd much prefer that the standard mechanics tell me what the outcome possibilities are there and what category they land in.
Using this example in particular, the possible outcomes are pretty obvious before game mechanics even get involved:

--- you make the jump without problem
--- you make the jump but don't stick the landing
--- you mostly make the jump but end up partly hanging off the far edge
--- you face-plant into the far side but can grab something before you fall
--- you fall to your doom
--- you abort at the last minute and don't even try the jump.

Now, how closely you-as-player should know the odds of each result ideally would mirror your character's knowledge, but even then only in general rather than hard-coded numerical terms.

So yeah, if it's a 5-foot-wide chasm your odds of jumping it arte pretty damn good, if not perfect; if it's a 15-foot chasm that's a different story.
 

Using this example in particular, the possible outcomes are pretty obvious before game mechanics even get involved:

--- you make the jump without problem
--- you make the jump but don't stick the landing
--- you mostly make the jump but end up partly hanging off the far edge
--- you face-plant into the far side but can grab something before you fall
--- you fall to your doom
--- you abort at the last minute and don't even try the jump.

Now, how closely you-as-player should know the odds of each result ideally would mirror your character's knowledge, but even then only in general rather than hard-coded numerical terms.

So yeah, if it's a 5-foot-wide chasm your odds of jumping it arte pretty damn good, if not perfect; if it's a 15-foot chasm that's a different story.

Your second to last clause is where I disagree, because this is the kind of area where I want both the player and the GM/system to be on the same page, and the only reliable way to do that is, in the end of the days, knowing the numbers. Natural language just won't cut it because they can often mean very different things to different people.
 

Remove ads

Top