Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

If this is true, then it's an utterly worthless distinction as every social situation in life involves this level of negotiation at every decision point. There's no point in even considering it if it's around 100% of the time in every game, life situation, or whatever.

Yet the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, social psychology etc thrive despite your declaration that it is worthless to consider the things they consider!

As the OP pointed out, it is possible to play imagination games without any rules framework of the sort that is common in RPGs. Because human beings are capable of social negotiation.

So, as the OP asks, what do rules bring to the table?

@innerdude has been providing an answer to that question: in various way, they turn unmediated negotiation into mediated negotiation. (Sometimes very highly mediated, as for instance in D&D combat resolution.)

A lot of innerdude's examples, and you and @Micah Sweet in response, lean very heavily on a notion of authority - who is authorised to establish this or that bit of fiction. (In a lot of RPGing, the answer is typically "the GM".)

As I think I posted upthread, I don't think that allocation of authority in itself is a particularly effective way of mediating negotiations in the context of RPGing. Hence why, it seems to me, approaches to RPGing that rely heavily on allocations of authority and nothing else are so prone to debates about "bad calls", "viking hat GMs", etc.

 

[deleuzian_kernel]

If this is true, then it's an utterly worthless distinction as every social situation in life involves this level of negotiation at every decision point. There's no point in even considering it if it's around 100% of the time in every game, life situation, or whatever.

Yet the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, social psychology etc thrive despite your declaration that it is worthless to consider the things they consider!

This brings us back to one of the foundational theory posts that originated this thread, specifically this one.

1. Moment-to-moment assent trumps pre-agreed authority, in every case.

(...)

2. Any well-designed roleplaying game will assign (at least some) authority upfront.

Caveat:
Nevertheless, as a designer, ignoring the fact of point 1 won't improve your understanding of your medium and it won't better your designs.

Sure, we can pretend that moment-to-moment assent is a given aspect in any social situation, specifically those that have to do with creative endeavors, and still be able to go on with our gaming lives.

Even if we choose to ignore these (seemingly) invisible mechanisms, its extremely likely that we can still produce acceptable accidents, more so if there are other elements to our creative negotiation that conspire to indeed make it be a productive one, such as blunt authority distribution. Play happens, sure, and is good and successful most of the time.

But ignoring that moment-to-moment assent is the driving force of creative collaboration, dismissing it as 'utterly worthless', will definitely cut off participants from being able to do anything else other than follow procedures inherited from tradition and assume that they will always 'magically' work and produce healthy creative collaboration. Historically, we have found that this is not true!

I'm thinking RAW Vampire The Masquerade*, one the most deprotagonizing, uncollaborative systems ever. Players are given a good number of tools to manifest their protagonism, but their impetus is promptly cut off by a sloppy authority distribution scheme inherited from the "GM-as-primary-storyteller" tradition that follows AD&D. In this dynamic, every single player creative contribution in the fiction must necessarily conform with the GM's own vision of the fiction, which in turn usually conforms with the meta-plot concerns of the setting. These creative contributions can be easily vetoed off, or bent through illusionism.

Player: I walk up to the bar, sit next to the beautiful girl, and say, "Lonely night?"
GM: Before that happens, as you start walking up to the bar you are cut off by a hooded figure. "Come with me, I have something to show you."

GM as "keeper of the fiction" works in old school gaming because the agenda of that tradition requires it, and having players act as moral protagonists is not it. Even then, there are other arenas in which these games employ moment-to-moment assent.

When these "given and obvious" procedures don't work to suit our goals, people are confounded and start looking at the wrong things, missing completely what the underlying problem is. Turns out they weren't paying attention to the actual social mechanisms of how fiction gets built.

*This is not an attack on VtM players! If your VtM game was fruitful, I believe you. How did YOU overcome the shortcomings I described above?

 

[Fenris-77]

Rulings are still important, of course. That's why I don't believe there are rules-light games. There are just games with fewer rules in the book and more opportunities for (hopefully consistent) rulings to be made, developing a corpus of rules over time.

Rules-light has nothing to do with adjudication, but rather with the actual volume of mechanical heft possessed by system X. It isn't something that not believing in makes disappear, nor does a rules-light RPG author die every time you clap your hands.

 

[pemerton]

@andreszarta

I think it is worth considering the relationship between GM authority ("keeper of the fiction") and moment-to-moment assent even in more OSR-ish play.

There are a host of "folk" terms for criticising certain events/decisions in RPGing - "gotcha" GMing, "viking hat" GMing, etc. And there are ideas that sit in the same analytical space: "is this a fair trap?", "did I make the right ruling?", etc.

As I've already mentioned in this thread, I think it's no coincidence that we find these ways of thinking about RPGing emerging in GM-as-keeper-of-the-fiction play. These ways of thinking are precisely ways of trying to point to, and describe, situations where there has been no violation of the authority distribution, and yet moment-to-moment assent has been put under pressure.

To me, reflecting on the above - as much as reflecting on other experiences, like the VtM one you mention - is a good reason to agree with Baker that rules should do more than clearly assign authority (though that can often be helpful too). Or to put it another way: where the function of rules is to mediate negotiation, I don't think mere content-neutral authority allocations are the best way to go about the task.

And we can see implicit recognition of this in some classic texts. Moldvay, for instance, does not encourage purely content neutral GM authority in his Basic rules. He uses notions like "There's always a chance". By contemporary standards some of his "chances" are pretty brutal (eg PC death on anything but 99-00 on d%) but there is at least a hint there of a soft move/hard move structure.

 

[Fenris-77]

Trust @pemerton to take something complicated and make it sound blisteringly obvious.

 

[pemerton]

Trust @pemerton to take something complicated and make sound blisteringly obvious.

I think that's a compliment . . . ?

 

[Fenris-77]

I think that's a compliment . . . ?

Of the highest sort my friend.

 

[deleuzian_kernel]

This is false in D&D. That agreement was made to follow that prior to the first session of the campaign. You agree by virtue of playing the game. It does not happen every time the DM narrates a result, or even the first time the DM narrates a result.

There are times when it appears like the DM is either abusing his authority OR has simply misremembered a rule and the players will stop and bring that up, but absent that there's no negotiation going on.

There is always negotiation in a game like D&D.

Two scenarios
(1)
GM: You travel 5 days on your way to Appleshire, and as you arrive at the front gates...
Player: Wait, we actually wanted to make a quick stop at Pebblebrook to talk to the Mayor about what we saw on the mine.
GM: Ah! Ok, so you arrive at Pebblebrook...

(2)
GM: Take 10 fire damage.
Player: Halved right? Due to my infernal resistance.
GM: Well, that's for regular fire. This is more like, primordial fire, you know.
Player: Still! It comes from my demon heritage, I should be able to resist primordial fire too, no?
GM: It's in the rules though, it only halves regular fire. Doesn't say anything about primordial fire.
...
(2A) Assent
Player: Sure, if it's in the rules I can come up with a reason that makes sense of why my resistance fails.

(2B) Refusal to assent
Player: Hang on, but we made an exception to the resistance rules when the Triton was able to half slashing damage from water, even though it only mentions bludgeoning form water. How is this any different?
Other Player: That's a good point! Primordial fire still just burns like regular fire no, its magic is more about not being able to be easily quenched, no?

 

[Maxperson]

Doesn't it?

In that case you seem to be describing a board game (or war game), not a RPG.

Ditto.

But in fact, at least in my experience, these are all components of action resolution and hence do establish who can say what, and when, about what happens next in the shared fiction.

EDIT: reading on, I see I've been massively ninja'd by @innerdude.

So who does the PHB dictate to say what happens in the fiction when it comes to choosing a class?

 

[Fenris-77]

So who does the PHB dictate to say what happens in the fiction when it comes to choosing a class?

Choosing a class has nothing to do with 'the fiction'.