Why do RPGs have rules?

[Maxperson]

You said that Tolkien was simulating geology because he decided that archangels sang the world into existence.

Go back and reread. I never said he was simulating geology.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Well, first there's much more to it than just "wander[ing] hallways and rooms gathering achievements".

Second, and perhaps more important, while characerization may have little to no mechanical impact it still plays - or certainly can play - a very real part in things.

I would venture to say that a rogue is a rogue is a rogue in a game of 1e D&D played in the classical tradition. Sure, the character's equipment, race, and ability scores will have a modest (maybe huge in the case of magic items) impact on their exact capabilities, but I don't see where characterization plays any part at all. That is to say, if a player chooses to eschew skilled play and invent a bunch of character idiosyncrasies, and then play 'badly' in order to RP them, the general reaction in most groups will vary from mild eye-rolling to expulsion. It is expected that you play your character to win, that's classic D&D and not doing so is akin to neglecting to do obvious things in a game of Monopoly, like buying pretty much every property you land on.

It depends, I think, on whether one views that which you call 'color' as an integral and vital part of the game or as just meaningless/extraneous fluff. Those GM narrations of the lands and weather your party passes through as you travel, those moments of in-character banter around the campfire, that strange way of introducing himself that the Gnome insists on busting out at every opportunity - these are all just 'color' in that they have neither mechanical nor story impact, yet IMO without these things the game wouldn't be worth playing.

I'm not against any of these things. However I don't recall this sort of stuff being a very large part of any the games I either GMed or played in. I mean, sure, characters had some personality and likes and dislikes, and all things being even we would RP that stuff, but most of the really memorable moments, the ones that I recall, all had to do with actual play, like defeating a monster, or conversely being defeated by one. I remember my players were really thrilled when they finally figured out a way to defeat the clay golem that roamed level one of my original dungeon. It only had one hit point left, but it was hard to damage (IIRC it took at least a +1 weapon). Honestly I've forgotten how it played out since it was 40 years ago now, but I know the players were thrilled and it was a story long told around the table for years after.

And yes, just about every example of 'color' is going to slow down the process of getting on with the story. So what.

I'm not sure if that's the reason behind alignment or just a probably-unintentional side effect.

What else would alignment really be for? I think you may be missing the gold for the silver here though overall. I mean, Takeo and the crew expelling the Oni (demon) from his sword is a pretty memorable moment of play, at least in recent times. It was deeply meaningful to the character and carried plenty of the attributes of what you call 'color', but it was NOT just some amusing moment at a campfire. Instead if was a very risky life-and-death moment where the character attained an outcome that was both highly meaningful to him personally, and also formed a part of the core activity of the game, a score. I think you can have your cake and eat it to, and that's exactly how it plays for me! I would never go back to where my actual RP is just funny gnome jokes or something.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Dismissing that anything can be meaningfully simulative is frankly a negative attitude to take. Now that you related some of your own life experience I understand where you coming from. Since the early 2000s after I worked up my first simulators when I watch any drama with anything involving real world space tech, I know every little thing they get wrong in films and dramas like Apollo 13, Gravity, From the Earth to the Moon, For all Mankind and so on and so forth.

But I learned to enjoy them for what they are as long as they are in the ballpark.

Sure, they take DRAMATIC LICENSE, and neither is a movie a simulation. Its a story. I don't think the two are closely related categories at all. I don't have a negative attitude, I just literally do not think that the stuff we do in RPGs is in any way shape or form related to simulation in any formal sense. And as I've said many times, I don't really object to the use of the word in respect to some basic 'local' aspects of RPG realism, the word 'simulation' after all has an informal meaning. What I see however is some of the people with whom I regularly interact on this forum trying to maintain that what they're doing has some actual rigor, that it is something MORE than plausibility, or that it can meaningfully constrain any but the most immediate and local aspects of the fiction.

So when it came to my campaigns, rather than throwing up my hands and not bothering trying to simulate anything I figured out what I could with pen, paper, dice, and a set of RPG rules. When simulation of real life was a focus I did the work to see how the outcome matched up against real-life results and adjusted if they weren't.

The problem is, look at the sorts of stuff that some people are claiming to fall into the realm of 'simulation', like demographics, geography, weather, politics, etc. These are not things you can approach with paper and pencils, or even large heavily-funded government 3-letter agencies for that matter!

It means don't set impossible standards of accuracy. Not everything needs to be within .001 degrees to be useful for a particular application. That some folks are happy to get it to .1 degrees and call it a day for what they are trying to do.

It is not I who am setting any impossible standards. I'm simply pointing out that calling what GM's do, generally speaking, in terms of laying out the events of play has ZERO to do with simulation, nothing whatsoever. Its about as much a simulation as a lion is a grapefruit. I'm not twigged about .1 degrees of jack, I'm pointing out that the entire usage is a monumental category error right on the face of it!

And some people

Because GURPS method of calculating damage incorporates the acceleration imparted by Earth's Gravity (32 ft/sec^2) and the mass of the object impacting the ground. In addition, its GURPS distinguishes between collision with a hard unyielding surface and other types of surfaces.

D&D either does a linear 1d6 damage per foot. Or a factorial sequence in later editions (1d6 for 10 feet, 1d6+2d6 = 3d6 for 20 feet, and so on).

See, I knew you were going to say this, that "the realistic way is a geometric damage progression", but if you actually look at the statistics on the outcomes of falls, you will see that neither procedure produces anything really resembling the real-world lethality of falls! The web site I just now consulted on this claims that falls of 50' have about a 50% survival rate (this is obviously real-world, so ordinary people without some sort of magic or high level hit points, etc.). Falls from 70' are about 90% fatal. This obviously varies by surface and whatnot, as well as the health of the person falling. There is however, NO known height from which a fall will be 100% fatal (well, actually, sure, a fall from 100 miles will cook you but people have survived falls of more than 30,000 feet). So I would argue that none of the systems you are mentioning is even faintly realistic, and the whole geometric vs linear thing means little. If anything the linear allocation of damage may actually be MORE reflective of reality, as it offers some probability of longer falls doing minimal damage.

Then there is the fact that D&D only care about combat endurance (hit points) and not the impact of injury. Whereas GURPS does care so going through the above procedure for GURPS will result in a range of injuries that matches with what happens in life.

Yet I never found that GURPS generally gave me any great sense of its injury systems being very realistic either. I mean, they produce fiction that encompasses a larger range of what people experience in real life, but that's about it.

I been in GURPS Playtests. The authors and the playtesters can and will do the math and tweak accordingly to get results to line up with life (or fiction in cases like with Discworld).

Meh, back in the day Steve and various of the other people from Metagaming would show up with playtest material at our club. They did a lot of RPG playtesting, though that was 5-6 years before GURPS was published. I don't recall a lot about the mechanics of those things. At the time Melee and Wizard were already out there, and I have the impression what they were working on was pretty close to that, though not the same as the TFT rules that eventually got published. Still, GURPS is in many ways pretty beholden to the ideas of TFT. I won't claim I've ever had a real conversation with Steve, but my impression is that he's much more of a board gamer and that his approach to RPGs, as such, is much like AH's was, to treat the thing as basically a wargame. As a consequence, I personally never found GURPS to be at all to my tastes, even back in the days before narrativism was really a thing.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Here's the thing...
The CT CG process is low choice. And I can cite the process from memory from 40 years of at least occasional, and over 5 years of campaigns...
RAW:

1. roll atts, in sequence. Str, Dex, End, Int, Edu, Soc
2. pick service (career) to attempt to enter.
3. roll for entry.
   1. on scuccess, go to 5
   2. on fail, go to 4
4. roll for service drafted into
5. Roll term's survival
   1. on success, gain 1 skill roll
      1. if term1, gain a second skill
      2. if term 1, check for automatic service skills.
   2. on fail, go to 1
6. if not a term 1 draftee nor already commissioned, nor in a rankless career, rollfor commission
   1. on success, gain rank 1 (commission) and 1 skill roll
      1. check for automatic skills for rank 1 (which are additional to the roll)
7. if commissioned and not maximum rank and not in a rankless career, roll for promotion
   1. on success, gain +1 rank and 1 skill roll
      1. check for service automatic skills for current rank.
8. for each skill roll,
   1. choose one of the skill tables
      1. If education 8+, all four are available
      2. if Education 7-, only the first three are available
      3. it is unclear to me whether prior rolls this term unlock table 4 for this term. I allow it. Some don't.
   2. roll 1d
   3. take the indicated skill
      1. Cascades if that skill is vehicle, gun combat, or blade combat, (or, if using S4, the additional cascades) pick the skill from the appropriate list.
9. Roll Aging Saves if term 4+
10. Roll for reenlistment
    1. if nat 12, go back to 5.0
    2. if term < 7 and success but not nat 12, choose between Muster Out or stay in
       1. go back to 5.0
       2. go on to 11
    3. if term > 7, go on to 11.
    4. if failed, go on to 11
11. figure total mustering out rolls
    1. 1 per term
    2. additional for rank
       1. R1 or R2, 1 roll
       2. R3 or R4, 2 rolls
       3. R5 or R6, 3 rolls
12. make the rolls
    1. for each roll, Choose Cash or Benefits.
       1. no more than 3 benefits rolls can only be applied to the cash table.
    2. rollon that table
       1. characters with rank 5 or 6 choose whether or not to apply their +1 before rolling on the material benefits table
       2. characters with gambling skill or who have retired choose before rolling whether to apply a +1 to the rolls on the cash table
    3. resolve attribute gains
    4. resolve weapon benefits
       1. if more than 1, choose whether the 2nd and later are additional weapons or skill in previously obtained weapons
13. if 5+ terms completed, note retirement pay.
14. Name the character.
15. if need be, name the ship.
16. purchase additional starting gear

I've bolded all the choice points, and underlined the actual points for dice rolls. More is defined by random than by rolling.
Now, compared to then-current (1977) D&D, that was a lot of choice. But, at the same point, one didn't pick one's skills, merely affected the odds of which they got by table choices. The choice is barely meaningful.
RAP, many allowed rolling the skill choice die then picking the table, making the choice very meaningful.

D&D OE character gen:
Roll 6 atts in sequence (which order was always a controversy in my circles due to the exemplar in Vol 1 p 10)

Sequence a: STR INT WIS CON DEX CHA (order in text)​

Sequence b: STR CON INT DEX WIS CHA (reading card in columns)​

Sequence c: STR DEX CON INT WIS CHA (essentially, Traveller order)​

Roll for starting cash
Choose race
Choose class (unless demihuman - elves per unexpanded OE are always W/M duals, while halflings and dwarves are only fighting men)
Roll HP.
choose Alignment
choose Languages
if need be, Starting Spells.
purchase starting gear
One can kind of roleplay the choices in Traveller. The iteration is where the choices matter for an RP context, but for most, it's mechanistic during, and then post-generation, a narrative is devised. It's definitely a form of play of Traveller, but whether it's RP varies by individual. (Says the guy who random-rolled some NPCs wed night while running a CT/MT hybrid.)
The choices in D&D are far fewer, but only because of iteration. The RP can start in char gen... with class choice. (demi-humans don't get to make that choice until Sup 1 adds thieves. Note that class choice is often mechanistic (either due to attribute requirements or race choice); Languages and Alignment are also race constrained, starting spells are only for certain classes. The first that's really an RP choice is starting gear. Given the rules, the real munchkins spend 2 GP on starting weapons: dagger and spear ... "But wait, Daggers cost 3!" Sure... but...

• buy two spears...
• use spear 1 to chop down spear 2 to a dagger.

As I said, I was talking munchkins. (and yes, I've done that as a player, and seen other players try that.
Once players used the alternate damage by weapon type, equipment went from the RP sphere to mixed RP and Mechanistic.

---

TLDR:
Classic Traveller has less meaningful choice than it seems.
D&D can support very limited RP in char gen, but it's strongest before the change to damage by weapon type.

I've played quite a lot of each, thx We did tend to use the year-by-year variations of the LP system in our CT play though, at least once they were available since we played a lot in the very early days before things like Mercenary and such even got printed.

Still, I think there's room in there to fold in some RP, particularly around steps 5-8, which are the meat of the system. Obviously this will impact how LPs work, but I don't think that matters much, since it would be shifting the focus of play from the character's retirement years back into their prime. This was always an odd feature of Traveller, that many of the PCs are already 'over the hill', where in most RPGs they start wet behind the ears. Well, CT is actually a kind of an odd game as RPGs go when you think about it...

 

[Lanefan]

I would venture to say that a rogue is a rogue is a rogue in a game of 1e D&D played in the classical tradition. Sure, the character's equipment, race, and ability scores will have a modest (maybe huge in the case of magic items) impact on their exact capabilities, but I don't see where characterization plays any part at all. That is to say, if a player chooses to eschew skilled play and invent a bunch of character idiosyncrasies, and then play 'badly' in order to RP them, the general reaction in most groups will vary from mild eye-rolling to expulsion.

Even though their underlying mechanics might be the same, things are being done right IMO if two characters of the same class/species are immediately identifyable as being greatly different people due to their in-game personalities, characterizations, morals, and quirks.

In short, mechanics ain't everything.

I'm not against any of these things. However I don't recall this sort of stuff being a very large part of any the games I either GMed or played in. I mean, sure, characters had some personality and likes and dislikes, and all things being even we would RP that stuff, but most of the really memorable moments, the ones that I recall, all had to do with actual play, like defeating a monster, or conversely being defeated by one. I remember my players were really thrilled when they finally figured out a way to defeat the clay golem that roamed level one of my original dungeon. It only had one hit point left, but it was hard to damage (IIRC it took at least a +1 weapon). Honestly I've forgotten how it played out since it was 40 years ago now, but I know the players were thrilled and it was a story long told around the table for years after.

Nice. We've got a few memorable edge-of-the-seat stories, similar to yours here.

Many of our memorable moments, however, also come from the characters' (not always pleasant) interactions with each other; where whatever adventure or story was happening at the time was either irrelevant or merely a backdrop.

For a long time the most famous and talked-about combat our crew ever saw was "The Battle of Three Tents". It was so named because during said combat all three of the party's tents were destroyed by our own MU using a telekinesed boulder - he'd just acquired a ring of telekinesis, and when we were attacked while camped at night he insisted on trying it out. He hadn't a clue how to use it, and as well as whacking all our tents his only contribution to proceedings was to clobber our Ranger for damage and, when the combat ended, drop the rock on my namesake character's foot for more damage.

Who were the foes? Why were they there?* Irrelevant to the stories told for decades after, because all the stories and memories revolved around what that damn MU did to his own party.

* - a patrol of a few Hobgoblins and their Orc soldiers, rolled as a wandering monster and otherwise irrelevant to the adventure.

What else would alignment really be for? I think you may be missing the gold for the silver here though overall. I mean, Takeo and the crew expelling the Oni (demon) from his sword is a pretty memorable moment of play, at least in recent times. It was deeply meaningful to the character and carried plenty of the attributes of what you call 'color', but it was NOT just some amusing moment at a campfire. Instead if was a very risky life-and-death moment where the character attained an outcome that was both highly meaningful to him personally, and also formed a part of the core activity of the game, a score. I think you can have your cake and eat it to, and that's exactly how it plays for me! I would never go back to where my actual RP is just funny gnome jokes or something.

The fact it was a life and death moment moves it beyond simple 'color'.

 

[pemerton]

In this book, The World of Odysseus, the classicist MI Finley draws on anthropological studies of "heroic" mountain cultures - eg in Montenegro - to try and understand what the society of Homeric Greece was actually like.

In the contemporary world, it is possible to go to places where social and economic structures and relationships more closely resemble those that predominated in mediaeval villages, where oral culture is more predominant than it is in (say) contemporary London, where the projection of government power is less of a factor in everyday life than it is in (say) contemporary Chicago.

In my experiences of FRPGing, I rarely see portrayals of mediaeval villages that even attempt to capture these differences.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Go back and reread. I never said he was simulating geology.

It’s difficult to read the below as anything but that. So if I’m mistaken, then what did you mean?

Tolkien established that the world was created by songs sung by angels to achieve Eru's vision. With that in mind, the mountains of Middle Earth become realistic/simulation of that supernatural song to achieve Eru's will.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Why was simulation fidelity so important to your application? What business impact did lack of fidelity have? I assume you were probably training pilots or something.

You keep denigrating simulations that aren't as detailed as the ones your business used, but in that case the real takeaway is that simulations that don't mimic reality closely enough, if used for training, will not build physical intuitions that allow pilots to successfully replicate these feats in real life.

Since no one is playing D&D to develop the capability to Fireball giants into oblivion in real life, guess what? That's not a failure mode for these kinds of simulations! The objective in this case isn't to build physical intuitions, it's to avoid breaking willing suspension of disbelief[1].

You're apparently equating "not a training simulation (Training simulation - Wikipedia)" with "not a simulation (Simulation - Wikipedia)".

Read your own references, OK?

"A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time."

A model, in this context, means a mathematical or logical formulation which relates characteristics of a modeled system to characteristics of the model itself. Normally a model will be simpler than the actual modeled system, and may only be valid within a certain 'model domain', that is some set of states, time, actions, or with respect to only certain traits of the modeled system.

Simulations drive models. That is, an instance of a simulation updates the state of its model over time, relating model state at one time to model state at another time (there are some variations here, but they're not important for this discussion).

(Or maybe you're equating it with something else like an engineering simulation--again, it's not entirely clear yet what your business objective was for your simulations.)

[1] Different people have different thresholds for what breaks their willing suspension of disbelief (not just in games, in books and movies too), as well as different levels of desire to prioritize narrative satisfaction over maintaining willing suspension of disbelief. This is the whole point of GDS. Again, I'm not claiming simulationism is in inherently virtuous; just disputing the claim that has been made repeatedly that RPGs are "not simulations" because they are lower fidelity than the airplane simulations your business did back in the 1980s, @AbdulAlhazred .

Honestly, it isn't ACCURACY that really is fundamentally the issue. Its simply a category error to call what is happening in RPGs simulation AT ALL. It isn't. There is usually no model, except in the simplest cases (IE D&D's rule for falling could be said to take the character as a model and apply a rule which alters its hit points based on an input of the distance fallen). Even the falling example is a tenuous simulation. The model is extremely lacking in detail, and the rule being applied is consequently simplistic in the extreme. The results are only realistic to a sort of 'order of magnitude' degree, but still, I've repeatedly yielded on these edge cases. I hardly think, even collectively, they add up to much.

On the whole there are no models, because there are no realities to be modeled! I also grant that non-existent things are often said to be modeled, such as aircraft which do not yet exist, yet these are very specific things which COULD exist, and who's posited characteristics are well enough understood to be modeled (where this is not the case then engineering studies must be conducted first, at least in the engineering world, other disciplines may operate similarly). A fantasy world is NOT understood, not in a fundamental sense. It contains features which are not simply fanciful things which can be modeled, but things which posit fundamental differences between the fantasy world and reality at a very low level. Dragons simply cannot fly, by any real-world measure. The fact that they do fly, and can breath fire, isn't simply some trivial thing, it indicates that the entire fundamental basis of the fantasy world is not rooted in physical laws at all! The implications are beyond wide-ranging, and entirely unknowable!

There are also no models because the state of the fantasy world is so poorly defined that constructing a model from it would be of little or no value, even assuming we understood its laws well enough. So, we cannot construct a model, and we cannot initialize the state of a simulation, and thus we really have nothing at all. Simply some 'rules of thumb' and to call a rule of thumb of this kind a simulation is to rob the term of all meaning.

Finally, I don't actually have any issue with people's use of various labels for styles of RPG design, play, agenda, etc. Terms get used in ways far from their actual original meanings in these specialized contexts all the time. What I am pointing out is simply that it is of no use to take such a term used in such a specialized way, and then attribute the character of the more usual and formal meaning of the term to this special context. So, for example, Ron Edwards uses the term 'simulation' (and he probably got it through its general usage in alt.rec.games which derived from a more conventional war gamer usage of the term). You may pick it up from either of those sources and term your play 'simulationist', as you wish. I am not the English language police! However, when you then draw conclusions about your play based on a mistaken assumption that 'simulationism' in RPGs is in any substantive way related to the actual classic concept of simulations, then your reasoning will inevitably be seriously flawed. IMHO this is the root and cause of what I see as flawed analysis of this sort of play which I have commonly encountered at various times throughout my RPG gaming hobby activities.

Still, I also defend my previous post. Simulations of highly complex, non-linear, and largely unquantifiable systems is a highly fraught endeavor, at best. Having some experience, as I indicated, with some of the MORE TRACTABLE types of simulations I know that even these are often quirky at best. Extrapolations of the sort which are undertaken in RPGs, of people's motives, of social dynamics, of economic considerations, and most importantly of human motives, thought, and emotion, seems ESPECIALLY fraught. So I stick by my statement, you better have some really good data to even attempt it, and RPG game masters do not have that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Wrong.

Having this sort of discussion seems monumentally fruitless.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

To me "blasting it in two" implies that 8 of 8 hit points were dealt. Whether that's right, this does reveal that simulationism applies to world facts collectively, and on an ongoing basis. The test isn't will one nominated world fact stand up in isolation? It's will they consistently stand up?

If the nominated world fact turns out to have come from an internalisation of simulationist rules, and that goes on to apply consistently, then I think you can certainly argue that simulationism is being done. The debate at hand becomes a process of sharing and ironing out references and theories.

I understood you to be ruling that out though, in your earlier post.

And yet this model of structural damage produces no account whatsoever which we can use to determine that the building was affected in any particular way. It might have collapsed, burned, 'split in two', or a dozen other things. Likewise even if it took 4 points of its 8 points of structure, we have no idea what that means. In a mechanical sense it simply indicates that the buildings structure points are less, nothing more. Fictionally it is unconstrained. I'd point out that this is the same sort of issue which makes D&D combat such a poor simulation, it isn't even telling us what happened! Surely any simulation that has any substantive worth at all will at least tell us what the effects were on the relevant features of the model when the thing is run.

So, frankly, the whole 'split in half' thing is a bogus side argument, as the model being employed (at least if you are playing AD&D) lacks the necessary fidelity to output this sort of information. Again, it is no simulation at all!