Why do RPGs have rules?

[Bedrockgames]

I'm thinking along these lines:

It's a "living world". That means that, from time to time, the GM "updates" or "evolves" the fiction - that's the "living" part, right?

Most people use the term world in motion. I use living world. So my meaning is possibly slightly out of sync with other GMs here. What I mean by that isn't what I would call updates or evolution of the fiction (though I think this may just be us conceptualizing things differently and using different language). What I mean is the world is active, the world is responsive and so are the NPCs, who operate with will like a player character. So it isn't like I have set pieces that keep gettin moved around or changed (i.e. the players went north so nix the final battle with the villain by the volcano and prep the one by the ice fortress). Reactive is a key point here, because it isn't just me updating, it is me reacting to what the players are actually doing and reacting to other events that unfold in the setting (the latter probably fits more with 'updating the fiction' description, though I would not use this language myself). Things arising in the world can happen a number of ways: 1) through an active NPC or power group (so the players have been doing things, the world has been moving, and I can easily discern based on that NPC A or group B will have a range of new choices before them and this one or that one seems most like the one they would pick or the one that is in their best interest if they have enough information to discern that, 2) Through me making decisions based on any number of procedures: through fiat (an earthquake strikes the capital!), through tables (this is my preferred method for things like global events or developments), through dice resolution (if there is an ongoing conflict between NPCs and or groups or armies, I will usually resolve this with whatever dice rolling methods seems like it captures things most accurately and fairly.

But I would say this isn't the only thing that is happening in this kind of campaign.

Some of those updates are responses to things the players have their PCs do - I think that's pretty key to the approach. Some of those updates are independent of the players and the PCs - eg the GM has a default "timeline" unfolding, or periodically rolls for random events, or whatever.

Fair enough, but I wouldn't call these updates to the fiction. I just call them what they are: the duke's brother was murdered in the ambush the PCs set, so he now wants revenge and I consider all the ways he would try to gain it given his resources, the information he has about the PCs, etc.

Suppose that the players typically need X actions to work out the nature of some element of the fiction, and its relationship to other elements (eg they might have to talk to a person, track down a rumour, inspect a building, and cast a spell).

And suppose that the GM typically makes Y changes per X actions performed by the PCs. And suppose that there is a rate of random events that is Z per X actions. So Y+Z changes are happening per element of the fiction that the players work out.

Here you are losing me though I think I get what you are saying. It isn't something I set to any kind of timer. And players aren't counting updates. This is a very organic process.

Some things might be set to a kind of timer (random encounters are usually based on a somewhat predictable pattern here), and if there is an ongoing conflict I might be rolling once per week or simply once per session to see if there are developments. I am not particularly worried about keeping it on a clock though.

Suppose that Y and Z each equal 0.5. Then that means that, typically, the GM is making 1 change to the world per element of the fiction the players work out. Assuming that that change has some relevant to the element the players are working out, at this rate of change the player's grasp of the ingame situation will always be imperfect, though they might be able to "see" it just out of reach, make sensible extrapolations, etc

Suppose that Y and Z are each well above 1. That suggests to me that, over time, the players are never really going to be able to grasp the setting. It is moving more quickly than they can generate knowledge about it.

I just don't find this problem to arise in practice. Again things progress organically, often in response to what players are doing. Naturally there are gong to be things they never know (though they will sense them).

Yes their grasp will not always be perfect. But in life peoples' grasp isn't perfect. However I am always happy to address any questions the players have. So if they need me to re-explain relationships I can do that. If they need me to tell them what they would know about something I can do that. Like I said there is a conversation aspect to this that is also very important.

Suppose that Y and Z sum to less than 1. Then, over the course of play, the players gain more and more knowledge of the setting, as things change less quickly than they are learning about those things. (In the Tomb of Horrors Y and Z are both equal to zero, or near enough to, making ToH the paradigm of the static dungeon crawl.)

As I posted upthread, the mathematical presentation is a fairly crude one. But the idea behind it seems to me pretty important for "living world" GMing.

Maybe other GMs would find this math useful or important. I wouldn't. It isn't anything I consider when I run a living world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It seems that mediaeval people thought that the existence of certain sorts of "magic" or supernatural phenomena was consistent with the sort of natural and social environments they were familiar with.

So when we imagine FRPGing in those environments, one option is to adopt their frameworks of understanding and explanation. This necessarily requires suspending our own frameworks of understanding and explanation (otherwise, events in the fiction would not only be causally overdetermined, but would be overdetermined by inconsistent causes!).

The best known example of this in RPGing, I think, is Glorantha - for instance, in Glorantha mountain ranges are explained by mythical considerations, not scientific geology; diseases are caused by evil spirits, not germs or other biological phenomena/agents; etc.

Right, this is basically what I did in my D&D campaigns of yore, and I created a similar conceit in my own RPG, Heroes of Myth and Legend. That is there IS NO SUCH THING as 'natural processes', there is ONLY magic. This is largely how people in most premodern societies looked at the world. To them there were no 'laws' that the world followed, it was literally a thing constructed by God and following the will of God (or whatever other forces you happened to believe in). This is literally the way things work in HoML, magic is universal. The conceit is that it can be bent to human will, or at least the will of a very few special people.

This doesn't solve anyone's problems though! Sure, it kind of lets us use historical society as a reference point in terms of how people might have thought about this, but the actual social, political, ecological, economic, etc. impact of actual spell casting still pretty much invalidates our ideas about how society will actually function.

Every time I read a post about FPRGing which discusses how monsters might have "evolved", which worries about the existence of half-elves through the lens of genetics, that assumes that universal gravitation operates, I wince.

Indeed, I feel exactly the same.

There are techniques of learning how to imaginatively inhabit a different sort of social situation. I don't claim to be an expert - for instance, I've neither studied nor taught anthropology.

But I have taught theoretical sociology through a broadly "modernity"/"world history" lens, and an important first step in teaching this material is to expose students to examples of non-"modern" social forms and practices, in ways that centre these as "normal" and human rather than weird or deviant or "other".

I'm not really familiar with any RPG that tries to take this approach, with the possible exception (again, and maybe unsurprisingly) of Gloranthic RPGing.

I'm not familiar with an D&D material that takes this approach!

Yeah, I couldn't name anything. I really think the fundamental problem is you can't easily encourage players to try to enter into such a mindset, so you pretty much have to build your setting as "modern, but with pit toilets and horses instead of cars" which is pretty much exactly what you generally get. And of course this is all before we even start to look at just how many different and equally different cultures have existed, even in Europe in the past 1000 years.

Glorantha is a pretty clever creation, with the hero quest and the whole nature of its eschatology and such. The players are really encouraged to enter into some sort of interaction with the heroic dream times of the quests and that sort of naturally imposes a kind of "this is all how the world actually works, its just magic" logic on the PCs. Maybe there are other ways to do that? I don't know.

 

[clearstream]

In this post I aim to leverage loverdrive's set of everything possible in a roleplaying game to compare dramatist and simulationist play.

There's an infinite set E, that contains everything, everything, Super Everything possible in a roleplaying game, from defeating princesses to rescuing dragons to finding love to getting shot in the face to randomly dying from complications of teeth cavities. If you can think of it, it is included in E.

The exact kinds and qualities of elements in E has thus far been left vague: to make E manageable I assume that each possibility is assigned a simple identity. That can then be represented E(p1,p2, ...) Subsets of E can then readily include

• D containing all dramatist possibilities D(d1, d2, ...)
• P containing all simulationist possibilities P(p1, p2, ...)

I believe folk accept both these sets have contents, even if there is debate about the qualities of those contents. Posters have argued for the intersection to also have contents i.e. some dramatist possibilities are simulationist. That can be put as saying that dramatic possibilities can also be plausible (hence the set is labelled P). I believe folk accept that D and P are different sets, meaning that each contains some elements not found in the other.

I contend that for each element in D there is some set of possibilities that it exists in virtue of, and the same for P. So that E also contains subsets like this

• d1(b1, b2, ...)
• d2(b2, b3, ...)
• p1(b3, b4, ...)
• p2(b4, b5, ...)

What makes a possibility a member of such a subset is its fit to some mapping principle(s) or function(s) from it to the possibility that has it as a basis (hence such elements are labelled b). For the sake of this example, the subsets contain all and any elements that can form a basis of the possibility, whether individually or collectively. Illustratively, the possibilities d2 and p1 can therefore fall in the intersection of D and P.

Dramatist play could include d1, d2, and p1; and p2 in moments of deviation from its normal principles. A parallel observation can be made of simulationist play. Thus the two modes are not made distinct through absolutes (the one absolutely avoiding anything found in the other) but in terms of normal principles and propensities. The distributions of possibities found in sessions of each mode are, statistically, significantly distinct.

An intuition I hope to drive with the outline above is that looking for absolutely undifferentiated possibilities is mistaken and unnecessary. A non-empty intersection between D and P does not make them one and the same set! Over all of E every possible subset like d1, d2, p1, p2 exists, and the sets of those subsets will - like D and P - be both distinct and intersecting.

The reasoning above can be resisted in various ways, for example by saying that

1. there are no dramatist principles (D is empty)
2. there are no simulationist principles (P is empty)
3. there are D and P principles, but they are used equally often in all modes of play (so the resultant play can't be differentiated)
4. every D principle is also a P principle (or to put it another way, every basis element has suitable qualities to fit both D and P)

Arguments have been made in the direction of 3 and 4, and it would be open to their proponents to make their claims strong enough to quash the suggested intuition. Notwithstanding, I have shown that proponents of each mode can resist being held to proving every reified possibility to be distinct: that's not a necessary basis for distinctive modes. All that is required are distinguishable qualities that - over E - result in distinct distributions of possibilities.

Illustrative distinguishable qualities of simulationist principles are to be uncaring of player character goals and of narrative arcs, giving way to caring about your references - and I suppose conjectures - and experiencing them through inhabitation. I would recommend reading this powerful up to date explanation of simulationism.

 

[MichaelSomething]

We wonder about how a magical society can collapse in the same way historians wonder how the bronze age civilizations collapse.

 

[clearstream]

We wonder about how a magical society can collapse in the same way historians wonder how the bronze age civilizations collapse.

I like your idea here, while suggesting that it's in fact a different way in respects that matter. Relinking this, because I feel it really hits so much that's right

Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

www.arkenstonepublishing.net

@Bedrockgames @robertsconley as related to your interests.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I like your idea here, while suggesting that it's in fact a different way in respects that matter. Relinking this, because I feel it really hits so much that's right

Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

www.arkenstonepublishing.net

@Bedrockgames @robertsconley as related to your interests.

Articles like that aren't exactly my cup of tea. I just don't think about gaming in that way

 

[robertsconley]

Articles like that aren't exactly my cup of tea. I just don't think about gaming in that way

My sentiments are the same as @Bedrockgames

I like your idea here, while suggesting that it's in fact a different way in respects that matter. Relinking this, because I feel it really hits so much that's right

Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

www.arkenstonepublishing.net

@Bedrockgames @robertsconley as related to your interests.

Every theory has a point. Something that it is trying to address. GNS/Forge Theory is about the design of RPG systems. Stuff that game authors and hobbyists write as rulebooks. Things like OD&D, GURPS, Shadowdark, Blades in the Dark, Fate, Dogs in the Vineyard, and so on.

My theory and advice are not concerned with writing systems. But rather about running RPG campaigns. The system has a very specific role in the scheme I use. It is the tool I use to adjudicate when you or another player says as their character "I do X". Which specific system I use is chosen for two reasons. One it is useful to help me adjudicate what players describe they do as their characters. Two, it is something that I and the group will enjoy using.

What I am concerned about is how to manage the campaign. Systems that try to encapsulate campaign management into mechanics just get in the way. Systems that do this are too limited to handle all the possibilities. I found these types of mechanics detrimental to creativity as most players tend to think "What I can do in the game" rather than "What can I do as my character".

My focus is on using my experience with actual play to develop a series of techniques for managing RPG campaigns that work regardless of the mechanics being used to resolve character actions.

While the article you link is interesting. Since I am not concerned with the issues it raises it is not germane to what I focus on.

 

[Pedantic]

I like your idea here, while suggesting that it's in fact a different way in respects that matter. Relinking this, because I feel it really hits so much that's right

Observations on GNS Simulationism – Correspondence is about Diligence

www.arkenstonepublishing.net

@Bedrockgames @robertsconley as related to your interests.

This is interesting, because the sort of scholarly understanding of Exploration laid out here feels as or more relevant to my board game play, than how I've interacted with RPGs. I play largely low-no randomness games that are usually rated highly on "interaction" between players, or described as "sharp" or "cruel." The joke about Splotter games is that if you can't lose on the first turn, then there was no reason to have a first turn.

The games are competitive, and all the players will try to win to the best of their abilities and we keep vague track of victories, note our relative final scoring positions relative to each other, and so on over the weeks, but the point of the game is not to win, or to demonstrate that we can win, it's to experience interesting board states. All the competitive decision making is in service of finding out what can be made to happen inside this given ruleset, what will emerge when we iterate on the incentives and interactions. Generally we stop playing a given game not when we've all won, or when we know who will win consistently, but when we are no longer confident we won't see something new and interesting by spending a few hours spinning the thing up and going through the motions.

Anyway, fundamentally, that interaction felt more like Exploration and a scholarly appreciation and analysis, as that article presented it, than anything else.

 

[clearstream]

This is interesting, because the sort of scholarly understanding of Exploration laid out here feels as or more relevant to my board game play, than how I've interacted with RPGs. I play largely low-no randomness games that are usually rated highly on "interaction" between players, or described as "sharp" or "cruel." The joke about Splotter games is that if you can't lose on the first turn, then there was no reason to have a first turn.

The games are competitive, and all the players will try to win to the best of their abilities and we keep vague track of victories, note our relative final scoring positions relative to each other, and so on over the weeks, but the point of the game is not to win, or to demonstrate that we can win, it's to experience interesting board states. All the competitive decision making is in service of finding out what can be made to happen inside this given ruleset, what will emerge when we iterate on the incentives and interactions. Generally we stop playing a given game not when we've all won, or when we know who will win consistently, but when we are no longer confident we won't see something new and interesting by spending a few hours spinning the thing up and going through the motions.

Anyway, fundamentally, that interaction felt more like Exploration and a scholarly appreciation and analysis, as that article presented it, than anything else.

I read the word "appreciation" to include aesthetic and emotional dimensions. Do you feel that way to any extent?

 

[clearstream]

Up-thread we discussed Tolkien in the context of some ideas about simulationism. In his essay "On Fairy Stories" is this insight into his thinking: Tolkien explains that

"What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true:" it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside."

I have argued (for example in my posts #768 and #769) that the truth-value of facts in an imagined world is in virtue of their author establishing those facts. Practically speaking, the author is conceded expertise over that world: what they say is true just because they are the one to have said it.

Tolkien adds a constraint. The author has said it, and they are in accord with the laws of that world. I suspect that amounts to saying that any proposed new facts must be in accord and not discord with existing facts. Seeing as any laws of that world are just those that the author has themselves constructed, or adopted in through some process (such as choosing a game text.) A clear statement of a simulationist principle: by Tolkien.