Why do RPGs have rules?

[Maxperson]

My position and I think the position of others is not that 5e has a strong view against GM authority/rule zero (whatever that is, we still don't have a working definition) , but instead that it is deliberately vague about such things. This is the compromise edition, the 'please like us and do whatever you would normally do' edition.

Not 100% certain =/= vague. There was nothing vague about ANY of those quotes of mine, even if when you squint sideways you can finagle a bit of room for it not to be 100%.

Fudging is still a lie. 'Oh I rolled a 20, wink emoji' or 'Oh I didn't roll a 20, wink emoji'.

Again, please show me the text of this rule zero.

There is no inherent lie with fudging.

DM rolls an 18: "I rolled a 5." = lie.

DM rolls a 20: "The monster missed." = truth. The monster did miss since the DM is within his rights to alter outcomes. The roll doesn't have to determine the result. As the quote I provided earlier said, rolling is like a rule and the DM is not subject to the rules, they are subject to him.

I do it all the time if a player rolls and in mid roll I decide that he really didn't need to roll, even if that roll comes up a 1. I just tell the player that I don't think his PC could fail, so he succeeds.

 

[soviet]

Not 100% certain =/= vague. There was nothing vague about ANY of those quotes of mine, even if when you squint sideways you can finagle a bit of room for it not to be 100%.

There is no inherent lie with fudging.

DM rolls an 18: "I rolled a 5." = lie.

DM rolls a 20: "The monster missed." = truth. The monster did miss since the DM is within his rights to alter outcomes. The roll doesn't have to determine the result. As the quote I provided earlier said, rolling is like a rule and the DM is not subject to the rules, they are subject to him.

I do it all the time if a player rolls and in mid roll I decide that he really didn't need to roll, even if that roll comes up a 1. I just tell the player that I don't think his PC could fail, so he succeeds.

So you're saying that in 5e the DM has a secret and unilateral veto over the outcome of every single game action, such that the hundreds of pages of rules are merely suggestions that operate under their whim from moment to moment, and your evidence is... twelve vague phrases from a couple of sections in the DMG.

 

[Maxperson]

So you're saying that in 5e the DM has a secret and unilateral veto over the outcome of every single game action, such that the hundreds of pages of rules are merely suggestions that operate under their whim from moment to moment, and your evidence is... twelve vague phrases from a couple of sections in the DMG.

No. There's still the social contract to consider. The DM shouldn't be a douche about it.

 

[hawkeyefan]

And nothing the other way that I have seen or has been provided by anyone on that side. That's pretty telling about how 5e views it.

No, it’s telling how you see it.

The rules are so open because they were written in natural language rather than technical language. This was almost certainly deliberate because as @soviet points out, they needed to try and get many different groups back with this edition.

First, there is no "lie." The DM can add house rules and add, remove or alter existing rules as he sees fit, "They serve him not the other way around." That means that the DM can change a rule from round to round if he wants and it won't be a "lie," but rather a change to the rules. As for ignore, the DM can ignore a rule as a change or house rule from round to round if he wants. It's not a conflation. It's Rule 0.

It’s never cited as such, this is what started this whole conversation.

Your taking several different snippets from the places they’re scattered around the book and them lumping them all together and calling them Rule Zero.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if this was the designers’ intent that this be presented as a bullet list under a section titled “Rule Zero”? And better yet, that it be in the rulebook that everyone’s more likely to read, the PHB?

Sure. The primary goal is fun(keeping them coming back for more). The DM can fail at the goal, but that goal has nothing to do with whether or not he has Rule 0 authority. He can succeed with it, or fail without it.

But he serves the players. Just as the rules serve him.

If you’re defining “serves” in that way, then I don’t see how your interpretation can stand.

 

[Pedantic]

I'm no expert on the 'magic circle', the Wikipedia 'lusory_attitude' article linked to a "Magic Circle" article, and I did skim it earlier. They don't appear to be the same thing at all, IMHO. I mean, if you are playing an RPG, there is presumably a shared imagined world, and then it has a 'boundary' in some sense which is the 'magic circle' as I understand it. So 'crossing the magic circle' is a way of saying "participating in the shared imagined world" with a kind of notion of some degree of consistency, structure, and extended duration to that world (or at least those which lack those traits are not really analyzable).

I think this is a mistake; you're substituting the literary meaning of "magic circle" for the ludic one here. In a literary sense, the magic circle is the suspension of disbelief that allows one to engage with a story (and possible the conceits of the story) and care about non-real people and events. It is from that meaning we get the ludic sense of a magic circle, but in games, the magic circle is not primarily concerned with a fictional reality, but with fictional constraints and systems. When playing a game you submit to the systems the game requires, agreeing that victory is defined by these points, and the available actions are those specified on this reference sheet, and other moves that could be made aren't valid and other means of evaluating success don't count. You could make a case that there's a literary magic circle also at play, in an RPG concerning the shared fiction, or even in a board game, that this cube is representative of a sufficient coal to power a train over an average mainland route and so on, but the core meaning is different.

Sure

I can see that the points "players agree to a set of rules which they treat as binding on them when they join a game" and "games have rules and processes which define them as such" as being kind of fundamental building blocks of ideas about games. I agree though, they're so basic that they are not going to tell us much in general. Your use of these concepts to question the 'gameness' of RPGs with omnipotent (unbound by the rules) GMs was kind of amusing. It made sense as an argument and seems like a useful observation, but it was hardly necessary to get so technical to arrive at what is a common observation in many circles.

There are TTRPGs I and my immediate social circle probably wouldn't classify as games, but our measuring stick is very much coming from board games. I generally think any activity that isn't trying to put participants under pressure to gauge the quality of decision making they're doing isn't a game, even it resembles them in other ways, but I think it's fairly settled ground that TTRPGs draw a bigger tent approach than I would if I was setting terms.

I don't think that really matters. As you are speaking to a math guy (I hesitate to use the term 'mathematician' as I don't really feel that my studies ever went far enough to warrant such a title) 100, 1000, and 10^43 power are all simply countable integer numbers of states. Its thus still very much true that the states of chess are limited to an infinitesimal fraction of those available in a D&D game, and in fact this is even more so in that the VAST majority of the chess 'configuration space' is filled with uninteresting chaff. The fact that chess books can give a thorough grounding in the tactics and strategy of chess by presenting perhaps less than 100 games, so maybe 5000 states pretty much tells me that this line of argument doesn't go much of anywhere useful.

I can easily tell the difference between chess and D&D. In fact, at the age of 13, in 1975, when I heard about the IDEA of D&D, I instantly and immediately grasped this exact difference! It was like an electric shock, the implications were instantly apparent! Now, had I been conversant at that time with Free Kriegsspiel or Dave and Co.'s Braunsteins I might have been less shocked, but it was definitely a revelation to my naive brain, and the 'openness' of D&D was exactly what I immediately saw as its most salient characteristic.

While I agree there is a difference, I don't know that it's meaningfully derived from the number of available board states. That there are more possible states a TTRPG can be in than a game of Go, when Go has so many board states as to be well beyond human comprehension isn't where that difference emerges from. I'd look instead to the available action declarations, instead of the resultant board state. Chess is different in that it will accept significantly less inputs and the distance between the resulting board state between all the available inputs is significantly smaller than it is in a TTRPG.

I just Googled "game studies magic circle" and found a link to this: Games and the Magic Circle

It defines the "magic circle" as "the area within which the rules of the game apply, a special space, ideally but not necessarily demarcated by the rules within which play occurs. It need not be a physical space, but can instead be virtual or a frame of mind." A frame of mind is, for present purposes, the same thing as an attitude - it establishes a (metaphorical) space within which play occurs, ie within which normative credence is given to the rules that constitute and govern the game.

I'm prepared to accept that, within the field of game studies, there are differences to be drawn between a lusory attitude approach and a magic circle approach, but I don't think those differences are going to tell us much about RPG play or design, at least not in the context of this discussion.

I don't know that these things are in conflict. Lusory attitude seems to be describing the mentality players adopt to enter a magic circle.

This capacity of the expert judge to reason about the modelled "reality" is a way of achieving "openness" of the game.

But that openness obviously makes possible the imagining of "realities" about which no one at the table is an expert, or about which no one could ever be an expert. It also invites an approach to the imagined reality in which what would really happen becomes a less interesting question than what exciting or engaging thing might happen?

This is the underlying assumption that always gives me pause. It requires a quite specific understanding of what "exciting and engaging" means, and focuses entirely on the question of "what happens" instead of "what did the players do?" I'm consistently annoyed that RPGs don't provide players sufficient agency to make and execute good plans, or don't have sufficiently impartial adjudication systems for player decisions to matter consistently.

To me, "rule zero" seems like a cludge that has the purpose of achieving the second sort of thing without having to change your basic presentation of the game (rules, procedures of play, etc) from what they were when play was aimed at the first sort of thing. Whereas Dungeon World (and many other RPGs) don't even pretend to be oriented towards the first sort of thing, and set out procedures of play and rules that are designed from the ground up to achieve the second sort of thing. This is how they become complete rule sets for open play.

This is where my stance on "rule zero" diverges, in that I don't think it's serving that goal either. Instead, it mostly serves to prevent a sufficiently concrete set of rules that players can actual engage in a game, and gets away with that by pretending to cover for incompleteness elsewhere in the system.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think this is a mistake; you're substituting the literary meaning of "magic circle" for the ludic one here. In a literary sense, the magic circle is the suspension of disbelief that allows one to engage with a story (and possible the conceits of the story) and care about non-real people and events. It is from that meaning we get the ludic sense of a magic circle, but in games, the magic circle is not primarily concerned with a fictional reality, but with fictional constraints and systems. When playing a game you submit to the systems the game requires, agreeing that victory is defined by these points, and the available actions are those specified on this reference sheet, and other moves that could be made aren't valid and other means of evaluating success don't count. You could make a case that there's a literary magic circle also at play, in an RPG concerning the shared fiction, or even in a board game, that this cube is representative of a sufficient coal to power a train over an average mainland route and so on, but the core meaning is different.

As I said, I just read the article, it claims to be discussing the topic WRT games mainly from what I could see. There was a bunch of stuff discussing the 'permeability' of the magic circle, as in how structures and considerations from outside tend to 'flow in' (but it can go both ways) I think the canonical examples are things like Linden's 2nd Life money, which took on a real world value. But yes, I think the idea of 'the rules of the virtual world' is cogent. However you have to take on more than that to enter the circle, as I would see it. You also have to actually have access to the shared imagined space, that is participate with the other people who are also there. Right?

While I agree there is a difference, I don't know that it's meaningfully derived from the number of available board states. That there are more possible states a TTRPG can be in than a game of Go, when Go has so many board states as to be well beyond human comprehension isn't where that difference emerges from. I'd look instead to the available action declarations, instead of the resultant board state. Chess is different in that it will accept significantly less inputs and the distance between the resulting board state between all the available inputs is significantly smaller than it is in a TTRPG.

I think there are potentially several useful ways to measure things. As I stated in another post, I think the USEFUL states in Chess, or Go for that matter, are VASTLY less than the total. Otherwise how could a chess strategy book teach chess in, say, 100 games? It thus MUST be that there are generalizations across these large spaces which effectively reduce them to much smaller spaces, and those much smaller spaces (and here maybe your idea of smaller differences is effective) are more similar too. So RPGs turn out to actually be much more EFFECTIVELY extensive than ANY board game.

I don't know that these things are in conflict. Lusory attitude seems to be describing the mentality players adopt to enter a magic circle.

This is the underlying assumption that always gives me pause. It requires a quite specific understanding of what "exciting and engaging" means, and focuses entirely on the question of "what happens" instead of "what did the players do?" I'm consistently annoyed that RPGs don't provide players sufficient agency to make and execute good plans, or don't have sufficiently impartial adjudication systems for player decisions to matter consistently.

This is where my stance on "rule zero" diverges, in that I don't think it's serving that goal either. Instead, it mostly serves to prevent a sufficiently concrete set of rules that players can actual engage in a game, and gets away with that by pretending to cover for incompleteness elsewhere in the system.

Yeah, I assume that what you are looking for then is something closer to true classic RPG play. I mean, WELL EXECUTED of course. But I don't know for sure...

 

[pemerton]

I don't know that these things are in conflict. Lusory attitude seems to be describing the mentality players adopt to enter a magic circle.

I don't know that they're in conflict either. Upthread I posited that they fill the same explanatory space, and @AbdulAlhazred questioned that.

I'm not very familiar with the work in which these concepts figure. I'm prepared to accept that they might be interestingly different (eg the lusory attitude by definition seems to be a mental state, whereas the magic circle seems like it might be a metaphor for more than just a mental state). But as I said, I don't think those differences are going to be very relevant to the conversation(s) in this thread.

This is the underlying assumption that always gives me pause. It requires a quite specific understanding of what "exciting and engaging" means, and focuses entirely on the question of "what happens" instead of "what did the players do?"

The contrast you draw here isn't entirely straightforward, as some of the things that happen are things that result from what the players do, and thereby what they have their PCs do.

But as per @AbdulAlhazred's reply to you just upthread, I infer from your posts that you are looking for something closer to a boardgame or wargame experience, than creation of a shared fiction as such.

 

[Maxperson]

The rules are so open because they were written in natural language rather than technical language. This was almost certainly deliberate because as @soviet points out, they needed to try and get many different groups back with this edition.

Yes, and the meaning of the natural language, "You are in charge..., "The rules serve you..." and "The game is yours..." is "You are in charge..., "The rules serve you..." and "The game is yours..." The DM is in charge and decides. The natural language doesn't mean anything different than what I am saying.

It’s never cited as such, this is what started this whole conversation.

Your taking several different snippets from the places they’re scattered around the book and them lumping them all together and calling them Rule Zero.

No. Not one lump at all. Each quote says that the DM is in charge. Not one requires the DM to consult the players on anything, though a few do say he should talk to the players and take them into consideration before making the decision. Each one all by itself is enough to qualify as Rule 0.

Wouldn’t it make more sense if this was the designers’ intent that this be presented as a bullet list under a section titled “Rule Zero”? And better yet, that it be in the rulebook that everyone’s more likely to read, the PHB?

Maybe, but the entire design intent of 5e is Rulings over Rules(another callback to Rule 0) so a lot of things are not explicitly said in order to have the DM make decisions about things.

But he serves the players. Just as the rules serve him

Show me one quote that says that the DM serves the players. Hell, show me one that even implies that. Even the strongest quotes that say the DM should talk to the players and take them into consideration don't even begin to imply that he serves the players. Nor do the players serve the DM.

One side serving the other is a completely ridiculous notion. We aren't slaves. The rules, however, are...............to the DM.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note:

There’s been a number of prickly posts and testy responses in this thread. I’ll also note that some of what was reported has already been self-edited.

So, let’s try keeping the temperature in here a little lower, as some have realized they needed to do.

 

[clearstream]

Commonality of use. @clearstream themselves said they got it from a specific article, and hadn't seen it outside of that. This is why jargon can very easily obscure as much as it can clarify, so I try to avoid it unless I'm reasonably sure anyone likely to get involved in the discussion knows what I'm talking about.

To be clearer, I haven't seen lusory commonly used except in connection with Suits' construction. I use it, because it puts something succinctly. It's not uncommon to see it cited in discourse on the sorts of issues at play in this thread. It's uncommon to see lusory used in any other context.

This thread asks why roleplaying games have rules. To answer that can reasonably start with why games have rules. Suits points out that to play a game is to voluntarily accept unnecessary obstacles, so one general category of game rules are those constitutive of such obstacles. The why of a rule that constitues an unnecessary obstacle is to constitute that obstacle. And the why of the obstacle is found in view of lusory (playful) ends. The OP cited Baker giving a why of rules, i.e. to force upon players the unwanted. That immediately put me in mind of Suits. The unnecessary and unwanted becomes, paradoxically, the necessary and wanted. That paradox is dissolved by Suits' observation.

Just as the OP rightly quotes something Baker put well, inviting and facilitating those interested to learn more, I quote something that has been influential in game studies because it is put well and those interested can readily find further discussion on it if they want to learn more.