Why do RPGs have rules?

[Pedantic]

The approach I use for preformulations is something like that in Torchbearer2. Starting from a base DC that can be thought of as the minimum degree of uncertainty to justify a check, guideline factors are considered to reach a DC. (5e contains a few types of DC, so this process is for the most general case.)

My preference is a table of DCs covering a reasonable spread of uses per skill, along with a set of conditional/siutational modifiers (i.e, climbing a rough stone wall, climbing a rough stone wall while it's raining, etc.)

The goal is that the DC of an action should be derivable from the description of the situation. There is no situation a check is unjustified, just situations a check result is guaranteed, and I think a robust defaulting system, (Take 10/Take 20, convert sufficiently large dice pools to X successes, etc) should be normative.

So this gets at what I have in mind for preformulations in the context of a simulationist or immersionist mode of play. There is a desire to have the objective setting (i.e. the setting that is not established by the players of characters living within that setting) be an impactful and scaled input into uncertainty and consequences.

There are significant questions about what might be the best means of achieving that? In broad brushstrokes, choices player has made in creating and advancing their character should count, as should what they describe doing. Unnecessary obstacles encountered in play should matter, such as NPC efforts against them or aspects of the established setting. As you say, it is ideal if there are guidelines that do some of the work for you. Expediting the procedure and producing DCs that are consistent with the fictional position, and go on to be consistent with similar fictional positions on future occasions.

"Unnecessary obstacle" bothers me as a formulation, precisely because it encourages the primary excess of generic/scaled difficulty systems: devaluing the player's approach. Deriving a fixed DC from the situation gives the player the ability to influence the difficulty and number of checks (and possibly avoid them altogether) between their current position and whatever position they want to be in. Immersionist/simulationist concerns are well and good, but I've long held that this is the best construction of skills that allow for interesting gameplay decisions. You can articulate an informed preference for different lines of play and different lines of play will produce different results.

 

[clearstream]

My preference is a table of DCs covering a reasonable spread of uses per skill, along with a set of conditional/siutational modifiers (i.e, climbing a rough stone wall, climbing a rough stone wall while it's raining, etc.)

The goal is that the DC of an action should be derivable from the description of the situation. There is no situation a check is unjustified, just situations a check result is guaranteed, and I think a robust defaulting system, (Take 10/Take 20, convert sufficiently large dice pools to X successes, etc) should be normative.

Aligned with you on all this.

"Unnecessary obstacle" bothers me as a formulation, precisely because it encourages the primary excess of generic/scaled difficulty systems: devaluing the player's approach. Deriving a fixed DC from the situation gives the player the ability to influence the difficulty and number of checks (and possibly avoid them altogether) between their current position and whatever position they want to be in.

By unnecessary obstacles, I just mean the nature of the problem. Can this person be swayed? Must we get out the tools and tinker with this old rusty lock, or could it also be quietly finessed? They're unnecessary in the ludic sense, which is to say that nothing compels us to have them other than our playfulness. In their absence the player approach would be moot: they'd be addressing an empty stage.

Immersionist/simulationist concerns are well and good, but I've long held that this is the best construction of skills that allow for interesting gameplay decisions. You can articulate an informed preference for different lines of play and different lines of play will produce different results.

I'm not sure here what construction you're referring to. Do you just mean the things you've said in what I've quoted? If so, then I agree. I want to create the conditions for articulating informed preferences for different lines of play, productive of different results. For me the crucial thing in an immersionist/simulationist mode is that players decide what they will address. Where and what they - through their characters - will add to the fiction.

 

[Pedantic]

By unnecessary obstacles, I just mean the nature of the problem. Can this person be swayed? Must we get out the tools and tinker with this old rusty lock, or could it also be quietly finessed? They're unnecessary in the ludic sense, which is to say that nothing compels us to have them other than our playfulness. In their absence the player approach would be moot: they'd be addressing an empty stage.

I see, that makes sense with earlier context.

I'm not sure here what construction you're referring to. Do you just mean the things you've said in what I've quoted? If so, then I agree. I want to create the conditions for articulating informed preferences for different lines of play, productive of different results. For me the crucial thing in an immersionist/simulationist mode is that players decide what they will address. Where and what they - through their characters - will add to the fiction.

Yes, but I think I should clarify that I'm evaluating lines of play in the context of effectiveness. You're kind of talking about a higher order concern, which is interesting, but I don't think complete. I try to think about the point I'm making with the positioning of intent. I'd prefer actions exist on a neutral plane: they cannot take intent (aside from, "trying to succeed" if success is uncertain) into account, they are machines that do whatever they say they do and act in known ways on the fiction. A player's intent is thus expressed by determining what their goal is (and they will likely have a complex hierarchy of goals, ranging from "stay alive" to "get into that place" to "kill this person" to "acquire a tchotchke from every town I visit"), and then stringing together actions to best achieve it.

The problem I run into is that I'm prioritizing that relationship between intent and action declaration and the resulting gameplay of trying to find the best path through that system, as the first design priority. The unique feature of a TTRPG (and the reason you'd play one instead of a board game) then is the flexibility of player intent. You can set your own victory conditions, and play continues (in most cases) after victory is achieved or becomes impossible, with the ability to set new goals.

Whatever is necessary in the play constrains of the GM, and/or the design constraints of the system to serve that point is fundamentally more important than either producing a consistent simulation or "interesting" situations. To that end, I've found it's generally necessary to assign the GM broad authority and heavy constraints on its use. Perhaps the ideal state of affairs would be to actually split the assorted GM roles into separate people, someone with broad worldbuilding authority, someone serving as a referee and someone else providing motive/action to established NPCs.

 

[pemerton]

I just wanted to point out that you might not even wait for future game designs to find a counter example. The mode in which I have played the card game Mao involve explicit rule making power as a clear part of the lusory fabric.

Without going into the details, the idea is that there is a "base game" where if you reach the "win" condition, your price is to reenter the game, having established a new rule (unknown to the other players). You then have to referee this rule, as noone else know it. There are no formal limits on the rules that can be established this way, but there are obvious practical and social limitations that informs what rules make sense. A large part of what make the game fun is to figure out these rules made by the other players as part of the gameplay, and I hence consider it quite obvious that this rule changing is a clear part of the lusory fabric.

I think this could be a perspective that could be good to have in mind when trying to determine if rule changing powers are part of the original D&D lusory fabric. I would claim that it indeed is, and would put it as a point 3d. It is not part of the DMs role as referee, but it is something they are allowed to wield in function of being a player in the game. Just as in Mao it is constrained by social acceptability, and just as i Mao the player has to referee it themselves (at least until some other player fully catches on).

The analogue to this in classic D&D play is monster design. Gygax's Monster Manual is a record of all the "rules changes" that he made, which players have to figure out as part of the gameplay.

One of the difficulties that occurred in classic D&D play was that all the rules that had been developed by Gygax et al in the course of play are presented, holus bolus, to new players (ie purchasers of their game rulebooks) without that context of play to support them or have them make sense. Hence what may have been high quality play at Gygax's table risks becoming arbitrary nonsense at others' tables.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have to call out the  excellent use of that Latin phrase, which I first saw as the title of a very good episode of Star Trek Deep Space 9.

Why thank you sir

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I see, that makes sense with earlier context.

Yes, but I think I should clarify that I'm evaluating lines of play in the context of effectiveness. You're kind of talking about a higher order concern, which is interesting, but I don't think complete. I try to think about the point I'm making with the positioning of intent. I'd prefer actions exist on a neutral plane: they cannot take intent (aside from, "trying to succeed" if success is uncertain) into account, they are machines that do whatever they say they do and act in known ways on the fiction. A player's intent is thus expressed by determining what their goal is (and they will likely have a complex hierarchy of goals, ranging from "stay alive" to "get into that place" to "kill this person" to "acquire a tchotchke from every town I visit"), and then stringing together actions to best achieve it.

The problem I run into is that I'm prioritizing that relationship between intent and action declaration and the resulting gameplay of trying to find the best path through that system, as the first design priority. The unique feature of a TTRPG (and the reason you'd play one instead of a board game) then is the flexibility of player intent. You can set your own victory conditions, and play continues (in most cases) after victory is achieved or becomes impossible, with the ability to set new goals.

Whatever is necessary in the play constrains of the GM, and/or the design constraints of the system to serve that point is fundamentally more important than either producing a consistent simulation or "interesting" situations. To that end, I've found it's generally necessary to assign the GM broad authority and heavy constraints on its use. Perhaps the ideal state of affairs would be to actually split the assorted GM roles into separate people, someone with broad worldbuilding authority, someone serving as a referee and someone else providing motive/action to established NPCs.

Your preferences almost read like an add for a trad interpretation of 4e D&D!

 

[Pedantic]

Your preferences almost read like an add for a trad interpretation of 4e D&D!

My preferences were largely crystalized by exactly how much I hated skill challenges, making that something of a non-starter. Once you strip those and page 42 out, 4e's rules start to run pretty thin outside of combat. I don't much care for illusory scaling in level based systems.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

My preferences were largely crystalized by exactly how much I hated skill challenges, making that something of a non-starter. Once you strip those and page 42 out, 4e's rules start to run pretty thin outside of combat. I don't much care for illusory scaling in level based systems.

Well, illusory, or just good guidance? You put a flavor on things that matches your conception of how difficult a thing should be an at-level DC for a 15th level PC. I mean, the game itself provides quite a few examples, and the skill descriptions are fairly clear about what a lot of the DCs 'should be'. The level thing to me is just "why of course terrain in places that 15th level PCs go to is DC25!" Yeah, that's primordial ice, adamantium doors, whatever. I can't figure out what 5e is trying to do AT ALL, it doesn't even make sense to me.

But 4e has just as many non-combat rules as any D&D-like game. Anyway, whatever, it seems less arbitrary than most in my book.

 

[pemerton]

I can't figure out what 5e is trying to do AT ALL, it doesn't even make sense to me.

5e uses bounded accuracy for the d20-based component of the rules; but then for two components of the system it uses extremely "unbounded" maths - hit points, which provide the "clock" for combat resolution; and spell (and similar magical) effects.

So when resolution engages d20s only (eg most ability/skill checks) it is bounded; but when it involves combat or injury it is not bounded; and when it involves spell effects it is not bounded.

The apparent result is all the classic stuff that to me makes no sense - eg mid-level wizards can pick themselves up after falling unexpectedly down a pit, or being clocked sidewise by a bugbear's club; but can't run a hurdle race or jump a pit or lift a heavy load. And high level fighters are superhuman when fighting dragons, but pretty mundane when commanding troops. They have the hand-eye and muscular coordination to fight like two or more ordinary people (Extra Attack, Action Surge) but not to pick pockets or walk tightropes or even throw javelins (which have the same range for a high level fighter as a low level <whoever has javelin proficiency>.

To relate this to the OP: the fiction that 5e seems to give rise to, when its rules are applied so as to mediate and ease negotiation, is not one that I can easily assent to. In comparison, 4e makes sense to me: at Heroic tier it generates recognisably heroic adventure fiction, and at Paragon and even moreso Epic it just goes nuts!

 

[clearstream]

To that end, I've found it's generally necessary to assign the GM broad authority and heavy constraints on its use. Perhaps the ideal state of affairs would be to actually split the assorted GM roles into separate people, someone with broad worldbuilding authority, someone serving as a referee and someone else providing motive/action to established NPCs.

I too have been wondering about that. In recent play I am finding that the job of generating unnecessary obstacles can be separated out from the job of managing those obstacles (such as the providing of motive/action to NPCs that you identify... only, after they are established.)

It somehow is coming to feel natural for  player to narrate complications, and then give it to GM to manage whatever they've introduced. It may be a new problem, or a new facet or amplification of an old problem. Either way, GM will then manage it. In a sense, this is a parsimonious application of the Czege Principle.