Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Sure, but what's the point of making that distinction? See below...

If the only real distinction is the quantifiable end goal, then it still mostly looks, walks, and quacks like a duck, so to speak, and we are better of considering it a game with some special considerations, rather than a non-game activity.

You just answered your own question there, Umbran. The point is to see if it quacks like a duck. Especially in a thread that heavily implicates the theory of game design, it's helpful to know if we're examining something that has the characteristics of games in the first place.

For example, do we expect to need a solution to the kingmaker problem? If it's not a game then obviously we don't.

But more importantly, knowing that RPGs are not necessarily considered games according to Zimmerman et al. is interesting, and that's enough reason to mention it.

 

[pemerton]

I think your latter clause here contradicts your first, unless your premise is that expertise has to evaluate things deterministically rather than probablistically. Or put another way, someone with a good knowledge of history and samples should be able to, with information about other social factors in play in that town, at least be able to evaluate a probable reaction of the town, even if others are possible. That still seems an expression of expertise to me. In fact, expertise seems relevant to establishing a reasonable range of probable outcomes, such as one might use to put a table together. That seems quite far from "no knowledge or expertise possible here" even if the result is not deterministic and there's room to argue the result; anything involving social and psychological elements can produce disagreement, but that does not mean there is no difference between someone going on intuition and someone who has studied the subject in relevance of expertise. Any other claim seems to make any social science pointless.

I read a lot of social science. I've been a practicising academic for decades, working across two disciplines (philosophy and law), both of which are social science-adjacent and one of which is characterised by many as a social science (law). I have supervised PhD students doing social science in the strict sense.

Social science does not get its utility primarily from being predictive. It gets its utility primarily from being explanatory - that is to say, it yields an appreciation of causal relationships and social processes.

The idea that fictions like The World of Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms, the Lord of the Rings, etc, in any way express social scientific reasoning at all (let alone predictive reasoning), as opposed to authorial inclinations, is impossible for me to take seriously. GH and FR are obviously based on the model of REH's Hyborian Age. LotR has slightly different literary antecedents, but the creative process - while more sophisticated - is at its core comparable.

I mean, just to pick on some of the big ones: the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe and then of the Soviet Union itself, the duration of the current war in Ukraine, the outbreak and duration of the First World War, etc.

In my RPG scenario, when my Lenin-doppelganger returns to my oppressive traditionalist kingdom, and joining with his cabal of friends assassinates key ruling figures and asserts control of the government, what happens? Is it like The Hour of the Dragon or The Scarlet Citadel - REH's stories in which key figures rally around the deposed King Conan and help him restore his rule? Do the liberated people embrace their liberators? If they do, does this revolutionary zeal survive a crisis of administration caused by the loss of legitimacy the traditionalist regime provided? Etc, etc, etc.

No GM can claim to be working out this sort of stuff in virtue of expertise. They are making authorship decisions, within some bounds of "plausibility" established by their knowledge and imagination.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Social science does not get its utility primarily from being predictive. It gets its utility primarily from being explanatory - that is to say, it yields an appreciation of causal relationships and social processes.

I don't think that's particularly accurate with some of them; it just means that their predictive capability has some wiggle in it. That's true of a lot of fields with a lot of moving parts (try to argue how "predictive" parts of medical science are, yet I doubt people would claim they do not have expertise and are not useful in that regard when viewed in a statistical, rather than deterministic fashion).

The idea that fictions like The World of Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms, the Lord of the Rings, etc, in any way express social scientific reasoning at all (let alone predictive reasoning), as opposed to authorial inclinations, is impossible for me to take seriously. GH and FR are obviously based on the model of REH's Hyborian Age. LotR has slightly different literary antecedents, but the creative process - while more sophisticated - is at its core comparable.

The fact that they've chosen to do that does not in any way tell me it cannot be done. It just says they haven't chosen to do so in any particularly notable way.

I mean, just to pick on some of the big ones: the Russian Revolution, the collapse of the Soviet empire in Central and Eastern Europe and then of the Soviet Union itself, the duration of the current war in Ukraine, the outbreak and duration of the First World War, etc.

I don't consider some of those particular unlikely. They may not have been the events of greatest probability, but that's not the same thing; as I mentioned, in a game context, they'd have been on the table, just not the most likely. After all, a specialist in sword fighting will tell you what's likely to happen, not what will happen; that's why there's die rolls in combat resolution. That doesn't make his expertise irrelevant, it just means there's a lot of moving parts, some of them below the level of resolution you're likely to look at. This is not appreciably different except as to scale.

In my RPG scenario, when my Lenin-doppelganger returns to my oppressive traditionalist kingdom, and joining with his cabal of friends assassinates key ruling figures and asserts control of the government, what happens?

You have not provided me enough information at this point to even set up a group of possible results meaningfully. That does not mean I believe I could not do so with a clearer understanding of the situation.

Is it like The Hour of the Dragon or The Scarlet Citadel - REH's stories in which key figures rally around the deposed King Conan and help him restore his rule? Do the liberated people embrace their liberators? If they do, does this revolutionary zeal survive a crisis of administration caused by the loss of legitimacy the traditionalist regime provided? Etc, etc, etc.

No GM can claim to be working out this sort of stuff in virtue of expertise. They are making authorship decisions, within some bounds of "plausibility" established by their knowledge and imagination.

I still maintain they very much could work such things out with an understanding of history to the degree of doing as I've suggested by making a set of probabilities and then generating from them. The fact few will bother does not make that less true and does not seem to have anything to do with your premise. You seem to be arguing that it is not done (which is generally true but I do not believe can be shown to be universally true) and cannot be done (which I neither believe is true nor do I believe you have shown to be true).

 

[pemerton]

I don't consider some of those particular unlikely.

Which of them was predicted by any social scientist of the day? By a majority of them?

Which economist predicted the current inflationary spike? Was their prediction regarded as plausible, or likely, by most of their colleagues?

You have not provided me enough information at this point to even set up a group of possible results meaningfully. That does not mean I believe I could not do so with a clearer understanding of the situation.

To be perfectly blunt, I don't believe you.

Of course, after the event, clever people can often discern what it was that resulted in some unexpected thing occurring.

But I've read a lot of RPG books. Tables of random events. The Pendragon, Magical Mediaeval Society rules, etc. They are just lists on tables that reflect someone's sense of what is plausible. They're story telling devices, not models of actual social processes.

Heck, even in my own field people typically can't predict the outcomes of High Court litigation. Of course they have views, and can scour the transcripts for signs of which judge might be inclined to favour which litigant. But no one knows - if they did, they'd settle!

 

[Thomas Shey]

Which of them was predicted by any social scientist of the day? By a majority of them?

You do understand the difference between "Not unlikely" and "Not the expected result" right? If you think something has a 30% chance of occurring, is it the one you're going to predict?


Less-than-expected results happen fairly often. They're rarely predicted because they're not expected. There's even a term for it in medicine; you look for horses, not zebras.

Which economist predicted the current inflationary spike? Was their prediction regarded as plausible, or likely, by most of their colleagues?

This is rapidly coming across as you thoroughly missing my point.

To be perfectly blunt, I don't believe you.

And to be equally blunt, I think your premise is faulty from the start. So I guess we're done here.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Are you sure the Army wargames you describe are descended from free Kriegspiel and not classic Kriegsspiel? Obviously I wasn't alive in the 1800s, so I'll borrow from The Elusive Shift's characterization:

In the pioneering Reiswitz system developed in the 1820s, players no longer moved pieces on a board but instead wrote orders just as they would to subordinates in wartime, and the referee—in consultation with the rules and sometimes dice—would determine the outcome. Reiswitz intended his game as a teaching tool that would instruct officers in the science of command, especially in drafting written orders, and so the authority of a referee in his game resembled the authority of a teacher over a classroom. By having his referee respond to player orders with only the limited intelligence that wartime commanders would receive, Reiswitz hoped his game would instill in a player “the same sort of uncertainty over results as he would have in the field.”8 Later Kriegsspiel authors such as Julius von Verdy du Vernois had learned from experience that prescriptive rules could make the game dull, overcomplicated, and unrealistic, so they granted referees total discretion in determining the outcome of game events, a movement then called “free” Kriegsspiel.9 This broad referee discretion in deciding events unlocked a corresponding principle codified by Charles Totten’s wargame Strategos in the 1880s: “anything can be attempted.” Players can propose that their forces attempt anything that people in that situation could realistically do.10 This idea was unearthed and reinvigorated by Twin Cities wargamers in the late 1960s, from whence it then exerted a crucial influence on D&D.

If 99.999% of your wargames were not subject to referee discretion that sounds quite a lot like the attitude Vernois was pushing back against by creating FK. Why do you believe your wargames were FK-descended?

Edited for tone. I'm sincerely asking, not arguing.

Well, my understanding is 'Kriegsspiel' itself was never used in any actual military training. It was a concept, and it was demonstrated and became a bit of a hobby, but wasn't taken very seriously. Later the idea was resurrected, in the later part of the 19th Century. All further development, in a professional sense, springs from FK. That includes versions that were practiced by ALL modern professional armies since the early 20th Century. Not having played with Verdy, I cannot definitively attest to how much variation there is between his games and the ones the ROTC used in the 1980s (and I would assume form the basis of whatever they do now, though I guess computers have probably changed things quite a bit).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I asked an epistemologist what it might mean to be expert in an imaginary domain, and they gave this reply


I think this dovetails quite well with my suggestion that expertise in such circumstances is conferred. Alternatively, or I suppose additionally, I could say that it is not their expertise in the imaginary domain that I'm most concerned with, but their expertise in other domains useful to the project of RPG play.

Well, suffice it to say that YOUR epistemologist can fight it out with mine if they wish (I don't actually have one, but I can certainly read about the subject). Many, perhaps most, modern philosophers will hold that ideas do not have any object existence outside of our actual exercise of our minds. Its certainly a subject which, IMHO, does not actually have any possibility of 'answers', and (again following yet another school of philosophers, yay) I would hold that the very notion of asking if ideas exist or not is nonsensical and is, at best, an accident of our sloppy construction of language (which is after all mostly suited to practical tasks).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

If "Forge Games™" are so valuable and interesting, why don't they dominate the RPG hobby - like say WoTC's golden calf or CoC or Traveller or Cyberpunk or those other really boring games that everyone is playing?

Don't they? I can literally find 100's, probably 1000's of titles on DTRPG that either explicitly or arguably fall within that description. Basically EVERYONE that I have gamed with over my many years of playing and running RPGs plays some of these titles at least part of the time. This type of game has been available since the mid-to-late 1990s and is going strong!

Honestly, the word 'dominate', or the actuality of 'domination' whatever that would mean, is hardly the only way to describe the importance of various RPGs in any case. I think it would be literally almost impossible to be a serious professional RPG designer and be ignorant of the techniques used in narrativist games. They sure aren't going away, and they have visibly altered the conversation around RPG design.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Well, my understanding is 'Kriegsspiel' itself was never used in any actual military training. It was a concept, and it was demonstrated and became a bit of a hobby, but wasn't taken very seriously. Later the idea was resurrected, in the later part of the 19th Century. All further development, in a professional sense, springs from FK. That includes versions that were practiced by ALL modern professional armies since the early 20th Century. Not having played with Verdy, I cannot definitively attest to how much variation there is between his games and the ones the ROTC used in the 1980s (and I would assume form the basis of whatever they do now, though I guess computers have probably changed things quite a bit).

Interesting. My sources say the exact opposite (Kriegspiel is sometimes
credited for Prussian success in the Franco-German war of 1870, six years before free Kriegspiel was formulated, see Kriegsspiel – How a 19th Century Table-Top War Game Changed History - MilitaryHistoryNow.com, and that success in turn is credited with other countries' interest in military wargaming) but at least now I know why you believe what you do. Thank you for elaborating on your opinion.

German professional wargaming (1824–1914)​

Prussian officers playing Kriegsspiel (illustr. August 1872).
Reisswitz showed his wargame to the Prussian king and his General Staff in 1824. They were greatly impressed. General Karl von Mueffling wrote: "It’s not a game at all! It's training for war. I shall recommend it enthusiastically to the whole army." The king decreed that every regiment should play Kriegsspiel, and by the end of the decade every regiment had purchased materials for it.[32] By the 1850s it had become very popular in the army.[33] Kriegsspiel was therefore the first wargame to be treated as a serious tool of training and research by a military organization.

...

Over the years, other officers updated Reisswitz's game to reflect changes in technology and doctrine. A particularly noteworthy variant was free Kriegsspiel, developed in 1876 by General Julius von Verdy du Vernois. Vernois was frustrated by the cumbersome rules of traditional rigid Kriegsspiel. They took a lot of time to learn and prevented experienced officers from applying their own expertise. The computations also slowed down the game; sometimes, a session would take longer to play than the actual battle it represented. Vernois advocated dispensing with the rules altogether and allowing the umpire to determine the outcomes of player decisions as he saw fit. Dice, rulers, computations, etc. were optional. This rules-free variant, of course, depended more heavily on the competence and impartiality of the umpire. The relative merits and drawbacks of rules-heavy and freeform wargaming are still debated to this day.

(Emphasis mine.) I would suggest that a thread titled Why Do RPGs Have Rules? probably has a lot to learn from the debate over rules-heavy vs. freeform wargaming.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think your latter clause here contradicts your first, unless your premise is that expertise has to evaluate things deterministically rather than probablistically. Or put another way, someone with a good knowledge of history and samples should be able to, with information about other social factors in play in that town, at least be able to evaluate a probable reaction of the town, even if others are possible. That still seems an expression of expertise to me. In fact, expertise seems relevant to establishing a reasonable range of probable outcomes, such as one might use to put a table together. That seems quite far from "no knowledge or expertise possible here" even if the result is not deterministic and there's room to argue the result; anything involving social and psychological elements can produce disagreement, but that does not mean there is no difference between someone going on intuition and someone who has studied the subject in relevance of expertise. Any other claim seems to make any social science pointless.

My understanding is that ACTUAL efforts have been made in terms of quantifying these sorts of things. In fact there's rather a rich literature. Its not ALL probabilistic, but Monte Carlo methods would certainly be a likely approach in terms of picking an outcome. However, as the entire sad history of 'Intelligence Snafus' indicates, even very well-funded and highly trained organizations with much motivation have a poor track record at predicting outcomes in these sorts of complex situations. I won't refer to any current events, but you needn't look far to see the leadership of modern nations massively miscalculating basic facts about their neighbor's behavior...

What I gather from this is that, at least beyond some fairly limited threshold, the sheer number of variables and lack of quantified values for them alone will preclude forecasting that is much better than pure guesswork and just adjudicating something that 'seems likely'. Certainly if the CIA cannot get these sorts of things right, your local dungeon master is completely overmatched by the task. So in terms of deployment within RPGs, IMHO this sort of idea is a non-starter. We make stuff up, and we give it some basic plausibility. So the question really is; what are the actual criteria that are used to decide between plausible outcomes A and B? I would volunteer that those are going to depend on the agenda of the game in question.