Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

It's interesting BTW that we feel so differently about starting in medias res. Also unlike you I don't associate it with linear media. Gameplay has to start somewhere, and experiences like the one I described above make me wary of starting without immediate interesting decisions to make. (Unlike a linear story there's no social pressure to make the decisions in a certain way--either killing the hypothetical goblins, or surrendering to them and telling them fables about a great hidden treasure you can show them, or challenging the biggest goblin to single combat in a bid to take control of the goblin band, are all valid things to attempt. A linear story in the other hand would have exactly one of those options in mind.)

I agree with much of that. To connect some dots on my previous, the players say who their characters are in the imagined world. They might choose roles that put them in the path of invaders, or they might not. The refugee scenario is to encourage thinking about ways different characters could find themselves involved. A courier might have no interest in fighting, they just need to get through.

In media res originates in linear media. From a ludological perspective by my lights justifications for its use must be reevaluated.

 

[Emberashh]

Hamburgers and buns aren't a dichotomy either, but if one of them is clearly absent, it's not a good experience.

Not that I disagree with the point, but I will note that bunless burgers are actually really nice. Usually when I visit other peoples cook outs I usually skip the buns and just go for a meat sandwich instead, as its better than having dry, untoasted buns that just fill you up.

Conflict ought to be emergent, not imposed for the sake of a dramatic narrative.

I think, particulary when it comes to opening a new game, that oftentimes this preference has to balance itself against the, in my opinion, much more unideal issue of repetition.

The trope of the party meeting in a tavern is a classic of course, and absolutely follows the desire to want whatever conflicts that come be emergent, but it is also more or less a cliché at the same time.

Changing up the circumstances to avoid the repetitive opening can be very worthwhile, and a in media res style opening is a great change of pace from the more idyllic. It also can often help to foster a more interesting origin for the groups comraderie.

For example, my DCC campaign was opened with the characters being abducted by space pirates. I prompted the players to describe to me what their characters were up to prior to their abduction by, to them, unknown forces, and the first session started with them simply having to figure out what was going on.

They were both literally and figuratively in the dark, and the proceding funnel that saw the group wittled down to the eventual party as they broke out and siezed the ship served as a nice mix of mystery and action to kick off the campaign.

While this situation could easily have been gotten to by starting in the tavern, I don't believe it would have made for a better overall experience.

I also think this question comes down to whether or not we're emphasizing sandbox play over a linear experience, and I don't think that there is an either/or between the two.

Opening a sandbox with a slightly (if not overtly) linear experience is not uncommon, and its often a good idea if the players are new to the game, as the experience can easily sub in as a tutorial section, and this is the approach video game sandboxes often take with good success.

Skyrim does this rather famously (as does its immediate predecessor) and it actually goes to prove my point, just the other way around.

While Skyrim's and Oblivion's introduction dungeons are great and do a good job of introducing the player to the world and the story to be, they very, very, very quickly become repetitive on subsequent playthroughs, and alternative start mods were often among the first mods to be dropped for both games, with the best examples giving a wide variety of start options ranging from your simple tavern starts to exciting prison breaks and all sorts of other things.

Interestingly though, Morrowind bucked the trend for TES games thus far by not doing an intro dungeon. You have a short controls tutorial as you go through character creation, and then you're unceremoniously kicked out of the Census office with a name and a package.

This kind of start is actually quite brilliant, given that it plays into the atmosphere of Morrowind being this unforgiving place and you a worthless welp, but it does have the drawback of, well, not really being all that interesting from a story perspective. To the overall story being told in Morrowind, your specific start in Seyda Neen is immaterial.

While that works for Morrowinds story, as the whole point of your characters origin is for you to be some unknown and unimportant person who only just meets the qualities of a prophecy, and can only become more through the actions of the story, it doesn't work for every kind of story, and it certainly isn't the way you'd want to begin every story.

 

[aramis erak]

It's trivial to show that this simply isn't true. There are multiple games in multiple genres that include the ability to change, discard, or add rules. Fluxx, Risk Legacy, Mao, 21, Nomic. And that's just off the top of my head (and without delving into Calvinball).

It's also axiomatically wrong by the denotation of "game" - which is one of the more overloaded terms

Definition of GAME

a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other; a division of a larger contest; the manner of playing in a contest… See the full definition

www.merriam-webster.com

Note 2 a..

2
a
(1) : activity engaged in for diversion or amusement : PLAY
(2) : the equipment for a game

But denotational elements are a bit picayune and an appeal to authority.

UMich has a very odd dictionary site... Oh, and it's for Middle English... but it shows the wondrous antiquity of play as synonym for game.

MiddleEnglishDictionary

quod.lib.umich.edu

 

[Thomas Shey]

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...

That's usually a consequence as much of bad information created by organizational bias as it is of bad assessment, though. We'd like to think that professional intelligence orgs wouldn't be vulnerable to that, but they very much are, and that's before political issues come in. At that point "garbage in, garbage out" has some relevance.

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.

I still stand by my opinion that its possible for a GM who takes this seriously to have more reliable information available to him that most intelligence agencies will, albeit there are still some limitations as to noise (you have to be pretty OCD to bother to pursue this sort of thing down to the level of knowing what every little organizational/sub-cultural group thinks about in your setting). And of course you can argue that since he probably made it all up in the first place, he's just deciding the outcome by proxy (but I think that depends at least to some degree how far in advance of the situation he made those decisions).

That all said, I still must insist that there's going to be a big difference between someone with appropriate areas of expertise here in the relevant social sciences, and someone who gets everything he understands about that from fiction, assuming the GM cares to look at it through a social and/or political lens. (There's no assurance he'll bother, but that gets back to the fact that a lot of people who are knowledgeable in an areas will do extra lifting in those areas in the first place--I probably place more effort on religion in game setting than most people do because of my interest in that area). I just don't think claiming there's no difference in result relative to expertise in this area is sound, and looks a lot to me like post hoc reasoning.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Here's the thing, if ANY REASONABLE EFFORT would produce good probabilistic ideas of the outcomes of courses of action in the real world that are non-trivially complex, then why isn't the CIA feeding the US government with incredibly accurate advice?

What makes you think they never are? The fact that they don't do it consistently is largely a consequence of what I mentioned in my prior post: organizational bias and internal and external politics. Even if they do, there's no assurance the government will listen, and in fact, there are numerous examples I could give of this not being the case but it would slide right into politics in a way I don't think would go well here. I'll just note there's a standout example of this process within this century that's an example in point.

We know from historical record that, in fact, the advice given to national leaders by extremely well-funded, highly expert, and vastly experienced intelligence organizations is famously filled with garbage. Clearly no scientific discipline has been invented which is of much use in this endeavor! Heck, as a guy with a math degree and an avowed interest in this subject I am certainly no world-class expert, but if major advances, to the level of being at all useful, had been made,I'd probably have heard about it. We would certainly see the results!

Again, I refer you to my prior post. Good analysis only occurs when people want it to occur, and in many cases they, effectively, don't when it contradicts standing views or what either the organization or those they report to want to happen.

I mean, your point about "things happen and many of them are not the most probable" IS actually a really good point. I think the problem is, there are such a vast array of possible outcomes of complex situations that most of the probability space is filled with very low likelihood ones. So even if a model can pick out a few of the most likely, they only represent a few % of the total probability.

And this is different than any other result output in a game context in that...?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

What makes you think they never are? The fact that they don't do it consistently is largely a consequence of what I mentioned in my prior post: organizational bias and internal and external politics. Even if they do, there's no assurance the government will listen, and in fact, there are numerous examples I could give of this not being the case but it would slide right into politics in a way I don't think would go well here. I'll just note there's a standout example of this process within this century that's an example in point.

There's also the fact that unlike a GM, intelligence organizations never have access to perfect information about the world they live in.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

In media res originates in linear media. From a ludological perspective by my lights justifications for its use must be reevaluated.

Almost all tropes originate in linear media, most of them without being in any way tied to linearity.

To illustrate the point, here's a handy table that you can have players roll on at the start of an adventure (or campaign). If players dislike a given result they may reroll.

You All Meet (d6):

1. During a pirate raid
2. In a booby-trapped hallway
3. During a prison break
4. When two Mafia bosses double-cross each other
5. Over a vampire's just-uncovered coffin
6. At a hostage negotiation with a dragon

Notice how players aren't forced into any particular role in a scenario. Are they Mafia goons? Undercover cops? Innocent bystanders? Accidental heroes? Some of each?

I've found that this is a nice change of pace from leisurely openings like "you all meet at a hairdresser", and it's clearly not linear because the GM doesn't even know in advance how they'll actually meet!

One word of caution: interesting decisions take time to make. It may look at first like a slow start as they hem and haw about who they are in this scenario and what they want to do. Don't rush them! Their minds are already racing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Almost all tropes originate in linear media, most of them without being in any way tied to linearity.

To illustrate the point, here's a handy table that you can have players roll on at the start of an adventure (or campaign). If players dislike a given result they may reroll.

You All Meet (d6):

1. During a pirate raid
2. In a booby-trapped hallway
3. During a prison break
4. When two Mafia bosses double-cross each other
5. Over a vampire's just-uncovered coffin
6. At a hostage negotiation with a dragon

Notice how players aren't forced into any particular role in a scenario. Are they Mafia goons? Undercover cops? Innocent bystanders? Accidental heroes? Some of each?

I've found that this is a nice change of pace from leisurely openings like "you all meet at a hairdresser", and it's clearly not linear because the GM doesn't even know in advance how they'll actually meet!

But, since the GM provided all these options, some people will still see this as a railroad...

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

But, since the GM provided all these options, some people will still see this as a railroad...

If they opt out of every option on the table, ask them to invent their own.

 

[Autumnal]

If it were a practical concern, we'd note that many precepts of game design still hold for these things you want to call "non-game shared recreational activities". 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.

I’ve got Ludwig Wittgenstein right here…

But seriously. There’s immense practical value to his idea of looking at family resemblances and applied usages, while expecting many exact boundaries to either flat out nor exist or to be so hard to define that they’re not worth the effort. People playing RPGs act like people playing games of various sorts, and what’s unique (if anything) about our play is no more remarkable than unique rules and practices for team sports played on fields.

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.

Yes. Yes, yes, yes. This. The best mode for a lot of social science work is the postmortem. Sometimes, if things line up just right, you can get a diagnosis of something in progress. Anticipation is hard to do, and hard for others to recognize when it succeeds.

At the risk of repetition, it's not ideal to use dramatic forcing techniques such as in media res, even though such techniques might have a worthwhile purpose (and implications) in the linear media they come from and other modes of RPG. Answering this question makes me see that my immersionism is connected with a desire to see game play out as game. Conflict ought to be emergent, not imposed for the sake of a dramatic narrative.

But not everyone who values immersion immerses most easily or enjoyably in a basically naturalistic framework. Many of us prefer to do so within a genre framework, in which expectations and events routinely diverge from naturalistic versions.

For us, an in media res dramatic opener which will be explained along the way is a happy thing, welcome and familiar. We know where we are at the point. As Clive Barker puts it in the opening sentences of Weaveworld:

“Nothing ever begins.

“There is no first moment; no single word or place from which this or any other story springs.

“The threads can always be traced back to some earlier tale, and to the tales that preceded that; though as the narrator’s voice recedes, the connections will seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making.

“Thus the pagan will be sanctified, the tragic become laughable; great lovers will stoop to sentiment, and demons dwindle to clockwork toys.

“Nothing is fixed. In and out the shuttle goes fact and fiction, mind and matter, woven into patterns that may have only this in common: that hidden amongst them is a filigree which will with time become a world.”

That’s the pure thing, for me. It’s pieces whose pattern will develop over time, and we can play in the expectation of it adding up to a story while knowing very little about what the story will be. (Lots of people talk about story as a goal in gaming, pro and con, in teleological terms. But actual authors writing actual stories seldom know what all the major moments and consequences and resolutions will be, so we don’t have to as gamers to share a determination to make as satisfying a story together as we can, either.)