Why do RPGs have rules?

[Umbran]

giving a concrete example is apparently against Enworld policy

Mod Note:
No. Giving real-world POLITICAL examples is against policy.

And commenting on moderation is also against policy, by the way. If you have questions or comments, please take them to PM with one of the staff. Thanks.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Instead of semantically quibbling, let me propose something specific to illustrate the point: let me be constructively vague:

In the real world, an intelligence analyst may spend a lot of effort on establishing inference chains (A -> B; B & C -> D; giving a concrete example is apparently against Enworld policy but hopefully you can think of one, either ancient or modern) without knowing if the underlying suppositions A and C are true. Intelligence agencies can produce wrong conclusions because they are wrong about the facts. GMs are never in that position. GMs can only be wrong about whether A -> B, not about whether A.

GMs have access to knowledge about everybody's motives, who's paying off whom, where everybody keeps their wealth, etc. They are never wrong about such things. You are correct that they may be MISSING information that hasn't been created yet, but never being WRONG is still an enormous advantage that the CIA can only wish it had.

Do you disagree?

I'll be honest.

I'm not sure.

I understand the point you're making, but how does "I originally thought character X was doing something for Y reason, but during emergent events over the course of a campaign concluded that was probably wrong and instead it was for Z reason" count? I've absolutely had that happen, and I think if I made decisions based on Y early on, in practice it would end up being wrong.

If that sort of emergent and quasi-organic process doesn't happen with someone as a GM--once they've decided people are doing things for a given reason they stick with it--it might seem kind of strange, but its the sort of thing I have happen with PCs and NPCs alike, so...

 

[Thomas Shey]

Aside: on quantum ogres and disregarding of player agency.

The chief reason why I love Apocalypse World is because it drowns PCs in trouble; it doesn't matter what you do, you will experience hardship and there's no move you can possibly make (pun intended, I guess) to escape. If you do everything in your power to remove a threat from the picture, something else will arise to be a thorn in your side. If you don't, it won't.

Because hardship is a reward, not unlike how the reward for beating a level in a vidyagame is to get to play the next, even harder level.

And the fact that's not true with all players is, I think, one of the issues fans of PbtA games sometimes have trouble engaging with.

 

[Aldarc]

And the fact that's not true with all players is, I think, one of the issues fans of PbtA games sometimes have trouble engaging with.

I read what loverdrive wrote, and I'm not following what you are saying here.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I read what loverdrive wrote, and I'm not following what you are saying here.

Hardship is not a reward for everyone. It may be a necessary additional step along the way to things, but having constantly mounting trouble is perceived as a punishment for some. And I really get the feeling some PbtA fans either don't get that, or don't think it should be true.

 

[Aldarc]

Hardship is not a reward for everyone. It may be a necessary additional step along the way to things, but having constantly mounting trouble is perceived as a punishment for some. And I really get the feeling some PbtA fans either don't get that, or don't think it should be true.

I'll be honest, this is not how I would have described the appeal of PbtA either, but I kinda chalked that up to loverdrive having a Russian outlook on life.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

It doesn't even matter. There's a much more profound problem with the notion of 'simulation' beyond a very surface level of 'establishment of plausibility' (and I'd say for anything that isn't pretty small scale even plausibility is just 'sounds good'). The reason for this is the sheer thinness of the actual formulation of the world in question. In principle you COULD work out the outcomes of basically almost everything in the real world, unless it hinges in some extreme way on very small factors that simply aren't tractable mathematically (IE did it rain on the 35 day of the war or not).

For example, we can't really simulate any of the ecology of our fantasy world, because A) ecological factors are fundamentally energy transfer functions, and we don't have anything like data on net energy flows in our fantasy ecology B) it doesn't HAVE a well-defined initial state because no GM in existence inventoried the populations of every species in their fantasy world C) we don't even know the actual underlying laws, not even their form, for a D&D-like magical world. I'm sure I could come up with a D, E, and F without a lot of trouble. If we have no idea what the ecology of this world will actually do, then how can we simulate population dynamics, and the corresponding cultural effects, etc. We can surely make up these things, but then they are made up, and not part of a simulation.

Likewise with politics, economy, social dynamics, and on down the line to individual behavior beyond fairly trivial cases. All we can do is invent 'sounds plausible' statements about basically ANYTHING in the world, and from there we can invent 'sounds plausible' events and such which it sounds like might follow from them. You might 'do some calculations' or something somewhere in this sea of plausible sounding things, but all their inputs must also be simply plausible sounding inputs!

The kind of detail required to predict anything literally does not exist in a fantasy world. You are FAR FAR WORSE OFF than the CIA in the real world. They can potentially acquire sufficient information to predict SOMETHING, but the very concept of causality itself is not one that can be entertained in a fantasy world! There are no rules, no actual state of the fantasy world, etc. Heck, I expect that the CIA will get a lot better at its job as soon as 'AI' gets a bit better, as their ability to note correlations and perform inductive reasoning about things will increase vastly. Such techniques are impossible to apply to non-existent worlds which include very few facts.

For whatever reason…I was chewing on this notion today. I read one of snarf’s essays about free kriegspiel sp? And also came to the same conclusion.

If the referee sees a group marching forward under rifle fire with certain cover, military analysts may have determined probable casualty rates or unit behavior based on observations.

I don’t necessarily need a rule about the sun to know it’s light out more often during the day than night. It’s not a rule—-it’s an assumption.

But how many orcs does a fireball kill? How tough are they? How much can they dodge? How hot is that fire?

If I make those decisions they seem to be the root of rules….

 

[loverdrive]

Hardship is not a reward for everyone. It may be a necessary additional step along the way to things, but having constantly mounting trouble is perceived as a punishment for some. And I really get the feeling some PbtA fans either don't get that, or don't think it should be true.

I'd say hardship being a reward is a necessary component of any PvE game (which RPGs tend to be).

Consider this hypothetical example: PCs have ventured into a tomb of a long dead god, survived all the obstacles on the way and stole its power, becoming god-like beings as a result.

What now, assuming that it wasn't the premise of the whole campaign, and the game is expected to carry on?

Option A: nothing happens
The PCs are now gods among mortal men, and there's nothing the mortals can do to even remotely challenge them. The game effectively ends, and even if the players continue to show up, the game they're playing is now fundamentally transformed. The warrior can't be the warrior anymore, as no one can give them a real fight.

Option B: something happens
The GM pulls out a new threat out of her ass, the armies of Ya'juj and Ma'juj destroy the wall of Dhu'l-Qarnayn, grey little men show up on their flying saucers, whatever, but the game actually continues. The warrior gets to be the warrior AND flex their newfound godhood, suplexing a giant daemonic tripod walkers (shouting RULES OF NATURE while doing so, of course), all that.


Yes, of course in the option A the PCs can now set out to the other worlds, idk, invading Hell themselves, but what is it, if not additional hardship?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I read what loverdrive wrote, and I'm not following what you are saying here.

Not all players are looking to be constantly drowning in trouble I expect.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'll be honest, this is not how I would have described the appeal of PbtA either, but I kinda chalked that up to loverdrive having a Russian outlook on life.

But it doesn't seem that far off of the kind of base premise of PbtA from the point of view of people who don't like that sort of thing. That's always been the issue; as a design, PbtA thinks that avoiding trouble is a flaw. On a certain level, there's some argument to that; if you don't have things going wrong (at least on some level) there's nothing to do in the typical structure of an RPG. But a lot of people don't enjoy the sense the system really wants to chronically push you to that, because that seems like a failure state; for them it both feels fatiguing and feels like they're rolling a rock uphill all the time (and that's over and above how it can project on people who find failure synonymous with incompetence, on the part of the player, the character, or both).