Why do RPGs have rules?

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
It's not. But if both are equally (un)realistic, why not frame the situation that speaks to the PC's dramatic need?

Conversely, if there's no plan to do that, then why bother having players establish such things for their PCs?
Because its all set up ahead of time. I don't decide in the moment that the orcs are in whatever direction tbe PC decides to go. I decide where the orcs are, provide access to information that can lead the PC to the orcs, but run based on whatever is in the direction the PC actually decides to go. If that's to the orcs, great! If that's to the goblins, great! It's up to them where they go, but its up to me before they make that decision what is in that direction.
 

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I look at the game/campaign as being bigger than any one PC's story, in part because I don't want the campaign to end if-when that PC's story ends. And so, there's always going to be lots more out there at any given time than just what matters to the PC you happen to be playing at the moment.
Right, so, to me that is the essence of where we all differ in preference. Either as GM or as a player I am all about the characters. The wider world may be interesting in that it forms their perspective on things, but "after your adventuring career" (or even the supposition that 'adventuring' is a discrete thing ala D&D) doesn't really scan for me.

Now, there's clearly other players, so its not a question of a demand to focus only on my stuff, but I can handle working out where we all fit together, or where we all conflict, etc. depending on the game and whatnot. Certainly I expect the GM to have everyone in mind. So if my character's goal is to become lord of his own domain, then clearly that will not be the ONLY thing going on.

Anyway, that may not be WHY we have different tastes, that I cannot really explain, but other stuff stems from that, I think.
 

Seldom was an issue under AD&D 1e/2e and BX/BECMI/Cyclo+Wrath.
I've used TOTM in 5E, it wasn't that big an issue.

It's far easier, however, to go from minis based rules to TOTM play than to use TOTM-focused rules on a map...
Ehhhhhh, dunno about that... So, yes, for the very loose and arguably minis-based AD&D system its easy to go to ToTM, but its also arguable that its the other way around! I mean the system is notoriously vague as to what exactly the rules are related to 'where you are on the battlefield'. I think B/X and its Basic siblings probably mostly fall into the same bag as AD&D, though they may be more clear as to exactly what is going on (Holmes is the only one I'm familiar with to any great degree, and its pretty vague).

4e is grid based, and any attempt to subvert that is mostly doomed to failure, or at the very least requires some severe compromises in game play. So I'd say its a counter-argument.

5e I think is pretty much designed to default to ToTM with the proviso that you'll have to 'wing it' on AoEs. It certainly can be put on a grid without too much problem and was clearly written with that in mind.

I would agree with the proposition that a grid really won't help much with Dungeon World, and might be actively disadvantageous in terms of how the experience plays. However, that may depend on the participants, some people might like a battlemap and here I think there's unlikely to be actual rules impact from adding it, though it may tend to lead to more conservative notions of what kinds of fictional actions are possible, or what their hazards are. Some people may WANT that.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
I've actually found that playing theater of the mind with 5e can help create far more compelling decisions in combat. When everything is on a grid and we're obeying the absurdly specific areas of effects of spells and mostly static physical positioning of all combatants, things are more rigid.

When you're using theater of the mind instead, then the GM is free to craft things a bit. "Sure, you can hit all four gnolls with the fireball, but you'll hit your fighter as well" rather than "If I center my fireball on this square, I can get all the bad guys and miss all my allies".
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Seldom was an issue under AD&D 1e/2e and BX/BECMI/Cyclo+Wrath.
I've used TOTM in 5E, it wasn't that big an issue.
Even in 1e, having tried TotM once or twice and had it massively fail mostly due to arguments over character and opponent positioning relative to each other and to terrain/setting features, never again. Map and minis all the way, thanks.

That said, the grid is just there as a scale reference. If-when relevant, distances are measured in straight-line feet in whatever direction is required, rather than strictly aligned with the squares or diagonals.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I've actually found that playing theater of the mind with 5e can help create far more compelling decisions in combat. When everything is on a grid and we're obeying the absurdly specific areas of effects of spells and mostly static physical positioning of all combatants, things are more rigid.

When you're using theater of the mind instead, then the GM is free to craft things a bit. "Sure, you can hit all four gnolls with the fireball, but you'll hit your fighter as well" rather than "If I center my fireball on this square, I can get all the bad guys and miss all my allies".
It can also cause arguments, in exactly the situation you describe.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Right, so, to me that is the essence of where we all differ in preference. Either as GM or as a player I am all about the characters. The wider world may be interesting in that it forms their perspective on things, but "after your adventuring career" (or even the supposition that 'adventuring' is a discrete thing ala D&D) doesn't really scan for me.

Now, there's clearly other players, so its not a question of a demand to focus only on my stuff, but I can handle working out where we all fit together, or where we all conflict, etc. depending on the game and whatnot. Certainly I expect the GM to have everyone in mind. So if my character's goal is to become lord of his own domain, then clearly that will not be the ONLY thing going on.
Sure. My point is, however, that once that character does become lord of his own domain, what happens next? Where does or can the greater campaign go from there, and how? How can both the players and GM make further use of the background lore and stories that have built up over the course of play so far?

Completely ending the campaign and starting something new is to me the nuclear option, in that starting brand new means designing a whole new setting - which IME represents about a real-world year of work before even getting to the point of asking who's interested in playing in it. I'd rather not do all that any more frequently than I have to, if it's all the same. :)
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
I've actually found that playing theater of the mind with 5e can help create far more compelling decisions in combat. When everything is on a grid and we're obeying the absurdly specific areas of effects of spells and mostly static physical positioning of all combatants, things are more rigid.

When you're using theater of the mind instead, then the GM is free to craft things a bit. "Sure, you can hit all four gnolls with the fireball, but you'll hit your fighter as well" rather than "If I center my fireball on this square, I can get all the bad guys and miss all my allies".
Make them roll to aim their AoE spells, my friend. Solves all these headaches. :)

The bolded is what you want to do. Now roll and let's see whether you in fact did it.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Sure. My point is, however, that once that character does become lord of his own domain, what happens next? Where does or can the greater campaign go from there, and how? How can both the players and GM make further use of the background lore and stories that have built up over the course of play so far?

Completely ending the campaign and starting something new is to me the nuclear option, in that starting brand new means designing a whole new setting - which IME represents about a real-world year of work before even getting to the point of asking who's interested in playing in it. I'd rather not do all that any more frequently than I have to, if it's all the same. :)
There are OSR games specifically designed to answer that question. ACKS, for example, is all about players becoming rulers, how that works and what happens next.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
It can also cause arguments, in exactly the situation you describe.

It generally hasn't for me. Certainly no less than any other kind of ruling that might be needed.

The grid is what turns every character into a perfect battle computer, able to determine all distances and ranges at all times, all during what's meant to be a hectic and deadly situation. Theater of the mind gets rid of that, and gives the ability for the GM to put in some interesting tactical decisions. Which, to be honest, 5e is fairly lacking.

Make them roll to aim their AoE spells, my friend. Solves all these headaches. :)

The bolded is what you want to do. Now roll and let's see whether you in fact did it.

I think what I've proposed works just as well, and doesn't require any additional rolls.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
It generally hasn't for me. Certainly no less than any other kind of ruling that might be needed.

The grid is what turns every character into a perfect battle computer, able to determine all distances and ranges at all times, all during what's meant to be a hectic and deadly situation. Theater of the mind gets rid of that, and gives the ability for the GM to put in some interesting tactical decisions. Which, to be honest, 5e is fairly lacking.



I think what I've proposed works just as well, and doesn't require any additional rolls.
Both sides have their positives and negatives, and I've used both ways extensively.
 

It generally hasn't for me. Certainly no less than any other kind of ruling that might be needed.

The grid is what turns every character into a perfect battle computer, able to determine all distances and ranges at all times, all during what's meant to be a hectic and deadly situation. Theater of the mind gets rid of that, and gives the ability for the GM to put in some interesting tactical decisions. Which, to be honest, 5e is fairly lacking.



I think what I've proposed works just as well, and doesn't require any additional rolls.

I very much prefer theater of the mind. One of the things that bothered me when 3E came out was the slow shift to people mostly using grids (and it feels by 3.5 it felt like an expectation). I was still playing 3E at that time, but this is something that will generally disrupt my sense of what makes RPGs so special. Not saying others have this same experience with the grid. It is very subjective. I just much prefer having a shared space we are discussing in our imaginations to a tactical grid. I want to picture a movie in my head, not something that feels tied to a board
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
I very much prefer theater of the mind. One of the things that bothered me when 3E came out was the slow shift to people mostly using grids (and it feels by 3.5 it felt like an expectation). I was still playing 3E at that time, but this is something that will generally disrupt my sense of what makes RPGs so special. Not saying others have this same experience with the grid. It is very subjective. I just much prefer having a shared space we are discussing in our imaginations to a tactical grid. I want to picture a movie in my head, not something that feels tied to a board

Yeah, it's a bit tricky because I generally want the players to be informed so they can make decisions, and a grid and minis certainly does that. But I don't like the precision of it all. I like things to be a bit more loose... a little less exact in all ways at all times.

And like I said, 5e kind of lacks a lot of tactical play except what the GM brings to the table, so I think allowing the GM some leeway with distances and stuff works well.
 

aramis erak

Legend
I like the implied premise of your first bullet, i.e. that we can hardly find the mechanics interesting if there are none. I feel like your fourth bullet is a subset of that - we find the mechanics interesting because they simulate something in a way we're interested in. So I would make your first bullet a 6th reason why RPGs need rules.

The middle two I feel fall well into - rules could do this, but are not necessitated. The group could just agree to enforce setting tropes on themselves, and similarly could just ad-lib some starting points. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be more successful with rules; I am drawing a line between what is necessary and what is ideal.

EDIT #3 can be PvP but isn't limited to PvP. Players can want their PvE play to be competitively robust. (They can also want their characters to be able to come into conflict without that amounting to antisocial play. I note your "seldom seen", but in some modes it's more common.)
Player agreement to some limit is still a rule, albeit a different tier of rules from explicit and implicit rules-as-written and written houserules. But for licensed games, genre enforcement is one of the primary selling points. Further, for many players, unless it's in rules text, it simply will not be agreed to. I've often encountered players unwilling to adhere to restrictions not in rules. (There are terms for such people... rules lawyers, munchkins, power-gamers all tend towards that.) Had one who so egregiously violated the group agreed (annd verbally agreed to by him) restriction in a GURPS game, an agreement that every character had the same patron and either a deep sense of duty to him or a weaker actual duty; said player rewrote his sheet after approval and tried to pass it off as the approved one. He decided to kill said patron... I reacted poorly, but everyone else cheered when said patron soul-jarred him, then used a continuous flame-jet on his body. Said patron then used a resurrection spell, and put him back into the reconstituted (but naked, unarmed, and healthy). Turns out the guy seems to be a jerk in most contexts, but he;s just one of a dozen such people I've encountered in >40 years GMing.

The creative tools are, usually, not for the players, but for the GM. Traveller has them aimed squarely at the ref (GM), but uses the coded output strings for both character use and for ref and player knowledgebases. (The strings to describe a world are, canonically, in universe shorthand. Likewise, the strings for characters' attributes appear in the supplement 12 in-setting ID cards...)

Examining the best known such tool, Traveller's world generation (only mildly changed in even the newest editions, excepting and ignoring the ports to GURPS and Hero)... Creating a single world is a big challenge. Creating 10 to 40 of them? daunting. Creating the average of 300 per sector? at best, you get swathes of similar worlds. Which is where the random world gen comes in: I can bang out a subsector in an afternoon, with a couple senteces per world, inspired by the string of physical and social data (Startport Class, Diameter, Atmosphere, Water coverage, Population¹, government type, law level, tech level, presence of bases for the parent interstellar polity, presence of asteroid/planetoid belts, presence of gas giants, and in later evolutions, stellar type.) In the end, it's allowed me to riff world differences much more easily than if I were to create them all from scratch.

Now, Brad Murray's Diaspora uses a different process, but has a system for generating a cluster of worlds, and the worlds themselves, to do likewise... but shifts the rationalizations to group rather than GM alone. Mostly due to the consensus standard that Brad's games employ (final authority is group as a whole, not GM, in all of the games of his I've read.) It works in a similar manner - a short form rolled mechanical description, which serves as a springboard for the group to provide details inspired by it. Less random, more group labeling of new traits, but still, the idea is that it provides a spur of the imagination and a shorthand reference. (While I've not run Diaspora, per se, I've used its rules for solo activities other than in-character play, and used many of Brad's techniques in some Traveller campaigns.)

That said, many games character generation rules are inspirational/evocational... most notably, again, Traveller (with it's career based path) and Cyberpunk 2013/2020 with it's low-mechanical-impact lifepath... but also any game with purely randomized character gen (WFRP1E) or random atts with a few choices following (D&D pre-3E, Palladium, Traveller except the ports...)
 

Sure. My point is, however, that once that character does become lord of his own domain, what happens next? Where does or can the greater campaign go from there, and how? How can both the players and GM make further use of the background lore and stories that have built up over the course of play so far?

Completely ending the campaign and starting something new is to me the nuclear option, in that starting brand new means designing a whole new setting - which IME represents about a real-world year of work before even getting to the point of asking who's interested in playing in it. I'd rather not do all that any more frequently than I have to, if it's all the same. :)
Honestly, since I have not yet played in a campaign where the GM wasn't either too concerned with their own agenda, or hell bent against me, I have never seen it happen! I mean, sure, back in the way old days some of our characters followed the 'build a keep' rules, and then you defend it against the obvious stream of bad guys who try to take it away...
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Honestly, since I have not yet played in a campaign where the GM wasn't either too concerned with their own agenda, or hell bent against me, I have never seen it happen! I mean, sure, back in the way old days some of our characters followed the 'build a keep' rules, and then you defend it against the obvious stream of bad guys who try to take it away...
Sounds like you've had it rough. I'm sorry to hear that.
 

innerdude

Legend
.... its all set up ahead of time. I don't decide in the moment that the orcs are in whatever direction the PC decides to go. I decide where the orcs are, provide access to information that can lead the PC to the orcs, but run based on whatever is in the direction the PC actually decides to go. If that's to the orcs, great! If that's to the goblins, great! It's up to them where they go, but its up to me before they make that decision what is in that direction.

And I think this, right here, is the crux of where my divergence in play preferences began. There came a point after a 7-year run of 3.x as a player in 2009---with a highly "sim" driven GM---where I no longer wanted nor cared to maintain the "simulationism" of, "Well, you chose wrong, so now your character has to fight these meaningless goblin battles before getting to the larger orc problem that actually has narrative stakes for your character."

There was no longer anything compelling about that in play. I wasn't interested in the "sim" or exploration of, "Oh, well now you get to see this tiny little part of the goblin habitat in Forest of Sharpteeth, isn't that cool?"

Well . . . no. No, it isn't cool, or at least isn't as cool as you think, Mister GM. The things that make gameplay interesting to me are things relevant to my character. The game world itself is ever less relevant.

Sadly, I didn't fully learn from my own experience. Four years later I started running a Savage Worlds fantasy campaign in my own homebrew world that was largely successful, but I fell back into the highly ingrained "trad" habits I'd assimilated over the years for running it, and I wonder if players felt some of the similar pains.

So I think my attitude toward "sim" shifted. Because I no longer think that hard sim of this kind is important to "immersion." I no longer believe immersion is predicated on the kind of rigid enforcement of "orcs are HERE, goblins are THERE, because that's just the way it is."

So yes, if I "quantum maneuver" the game world so that what's relevant to character/player stakes into the forefront, that's just what I'm going to do.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
And I think this, right here, is the crux of where my divergence in play preferences began. There came a point after a 7-year run of 3.x as a player in 2009---with a highly "sim" driven GM---where I no longer wanted nor cared to maintain the "simulationism" of, "Well, you chose wrong, so now your character has to fight these meaningless goblin battles before getting to the larger orc problem that actually has narrative stakes for your character."

There was no longer anything compelling about that in play. I wasn't interested in the "sim" or exploration of, "Oh, well now you get to see this tiny little part of the goblin habitat in Forest of Sharpteeth, isn't that cool?"

Well . . . no. No, it isn't cool, or at least isn't as cool as you think, Mister GM. The things that make gameplay interesting to me are things relevant to my character. The game world itself is ever less relevant.

Sadly, I didn't fully learn from my own experience. Four years later I started running a Savage Worlds fantasy campaign in my own homebrew world that was largely successful, but I fell back into the highly ingrained "trad" habits I'd assimilated over the years for running it, and I wonder if players felt some of the similar pains.

So I think my attitude toward "sim" shifted. Because I no longer think that hard sim of this kind is important to "immersion." I no longer believe immersion is predicated on the kind of rigid enforcement of "orcs are HERE, goblins are THERE, because that's just the way it is."

So yes, if I "quantum maneuver" the game world so that what's relevant to character/player stakes into the forefront, that's just what I'm going to do.
Well we can of course all believe whatever we want. To me, fidelity to a shared, coherent setting is far more important than twisting the universe to make sure an individual's "narrative stakes" are catered to, and I feel that way from either side of the screen.

Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever heard the story of how someone came to love storygames that didn't heavily involve a series of bad GMs in that person's past. It's like the genre's fans are mostly victims of bad actors.
 

Pedantic

Legend
Now that I think of it, I'm not sure I've ever heard the story of how someone came to love storygames that didn't heavily involve a series of bad GMs in that person's past. It's like the genre's fans are mostly victims of bad actors.
I don't think there's any generalizable trend there, and that most of the discontent here comes from treating the specific as the universal.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I don't think there's any generalizable trend there, and that most of the discontent here comes from treating the specific as the universal.
I did say that it has been my experience. Storygame fans who discuss their history tend to do so in terms of being "burned" by traditional gaming, usually by bad GMs. I would love to hear from someone who loves them and hasn't been hurt by proponents of the older style.
 

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