Why do RPGs have rules?

hawkeyefan

Legend
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.

I've never had anyone I'd categorize as a bad GM. I think I've seen... and performed... some bad GMing. But I think a lot of that is because what I'd consider bad GMing now was actually a primary mode of play, supported by actual products and sources of GMing advice.

I think a big part of it is also my tastes have changed, and also the amount of time I can devote to gaming. I used to be a full on world builder where I'd spend a lot of my free time crafting settings and scenarios, which required a lot of work. As I've gotten older, I'm less able to do so, and I also had a couple of instances where what I was doing didn't suit all my players, and there was conflict... and I realized that the amount of effort I put into the game kind of made my argument stronger by default... but that wasn't really fair. Basically, I was annoyed that my level of effort wasn't always appreciated, and I realized that it also wasn't necessary. I had a game kind of fall apart because of this, and it was eye opening. And I don't expect most trad minded folks here would view anything I did as bad GMing... but I think it was problematic.

The amount of work was simply not needed, and all the time I'd spent on it was lost... and I realized that if that was anyone's fault, it was mine. I chose to spend all that time and effort. And so I decided not to do that anymore.

I changed the way I GMed. This was around the time 5e first came out, so I started with that. But before long, I had very similar concerns coming up... and so I looked beyond D&D and other familiar games, and learned about all kinds of games that were doing things in a way that suited me and which still allowed many of the things that I like.

I don't think that my shift in game style had much to do with anyone else's GMing, it was much more about my own.
 

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Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I've never had anyone I'd categorize as a bad GM. I think I've seen... and performed... some bad GMing. But I think a lot of that is because what I'd consider bad GMing now was actually a primary mode of play, supported by actual products and sources of GMing advice.

I think a big part of it is also my tastes have changed, and also the amount of time I can devote to gaming. I used to be a full on world builder where I'd spend a lot of my free time crafting settings and scenarios, which required a lot of work. As I've gotten older, I'm less able to do so, and I also had a couple of instances where what I was doing didn't suit all my players, and there was conflict... and I realized that the amount of effort I put into the game kind of made my argument stronger by default... but that wasn't really fair. Basically, I was annoyed that my level of effort wasn't always appreciated, and I realized that it also wasn't necessary. I had a game kind of fall apart because of this, and it was eye opening. And I don't expect most trad minded folks here would view anything I did as bad GMing... but I think it was problematic.

The amount of work was simply not needed, and all the time I'd spent on it was lost... and I realized that if that was anyone's fault, it was mine. I chose to spend all that time and effort. And so I decided not to do that anymore.

I changed the way I GMed. This was around the time 5e first came out, so I started with that. But before long, I had very similar concerns coming up... and so I looked beyond D&D and other familiar games, and learned about all kinds of games that were doing things in a way that suited me and which still allowed many of the things that I like.

I don't think that my shift in game style had much to do with anyone else's GMing, it was much more about my own.
Fair enough, thank you. I think a big difference here is if you value worldbuilding as an exercise for its own sake, in addition to the value it brings to the game. If you do (as everyone here knows I do) the work simply doesn't feel as much like work, and you can soldier on even through the difficult parts. If you don't, if you are instead focused mostly or entirely on the needs of your players, world building feels like much more of an obligation, leading one to finding another way.
 

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.

Well, I'll only speak to myself here, but most of the folks you're talking to in this thread are overwhelmingly (to nearly exclusively) GMs. But before I get into my anecdote, I don't like the framing of all games that aren't Traditional as "Storygames." All of the games that would be captured under the "Storygames" umbrella include systems and agendas that diverge dramatically from one another. There are "Storygames" that verge toward "Writer's Rooms" in their process and play, there are others that verge toward "Player's Side Railroads" in their process and play, and then there are "Story Now" games that have a rather traditional authority/role model when it comes to situation framing and consequence handling, but diverge dramatically from Traditional games in key ways. These games are systemitized and play sufficiently differently that you can have a healthy conversation over whether these archetypes even evolved from a common ancestor.

Ok, my anecdote (which doesn't entail being burned by a series of bad GM's in my past):

* Starting running games at 7 years old in '84. Pawn Stance Dungeon Crawls exclusively. Full Gamism, challenge-based play. Did that for like 7 years including moving through Moldvay Basic to B/X to (reluctantly when I moved to Florida) AD&D 1e and supps.

* I watched, though did not participate in, many many games with 10 longterm Trad GMs from 1987 through 1994. Full-on Hickman Revolution GMs w/ a combination of GM-side manipulation of the gamestate to accomplish Sim veneer meets Storyteller imperatives. Massive use of GM Force to corral players into a metaplot thus putting them persistently in a passive/reactive state of play. Chicken or the egg if the players were passive participants first or if they were conditioned to be passive by the GM's deployment of techniques and opaque system. Regardless, a mixture of functional games and totally dysfunctional games. Really depended upon (a) how special the GM was in the performative aspects of play + the covert manipulation of gamestate + how good of a "tour guide" they were for the setting and metaplot + how capable they were at constructing metaplot/bread-crumbing/info-dumping via exposition and (b) how willing the players were to be passive consumers of the GM's work.

* RC comes out in early 90s and I spend the next half-decade running hexcrawls that were mostly Gamism. Not as Pawn-Stancey as the above, but in the neighborhood.

* Ran some Over the Edge and Everway in the mid 90s.

* Playtested 3.x FR due to one of my friends adoring the setting and he and a few others convinced me to run a Trad, Setting-Tourism, Metaplot-heavy 3.x FR game for 7 years starting with AD&D 2e in 1997 through about 2004 with 3.x when it came out in 99. I did not enjoy this is the most charitable way I can put this. The players enjoyed the game very much, but I did not (again...charitable).

* Early 2000s I ran a little Fate, a little bit of Burning Wheel, and then ran Dogs, Sorcerer, Shadows of Yesterday, My Life With Master, and Sorcerer when they came out. I ran a ton, ton, ton of Dogs in the Vineyard from 2004 to date.

* 2007 rolls around and the lead up to 4e D&D has me very, very excited. It looks to be combining the best of Gamism with Story Now tech. It comes out and doesn't disappoint. I loved it, I love it, I've run 2 games from 1-30, a few other games spanning Heroic Tier or Paragon Tier and have run several PBPs of 4e (including one presently).

* AW comes out and I run the hell out of that and several derivatives and at volume. I've run probably 10 PBtA games or so. They aren't all the same engine. Some are better than others. I'm just finishing a 16 month Stonetop game and I'm on session 5 of another Stonetop game.

* From early 10s through now I've run a ton of Cortex+, Strike (!), Mouse Guard, Torchbearer, Harper's games like Blades in the Dark (et al) and various and sundry other games that span that gamut of "Storygames" listed above. Too many to mention to be honest.

* Late 2016, I get requested to fill in for a rather flakey 5e GM who was running that same Hickman Revolution style game with their own setting and an elaborate metaplot. I get access to their notes and just wing it when I fill in. I try to breadcrumb/info dump to mainline the metaplot & setting-as-protagonist game they were running...but I just gave up and tried to make each session fun for these 13-16 year olds I was running games for. Waaaaaaay too much effort to ingest these plot points and GM Force shenigans to ensure them. If you don't want your story trajectory that you're imposing upon play to go awry....maybe reliably show up to run your game. So I let them figure out how to info dump/GM Force their metaplot back online when they ran their game. It actually kind of worked for them to be honest because they kids got this toggle of two very different games when I was running their 5e game vs when the primary GM was running it. So fair enough.

* My only play experience is a one-off Cthulu by a fantastic Railroading Cthulu GM. Total Cthulu Railroad and fantastic game. One-off Traveller game by a very good Traveller GM way back when. A pair of Story Now one-off games where I simultaneously tutored/played a PC to help a young girl run a Mouse Guard game and a 50 year old (who was brand new to TTRPGing but a few years before) run a Dungeon World game. Every one of those experiences was excellent. I might be forgetting one...but those come to mind. Oh yeah, a Dread game and a 10 Candles game that I co-GMed and ran a PC. Great games.




So no personal horror stories of being a player in a game for me. My very scant play experience has all been excellent whether its been a one-shot, total railroad or something else.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
Fair enough, thank you. I think a big difference here is if you value worldbuilding as an exercise for its own sake, in addition to the value it brings to the game. If you do (as everyone here knows I do) the work simply doesn't feel as much like work, and you can soldier on even through the difficult parts. If you don't, if you are instead focused mostly or entirely on the needs of your players, world building feels like much more of an obligation, leading one to finding another way.

There's some of that in there for sure. The work didn't really feel like work... until it was wasted. Until the game I had put so much preparation into wasn't going to happen because two players weren't really on board with what I was setting up. Once that happened, it was hard not to look at it as work and time wasted.

It'd have been very easy for me to blame the players. And I think many folks here likely would do so. But that's the easy way out. I looked at the situation and considered it a long time. It was the first time I ever had a game fall apart like that. I wanted to at least learn a lesson from it. Spending a lot of time considering it, and discussing some of it with some of the players at times, was eye-opening.

The situation also made me look at what value the preparation brings to the game. And I had to face the difficult truth that a big part of the prep was my personal enjoyment. And although it matters that the GM has fun, it also matters if the players have fun. A lot of the prep wasn't always stuff the players would ever know, or pick up on. In a lot of ways, I was treating them as an audience, but they were an audience who didn't always get all the information. The nature of the game required that I keep things from them... and then that limits their ability to enjoy or appreciate the elements I'd created. To boil it down, they weren't getting nearly as much enjoyment from the prep as I was.

So I decided to prepare with that in mind. My goal was to focus on more gameable prep... stuff that would be equally enjoyable/applicable to the players. And I wound up finding this equally if not more enjoyable. I liked having less control over things, and learning through play. I liked letting the players have more control over how things went. I think I'd always liked this kind of thing when it happened in play, but I assumed it was a kind of rarity that had to happen "naturally". I didn't realize that you could focus on this kind of play specifically.

If I look back at my earliest games, I'd never describe them as bad or not fun or anything like that. I loved the vast majority of gaming that I've done over the years. And I've made lifelong friends because of gaming, so I'd not change that for anything. But my tastes and preferences have shifted.
 

loverdrive

Prophet of the profane (She/Her)
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.
This reeks of "no true scotsman" stuff. Oh, yeah, it's always the GM's fault, only if you had a good GM...

I've had good GMs who don't waste my time with pointless drek. The problem is that they all ran their games as if it was Apocalypse World, and at that point, why not just play Apocalypse World?

Trad games have time waste built into them. Time wasted on pointless boring combat (and, like, I'm one of those people who is happy to take vacation and travel to another city to play in a Warhammer tournament); time wasted on arguing whatever the hell "melee attack with a weapon" is; time wasted building a 150pts GURPS character from scratch mid-session; and, of course, constant looming risk that time that wasn't wasted before will go to waste and good scenes will retroactively become a steaming pile of drek.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
This reeks of "no true scotsman" stuff. Oh, yeah, it's always the GM's fault, only if you had a good GM...

I've had good GMs who don't waste my time with pointless drek. The problem is that they all ran their games as if it was Apocalypse World, and at that point, why not just play Apocalypse World?

Trad games have time waste built into them. Time wasted on pointless boring combat (and, like, I'm one of those people who is happy to take vacation and travel to another city to play in a Warhammer tournament); time wasted on arguing whatever the hell "melee attack with a weapon" is; time wasted building a 150pts GURPS character from scratch mid-session; and, of course, constant looming risk that time that wasn't wasted before will go to waste and good scenes will retroactively become a steaming pile of drek.
Well, that was an overwhelmingly partisan response quite disrespectful of any form of gaming that isn't your own. Hard to respond fairly to something so scathingly negative of other people's preferences.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
There's some of that in there for sure. The work didn't really feel like work... until it was wasted. Until the game I had put so much preparation into wasn't going to happen because two players weren't really on board with what I was setting up.
For me, were those two players to say "thanks but no thanks" on being invited in it's all good; I'd just invite two others in instead. There's no point having players who don't want to be there.
 

Lanefan

Victoria Rules
Trad games have time waste built into them. Time wasted on pointless boring combat (and, like, I'm one of those people who is happy to take vacation and travel to another city to play in a Warhammer tournament); time wasted on arguing whatever the hell "melee attack with a weapon" is; time wasted building a 150pts GURPS character from scratch mid-session; and, of course, constant looming risk that time that wasn't wasted before will go to waste and good scenes will retroactively become a steaming pile of drek.
Your rather tight definition of "wasted time" greatly overlaps with many other people's definition of enjoyable gaming.

Is a good scene a good scene in the moment? If yes, then nothing else matters then or later - even if that scene turns out to be meaningless in the long run, it did its job by providing enjoyment at the time. Therefore, that time was not wasted.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
For me, were those two players to say "thanks but no thanks" on being invited in it's all good; I'd just invite two others in instead. There's no point having players who don't want to be there.

That’s one way to look at it.

Another would be, because these players are my friends, isn’t there something I could come up with that would appeal to us all?

I didn’t want there to be a game without them. I wanted to include the whole group.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
Your rather tight definition of "wasted time" greatly overlaps with many other people's definition of enjoyable gaming.

Is a good scene a good scene in the moment? If yes, then nothing else matters then or later - even if that scene turns out to be meaningless in the long run, it did its job by providing enjoyment at the time. Therefore, that time was not wasted.

I don’t think that’s always true.

I’ve played in games where a seemingly important choice is later shown to not be as meaningful, and that’s harmed my enjoyment. Sure, I had fun at the time… but the retrospective take harms enjoyment at that point, and likely going forward.

So that stuff can certainly matter.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
That’s one way to look at it.

Another would be, because these players are my friends, isn’t there something I could come up with that would appeal to us all?

I didn’t want there to be a game without them. I wanted to include the whole group.
Yes, and bending to the desires of some of your players was, I suspect, no great hardship for you, because you weren't really having much fun in any event. You weren't asked sacrifice something you really enjoyed, lessening the fun you get out of gaming. That's not going to be true of everyone, not the GM, and not the players that didn't raise complaints.
 

robertsconley

Adventurer
So why do RPGs have rules?
Because of the central mechanic that defines an RPG where
  1. The referee describes a setting
  2. The players describe some character they want to play in the setting.
  3. The referee describes the circumstances in which the characters find themselves.
  4. The players describe what they do as their characters.
  5. The referee adjudicates what the players do as their characters and then loops back to #3.
Steps 3 and 5 repeats until the session or campaign ends.

If the referee is a good teacher, coach, and communicator. Knows the setting of the campaign very well including what is possible for characters to do. An RPG campaign can be played without any reference to a system. However, the skill required to make it fun and doable as a hobby is high enough that most folks turn to a written system.

Having an RPG system saves the players and referee time and work in several ways.
  • As a terse form of communication as to how a setting or genre works.
  • The system mechanics will provide a terse and often precise description of various elements of the setting like characters, and objects.
  • By teaching the referee and players how to handle common situations that arise in the setting or genre. Determining when there is a certain success, a certain failure, or the odds are uncertain, thus needs to be resolved with a procedure.
  • As a reference so that similar rulings are made for similar situations.
This allows the group to spend more of their limited hobby time and verbal bandwidth on playing the campaign. Rules are not a requirement to run an RPG campaign but having a set of rules make it more fun and doable in the time one has for a hobby.

The key element for tabletop roleplaying that elevates it above "Let's Pretend" that makes it work is the judgment of the human referee, not the rules. The rules are an aide and a tool to make this happen easier as a fun pastime.

Where it gets messy is in the implementation of the system. The only firm requirement that the system needs to follow is that the mechanics reflect the setting of the campaign accurately. If they don't then either one of two things will happen. The rules will be modified to reflect what missing or the setting will be altered to reflect how the rules describe things.

Beyond that, it is a purely personal preference. Are characters described using class and level or skills and talents? Is armor about avoidance or damage resistance? Does social interaction get the most detail, is it combat encounters? Or both. Level of detail and focus are often the main drivers in which set of rules the group finds fun and interesting.

As long as the result is consistent with the setting and the group finds it fun to play there is no right answer. The loose analogy I like to use is that it doesn't matter whether the car is painted red or blue., they both will get you to your destination. But you may have more fun getting there driving a red car.

Again while this is easy to describe, the implementation is messy given the flexibility of the core mechanic that all RPGs share.
 

Micah Sweet

Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I don’t think that’s always true.

I’ve played in games where a seemingly important choice is later shown to not be as meaningful, and that’s harmed my enjoyment. Sure, I had fun at the time… but the retrospective take harms enjoyment at that point, and likely going forward.

So that stuff can certainly matter.
It definitely depends on the person, just like nearly everything else.
 

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
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.
Mod Note:

That’s painting a bunch of gamers with a pretty dismissive and divisive brush. And that’s a good recipe for sowing discord in a thread or forum.

I think you’ve done enough damage in this thread. You might want to reconsider how you describe your fellow hobbyists.
 

hawkeyefan

Legend
Yes, and bending to the desires of some of your players was, I suspect, no great hardship for you, because you weren't really having much fun in any event. You weren't asked sacrifice something you really enjoyed, lessening the fun you get out of gaming. That's not going to be true of everyone, not the GM, and not the players that didn't raise complaints.

Well not exactly. As I said, this was a big deal for me. I'd never had a game fall apart like that. I wasn't going to continue without two of my friends included, but I absolutely felt like I was giving something up. I had put a lot of effort into the game, and I think if we stuck with it, they'd have liked it. It's not the kind of game I'd try and run today, but at the time, it was something I was really looking forward to.

This was a pretty formative experience for me and was a big part of my shift in thinking as a GM and a gamer in general. It forced me to look at my GMing and what I was doing with prep with a dispassionate eye and really examine what was going on. I don't think that was an easy thing to do.
 




pemerton

Legend
Seeing as we're doing origin stories . . . I've posted mine on these boards several times over the years. Here's a link to a 2013 post: https://www.enworld.org/threads/pem...a-good-approach-to-d-d-4e.333786/post-6074196

I discovered The Forge more-or-less randomly in 2004 (I can't remember what link or Google search took me there) and found the GNS essays hugely interesting. (And had no prior knowledge of the Usenet discussions and analysis.) And naturally enough they made me think about my own playstyle. At that time I was GMing Rolemaster, and had been doing so for many years, and I was easily able to identify it as a purist-for-system simulation system (= process simulation). But what I and my group were doing with it seemed a bit different from sheer process simulation and world exploration: it seemed to have more in common with the vanilla narrativism that Edwards described. In particular, morality in our game emerged out of play and mostly at the metagame level of player decision and response, rather than ingame as part of the fiction. (I have a long time hatred of mechanical alignment!) And a lot of my play approximated more towards No Myth (improvised NPCs, locations etc) than heavy pre-prep, and that seemed to be a strength rather than a weakness.

So reading those essays, plus other posts, blogs etc, plus starting to look at some of the games Edwards referenced (Maelstrom Storytelling, HeroWars/Quest, etc), got me thinking more theoretically about my game and the techniques I was using. And I came to understand the Forge style in terms of my own play, rather than encountering it externally and not noticing it could be relevant to my own (very non-avant garde) fantasy RPGing.

This meant that when 4e started to be revealed by WotC, and some of its key features started to be revealed, I felt I had a fairly good handle on what was motivating the designers and what sort of play their game was meant to support. And therefore was pretty sure it would be a game I would enjoy - a level of mechanical crunch comparable to Rolemaster (for no very sensible reasons my group is pretty crunch-loving), but action resolution mechanics that would better support my preferred approach. (RM's PC build rules are pretty good for light fantasy narrativism play, but quite a bit of its action resolution is not.)

. . .

I really stumbled into it [ie scene-framing, no myth techinques] when I started GMing Oriental Adventures in 1986/87. I knew that I didn't really enjoy, and was also quite bad at, designing and adjudicating dungeons in the Pulsipherian/Gygaxian style. The difference that OA made was that the PCs had pretty clear inbuilt hooks (honour, family, etc etc) and so did the monsters (the Celestial Bureaucracy, etc), so it made it easy to build and adjudicate fun and engaging encounters on the fly.

After that I ran a two-person thief game in a similar way - of all the AD&D archtypes, I think the thief has the easiest inbuilt hooks (which in my view also explains some of the notorious problems of thieves in dungeon exploration, because it means having to ignore those hooks). And then I strated my series of long-running RM games, which is also how I met my current group.

. . .

I've become more self-conscious about my techniques and have deliberately cultivated some and changed others

. . .

One example of a deliberate change in technique - being a lot more upfront about stakes, for instance by table-talking with the players, and by using many fewer secret notes/one-on-one reveals and instead doing many reveals in front of the whole group even though only one or two PCs would know - thus setting up an emotional tension between what the players know and what their PCs know and can do about it. And giving them clear options for pushing the game forward to resolve those tensions. (Having been doing this for several years now, I've recently discovered that Robin Laws talks about this very technique in his "On the Literary Edge" essay in Over the Edge.)​
 

pemerton

Legend
Because of the central mechanic that defines an RPG where
  1. The referee describes a setting
  2. The players describe some character they want to play in the setting.
  3. The referee describes the circumstances in which the characters find themselves.
  4. The players describe what they do as their characters.
  5. The referee adjudicates what the players do as their characters and then loops back to #3.
Steps 3 and 5 repeats until the session or campaign ends.
This process describes a pretty narrow slice of the full gamut of RPGing.
 

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