Why do RPGs have rules?

[Thomas Shey]

But somehow the fact it was made up 20 years ago somehow makes it less arbitrary than making it up 20 seconds ago . . . .

I think for some values of "arbitrary" this is absolutely true. Whether that value matters to you is a different question.

 

[pemerton]

There could be in-fiction circumstances that dictate one is more realistic than the other, such as the party wandering through a large orc territory and no goblins are anywhere nearby

The point is that this is all just made up! The GM could just as easily made it a large Goblin territory, or whatever else.

The closer the game holds to reality(and nobody is expecting the game to mirror reality), the more realistic it is. There isn't a person alive who has every circumstance they encounter meet some sort of personal dramatic need. Games that are all about meeting dramatic needs, while fun for those who play they, are inherently less realistic on that aspect of RPGing than simulationist games where sometimes a dramatic need is met, and sometimes it's something else.

I struggle to take this seriously: the reason for having events in our RPGing that don't speak to player-authored dramatic needs for PCs is because it's more realistic?

The reason there isn't a person alive who has every circumstance they encounter meet some sort of personal dramatic need is because real people, not being characters in fictions, don't have dramatic needs. That said, most people I know and deal with have more in their day-to-day life that speaks to their personal concerns and connections then seems to be the case in the typical "simulationist" RPG of the sort you seem to be describing.

 

[pemerton]

I wouldn't say it was necessarily the case that a game world constructed around dramatic needs couldn't be more realistic in respects than some other game world. Still it would be less realistic to the extent that it lacks truths that are independent of the characters.

Upthread, the issue of Middle Earth and simulationism was raised. It seemed to be suggested that there could be a simulationist game set in Middle Earth.

Everything in Middle Earth is authored to meet some dramatic need or serve some thematic purpose.

Now it is being posited that this is "unrealistic" and hence at odd with simulationism.

I'm lost.

there would be world-truths that are independent of or external to character-related dramatic needs.

If a "world truth" means something the GM has made up in their notes that the players never learn about, then it's separate from play, and in my view of little interest.

If a "world truth" means something that we can imagine happening that is independent of the events the PCs participate in, then every RPG with some minimum degree of sophistication has this. Eg in my BW games there are shops, soldiers, guards, sailors, etc and its obvious that all these people have lives and families and so on that don't have any relevance to or bearing on the PCs.

If a "world truth" means something that the GM makes a focus of play that is not connected to the players' evinced concerns for their PCs, then what we're talking about in my view is not "realism" but rather who gets to decide what play is about.

 

[AnotherGuy]

There is no "living world". It's just "makings up" based upon rationalizations, justifications, and extrapolations of other "makings up."

I struggle to take this seriously: the reason for having events in our RPGing that don't speak to player-authored dramatic needs for PCs is because it's more realistic?

I imagine things evolve in your (@pemerton and @innerdude) fictional worlds without the need for hard or soft moves.
For instance, surely the passage of time alters the state of things within your world that necessitates some fictional authoring?

 

[pemerton]

There might not be a direct translation but IMO there's at least some correlation between length and quality, in that a longer campaign is more likely to entail deeper and richer interaction with the other characters (as they come and go) along with the setting and its elements; if for no other reason than people tend not to begrudge the time these things take.

This is absolutely bizarre.

Soap operas run for years and years. Films with compelling characters and dramatic interactions runs for a couple of hours. There's no correlation at all between number of sessions played and quality of play.

 

[pemerton]

I've run through three definitions of real: 1) mapping to sets of real-world facts, 2) externality to imagined characters, and 3) fits a naturalistic theory.

Oh right. I agree, It's all make believe.

When I ran a Wuthering Heights game, and one PC had to carry a box with a body in it from his book shop in Soho to the Thames, so as to dump it in the river, we Googled a map of London. I would say that's a pretty tight mapping to sets of real-world facts.

If that makes Wuthering Heights a sim game then I'll eat my piece of clothing that flutters in the wind.

As for "externality to imagined characters", how is something that's all make belief "external" to other imaginary things?

To talk about what simulationist RPGing involves we need to talk about the actual people doing it, and what they do. Not try and identify features of their fiction that ostensibly differentiate it from others' fiction.

 

[loverdrive]

This is absolutely bizarre.

Soap operas run for years and years. Films with compelling characters and dramatic interactions runs for a couple of hours. There's no correlation at all between number of sessions played and quality of play.

I mean... If one purposefully avoids interesting dramatic developments and strives to them only ever happening on accident, a longer campaign obviously has more opportunities for cool dramatic interactions to happen randomly.

 

[pemerton]

I imagine things evolve in your (@pemerton and @innerdude) fictional worlds without the need for hard or soft moves.
For instance, surely the passage of time alters the state of things within your world that necessitates some fictional authoring?

Do you mean the passage of time at the table, or the imagined passage of time in the fiction? I think you mean the latter, but am not 100% sure.

If you do mean the latter, I feel that your question gets things the wrong way round - you seem to say that imagined events necessitate real world action. But it's the opposite - real world actions include the authoring of new imagined events.

So if, at the table, for whatever reason there is agreement that, in the fiction, time has passed, then someone has to frame a new scene or otherwise say something about what is happening now. In AW, this would be the GM making a soft move. In Torchbearer, the rulebook gives the GM advice on how to prompt the move into the next Adventure Phase as the players finish their Town Phase - to use PbtA language, this is a type of soft move, namely, providing an opportunity.

 

[Krachek]

Wrong.

The thing that I finally grasped about "trad sim" GM-ing is that literally all of it is arbitrary.

Whatever reasons the GM chooses for inserting one bit of fiction or another is only based on some other bits of fiction the GM made up yesterday.

Or last week. Or 20 years ago when (s)he created the campaign world.

But somehow the fact it was made up 20 years ago somehow makes it less arbitrary than making it up 20 seconds ago . . . .

I would not give much value on idea I have 20 years ago, those are usually more dull and lame than idea and content I produce today.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The closer the game holds to reality(and nobody is expecting the game to mirror reality), the more realistic it is. There isn't a person alive who has every circumstance they encounter meet some sort of personal dramatic need. Games that are all about meeting dramatic needs, while fun for those who play they, are inherently less realistic on that aspect of RPGing than simulationist games where sometimes a dramatic need is met, and sometimes it's something else.

Here are two scenarios.

1) The PCs leave town, traveling to the north and run into goblins.
2) The PCs leave town, traveling to the north and run into the tribe of orcs that killed the ranger’s family.

Which is more realistic?

I'm not talking about the passion-project types, I'm talking about the big players - WotC, Paizo, a few others.

But WotC doesn’t make more than one system. And Paizo doesn’t really, either, with Starfinder as an exception (though I don’t know if they’re even still putting out material for it).

Most of the big companies produce games based on one system. So I’m not really sure if your initial point is all that valid.

There might not be a direct translation but IMO there's at least some correlation between length and quality, in that a longer campaign is more likely to entail deeper and richer interaction with the other characters (as they come and go) along with the setting and its elements; if for no other reason than people tend not to begrudge the time these things take.

Nope, it’s a preference. If it’s a preference a person has, then they may be more likely to consider a longer campaign yo be good. But, I’d think that if a campaign is good, it’s more likey to go long because the participants are enjoying it. The length of a campaign would, in that sense, seem to be a result of the quality of play rather than a cause of it.

Also, deeper and richer interaction with the characters doesn’t seem to be about length of the campaign so much as the game’s focus. I’ve played years-long campaigns that had very shallow and minimal character interaction. It doesn’t tend to be what the game is about. There are games that are designed to be focused specifically on the characters and the depth of their interactions.

Given how often you seem to criticize this kind of play, it seems strange to now see you claim that its goal is a positive outcome of long campaigns.

 

[AnotherGuy]

Do you mean the passage of time at the table, or the imagined passage of time in the fiction? I think you mean the latter, but am not 100% sure.

If you do mean the latter, I feel that your question gets things the wrong way round - you seem to say that imagined events necessitate real world action. But it's the opposite - real world actions include the authoring of new imagined events.

So if, at the table, for whatever reason there is agreement that, in the fiction, time has passed, then someone has to frame a new scene or otherwise say something about what is happening now. In AW, this would be the GM making a soft move. In Torchbearer, the rulebook gives the GM advice on how to prompt the move into the next Adventure Phase as the players finish their Town Phase - to use PbtA language, this is a type of soft move, namely, providing an opportunity.

You were correct, I was referring to the passage of time within the fiction.

So if I'm understanding you correctly, 10 years pass.
Where say in D&D, a DM like myself will narrate to the players what their characters have heard/learned about the changes to a region (imagined events necessitating real world action), your understanding is

The GM frames a new scene (real world action authoring new imagined events), which you say in AW this is referred to a soft move.

I'm suspecting, and please correctly me if I'm wrong or miss something, the only difference that may exist between the two would be the motive for the change in the fiction. Perhaps yours is necessitated by dramatic needs, where the former is because I am attempting to adhere to a simulationist principle (whatever that is). Is that a fair statement to make?

...........................................................................​

Another example. In the style of games you play, one uses clocks/die in order for a GM to make a hard move such as a change in the fiction and the gamist mechanic of that is foregrounded (i.e. the players are aware of it).
Would it be fair then to say that if the DM in your typical traditional D&D game foregrounded the mechanics about a future change and say used a different element, say fictional time (x days something occurs), to narrate changes in the fiction - the two play styles, at least in that example, would be similar if not identical?

 

[Maxperson]

Per my email just above, I feel there are two definitions of "real" in play here.

You write lots of emails, don't you?

Under one definition the real it encompasses the sets of those facts that map to our experiences and knowledge of the actual Earth in the actual Universe, i.e. the one that we as players, referees etc (and not our characters) live in. That is what is often meant by simulation, for example to simulate a bronze age economy is to map it to what we know about say the historical Mediterranean bronze age economies on Earth.

Another definition of real is the metaphysical. I won't characterise that as having any simple definition, but for the purposes at hand I believe it includes that real facts be facts that are external to and independent of the person or simulated person perceiving or impacted by those facts. The real facts are not dependent on the person or simulated person. They can stand alone. They stand even where never perceived and never impacting the person or simulated person.

I agree with you about both of these. The only thing I would say is that with the first definition, you don't need to map it completely to what you know about the bronze age. The model doesn't have to map closely to what has happened here on Earth, but can model it in a more general way.

 

[innerdude]

I imagine things evolve in your (@pemerton and @innerdude) fictional worlds without the need for hard or soft moves.
For instance, surely the passage of time alters the state of things within your world that necessitates some fictional authoring?

Well sure. I'm not suggesting that no authoring is done, or that it needn't be based on / extrapolated from preestablished authoring, or that one shouldn't try and make the authoring consistent.

I'm just saying you can't claim that the process isn't arbitrary. Creating fiction doesn't somehow lose its arbitrary nature just because you claim to adhere to some quotient of (arbitrary) "absolute fidelity" to an (arbitrary) "realist" standard, when your judgment of adherence to those standards is already based on a thousand fictional things decided (arbitrarily) some count of X days ago.

I'm not saying the process shouldn't be done. I'm saying it should be done with a wider multiplicity of concerns (one of them being player/character dramatic needs).

And I can say this with supreme confidence because I've done it, and it didn't break my games (they didn't devolve into Toon absurdity), and it made them better.

Are there times not to do it? Yes. Dungeon crawling being an obvious one. Dungeon crawling is on its face opposed to catering to dramatic needs.

But the cries of anathema and "the end of roleplaying as we know it" around injecting dramatic needs into the fiction are massively overblown by the sim crowd.

Once again, backed by first hand experience.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Has anyone even done that? I don't recall seeing someone say that orcs are more realistic than goblins. There could be in-fiction circumstances that dictate one is more realistic than the other, such as the party wandering through a large orc territory and no goblins are anywhere nearby, but absent that sort circumstance, they are equally plausible.

I agree, one could already have been established in the fiction, or at least implied, or there could be some genre logic that applies, etc. so that one might actually seem to fit better. At a basic level, both are plausible.

You can't call it arbitrary, because you cannot possibly know if the DM picked one on a whim(arbitrary) or had a reason for it. Absent that certainty, you're belittling what simulationist DMs do by calling it arbitrary. Someone really running a simulationist game has reasons for everything he's doing, so nothing is arbitrary.

A reason? And what could that reason possibly be? List me a set of reasons which would apply! I'm not saying they don't exist, but the only category they can really fall into is the GM's agenda! Every single reason will fall into that category. I mean, I can imagine some fairly unusual scenarios, like "I am not using spiders because one of my players is deathly afraid of them" or other such 'lines and veils' as they are called (this one I have seen once, but it is not common). I mean, verisimilitude could be a whole table agenda, but as I said, its fundamentally flawed in that the GM ultimately has all fictional authority, and thus established the conditions of the verisimilitude to start with.

 

[Maxperson]

Wrong.

The thing that I finally grasped about "trad sim" GM-ing is that literally all of it is arbitrary.

That's simply impossible. I mean, literally impossible. Whatever you grasped is flat out wrong. If I am basing my decisions on reason, that is mutually exclusive to basing it on a whim(arbitrary). Whatever it is that you grasped cannot alter reality and make me wrong about this.

I suppose you might use the definition of arbitrary that means that I am acting as a judge and being an arbiter, but the context of use here is not that. People here use it to mean whim in order to put down the style that they dislike, so I push back against that inaccurate depiction of what it is that I do.

Whatever reasons the GM chooses for inserting one bit of fiction or another is only based on some other bits of fiction the GM made up yesterday.

False. That's not only what it is based on.

Even if it was, though, as long as it is all based on reason, arbitrary never comes into play. Even going back to the construction of the original campaign(if the DM created it), the design of the campaign is based on reason. What's more, even if the original world was created completely on a whim, further decisions that use that whim as the foundation for the decision are in fact not arbitrary. I would have a reason for the decision that I just made. What happened originally doesn't alter the fact that I would be using reason for the decision.

 

[Maxperson]

Realism as a focus of play is often overrated by it's fans.

Not really. If a table of fans enjoys it, it's not overrated. I mean, I could just as easily say that Story Now as a focus is often overrated by it's fans. Neither is true, though. People should just organize according to what they enjoy and have at it!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Another definition of real is the metaphysical. I won't characterise that as having any simple definition, but for the purposes at hand I believe it includes that real facts be facts that are external to and independent of the person or simulated person perceiving or impacted by those facts. The real facts are not dependent on the person or simulated person. They can stand alone. They stand even where never perceived and never impacting the person or simulated person.

See, I might once have sort of accepted this, but over time I realized its nonsensical. The imagined world is so 'thin' in terms of the web of facts which are established within it, that to say one thing is more realistic than another has no meaning at all. Nobody can do it, orcs, goblins, hyperborians, bullywugs, or cat people, it could be ANYTHING and virtually any plot or characters could be present as needed.

Fundamentally I protest: My narrativist Dungeon World or HoML games lack NOTHING in verisimilitude relative to your trad simulationist ones! This argument is a nothingburger IMHO.

 

[Maxperson]

I struggle to take this seriously: the reason for having events in our RPGing that don't speak to player-authored dramatic needs for PCs is because it's more realistic?

So every event in your life has meet a dramatic need for you? Nothing has ever happened outside of your control and which has not been dramatic?

The reason there isn't a person alive who has every circumstance they encounter meet some sort of personal dramatic need is because real people, not being characters in fictions, don't have dramatic needs.

Sure they do. What is a dramatic need for your PC is effectively the same as someone in the real world who had a child kidnapped and getting the news that he has been found.

We all have things that when happen would correspond to a dramatic need for a PC.

 

[hawkeyefan]

That's simply impossible. I mean, literally impossible. Whatever you grasped is flat out wrong. If I am basing my decisions on reason, that is mutually exclusive to basing it on a whim(arbitrary). Whatever it is that you grasped cannot alter reality and make me wrong about this.

I suppose you might use the definition of arbitrary that means that I am acting as a judge and being an arbiter, but the context of use here is not that. People here use it to mean whim in order to put down the style that they dislike, so I push back against that inaccurate depiction of what it is that I do.

False. That's not only what it is based on.

Even if it was, though, as long as it is all based on reason, arbitrary never comes into play. Even going back to the construction of the original campaign(if the DM created it), the design of the campaign is based on reason. What's more, even if the original world was created completely on a whim, further decisions that use that whim as the foundation for the decision are in fact not arbitrary. I would have a reason for the decision that I just made. What happened originally doesn't alter the fact that I would be using reason for the decision.

It's not false though. Whatever "reasons" that the GM has are also constructs of imagination. If they decide that elves live in the forest because that's what genre tells us, that's a choice. They could just as easily subvert that trope and have the elves live in the desert. There's a reason for either. What makes one more real than the other? Nothing.

If you trace back this perceived causality, it all leads to the GM deciding something. There's no actual causality for any of it other than "this is how the GM decided it would be". And that's perfectly fine... folks should play however they want. But they should own it.

Because the point in this case was about why the PCs are faced with an element unrelated to their goals (the goblins) versus an element related to their goals (the orcs one PC was seeking). It comes down to "what the GM has decided" versus "what the player wants".

If you hold "what the GM has decided" to be more important than "what the player wants" that's perfectly fine... but call it what it is and don't mistake it for some kind of causality or adherence to "more realistic" processes.

 

[innerdude]

That's simply impossible. I mean, literally impossible. Whatever you grasped is flat out wrong. If I am basing my decisions on reason, that is mutually exclusive to basing it on a whim(arbitrary). Whatever it is that you grasped cannot alter reality and make me wrong about this.

I suppose you might use the definition of arbitrary that means that I am acting as a judge and being an arbiter, but the context of use here is not that. People here use it to mean whim in order to put down the style that they dislike, so I push back against that inaccurate depiction of what it is that I do.

False. That's not only what it is based on.

Even if it was, though, as long as it is all based on reason, arbitrary never comes into play. Even going back to the construction of the original campaign(if the DM created it), the design of the campaign is based on reason. What's more, even if the original world was created completely on a whim, further decisions that use that whim as the foundation for the decision are in fact not arbitrary. I would have a reason for the decision that I just made. What happened originally doesn't alter the fact that I would be using reason for the decision.

The creation of fiction, regardless of method, process, intent, modeling, or descriptor, is by definition arbitrary.

Full stop.