Why do RPGs have rules?

[Maxperson]

Of course, but there are also continuing adventures. I assume your D&D party doesn't sit around crocheting. They get into danger and go on missions and seek treasure and fight monsters and all that. As I said... they are not typical folks.

Comparing two games, one where the ongoing events are related to the character and another where the ongoing events are more random in nature, and declaring one more realistic than the other is just silly.

It's not silly. One is closer to how reality works than the other.

I'm saying that the basis of your argument seems to come from a very traditional model of play... where the DM has prepped everything ahead of time, and the players kind of have their characters wander about, and interact with "what's there" whenever they arrive in a new location. It's this model that makes related things seem less plausible.

My example involved no prep. It assumed those encounters(the goblins, caravan and hermit) happened via story now means. The point wasn't about HOW they came about. It was that all of them unrealistically involve dramatic character needs.

So why wouldn't everything that happens be related to their needs?

It's highly unrealistic?

I'm not saying you have to drop what you do. Just saying I think that attributing it to an appeal to realism is misguided.

Are you trying to invent a new fallacy?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Both and neither, at the same time.

The quesiton is more, which is more contrived? Put another way, is the GM intending to put goblins in the way no matter which way the PCs go, or is she willing to honour her prep such that if the PCs go north they meet goblins, if they go south they meet the orcs they're looking for, if they go east they meet giants, and if they go west they'd better have a boat?

It's all contrived. The GM has made it up, in your case they did so ahead of play.

What matters quite a bit and what's missing from this example is why would the characters go any other way than whatever way the orcs are? Why wouldn't they know that there's water to the west? Why don't they know where the orcs are? Do they have resources available to them to try and help their cause?

Again, that's the problem with these hypotheticals instead of actual play examples.

Well, maybe unrelated, maybe not.

Maybe those goblins know something about the orcs that - if the PCs bother to ask - could help them. Maybe there's disharmony between the goblins and orcs that the PCs could use to their advantage. Or maybe the goblins are just red herrings.

If the goblins have information that leads to the orcs, then that would seem to be considering the dramatic needs of the characters, no?

The term I like to use is "contrived". And IME when plot elements are contrived such that the PCs happen to run into them just when they need to, it very quickly comes across to the players as being contrived; and thus makes it all neither realistic nor believable (I hit this issue with just about every book and-or movie I ever encounter).

But that can happen. Things do sometimes happen just when needed.

Players should be aware that everything that happens in a game is contrived. Every bit of every RPG session.

If you see a DM honouring his prep as being problematic it's no wonder we can't agree on much.

It can be. It depends on the game, doesn't it? I know you only play one game, but not all games play that way. As someone who plays games similar to yours and then also of the story now variety, I can tell you that this can be problematic.

Again, the rudimentary hypothetical makes it hard to say.

If I'm playing a hexcrawl type, old school system, and I want to find the orcs, I expect that the location of the orcs will be set ahead of time, but that I have resources at my disposal that give me a good chance of finding out their location, and that whether or not I do find out will depend on the chance of the dice. In this kind of situation, it's of course perfectly fine to honor your prep.

But there are games that don't rely on this sort of prep, or rely on it only to the extent of a loose framework. So the idea of honoring prep in those games is ill-suited.

Illusionism - where a DM doesn't honour his own prep - is also generally seen as Bad. So what's left?

That's not what illusionism is.

Reminds me of a quote from a hockey coach years ago: "We can't win at home and we can't win on the road. My failing as a coach is I can't think of anywhere else to play."

That's because you're experienced with only one type of RPG.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I think I am misunderstanding what you are critiquing. So far as I am concerned the players drive play. That there be world-facts external to and not contingent upon them does not stop them being the spotlight. Nor that a dramatic narrative arc is not pursued.

The characters are always in the spotlight. They're our view of the world. But the players and their ability to drive play is something else.

What is play about? Is it about goals set by the players? Is it about goals given by the GM? How does prep or play process promote one or the other?

It's about both, in the common GM-centric mode. That there be a world is not in competition with the characters. Barring misalignment on purpose of play.

Not really, no. Perhaps it can be about both at times. But generally, if you're playing "Against The Giants" or "Tomb of Annihilation" and so on, the game is about the world. It focuses on the characters, but it is not about the characters. You can tell this because I have had characters go through both of those adventures, and many other people have, too, and they largely play the same. The story is that of the adventure.

If play is about a character, it cannot be so easily duplicated by others because it is specific to that character.

We have different definitions of "real" in mind. Supposing some play lacked world facts beyond the characters, then I'd call it less real just in the sense that I am defining. I wouldn't necessarily call it less plausible.

I would say that's a idiosyncratic definition of real. Especially in an RPG context.

You'd have no issue with one group saying their game has less dramatic or narrative focus than some other group, right?

Correct. Those are qualities of fiction. You know what's not a quality of fiction? Reality.

Stonetop has nearly 300 pages of setting, parts of which are written in the form of world facts. For example Barrier Pass is 5 days north. That is stated independently of any dramatic need for it to be 5-days north.

OTOH much is in the form "there is this, say something about it". The "there is this" part of that has interesting consequences in that a world-fact has been nominated while leaving its contents incompletely defined. It's partially contingent.

It's a matter of how the prep is used, and how the GM is meant to deploy it. The book goes out of its way to point out that nothing is written in stone. Sure, travel distances and the like serve a purpose... it gives the players information. They know where many locations are, and can make informed decisions about going to these places.

Look at other details in the book? What happened to the Forest Folk, for instance. The book offers a few suggestions, but leaves it up to each group to determine what happened in play (if it becomes important to play).

This information isn't presented to thwart players.

It needn't be GM. Ideally there are procedures by which setting change occurs. NPCs have motives so that what they do is about them, not the players, except to the extent they interact.

That's the GM. NPCs don't act on their own.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

If adherence to realism is an actual priority for a GM, then

-PCs should go months, if not years, between getting into notable fights, unless they're in the frontlines in a war. Campaigns that aren't set during a war should probably fast forward years or decades between sessions.

-Melee combat should be completely awkward, confusing, and full of broken weapons and people rolling around in the dirt with knives.

-PCs should probably get dysentery pretty often and definitely die from infections on the regular.

-Most D&D-style wandering adventurers should be considered the worst scum of the Earth by everyone who isn't one, literal murder hobos too desperate or stupid or unstable to do anything else.


Seriously, c'mon with this realism stuff. Be honest about whether you want realism—as adjudicated by you, the GM, blessed with your towering intellect and mastery of all topics before you—or you want to apply a patina of self-aggrandizing importance to a campaign about sticking swords in orcs' bellies.

 

[hawkeyefan]

If I didn't know you were arguing in good faith because of prior discourse, this question would give me pause and make me wonder about your motives, because the answer is part of the definition of C:

C) unrelated remarkable events often happen if they go to the places where remarkable events happen (Wild West or equivalent)

In context it should be clear that "the players decide to go there" is the answer. Otherwise it would be A instead of C.

Characters can go to places for any number of reasons. Players may decide to go there. Or the GM may narrate that they've gone there. I wanted to be sure what you meant.

If the players choose to go to the wild west, then I'd have said it fits my B.

The players may have an agenda, but even if they don't, the Wild West (not the historical version, the tropey version) will have improbable events built into it, maybe in the form of random tables. For as long as the players stay in the Wild West they will experience improbable events regularly; if they leave, they will stop. This distinguishes C from A: the events are not "continually happening". They are conditional upon the players staying in a place where interesting events happen.

I feel like I'm stating the obvious here.

You are. There are undoubtedly different methods to determine what happens to the characters.

All I'm focusing on is the claim that unrelated events happening to them are more realistic than related events happening to them is misguided.

You're attributing the interesting events to the location in the setting. But what if the characters leave the wild west and instead decide to go fight in the foreign legion? The interesting events don't stop, you just use a different table for rolling events.

RPGs are going to be about characters having interesting adventures... whether they're monster hunters, treasure seekers, criminals, revolutionaries, or Victorian era socialites. The adventures will be suited to the genre and setting, sure, but no matter what, they'll alwaysbe present.

If D is A then either you're wasting tons of table time waiting around growing crops and doing household chores/etc. until the next interesting thing five or ten years later happens, or you're zooming out/skipping forward is involved, which is my point--controlling pacing via time-skips/zooming out is the only way to resolve the tension between realism and the need for drama. You said it wasn't essential but it is. Otherwise it's either unrealistic [edit: i.e. contrived] or boring (or both).

I thought your (B) was about the orcs showing up instead of the goblins? I don't think there's anyone on this thread who would object to remarkable things happening in an otherwise-unremarkable context purely because the PCs made them happen (murdered an emperor, seduced a president, went looking for orcs). The discussion you're having with MaxPerson is not about the presence of interesting consequences to PC actions, it's about the absence of unrelated events happening (and you've said that this absence is not necessarily due to timeskip/zoom-out).

Funny how the conversation keeps coming back to subtraction vs. addition. Maybe that's my cue to bow out because last time that discussion went nowhere. I'll finish this post though.

I didn't say it wasn't about time skipping. I said that wasn't my main point, but that yes, there is some of that too.

Given the nature of RPG characters to have continuing adventures, I don't think there's a strong argument to state that adventures unrelated to the characters are more realistic than ones that are. I don't think we should be viewing this in that light at all... plausibility of this sort seems to be present in almost all play (except a few exceptions that actively eschew it).

So if plausibility is always a concern and we need not concern ourselves with how "realistic" our methods are, then what about our methods should we be concerned with?

That's fine. Then they can meet the goblins instead of the orcs--if your hypothesis is correct, then dramatist-leaning players can be completely satisfied in a 100% simulationist ("realistic") campaign.

I don't think so... a sim GM wouldn't feel the need to craft events relevant to the characters for fear of being "unrealistic".

C, D, and E are all more realistic than A (Weirdness Magnet) or B (Personalized Weirdness Magnet). If you deny their existence and then use that denial to focus on strictly A vs. B then we have nothing to discuss; you're simply rejecting my perspective out of hand.

They're not more realistic. They're all the same. The GM is deciding what happens. That's not how reality works. There's not a person who says "I don't care if this fits his dramatic needs or not, it's what's happening!"

We're choosing elements of fiction. We're deciding what happens in our make believe world. Whatever methods we choose to use may differ in ways, but none of them is more realistic than any other.

It wouldn't be "too coincidental" if for example E: the players are the ones causing unusual things to happen by taking unusual actions first.

I will stop repeating myself now. Hopefully SOMEONE out there on the Internet got some insight out of reading this. I wish it could be you.

The players causing interesting things to happen is one of the two things I suggested, my B. If they cause something to happen, then it is related to them.

 

[hawkeyefan]

It's not silly. One is closer to how reality works than the other.

It's really not, though.

My example involved no prep. It assumed those encounters(the goblins, caravan and hermit) happened via story now means. The point wasn't about HOW they came about. It was that all of them unrealistically involve dramatic character needs.

So what? You provided flawed and/or limited examples. That doesn't render anything unrealistic.

It's highly unrealistic?

It's not. Not unless you're trying to view it through a traditional RPG approach.

In the Spire RPG, the PCs are members of a clandestine insurrectionist group of drow resisting high elf rule of their city. The vast majority of play revolved purely around what the players wanted their characters to do, and then the fallout from those actions. Very little happened that was purely random. Almost all the events of play were related to the players' characters and their actions.

I never rolled for random encounters or added in something just for laughs. They had goals, and they were always working toward them. I introduced ideas or NPCs for them to deal with, obstacles to face and so on, but it was all about their goals.

Why wouldn't it be?

There are two elements happening here. One is that, as @FormerlyHemlock has mentioned, we don't focus on the mundane. Sure, we can assume some stuff is happening here and there that's unrelated, but we don't focus on it.

The second is that this game is different than D&D. The setting is a city that the characters have most likely lived in their entire lives. Our game focused on one specific district, and then had two other districts as secondary locations, and then one more as a place they went to once. Four out of some fifteen districts. The primary district is where all the characters grew up. In this sense, "random" and "unrelated" are just poor expectations.

You have to acknowledge that and consider it. The characters aren't exploring unknown dungeons or untamed wilderness. There's nothing that they're doing except pursuing their mission, maintaining their lives, and pursuing any other goals that may come into play (which very likely will conflict with their mission, or the goals of other characters).

Given this kind of situation, in what way would adding unrelated things as a focus of play add realism?

Are you trying to invent a new fallacy?

You did the heavy lifting, man... all I did was give it a label.

 

[Lanefan]

If adherence to realism is an actual priority for a GM, then

-PCs should go months, if not years, between getting into notable fights, unless they're in the frontlines in a war. Campaigns that aren't set during a war should probably fast forward years or decades between sessions.

Maybe not quite to this extent, but there's a very strong case to be made that there needs to be a greatly longer in-game "downtime" period between adventures or big fights or what-have-you, for any given character or party, somehow enforced by the rules. Modern D&D with its 1-20 level path in well under two in-game years and x-number of combats a day (unless very minor) is kinda ludicrous.

-Melee combat should be completely awkward, confusing, and full of broken weapons and people rolling around in the dirt with knives.

Very much agree with this, and I'll add in a dose of random as well. This is one place where the twin desires to streamline game mechanics and to make things "fun" for the players and the desire for at least a vague nod to realism really butt heads.

-PCs should probably get dysentery pretty often and definitely die from infections on the regular.

True, though mitigated by the presence of magical healing in various games.

-Most D&D-style wandering adventurers should be considered the worst scum of the Earth by everyone who isn't one, literal murder hobos too desperate or stupid or unstable to do anything else.

Not quite sold on this one, as PCs can also be or become folk heroes even while living a murderhobo lifestyle. Never mind that most PCs soon become rich enough to eschew the "hobo" part of that should they so desire.

Seriously, c'mon with this realism stuff. Be honest about whether you want realism—as adjudicated by you, the GM, blessed with your towering intellect and mastery of all topics before you—or you want to apply a patina of self-aggrandizing importance to a campaign about sticking swords in orcs' bellies.

 

[hawkeyefan]

Not quite sold on this one, as PCs can also be or become folk heroes even while living a murderhobo lifestyle. Never mind that most PCs soon become rich enough to eschew the "hobo" part of that should they so desire.

Nothing screams realism like hobos becoming rich!

 

[Maxperson]

You did the heavy lifting, man... all I did was give it a label.

Sure. More belittling of the style you don't like. It's not really sim(because you don't like it)! It's a new fallacy(because you don't like it)! And more. Maybe try to understand the other side a bit rather than just try to crap all over the style.

 

[Maxperson]

Nothing screams realism like hobos becoming rich!

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/06/us/california-woman-wins-5-million-lottery-ticket-trnd/index.html

Los Angeles woman nearly gives away $1.3 million winning lottery ticket to homeless man

A 26-year-old hairdresser from Los Angeles nearly gave away her winning $1.3 million lottery ticket to a homeless man.

abc7news.com

Homeless people who won the lottery - The Health Lottery

It’s nice to see good things happening to good people. Here are the extraordinary tales of five homeless people who got lucky and won the lottery.

www.healthlottery.co.uk

Homeless man who reached US with $500 becomes millionaire through online trading

A homeless man, Nick Mocuta, who had reached the United States from Romania with only $500 (Rs 37,000) in his pocket, now owns more than 100 flats in the US.

www.republicworld.com

20 rich and famous people who were once homeless

Before they rose to fame, some of the world's richest and most successful people were homeless.

www.businessinsider.com

You said the PCs were exceptional, right?

 

[hawkeyefan]

Sure. More belittling of the style you don't like. It's not really sim(because you don't like it)! It's a new fallacy(because you don't like it)! And more. Maybe try to understand the other side a bit rather than just try to crap all over the style.

I don't dislike D&D. I play it every week. I’m just able to honestly assess it.

I’m not the one crapping on anything. Which one of us is labeling one type of game as less realistic and which of us is saying they’re equally realistic?

Address the argument. State your case and back it ip. Criticize my argument, not my character.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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

If it's all they're exposed to then obviously that's what will draw the response.

Diminishing xp returns?

I think the problem with long games is that people simply do not have that level of stability and ability to commit to years of play, especially as players nowadays are MUCH more likely to be older than they were even 20 or 25 years ago. I mean, back when I started there were ZERO 25+ yr old RPG people that I was in contact with. Obviously Gygax and some of the wargame people WERE older, but for a long time games were often being run by high school kids and college students, and maybe people up to their late 20's who were likely to be in the same place for 5 or even 10 years and had time to play. I know from around 20 to my late 20s was probably the main time when was in longer games.

And with tons of other instant gratification media out there, games have to be snappy and deliver or they will lose out. I mean, there will always be games that cater to longer format play, but I really think we're in an age when it is not the dominant form.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

If adherence to realism is an actual priority for a GM, then

-PCs should go months, if not years, between getting into notable fights, unless they're in the frontlines in a war. Campaigns that aren't set during a war should probably fast forward years or decades between sessions.

-Melee combat should be completely awkward, confusing, and full of broken weapons and people rolling around in the dirt with knives.

-PCs should probably get dysentery pretty often and definitely die from infections on the regular.

-Most D&D-style wandering adventurers should be considered the worst scum of the Earth by everyone who isn't one, literal murder hobos too desperate or stupid or unstable to do anything else.


Seriously, c'mon with this realism stuff. Be honest about whether you want realism—as adjudicated by you, the GM, blessed with your towering intellect and mastery of all topics before you—or you want to apply a patina of self-aggrandizing importance to a campaign about sticking swords in orcs' bellies.

Mod Note:

I‘m pretty sure most people in this thread can distinguish between “reality” (which is what you described in your post) and “realism” which reflects reality as much as the fiction writer(s) please.

Which makes your post’s coda a nasty 1-2 punch that does nothing but score you some Internet points at the cost of some of this thread’s (dwindling) civil discourse. And enough jabs like that can earn you a different kind of points, understand?

Disagree with others if you want, but don’t become disagreeable when you choose to do so.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Mod Note #2:

Some people in here are denigrating the playstyles of others while simultaneously doing the exact same thing themselves. Let’s put the kibosh on that before the thread- which is generating an unusual amount of reports- gets locked.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

WTF???!!!! Impossible! I don't like it, therefore it is literally impossible, the most powerful sort of impossible! Listen to yourself. Listen to what you are told, your decisions are based on what you feel like playing, there's nothing reasonable OR unreasonable about having preferences, but there's no LOGIC to it.

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.

No, we simply see through this whole charade Max. Years or decades ago we saw it in a rational light and stopped pretending it was somehow based on anything but whim. I say that, and yet I don't hate trad play. I find some aspects of it which some of you all seem to really cling to as negative, but there can be really excellent trad play, it just doesn't imagine that there's anything realistic going on.

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.

There's no reason here. Tell me, what would be the 'reason' why orcs and not goblins? I don't think any world I've ever seen is constrained enough to put forth a MODEL BASED logical reason for one over the other, period. Its pure aesthetics or whatever.

 

[Autumnal]

I don't find this very helpful. I mean, why aren't character described the way they are in novels: by name, appearance, aspirations, relationships etc?

This is exactly what led me down the primrose path away from games where realism in the D&Dish sense is a priority. I’d say that my top priorities these days are 1) characters’ interior lives and 2) the evocation of genre conventions and expectations to produce game play that “is like” something - specifically, a set of stories sharing some significant features.

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.

As a real person who is seriously disabled, I certainly have dramatic wants.

I would say that even if players are being proactive, if you're not skipping over uninteresting aspects of their lives it challenges willing suspension of disbelief for everything that they experience to be dramatically relevant. The zooming out or skipping over part (i.e. control of pacing) is mandatory IMO for resolving the tension between realism and drama.

Yes, but this seems kind of vacuously true, in that as nearly as I know, everybody [/I] skips and compresses. Genuinely, I can’t think of more than a literal handful of gaming sessions I’ve seen or heard about in 45 years of gaming that unfolded in anything close to 1:1 time. And what everybody doesn’t can’t be very diagnostic. The differences would be in the criteria for zooming in and out, in expectations and outcomes.

 

[Lanefan]

No, we simply see through this whole charade Max. Years or decades ago we saw it in a rational light and stopped pretending it was somehow based on anything but whim.

I'll assume by this you're not trying to suggest that trad play is irrational (and I don't think you are) but note that as written your phrasing here can be parsed that way.

I say that, and yet I don't hate trad play. I find some aspects of it which some of you all seem to really cling to as negative, but there can be really excellent trad play, it just doesn't imagine that there's anything realistic going on.

So alright, if trad play can't do realistic, what can?

 

[Lanefan]

Genuinely, I can’t think of more than a literal handful of gaming sessions I’ve seen or heard about in 45 years of gaming that unfolded in anything close to 1:1 time.

True, though it can go both ways: I've had 15-ish minutes of in-game time take three sessions to play out, and a single in-game day take nine; and have also had sessions where weeks of in-game time went by in a relative heartbeat.

Over the long term my games end up going a bit slower in game time than in real time, averaging roughly 1 year game time for 2 years real time. This is often due to the same stretch of in-game time being played through more than once by different parties e.g. party A will adventure during March of (in-game) year xxx, then we'll play party B in an adventure in February-March of that same year; thus in the fiction both parties are in the field at the same time and they'll all meet up in April sometime.

In real time, however, these two parties would be run one after the other; thus if each of those adventures hits my long-term average of about 9 sessions each you're looking at 18 sessions, which is about 4 real-world months of regular weekly play.

 

[Autumnal]

I'll assume by this you're not trying to suggest that trad play is irrational (and I don't think you are) but note that as written your phrasing here can be parsed that way.

My take is that in between “rational” and “irrational” there is a vast hinterland. At the poles, logic is decisive, whether for or against. In between, many things are “reasonable”, compatible with much reasoning but not carrying the weight of a strong determination. X is reasonable, given A, B, and C. But Y and Z are too, and the choice is made on ground they are fundamentally about reason: aesthetics, sense of interesting game play, giving a bit of extra good time to the player who had a very crappy time lately, etc. I don’t think any of those is hostile to reason - though obviously this depends on definitions - it’s just that reason isn’t making a decision alone.

I think that reason alone is almost never sufficient when it comes to artistic works of imagination, which RPG campaigns are. Actual life is very often non-retinopathy in important ways, and that’s with vastly greater info density than any campaign can have. There just isn’t enough in a campaign for reason to work alone.

@Lanefan : Yeah, zooming in is definitely a thing some sessions. It’s like comic books that cover a year every 12-18 issues, which is often a few days shown in great detail and then zooming ahead.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Yes, but this seems kind of vacuously true, in that as nearly as I know, everybody [/I] skips and compresses. Genuinely, I can’t think of more than a literal handful of gaming sessions I’ve seen or heard about in 45 years of gaming that unfolded in anything close to 1:1 time. And what everybody doesn’t can’t be very diagnostic. The differences would be in the criteria for zooming in and out, in expectations and outcomes.

I've had bad experiences with DMs who don't skip over enough. It can feel very frustrating, wandering around talking with NPCs but not finding anything interesting to do or interesting decisions to make.

Or maybe I just want to spend 100 gp buying spell components for Find Familiar x2, so I tell the DM I want to go to the market to buy it, and he starts describing being at the market... and I'm too new to tell the DM explicitly, "I'm not actually interested in the market. I was hoping you'd just say, 'okay, it's done and you have your components now' so I could go do something interesting."