Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

For the most part we agree on the above point, although I reiterate that predictability is important, not merely so the GM can avoid social opprobrium but so players can make informed decisions about issues their characters would understand without having to play Mother May I, which breaks flow.

Imagine playing a 5E wizard trying to decide between preparing Haste and Invisibility before infiltrating a hobgoblin citadel, but you don't know any of the rules of 5E so you are reduced to asking your GM for educated guesses about what the different spells might do in hypothetical scenarios, and his answer is usually "it depends." It's hard to meaningfully roleplay a wizard when you don't know the things a wizard should logically know!

Suppose I'm playing MHRP (or a fantasy version of it), and my wizard hero has a series of power sets, with the overarching instruction All these power sets begin shut down, but at the start of each session, and during a Transition Scene, you may choose to restore one of them. After you use one of these power sets in an action, it shuts down at the end of that Action Scene.

Two of these power sets are Spell of Invisibility (Invisibility d10) and Haste Spell (Enhanced Reflexes d8, Enhanced Speed d8).

As a player, at the end of the Transition Scene where we are preparing to infiltrate the enemy citadel, I have to choose which power set to restore (in the fiction, which spell to memorise).

If I'm not sure how action declarations and action resolution work in MHRP, I can ask the GM or I can read the rules. But these won't tell me what my spells might do in hypothetical scenarios, beyond the rather obvious:

At d10, [Invisibility] renders you completely invisible to standard visual means. You can move around without being noticed, and you don’t leave a shadow or other signs of being there. Certain spectrums of visual detection may spot you, such as infrared or dimensional locators.

At Enhanced Speed d8, you can run at the speed of a horse

Enhanced Reflexes d8 represents two to three times the normal human response time and hand-eye coordination.​

What I can actually do with those effects is up to my imagination (and the luck of the dice). The GM has nothing especially useful to tell me about it.

The risk of "Mother May I" and the role of rules in obviating that particular risk is a function, I think, of particular approaches to defining players' abilities within the rules.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I think the fixation, which @Maxperson also has evinced, with who tosses the dice, is a bit misplaced. The GM asks the player to save. PHB P180 contains the save rule, and it certainly SEEMS written with the assumption that the player is making saves, but if the GM did roll the dice, I can't say this would 'break a rule'. OTOH it IS the rules which have told the GM to require a save, in most cases (arguably all, but my guess is there's a "you can keep stuff hidden from the players" option in the DMG somewhere). At worst we might say "sometimes the rules don't explicitly state who says X, but conventions exist, and are generally only set aside for specific reasons."

Are you then abandoning the formulation that says rules are about determining who gets to say what when? That's what I'm pushing back on. If you're willing to concede that only a minority of rules are about who says what (a metagame concern), and a majority are merely about what happens, then we are in agreement and can stop talking about "who".

P.S. RE: your saving throw example, I'm sure you realize that it's not necessarily the GM asking the player to save. Friendly fire Hypnotic Patterns and Fireballs, for example, lead directly to players stating the need for a save, a DC, and effect on failure, with no detour through the GM's mouth required unless something very unusual is happening. "Who says" isn't typically important for resolving "what happens as a result?" Do you agree or disagree? If we agree we are done.

 

[pemerton]

How long did it take before the lack of agreement was discovered? What might have happened differently if the lack of agreement had been discovered sooner?

Some disagreements luckily turn out not to matter or are never discovered (player doesn't know the GM thinks he took 6d6 damage from evil runes earlier; GM never realizes that the player doesn't realize) but this example was constructed so that both GM and player discover and frankly discuss the disagreement.

I still don't see how it is supposed to be a counterexample to "Play cannot continue until all parties agree upon the current game state."

In your example, the disagreement is discovered. Play stops until it is resolved. As I said, that seems like an illustration of the point.

Nothing in @innerdude's example, at least as I understand it, is meant to depend on subtle points of metaphysics, like "if no one has noticed the lack of agreement yet, is there nevertheless disagreement that is not stopping play"? Given that the topic is agreement on a shared fiction, the sorts of agreement and disagreement that are at issue are those that actually manifest in the social context.

Vincent Baker discusses some subtle examples here - anyway: Secrets: the Smelly Chamberlain - but I don't think they're really counterexamples either. In those examples, when there is no agreement and yet no bust up (options 4 and 6), there is a type of pathology or at least infelicity in play, even though it goes on.

 

[Fenris-77]

Weird response. I'm saying that ruling at the table become new rules, so "rules light" systems are simply those which have fewer rules to start with, thus requiring more rulings as the chance of encountering a situation outside the book rules goes up.

Weird? I don't think so. Keep in mind in your post you said that you don't believe in rules-light games. If we want to take the Pepsi challenge for weird statements I'm pretty sure you win by a landslide. So, IDK, own your own posts? I'm not sure.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I still don't see how it is supposed to be a counterexample to "Play cannot continue until all parties agree upon the current game state."

In your example, the disagreement is discovered. Play stops until it is resolved. As I said, that seems like an illustration of the point.

You are missing the point--in this example, play continued long past the point where there was a disagreement. The point is that it would be really nice if it genuinely was impossible for play to continue without detecting and resolving all disagreements.

Any further questions?

 

[loverdrive]

Weird response. I'm saying that ruling at the table become new rules, so "rules light" systems are simply those which have fewer rules to start with, thus requiring more rulings as the chance of encountering a situation outside the book rules goes up.

Here's the entirety of the rules in Swashbuckling!

Spoiler

It fits on a half of a A4 page, it surely does exist, and the play process doesn't involve making any "rulings" of any kind.

So, yeah, rules-light games do exist.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Weird? I don't think so. Keep in mind in your post you said that you don't believe in rules-light games. If we want to take the Pepsi challenge for weird statements I'm pretty sure you win by a landslide. So, IDK, own your own posts? I'm not sure.

I think I clarified my position well enough. Feel free to disagree.

 

[Maxperson]

Choosing a class has nothing to do with 'the fiction'.

I agree. It has been argued here, though, that the rules are for who decides what happens in the fiction. My argument is that most of the rules do not dictate who is affecting the fiction OR don't have anything to do with it at all.

 

[Maxperson]

Well, the rules are telling the player which things they can say about the race of their PC. The player is then stating what is true here. I mean, D&D basically says that all fiction is in the hands of the GM, so we can imagine them saying "NO DWARVES!" or "You must be human" or whatever.

This is incorrect. The rules are not telling the player. They are telling everyone who plays the game, which includes the DM. The DM can by RAW also use the same rules to create characters.

 

[Maxperson]

This is basically a travesty of logic. Your point is "Rule 0, therefor none of the rest of the rules has anything meaningful to say about... well, anything!" LOL. OK. I mean, you really want to die on that hill?

Nope. I don't want to die on your Straw hill.

Rule 0 is simply the rule involved in making the change to the rules. It's in fact the ONLY rule involved with changing the list of classes available. Nothing in that statement can be construed to mean that none of the rest of the rules mean anything or say anything.

I mean, its especially dubious since nobody has been able to clearly point to an outright rule 0 in, say, 5e. I think this argument is "skating away on the thin ice of a new day"

So the dozen or so, "This is your game DM" and "You the DM decide which rules to use" and "Ask the DM if he made any changes to the rules" don't do it for you. Rule 0 is so important to 5e that they repeat it about a dozen times.