Why do RPGs have rules?

[Aldarc]

Semantic arguments are boring.

Is this you?

As I predicted; sounds like rule creation/fiat exercise to me.

 

[clearstream]

Semantic arguments are boring. What's the substantive difference underlying this analogy? Apparently you believe that it's important whether "that which causes storms" is called "Thor" or "Zeus". Why, and what actual point are you trying to make about game rules?

For me the metaphor reminds that the capacity to form and modify rules is preexisting. Applying Occam’s Razor one shouldn't be too willing to conclude Thor on the evidence of storms alone. Why not stop at - there are storms? Likewise rule zero from the preexisting capacity.

This gets firmly in mind the question of what if anything changes with rather than without a rule zero? While that depends on how I'm defining rule zero, the least requirement is that it should be doing something additional to forming and modifying rules. It needs to say something other than that.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Is this you?

Yes.

Semantic arguments are arguments about what things are called, rather than what they do.

What's your substantive point? Are you trying to ask a question about what fiat does? (See above discussion of incompleteness, https://www.enworld.org/threads/why-do-rpgs-have-rules.697430/page-16#post-9014557 Fiat patches over incompleteness.)

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

For me the metaphor reminds that the capacity to form and modify rules is preexisting. Applying Occam’s Razor one shouldn't be too willing to conclude Thor on the evidence of storms alone. Why not stop at - there are storms? Likewise rule zero from the preexisting capacity.

This gets firmly in mind the question of what if anything changes with rather than without a rule zero? While that depends on how I'm defining rule zero, the least requirement is that it should be doing something additional to forming and modifying rules. It needs to say something other than that.

Thanks. I think you're saying that the term "rule zero" adds nothing to discourse about any particular game and might as well be dropped. I wish I knew if that was the point Aldarc was trying to make.

 

[aramis erak]

The only role which absolutely needs to go on the GM is Manager of Still-Secret Information, which is a subset of (Adjudication + Cast) which excludes rule adjudication and onscreen dialogue/actions. This is because it's impossible to un-know things that you already know, and difficult to pretend not to know them well enough to roleplay not knowing them. (If you know for a fact that Door A leads to certain doom and Door B leads to freedom, any clues given about A and B are meaningless! You already know what not to believe.)

There are ways to play where secrets simply do not exist; anything unknown is solved by an alternate mode...
Method 1: formulate a question, preferably in Yes/No, and apply randomization to decide if it's true or false.
Method 2: when it becomes important to answer a secret, randomize who decides.

Mode 1 is used in a number of GM-less games
Mode 2 is used by several games by John Wick. Most notably Houses of the Blooded. Blood and Honor is the same core mechanics as HotBlooded, but adapted for samurai.

Both modes are advocated for in Bruce Murray's Diaspora.
Mythic GM Emulator is mode 1.

Using both modes, even mysteries can be played, with no secrets.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Honestly, that seems significantly different from the way many are discussing it in this thread.

I don't have my 3E books on hand (recently moved) but yes, that seems very different from what is meant in this thread and what rule zero is generally taken to mean in most uses online.

 

[aramis erak]

The purpose of rules is to confuse and frustrate the players in order to push them towards lateral thinking, free form improv, and thinking solely in the context of the fiction.

Ah, the Gygaxian viewpoint... at least, a view expressed in the AD&D 1E DMG at certain points.

In DW the rules are clear: if you do it, you do it - and a player-side move is resolved - and otherwise the GM makes a move, soft unless the conditions for a hard move are satisfied.

The function of custom moves in DW, AW and similar games is not to "allow for things the rules don't explicitly allow", because there is no action that is feasible within the fiction that the rules don't explicitly allow.

Per the designer, the point is to make interesting only that which should be interesting in genre...
\

I don't have my 3E books on hand (recently moved) but yes, that seems very different from what is meant in this thread and what rule zero is generally taken to mean in most uses online.

Burning Wheel and derivatives Rule 0 is "Don't be a dick."

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

There are ways to play where secrets simply do not exist; anything unknown is solved by an alternate mode...
Method 1: formulate a question, preferably in Yes/No, and apply randomization to decide if it's true or false.
Method 2: when it becomes important to answer a secret, randomize who decides.

Mode 1 is used in a number of GM-less games
Mode 2 is used by several games by John Wick. Most notably Houses of the Blooded. Blood and Honor is the same core mechanics as HotBlooded, but adapted for samurai.

Both modes are advocated for in Bruce Murray's Diaspora.
Mythic GM Emulator is mode 1.

Using both modes, even mysteries can be played, with no secrets.

Method 2 is interesting and not something I'd ever thought of before. Obviously there are limitations to both modes but it's thought-provoking! Thanks for sharing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I haven't played Dungeon World, but if you're using "sufficient" the way I think you are, meaning "no creativity or rule interpolation/creation" is required, I find that claim hard to believe. I hear dungeon worlders talking about making up "custom moves," with defined prerequisites and effects, and that sounds like rule creation to me.

Not really. 99.99% of the time, it's just taking an existing move and adapting it. For example, one of my players "upgraded" from tiefling to full on cambion (magically made effectively half-devil) during play. That, to me, meant he should gain new powers, and devils had been established to have teleportation abilities. So I came up with a move that I felt worked with that. I built it using the "pick N from this list, or (N minus 1 or 2) on partial success." This is a standard form used by lots of moves, so it's not really "creating" a rule. That is, here is my Teleport move:

Teleportation​

When you pass through the nether realms to teleport somewhere you can physically see, roll+CHA.
On a 10+, choose 2.
On a 7-9, choose 1.

• You go exactly where you want to.
• Your motion goes unseen in either world.
• Your motion is effectively instant.

On a miss, you still teleport, but it is seriously disorienting, or even dangerous. The DM will tell you how.

And here is a default game move, belonging to the Fighter class, for using physical strength to overcome inanimate obstacles in the world:

Bend Bars, Lift Gates​

When you use pure strength to destroy an inanimate obstacle, roll+STR.

✴ On a 10+, choose 3.
✴ On a 7-9 choose 2.

• It doesn’t take a very long time
• Nothing of value is damaged
• It doesn’t make an inordinate amount of noise
• You can fix the thing again without a lot of effort

As you can see, the structure is essentially identical. I just swapped out the trigger phrase, and picked benefits (or, rather, bad things to avoid) that were relevant to Nightcrawler-style teleportation rather than breaking physical objects so you can explore past them. The only difference is that I added a "what happens on a miss" clause (that is, an explanation for what consequences a player might face for getting a truly "failed" roll.) Many ofher moves do this too, so again not making this from whole cloth, just building a move from a standard mold ans boltong on a standard addon.

It's unavoidable. Players will always want to occasionally try sometime the rules don't explicitly allow, and you'll have to make up a reasonable result or system for producing results. Have I misunderstood you or do you genuinely think that Dungeon World has rules and outcomes defined already for every conceivable player action from plunging a toilet to digging mile-long tunnel?

The problem with your question is that you presume that all rules can only take one form: discrete, individual chunks that explicitly approve of, define, or delimit single acts. And, if that assumption is granted, you are quite correct that no system could ever even hope to be comprehensive, because you would need infinitely many narrow, specific rules to cover even a small range of situations, let alone the dizzying variety of unexpected things players might want to do.

But that assumption is incorrect. There is at least one other shape rules can take, which evades this problem. I don't know if there is any kind of official term, but my term is "extensible framework rules." That is, a rule designed so that, without creating any new content (not even to the limited degree of my Teleportation move above), you can apply one rule to a diverse and infinite set of situations. 4e's Skill Challenge rules are an example of this. Dungeon World's Undertake a Perilous Journey and Ritual moves are other examples (the former being what it says on the tin, expeditions into dangerous territory on land or sea; the latter being the catch-all for producing magical effects that aren't codified as moves or spells.) These structures make a different kind of sacrifice, if one can call it that: they are necessarily slightly more abstract than individual, discrete rules would be, so they can work across a diverse and non-finite set of circumstances.

A ruleset that employs a mix of both discrete-individual rules and extensible-framework rules can actually achieve comprehensive coverage, or at least something like it.

I suspect you're going to come back with something that says the GM or the player will make something appropriate up, in which case I'm going to say "that's just GM fiat, a.k.a. Rule Zero, extended to be shared with the players." That wouldn't count as an absence of fiat.

And if the answer is "99.9% of the time you just use an existing extensible framework rule, and the other 0.1% you take an existing rule template and apply it to the current situation," where would that fall? Because that doesn't read to me as being "GM fiat," at least not in any sense of the phrase that I'm familiar with.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

And if the answer is "99.9% of the time you just use an existing extensible framework rule, and the other 0.1% you take an existing rule template and apply it to the current situation," where would that fall? Because that doesn't read to me as being "GM fiat," at least not in any sense of the phrase that I'm familiar with.

That would fall into the camp of being just like every other RPG I'm aware of: needing a GM or GM substitute (like player consensus) to fill in gaps. It's sometime that can only be done by a human, not a CRPG, and to bring us back on topic, it's the primary purpose of GM fiat/Rule Zero/whatever you want to call it. I'm contradicting maxperson's claim that filling in gaps is not what Rule Zero is primarily for (bearing in mind that Rule Zero is just a Internet name for the GM's authority to contradict or extend the rules, not an actual rule in most games). I'm saying that the extending function is used more often than the contradiction function, IME.

Rule templates are ubiquitous. E.g. 5E monsters don't have to but usually do have the attack bonus and damage bonus you'd expect from their Str/Dex + CR. There's an implicit template there; it's used 99% of the time; but it's still not something you'd want to try to automate in a CRPG. There's nothing special about "extensible rule frameworks" or "rule templates" that makes them qualify as complete in the sense clearsense posits above, or the sense that I'm talking about (uniquely identifying the correct game state after the move occurs).