Why do RPGs have rules?

[pemerton]

I'm against it because your claim implicitly devalues worldbuilding IMO, and as I've said many times before, it is to me the most enjoyable part of the RPG experience.

My claim is a statement of fact: something done on one's own is not shared. QED.

 

[pemerton]

'lusory' is just a fancy way of saying 'gaming'. Academics like to generate terms like this so they can avoid contaminating their discussions with common language arguments I guess. So, 'lusory attitude' simply means "playing a game" and 'lusory means' simply means "game process of play" (at least this is my interpretation, I think its at least roughly correct). So when someone says the players "adopt a lusory attitude" they mean they agree to play a particular game, and by implication follow its rules. Then when they play they use the 'lusory means' to actually play the game. Now, I think those 'means' may or may not be said to include things like boards, dice, pieces, etc. but I think its easiest to assume these fall within the 'means'.

Well, as I posted upthread I think it's obvious where Suits's concern with a "lusory attitude" comes from, in the context of post-War English language philosophy (which is his field).

I believe there is another author in "gaming studies" (I can't recall the name) who uses the more metaphorical phrase "magic circle".

What these terms are trying to point to is that (i) playing a game involves treating some norms as salient and binding, and yet (ii) there is non non-arbitrary reason for accepting those norms as salient and binding. The players pretend, in some fashion, that the rules of the game resemble legal, moral, social etc norms even though they don't!

I don't think that that particular point is very important for discussing RPGing - as I've already said, it is @clearstream who introduced the notion and the whole framework into this discussion, and my taking up of the terminology has been as a courtesy to him, as it is easy enough to deploy even if in my view not particularly necessary.

The relationship between "lusory attitude" and "rule zero" could be described this way: if the GM is at liberty to suspend or change the rules of the game, then isn't the real rule GM decides. @clearstream's response to this (see eg post 435 upthread) is that the GM's decision-making is constrained by social norms etc - what Vincent Baker calls "social contract". Applying the lens of the OP, this is the view that RPGs don't need rules after all, as social contract can do the work without the mediation and easing of negotiation that (according to Baker) rules provide.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Hmm. I would say that's a bizarre way to use the word "complete", but that doesn't prove they're not using it that way anyway. It's possible.

Why would it not make sense or seem 'bizarre'? The principles and agenda of Dungeon World are PART OF THE RULES, in fact a very important part! They bind the GM to saying fairly particular kinds of things when framing a scene or describing a gm move, etc. That being said, completeness in my book is more about a 'fully described process'. DW is complete in that it always describes what to do next. That 'what' may involve considerable judgment and leeway, but it is a qualifiable thing. IMHO D&D generally lacks this trait that what comes next is fully described. I think it sort of piecewise approaches it in the case of 5e, but it never quite gets there. TBH I think the main impediment here is the "GM-Centric" attitude of the designers of D&D. When AW was written, the designer went back to square one and thought about the process of playing the game. The 5e authors thought about how to inform a GM-as-game-purveyor as to the best way to do their job. 5e kind of 'backs into' the ideas of process of play, but it never quite puts them front and center in the way AW or DW (etc.) do.

The principles and agenda statements that pretty much every PbtA has are a part of this, clearly stating what the game is designed to be about and what to be guided by in the application of imagination and judgment when executing the 'game loop'. As with core game loop stuff itself, D&D first starts from the position that the GM doesn't have these constraints, and then tries to instill them in bits and parts throughout the rules, somewhat inconsistently, as pieces of advice. Its a lot less effective, IMHO, than the GM chapter of the DW rules starting on P159, which states them unequivocally and concisely. The opening of the chapter says it all:
"How to GM
When you sit down at the table as a GM you do these things:

• Describe the situation
• Follow the rules
• Make moves
• Exploit your prep"

and then:
"Agenda
Your agenda makes up the things you aim to do at all times while
GMing a game of Dungeon World:

• Portray a fantastic world
• Fill the characters’ lives with adventure
• Play to find out what happens"

and finally:
"Principles

• Draw maps, leave blanks
• Address the characters, not the players
• Embrace the fantastic
• Make a move that follows
• Never speak the name of your move
• Give every monster life
• Name every person
• Ask questions and use the answers
• Be a fan of the characters
• Think dangerous
• Begin and end with the fiction
• Think offscreen, too"

Naturally each of these bullet points is further visited in the text.

The whole chapter is 25 pages, and includes the advice on how to run a fight, how to interact with NPCs, and several other similar things. It is, IMHO the most concise and effective presentation of GMing techniques in existence, at least in the context of the game and style of game it is presenting. No edition of D&D IMHO has anything approaching this.

And I want to state, I tie this all the way back to the OP and the question "what is the purpose of rules" and HERE IT IS. Between the core rules description of chapter 1 and this 25 page GM chapter we have a 50 page (and in 5e's format this would be more like 12 pages I'm guessing, as the typography is much less dense) we have the complete description of the process of play of a substantial RPG capable of portraying the entire range of play which might be found in D&D games, including everything both GM and players need, every rule they will have to follow and activity they will have to undertake in order to play (aside from system specific stuff like chargen) fully and unambiguously described. This is the purpose of rules, to define HOW TO PLAY, pure and simple! It includes how the GM and the dice will introduce 'unwanted fiction' which will form obstacles for the PCs, how and when each participant should have input, and the nature and form of that input, the constraints on it when it is open-ended, etc.

So, I would boil down "how to play" as being "what activities do the participants engage in which constitutes play" and "what are the constraints on these activities which limit the form of this play" and maybe the more general "what does it mean to enter into play" though I think that aspect is a bit less concrete in that it is effectively "submit to the rules and pick a role within the game" and applies roughly to all games in about the same way.

 

[clearstream]

I've not used the phrase "lusory fabric". That is @clearstream's term.

More generally, if you or anyone else (eg @Micah Sweet) object to references to Suits in this thread, please take it up with @clearstream. He is the one who introduced Suits's frame of analysis. I adopted it as a courtesy to him.

Yes, the blame must fall squarely on me; and I appreciate the courtesy shown.

Lusory is simply playful, related to ludic. I often put it to myself as "gameful" as it is used specifically in connection to playfulness in the sense of playimg a game.

It's not a common term - I don't recall encountering it outside of Suits' discussion in The Grasshopper - but it's a good term in the context of his ideas. The eponymous grasshopper claims

that Utopian existence is fundamentally concerned with game-playing

And goes on to define the way in which playing a game is distinct from other sorts of activities such as work. The term "lusory fabric" I minted only today, and "ludic fabric" would probably be better. I meant the whole construct - prelusory goals, lusory means, and lusory attitude.

 

[Micah Sweet]

'lusory' is just a fancy way of saying 'gaming'. Academics like to generate terms like this so they can avoid contaminating their discussions with common language arguments I guess. So, 'lusory attitude' simply means "playing a game" and 'lusory means' simply means "game process of play" (at least this is my interpretation, I think its at least roughly correct). So when someone says the players "adopt a lusory attitude" they mean they agree to play a particular game, and by implication follow its rules. Then when they play they use the 'lusory means' to actually play the game. Now, I think those 'means' may or may not be said to include things like boards, dice, pieces, etc. but I think its easiest to assume these fall within the 'means'.

This to me confirms the ivory tower attitude I suggested above.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My claim is a statement of fact: something done on one's own is not shared. QED.

My point is that all that work doesn't immediately become fluid once the game begins. The setting is still the setting.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Why would it not make sense or seem 'bizarre'?

Because it leads to you calling 'complete' things which have glaringly obvious incompleteness to them, and when called on it your only response is to say stuff like "by that standard all RPGs are incomplete, so that can't be true" instead of "ah. I only meant complete w/rt such-and-such limited subset of properties."

That seems strange to me, like someone insisting that a partial function is total because it works on all the odd numbers. But it seems that you agree with clearstream so I suppose it may actually be true that that's what you mean by "complete". Different standards I guess.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Strange, because I have. Nearly all of my games, in fact. We always talked about it as "our game" when I first played in high school because it was the game that our gaming group was collectively playing together. Same was true with my group in college. Likewise, I played Pathfinder 1 with my friends in grad school. We definitely didn't think about it as the GM's game. We thought of it as all of our game because we were friends who were playing a hobby game together as friends. That viewpoint continued when I moved to Vienna and found a new gaming group. It was the group's game that a GM ran rather than the GM's game. These were not people playing "bespoke games" either. We were playing more traditional games in the vein of D&D: i.e, 3e D&D, d20 Modern, Star Wars Saga, 4e D&D, Pathfinder 1, and Numenera. Moreover, this was true whether I was a PC player or the GM player. I think that GM's were possessive about their homebrew settings; however, I think that's different.

Yeah, in fact D&D is a product of this sort of environment in which there was an overarching structure of a campaign world "The Great Kingdom" et al and then Dave, and finally Gary, focused in on specific elements of that and invented their own rules set to play with a different aspect of that world. Furthermore within that play they had vast numbers of participants and multiple PCs per player, sub-GMs, spin off campaigns, crossovers, etc. So I doubt it is possible to unequivocally say that any one specific person fully 'owned' any of it, 100%. Even the rules were an ongoing team effort in which the various participants extended and perfected parts and then subjected them to scrutiny by other participants, reworked them, discarded them, or incorporated them into the canonical version of the rules.

My own play from 1977 to 1980 was all within the context of a large club where there were dozens of D&D games and GMs. Characters and players were constantly exchanged between games (often with no logical explanation of why or how this happened). Nobody 'owned' much of anything. A couple of older and more disciplined GMs ran 'closed games' where they held all the character sheets and only specific people got invited to play, but that was not the usual thing. Even in later years, in the 80s and 90s my friends and I often exchanged roles, running adventures in each other's campaign worlds, spinning off copies of characters into different places, etc. We even had one set of campaigns that were run by different GMs using different systems where we would do crossovers all the time. So we basically had characters moving from 1e AD&D -> Gamma World -> Boot Hill -> Fight in the Skies -> Car Wars -> Star Fleet Battles -> ... Who owned that mess? I'm not sure I could even parse the concept of ownership because its hard to say where the boundaries of games were! My 14th level AD&D super wizard had wings and a dual brain (GW mutations), carried a laser pistol as a backup weapon, and had a Car Wars motorcycle hidden in his portable hole as an emergency getaway device! One of the other PCs had a small wing of WWI aircraft attached to his D&D army! And there was a mexican bandito running around with revolvers who got to like 10th level as a D&D character.

 

[Aldarc]

For that last point, are you saying that I shouldn't express a negative opinion about a type of game because other people like it? Hmm...

(1) You are free to ask me questions without fully-loading your questions, unlocking the safety, and pointing them at my face.

(2) I would say that it's less about expressing a negative opinion about things other people like and more about how you choose to do it.

As for your other points, it has been IMO exhaustively proven by multiple examples that D&D is designed to be the GM's game primarily, as in "the buck stops here". You can play it differently of course, but you are changing fundamental assumptions by doing so,

I don't think that people have questioned whether the GM isn't the primary rules arbiter or facilitator for running the game. It's more about what we mean by "the GM's game functionally." And I think that your statement risks equivocating between those different understandings that have cropped up in this thread.

so I feel justified in claiming that the kind of game you espouse would not feel like D&D to me, and I won't apologize for saying so.

Considering your abrasive language here, I'm curious what kind of game you think I'm espousing, Micah, because I'm genuinely worried that you are dangerously close to an argumentative strawman concerning views I have expressed in this thread. My contributions in this thread have been fairly limited to discussing the vagueries around Rule 0 and about how gaming groups I've played in viewed games as the group's game rather than the GM's game. So you may want to walk back your strongs claims here and dial your attitude down a notch.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

[never mind, better not to get involved]