Why do RPGs have rules?

[hawkeyefan]

Yes, and the meaning of the natural language, "You are in charge..., "The rules serve you..." and "The game is yours..." is "You are in charge..., "The rules serve you..." and "The game is yours..." The DM is in charge and decides. The natural language doesn't mean anything different than what I am saying.

You're cutting it all down even more here. The context of text in which those snippets appear is important.

No. Not one lump at all. Each quote says that the DM is in charge. Not one requires the DM to consult the players on anything, though a few do say he should talk to the players and take them into consideration before making the decision. Each one all by itself is enough to qualify as Rule 0.

I don't agree. We interpret them differently.

Maybe, but the entire design intent of 5e is Rulings over Rules(another callback to Rule 0) so a lot of things are not explicitly said in order to have the DM make decisions about things.

Except their own authority?

This is largely my point. The book is written to allow multiple interpretations. this is why they don't actually commit to a Rule Zero of the kind you're citing, and why you need to cobble one together using little pieces of text from all over the book like a Frankenstein's Monster of DM authority.

Show me one quote that says that the DM serves the players. Hell, show me one that even implies that. Even the strongest quotes that say the DM should talk to the players and take them into consideration don't even begin to imply that he serves the players. Nor do the players serve the DM.

One side serving the other is a completely ridiculous notion. We aren't slaves. The rules, however, are...............to the DM.

I already have, more than once.

Also, service doesn't mean slavery, that's a silly take. If you hire a mechanic to fix you car, he provides a service. He works for you. The DM is clearly meant to serve the group. He's given authority, yes, and the purpose of that authority is to serve the game and the participants.

That you don't see that seems to be because you don't want to.

 

[clearstream]

There is no difference between "being an expert on my imagined world" and "being the authoritative teller of fictions about my imagined world".

It's not at all clear what you mean by that. Suppose a player describes their character in the fictional city of Sigilstar looking for a tea shop. Is that the telling of a fiction in the sense you mean? I'm thinking in particular of player in the 5e sense as having strong authority over what their character does, says and thinks. Is their character and its meandering fiction?

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I have it and have read it. It doesn't tell me how to resolve the action declaration "We leave the dome to find the enemies' hideout." It assumes that I will have a map and resolve things in a hexcrawlish fashion - a terrible assumption for a game of interplanetary travel and exploration.

This might be the first time we've agreed on anything this whole thread.

To wit, when faced with a pacing problem where it's unclear how the players will do things and in what granularity (as opposed to a question about what the characters will do), asking the players to declare a tentative result like "We leave the dome and find the enemies' hideout then knock on the door" works pretty well. The GM can always override that and say "when you leave the dome, you have several choices about which direction to search...". But having the players lead with that tentative result helps the GM avoid playing out in detail things that GM and players both are uninterested in spending table time on.

I get the impression that when you say about Dungeon World, (paraphrased from memory) "when the players declare a move, it happens unless the GM makes a GM move," the ability to avoid pacing problems is one of the things you like about that procedure, and if so I agree--pacing problems are annoying. Up until now it wasn't clear at all to me what sentences like that were trying to say but now maybe I get where you're coming from.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

for 3E or 5E, you're experiencing houseruling, since 5E explicitly puts the DM in charge of rules interpretation.

Apropos of nothing: when I ran 5E, there were a lot of rules I didn't have a strong opinion on and was willing to let the table vote on. E.g. (1) when you cast Animate Dead on goblin skeletons, do you get the DMG stat mods for goblins on the skeletons, or do they somehow become vanilla MM skeletons? Do shortbows and armor scraps materialize out of thin air for them? (2) If you wildshape into an Earth Elemental and then Misty Step above someone's head, do they have a chance to dodge and how detailed do we want to get about computing falling damage to both sides?

In these cases I viewed my role as a facilitator of rule discussions, proposing rule options and helping players choose one that felt right to them.

In other cases, there is only one rule variant I'm willing to use, and I will leave the table before using any other because it would break my suspension of disbelief. No, you may not use Inured To Undeath (10th level Necromancer feature which says your max HP cannot be reduced) as an excuse to permanently increase your HP total via the Aid spell. If you want to do that, DM yourself, I refuse to do it for you.

Did letting players have input on many rules count as a "houserule" w/rt 5E's attitude toward DMing? Beats me, but it's how I did things regardless. (And how I still do things, just not in 5E.)

 

[Manbearcat]

Thanks for engaging substantively, Manbearcat. I want to make sure I know where you're coming from on the idea of new rule-like things that still don't count as rules. Since I'm not familiar with Dungeon World terminology, could we examine the same situation (opening a sewer hatch) from the perspective of AD&D to see if these also don't count as rules in your eyes, or if there's something special and different about Dungeon World?

You're welcome and for sure, we can.

Player wants to open the sewer hatch. DM specifies Open Doors roll at -2 to pull open. Player fails. Ties a rope to the sewer hatch, sets up a pulley system as a force multiplier. DM allows this to give a +6 bonus on the Open Door roll but says that if it fails then that means the rope snapped. Player succeeds and DM gives them a 50% chance of being drenched in sewer water spraying out of the hatch (they roll 2 on a d6 and do get drenched) but this turns out to be a valid back door into the area where the princess is being held hostage.

Same scenario as the Dungeon World custom move for sewer hatches quoted above. Same degree of reasonable extrapolation to cover scenarios not spelled out explicitly AFAIK in the AD&D rulebooks (pulleys and rope strength; probability of getting drenched by a nearby liquid steam).

This ruling works within the unifying structure of the game (success rolls against a value on a table, in this case Str table for a feat of strength). I don't grok the meaning behind your words like "unifying agenda" and "give expression to some aspect of the game rather than subvert it", but I don't think you're saying anything that would make using ropes and pulleys a form of subverting the game. It seems to me that all the things you're saying about Dungeon World apply equally to this AD&D scenario.

Would you say that this scenario also doesn't rise to the level of new AD&D ad hoc rule creation? In my mind when I talk about the need for a GM to improvise rulings and rules to cover gaps, this type of thing (extrapolating how much pulleys multiply your effectiveness) is indeed included, but do you disagree?

Ok, so I think the starting point here is that we're suffering a difference on the question of "what constitutes unifying" or "what constitutes integrated" when it comes to game engines.

AD&D and Apocalypse World are wildly different beasts. To start, I would say AD&D is not an integrated system. It is an extremely dense, comparatively baroque (particularly when evaluated against the population of all games in the last 20 years and change), discrete toolkit of a system where the constituent parts sometimes interlock, sometimes are at-tension (tension that must be resolved by the GM), sometimes diverge, and sometimes the rules are silent on a subject where multiple AD&D templates for resolution can be applied (percentile, roll low vs ability, save vs, reference various analagous modifiers and map onto what you're choosing to deploy as action resolution). For those who love AD&D, resolving (sometimes compatible and sometimes incompatible) subsystem collisions and heavily mediating action resolution is a feature. It requires that GMs are involved heavily (on multiple axes) in most every moment of noncombat action resolution; extrapolating via their personal preconceptions of some combination of the shared imagined space + indexing their mental modeling or coupling of naturalistic causal logic, then resolving.

Broadly speaking, I would say that a typical session of AD&D GMing (particularly noncombat situation/obstacle resolution) entails a sufficient amount of the above which would rise to the level of "new rules creation." I think an easy way to demonstrate this is to contrast AD&D with D&D 5e which, imo, is AD&D 3e. 5e's ethos of "rulings not rules" would probably land on "hey, we're actually generating rules in-situ by way of our rulings." But, while 5e easily has just as much GM input into the trajectory of play as AD&D does, I don't think 5e's version of noncombat action resolution remotely rises to that level of "rules creation in-situ" that AD&D does because 5e's loop does not entail the session-consistent resolving of the features described in paragraph 2 above.

Put another way, a 5e GM will (a) resolve the first order action resolution component above in a stable fashion; reference Ability Check loop. However, (b) there is going to be significant table heterogeneity across the various layers of that loop from uncertainty evaluation for "yes/no/roll dice" to setting a DC to generating consequences. Then, (c) evaluate if Exhaustion applies or some other thing like Vile Transformation or whatever.

I think a strong case could certainly be made that some instantiations of (b) and (c) in 5e rise to the level of "new rules creation" because GMs are generating and operationalizing such a unique matrix of rulings AND those rulings are going to be governed by unique, individual GM ethos or governing principles. The combination of those two things will generate a "new rules creation" situation in 5e sometimes. But because of the stability and unifying experience of (a) and the lack of so many subsystems to index and resolve (for incompatibility or make a ruling on priority or to "glue together"), the instances of "new rules creation" situations in 5e is going to fall well short of AD&D.

Now pivoting to AW (or DW), this is reduced to virtually no instances of "new rules creation" because (if GMed correctly...and there is absolutely a transparent, orthodox way to GM the game) of the convergence of stability in content generation, stability in resolution loop, stability in agenda and principles, minimization of indexing (particularly the reality that any indexing of stuff is not going to require a weighing of contravening action resolution subsystems or collisions that generate potential unwieldiness). In DW, I don't need to evaluate (i) is there a novel class resolution subsystem for this vs (ii) is there a novel percentile subsystem for this already vs (iii) should I develop percentile odds and extrapolate fiction to generate a causally coherent modifier vs (iii) same as prior but "roll under Ability/Prof" vs (iv) saving throw vs xyz...and then evaluate various other novel or unified features of system for fallout/consequences. In DW, you resolve the same conversation architecture and move resolution loop ad infinitum.

TLDR: Its the discrete and novelty in general and the "discrete and novelty at scale" specifically that differentiates any given moment of situation/obstacle resolution in AD&D from that of AW's (and derivative's) "unified & rote" in conversation structure, in content generation procedure, in application of system-specific principles and action resolution engine. Therein lies my assessment of AD&D as a relative, new rules-generating engine in contrast with AW's absence thereof.

Put another way, imagine if you took the most stable, most straight-forward system component of AD&D, applied it at scale to the entire game, made that table-facing, and then removed any GM as storyteller imperatives/rights to the GMing role. That would make for a pretty drastically different experience than running AD&D, right? The difference, in large degree, would be owed to the minimization (if not removal) of discreteness and novelty at scale.

 

[clearstream]

Did letting players have input on many rules count as a "houserule" w/rt 5E's attitude toward DMing? Beats me, but it's how I did things regardless. (And how I still do things, just not in 5E.)

DMG 235 Rules Discussions outlines the group hashing out different interpretations of a rule, as one option, and DM making a call as another.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It wouldn't seem right to say that a referee decides play in a game of football. The players observably enjoy genuine decision-making and in collaboration have decisive impact on the game.


It seems plausible to say that Tolkien in fact was an expert in the world of Middle Earth. Which is an imagined reality - suggesting it is possible to be "expert" in a non-existent world. Then, when it comes to interesting questions - interest is in the eye of the beholder - I'm mindful of immersionism as a mode of play.

One way a person can be most expert in an imagined world (to the extent that it matters) is if they are the original designer of that world. Another is if they acquire expertise in a world designed by others. A corollary of Baker's concern is that expertise can turn out to be conferred upon one participant in the same way as authority is vested by players in their referee. So that what they say about the world is true because they said it.


I feel this is a reasonable line to take if one hopes to argue that one participant's power to change rules must disrupt (what I've called) the lusory fabric. I need to bring judge into the game as a player so as to dispose of their otherwise clearly not disruptive conduct as referee. That step can be resisted through saying any or all of

• a person is capable of operating in a plurality of modes in play, so that they can operate as both referee and player
• it is possible for a person to be expert or conferred with expertise in their version of an imagined world
• there's no need to be the most expert to be an effective referee: other qualities are more important
• possessing an agenda for refereeing is not necessarily identical to possessing an agenda for playing: the referee does not share in the prelusory goals of the players... they're more akin to a game affordance for those goals (elsewhere I described the FKR GM as a "font of unnecessary obstacles")

Generally, it seems straightforward and plausible to say that GM can indeed act as referee.


The way I would reframe what you say here is that there are multiple RPG modes, and in some of those modes GM is intended to be a player. In those modes, it's intuitive to picture that anyone with rule-forming-and-modifying authority must adopt a lusory attitude that forestalls their waving aside all unnecessary obstacles. There are then a subset of rules, the "why" of which is just that. Those rules are not necessary in a refereed game.

Rule zero is not a fix for that mode. Rather it is available and suitable (heh) in just those cases where GM is assigned the function of referee. If I set out to assess rule zero against the standards of a mode in which GM is player, then it's almost inevitable I will have concerns about limits on its use.

I would not personally go ahead and argue that all possible modes of RPG necessitate GM as player so that there is no such thing as GM as referee, not least because GM is characterised as referee in numerous game texts. To me, that is a radical and somewhat implausible argument that needs to be supported by more than has been so far laid out.

EDIT Rereading your "When the point of play" paragraph, I can see that can be taken as a conditional: if it is like this, then etc. If that's what you intend, my final paragraph just above should be ignored and we might turn out to be saying similar things. It's unclear to me whether "invites" in the paragraph preceding that one indicates something you view as inevitable - it leads us to X - or possible - we're invited to consider X.

Meh, I feel like this reads as a kind of weak rejection of Pemerton's rather insightful observation about the historical trajectory of refereeing in RPGs, but it falls short of being a substantive one. I mean, you may object to the use of the word 'kludge', but I thought it was actually kind of appropriate, if a little weighted. Rule 0 is a way of 'patching' the differences between the original 'KS-like' model of play with what we now call 'trad' priorities.

 

[clearstream]

Broadly speaking, I would say that a typical session of AD&D GMing (particularly noncombat situation/obstacle resolution) entails a sufficient amount of the above which would rise to the level of "new rules creation." I think an easy way to demonstrate this is to contrast AD&D with D&D 5e which, imo, is AD&D 3e. 5e's ethos of "rulings not rules" would probably land on "hey, we're actually generating rules in-situ by way of our rulings." But, while 5e easily has just as much GM input into the trajectory of play as AD&D does, I don't think 5e's version of noncombat action resolution remotely rises to that level of "rules creation in-situ" that AD&D does because 5e's loop does not entail the session-consistent resolving of the features described in paragraph 2 above.

Put another way, a 5e GM will (a) resolve the first order action resolution component above in a stable fashion; reference Ability Check loop. However, (b) there is going to be significant table heterogeneity across the various layers of that loop from uncertainty evaluation for "yes/no/roll dice" to setting a DC to generating consequences. Then, (c) evaluate if Exhaustion applies or some other thing like Vile Transformation or whatever.

An exercise I found informing was - applying the DMG version of 5e - to write out the index (DMG242) of consequences (DMG237) for a given ability check. This produces an entity somewhat like a PbtA move. An example

When you do the things listed for dex|stealth -

• Success: creatures don’t become aware of your position
• Critical success: lay a false trail or otherwise sew confusion
• Success w. hindrance: creatures catch your trail or become watchful
• Failure: creatures become aware of your location

Success is roll above the DC. Hindrance is DC to DC minus 2. Failure is DC minus 5. Natural 20 is critical success. Natural 1 is critical failure.

I'm still reflecting on the intuitions driven through performing that exercise.

 

[Pedantic]

An exercise I found informing was - applying the DMG version of 5e - to write out the index (DMG242) of consequences (DMG237) for a given ability check. This produces an entity somewhat like a PbtA move. An example

When you do the things listed for dex|stealth -

• Success: creatures don’t become aware of your position
• Critical success: lay a false trail or otherwise sew confusion
• Success + hindrance: creatures catch your trail or become watchful
• Failure: creatures become aware of your location

Success is roll above the DC. Hindrance is DC to DC minus 2. Failure is DC minus 5. Natural 20 is critical success. Natural 1 is critical failure.

I'm still reflecting on the intuitions driven through performing that exercise.

It's a bit meaningless if the game doesn't specify a DC or how to derive one. You can easily slide any given situation entirely off the table.

 

[Maxperson]

To me what is clear in the 5e text is that DM has a number of functions that players do not have. One of them is as referee saying how the rules apply, another is - again as referee - making rulings when play goes into less-well-defined territory. It's not a literal 3e rule "0.", but is that earnestly at issue here?

(Or maybe it is at issue, and I'm not properly understanding why. If what someone means by "rule zero" is unfettered power to change the rules... that doesn't seem right to me for reasons I've outlined in various posts already. #432 and #435 are examples. And I would agree with @hawkeyefan about the 5e game text, if that's truly the contention.)

It looks like from post #435 that you are saying that the DM is limited by the social contract/culture of DMing. In that I totally agree. My argument is that as written the rules do not limit the DM like that. If I want to tell the social contract to go hang(which I would never do), then by RAW I can unilaterally enact whatever rules changes or additions I want.

Rule 0 isn't dependent on the social contract. It's what the game rules allow or don't allow the DM to do unilaterally in regards to changing rules.