Why do RPGs have rules?

[FormerlyHemlock]

Why would you think this? Things happen in real life all the time that provoke action from people... The question is was it created for that sole purpose (agenda) and in play can only serve that purpose (agenda).

In other words is the bear in the forest because bears inhabit the forest and the PC's can deal with it in whatever way they see fit...or is it there specifically to cause adversity and thus must be dealt with as a problem?

Since I obviously enjoy talking about myself far too much in passing I'll remark that while I'm 95%+ simulationist as a referee, as an worldbuilder my agenda is a lot more tolerant of gamism. I don't mind building a world that will give players interesting decisions to make, but once the game starts I take off my worldbuilder hat and try to be a neutral referee.

 

[Imaro]

Since I obviously enjoy talking about myself far too much in passing I'll remark that while I'm 95%+ simulationist as a referee, as an worldbuilder my agenda is a lot more tolerant of gamism. I don't mind building a world that will give players interesting decisions to make, but once the game starts I take off my worldbuilder hat and try to be a neutral referee.

I honestly find all these categorization a little to rigid for my tastes, especially as many proponents of the Forge talk about them on these boards... its only as a mixture that I think they even begin to capture what actually happens at many tables in the wild... of course then you're treading on incoherent play territory...though if its fun who cares.

 

[aramis erak]

Yeah, sometimes. Often, I'd say.

This was not the case here, though.

By your definition of fun, (would not rather be someplace else) I've run a lot of sessions that were not meeting it.

That there were hoped for later benefits to them is why I stuck with them.

Not everyone is motivated by sheer hedonistic pleasure.

As a GM, I've run a number of sessions that were absolutely not what i wanted to be doing because of a combination of sense of duty to the group and hope for enjoyable play in later sessions. Hope that usually is realized.

That you feel the need to claim that no other reason is acceptable is pretty damned narrow minded. That for you it is the only acceptable is fine.

 

[Maxperson]

That's not a simulation. It's just a description!

I mean, in my last session of Torchbearer, my final bit of narration for the session was to describe a bolt of lightning blasting the house the PCs were in, blasting it in two.

That's not a simulation either. I just made it up!

Yes, yours was not a simulation in the context of an RPG. A lightning bolt won't blast a house in two, so that was purely a non-simulation(but cool) fantasy moment.

Remember, simulation in the context of an RPG =/= simulation in the real world.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

(A) out of curiosity, would this question be asked during play or before play? I'm trying to understand how the words "like in a PbtA" fit into this otherwise-system-agnostic concept. But basically yes, I think we agree.

I would prototypically expect it would be asked during play, but it could be asked in some other context. Session 0 could be a good time for a question of that scope.

(B) That's how I initially interpreted it, and my initial impulse was therefore to agree, but then I thought harder and realized that it's incorrect! The GM can frame the initial hook in a way that deprives PCs of their realistic and drama-destroying advantages like armies of skeleton archers ("your skeletons were all washed overboard during the shipwreck", which the player has already agreed to) and the fact that players don't have perfect information during play creates drama of its own, even if they turn out to be right all along. (Is refusing to eat the halfling meat but offering them cookies REALLY going to be a sufficiently non- offensive choice to win over the natives?)

Well, I think that attests to the fact that "no plan survives contact with the enemy" so to speak. So, yeah, more realistically there will be uncertainty. One of the purposes of classic D&D mechanics is to guarantee some lower bound to that, and to make it likely that there will be some increase in tension as hit points, spells, heals, hirelings, gear, and a guaranteed route back out of the dungeon all fade. Really the trick here, and what indicates why I said this, is that the best strategy is the old 15 minute workday! Never exceed the range of a quick exit.

Heck, when we ran "The Dungeon Company" we boarded up everything we weren't interested in RIGHT NOW, including passages! We cached stores of equipment at regular points, had hirelings who patrolled and stood guard along our routes, etc. TDC never lost a character, not once. If a door was locked, we either broke it down, cut away the hinges, or used magic on it. We treated the whole activity just like fully rational people interested in making a living would do! We even regularly tethered ourselves to anchor points and stationed people nearby to haul us out if anything went wrong.

I mean, sure all that cost some GPs, but what? The problem was, it was very anti-dramatic! I mean, the GM did cook up challenges for us, of course, but we approached those with equal care and systematic thinking.

(C) Not exactly. It's the result of me running a very simulationist game (in terms of Six Cultures of Play it's maybe halfway between Classic and OSR) while thinking hard about the D in GDS and what XP is for. XP is a reward to players for metagame reasons, and unless you view it through a sort of energy-vampire "there can be only one!" lens, it has non-diegetic effects. (In other words, if PCs know that killing dragons makes you stronger and tougher, they are basically vampires. If only players know this, because it doesn't work that way for anyone else in the gameworld, then it's a non-diegetic act of GM fiat on their behalf, as a reward designed to keep players around longer. To Gygax it was clearly the latter: by the account given in The Elusive Shift, after the first game he first played with Arneson he got excited about the concept of character advancement being used to increase a player's emotional investment in continuing play.)

Metagame rewards used to produce non-diegetic effects? That sounds like everyone is in director stance! So why not embrace that fully as an alternate mode of play that has nothing to do with simulationism and everything to do with creativity and fiction-writing?

Therefore, nowadays I award XP (actually DFRPG characters points) exclusively for earning good reviews from other players on your post-session writeup of something related to the session. It has been amazing! Some players write short poems; some write journal entries filling in scenes that I as GM minimized; some retell events in a more highly dramatic way with a hint of unreliable narrator; and every 3-to-5-star review from the other players (including yourself) earns you 1 character point to spend on any character you like, or save for the future. My friends seem content for now to mostly just bank points instead of actually buying new advantages/disadvantages, which means I'm also stressing less about the possibility of accidental TPK in a future scenario, because they can just write up the TPK, gain points for it, and not have wasted a Saturday (or multiple Saturdays).

Sounds very narrativist to me. I mean, we need to consider that there are actually a few flavors of narrative agendas. Not all of it is "play is about the PC's interior lives." Think about Stonetop for instance, where its largely about the survival of the village and what you can do for it. BitD has a pretty strong "the story is about the crew" thing going. Spire, from what I understand, is about people going against the system. So, right now it sounds like the focus is on telling cool stories, but you could in theory turn that various ways, like focusing on particular types of story or whatever. That might be a cool way to drive specific genres (not the only thing, but part of it).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

This along with @pemerton's Goldilocks thought experiment put in mind some additional thoughts that may evade the obstacles presented by our disparate theoretical underpinnings.

In the past, I have said something like the bolded part with respect to MC choice of hard and soft moves from prompts that at times seem to me too thin. One example was the 6- hard move from Hack and Slash. Other posters made the argument that the hard move is sufficiently well constrained. I'll assume, but I could be mistaken, that all agree that within such constraints a vast number of variations are possible so that were we to picture two groups proceeding from the identical situation, one MC might choose one hard move and a second a different hard move... distributed normally.

Deciding what comes next in the Goldilocks example is for many imaginers somewhat constrained. The fictional position isn't very detailed, but as to the details that are there it's not taxing to form intuitions. Such intuitions depend on some sort of internal model of bears, hydration, buckets, wells, etc. While there are vastly many variations possible, norms will apply i.e. those in the conversation will be able to form a consensus about outre and normal answers to "What happens next?"

In the real world, faced with that question one strategy is simply - wait and see. Dr Science with their model of the weather can make a prediction for Sunday, and when Sunday comes around they can see if their prediction is validated. This strategy is not available in imaginary worlds. What happens on Sunday is down to what we decide happens on Sunday. This revises the purpose of models in respect of imaginary worlds. The test that you and I have in our respective ways demanded, is that the game systems should prove normative.

That is why I suggested further above that rather than models or simulations, we should be thinking in terms of normative functions that map from A to B. I mean "functions" in a very open sense - any heuristic that the group can accept the results of will do... which can be made more often true if the group enter into social contracts to sustain an attitude of such acceptance.

If a participant whose turn it is to imagine what the bear does next says - "She dips the bucket in the well" - there is no waiting to see if that will be validated or not. The only test for its predictive accuracy is consent.

I agree with your initial prediction, we are now in total agreement, such things have none of the character of simulation whatsoever. They are narratives. Now, the structure of narratives has long been noted to be pretty regular, and if I recall my Graves, there are only a fairly small number of patterns that are enacted by them. So, sure you could state that the bear will now dip water out of the well. This "follows from the fiction" of the already established narrative, and honors the fictional position in which the bear has a bucket, etc. Certainly nobody is disputing that these techniques and factors are likely to be present in RPG play of probably all types (Toon and such aside). What I would point out is that where these 'functions' you speak of are coming from, the inputs to them, are not constraints created by the existence of inexorable laws within the fiction. These inputs are coming FROM THE MINDS OF THE AUTHORS, and the causality is like "why did the author write that the bear dipped water out of the well? Because of X, Y, and Z elements of their mental state, cause and effect!" This is why the fiction is not a simulation.

In a more general sense, the real world in COHERENT. It is a single unitary thing in which ALL the parts form a single entirely interlocking pattern of causes and effects that is UNIVERSAL. So if there is any model whatsoever that can describe reality, then that model can certainly be used predictively. It is already known from the start that each fact is in accord with all the others, consistent with this model as an initial state. You pointed out that there may be simpler models that are adequately predictive as well, but the only reason this is so is because, AGAIN, there is a single unifying causative 'scheme' which unites all the facts. Imaginary worlds utterly lack this character. We cannot even say there are ANY models which are valid for them at all! And as you have just now pointed out, the concept of 'prediction' in a non-existent milieu is a meaningless concept.

I mean, we do agree, there are statements we can make about the bear "it dips water out of the well with the bucket" vs "the bear spontaneously bursts into flames and goes up in smoke" where we find the former statement comports better with our experiences of the everyday world and therefor commands more verisimilitude. It might also lead in a more satisfactory narrative direction, coming closer to adhering to the universal rules of drama, and thus be more satisfying for whatever reasons it is that such dramas please us (I don't know, its not something I'm knowledgeable about).

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I honestly find all these categorization a little to rigid for my tastes, especially as many proponents of the Forge talk about them on these boards... its only as a mixture that I think they even begin to capture what actually happens at many tables in the wild... of course then you're treading on incoherent play territory...though if its fun who cares.

To be fair, the GDS guys are far less rigid.

2) Which one am I? Drama-, Game-, or Simulation-oriented?​

Most likely, none of the above. Your individual style cannot be pidgeonholed into a single word. More to the point, you probably use a mix of different techniques, and work towards more than one goal. You may tend more towards one corner of the triangle, but you probably value a mix.

Source: The Threefold Model FAQ

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Sounds very narrativist to me. I mean, we need to consider that there are actually a few flavors of narrative agendas. Not all of it is "play is about the PC's interior lives." Think about Stonetop for instance, where its largely about the survival of the village and what you can do for it. BitD has a pretty strong "the story is about the crew" thing going. Spire, from what I understand, is about people going against the system. So, right now it sounds like the focus is on telling cool stories, but you could in theory turn that various ways, like focusing on particular types of story or whatever. That might be a cool way to drive specific genres (not the only thing, but part of it).

The post-gameplay portion of play is intentionally Drama-inspired. I don't know if I would say "narrativist" in the RPG sense because nothing is actually happening except earning XP (character points). There's no RPG gameplay occuring. It's just writing and reviewing stories/poems/whatever, and even if someone writes that Bob has a secret hatred of Alice, that can just be an unreliable narrator--Bob doesn't have to actually hate Alice next session.

But yes, it's definitely reminiscent of and inspired by GDS "Drama", which is why the storytelling is also firewalled off from actual gameplay and what really happens. It is entirely about making people feel things[1], not making things happen, and rewarding those people for success with the ability to make characters grow in certain ways by delegated GM fiat.

The other major influence narrativism has had on my GMing is via pacing. I have become much more sensitive to how players at the table spend their time, and more willing to decouple what the characters do from how the players do it, in the interest of saving player time.

[1] For example, when I said earlier that I intend to take the next PC death and show their impact on an NPC, both grieving and coping and maybe stepping up, that's about making the players feel that the PC's life and death was not pointless, and had an impact on the gameworld. There's nothing stopping me from adding the NPC to the gameworld, and maybe I will, but the gameworld effect is not the point. It's all about making the people sitting around the kitchen table feel, and if I do it right they'll give me 3-5 stars.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I would prototypically expect it would be asked during play, but it could be asked in some other context. Session 0 could be a good time for a question of that scope.

Well, I think that attests to the fact that "no plan survives contact with the enemy" so to speak. So, yeah, more realistically there will be uncertainty. One of the purposes of classic D&D mechanics is to guarantee some lower bound to that, and to make it likely that there will be some increase in tension as hit points, spells, heals, hirelings, gear, and a guaranteed route back out of the dungeon all fade. Really the trick here, and what indicates why I said this, (A) is that the best strategy is the old 15 minute workday! Never exceed the range of a quick exit.

Heck, when we ran "The Dungeon Company" we boarded up everything we weren't interested in RIGHT NOW, including passages! We cached stores of equipment at regular points, had hirelings who patrolled and stood guard along our routes, etc. TDC never lost a character, not once. If a door was locked, we either broke it down, cut away the hinges, or used magic on it. We treated the whole activity just like fully rational people interested in making a living would do! We even regularly tethered ourselves to anchor points and stationed people nearby to haul us out if anything went wrong.

I mean, sure all that cost some GPs, but what? The problem was, it was very anti-dramatic! I mean, the GM did cook up challenges for us, of course, but we approached those with equal care and systematic thinking.

(A) is really the core of your argument and while it was clearly true in your situation that the 15-minute workday is the best strategy, it's not generally true in all cases, and I don't think it would be true in the situation I posited either (shipwreck in the course of buying low and selling high). If nothing else, your cargo will rot if you leave it in the shipwreck too long. (Or get looted by the natives, or stolen by pirates, or eaten by giant sharks.)

I mean, I'm not stupid. If I ask the players to buy into a scenario that will force them to abandon their realistic-but-boredom-creating advantages, I'm not somehow going to forget about time as a resource.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

No, but in an RPG context, "You set up camp near the river. Shortly before dusk you see a large brown bear head to the middle of the river. After about 10 minutes it catches a large fish and carries it off to eat."

That's plenty enough to be a simulation of what a bear might do in the woods. There is another thing that bears do in the woods, but this site doesn't allow us to say such things.

In an RPG context you don't need to create a scientific model that takes all kinds of things into account in order to be a simulation.

Its a depiction. It may be 'naturalistic' in that it depicts activities which people with knowledge of bears might expect of an actual bear. It doesn't 'simulate' anything at all. And yes, simulations include a model (a mathematical/logical description of how the state of a system evolves over time) and an initial state (which the model takes as input to produce states at times t+1, t+2, etc.). What you have instead is a STORY depicting the actions of a fictional bear. These are entirely different things. Calling a story a simulation, and attributing to it attributes of simulation is a category error.

Demonstration of category error consists of proving that the attributes claimed of the thing cannot possibly be attributed to it because they are inapplicable. I would probably merely point out that the bear in the river story is unconstrained, ANYTHING can happen, and there is no constraint, no limits, on what that is. A dragon could reach up from out of the river and swallow the bear. A pixie could land on the bear's back and magically give it wings so they fly off together. The bear could drown. The bear could eat a good meal of fish. The bear could catch nothing. The bear could be a high level druid using shapechange.

I could go on, literally forever, inventing "and then..." There is no criteria whatsoever you can use that appertain to simulations with which to evaluate those things. Instead the proper evaluation would be of a literary and dramatic nature, did I tell a good story? Do you see how I've shown the nature of the category error here? I'd note that this applies to ALL of these, what I would call Dramatist, stories equally. All of them are fundamentally unconstrained. None of them are simulations.