Why do RPGs have rules?

[AbdulAlhazred]

Unclear how much interest this will draw broadly, but (since we're playing and its a conversation we've touched upon but not elaborated on) I'm going to discuss Stonetop and how I handle deriving these types of answers via textual analysis. So the move in question is the following:



So the player (AA above) of Mehda the Antiquarian (Seeker playbook) used this in Expedition #1 after our When Spring Bursts Forth move generated both a Threat and an Opportunity (the PCs tackled the Threat and Requisitioned NPCs and sent them out on another Expedition to...ermm..."handle"...the Opportunity).

The final conflict was in a Redneedle Pine wood. There are pine cones galore. Mehda had a lit lantern. Consequently, Mehda pulled a Gandalf and lit pine needles to attack swarms of giant, corrupted insects (this Threat ended up as a kind of a Corrupted giant insects swarms as Xenomorphs deal). One of the Special Qualities of these swarms was vulnerable to fire so yay, moar damage.

Alright, onto the analysis:

* The Environmental Damage that is embedded in WWWYG is just a catch-all for any sorts of environmental damage which is pulled directly from DW. The examples cited are mundane, but it is certainly possible for it to be mundane or magic. So that is a tiny lean toward mundane, but still very much up for grabs.

* The Antiquarian version of Seeker is a sort of Indiana Jones (mundane) meets MacGyver (mundane) meets Use Magic Device specialist meets Wizard-on-the-side playbook (AA chose for her Instinct: Curiosity - To seek answers that maybe you oughtn’t). So we have both mundane "figure crazy crap out and implement strategems with bubble gum and paper clips" type and "get yourself in trouble with magic stuff" type. So, on the strength of that, WWWYG above, could still be either mundane or magic.

* However, across all of the texts generally (Magical Entity as a Threat header, Uses Magic or Spells as a header when creating monsters, Dangers and Opportunities denote "magic"), playbooks broadly (the Judge has Defend broadening/amplifying moves like Aegis of Faith and Mirrorshield that specifically calls out turning away/back spells and magical effects while other Defend broadening/amplifying moves are mundane), and within the Seeker playbook (contrast WWWYG above with the advanced move Arcane Adept that specifically calls out "invent spells and magical effects", you see Magic called out in the text of moves.

IMO, this is where we get toward "textual analysis supports this being the MacGuyver-ey, mundane shtick of the character...if you have some combination of Loadout + Environment of Imagined Space that supports the ability to deploy the trigger for WWWYG...do so...and its mundane (otherwise, make a move like Seek Insight or Know Things or a playbook move or load stuff out to open up th trigger to WWWYG).

---

So that is where I land on Work With What You've Got! The magic stuff comes from the Major Arcanum of The Azure Hand and moves like Arcane Adept (above), Attuned (basically Detect Magic), etc etc.

I'm pretty much in agreement with that assessment. I think it's an interesting case because we in our group tend towards a pretty strong" know your moves and call them out" style of play. We're all pretty old hands at RPGs and ate likely to wear off some of the more formal practice. I think that can lead to a bit of this ambiguity where what maps to what, cloud to boxes, gets a bit fuzzy.

So, like, Meds could perhaps combine the Azure Hand power draw move with WWWYG but it is not really perfectly clear how to do that or what might differentiate various juxtapositions of Seeker moves. I think this particular playbook, with it's sort of mix of Indiana Jones and Gandalf is a fair bit less straightforward than, say, the DW wizard, which is quite clear as to it's modus.

Seems like a reasonable entre to a discussion on player facing rules!

 

[Imaro]

This is clearly not a no-myth game. You have all this secret backstory, and you are making hard moves by reference to it, bypassing any action resolution framework.

Ok given this is true how do the players know the GM has violated No-Myth play... what does a game designed for No Myth do, outside of advice, to force proper play?

 

[Imaro]

To me, all serious RPGing seems to have this. I mean, Burning Wheel and Apocalypse World are full of rules and guidelines intended to produce this sense.

This is why, upthread, I've asked some other posters what their contrast is with (what they call) simulationist RPGing. In my imagination, the sort of contrast I am seeing is with "arena"-style play, or some "dungeon of the week" play. But in that case "simulationism" becomes a label for the scope and depth of the fiction, and not for any sort of GM technique or (what the Forge would call) creative agenda.

Now maybe I've got the contrast wrong: but that's my conjecture, until it gets corrected.

What is your oppinion on the default world of Blades... IMO it is thin and not very simulationist at all... as I said earlier, my first impressions were this is a moody, darkly cool world to pull of capers in but... its paper thin and some of it doesn't make causal sense or is left with no causal relationships...

Also note: I don't think thats a bad thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

What I'm saying is that there are simulation-based reasons why the danger in the setting increases the farther away from a settlement you get. Two birds with one stone and all that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Okay, then I guess you have three choices when you GM: extrapolate based on rulebooks instead of FKR-style, determine randomly (e.g. DC = d20+prof), or choose based on some other agenda like sexual attraction or dramatism.

I have four choices: reasonable guess, rulebook extrapolation, arbitrary randomness, sexual attraction/dramatism/etc.

Neither of us is forced to decide based on sexual attraction/dramatism/etc.

Well, what I am after is that a player will listen to a framing of a scene, and the evaluation they come to about it is reasonably similar to mine such that we can make decisions about the character's actions and perform other game activities in reference to the fiction without a long cumbersome process of interrogation.

I don't even see obtuse or complex sim considerations to be very useful here. Often I want the obvious surface of things to be what is key. Also I am working in a style of play where the players' interpretations are just as weighty as my own!

Very often we interpret things based on outcome in say PbtA. You rolled 6-, yup that board can't hold your weight! As for the choices I listed in my previous post? Those are the ones your stuck with if your process is classic. It ain't my prob, man!

 

[Maxperson]

Huh? Upthread, you equated simulation with realism. But now you're simulating monsters and magic? I've lost track of what your position is!

Because there's such a thing as fantasy realism. The setting will establish what is realistic for the setting. If the setting sets up dragons as a monster that exists as a very, very powerful and very, very rare creature, then it is realistic for the group to encounter one at some point. It is also realistic, given their rarity, for the party not to encounter one.

Yet in D&D play the PCs never meet the relatively few powerful ones when they're first level.

Why do you say that? That has not been my experience either as a player or a DM.

 

[Micah Sweet]

For me, this leads right back to the point I made upthread:

Purist-for-system simulationism is a simulation for everyone at the table, just as you describe here. It uses tables, often rather complex resolution processes, etc. The whole table gets to see "the imagined cosmos in action".

Whereas (what Edwards calls) high concept simulationism is a simulation for the players, in the sense that they get to experience a fiction beyond their control. But it is not a simulation for the GM, because the GM is deciding what happens (perhaps with some input from mechanical systems at least some of the time).

These are very different approaches to RPGing. And I say this based not just on the theoretical analysis, but my experience of the radical difference between RM and RQ play, and AD&D 2nd ed play, as I lived through these in the 90s. (Which is when I was active in club and convention play.)

Here I don't think I agree. Simulationism has a concern about the quality of the experience - it should have a "this is how it is" character to it. In purist-for-system play, that's the experience of having those tables etc "reveal" the fiction to you. (Some narrativist RPGs have elements of this too - eg Burning Wheel. Others don't - eg MHRP/Cortex+ Heroic. I'm happy to elaborate as to why if that would be interesting.)

In high concept play, it's a type of "experientialism". As per my posts way upthread about rule zero, I think this can come very close to being told a story by the GM, although the story-telling process is structured a little bit differently from normal, via the imposition of the form of the RPG.

Is there a reason you can't do both "high concept" and "purist for system" (if I must use Forge jargon) in the same game, each according to the most appropriate technique for the issue? I would call that, "simulation".

 

[Micah Sweet]

Huh? Upthread, you equated simulation with realism. But now you're simulating monsters and magic? I've lost track of what your position is!

Yet in D&D play the PCs never meet the relatively few powerful ones when they're first level.

Generally speaking, the GM isn't going to start the PCs at the beginning of the campaign right next to the demon fortress. That place is a ways off, because if it weren't there likely wouldn't be a settlement for the PCs to start at.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Something I think gets missed about simulations is that, when they're done well, narratives can arise emergently.

In the video game world, DayZ has no imposed narrative to speak of other than what "lore" can be gleamed from the world map.

But, that doesn't stop stories from being possible. And in fact, so able is DayZ at providing for this that the stories I can tell about my experiences in it are some of my favorites to recount, and much unlike any typical gaming war story, recounting an experience in DayZ is enhanced by the abstract simulation of real life, which provides a critical context to the story.

For instance, if I recall that one time in Battlefield when I almost got sniped, theres not really a story there.

But if I recall a night in DayZ, I can talk about how I decided to travel through the western forest in the dead of the night, only to be beset not just by sudden hunger, but a heavy thunderstorm, making my trek through the forest a matter of navigating practically pitch black darkness.

But fortunately, I had recently acquired some NVGs from a shootout I had on the southern coast, so despite the elements I could see pretty well.

Now hunger in DayZ isn't that devastating, but when you're freezing cold you use up more energy, so it was important that I find food asap, and lo and behold despite the weather I stumbled upon some deer, and for whatever reason i got it into my head that I was going to try and sneak up on a buck and stab it with a knife rather than just take it down with my rifle.

So for the next 10 minutes or so I crawled on my belly trying to sneak up on the deer, and when I eventually got up to it I was ecstatic as I managed to not spook it. But as soon as I raised my knife, a loud familar CRACK pierced the air and the buck fell dead. Somebody had sniped the deer and I was left just standing there with a knife, in pitch black darkness, with no way to know where the shot came from or if they could even see me. But fortunately I hauled ass out of that clearing, and no other bullets seemed to follow me.


However, come morning when the rain cleared, I heard a shootout ring out somewhere close in the forest, so before I logged for the night, I took my rifle and emptied a mag in that general direction. Probably didn't hit anything, but guaranteed whoever lived was as spooked as I was.


You can't tell that kind of story and have it have the same oomph without the context that this was a survival shooter, and likewise, while an imposed story could be well done, an emergent story has a quality you can't really manufacture, even if parts of your story are emergent.

Like, most people will love recounting the dice inducing some wack situation, but often times the context that you were playing Curse of Strahd or Kingmaker or Sailors on the Starless Sea is basically immaterial.

DayZ sounds awesome! I've never heard of it.

 

[Emberashh]

What I'm saying is that there are simulation-based reasons why the danger in the setting increases the farther away from a settlement you get. Two birds with one stone and all that.

Indeed, and given the classic RPG setting tends to be a pseudo medieval one, it just follows logically. A vast untamed wilderness is not always the safest, and while one could argue that a true wilderness wouldn't present the kinds of obstacles we expect in a hexcrawl, and especially not at the frequencies they occur, after a point one has to remember that the game has to game.

Which incidentally is what makes DayZ such an interesting case study, as it embraced a truer simulation (wild animals are fairly rare and even zombies are pretty lowkey despite being 28 Days Later zoomie zombies) to great effect.

But why that works in DayZ is due to its aim towards horror; the long stretches of nothing happening get juxtaposed with moments of sheer absolute terror.

That story I recounted only happened at the end of may be a 3 or 4 hour session. (Which to be fair even for DayZ isn't accurate, I play on low pop servers so I see much less people than I should)

DayZ sounds awesome! I've never heard of it.

Be forewarned, its called a jogging simulator for a reason. But as noted above, its part of the point, and if you get into it its hard to put it down. Its a game thats been a consistent part of my rotation for nearly a decade at this point, which should illustrate the staying power its capable of.