Why do RPGs have rules?

[loverdrive]

Okay, you and @AbdulAlhazred seem to have (slightly??) different takes on what No Myth entails and I've seen plenty of proponents on these very boards, some liking your post, claim that you are not supposed to have things pre-made. But given that your premise above is correct, how is this enforced by the game and how can the players be sure it is not being subverted by the GM without their knowledge.

Because the players know what is established? I'm not sure if I understand the question. It needs no enforcement, because it's impossible to subvert anything without player knowledge.

No Myth play rejects the idea that GM can write "door to storage area is booby-trapped" in her notebook and then use it as basis to declare how a PC opening that door explodes because they didn't check the door for traps. That's, more or less, it.

GM can prep. Arguably, should prep. It's just this prep is not treated as part of the game. In Apocalypse World, for example, it matters jack what MC's notes say, "you open the door and explode" is not a legitimate move. Players can and should object, and their objections will be supported by the game.

If someone suggests that No Myth demands the GM to never think about anything in advance, they are an idiot.

I'd say the easiest way to think about it is to compare it to how a player can prep for a traditional game. They can write and recite a bunch of one-liners, prepare a triumphant speech, whatever, and then leverage this work if a suitable situation arises in the game, but not much more than that.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The thing that frustrates me in my simulated or not-simulated (which ever part of the aisle you're on) game is what sort of repercussions can a DM reasonably inject upon the characters when they foil a BBEG's plans?
@innerdude mentioned this exact thing upthread.

The guide we have in the DMG is CR and level-appropriate encounter challenges.
That very idea though, I feel, flies in the face of a simulated reality.
What is worse is when you inject house rules, like we have done, that messes the entire maths of the game even further.

So what are my options really?
This is a mental stumbling block for me as all I ever do feels like a self-regulated table jerk. Illusionism essentially.

The PCs kill some bad guys at location #1. What does that mean for location #2 and the bad guys head-office? How fast is the bad-guy recruitment? How many bad guys were there to begin with? The PCs gain the support of xyz - how does that affect the final scenario with BBEG + forces?

Essentially I have to create mini-games/contests/possiblities within the game i.e. if A happens then b+d = the square root of more algebra. But who says one cannot change that during play or during the actual encounter when you see things are not challenging enough or too challenging? I mean how often have we justified adding an extra 50 or 100 hit points onto the BBEG in the middle of combat to make it more exciting or thrown in a Legendary Action? I mean I got tired with the monsters in 5e as they became too easy so I started using monsters from Level Up. But even then I might still make a change here or there in combat. I do not necessarily do that all the time, but that ability to do it exists and no one would know. And it feels wishy-washy.

The other day the PCs fought in a 19-round combat, in which the environment changed at the will of the BBEG while he was shape-changing into any creature he desired that usually suited the environment. It essentially took place in his lair, a dimensional dream plane. It was a truly glorious session that ONLY consisted of those 19 combat rounds - yeah it was THAT epic. The players absolutely loved it. I put much effort into the challenges.

But what was to stop me from having the BBEG creating a 500-foot fall into a lake of lava? Nothing really. So why didn't the BBEG do it in any of those 19 rounds of combat, especially towards the end when things were getting dangerous for him?

In the last round of combat the shapechanger had turned into a marilith and in the fiction I actually narrated it attacked the PC in a co-ordinated synchronised manner and then I made the hit rolls. I had no idea of the PC's hit point at that stage. In normal circumstances, the PC would be dead, (unconscious + follow up attacks = auto death saves) but instead I allowed him to be revitalised with a healing spell. Ofc, there needed to be some kind of consequence and so I ruled the PC secretly suffers from trauma (madness affliction) which upsets his long rest. Furthermore, should the PC encounter mariliths and serpentine creatures they would suffer a dragon fear-like effect. I ruled anything less than a Wish would not permanently cure the malady, except for an extended Skill Challenge which also requires Downtime between successful checks. This is all for the PC to discover.

Now all of this is me deciding on things - but all I'm really doing, I feel, is some mass illusion exercise.
I'm curating an enjoyable immersive simulated experience for the players - they're loving it, and certainly some of their ideas and strategies reflect some player skill, but there is also a large element of DM decides where the line is - and if I'm honest, that line has a lot of bias.

Maybe I'm over thinking things. I don't know.
But I refuse to believe @innerdude and I are the only ones that have experienced this.
That is why I can understand @loverdrive's argument despite my efforts to challenge it.

@Manbearcat if you have time, I'd be interested to know your thoughts on this. I know it is quite a ramble. Sorry.

You sound a lot like me c1992 maybe. My response was to essentially try to construct an entire campaign as a sort of giant multi-dimensional process sim where every path which could be taken, across an entire vast AP-like game would be constrained by defined parameters.

VERY VERY quickly what I realized in play, after months of prep was:

A) The players don't especially know, care, or appreciate how the fiction is generated. There is no special level of quality of fiction that appears simply because the GM made stuff up a while ago.

B) Unless you want to hard railroad there are very few game structures that work, and they all either heavily constrain the form of play, or they just lead to a sort of unfocused and mostly undramatic play.

The upshot was my response to make that campaign work. Lose the focus on the elements I created and focus on what happens when the character's personalities and motives drive play.

The meta-plot still existed, but like a DW front. One player had a female druid and her character spent years fighting a power struggle with the male-dominated druid hierarchy. I think I might have made 2 druid NPCs before that and had a plot point that the main group of druids was less than helpful to the local kingdom in its problem. She turned it into this whole other theme where the 'mothers' forced the hierarchy out of power etc. She even added this whole flower power thing and called her character 'Summer Twilight' etc.

I don't think it was exactly like modern narrativist play but it did put character ahead of plots and any silly notion of what 'should' happen or anything like that. Oddly, that game felt much more organic and true than any other!

 

[Micah Sweet]

You sound a lot like me c1992 maybe. My response was to essentially try to construct an entire campaign as a sort of giant multi-dimensional process sim where every path which could be taken, across an entire vast AP-like game would be constrained by defined parameters.

VERY VERY quickly what I realized in play, after months of prep was:

A) The players don't especially know, care, or appreciate how the fiction is generated. There is no special level of quality of fiction that appears simply because the GM made stuff up a while ago.

B) Unless you want to hard railroad there are very few game structures that work, and they all either heavily constrain the form of play, or they just lead to a sort of unfocused and mostly undramatic play.

The upshot was my response to make that campaign work. Lose the focus on the elements I created and focus on what happens when the character's personalities and motives drive play.

The meta-plot still existed, but like a DW front. One player had a female druid and her character spent years fighting a power struggle with the male-dominated druid hierarchy. I think I might have made 2 druid NPCs before that and had a plot point that the main group of druids was less than helpful to the local kingdom in its problem. She turned it into this whole other theme where the 'mothers' forced the hierarchy out of power etc. She even added this whole flower power thing and called her character 'Summer Twilight' etc.

I don't think it was exactly like modern narrativist play but it did put character ahead of plots and any silly notion of what 'should' happen or anything like that. Oddly, that game felt much more organic and true than any other!

All of that happened, it seems to me, because you had a narrativist preference and wanted the game and the players to incentivize drama and generate story beats. If that's not what you want, obviously things turn out differently.

 

[Emberashh]

The thing that frustrates me in my simulated or not-simulated (which ever part of the aisle you're on) game is what sort of repercussions can a DM reasonably inject upon the characters when they foil a BBEG's plans?

The thing about creating a living world is that you have to have conviction in it, and, insofar as the BBEG goes, you should also be roleplaying.

If the party is savvy enough to foil the BBEG earlier than you expected or intended, then you should maintain the integrity of that success and roleplay the BBEG accordingly. Its your character at the end of the day, so how do they react? What resources can they draw on? Will they get reckless and seek revenge at all costs, or may be this foiling was all part of the Master Plan (TM)?

The only person who can really say is you, because you ushered this BBEG into existence. If theres never any easy answers, prep is where your focus should be, giving that BBEG the experiences, resources, and world presence to be able to react appropriately. There won't always be an easy answer, but especially early on in a campaign, a BBEG shouldn't be getting caught in a do or die situation without intending to.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I see that some folk do have that intuition; as I would put it, they don't feel a sense of access to an internal model. One exercise that might cast light on that is to do some game design in which you externalise (write out) models that were formed internally.

I don't see how this helps.

If the stuff you make up is consistent then as it turns out you're not just making stuff up.

I don't agree with that at all. Plenty of fiction is consistent, that doesn't mean it wasn't made up.

The reverse of the exercise I suggested above is to internalise such a table. Learn it by memory. School yourself to apply it intuitively.

But apply it how? Roll for results, or choose from the list of potential results?

Just to check, do game concerns only apply to simulationism? Or do they also apply to narrativism?

I think they often do, yes. Most of the games I play that fall into the narrative bucket tend to have some pretty strong gamist leanings. Not all, I'd say, and not always to the same extent, but they're a factor.

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.

That's fair. I have a hard time accepting that such games have cast aside any gamist leanings, though, so much as they've considered both at the design stage and are trying to use simulation in a way that delivers an engaging game.

There is an implicit assumption here that the experience of play that players want is not that of simulationism. You essentially erase - avoid even admitting the possibility of - any quality of experience of play other than those qualities gamists and narrativists value. You then critique simulationism for its failings to satisfy gamism and narrativism. This is the chief and recurrent lapse of empathy that I have mentioned previously.

That's because as it's typically being described in this thread, simulation seems purely one-sided, and that's the GM side. So I am unclear how the players can enjoy simulation in that case. If we start to make the distinctions that @pemerton makes above, then I can start to see it because then the players are involved in it. But if we do that, then we're using yucky Forge waffle and many don't likey.

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.

I don't think the world was crafted with sim priorites. I think it was crafted to make a compelling game that suited the genre and themes that the game is going for. It's about crime, so it's always night time. It's about pressure, so you can't get out of the city. It's about upsetting the system, so you can't do anything without disrupting someone else's plans.

I think that once those kinds of things were decided, then the world was crafted to suit those needs. But there is consideration given to make sense of the world. Things like food and where it comes from and that kind of stuff have been given some consideration. Certainly the ideas of corruption and power structures and how societies work all resonate as pretty realistic (depending of course on how people decide to play it). But at the end of the day, it's clearly a fantasy setting.

But I don't think most game settings can escape the fantasy label enough to really be held up as paragons of simulation. Most D&D settings are clearly fantastic, even nonsensical in some ways.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Another point of confusion for me... Are agendas ways/styles to play games or are they design goals for games... or does this depend on the specific model/theory?

That was a discussion that tended to come up frequently when GDS was a thing. Its certainly hard to argue that some leans are not baked into some game designs; almost all high-genre games have genre emulation as a priority, and that almost always pulls away to some extent from another agenda (just depends on how the agendas are framed in a model).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I'm not sure I grant the premise here - 3E D&D isn't a sim RPG as far as I can tell.

Why does simulationism demand that zombies can't be wrong-footed? Because of the word "mindless"?

In RM, we treated undead as immune to Type M spells. RM doesn't really have defender mechanics, but undead can be parried, and defeated in initiative (by the player allocating offensive bonus to initiative).

I think I've missed something!

I think the ultimate point is to demonstrate the empty futility of the mindset that you can draw any conclusions about how plot or mechanics should proceed from pretending there are causal relationships at work that are not purely at the whim of game participants. In his example this becomes destructive of other, possibly also simulationist, goals.

 

[Imaro]

.
I don't think the world was crafted with sim priorites. I think it was crafted to make a compelling game that suited the genre and themes that the game is going for. It's about crime, so it's always night time. It's about pressure, so you can't get out of the city. It's about upsetting the system, so you can't do anything without disrupting someone else's plans.

I think that once those kinds of things were decided, then the world was crafted to suit those needs. But there is consideration given to make sense of the world. Things like food and where it comes from and that kind of stuff have been given some consideration. Certainly the ideas of corruption and power structures and how societies work all resonate as pretty realistic (depending of course on how people decide to play it). But at the end of the day, it's clearly a fantasy setting.

But I don't think most game settings can escape the fantasy label enough to really be held up as paragons of simulation. Most D&D settings are clearly fantastic, even nonsensical in some ways.

I'm not (and I don't think anyone is claiming they are) running paragons of simulation (Is anyone claiming to run a 100% perfectly aligned to 1 agenda game??) but its the priority for how the game is being run...

The world above has a dead sun and near endless night and no reason for why it isn't frozen or moving towards some sort of ice age is ever given... not a single mention...its just glossed over because like you said, a city in near endless night is a "cool" setting. This is where, IMO, a simulation agenda would conflict... this doesn't just bend the stick it totally breaks it...this is where the setting just has to be accepted as "for play".

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Okay, you and @AbdulAlhazred seem to have (slightly??) different takes on what No Myth entails and I've seen plenty of proponents on these very boards, some liking your post, claim that you are not supposed to have things pre-made. But given that your premise above is correct, how is this enforced by the game and how can the players be sure it is not being subverted by the GM without their knowledge.

I am asking this because these are the same questions being presented for a simulation agenda and when people say... because I extrapolate from cause, experience, what I know about the subject, etc. they are accused of not actually being able to do that but instead gaslighting themselves into thinking they are while serving another agenda. So I'm curious, what actually keeps someone who is playing NO-Myth style from setting up their pre-conceived ideas, plot, etc above what is established and how would the players know?

Here's an example... A manor is established in play that is owned by a benevolent mayor who really has his town's best interests at heart. The players are invited to the manor as acting diplomats for the town to discuss the rising tensions in the political state with a group of representatives from a secondary village to the north. There is a feast, introductions and the true negotiations are declared to start tomorrow. The players are all ready for a game of political intrigue, negotiation and closed door deals... I however as GM want to run a dungeon crawl I wrote up last night full of ghouls, undead and body horror. So I have decided that under the manor is a dungeon secretly built by his son (a secret cultist) who, when the players sleep at the house for the night, drugs them and dumps them into the ghoul-infested, haunted catacombs full of body-mutatring fungi. Now going strictly by what you said this doesn't violate No-Myth. But if this drastic of a change can be introduced from pre-planned notes through fictional maneuvering... I don't know it feels like this agenda doesn't really stop or enforce anything.

However if this is not a violation can you explain how and why?

Well, I can't totally answer for different interpretations of DW play, or similar games. I'd have to play with @loverdrive probably to understand if we even have substantive differences or if my explication is simply faulty. I felt like what she said was good.

So, I don't think a DW GM is necessarily doing anything wrong by introducing plot and related stuff into the game. Often this happens, and it's a vehicle for creating situations that speak to player/PC concerns.

As to your example, how did the original scenario arise? Is political intrigue central to character concerns. For example if a PC has a love interest with one of the other town's diplomats then presumably there's stuff to play out there. On the other hand maybe the GM's idea dovetails with other players interests. If not, then it's probably a little heavy-handed.

I would put it this way, the GM in DW and at least many other narrative games is heavily admonished to ask questions. Take this advice seriously! It's really how you find out, is a nice session of body horror a good idea? Trust me, the players will tell you. If they won't or if they think it's futile then there's work to be done in order to be an effective game.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I'm not (and I don't think anyone is claiming they are) running paragons of simulation (Is anyone claiming to run a 100% perfectly aligned to 1 agenda game??) but its the priority for how the game is being run...

I didn't say you did that, I'm just saying there are few settings that hold up to scrutiny. They're all fantasy worlds.

The world above has a dead sun and near endless night and no reason for why it isn't frozen or moving towards some sort of ice age is ever given... not a single mention...its just glossed over because like you said, a city in near endless night is a "cool" setting. This is where, IMO, a simulation agenda would conflict... this doesn't just bend the stick it totally breaks it...this is where the setting just has to be accepted as "for play".

Well it was all a magic cataclysm... so it's hard to say how anything "works" because magic is involved. The sun was shattered, but it's still there... vaguely seen as a burning ember through the darkness. But you're right, the game isn't concerned with why the world is still warm and such... it simply is, and no one can really say why.