Why do RPGs have rules?

[clearstream]

I followed what you meant, I just am unsure how that addressed what I was saying.

Don't follow. Do.

Sure. But I'm honestly not familiar with any games that involve such arbitrary GMing. It doesn't seem like a quality unique to simulation games.

It's prioritised. Analagously, virtually every game text has gamist elements. Only some prioritise them. (There's more that can be said here, of course.)

Again, I don't follow how this addresses my question. I asked if you are to use tables to facilitate simulation in order to disclaim making decisions about how things go, or if you should choose.

It sounds like you're saying you should choose? But remain impartial? How do you do that? If there are three possible outcomes, one is 50% likely, one 30%, and the last 20%, how do you decide? Do you just pick the 50% option since it's the most likely?

If you pick, how are you remaining impartial?

A verdict is reached through reference to established referents and relationships, seeking neither to favour or disfavour the characters, but to represent the world as it is.

As GM in this capacity is not a player, they share in the attitude of the referee. Miraculous as this impartiality might seem, it is no more miraculous than the lusory attitude itself.

If you would sincerely aim to question it, turn first to that.

What world isn't external to the players? Do you mean the characters? Either way, I'm not sure what this means.

I see it as essential that the world extend beyond the characters. That it be objectively real from their point of view. A world without preestablished facts that players narrate into existence as they play is not external to them in this way. I have noticed avenues for a world established on the fly to go on to be external.

Playing to find out in simulationist play is not playing for GM to find out, as they are not a player, but playing for players to find out. Partly. And then all are playing to find out what will happen on account of player decisions.

Player decisions are still constrained by legitimation, by their shared project of immersion, by game rules.

But perhaps your sense is right that all game worlds require a thread of simulationism. Again, in my view it is about priorities, not purity.

No, my concern isn't that the roles are asymmetrical. My concern is that when the GM is acting with simulation as a priority, how is it apparent to the players? If the players aren't involved in or aware of the methods of simulation, then it seems to me like the GM is just narrating what he'd like to narrate.

I haven't considered simulationist play where that purpose is concealed from players. I'm not sure how that would go. Above I used the term immersionism, which for me better gets at the prelusory goals of the players. But then, sometimes we'll work together between sessions on elements of world and related game mechanics. And per others' examples above, sometimes we'll step out of play to consider specific questions.

 

[clearstream]

It's just a trait of no myth play, predefined stuff is not binding. Only stuff that has been introduced into play is binding and forms fictional position which can block actions. If the GM frames a wall into existence then a legal response to "I walk forward" is "you run into the wall".

Note that things are less clear in some cases, like "I climb the wall" which in DW elicits a move, like DD. In BitD there's another layer where we talk about how hard this wall is to climb and the GM can further describe it. BitD generally has guidelines about how hard things are. DW just relegates that to an explanation of what happens.

Do you feel that stuff once established should go on to be binding?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Do you feel that stuff once established should go on to be binding?

Anything established in play is binding, it's now part of the fiction. The GM framed a wall, the wall exists. I don't know what the difference between established and binding is. The fiction is the fiction and all else is not the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

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

<snip>

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.

I don't think this is missed at all. I think it's well known!

"Story now" RPGing - AW, BW, etc - is not distinctive because a story can be constructed, post hoc, out of the fictional events ("Here's how we killed Strahd!") nor out of the at-the-table events ("Remember that time when so-and-so rolled that crazy crit?!").

It's distinctive because it aspires to have the actual experience of play, as it occurs in real time, to be an experience of a story - with dramatic needs, rising action, climax/crisis, resolution. Now this can be a matter of degree - but just as one example, if the game demands that a significant amount of time be spent maintaining, updating, planning around etc the details of resources listed on PC sheets (money, hit points, power points, etc) then it is going to suffer as a "story now" vehicle, because all that time spent at the table doing those calculations is not generating the experience of a story.

 

[pemerton]

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?

The players know because the GM has made a hard move that comes from nowhere - as in your example.

 

[pemerton]

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...

I've not read or played BitD. I read your comments upthread about moons and lightning towers. To me they didn't seem wildly different from stuff that is pretty commonplace in other RPGs and fantasy worlds - eg what keeps the flying citadels in Dragonlance aloft, or how are the Hobbits of the Shire able to afford such a materially rich standard of living, or how is a small thing like a Silmaril visible as a bright star in the night sky?

From what I know of how BitD plays, from others' accounts of it, I think that the internal causation it is concerned with is the social dynamics within Duskvol, which I gather are rather elaborate. Although I gather there is also the supply of some sort of magical substance to keep the lightning towers/fence/whatever it is going?

 

[pemerton]

Because there's such a thing as fantasy realism. The setting will establish what is realistic for the setting.

So why can't this apply to lightning bolts that strike houses because of the drastic failure of rituals for binding evil spirits?

 

[pemerton]

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".

I don't know what you mean by the most "appropriate" technique. As in, what makes a technique appropriate?

I can report from experience that a RPG which presents itself as purist-for-system - I'm thinking Rolemaster and RuneQuest as I type this - can have gaps or break-points in the mechanics that therefore invite the GM to just extrapolate what comes next. How to handle those gapes or breakpoints, as a GM, is a big issue. It is a source of the sort of pressure that @Manbearcat talked about upthread, for collapsing the purist-for-system play into something else.

This is why I ask about your use of "appropriate". Because to me, that contrasts with "patch" or "break glass in case of emergency" or - a potentially looming threat if the game isn't well-designed - "throw the mechanics overboard and just start extrapolating!"

 

[pemerton]

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".

But when I assert the same thing about the Shire - as I have in many posts over many years - I get a lot of push-back.

So isn't what bends or breaks the stick a matter of taste? Or knowledge - I think I'm better educated in economic history and economic geography than many RPGers, hence the fact that I can't see the Shire (or Rivendell, or Lothlorien) as remotely realistic. Nor the fact that Middle Earth appears to have enjoyed a roughly mediaeval level of technology, with no change in either that technology or in social forms, for literally thousands of years.

Yet even in this thread, Middle Earth has been held up as a paragon of simulation!

 

[pemerton]

they are aiming for a more consistent sense of a world the players are exploring.

<snip>

When it comes to emulating the world, then most GMs in this style will be doing a number of things and drawing on a range of techniques. Weather tables are a big one, as are event tables,

OK, this is a thing we can talk about! It's a real goal of play. Of the various posters in this thread, I know that @Campbell is into it (at least from time to time). And a few years ago, I posted some Classic Traveller actual play where, for a couple of sessions, the game had become focused on this sort of exploration. (I'm not super into it, and so - as those play reports indicate - I, as GM, tried to push the exploration towards something different in play.)

It seems to me, based on both experience and conjecture, that there are GM techniques and principles that are helpful and unhelpful for this sort of play. Upthread I even suggested some. Based on my experience as both player and GM, I think the two most important issues - as in, things that can cause this sort of play to fall over if not handled with care - are the role of secret backstory, and the related issue of how non-static the fictional situation can be, yet still amenable to exploration by the players. These are related, because a common way for a GM to reduce stasis is to draw on secret backstory. But the implications of this for exploration by the players are that, the more everything the players are being told is an expression or consequence of stuff known only to the GM, which is changing beneath the surface, the harder for them to draw sound inferences, to use "levers" in the fiction to change or reveal things, etc.