Why do RPGs have rules?

[Imaro]

So isn't what bends or breaks the stick a matter of taste? Or knowledge

I think, just as with your example of shopping and a game whose agenda is creating a story above... its a matter of degree. The thing I find weird is that this leeway is given to other agendas... but for some reason simulation must be 100%... black or white... is or isn't.

Edit: In other words I think a sun being dead and there being no mention of s drastic temperature change is a much more noticeable, egregious and blatant breaking of simulation (for the vast majority of players) than getting the exact economics of a small specific community in the fantasy world wrong.

 

[pemerton]

@Imaro, I'm tagging you because this post relates to the discussion of no myth that you've been participating in.

Just throwing it here, because I thought of an illustrative example and why not.

Spoiler: GM's notes

Dariga Aqqus, Head of Security in PYRAMID Inc.: tall, imposing woman in her 40s with a no-nonsense attitude. Amir's sister. Hates his guts.

Amir Aqqus, Middle manager in PYRAMID Inc. IT department: dishevelled guy in his 30s. Constantly screws up and has a gambling problem. Dariga's brother.

Spoiler: Player's notes

Current goal: get into PYRAMID Inc. headquarters.
What we know:

• Amir Aqqus's email credentials and contacts list
• He has a sister (?) who works in security department (?)
• He has a reputation of being disorganized and incompetent

Spoiler: Yes-Myth

Player: I'm going to email Dariga, like I'm sooo sorry, but, hey, sis, I forgot the door code, can you pleease send it to me?
GM (thinking): she hates her brother, so it's unlikely she'll compromise her job for him. Ain't gonna work.
GM (out loud): OK. You send her an email, and several hours latter, she responds: "go to hell".

Spoiler: No-Myth

Player: I'm going to email Dariga, like I'm sooo sorry, but, hey, sis, I forgot the door code, can you pleease send it to me?
GM: OK, sounds alright. Roll...
Player: Success!
GM (thinking): hm, she hates her brother, but maybe she still begrudgingly cleans his messes, blood is thicker than water and all that?
GM (out loud): sure. You send her an email, and she responds: "go to hell". Five minutes later, she sends another email: "4269".

This reminds me of a discussion that @chaochou, another poster and I had in the context of Classic Traveller.

The thread is here, and goes for a couple of pages: https://www.enworld.org/threads/should-the-pcs-try-and-capture-the-npc-starship.607662/

The thread title indicates what it was about. In the discussion, chaochou was suggesting possible approaches to infiltrating and capturing an enemy vessel, such as via faking a distress signal:

If I was going to try and get aboard the cruiser it wouldn't be through violence, and probably not stealth either.

I'd be looking to broadcast a distress signal and claim to have a life support malfunction and multiple system failures - throw the ship into a slow awkward spin to make it look convincing. Something to get you on board the target ship with a credible reason to be there and as little suspicion as possible.

Actually the Captain was once in an emergency situation himself as a young boy and vividly remembers his own rescue. He may be researching bio-weapons, but he'll take a distress call seriously. There's no honour amongst thieves though, and three or four of the other senior crew lost patience the last time they went out to a distress beacon. This one could easily push them over the edge.

This is, in the structure of the fiction, near identical to @loverdrive's example. The other poster chaochou and I were discussing with was insisting that chaochou's idea couldn't possibly work because of their own thoughts about what the captain of a military vessel engaged in illicit bioweapons research would do. This is just like loverdrive's example of "yes myth".

Whereas in a no myth game, then we would have some other way of working out what happens next, and then the infiction causation is established around that, as in loverdrive's example of "no myth". Here's how I explained that process in the Traveller thread:

Traveller doesn't expressly call out "say 'yes' or roll the dice", but can be played in more-or-less that way, I think, as there are dice rolls for nearly every aspect of content generation and resolution! In the particular context we're discussing here, the basic dice roll would be a reaction roll (perhaps with a negative DM if it is established in the fiction that the NPCs are, or have reason to be, suspicious; perhaps with a countervailing positive DM if the established fiction suggests the NPCs have a reason to be sympathetic or generous to the PCs - the Moldvay Basic rulebook gives an example of this in the context of D&D's reaction roll table; and I used this approach in our last session when the PCs had an interview with a bishop on Enlil).

If that reaction roll is positive, then the sort of backstory that chaochou has suggested could be one explanation for that, ie for why the NPCs react more favourably to a distress call than one would expect given standard protocols etc.

Exactly the same as loverdrive's example!

 

[pemerton]

In other words I think a sun being dead and there being no mention of s drastic temperature change is a much more noticeable, egregious and blatant breaking of simulation (for the vast majority of players) than getting the exact economics of a small specific community in the fantasy world wrong.

I can't comment on the vast majority of players, only me! I assume that Duskvol is a world in which magic explains quite a bit of stuff. Whereas nothing in The Hobbit or LotR suggests that magic is what allows the Hobbits in an isolated village to live lives with the same level of material well-being as was found in a centre of world production circa 200 years ago.

Perhaps magic is supposed to explain the thousands of years of social and technological stasis, although we're never told what that magic might be.

Hence why, as I posted, I think this must be pretty participant-relative.

 

[pemerton]

It gets murky. There's no perfect line between hard and soft. Nor is the definition of 'golden opportunity' exact either. Can I telegraph the ghoul thing and then later just frame the PCs there? Is that a hard move or an unwelcome truth? I don't disagree with you, but I prefer not to argue stuff in PbtA land on that basis as I think principles are ultimately the bedrock of play.

The actual mood and trajectory of play at the table - informed by questions asked and answered, by both formal and informal elements of how PCs have been built and played, etc - will surely be hugely relevant.

 

[pemerton]

I found your whole post interesting, and wanted to check this part. Way up thread (my #709) I proposed that rules override and extend norms. So that if I would normally expect X to happen (things to fall down, say) then a rule that conflicts with that overrides it (e.g. not if they are metal and suspended by magnetic powers.)

If that is right, then your principle should apply to any mode of play.

OK, so the principle that I set out is this:

What "no myth" play excludes is using that stuff that was thought of in advance as a basis for deciding, in advance, how things go in the fiction independent of the action resolution mechanics.​

@loverdrive gave an example, in a post not far upthread and that I've quoted even less far upthread. In my post that quoted loverdrive, I gave an example from another thread some years ago now, which illustrated the exact same idea in almost the exact same fashion as loverdrive.

I don't think that this principle is applicable to all RPGing. For instance, if the goal of play is to solve a puzzle the GM has established - eg to identify a breach in security as pre-authored by the GM - then the use of extrapolation from fiction in lieu of resolution mechanics will not be applicable.

Stuff thought of in advance can't be used to decide how things go independent of game mechanics. (It can decide where mechanics are silent.)

This seems like a verbal variant of what I posted upthread, in the post you quoted:

What "no myth" play excludes is using that stuff that was thought of in advance as a basis for deciding, in advance, how things go in the fiction independent of the action resolution mechanics.

Now, this point has implications. If the action resolution mechanics can't be applied except by reference to stuff that has been thought of in advance, then the RPG in question will not work well for no-myth play.

By positing a rule whereby the mechanics are (or can be obliged to be) "silent", you are positing action resolution mechanics that can't be applied except by reference to stuff that has been thought of in advance. Those would not be good mechanics for no myth RPGing.

Conversely, mechanics that are good for no myth RPGing conform to what Campbell has posted here:

This is difficult because in the games where No Myth (or at least Low Myth) play is the norm there are rules that are always in effect that take priority (when players look to you to find what happens next make a move, frame scenes that challenge their beliefs, frame scenes that reflect their kicker, etc). Those always take precedence over ideas you might have of how a given NPC feels, what the setting is like, etc.

And this is a constraint on the design of the mechanics, because if they are always in effect, and yet are capable of covering the full range of feasible action declarations, then they can't be any old thing!

Apocalypse World is perhaps the most technically brilliant example of mechanical design that satisfies these constraints. Burning Wheel is not bad either.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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?

Right, Doskvol is actually hard core sim! Leviathan blood powers all of the magitech in the city. There's an entire industry dedicated to hunting them, and then the blood has to be refined. Naturally this is a dirty and polluting process. So realism demands that Doskvol subjugated another island where they located this industry. Logic of course demanded that a war had to be fought against the natives, the Skavlanders. Very realistic, there are exploited refugees, terrorists, etc. The noble houses of Doskvol control this trade, as well as food production, coal mining, etc.

All of this is primarily a simulation of the effects of a magical cataclysm, every element follows inevitably and forms a highly coherent world model.

 

[Imaro]

Right, Doskvol is actually hard core sim! Leviathan blood powers all of the magitech in the city. There's an entire industry dedicated to hunting them, and then the blood has to be refined. Naturally this is a dirty and polluting process. So realism demands that Doskvol subjugated another island where they located this industry. Logic of course demanded that a war had to be fought against the natives, the Skavlanders. Very realistic, there are exploited refugees, terrorists, etc. The noble houses of Doskvol control this trade, as well as food production, coal mining, etc.

All of this is primarily a simulation of the effects of a magical cataclysm, every element follows inevitably and forms a highly coherent world model.

The problem is what the magical cataclysm is... what its specific effects were, even what is and what isn't due to its influence isn't explained. None of it.

Edit: To explain further... I would think part of simulating a magical catastrophe would be the juxtaposition between what was and what is now... but Duskhvol, imo, doesn't do this well if at all.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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

It absolutely can in my view, if magic in that world can have those kinds of effects.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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!"

I'm just saying you use the technique that, in your opinion, best represents the situation you're trying to simulate. That I would argue contrasts with the from what I can see much more structured system used by most narrative/storygames, where everyone (but especially the GM) has to follow the rules pretty strictly or you don't get the experience the game promises.

 

[Micah Sweet]

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.

The answer to that for me is to make the setting and keep it the way you made it; ie, no changing beneath the surface. The world is what it is, and the GMs feelings about how the PCs are interacting with the world shouldn't change that.