Why do RPGs have rules?

[robertsconley]

Right, but notice that there are at least TWO major things you are NOT claiming here that have been claimed over and over in this thread! One being that there is the possibility, and active practice, of SIMULATING the world, such that this simulation produces actual specific outcomes which are the logical consequence of how that world MUST realistically work. SECOND is the claim that we can measure the 'realism' of various options and objectively state that some things in our fantasy world would be more realistic outcomes than others.

Now, in the second case I think there are some fairly trivial examples where this is possible. "Joe stepped over an edge, he fell, it hurt", this seems to be realistic in a limited sense. I am still not of the opinion these would rise to the level of simulation, because you cannot draw any generalizable conclusions about gravity from what happens in D&D when you fall.

I have been a software engineer for 35 years dealing with motion control and software for metal-cutting machines and other forms of automation. I have a lot of experience creating rules that simulate reality.

In addition, I wrote several spaceflight simulators that emulated perfectly how various historical spacecraft like the Mercury spacecraft. Including details like the fact the spacecraft wasn't perfectly balanced, that it had a known rate of leaking oxygen that had a random variation over time, that pressing certain buttons and moving certain levers had very delays before something happened due to the fact hydraulics and mechanical relay took a small but noticeable amount of time to activate and so on.

The simulation of everything I did wasn't 100% perfect. It didn't need to be. My job was to work at it until the difference was low enough for the software or machine to be useful and safe for the application. In the RPGs that application is pretending to be characters living their lives in a setting. With the creative choice of making a system that supports the referee and players in a way that they can take the same factors as one would in life (instead of something fantastic like magic) come to a decision, and the outcome would be the same as it would be in life.

But to be clear that is a creative choice that is a subset of what is possible to do with RPGs. The overarching principle that helps RPG campaign is consistency with how the setting works. Whether it is grounded in how life works or something far more fantastic.

Including settings that are described as random or chaotic to human perception like another plane of existence. In those cases, the system would reflect the random and chaotic nature of the setting.

SECOND is the claim that we can measure the 'realism' of various options and objectively state that some things in our fantasy world would be more realistic outcomes than others.

Many fantasy worlds are a mix of mundane i.e. realistic elements and fantastic elements. That makes them more relatable to their human audiences. Some fantasy worlds are way more fantastic than others so for some trying to do the above is pointless. Some have a fair amount of mundane elements so if the game author decides to focus on the above that is a good of a creative choice as any other.

Now, in the second case I think there are some fairly trivial examples where this is possible. "Joe stepped over an edge, he fell, it hurt", this seems to be realistic in a limited sense. I am still not of the opinion these would rise to the level of simulation, because you cannot draw any generalizable conclusions about gravity from what happens in D&D when you fall.

In D&D, the procedure to used to handle falling damage is not realistic. The procedure in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is. And reflects how an object falls in a world with Earth's atmosphere and gravity through the formula it uses.

Some folks may think GURPS approach is overkill while others like myself had no issue with it. Although in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG they made a more useful table by assuming a few things and calculating the damage dice so all you have to do is a table lookup.

Still, there is another possibility where some folks are more interested in the narrative outcome of a fall. As a result the procedure it basically a fall from a great height is a setback of type, while a short fall is likely a momentary hindrance and leave it at that.

All of these methods, including D&D's take, are equally valid creative choices for an RPG campaign. All of them are consistent enough for a player to make a decision whether as their character to take that jump.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

A true simulationist would be using rules for downtime activity to fill the void.
Some hardcore gamists would, as well.
In games like Traveller, either of those two may send the characters back into the character generation as a way to "make use of the downtime."

Well, I think there was at least some talk of people using the lifepath system in CT to RP their characters, by like translating the 'survival' rolls into an RP scenario. I expect you can do a whole campaign like that, though it will require a bit of tinkering with a few subsystems. We certainly thought about it back in the early '80s when we were playing a lot of CT.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In that example, the distinction under my account is that some means external to and independent of player intentions is used to determine if the stream is running shallow or in flood. It's "real" from their characters' perspectives in just that way.

Frankly, here's my position: Some chart that randomly allocates 'flood' or 'low water' etc. isn't in any sense realistic.

1) the outcome of the toss of a die is simply random, so it lacks any causal connection to anything deeper, there's no chain of cause and effect.
2) any statistical distribution represented by this chart is simply arbitrary, because we lack any rigorous understanding of the interlinked factors of geography, hydrodynamics, global weather and climate patterns, and even astronomical factors which would need to be assembled and considered in order to construct such a distribution.

Given the 2 points above, coupled with the fact that the author of this 'stream level chart' must have SOME motivations for one possible configuration of that chart over the others, and we have ruled out simulation as such, we are left with what? I can only think of a very small list of reasons:

A) plausibility - each entry on the chart represents some sort of outcome which could plausibly be colored as a result of a natural process
B) gamism - each entry, and the overall configuration of entries, is in some way aligned with constructing a challenging scenario in a gamist sense.
C) trope - each entry conforms to some kind of genre convention or idea about the setting.
D) drama - the entries posit conditions which are likely to be useful in terms of producing a fictional challenge to the characters (but not necessarily a gamist one in that it has measurable win/loss cons etc.).

My guess is that any likely instantiation of such a stream flow chart will be implemented as a mix of several of these. I don't see any other major ones either, and given that there must be SOME motivation it will fall under one of these, or something very similar. The only other option is that the design of the chart is essentially mindless, its just an exercise in 'cargo cult RPG/adventure development' where the material is merely authored in imitation of past efforts without any thought (and again this might be partially in the mix).

You've described ways that the above form of realism interferes with narrativist purposes. To be more "realistic" in the sense I take you to mean here would also be measured by something like mapping to real world examples, and conformance to some shared theories about the world. @AbdulAlhazred objects to Tolkien's mountains not on the first and most distinctive of the three components I've proposed for a "simulationist principle" but under these latter two: the mountains' features don't map to those mountains have in the real world and presumably will fail to conform to theories about why mountains have the features they do.

Honestly, I wouldn't object to terming a weather/climate/hydrology model being built on top of Tolkien's rather contrived geography based on underlying realism, assuming it is realistic enough to construct such a model. I'm even willing to concede that it probably is, the mountains form ranges, etc. I'd assume if you had a team of scientists they could invent such a model and defend it as more realistic than not.

But no such team exists, nor is likely to ever exist, to do so. Your or my construction of a stream level chart for the Deeping Stream would thus necessarily be, at most, plausible, as in it would depict the possibilities of a stream, being dry, low, normal, high, flooded, or maybe even rampaging. I guess even more fantastical possibilities might exist in a fantasy world, turned to blood, frozen, steaming, necrotic, etc. None of these is connected to any larger understanding of the climate except the decree that it is generally temperate (though we have no evidence to suggest that such would likely be the case).

So, finally we come to that final nut, if 'sim' lacks anything beyond a very basic plausibility in terms of the possible range of outcomes, then it is no more plausible than the sort of narrativist fictional tying that is proposed in games like Dungeon World, where the moves of the GM (what he describes) must 'follow from the fiction', which presumably implies an obligation to pay at least lip service to plausibility. I say 'lip service' in that portraying a fantastical world is part of the agenda, which implies that there is also a thrust towards a degree of implausibility.

I tend to believe that there's a best mix which depends on the sort of thing and its scale. Smaller details of life, like food, air, water, gravity, general human behavior and biology, etc. are generally going to be assumed to work in a mundane fashion in general. Thus the players can navigate situations with the confidence that they can walk around, gain sustenance, interact with other people, etc. in a predictable fashion. Very few RPGs violate this sort of plausibility, and typically do so only in ways which display themselves as remarkable divergences. Elf bread weighs half as much as normal bread and is twice as sustaining. In the Magic Mountains is a peak from which you can leap and fly. Fey creatures are literally bound to verbal agreements, but act in perverse and unfathomable ways.

Larger scale things are less subject to realistic constraints. So we see that both of the cosmologies of D&D are highly fantastical, and even the nature and construction of the Earth itself is not really constrained by any natural laws or even logic. Likewise large scale social and historical features may be highly fantastical, and things like ecology and biology are generally given no more than lip service at an overall level, if that. This works fine, and allows for the introduction of the totally fantastic!

So, I have far less against plausibility than some people seem to think. As @Autumnal noted the other day it is rather necessary for most RPG play to function, regardless of agenda. I just don't think it relates to any sort of causality. In fact I think genre conventions are probably vastly more important in most RPGs in terms of player's navigating the world.

 

[niklinna]

I think for me, the idea now is to connect, as @clearstream is trying to do, the thread between sim mindset to the rules > processes and procedures > table play.

It's actually shocking to me that, for as long as I would have considered myself a "sim" GM, I didn't once think about the process I had been enmeshed in until I was 35 years old.

I'm actually curious how the tenets/ethos of sim is transferred from direct, in play experience to a formulated, procedural mindset.

Like, how is it done? From 1985 through 2012, I had totally and completely been inculcated in the idea that "sim" priorities were paramount without ever having had an actual discussion or conversation with another human being about what that idea looked like or how it had formed in my consciousness. It simply sprang whole cloth into being through my observations and experiences playing D&D 3x, Star Wars Saga, GURPS, Pathfinder 1e, and Savage Worlds.

But somehow that idea had been firmly planted.

It was in 2012 that I started catching snippets of conversation @pemerton, and @Manbearcat, @chaochou and others were having on the subject here.

It took 5 years, from 2012 to 2017, for the idea that maybe my "sim" mindset wasn't as all encompassing as I'd been brought to believe, to move toward actual action, when I tried out Dungeon World for about 6 sessions of GM-ing and mostly failed at it, but it was an interesting failure.

But how does the mindset itself come about without ever having thought about the idea tangibly and concretely?

Is it a byproduct of adopting Rule Zero at some level? Is it based on unstated but culturally understood norms about distribution of authorial authority?

Mm, when I started learning new languages, and eventually studying Linguistics in college, I had similar thoughts. I didn't take any electives on child language aquisition, but it was certainly discussed in what I did take. And it's not just language: Unspoken and implicit apprenticeships abound in human learning, and learning to step outside that and look at the activity from outside, as well as the process of learning that activity, is quite enlightening.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I think for me, the idea now is to connect, as @clearstream is trying to do, the thread between sim mindset to the rules > processes and procedures > table play.

It's actually shocking to me that, for as long as I would have considered myself a "sim" GM, I didn't once think about the process I had been enmeshed in until I was 35 years old.

I'm actually curious how the tenets/ethos of sim is transferred from direct, in play experience to a formulated, procedural mindset.

Like, how is it done? From 1985 through 2012, I had totally and completely been inculcated in the idea that "sim" priorities were paramount without ever having had an actual discussion or conversation with another human being about what that idea looked like or how it had formed in my consciousness. It simply sprang whole cloth into being through my observations and experiences playing D&D 3x, Star Wars Saga, GURPS, Pathfinder 1e, and Savage Worlds.

But somehow that idea had been firmly planted.

It was in 2012 that I started catching snippets of conversation @pemerton, and @Manbearcat, @chaochou and others were having on the subject here.

It took 5 years, from 2012 to 2017, for the idea that maybe my "sim" mindset wasn't as all encompassing as I'd been brought to believe, to move toward actual action, when I tried out Dungeon World for about 6 sessions of GM-ing and mostly failed at it, but it was an interesting failure.

But how does the mindset itself come about without ever having thought about the idea tangibly and concretely?

Is it a byproduct of adopting Rule Zero at some level? Is it based on unstated but culturally understood norms about distribution of authorial authority?

Its a genuinely interesting question. I would say that one possibility suggests itself. That is, this is an attitude which has existed in the general RPG community from day one. Certainly wargames lack any significant RP component, and 'fiction' is not their primary object. That is your typical wargame scenario begins with either an actual situation drawn as faithfully as possible from history, one extrapolated from history/current facts (IE simulating some future battle), or at least draws from 'plausible elements' (IE realistic terrain, force structures, and objectives) to some degree. There was always an element of 'fantastic wargaming' and more gamist wargaming where simulation was secondary, or shared agenda space with, some other drives. Still, overall there was always a strong element of realism/simulation in wargame culture.

So, we know that RPG culture emerged from wargame culture, admixed with the RP ideas drawn from Braunsteins and maybe some other similar sources. Thus an obsession with simulation seemed to form at least a subtext within early RPG culture. D&D is based on Chainmail, rules for fighting scale minis battles that are arguably fairly realistic. It takes some of those elements, scale, phased actions, miniatures/maps, mechanics related to damage, and the idea of simulating things like the effects of terrain and situation on combat. The inclusion of AH's Survival rules clearly extends that in the direction of exploration, etc. and we can see a similar mechanization in the dungeon exploration rules, though I think a LOT of this is more gamist than simulationist.

It was simply an inherently expected perspective. When the 'West Coast' people started playing D&D there was an immediate stinky uproar about how they eschewed these ideas! How heinous! However teenagers, mostly, took the core ideas of heroic fantasy RP and quickly went in a bit of a middle direction, dropping a lot of the wargamey parts of play, but building on the existing wargame legacy bits. Nobody outside of that West Coast crew, really questioned the fundamental "rules mapped onto the fantasy world" model for a LONG time, except in small places, like the Traveller rules for streetwise, or Toon's 'fourth wall' stuff. Still, it did gradually fall away. Its just taken a good long time. Ideas have a lot of sticking power, and people rarely really examine them. So even today you have a lot of older RPG people who seem unwilling to reexamine the possibilities, let alone really try anything new. A few of us did, and discovered that those West Coast people were onto something, 45 years ago.

 

[clearstream]

Frankly, here's my position: Some chart that randomly allocates 'flood' or 'low water' etc. isn't in any sense realistic.

1) the outcome of the toss of a die is simply random, so it lacks any causal connection to anything deeper, there's no chain of cause and effect.
2) any statistical distribution represented by this chart is simply arbitrary, because we lack any rigorous understanding of the interlinked factors of geography, hydrodynamics, global weather and climate patterns, and even astronomical factors which would need to be assembled and considered in order to construct such a distribution.

Given the 2 points above, coupled with the fact that the author of this 'stream level chart' must have SOME motivations for one possible configuration of that chart over the others, and we have ruled out simulation as such, we are left with what? I can only think of a very small list of reasons:

A) plausibility - each entry on the chart represents some sort of outcome which could plausibly be colored as a result of a natural process
B) gamism - each entry, and the overall configuration of entries, is in some way aligned with constructing a challenging scenario in a gamist sense.
C) trope - each entry conforms to some kind of genre convention or idea about the setting.
D) drama - the entries posit conditions which are likely to be useful in terms of producing a fictional challenge to the characters (but not necessarily a gamist one in that it has measurable win/loss cons etc.).

My guess is that any likely instantiation of such a stream flow chart will be implemented as a mix of several of these. I don't see any other major ones either, and given that there must be SOME motivation it will fall under one of these, or something very similar. The only other option is that the design of the chart is essentially mindless, its just an exercise in 'cargo cult RPG/adventure development' where the material is merely authored in imitation of past efforts without any thought (and again this might be partially in the mix).

So a facet of what I say makes simulationism distinct is - fit into your framing - motivations based on A) over B), C) and D).

My view is that all play is mixed, so it's only possible (in respect of any mode) to be speaking of priorities or weight given.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have been a software engineer for 35 years dealing with motion control and software for metal-cutting machines and other forms of automation. I have a lot of experience creating rules that simulate reality.

In addition, I wrote several spaceflight simulators that emulated perfectly how various historical spacecraft like the Mercury spacecraft. Including details like the fact the spacecraft wasn't perfectly balanced, that it had a known rate of leaking oxygen that had a random variation over time, that pressing certain buttons and moving certain levers had very delays before something happened due to the fact hydraulics and mechanical relay took a small but noticeable amount of time to activate and so on.

The simulation of everything I did wasn't 100% perfect. It didn't need to be. My job was to work at it until the difference was low enough for the software or machine to be useful and safe for the application. In the RPGs that application is pretending to be characters living their lives in a setting. With the creative choice of making a system that supports the referee and players in a way that they can take the same factors as one would in life (instead of something fantastic like magic) come to a decision, and the outcome would be the same as it would be in life.

Well, there is little doubt that you have flown on aircraft who's critical systems were simulated using software I wrote in the '80s. In fact it was so successful that for one project we extended our techniques to ALL of the control systems on the aircraft, and slaved the whole simulation to the actual prime contractor's flight simulation system so we could virtually fly the actual aircraft systems through any flight scenario, basically an 'iron airplane'.

What I learned from that is that every little detail is critically important. Time and time again our high fidelity models emulated hardware, and coupling to the actual control systems revealed unexpected things. I recall telling the engineers from a certain well-known aerospace company that their airplane would fall out of the sky under certain conditions, which they scoffed at, until it happened (luckily the aircraft wasn't lost in that case). Details matter, in fact the world is NOTHING BUT THE DETAILS! This is why I am utterly dismissive of the idea that anything meaningfully simulative happens in RPGs except for rather trivial cases like 'gravity works like so' possibly.

But to be clear that is a creative choice that is a subset of what is possible to do with RPGs. The overarching principle that helps RPG campaign is consistency with how the setting works. Whether it is grounded in how life works or something far more fantastic.

Including settings that are described as random or chaotic to human perception like another plane of existence. In those cases, the system would reflect the random and chaotic nature of the setting.

Sure, but what does this have to do with simulation?

Many fantasy worlds are a mix of mundane i.e. realistic elements and fantastic elements. That makes them more relatable to their human audiences. Some fantasy worlds are way more fantastic than others so for some trying to do the above is pointless. Some have a fair amount of mundane elements so if the game author decides to focus on the above that is a good of a creative choice as any other.

Realistic, as in plausible and recognizable as being drawn from mundane experience, yes. So you describe a rain shower in a fantasy world as if it was real, drops falling from the sky to the ground, etc. I agree this is realistic at that level and all RPGs, indeed virtually all fiction of all sorts, does this. I think we agree on the core reasons too.

In D&D, the procedure to used to handle falling damage is not realistic. The procedure in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is. And reflects how an object falls in a world with Earth's atmosphere and gravity through the formula it uses.

Some folks may think GURPS approach is overkill while others like myself had no issue with it. Although in the Dungeon Fantasy RPG they made a more useful table by assuming a few things and calculating the damage dice so all you have to do is a table lookup.

Still, there is another possibility where some folks are more interested in the narrative outcome of a fall. As a result the procedure it basically a fall from a great height is a setback of type, while a short fall is likely a momentary hindrance and leave it at that.

In what sense is the D&D version unrealistic and the GURPS version more realistic? Does one more accurately produce a mix of outcomes similar to reality (IE degree of mortality based on distance fallen)? What criteria are you using here? Is it even possible to say meaningfully when D&D PCs simply have a pool of hit points which gets debited when they 'fall', but has no other effect?

Thus, can you actually state a logical basis upon which, for instance, the narrative approach you outline is actually less realistic?

All of these methods, including D&D's take, are equally valid creative choices for an RPG campaign. All of them are consistent enough for a player to make a decision whether as their character to take that jump.

I'm not debating 'valid creative choices', I'm considering what sorts of qualities different techniques bring to play. Relating this to the original topic of the thread, what sorts of rules are needed in order to bring different desirable qualities into a game?

 

[clearstream]

I'm not debating 'valid creative choices', I'm considering what sorts of qualities different techniques bring to play. Relating this to the original topic of the thread, what sorts of rules are needed in order to bring different desirable qualities into a game?

Many here have said that among them would be rules that serve as a good enough model or means of approximation. Supposing you reject such rules, what do you have to replace them?

Is it right to say that actually you accept them and it is characterising them as simulation that you resist? I don't know that we even need to settle the matter of how we characterise them if they turn out to be what we would mutually be using.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I've run campaigns where every encounter was random in origin, and where I'm just drawing extrapolations from random elements, turning them into some form of sense, and running the characters/monsters/situations introduced from tables/cards based upon random inputs. I've done this with 3 editions of Traveller, 3 editions of Twilight 2000, and have done it with certain sections of published D&D adventures... including season 1-3 of DDAL where there's stretches of random-encounter hex-crawl. Season 1 (Hoard of the Dragon Queen) has 2 stretches of linear crawl, but that's just a really narrow map hex-crawl.

It's actually a common enough mode for many 80's adventure modules... including a few favorites: D&D X1, [classic] Traveller's Mission on Mithril, Nomads of the World Ocean, and Across the Bright Face. At least one Star Frontiers adventure. And my favorite TFT solo module, Master of the Amulets; it can also be run as a GM-less group or GM'd adventure...

Oh it’s absolutely a mode of play. A very prevalent one, I’d say, though probably not the most common. And I’ve played in and run that type of game plenty in the past. I expect to again at some point in the near future.

But…

QFT...
but the emergent story is about the characters discovering the module's story. And the players discovering both stories via play.

I generally don’t think this mode of play is going to be all that dependent on character. It will to some extent, of course (a group of martial type characters will handle obstacles differently from a group of rogues and magic users, etc.) but I don’t think that makes the game about those characters. Certainly not in the way I think people mean when they say “character focused”.

To me, if a game is character focused then you can’t strip the characters out, replace them with another group, and have it play put mostly the same.

 

[Lanefan]

That is certainly a strong element in CLASSIC play. In fact it is essentially the whole of true classic play. The external 'dungeon maze' simply exists and the job of the PCs is to wander its hallways and rooms gathering achievements. I'd note that characterization plays no real part in this sort of play, aside from 'color'.

Well, first there's much more to it than just "wander[ing] hallways and rooms gathering achievements".

Second, and perhaps more important, while characerization may have little to no mechanical impact it still plays - or certainly can play - a very real part in things.

It depends, I think, on whether one views that which you call 'color' as an integral and vital part of the game or as just meaningless/extraneous fluff. Those GM narrations of the lands and weather your party passes through as you travel, those moments of in-character banter around the campfire, that strange way of introducing himself that the Gnome insists on busting out at every opportunity - these are all just 'color' in that they have neither mechanical nor story impact, yet IMO without these things the game wouldn't be worth playing.

And yes, just about every example of 'color' is going to slow down the process of getting on with the story. So what.

Gygax clearly saw this, as plainly alignment is an attempt to make the character's beliefs and goals relevant at some level.

I'm not sure if that's the reason behind alignment or just a probably-unintentional side effect.