Why do RPGs have rules?

[Bedrockgames]

No problems.

To expand my thoughts, I find it somewhat silly to imagine life with supernatural counterfactuals while simultaneously insisting on simulated factuals for things like imagining life in Middle Age feudal societies. IMHO, it's impossible for me to imagine that a world with D&D style magic and ancestries, rather common or not, would result in a social outcome that produced the Middle Age (Western) Europe, its various societies/cultures, and accompanying norms. The mere existence of magic as a form of "capital" would have a tremendous transformative impact on the development and shape of human societies. That most everything else in human society is the same but there is some old guy in a tower who can cast fireball breaks my own sense of "realism" far more than any dramatic contrivance around player characters.

You can take it as far as you like though. Plenty of settings assume magic, assume medieval and run with the conceit that this has no observable impact on the culture, and just do their best to emulate a medieval style world that happens to have D&D style magic in it and monsters. But you can also run campaigns where you seriously think through the implications. It isn't impossible because clearly people do manage to imagine it. No one is saying "this is 100% how it would turn out" or offering it up as some kind of objective scientific experiment. It is merely a thought experiment. There is a whole field of history dedicated to this exercise. It isn't a science, it is more of an art, maybe a craft, but its aim is to help illuminate our understanding of how real history operates. And it isn't taken seriously the way real history is. I still think counter history books are fascinating to read and that it can be an interesting thorough exercise.

Also to be clear I am not saying this is a requirement of 'simulationist' play, just that this kind of thinking is often present and a kind of tool

 

[Bedrockgames]

The first example is also constrained - it is "what looks cool!"

The differences here are aesthetic in my view.

Fair enough but I would argue the constraint of 'it looks cool' versus the constraint of 'looks like it could plausibly be sopaceworthy' are substantively distinct and that the former is clearly in the camp we are describing as 'simulationist' whereas the former is not.

 

[Bedrockgames]

What is it like to be a bat?

This looks interesting. It isn't a paper I have read before. But I think this is arguing about something that I am not making the case for. I have mentioned many times this kind of thought experiment is simply a thought exercise where you take a hypothetical and think through and imagine all its consequences. There is no claim to any kind of scientifically objective insight. Just a claim that you can produce something with a degree of believability strong enough to function for a game aimed things like a world that is internally consistent, believable and has a degree of historical realism to it. I never claimed we could literally get into the mind of a non-existent immortal race. It is a disciplined form of speculation. And to be clear here, this is just one possible aspect of this kind of play. I happen to like settings that are treated as thought experiments. However they can also go off the rails (the way of kings was pretty interesting as a thought experiment but it did get kind of wonky at times, Songs of Distant Earth is an interesting thought experiment, and I rather liked the book, but as a setting, if it were to be an RPG, it got a little wonky too). And I am fine with settings that don't do that, or maybe focus the thought experiment to less realistic parts of the setting. My favorite setting is Ravenloft, that isn't particularly historically realistic (it is borrowing tropes and characters left and right from classic horror). But I think the powers check is an interesting thought experiment as a mechanic (an interesting way to get the cosmology to match the genre tropes). I certainly would not call it 'simlulationist' though.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think my response is, yes, that is one opinion. I don't have any real evidence that there's a significant difference. I'm no historian, but if my narrativist play was set in 1st Century Rome I can probably depict its typical environs moderately well, having had enough interest in such things to do some reading, etc. So I'd expect that much of the fiction I created would 'ring true' enough to pass at a game table. Naturally I'd probably have some maps of the city in that time period on hand in order to explain some of the geography if it became relevant. I expect you and I would probably get the same sorts of typically misunderstood things wrong. I expect those would most critically involve the world view and social aspects of life in Rome, which are AFAIK VERY different in many respects from what we modern Western people would think.

But wouldn't you say there is a difference between you attempting, even imperfectly, to model that campaign on what you know about how Rome worked, more broadly how humans have operated in history and how they operate now, versus ignoring that and just worrying about something else, like what maintains an exciting state of play, what feels right in terms of imagination, emulating as many genre tropes as you can. I am personally not a fan of the term simulationist. We can use different language here and simply use movies as a model: what type of film are you trying to game? A documentary? A historical biography? A 70s exploitation film? A noir mystery? a grounded character study or dramatic thriller? Those all will require different degrees of focus on and fidelity to believability, internal logic, etc. When the yellow car in Commando is damaged on one side then drives away and that side is perfectly undented or scratched, it doesn't bother me the way it would in a more grounded movie for example. I can let the inconsistency go. I can accept that he is firing a massive machine gun at dozens and dozens of opponents out in the open without getting gunned down or suffering real legal consequences. But if it were more grounded, I would expect more real world consequences to arise.

 

[Aldarc]

But you can also run campaigns where you seriously think through the implications. It isn't impossible because clearly people do manage to imagine it. No one is saying "this is 100% how it would turn out" or offering it up as some kind of objective scientific experiment. It is merely a thought experiment.

And yet so many campaigns that claim to think through the implications of magic in the real world pump out mostly unchanged medieval societies with magic layered on top?

To be clear: I'm not saying that the enterprise of thinking through the implications of magic is impossible. I'm saying that it's impossible for me to imagine how having D&D style magic as a part of human history would just result in a human society that was in the shape and appearance of the European Middle Ages but with a splash of magic.

 

[pemerton]

It seems that mediaeval people thought that the existence of certain sorts of "magic" or supernatural phenomena was consistent with the sort of natural and social environments they were familiar with.

So when we imagine FRPGing in those environments, one option is to adopt their frameworks of understanding and explanation. This necessarily requires suspending our own frameworks of understanding and explanation (otherwise, events in the fiction would not only be causally overdetermined, but would be overdetermined by inconsistent causes!).

The best known example of this in RPGing, I think, is Glorantha - for instance, in Glorantha mountain ranges are explained by mythical considerations, not scientific geology; diseases are caused by evil spirits, not germs or other biological phenomena/agents; etc.

Every time I read a post about FPRGing which discusses how monsters might have "evolved", which worries about the existence of half-elves through the lens of genetics, that assumes that universal gravitation operates, I wince.

What is it like to be a bat?

There are techniques of learning how to imaginatively inhabit a different sort of social situation. I don't claim to be an expert - for instance, I've neither studied nor taught anthropology.

But I have taught theoretical sociology through a broadly "modernity"/"world history" lens, and an important first step in teaching this material is to expose students to examples of non-"modern" social forms and practices, in ways that centre these as "normal" and human rather than weird or deviant or "other".

I'm not really familiar with any RPG that tries to take this approach, with the possible exception (again, and maybe unsurprisingly) of Gloranthic RPGing.

I'm not familiar with an D&D material that takes this approach!

 

[pemerton]

Fair enough but I would argue the constraint of 'it looks cool' versus the constraint of 'looks like it could plausibly be sopaceworthy' are substantively distinct

No disagreement.

and that the former is clearly in the camp we are describing as 'simulationist' whereas the former is not.

Sure. Again, no disagreement.

I just don't think this speaks to any of the differences between the sort of RPGing that @robertsconley is describing and (say) my RPGing. My play of BW, Prince Valiant, Classic Traveller, heck probably even Torchbearer, are all in the "simulationist" camp as per your post that I'm replying to. But the methods are completely different from the ones that @robertsconley favours.

 

[pemerton]

I'm not saying that the enterprise of thinking through the implications of magic is impossible. I'm saying that it's impossible for me to imagine how having D&D style magic as a part of human history would just result in a human society that was in the shape and appearance of the European Middle Ages but with a splash of magic.

Agreed. This is why Glorantha drops "as part of human history" - it doesn't "overlay" magic onto ordinary causal processes - it substitutes mythic/magical causation for genuine causation.

JRRT does much the same, though I think with less nitty-gritty than Glorantha.

Of course both Glorantha and JRRT are works of imagination, although in both cases informed by serious intellectual engagement with important systems of human belief and practice.

 

[Bedrockgames]

And yet so many campaigns that claim to think through the implications of magic in the real world pump out mostly unchanged medieval societies with magic layered on top?

Again though you can take is far as you want. Some people just think through the implication am one or two areas. That doesn’t bother me.

To be clear: I'm not saying that the enterprise of thinking through the implications of magic is impossible. I'm saying that it's impossible for me to imagine how having D&D style magic as a part of human history would just result in a human society that was in the shape and appearance of the European Middle Ages but with a splash of magic.

Again I think on the far end, if you think it through all the way, it can get wonky. No one is saying you can’t have conceits. And no one is saying it has to all be a thought experiment. The contention is more in this style when you do have conceits you try to ground them and you apply more naturalistic standards to them going forward

No disagreement.

Sure. Again, no disagreement.

I just don't think this speaks to any of the differences between the sort of RPGing that @robertsconley is describing and (say) my RPGing. My play of BW, Prince Valiant, Classic Traveller, heck probably even Torchbearer, are all in the "simulationist" camp as per your post that I'm replying to. But the methods are completely different from the ones that @robertsconley favours.

Sure but I never said you couldn’t arrive here by other means. The means might matter for other reasons and the means will have pros and cons, just like the approach Rob and I are talking about have pros and cons. That is why I mentioned Hillfolk being realistic, just as fun and only producing a major difference in two key areas that I could notice in practice

 

[Bedrockgames]

To be clear: I'm not saying that the enterprise of thinking through the implications of magic is impossible. I'm saying that it's impossible for me to imagine how having D&D style magic as a part of human history would just result in a human society that was in the shape and appearance of the European Middle Ages but with a splash of magic.

That is fair, but again for me this isn't about someone coming up with a 'scientifically' valid model of what society would look like or of simulating a real world. It is about creating the feel of a world that exists external to the players and has an internal consistency and believability to it. So as an example this isn't like a annales style analysis and modeling of all the mentalities by using interdisciplinary methods to account for things like geography, economic structures, etc. Even that probably falls short of the bar people are setting when they talk about modeling a real world. I am just talking about building a world from the ground up, having things like its history and institutions follow a logic the players can understand (and importantly anticipate when they make decisions), having NPCs operate based on their motivations and needs (rather than simply having them show up because it is good for the plot), providing a world that feels objective and consistent. It can and should be informed by what the GM knows and researches, but it doesn't require the GM be a genius or expert in 18 different fields of study. That isn't the point of it.