Outside of dungeons, I don't think the game has any comparable procedures, either. OK, so the evil duke and his scary knights are trying to track down the PCs and their friends in the city. The PCs are racing against time to find a solution. How close is he to getting them? How do I decide when this happens? Do the players have a right to know how near he is, or that he is after them at all?
This is what I mean by incompleteness.
My procedure as a DM for determining how close the evil Duke and his scary knights are to tracking down the PCs goes like this:
(First, the duke wouldn't be pursuing the PCs adversarily in the first place except in response to actions the PCs took with the knowledge that it might cause the duke (or at the very least, some powerful political figure) to come after them.)
- I'd start by determining how much of a priority the PCs have made themselves for the duke, considering any actions the PCs took (especially the success or failure of deliberate actions) to either increase or decrease that priority.
- Based on the priority the duke places on finding the PCs and his overall available resources, I'd next determine the resources he would devote to tracking the PCs.
- Finally, I'd determine how likely those resources would be to find the PCs in the elapsed time so far, taking into account the PCs' intervening choices (e.g. where to travel next, how high of a profile they're maintaining, etc.), especially the success or failure of PC actions intended to make it easier or harder for the duke to find them. The duke finds the PCs after the elapsed time catches up to the time required to find them, assuming the PCs are still in the area being searched at that time.
These determinations rarely give specific answers. When deciding between multiple possibilities, I consider the following factors:
- Consistency with material already established so far in play.
- Plausibility in the context of what the PCs know of the game setting.
- My preference for outcomes that cause the PCs' interactions with the setting to lead to learning more about, and becoming further involved with, other actors in the setting.
- My perception of whether having an encounter likely to lead to combat would be desirable, pacing-wise, at any particular moment, based on my read of the players' emotional state and current level of engagement.
- My deliberate bias towards ensuring that the PCs' actions impact the course of events and/or the state of the game setting.
I'd then repeat my process (tweaking the details, as relevant) to determine whether and how much the PCs learn of the Duke's pursuit.
Please note that although I've described my process methodically (based on reflective self-analysis), in actual use my process is more of an intuitive synthesis and less of a step-by-step resolution. I've been applying this process (with hopefully increasing levels of success) to running ad-hoc informal RPGs since before I knew D&D and similar packaged games existed, and continue to apply it with every system I run. Since I have a predefined process for running games, I prefer systems that provide useful action resolution mechanics and mechanical support for desired setting elements without trying to prescribe a specific process for running my game.
I realize that you would consider the fact that I need to bring in an external process for running 5e to mean that 5e is "incomplete" by your definition. However, from my standpoint, I suspect that any system you would consider to be "complete" would (unless it was written just for me) have process rules that would conflict with my personal process, and thus would be less useful to me as a tool for running games than "incomplete" games are.
I particularly liked this excerpt from one of the articles
@Malmuria linked upthread, which quoted Brendan from Necropraxis as saying:
"[Lack of codification of procedure] is a weakness because it is notoriously hard to learn how to play an RPG (which involves conversational form, conflict resolution, rules math, and many other components) from a text alone. It is a strength because it leaves the borders of potential wide open, assuming that you want to use the rules more like a toolkit than a how-to manual."
Using that terminology, I have a very strong preference for using a game system as a toolkit, rather than as a how-to manual. So, the how-to process elements you view as necessary for a game to be "complete", I view as actively unhelpful for running my game. I'm thrilled that there are both complete and incomplete game systems out there to cater to different preferences, but as far as my own use-case goes, I personally consider "completeness" (as you define it) to be undesirable.
